Modern Masters Vol. 15: Mark Schultz by TwoMorrows Publishing

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Modern Masters Volume Fourteen:

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME FIFTEEN:

MARK SCHULTZ edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Fred Perry designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover art by Mark Schultz front cover color by Art Edel front cover design by Randy Dahlk all interviews in this book were conducted and transcribed by Fred Perry

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • January 2008 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-893905-85-6 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz unless otherwise noted. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Xenozoic Tales, and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs cartoon series ©2008 Nelvana Ltd. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs toy series ©2008 Tyco Toys, Inc. SubHuman and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Michael Ryan and Mark Schultz. Nemo Girl ™ and ©2008 Clayburn Moore. Batgirl, Batman, Flash, Lois Lane, Saturn Girl, Superman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics. Black Widow, Fantastic Five ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC. Almuric ™ and ©2008 Robert E. Howard Properties, LLC. Dejah Thoris, John Carter, La of Opar, Tarzan and all related characters ™ and ©2008 ERB, Inc. Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant ™ and ©2008 King Features Syndicate, Inc. Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards ©2008 Jim Ottaviani. Aliens, Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp. King Kong ™ and ©2008 Universal Studios. Gorgo ™ and ©2008 King Brothers Ltd. Hatari! ™ and ©2008 Paramount Pictures. Mars Attacks! ™ and ©2008 Topps. Sheena, Queen of the Jungle ™ and ©2008 respective owner. Editorial package ©2008 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To Donna, whose faith and love are beyond measure; to Eric, who trusted me enough to give me a shot; and of course, to Mark, who is as fine a friend as he is an artist. — Fred And as ever, to Donna, Iain, and Caper Glee. — Eric Acknowledgements Mark Schultz, for the long conversations and for taking the time to rummage through the art files. Special Thanks Jerry Boyd, Clayburn Moore, Benno Rothschild 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 Fifteen:

MARK SCHULTZ

Table of Contents Introduction by Clayburn Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: Of Dimetrodons and Coelacanths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Xenozoic Age! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Part Three: Cadillacs, Dinosaurs, Spin-offs and Tie-ins . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Part Four: Expanding Horizons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Part Five: The Barbarian and the Prince . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Part Six: The Barbarian and the Prince . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Introduction I think it’s safe to say that Mark will never stop improving and growing as an illustrator and as a writer. He’s too concerned with getting it right—finding the perfect solution to the problem, the best way to tell the story— and evoking exactly what he wants from the viewer, and he’s always open to learning how to do it better. By always striving to find the perfect solution, he’s developed ink brushwork that is simply exquisite. Mark has a range of influences he’ll readily acknowledge: Dan Smith, N.C. Wyeth, Frazetta, Booth, Coll, and others, but he has taken those influences and established a style that is all his own. From the gorgeous women, through the wonderfully imaginative costumes, to the amazing animals and on to the exceptionally detailed backgrounds, the powerful subtlety of the storytelling draws the reader into worlds of unparalleled imagination.

riting the introduction for a book on the artwork of Mark Schultz is a real pleasure and honor for me. I get to write about one of my favorite artists and a valued friend and colleague. It’s interesting because the intro is written before publication, so I haven’t seen the book, although I’ve seen a lot of Mark’s work before it’s published. We often talk about the work we have in progress, as friends will do. He’s one of the very few people whose opinion I solicit at times on my sculptures, and his input has always been dead on and of great value to me. If Mark says something is right, I can feel confident it’s right.

In both his writing and his visual art, Mark is always working and reworking to get the best approach he can, and he doesn’t mind taking the time necessary to do it. That’s why each piece is such a gem. This applies to his comic work on his wonderful creation Xenozoic Tales on a panel-by-panel basis. Just study it a bit. Each panel is planned, carefully worked out, and each is an art piece on its own merit. By the later issues, Mark had established a style that was recognizable for its sophistication, richness of tone, elegance of brushwork, and pure mastery of the black-&-white medium. His storytelling is the best example of the term “cinematic”: look at the establishing shots, the way the mood is set, the viewpoint of the scene, the flow of the action and the lighting (or in this case, shading). The reader is taken through the story at exactly the pace and with the exact emotions that the story requires.

I’ve known Mark as a person of great personal integrity with an amazingly sharp and curious mind. We took a long road trip form Pennsylvania to Texas last year for the Robert E. Howard Days celebration in Howard’s hometown of Cross Plains and spent a lot of time talking politics, social issues, history, art, you name it. You can learn a lot from talking to a person like Mark Schultz, and it only reinforced why his work is so good. He has an extraordinary talent, but he has never become arrogant or pretentious about it, and he approaches it with intelligence and a mature respect for the reader. Arrogance just isn’t a part of it. Quite the opposite. One of the things I admire most about Mark is that he’s always gracious with the fans and readers he meets and he has a modesty that is unforced and genuine. I’ve always been impressed by this. As the great Al Williamson would say, “He’s one of the Good Guys.”

The same can be said of the body of Mark’s work to date, including the illustrations for Conan of Cimmeria, Mark’s one-shot illustrations and covers, and the studies and finished work for the upcoming Storms at Sea. By the way, as anyone who has seen the prelims can tell you, Storms at Sea is going to be fantastic. This new project clearly illustrates that Mark’s style has continued to evolve and has become that much more accomplished and sophisticated.

Mark is always working on something, whether writing or painting or drawing, and each new book is something to look forward to with great anticipation. So relax in a big comfortable chair, sit back, have a sip of your favorite beverage, and get ready. Because this is as good as it gets. Clayburn Moore Baltimore, Maryland

Part 1:

Of Dimetrodons and Coelacanths

MODERN MASTERS: So, Mark, you were born in western Pennsylvania?

MARK: About half, I guess, of my youth in western Pennsylvania. But a lot of my particular interests and my sports loyalties were formed while living in the Pittsburgh area. Many of the interests that play throughout my life, like my interest in dinosaurs, are tied up for me with that city. Pittsburgh has the Carnegie Institute, which features a natural history museum with a magnificent collection of dinosaurs.

MARK SCHULTZ: No, actually I was born in Trenton, New Jersey. I’ve been a lifetime resident of Pennsylvania; my parents were lifetime residents of Pennsylvania, but at the time they were living just outside Philadelphia, which is smack up against New Jersey, and my mother’s obstetrician was associated with a hospital in Trenton. So I was born in Trenton. Much to my chagrin, I have a New Jersey birth certificate even though I’ve never lived a day of my life in New Jersey, or indeed any place other than Pennsylvania.

MM: Do you remember about what age you first went there? MARK: Absolutely, it was a life-changing experience. I think I was probably six. I was aware of dinosaurs already; I don’t know where I first learned about dinosaurs, but I had already developed an interest and I had been after my parents for a long time to take me to the Carnegie so I could actually see dinosaur fossils. Actually my parents were probably the people who told me about fossils at the Carnegie, and once I heard that, I constantly pestered them to go see the skeletons. It probably didn’t take very long actually, but for me it seemed like it was forever.

MM: Wow, that explains so much about you. [Mark laughs] Then you spent most of your youth in western Pennsylvania?

MM: Was this the first time you had seen a dinosaur skeleton? MARK: Oh absolutely, other than in books. Standing under that Tyrannosaurus—and the Tyrannosaurus skeleton that is at the Carnegie is the type specimen from which all Tyrannosaurus rexes are described. There’s this huge thing, and at the time they had a big mural on the wall—a depiction of the living creature roughly life-size—just behind it. I don’t think the mural is still there but that made a big impression on me, too. Although it wasn’t that great a painting, at that age I was pretty darned impressed. This was about the same time that the movie Gorgo was in theaters. Not a great movie, but as a young kid I was so impressed by the ads 6

in the newspaper. I didn’t get to see it in the theatre; I couldn’t get my parents to take me. But the ads showed an upshot of Gorgo, this giant dinosaurian creature over the city, and the mural at the Carnegie of the tyrannosaur kinda took that same angle, looking up at it. The two images tied together in my mind and reinforced my interests in motion pictures and dinosaurs. MM: Had you been much of a doodler then? Had you been drawing? MARK: I’ve been drawing as long as I can remember. I can’t remember a time I haven’t drawn. MM: Were you drawing dinosaurs before then? MARK: I don’t think so. It was right around that period that I started drawing dinosaurs. In fact, the first thing I can remember drawing, sitting at the kitchen table with a little tin of water colors you got in a kit, was a water color of a brontosaur. It was the first time in my life I had a direction for what I wanted to draw, something other than every day reality, like a house or my family. Dinosaurs fascinated me. MM: And then it took off? You filled your room with your drawings of dinosaurs? MARK: Actually, I started putting together little books. I’d already come across children’s books about dinosaurs, like the How and Why Wonder Book series. I got really interested in the idea of books, collections of writings and drawings working together. I was actually drawing lines to indicate where the text should be in relation to the drawings. I’d assemble the pages and staple them together. MM: Were the books you were reading about dinosaurs fiction or primers for children? MARK: It was all non-fiction. I have vague recollections of seeing comic books with dinosaurs in them, but we didn’t actually have comic books at home. I assume I saw them on the newsstand. MM: What were you reading other than the dinosaur books? When did you start reading Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert Howard?

Previous Page: Hyner, Pennsylvania, as it may have appeared circa 350 million B.C. Above: Original poster art for Gorgo. Left: T-rex sketchbook illustration. Artwork ©2008 Mark Schultz. Gorgo ™ and ©2008 King Brothers Ltd.

Right: Pencil drawing of Tarzan. Below and Next Page: Mark’s pencils and inks for the cover of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, a 1999 Dark Horse comic reprinting Gold Key’s comic book adaptation (with art by the great Russ Manning) of the novel of the same name. Tarzan ™ and ©2008 ERB, Inc.

MARK: The earliest fiction I can remember reading was what you would expect at that age, Little Golden books like Tuffy the Tugboat. That book impressed me because it had this great double-page spread of the harbor that Tuffy the Tugboat was sailing out into. It just gave the impression of a much bigger world beyond the world of the page. There were all these different ships unloading cargo, passenger ships coming in. It gave the impression there was a bigger world out there, and it made a big impression on me. I guess it was only a couple of years later, which seems forever when you’re that age, I picked up an abridged version of Tarzan of the Apes. I should preface that by saying that since I was five or six, I was seeing the classic Tarzan movies on television, primarily the Weismuller stuff. That’s the series that made the biggest impression on me, but there were other jungle adventure movies, too, which I just loved. And then at some point, I discovered the book Tarzan of the Apes. I was about eight, maybe nine; I think I was about eight. But, you know, it didn’t really make a huge impression on me. 8

MM: Burroughs would be hard for an eight-year-old. MARK: At that age, he was a little too subtle. It sounds silly to call Burroughs subtle, but for that age it was hard. It just wasn’t all that exciting. I’m guessing it’s because he wrote in a very staid Victorian manner that early in his career. This was also an abridged version, so I’m guessing they might have taken out some of the bloodier stuff. So anyway, I didn’t really start to appreciate Burroughs until I was about 13 or 14. MM: Were you buying those books or checking them out from your library? MARK: I was seeing them on the newsstands, the paperback versions with the [Roy] Krenkel covers, and they were fascinating covers. But, as intriguing as they looked to me, those books were 50 or 60 cents each, which at the time felt like a small fortune. Sixty cents was like five comic books at that time, and I was really into comics. So, given the decision between getting five comic books or one book that had a really interesting cover but I didn’t know anything about the inside, I bought the comics. But then, Ace published what I consider to be the bible about Burroughs’ oeuvre: Richard Lupoff’s Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. And it cost all of 95¢. It was an important investment. [laughter] But looking through that book and seeing the gorgeous black-&-white interior art that was done by Al Williamson, by Reed Crandall, by Frank Frazetta, it just blew my mind. There was enough there that intrigued me that I thought, “There must be a lot to this Burroughs guy,” and I started to investigate him. MM: So were you reading any Tarzan when you got that book? MARK: No, I hadn’t picked up any Burroughs since that abridged version. I moved away from it completely. But I learned about all the different, to me much

more interesting, science fiction type of stuff, the more fantastic work that Burroughs had done beyond that initial Tarzan of the Apes. That’s really what got me hooked on Burroughs. I started picking up all his stuff en masse. I was even ordering books through the mail that I couldn’t find on the newsstand. I particularly liked the John Carter and Pellucidar stories. But I never really read many of the Tarzan books. I never became a huge fan of Tarzan, not like I did of John Carter.

MARK: That grabbed me a lot. My interest started shifting to DC. Actually, I had a subscription to Batman. This was right at the time when Carmine Infantino was taking over the book and they were heading in a new direction with Batman, re-envisioning him. I can remember back in the first grade, other kids would come in, six years old, bringing in the super-hero books. They always intrigued me, but never enough to start buying them myself. One of the first books that really made an impression on me was the first appearance of the Metal Men [Showcase #37]. A friend brought in the book, passed it around the class, and I saw it. There were the Metal Men fighting this giant flying manta ray thing and it came from prehistoric times. It opens with a prehistoric scene with dinosaurs, so I was really smitten by all this. But, for some reason—I was living out in the country, so I didn’t really have the option to buy comics from newsstands—I didn’t really become a comic collector at that point. But the first comic I ever had of my own was when I was sick, in the hospital to get my tonsils out. I asked my mom to get me a comic. I think I asked her for a Batman comic because I do remember liking the Batman/Superman comics I’d seen. I loved the whole Superman family. This was the Mort Weisinger regime at DC which is really reviled now. But I loved it; it’s still my favored version of Superman and Batman, fighting wacky menaces from outer space. Pure fun. The extended family and imaginary stories... it’s just fun fiction. It doesn’t have to follow continuity obsession. It doesn’t have to deal with “real-life” concerns. Because these are guys flying around in skin-tight shorts. How seriously should anyone take that? You’ve got a guy who dresses up like a bat who runs around with a little boy... and lives in a cave with the little boy. I’m sorry, you don’t take that for much more than what it is.

MM: If you were choosing buying comic books over books, what were you reading then? MARK: At the time I discovered Burroughs, actually I was picking up the occasional Tarzan comic, when they were being published by Dell and then Gold Key. At that age, I was pretty much a Dell/Gold Key kind of guy. Turok Son of Stone, Magnus Robot Fighter. And the TV adaptations. That was also about the time the Batman TV show came out. MM: Did that grab you like the other things?

MM: [laughs] That’s when Bat-mite started showing up, and Bat-hound.... MARK: I loved that stuff. So when I was in the hospital getting my tonsils out, I asked mom to get me a comic, a Batman comic. She couldn’t find it. But she did find something I had never heard of before, Hawkman. And this was Joe Kubert’s work in Brave and the Bold. The issue I saw was actually Hawkman’s third appearance. But it was great. Trying to read that after I came out of surgery and I was foggy from the dope, it was night and I was trying to read from the light in the parking lot outside my window... it was a hallucinatory experience. It made a big impression on me, and I’ve been a lifetime fan. 10

MM: Are you still a big Hawkman fan? MARK: I’m a fan of that period of Hawkman. Joe Kubert and later Murphy Anderson. Which kinda gets back to my point, and I’m being elliptical telling this. Anyway, when I started buying comics, Dell and Gold Key, it was adventure-type stuff. But then the Batman TV show came on, and my interest in DC comics peaked, and I subscribed to Batman and started picking up some of their superheroes. But the stuff I was always most interested in had a strong science fiction or adventure element to it. At that time, the Hawkman stuff was being drawn by Murphy Anderson and Gardner Fox was still writing it, keeping that SF approach. But also Flash. The Flash was pretty cool when Carmine Infantino drawing it. I think Gardner Fox was writing that, too, and it definitely had that science fiction angle to it. MM: Plus in every issue, they had the cool science facts. MARK: Yeah, I loved that stuff. And I loved the cool graphics that Infantino would do with the Flash running and the multiple leg effect. The way he would draw Flash’s uniform coming out of the ring, unfolding. It’s just really iconic. I got to ask Carmine Infantino a few years ago at Dragon*Con, at a panel, what his inspiration was, what his thinking was for drawing that really geometrical look to the uniform expanding out of the ring. He’s a very practical guy, and all he said was, “Well, I had to figure out how to draw it some way.” [laughter] MM: What were you reading before you hit the Burroughs really hard? MARK: About the time I was picking up DC, I also started reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. I was a huge Verne fan, but I didn’t really like Wells until a bit later. MM: Sure, that’s the hard science versus the political science. MARK: Exactly. To me, Verne was perfect boys’ adventure stuff. I remember plodding through Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; even though I didn’t understand everything and every word, I got the drift. I wanted to read more.

MM: I keep waiting for you to mention Howard. Did you see his books when you saw Burroughs—they were kept on the same shelves and the same artists were doing the covers? MARK: In the bookstores, yeah. But early on, I was getting most of my literature from the library. I was also picking up boys’ adventures like Tom Corbett and Tom Swift. There were several of those series for boys, and I would read them sporadically. I was ravenous and read every one, but I enjoyed science fiction at that level. I should also mention I got books from the Scholastic Book Club. I would order paperback editions, anthologies, and adaptations of classic science fiction. MM: And I’ve read an interview where you talked about your father reading you Edgar Allan Poe. MARK: Oh, that’s right. There’s another thing that made a big impression on me. My father is a big Poe fan. MM: So he had Poe’s works around the house? MARK: He had them in the house. MM: Do you remember the stories that affected you the most? MARK: I remember him reading “The Cask of Amontillado.” I remember “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “Tell-tale Heart.” You 11

Previous Page: More Tarzan! About this pencil piece Mark Schultz says, “This is the direction I was headed in for the planned fourth Dark Horse collection of Russ Manning’s Tarzan.” Unfortunately, the book was never produced. Above: “Lone Star Encounter”—one of two pieces of artwork Mark did for 1992’s Saucer People trading card set, published by Kitchen Sink Press. Tarzan ™ and ©2008 ERB, Inc. Saucer People artwork ©2008 Mark Schultz.

know, just all the classics, the shorter ones. Not the more involved ones, not the detective ones.

MARK: Pretty much right off the bat I could tell the difference. It didn’t take me long to figure it out.

MM: Right, the stuff that had an impact in the last page and a half. To scare the crap out of you.

MM: I guess if you’ve been reading Burroughs, and you’ve been reading Verne and Wells, and you’ve been reading Poe, the archaic language and style that Howard uses are not going to be any problem.

MARK: Yeah. I think that’s part of it. He was a good reader, and there was that sense of oral storytelling, being able to do a kind of performance with the voice. MM: So he did different voices? MARK: He didn’t push it, but he would vary his voice for dramatic effect. MM: Okay, we got Poe, we got space adventure. How did you get to Howard then?

Above: Conan in profile. Artwork for the cover embossing for a limited edition hardcover of Conan the Cimmerian. Right and Next Page: Preliminary pencils and finished inks of Mark’s take on a scene from King Kong. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC. King Kong ™ and ©2008 Universal Studios.

MARK: Well, I got to Howard through Burroughs. I was reading all these various Burroughs paperback rereleases and the comic books and various science fiction series. I guess I was about 13 when I found the Masters of Adventure book. One of the things that it said was that Howard was really influenced by Burroughs. And of course, I remember seeing those extraordinary Frazetta covers and being intrigued. And by that time I really trusted what Lupoff was telling me. He recommended this book or that book by Burroughs, and I found that I agreed with his choices. So I picked up some early Conan on his recommendation, basically. The first one I bought was Conan of Cimmeria. And I loved the stuff. Of course, those books were a mixture of Howard’s work and pastiches by other later authors. It became clear to me pretty quickly that Howard was vastly superior to those others. MM: You could really tell the difference? 12

MARK: To me, Howard’s stuff, compared to those other guys, is really modern, streamlined, almost Steinbeckian. Compared to the florid Victorian language of those other guys. MM: Maybe I’m thinking of the locales. He seems really capable of going on in his descriptions for a while. MARK: He’s very descriptive, very visual. He’ll describe a scene at great lengths, but not to the extent of some of his contemporaries in Weird Tales. He kept things moving. He would go into descriptive passages, but by and large, he used very

unsentimental, very propulsive writing. I don’t think any writer in any genre, before or since, has written action better than Howard. He just had a sense for distilling things and injecting a sense of urgency.

MARK: It was on a TV jungle theatre show on Saturday mornings in Pittsburgh back when I was five or six years old. They showed the Weismuller Tarzans, and they would also show other features that had to do with jungles to one extent or another. They showed King Kong and Son of Kong back-to-back. I was floored by them. It really made such an impact on me. I was too young to really follow the storyline too closely, but all the various scenes had a visual effect on me to the point where I actually to this day have dream imagery that comes right out of them.

MM: We’ve been talking about things that had an impact on you, and I want to turn to one you’ve mentioned to me a number of times. How old were you when you first saw King Kong?

MM: So every time it came on, you made an effort to see it? MARK: I didn’t get a chance to see it again until I was probably 14. MM: How different was the experience at that age? MARK: Well, I had been waiting a long time to see it again. When I first saw it when I was five, I had never heard of it before. I didn’t know anything about it. But as I got a bit older I came to realize that this film I had stumbled on was very well known—iconic. Even more so than today, King Kong was a cultural icon, and there was a lot of popular references to it. Comedians would refer to King Kong in their routines; Bob Newhart did an entire routine about a watchman on the Empire State Building the night that King Kong climbed it. So it was a pop culture reference for everyone. There was no way you could avoid it. It seemed like every other issue of Mad magazine had a reference to King Kong. So it became this Holy Grail for me, and I learned enough about it that I wanted to see it again. I don’t know what it was about the area we lived in 13

that they didn’t show Kong on TV, at least not at a time when I could see it. But I wanted to see it badly. MM: How did your perception of it change? MARK: It lived up to my expectations. Although, I was a little disappointed, because I knew the story pretty well by then, and the broadcast I saw at 14 cut out the whole sequence with the guys being chased by the brontosaur, I guess so they could fit it into a time slot. You know, the scene involving some guy being treed, and it just was gone. It disappointed the hell out of me. I was waiting and waiting for it and thought maybe I had my storyline wrong, maybe it would come later in the movie, but no, it was cut out. But you know, I was at the right age to see it the second time. It had an enormous impact on me. MM: Were there other films that affected you like that? MARK: I’m sure there were. There were always films constantly coming out to theatres that I wanted to see, but I was too young. The first film I went to see with

friends on my own was Planet of the Apes. I was probably eleven or twelve. MM: Did you like it? MARK: Oh yeah. Very much. It might have been that or it might have been Thunderball, one of those two. But previous to that, I had to get my parents to take me, and they were not interested in that kind of film. They took me to a lot of great films; they took me to Hatari! which was a very influential film for me. MM: John Wayne. MARK: John Wayne in a Howard Hawks film. Running around in Land Rovers, capturing big game. That was a really important image that became a big part of Xenozoic Tales. John Wayne is a big part of Jack. And just the whole ambiance, the group dynamics that Hawks put in most of his films is really evident in Hatari!. A bunch of guys and women working together; they’re all professional and really good at what they do. MM: And really smart ones too. MARK: Really smart, and they work together. You know, they have conflicts but there’s none of this sort of contemporary storytelling where one of them is a traitor or a ratbastard and there’s a lot of group tension. These are people that enjoy working together and you want to be there with them. MM: So, by the time you’re in high school, you’re reading comics regularly.... MARK: Yeah, pretty regularly. MM: ...and you’re getting books from the library. How soon did you run into Cordwainer Smith? MARK: Probably my junior or senior year in high school. MM: In some ways that’s a completely different impulse from the kind of science fiction you’ve mentioned so far. 15

Previous Page: Kong’s grand entrance. Above: Original poster art for Hatari!—a film which heavily influenced the feel of Xenozoic Tales. Left: Sketch of Jack “Cadillac” Tenrec, whose character was partly inspired by John Wayne.

Sturgeon, Harry Kuttner. I was gravitating more towards the soft science fiction, the character-driven as opposed to the hard. I enjoyed guys like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but they were never among my favorites, though Heinlein kinda straddles hard and soft, doesn’t he? I really liked to pick up everything I could from Theodore Sturgeon. And I always really enjoyed Clifford Simak. He wrote very humanistic science fiction where often the aliens were more human than the humans. I went back and forth between that sort of stuff and the weird speculative fiction, you know like Lovecraft, the Weird Tales fantasy stuff. MM: I didn’t realize you started reading Lovecraft quite so early. MARK: You know, I didn’t know anything about Smith. From about the age of 13, I was picking up lots of SF paperbacks cold, just experimenting, checking out authors I didn’t know much about. One of those guys was Cordwainer Smith, and he was one that was so good and that I enjoyed so much that it just stuck. Many others I read, I’ve never looked at again. Above: In 1994, Topps rereleased their classic Mars Attacks! trading card set, this time in an “archive” box set, with 45 new cards added, including this one drawn by Mark. Next Page: To our dismay, Mark wasn’t able to find any of his childhood drawings of The Dimetrodon, but here’s a sketchbook drawing of the real thing. Mars Attacks! ™ and ©2008 Topps.

MM: Was it a collection of short stories? MARK: No, the first one I read was his novel, Norstrilia. I think it had some introductory remarks that mentioned his short stories, and shortly thereafter a publisher came out with a collection of his short stories. I picked them up and enjoyed them very much. MM: Of all those books you were picking up, were there others that you really liked? Did you look for specific things? MARK: Well, I would pick up anything by Burroughs and Howard in paperback. I wasn’t quite as thorough with other authors. But I think it was in the ninth grade, I went to the library and found a couple of books by Sam Moscowitz: Seekers of Tomorrow and Explorers of the Infinite. They were early guides to the pioneers of science fiction. Explorers of the Infinite covered Verne and Wells, everyone up to about 1930, I guess. From there on, the guys from the classic years, the Campbell years, were in Seekers of Tomorrow, and I learned about who was who. So I started picking up Theodore 16

MARK: Oh yeah. I started reading Lovecraft about the same time I started reading Howard, about 14. I started learning about Weird Tales and started picking up Clark Ashton Smith, too. But at the same time I was picking up the guys that came out of Astounding. Fritz Leiber, A.E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp. I never cared for de Camp’s writing when he was doing pastiches of Conan, but his own humorous science fiction stories I loved. Edmond Hamilton, C.L. Moore, Ray Bradbury, too. MM: You’ve painted this picture of yourself in high school. I see a tall slender kid, reading comic books, going to science fiction movies, reading science fiction books. You were a geek. MARK: Oh, totally. That on top of the fact that my family tended to move every so often. By the time I was in high school, I’d been through the wringer of having to re-establish myself, be the new kid all the time, and I’d became pretty much a loner. I wouldn’t go out of my way to meet people. I think that’s true of a lot of people that make their profession drawing or writing in general, any kind of profession that’s relatively isolated. You become more comfortable being by yourself. MM: How much drawing were you doing by the time you were in high school? MARK: Lots. It was something I was doing constantly.

MM: Were you working on specific things or taking art classes in high school?

typical of kids. I see it all the time, young people who want to become comics professionals—they create a whole slew of characters, but there’s no back story, no plot, nothing to link it all together. It’s just cool characters. So I designed lots of cool characters.

MARK: I had weekly art classes from the seventh grade all the way through high school. Of course, I got to take more in high school; there was a little bit of flexibility for scheduling in the curriculum that went towards your particular interest. I knew I was going to go to college for art, or I had a pretty good idea I was.

MM: Then what kinds of things were you doing in high school? MARK: By that time I had come under the influence of illustrative guys like Frazetta.

MM: Were you drawing comics for yourself? MARK: I had gone through a stage of that when Batman was on TV. The first super-hero I ever created was called the Dimetrodon. [laughter] He was a lot like Batman in that he dressed up like an animal, but he was a prehistoric animal. He had a huge fin on his back. The poor guy couldn’t sit down or walk through doorways.

MM: You mentioned Frazetta when you were talking about picking up Howard books. By that time, he had to have been doing the Burroughs books as well. MARK: Oh, yeah. He had been painting covers for the Ace edition Burroughs books early on, before he had started doing the Howard covers. Then he went back and redid some Burroughs covers for Ace. So I went through a period for several years where I wanted to draw like Frank Frazetta. I think, when you’re that age, 15, 16, 17, and you’re male, you’re at the perfect age to be into Frazetta. He’s at the pinnacle of his influence and power because he’s all about that male aggression and it’s perfect for guys that age. I really wanted to duplicate his style without having any of the fundamentals or the skill necessary to try to pull it off. I had no understanding of what lay under all the cool surface technique!

MM: He didn’t inherit the powers of a Dimetrodon? MARK: No, I don’t think I thought it out that far. Basically I drew a cover with him, and did a page or two of continuity inside until I got bored with it. I think it’s

MM: Were you any good at that at all? MARK: No, no, no, no, no. It was crap. But even at that age, I was gravitating to the types of subject matter— Burroughs and Howard—that continue to interest me to this very day. MM: Well, it seems only natural. I don’t read Burroughs now as much as I might like, but he has a lasting influence. John Carter is a model of a man; he is the man that we all really need to try to be. MARK: Absolutely. But you have to come upon it at the right time of your life. If you’re beyond a certain age, I don’t think you can access it. I know people that really love the same things that we love, science fiction and the fantastic, but they didn’t read Burroughs at the right age. And now I try to convince them why this is great stuff, and they don’t get it. They just don’t understand it. It has to make a make an impact on you when you’re at the age when you’re still inexperienced and ready to be influenced. MM: And we can identify with John Carter. He’s a master at everything he tries, except talking to women. 17

MARK: He’s just a reflection of a big boy, an adolescent. He has the attributes, the physical strength of a grown man but still mentally he’s around age 13 or 14. You know I remember how he got to Mars.... MM: By praying?

and Howard who would go back and forth between epic poetry and prose. I loved those formats. But looking back at it, it was horribly pretentious, everything you could imagine from a teenager—the world’s against me and everything’s crap.

MARK: Well, by thinking really hard about it. So I would go outside and I knew that red star was Mars. I’d think, “You know, if I really concentrate, maybe it will happen.”

MM: But you know, if you had Lovecraft as your model you had the advantage that you could’ve just written nonsense words as long as they rhymed. [laughter]

MM: Well, since you admitted you did it first, I’ll say I did it a couple of times too.

MARK: I loved trying to coin very archaic-sounding and phantasmagorical words.

MARK: I think everyone that read it has tried it. Carl Sagan admitted he tried it, although he was very skeptical. Not me—I thought there was a 50-50 chance.

MM: And I say that as though it is a joke, but actually, that kind of poetry requires some knowledge of meter and scansion to work that out.

MM: On to college. Did you apply anywhere else but Kutztown State?

MARK: Yeah, I didn’t have that kind of knowledge. I had no understanding of why he had chosen those words, so I would just throw things out there helter-skelter.

MARK: Yeah. I applied to the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. I got accepted there, but that was one snobbish school. The people I talked to when I went down to show them my portfolio and be interviewed, they looked at my stuff and told me I had promise. Then they asked who influenced me, and I said, “Frank Frazetta.” They asked me who Frank Frazetta was, and I said he painted paperback covers. And I’ll never forget the professor’s response: “Well, we’ll see if we can change your mind about that.” I’m glad I didn’t go there, because at the time it was tied to a very narrow definition of what art should be. But I was accepted there and I was also accepted at Penn State, but that school didn’t have as strong an art program as Kutztown did. Kutztown is a much smaller school, a state school with a very strong art program. And you know, at that time, I thought I’d wind up a visual artist. I was also very interested in writing at the time. And I knew that if I wanted to, I could switch over to English or journalism, which gave me a couple of options going to that school.

MM: So throw in some consonants and an apostrophe and you’re good to go? MARK: Um hmm. And the payoff was pretty much always “life’s a bitch and then you die.” It was like Clark Ashton Smith stories: you’d have a fantastic location, you’d throw your characters into the situation, and by the end they were all dead. The horror of the universe overpowers all human aspirations. You could say that Lovecraft boils down to that too, but he’s really a lot more subtle about it. Lovecraft writes about the wonder of the universe, not just the horror. But at that age, I didn’t have anywhere near the sophistication to understand that what made guys like Lovecraft really good was that broader, more complex view of things.

MM: Really? What kinds of things were you writing on your own? Short stories?

MM: When you got to Kutztown, you began majoring in fine arts?

MARK: Yeah, attempts at short stories. I did some poetry at that time. I mean, again, I was reading guys like Lovecraft

MARK: I started by majoring in what was called at the 19

Previous Page: John Carter protects his love, Dejah Thoris, from a charging green Martian. Above and Below: Pre-comics inking experiments. John Carter, Dejah Thoris ™ and ©2008 ERB, Inc. Artwork ©2008 Mark Schultz.

Right: A pre-comics ink wash painting. Below: Another pre-comics inking experiment. Next Page: It’s the Fantastic Four—the next generation! Fantastic Five #2 cover art. Fantastic Five ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

time Advertising Art. I lasted a year in that, but the first year was taking required art classes and fundamentals courses. It would have been the same no matter what my art major was. MM: What happened to drive you away from that? MARK: I just found that the courses I would be taking in advertising art weren’t what I was particularly interested in. I wanted to become an illustrator. I was looking at taking classes that would prepare me to be an illustrator. I had assumed that advertising art would take me in that direction, but then I saw that I wouldn’t be taking life drawing so much as I would be taking design courses. Now I appreciate basic design much more, but at the time, I was more interested in learning how to paint and how to draw than 20

working in design and typography. So I switched over. I was worried that my parents wouldn’t be happy with my switch, but they were fine. I’ve always been lucky in that my parents saw higher education as a venue for gaining knowledge, not as the direct route to an avocation or career. So they didn’t equate the money spent on college as a deposit toward a guaranteed career. MM: So you could tell your fine arts professors you were interested in being the next Frazetta? MARK: Well, by that time I learned to keep my mouth shut. [laughs] But Kutztown, as opposed to what I saw at Tyler, had a lot of differing viewpoints among the professors. There was no singular direction at the school. It was not like you go to that school and you get influenced to go in a particular direction. There were some varied opinions within the faculty, and I think that was good. There were professors who were totally unsympathetic to my interest in comics and illustration. But there were some that did do illustration themselves and were familiar with the classic strip art as well as illustration. That first Frazetta collection from Bantam....

MM: The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta?

anything else that I read regularly. In retrospect, I’ve learned to really appreciate what Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy were doing, the James Bond slash kung fu epic with Fu Manchu thrown in there. I loved the scope of that story and the venue was something that Marvel really hadn’t done much for years, at least not since Steranko had been doing S.H.I.E.L.D. So that was really cool, and I enjoyed it a great deal probably because it was more adventure stuff than super-heroes. I have never been a big super-hero fan. I always loved the Fantastic Four when Kirby was writing them, but I didn’t consider them super-heroes. It didn’t have all that stuff like secret identities that I found so difficult to believe. It was more of a science fiction story. They were out there exploring the universe.

MARK: Yeah. I showed that to one professor, who was the most sympathetic, and he was real enthusiastic about it. He loved it, and I told him that the artist lives up in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, just an hour and a half up from Kutztown. MM: He hadn’t seen Frazetta before that? MARK: I don’t believe he had. If he had, he wasn’t real familiar with him. So at my professor’s urging I wrote to Frazetta, inviting him to come down and give a lecture at Kutztown. I never got a reply back, which I’ve learned since then is typical. He’s apparently never been particularly comfortable with public appearances, so it wasn’t like he specifically ignored my letter. By that time I was a junior in college and I had pretty much lost interest in comics, but I still would go down from time to time to the newsstand to see what was coming out. There just wasn’t much in that period that interested me at all. MM: Was it that the stories and art just didn’t do it for you any more or was it a lack of time or money? MARK: Mostly it was not having the time, but most of the comics through those years I just didn’t find particularly compelling. MM: This was the early ’70s? MARK: I started college in ’73, so this would have been about ’75 and ’76. MM: So, the DC Implosion? MARK: Yeah, I was aware of the DC Implosion but I wasn’t buying any DC at the time. I was still following Marvel’s Conan; the Kull stuff had petered out by then. I didn’t start picking up Master of Kung Fu until Mike Zeck was doing it; I’ve always been a big fan of Zeck’s art. His early art had its own very special individual vibe that I found attractive. And the other book about that time I was interested in was Tomb of Dracula. I picked up that, and I would pick up an occasional issue of Staton and Cuti’s E-Man. There really wasn’t 21

classes with her, and she introduced us. Denise and I were just friends for a couple of years, and I had long split with the other girl when we started getting serious. We would go to movies together. The nice thing about being in a college town is that there are lots of great little film programs going on. The first thing we ever did together, just the two of us, not as a date because she was seeing someone, was go to see Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Buster Keaton’s The General.

For me, the comics that I stayed interested in over time have always been a combination of story and art, keeping me interested in the visual of the story. I won’t stay with a book when a writer or art team who are doing things I am interested in leaves. I won’t stay loyal to it just because of a character. I’m not character-oriented when it comes to comics. It’s got to be a story I enjoy and art I enjoy. I enjoyed Spider-Man when Ditko was working on it, but when he left... I had a lot of friends who got interested in it at that point... but for me, that was really the end of my interest in Spider-Man. There is something otherworldly and quirky about Ditko’s art and storytelling that made that a real exciting book for me. And when he was gone, it didn’t have that impact any more.

MM: Did you do studio work together or take classes together? MARK: We only had one class together, because she was two years behind me. And I didn’t have a studio; I shared a house with a couple other students off-campus where I did all my painting. Denise and I didn’t really spend time together until after I graduated. I ended up staying in Kutztown for a couple years after I graduated.

MM: Had you met Denise by your junior year? MARK: I didn’t meet her until my senior year. MM: Well, there’s a big influence.

MM: So what did you do with your degree in fine arts?

MARK: Denise? Yeah. Away from comics, yeah. She helped me widen my appreciation of art. We were both really into aspects of traditional Japanese art.

MARK: I made a living doing security work, first at Kutztown and then at another college in the area. I picked up odd illustration jobs from Rodale Press, which publishes how-to books. I did a book, still in print actually, called Woodcutter’s Companion, about how to find, collect, cut and stack your own firewood. It was horrible stuff, but they were very happy with the job I did. So Rodale continued feeding me illustration jobs on books of that sort, which paid just terrible, but it kept my hand in illustration. Those jobs taught me the basics of commercial art, of producing art for reproduction.

MM: She was an art student at Kutztown as well? MARK: She was. I met her when I was dating a girl in one of Denise’s classes. This other girl and I were in the art building looking at a gallery of student art, a display of various student self-portraits. And the only one that I really liked turned out to be Denise’s self-portrait. It was confident and kind of arrogant. I said, “Wow, this person really has a more self-assured manner of drawing than any of the others.” I asked my girlfriend if she had any

MM: Were you still writing then? 22

MARK: No. As it turned out, I’d fallen away from writing completely after high school. I never continued it in college. The only storytelling I can recall in college at all was when I wrote and directed a short film. There was a student film festival where students were loaned camera equipment and invited to submit their work. MM: What was the name of your film? MARK: I don’t even remember the name of the film, but I’ve got it here some place. I haven’t seen it in 25 or 30 years. MM: Was it a science fiction movie? MARK: No, it was vaguely horror, kind of a psychological study, but really not much of anything. It’s probably disintegrated by now. But yeah, that was the only conscious storytelling I can recall in college. Although I think there’s a lot of unintended storytelling going on in my single images. In fact, when I had my senior show, there were a lot of paintings that were vaguely symbolic, surrealistic... a lot of fish images in my paintings. I used the coelacanth as an iconic shape. MM: And that hasn’t changed at all, has it? MARK: It hasn’t changed. And it was interesting because my senior show came up and Marsha Tucker happened to be a visiting lecturer. Tucker was an influential art curator, museum director, and critic in

New York City. At the time, she was championing “outsider art.” I didn’t think she would have any interest in the type of stuff I was doing—very illustrative, old-fashioned objective art. One of my professors asked her to look at my work and she did. She said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I think you’re trying to tell a story. I think that story is really important to you and you should think about that.” And it turns out that she was absolutely right. It took me years and years after that to put it together and realize what she was telling me was exactly what I needed to be doing. But I went through a long period before I was able to get back into storytelling which, for me, meant getting into comics. MM: Were you working late night shifts? MARK: Yeah, I was working four to midnight or 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. Four to midnight was actually a great time to work. I would take a half-hour to get home, and me and my roommate would go get a beer and stay out until about two o’clock. I’d get home, sleep in late, get up and paint until I had to go to back work around four.

MM: What were you painting then? MARK: Mostly oil, some water color, all trying to incorporate these iconic images, fish, the coelacanth. MM: Let’s back up a second, because I think we may have glossed over something. You have an active interest in ecology and conservation—was that something you grew up with or did you get a feeling for it in college? MARK: I’m not really sure where it came from. I’ve always had an appreciation for nature because I largely grew up in the country. I think it was just reinforced by my parents. MM: You also have, based on my conversations with you, a deep appreciation for the water. And you’ve never really lived near water, unless you count the Monongahela. MARK: And the Allegheny and the Susquehanna. Pennsylvania has lots of rivers and streams but not a lot of large standing bodies. MM: So do you have any idea where the interest came from? MARK: Maybe 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, because I read that before I ever spent significant time at the ocean. I’ve always been intrigued by the ocean. My parents took me to the New Jersey shore when I was two or three, but I can just barely remember that. Later, the family took a vacation up to Cape Cod, and I fell in love with salt water. But my parents had me swimming by the time I was four.

MARK: The coelacanth is just an example of a surviving bit of the prehistoric world that fascinated me as a kid. It wasn’t specifically tied into my interest in the ocean. I didn’t have the experience of actually seeing living oceanic life or even of having the feeling of being in the ocean and the waves until I was older.

MM: What I’m driving at is that you have this motif of the ocean in the art you’re describing, but you really didn’t have that much experience with it. Where did the coelacanth come from?

MM: Going back to the womb? [laughter] MARK: Could be. There’s just something very intriguing about the ocean, and I think it does go back to the fact that we are composed mostly of water, salt water actually. Life did come from the ocean, and there’s that very primitive connection to it. MM: You know, we haven’t talked about any of your EC experiences. MARK: You’re right. When I was eight years old or so, I had seen Tales of the Incredible, a paperback collection of EC 24

stories. I saw it on the paperback shelf in a grocery store, and it fascinated me because it was really horrifying and weird. It scared the bejeezus out of me. This was back when I was reading Dell and Gold Key comics, and Classics Illustrated. So this stuff was way too intense for me. I could tell it was really good, but I just felt at that age it was for an older audience. And I knew there was no way my parents would let me have it, either. Then there was a company called East Coast Comix that actually republished entire EC issues. My memory here is foggy, but I think this run appeared in the early or mid-’70s. Issues seemed to turn up on newsstands very irregularly. Bad distribution, I would guess. MM: Suddenly you’re exposed to Wally Wood and Al Williamson in a different way from the way he appeared in the Lupoff book. Did you put that together? MARK: I had also been seeing Williamson’s X-9 stuff in the newspapers, back was I was like 13 or 14 years old. For a while there I was clipping them and saving them. It took me a long time to put it together that this was all the same guy. When I put it together, it blew my mind that it was all the same guy. Up ’til then it just didn’t occur to me that someone could be a cartoonist and an illustrator. MM: And eventually you became good friends with him. MARK: Oh yeah. He wrote the intro to my first collection. But you know, I was going to say, it wasn’t until I matured to the point that I really appreciated what EC had done that I started to want to do comics myself. Part of that was loving the short story format. Tight, six-, seven-, or eight-page stories. What really did the trick was, one day I took most of my Marvels and DCs—several boxes‚ worth—to a comic book shop and traded them all in. And what I got in return was a collection of ECs and Spirits that Dan, the shop owner, had gotten in that day just by happenstance. They were reading copies, not in great shape, but they were fine for my purposes. Original copies of EC and Spirit sections.

MM: Did you know about Eisner before then? MARK: I was aware of him for years without really reading him until I began picking up The Spirit Magazine from the comic book shop. I missed out on the Harvey magazine and the Warren magazine. For some reason I completely missed them, but I was able to dig into Eisner when Kitchen Sink began reprinting The Spirit after Warren dropped the series, probably about ’82. MM: Here we are again—you’ve got the beautiful women and the strong women that Eisner draws. Clearly Hannah comes from that, but you have strong women throughout your writing. MARK: There’s a real tradition of women like that in film and literature, in the ’30s and ’40s especially. But they kinda petered out after the war when, for whatever reason—changing culture, changing economic conditions, whatever—women got stuck back in domestic roles. MM: Well, in the ’40s there’s the war, right? MARK: Right, the war forced women to take up non-traditional roles. MM: And in the ’30s, in the middle class and lower, the women needed to work to bring money into the households. But in the ’50s, the soldiers are back, America is prosperous, and the women don’t need to work unless they want to. MARK: In fact, they were seen as a threat, as taking jobs away from men. Men without jobs, supported by women, were considered

Previous Page Top: Sketches of the prehistoric survivor, the coelacanth. Previous Page Bottom: More pre-comics experiments in inking, this time illustrating sea life. Below: More pre-comics experimentation, this piece entitled, “A Paleantologist’s Dream.” Artwork ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

Right: If you want a strong female character, look no further than Will Eisner’s creation, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Below: Of course, if you did stop there you wouldn’t get to Hannah Dundee. Next Page: A very early Xenozoic Tales drawing, which Mark says was “probably done before or during working on the Death Rattle “Xenozoic!” story.” This piece was used as promo art for Kitchen Sink Press’ Kitchen Sink Pipeline newsletter. Sheena, Queen of the Jungle ™ and ©2008 respective owner. Hannah Dundee, Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

to be emasculated. So yeah, these societal pressures pushed the women back into subservient roles and cut off their options. But you look at the films that were coming out in the ’30s and ’40s, obviously there were many strong, independent women. That’s a big reason I’m a fan of Hawks, John Ford, and the screwball comedies. They all consistently feature female characters as strong and independent as the males. MM: And of course, there’s one more strong woman we haven’t finished up with yet—you and Denise eventually got serious. MARK: Well, yeah—Denise and I began to get serious the year she graduated from college, ’78. We got married in ’80, and we’ve been together ever since. MM: I’m not sure who gets the credit for that.... MARK: Oh, she does. I’m not fooling myself. You’ve got to understand, too, that Denise had really no idea that I was going to renew my interest in comics or genre fiction. So she really didn’t know what she was getting into. I kinda pulled a 180 on her in that my interest shifted from fine art to a very specific and much more commercial field. Still, what I love about comics is that it is the perfect combination of being able to make a living in something and still having as much freedom as you can take. It’s a good balance of the two. So when I moved towards comics, she had to adapt too. MM: She adapted well. MARK: She’s been a big help with Xenozoic Tales. She did the lettering and helped with the coloring decisions with the covers. I bounce ideas off her in regards to the storytelling, working out plot elements with her. MM: And you discuss art decisions with her as well? MARK: Oh absolutely. She’s very strong-willed, as am I. She has definite ideas and sometimes we lock horns, but they’re creative differences and her point-of-view always helps. 26

Part 2:

Xenozoic Age! MM: The book helped you study the process of writing fiction, but what did you know about writing proposals for comic series?

MM: We talked about the art you were doing when you graduated, but clearly, Xenozoic Tales involves both writing and art for you. I was curious about what kind of writing you were doing before you started Xenozoic Tales and the story that was in Death Rattle or if this was something you did cold and was the first thing you had written in a decade.

MARK: Absolutely nothing. Looking back at the proposal I sent out for Xenozoic Tales, I’m embarrassed. I think I’m lucky that my art samples carried the proposal. MM: What did the proposal consist of, then?

MARK: Pretty much the latter. I went into this not having written anything for myself or for publication since my early years in college. But, as I became more and more aware that I did have a serious interest in telling stories through comics, I realized that I had to have some kind of guide to teach me how to do this. So I began to study not only the works of comic creators I admired, like Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner, but also a great little book I found at the library called something like How to Write a Short Short Story. It was a primer, a writer’s guide to short short fiction, a prose format that isn’t seen anymore. The format is only two or three pages long and because of its size and the tight structure it follows, usually the idea is to save some sort of kicker to the very end. I guess O. Henry was considered a writer of the form.

MARK: It was basically a one-, maybe two-page summary of the background of the Xenozoic Age. It talked a little bit about the characters of Jack and Hannah. It talked about how the construct of the Xenozoic Age would give me the freedom to tell different types of genre stories. I was interested in being able to play around and experiment in different genres. MM: And the art you included? MARK: I drew up an eight-page story that eventually evolved into “Mammoth Pitfall,” which we later published. I sent copies of pencils, copies of the inked piece... I can’t remember if I sent them the script. I tried to downplay that because in those days I was writing everything by hand.

MM: I was thinking of James Thurber. MARK: Oh, excellent, yeah. Thurber, too. It just seemed to me that the format fit very well with six-, seven-, eight-page comic stories. Those were the formats I was looking at from EC and Will Eisner’s Spirit stories. This book offered a great deal of help beyond what I could get from studying Kurtzman and Eisner’s work. 27

MM: When did you start sending the proposal around?

Below: The beauty of Xenozoic Tales was that it allowed Mark to mix prehistoric creatures of any and all eras, including mammoths. Next Page: An early Xenozoic Tales attempt. Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

MARK: Death Rattle was published in November of ’86 and the first Xenozoic Tales was in February of ’87. So it must have been late May of ’86. MM: Wow! That’s a fast turnaround! MARK: Yeah. I worked all through the early months of ’86 on the proposal story, “Mammoth Pitfall.” Basically I would work on it between paying jobs. The thing I remember most was that I was working on it one morning when the news

came over the radio about the Challenger accident. That was one of the moments that really stuck with me because here was this almost inconceivably horrible thing that happened while I was working on something that was going to change my life. I finished the proposal story in May, made up seven different packages and mailed them. I think of the seven publishers I sent it to, six of them got back to me, either with “thanks but no thanks” or offers for work. Kitchen Sink was actually the first I heard from; I got a letter from Dave Schreiner, the editor there, expressing interest. That was one of the red-letter days of my life, one of the happiest moments of my life. Because up until then, I really didn’t know if I was going to be able to do this. Did I have the talent to do it? Would anyone be interested in the type of thing I wanted to do? I didn’t even know if it would logistically work, living in Pennsylvania and dealing with a publisher elsewhere. MM: Who was the other? MARK: I also got a call from Pat Redding, an editor at Marvel under Larry Hama on The Savage Sword of Conan, asking me if I would be interested in inking a “King Kull” back-up story. I accepted. This was going on at the same time that Kitchen Sink offered me a chance to develop a Xenozoic story in the pages of Death Rattle, so I was working on them concurrently. So I had to focus on Conan to get it done quickly that summer. It was actually the first professional comics job I finished, but I can’t remember if it was the first job I actually had published. MM: Your Xenozoic proposal contained a story that turns out to be towards the beginning of the cycle, and you had descriptions of your characters and the Xenozoic world. How well developed was that world? How long had you spent working it out? What inspired it in the first place and how did you go about working it out? MARK: What inspired it was my frustration with my day job doing commercial advertising illustration. I wasn’t happy doing that. I had drifted away from fine art, the kind of

painting I had studied in school. I was frustrated by the hypocrisy: the fine arts gallery scene is completely controlled by special interests... by money interests, I should say. I was not happy; I had drifted away from fine arts to the point where I was illustrating how-to books. But I still loved comic books and movies—all sorts of storytelling, actually—so I just started wondering if I had my own comic book, what kind of thing would I be doing. So, at first it was all theoretical. But over a period of about three years, Xenozoic evolved and became something more concrete, more obtainable, in my mind. MM: It was more like you had an object you were writing toward rather than just creating a world for the heck of it? You said, “I want to write a comic book and here’s the kind of comic book I want to write based on what I know”? MARK: Except when I started this, I really didn’t have any kind of plan. That was alien from my existence. I had never gone to a comic convention, and I had no contact with anyone who was working professionally in the industry. So I really didn’t have any kind of game plan—I didn’t know the first thing about the business side of comics. I was just frustrated and just daydreaming. MM: It really was just an outlet for you. MARK: Absolutely. It was just exercising creativity with no specific goal in mind. But, as I started to firm up my ideas for Xenozoic, I would drop by a comic shop to see what independent comic creators were doing. I began to get excited about the potential and what could actually be put out in the marketplace and sell.

MARK: A very sketchy one. Again, I had story ideas and I had the basic background concepts, but I hadn’t worked out any kind of detail or even worked out the relationship between Jack and Hannah—how did they get together? There were a lot of holes.

MM: 1983 was the beginning of the independents, really.

MARK: Actually, I think the concept of the Xenozoic was first. I can remember very early on doing a picture of a Tyrannosaurus chasing a classic 1950s automobile with the proto-Jack and the proto-Hannah. But they were very different; they were wearing jury-rigged armor-like devices. As I think about it, I remember that they were warriors but I got away from that before too long. The first illustrations of Jack and Hannah were influenced by the Mad Max movies. I didn’t sit down and organize a coherent reference bible. I had a little bit on this piece of paper here and some over there. It was all done by hand; I was never any good with a typewriter.

MM: Were the characters first?

MARK: Right. I would go to the store and I would see early issues of Rocketeer, early issues of Love and Rockets; I would see American Flagg. I’d see Death Rattle and The Spirit. I loved all these books. So I just got to thinking that maybe there was room for the kind of thing I wanted to do. You’ve got to remember that in the ’70s I was driven away from comics by the stuff coming out of Marvel and DC. There just wasn’t much to be excited about. All this new alternative stuff got me thinking in terms of “maybe there’s a chance.” MM: Did you start writing a bible for your potential series? 29

Of course, when it came time to actually put the stories together, I realized how many holes there were. I had to figure out what exactly Jack does for a living. What does Hannah do? What do they represent? Who are the people they live with? I had never attempted to put together the background for a series, so I guess I was just going to come to it in a very piecemeal kind of way, because of inexperience. MM: But once you had a few stories in place that were good, where were you going to go with this? It easily could have just been stories set in the Xenozoic era without going anywhere, cool characters doing cool things in a one-off fashion. But Xenozoic Tales has an arc, there’s a destination. Everything up front is going to lead to something down the road. MARK: Yeah, but I didn’t plan it when I started it. I still feel this way about it: the series I always point to is Prince Valiant. I don’t think anyone goes to Prince Valiant thinking that it all is leading to some sort of climax. Prince Valiant isn’t headed anywhere; he’s not going to ultimately become King of All Britannia, end story. It’s just the arc of a person’s life. MM: Prince Valiant roams around Spain for a while, but eventually he’s going to get back to his wife. That closes that arc out, and then there’s another story to tell.

Above: Okay, you’ve got a cool, no-nonsense hero, a beautiful, mysterious woman, dinosaurs, and a Cadillac... what more do you need? Next Page Top: Early Xenozoic sketches with Wally Wood-inspired lighting. Next Page Bottom: Hannah all decked out and ready for action! Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

MM: So when you finally did sit down and write, did you have a story arc in mind, or were you just playing with the characters, trying to get a feel for the world you had created? MARK: About the best way I can describe it is that my earliest thoughts were all very plot-driven. My initial concept was that there was going to be a future world where dinosaurs had returned and the remnants of the human race were struggling to get by with very simple technology. I don’t know how much more fleshed out it was than that. I had a few set pieces, like Jack’s garage and the jungle interior. I had a couple of characters that were iconic heroic types, but I didn’t have what they represented worked out. I had basic plots for stories involving the characters, a handful that I was fleshing out. 30

MARK: Right! That’s how I think about Xenozoic. Even though there is this big mystery that informs everything—how the Xenozoic came about, why do we have dinosaurs back on the earth—that’s certainly something that’s going to always be a part of it. Solving that mystery is not what this is about. It’s not like Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series. MM: It’s a journey, not a destination. MARK: Exactly. I submitted my ideas to Kitchen Sink, and they basically gave me a try-out with Death Rattle. And when they liked what they saw of that, Denis Kitchen offered me a chance with my own book, Xenozoic Tales. That’s when Dave Schreiner sat down and asked what my plans for the story were, what the big picture was. That was when I realized how much I had to do.

Dave was very instrumental in helping me getting my mind working developing all the important background pieces that gives the stories coherence. If you want readers to buy into your make-believe world, there need to be rules and details carefully observed. So it was largely Dave who said “try this,” and I did. MM: So you sent them a proposal and they said, “Give us another story”? MARK: Pretty much. They wrote me back and said they were excited about the story and wanted to talk further. We actually spent some time writing back and forth for a month or two about possibilities, and Denis finally said he’d like to give me a shot in Death Rattle. We talked about the fact that “Mammoth Pitfall” wouldn’t be appropriate for Death Rattle; they wanted something more science-fiction oriented.

much the way I still do it, although I’m a little more confident about certain things now. I now know how much to pull back in certain scenes, how much detail to put in. Back then, I hadn’t even seen good examples of original comic book art. I was trying to figure out how to do things by looking at back issues of comics. So I had old EC issues out with Wally Wood’s work, trying to figure out if I should use a brush here, should I use a pen here. How was he holding the brush to get that kind of line?

MM: And a little horror too? MARK: Right. Science fiction/horror. Exactly. MM: How long did it take to write “Xenozoic” then? Was it something you had in mind?

MM: They must have been really enthusiastic about it when they got it—there were only two months between Death Rattle and the first issue of Xenozoic Tales.

MARK: No, I don’t think I did, but it didn’t take too long to write it. It took me months to draw it, because I was still working my security job and producing commercial illustration.

MARK: Denis offered me Xenozoic Tales before the Death Rattle story was published, so he must’ve felt pretty confident about it. I should say that I came along at a good time because this was right at the heyday of that black-&-white explosion that came on the heels of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Turtles did so well that everybody and their mother thought that black-&-white was the new hot thing. You know, when I sent my proposals around, I always had in the back of my mind that if anyone would be interested in Xenozoic, it would be Kitchen Sink, just because of the vibe I got from

MM: And you were also learning the process of drawing for a comic book. MARK: Oh, absolutely. MM: Did you go through a number of sketches or were you trying to get it right the first time? MARK: Oh, sketch after sketch after sketch. Pretty 31

reading their books. They had Eisner and they were doing really good anthologies like Death Rattle that harkened back to EC. I just had it in my mind that this was the kind of publisher that would get what I wanted to do.

but mostly John Wayne and some Burt Lancaster. MM: What about Hannah? MARK: Well, Hannah started without me having any strong idea of what she should be like. She was a real case of the character evolving and teaching me how to write her. The actress that I see as being the spirit and personality of Hannah is Barbara Stanwyck. [Fred makes a sound] You just snorted when I said “Barbara Stanwyck.”

MM: You mentioned earlier that Jack has a lot of John Wayne in him. Did you have other models in mind that helped influence Jack that you can point to now? MARK: All the iconic hero figures inform him. I tell people that physically, the person I wanted Jack to be most like was Burt Lancaster. Burt Lancaster on the young side of 30. Physically, that holds true still. But personality-wise, Jack more than anyone else takes after John Wayne, especially Wayne playing his rougharound-the-edges, his crusty guise.

MM: It depends on which Barbara Stanwyck you’re talking about. Are you talking about Double Indemnity? That seems a little hard for Hannah. MARK: Well, absolutely in that Hannah is very manipulative.

MM: Like Rooster Cogburn?

MM: I can see that some, but I wouldn’t go to the level of manipulation in Double Indemnity. That makes me really scared for Jack.

MARK: Well, probably before that. Maybe crusty is not the right word... younger than crusty. Red River or The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. They’re not anti-heroes, but they aren’t necessarily pleasant to be around. They’re aloof. They’re difficult to get along with a lot of the time. That’s who I wanted Jack to be. I think Clint Eastwood took a measure of that in developing his characters for the spaghetti westerns, but I think he took it to another level so that it almost became a parody. Maybe there is a little of that in Jack,

MARK: Well, Hannah is a highly-trained spy, bottom line. A diplomat is what she would say, but in reality she’s a spy. My favorite Barbara Stanwyck roles are her comedies: Ball of Fire, The Lady Eve. All these things inform Hannah. But the thing about Barbara Stanwyck that’s in every role she’s ever done is that she’s no-nonsense and she would not take crap from anyone. She doesn’t just walk, she strides into a room. She’s totally confident; totally in charge. That’s exactly how I see Hannah. In fact, that’s the friction between her and Jack, that they both think they’re the one in charge. They both assume that everyone else is going to fall in line behind them.

MARK: The darn thing is that just as I started getting going on the story, I lost the ability to tell the story. There’s so much more about the characters that hasn’t come out. Once I can find the way, I’ll get back to Xenozoic Tales and continue their story.

MM: That really changes Jack and Hannah’s embrace in issue #13, when they finally get together and how the dark and

MM: You mentioned Lancaster as a physical model for Jack; did Hannah have one also?

light works in that panel. MARK: The idea is that they are like tigers. They’re going to circle each other and they’re not going to be very friendly most of the time. But every once in a while they go into heat. MM: I can see glimpses of how Hannah is going to develop.

MARK: Not so much. Hannah started out being my attempt to do one of those luscious Wally Wood femme fatales: very dark, curly hair, extraordinary figure.

Both Pages: Pages 3 and 4 of Xenozoic Tales #13, both in thumbnail form and final inks. In this case, Mark drew two pages of thumbnails per sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" paper. Mark also includes dialogue on the thumbnails. Notice on page 4 how Mark uses the tree branches to lead the reader’s eyes from the spying Balclutha in panel 2 to the entangled lovers, Jack and Hannah, in panel 3.

She didn’t start out with an actual template so much as she evolved into herself. It took me a while to figure out how to draw her nose. Once I figured out she had more of a Roman nose—in retrospect, I realize it’s Barbara Stanwyck’s nose, but I wasn’t thinking of that when I did it—when I started adding those little touches she started to develop her own personality. I mentioned before that when I started Xenozoic Tales, I was planning my stories around external, environmental elements—this part or that part of the Xenozoic world. But as I continued to write, more and more the stories came out of the characters. I had certain directions I couldn’t go in any more; the characters determined their own directions.

MARK: He inked two of the three stories in the second issue—“Rogue” and “The Rules of the Game.” It was an experiment having someone else ink me. I think Steve did a fine job, but I was very frustrated because I like to control all aspects of the art. The idea was to speed up the process because it was taking me so long and Steve’s inking would help with that, and it worked out reasonably well. But I just wasn’t happy with someone else working on my art. So we opted to go with me writing a back-up story that Steve would draw instead of me trying to do the whole issue myself. That worked out really well. Steve is a really great storyteller. MM: He is. He really carried the atmosphere that you created in the other stories. We got to see facets, again, we wouldn’t usually see. It’s not just an adventure world; there are lives here. There’s normalcy. There’s people who have everyday lives who aren’t involved with the things that Jack and Hannah are concerned with. They couldn’t care less about another city-state. They’re just trying to survive.

MM: You know, one of my favorite characters was actually in the back-up stories, Eustace. He’s such a wonderful character and has such a great point-of-view that’s entirely separate from the world that Jack and Hannah see. MARK: A lot of that has to do with the great job Steve Stiles did with those stories.

MARK: That’s exactly what I wanted to get across, the idea that these stories would flesh out the rest of the world, showing there’s a bigger world. The world is a character, too, not just a background for Jack and Hannah to go gallivanting through.

MM: I was going to ask about Steve. He inked the second issue and started drawing in the third?

MM: What kind of scripts did you give Steve? To fall back on the paradigms, were they DC-style or Marvelstyle? Or something uniquely your own? MARK: Actually I kinda developed my own kind of script, based, I guess, on theatrical scripts. And from reading some of Will Eisner’s books on creating comics. I would break things down by pages and panels. I would give a description of what I wanted to see happening to tell the story, just basic information. I would never give him, “I want it done from this angle” or “I want it to look this way.” I would just describe the information we needed in a panel to tell a story, and break it down with dialogue and captions. And he would take it from there. MM: After Jack and Hannah, you have a lot of fun naming your characters. MARK: Yeah. [laughs] MM: Does it come easy for you? I know when I do what little writing I do, naming characters is the hardest thing for me. I know you make references in your names, but do the names leap into your head or do you actually work on making those references? MARK: Sometimes they come right away. It’s real obvious to me, a little in-joke or a name that 34

sounded right for the qualities of the character. And other times it is tough. But I keep a stock file of names I’ve heard or that I found interesting. I find something about them appealing, either in a phonetic sense or in a connotative sense. MM: The first one I think of is Wilhelmina Scharnhorst. It was a German battleship, wasn’t it? MARK: Well, Scharnhorst was a German admiral, and then it was the name of a battleship. But to me, beyond even that, “Scharnhorst” just has a big sound to it, just the vowels in it. It sounds like a big bulky thing. MM: But clearly, not so big as Gorgostamos. MARK: [chuckles] Yeah. We talked about Gorgo earlier. There’s Gorgo right there and “stamos” is Greek for “mouth.” MM: And when I first read it, I could’ve sworn I had heard the name before, because it feels so organic. But the only reference I can find to it is in your book. It’s just so big and Greek. MARK: It’s one of those things when I’m sure I read another name that was really similar to it, a real name or a location. Maybe the name of a town or a geographical feature. I just liked the sound of it, so I took that source and screwed around with it a little bit and that’s what I came up with. MM: Another one I’m fond of is Remfro Rynchus. It just winks at the dinosaur concept, and I think “rynchus” is a suffix used with avian dinosaurs? MARK: It’s a bad, bad... I believe you can call it a turning of the word. The flying creature is a rhamphorhynchus. It’s a pterodactyl, a type of flying reptile. Thinking about it now, it makes me curl up inside. But I’ve gotten other compliments on it; people remember it. I like the character, too, but I really don’t particularly like that name. I was trying too hard to make a pun. It did its job, but I really don’t particularly like that name. I don’t think it worked. MM: Governor Dahlgren—is that a nod to the science fiction novel, or is it something you just liked the sound of? MARK: No, actually, I just liked the sound of it. It’s based on the big gun manufacturer. Dahlgren built big naval guns during the Civil War. Being a Civil War buff, I’d always read about the Dahlgren guns on Admiral Farragut’s ship, and I liked the sound of it. I remember seeing the Delany novel and thinking it was a cool name for a book, but I never read it. Primarily it was because I like the name of the guns. I should say, a lot of times coming up with names that I find personally interesting or referential—geographic features or historically themed stuff—a lot of that comes from Cordwainer Smith and how he played around with the same idea. 35

Previous Page: Sketches of Hannah. Above: Governor Lorraine Dahlgren as drawn for the cover of Oo La La, a French comics magazine.

Below and Next Page: The opening splash page to Xenozoic Tales #14— featuring Lord Drumheller —from script to perspective sketch to finished inks. Even though Mark is writing for himself, he includes visual descriptions in his script. Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

MM: I recently watched a documentary on dinosaurs, talking about the world’s largest dinosaur and just started laughing when I found out there is a dinosaur museum in Drumheller, Alberta. And I thought to myself about how sly you are. MARK: It’s even more specific than that. Back in 1989 or 1990, one of the first signings I did outside the local community was for a comic shop owned by my pal Mike Moynihan up in Calgary, Alberta. This was done in conjunction with the Marvel reprints, so Mike and Marvel shared the expense of me flying up. In addition to making a good friend in Mike, I also met Michael Ryan, who at the time was working towards his master’s degree in paleontology. Michael’s become a very good friend and one of my professional go-to people when I

have science questions. But the two Mikes took me out to where Ryan worked, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta. And again, what a great name is Drumheller! It sounds like something out of Kipling. So that was just one of those things that I filed away. I liked the sound of it and thought someday I would be able to use it. It sounds belligerent. MM: Well, the last one I’m going to specifically ask about is another bunch of my favorite characters, the Terhune brothers. MARK: The joke is, they’re all named after tools. MM: Vice and Hammer and Screw. Screw is such a great name for a.... MARK: Dirt monkey?

logo changes. Was that a conscious decision?

MM: [chuckles] And then there was the unnamed Terhune that fell into the [Mark starts cackling] power unit at Jack’s lab. He ended up saving them all from destruction when the earthquake hit.

MARK: Nope, nope. That just happened that way. I had wanted to change the logo for a long time. I just got around to it at that point. Actually, at around issue #10 or 11, I started to get more confident about designing as well as coloring. I was taking more control of production in general. MM: We talked about characters and their relationships to movies, but I wanted to ask you about two specific moments in the books that seemed to me to be conscious references to movies as well. For instance the scene in issue #3 where Hannah is in the library and stumbles upon what turns out to be the casing of an atomic bomb. I remember looking at that and wondering if you were trying to make a reference to Beneath the Planet of the Apes, because it invokes the same sort of dread.

MARK: He had to be good for something. The guy who became the first Terhune in “Mammoth Pitfall,” when it was still a submission, he was going to be called Calamari. I can’t remember why we changed it.

MARK: Well, yes, I think to a certain extent. I’ve got to say I don’t dislike that movie but I don’t have any particular affection for it.

MM: Wouldn’t calling him Calamari evoke references to Star Wars?

MM: Well, the movie is pretty bad, but that scene is compelling because it explains a lot of what is going on. In Xenozoic, when Hannah finds it....

MARK: Really? MM: Yeah, General Ackbar was from a race called the Calamari. MARK: Oh, that’s right. Maybe that’s the reason. I forgot about that. I don’t think I was thinking of that when I named him, but that’s a good reason not to use it. I was just thinking of squid. MM: And we need to mention, again, that Denise was doing the lettering. MARK: I tried to letter that first story, “Mammoth Pitfall,” and I did such a horrible job of it that I begged her to try her hand at lettering. And she was naturally good at it. She’s a better craftsman than me. MM: Did she design the original logo? MARK: No, the original logo was designed by the art director at Kitchen Sink, Pete Poplaski, who colored the covers of the early issues as well. MM: When Jack and Hannah get to Wassoon, the 38

MARK: I’m trying to remember my thinking behind it, other than I wanted to show that there were dangers down there. It was symbolic of how much of the past had been lost to the people of the Xenozoic Age. I think I just like the visual impact. I think it was Fat Boy I put in there, the one that fell on Hiroshima. It’s such an iconic shape. It is a powerful twentiethcentury image. I think it’s actually very stylized and has a beautiful shape in a very scary, terrible way. And I just like the idea of that juxtaposed with Hannah. MM: It’s a beautiful panel. The layout of the bomb on a pedestal and the reader seeing it through Hannah who is looking up at it. There’s steam and smoke all around it. We know this is a bad thing, but Hannah is just taken aback by it as well, and she has no idea what it is. MARK: I think she does have some idea. She had no idea she was going to find it there. I don’t think most of the other people have any idea what it is, but Hannah is a little better educated. Something I want to explore and haven’t gotten to yet is that the Wassoon have a much higher respect for history and learning than the City in the Sea. But they are handicapped because they don’t have any library or any other physical remains of the past. Everything that they know about it has been passed down orally generation after generation, and that’s a real important skill for them. One of the reasons they are so interested in acquiring a foothold in City in the Sea is to get access to the treasure trove there, the library. They want to exploit that, not necessarily in a negative way, but they know that there’s a lot of information there, and they have contempt for the City in the Sea and people like Jack who have kept a very tight rein on what comes out of the library. MM: Let me get to the other scene that

jumped out of me as having a strong movie reference. We’ve talked here about how strong an influence King Kong was on you. What about the whole story of “Primeval” when Jack and Hannah end up on the island with the giant bugs? MARK: Yeah, my tribute to the cut abyss scene in King Kong. MM: How much fun was it for you to do research on insects for those scenes? 39

Previous Page Top: Head sketch of Remfro Rynchus—sans goggles. Previous Page Bottom: Hannah finds the bomb. Above: Self-rejected, partially completed cover art for Xenozoic Tales #13.

Right: Preliminary sketch for panel 3 of Xenozoic Tales #13, page 13. The sketch was done at full size on overlay tissue. Below: Jack turns the table in this preliminary sketch for a later panel in the story. Next Page: Page 3 of Xenozoic Tales #13 in its finished form. Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

MARK: Oh, a lot. All sorts of creepy crawly things. MM: And drawing those things? MARK: Oh, that was a mixed bag, because I had to figure out how to ink a lot of those things. Trying to ink a millipede or a centipede... my gosh, that took a lot of time. MM: Are there other scenes that are not so obvious references to books or movies? MARK: Well, “Xenozoic!”, the story that was in Death Rattle, is [Joseph Conrad’s]

Heart of Darkness. That’s one of my go-to swipes. If I’m ever in doubt about where to take a story, I turn to Heart of Darkness. You can always put together a story out of that. It’s as fundamental as The Odyssey. It is The Odyssey, sort of, in reverse. I’m trying to think of others here, but I’m drawing a blank. I’m sure there are lots. Motion pictures and books I’ve read and enjoyed inform all my work. The chase sequence in “Dangerous Grounds” [Xenozoic Tales #13] is “The Most Dangerous Game,” of course. The battle between the monolophosaurus and the giant harvestman from issue #14 is a tip of the hat to Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen.... MM: You mentioned Hatari! earlier. If I had ever seen the movie, I would have recognized it in the covers featuring Jack driving the car at breakneck speed from a herd of dinosaurs as Hannah looks back at them from the passenger seat. MARK: Hatari! made a huge impact on me. If I hadn’t seen it as a kid... jeez, I don’t know if there would have been a Xenozoic Tales. It left a very strong image that sort of burned itself into my brain.

Above: Mark drew this illustration to work out the design of the harvestman. Next Page Bottom: Mark also worked out a monolophosaurus sketch as scientifically accurate as he could based on skeletal evidence, though he says he got some of the details wrong. Next Page Top: Shrike versus harvestman... Harryhausen style! Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

MM: Let’s talk about the creative process a little. When you’re working on an issue of Xenozoic Tales, do you write out the script first or do you have everything in mind that you are going to draw? MARK: No, I write it all out as though I was writing it out for another artist. I tell you, it’s helpful because it makes me think things through. I won’t go into as much detail as if I was writing for another artist, but typing out the entire script helps me work out the details. What I would do was type out an entire script and send it to my editor to let them do a pass through it. Dave Schreiner, especially, was a great help as I was learning the process. He’d point out the storytelling problems He would make suggestions to help refine the dialogue. Or he’d suggest I simplify: “You know, Mark, you don’t need to have dialogue here. You can get by without it.” Suggestions like that helped out an awful lot. If I have a style of storytelling, I owe a 42

lot of that to Dave. After I scripted it all out and had the editor go through it, I’d start drawing it and it might change again. Even though I had a full script, it’s not set in stone. It would evolve beyond that. MM: Is there a pattern for you about how many drafts you do before you’re finalized or do you just do it until its right? MARK: I’ll do a panel breakdown before I start typing the script. So if it’s a 22-page story, I’ll have 22 pages of typewriter paper laid out. I’ll do a very simple little breakdown of how I see the panels fit together on the page with little notations, all by hand. Sometimes I’ll actually draw a rough thumbnail sketch in there if I feel it’s helpful. I’ll make little notes about dialogue. At that point, after I’ve gone through the entire 22-page story, then I’ll actually start typing it out. So I guess in that respect it does go through two drafts.

Usually that’s all it does. Unless you consider that when I am penciling it in, it’s evolving into another draft. MM: That’s part of what I’m asking. I’ve seen your work as you go through a number of drafts as you draw.... MARK: It depends on the particular image. Sometimes I’ll know exactly what it needs to have and it will go down immediately in one pass. And other times, it’s like pulling teeth, and I have to do it over and over again on separate pieces of paper, on tracing paper, on overlays. For one panel I might do one overlay for characters in the foreground, an overlay for people in the background, and another overlay for architecture if I have to work out perspective. My process is fairly organic and very fluid depending on the needs of the particular image. Sometimes I have great photographic reference that makes it easy to figure out how to draw a particular visual element. MM: How many pictures of the Chrysler Building do you have? MARK: [chuckles] I’ve got tons and tons of books about art deco in general. All sorts of shots with New York, New York in the ’30s, New York in the ’40s, contemporary New York, art deco in New York, and all these are great resources. And Hugh Ferriss’ incredible architectural renderings. And then shots of ruined, crumbling buildings.

MARK: I was encouraged. I was happy to have any readers.

And, of course, all the great fantastic cities that guys like Roy Krenkel and Franklin Booth did. These all help inform how I do aspects of my work, in this case architecture. On top of that, photographs that I have actually taken myself, from various cities. Other countries. Whether it’s an entire building or just a bit of masonry, a detail.

MM: Do you remember what the numbers were like? MARK: They started out better than I thought they might, pretty good. As I remember it, they started out in the mid-teens. And then they took a big dip with the second issue, which was expected: a combination of the fact that all second issues dip a bit plus the fact that the black-&-white boom went bust. Stores started dropping their order numbers. You see that kind of thinking from Hollywood, too—it’s not the content that counts but the form it’s taking. People thought black-&-white was the next big thing and they ordered indiscriminately. And of course a lot of that turned out to be crap that didn’t sell. So they decided that b-&-w was the problem. Arrrgh. So yeah, the sales for the second book dropped pretty dramatically. They stayed low through the third and the fourth issues and started to pick up slowly, and we were just determined to stick with it. By the time we got to issue #9 and 10, the numbers were back up into the teens and were healthy again. The last few issues were selling out; first day sales were still around 15 or 16 thousand, but they would sell out at 20 or 22 thousand.

MM: And we’ll see this when Jack and Hannah travel over the Atlantic? MARK: Yeah, at some point I want to get them over there. MM: That’s just mean. MARK: Well, there’s so much of this world I still want to explore. MM: What was the response from readers to Xenozoic Tales?

MM: When did you go to your first convention? MARK: Although I’d gone to one or two local shows, my first major con was in Chicago. MM: As the creator of Xenozoic Tales? MARK: Yeah, yeah. Kitchen Sink brought me out. This would’ve been in ’88. MM: What was that experience like for you, getting out in front of the fans? MARK: I was pretty overwhelmed by it. I remember the first time I was out on the big dealer’s floor with the Kitchen Sink booth, and Denis or someone said, “You should be at your panel now.” I was like “Wha..?! What’s a panel?” [laughter] If you’ve ever seen me on a panel, you know that I’m not comfortable talking in front of people. I felt like I was thrown right into the frying pan. But one of the people on my first panel was Bernie Wrightson, one of my art heroes. That could have been intimidating, except that Bernie is a very nice guy, and he carried the panel. I only had to open my mouth once or twice. MM: And so you came off aloof. 44

MARK: Probably. [chuckles] I was just very very shy at conventions for a long time, and now I’m nothing but obnoxious. But back in those days, it was hard for me to relax. MM: Along with the fans’ response, critical response was pretty good too. MARK: Yeah, it generally was. MM: Did Denis send you articles or did you find them yourself? MARK: No, Denis was really good at keeping me apprised of what was happening. It was very gratifying is about all I can say. The response was better than I had hoped. MM: Did you find any irony when you won the Eisner? I mean, you had been putting Xenozoic Tales bi-monthly to good response, but you began to slow down. And then when you got to putting out an issue a year, you win an Eisner. Why would you want to put out more than one issue a year?

MARK: It was complex. In the first couple of years I was able to get out eight issues, four issues a year, which as I look back on it was miraculous. I was working long hours and I was exhausted. I couldn’t keep that up. But then after the first couple of years what began happening was I started to get interest from Hollywood, and more of my time was going into dealing with the promoting and developing the property as a TV show. And when that went into full swing, 45

Previous Page: An alternate take on the cover to Xenozoic Tales #7. Above: Pencil art for the cover of Xenozoic Tales #14. Left: Mark wasn’t satisfied with Hannah’s pose so he drew this overlay as a replacement.

that really pulled me away from spending the kind of time on the book I should have been spending to keep it regular.

MM: Was that based on the fact that you couldn’t get it out as fast as you might like? Clearly the sales weren’t poor.

MM: And sadly Xenozoic Tales comes to an end in ’96.

MARK: Kitchen Sink had really evolved into another kind of publishing house. The people who by then had taken control of the purse strings were interested in tie-ins with motion pictures and video gaming, and developing properties they thought would have greater mainstream appeal. They were doing tie-ins with Duke Nukem video games and the second Crow movie, where they nearly lost their shirts. There were some questionable choices made—they never seemed to quite understand what Denis Kitchen had done to make Kitchen Sink successful in the first place. When the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs TV show didn’t become a self-perpetuating series—no more than a single year in original programming and the merchandise dying on the vine—the company became less interested in Xenozoic Tales. That’s not to say editorial wasn’t interested. Denis and editorial were always interested in continuing, but the people that made the financial decisions weren’t infatuated with me. So it was harder to get things done. That plus I didn’t help myself by being so darned slow in getting the product out there made it even less tenable, less attractive to put money into it. It became a property that had seen its day; it was time to move on to other things. Without the support of the merchandising and without being fast enough to make money off the comic itself, I just couldn’t afford to keep it going.

MARK: Not to an end—to a hiatus period. But, yeah, at the end of ’96.

Part 3:

Cadillacs, Dinosaurs, Spin-offs, and Tie-ins MARK: And Michael Newhall and Randall Brendt did some of the work also. They did really fine work, though they were testing the water since Xenozoic Tales was created to be published in black-&-white. When I created the original art I used a lot of black areas and gray-shaded areas that wouldn’t be there if it was created for color; they actually take the place of the color. I love working in black&-white, but I approach a piece very differently if I know color is going to be added. They are two different things; I don’t put in a lot of texture and shading technique that I would if I was working in black-&white. So when they added color to work that was originally intended for black-&-white, it tended to be a little too heavy. There was too much going on, and it obscured things so that the images became confused. So, I’ve got mixed emotions about the work that was done on the Epic series. When we recolored another story a year or so later for the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs oneshot that was published to promote the toy line, Ray Fehrenbach colored that one, too. And by that time, Ray and I had gotten a better feel for how to color black-&-white artwork. He was still working with art originally intended for black-&-white, but he had learned to pull back, using a lighter coloring scheme and allowing a lot more white areas to remain. That was a coloring job that really worked.

MM: Let’s talk some about the different projects that came out of Xenozoic Tales while it was being published. The first one, I think, was the colorized version, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, that came out of Epic. Do you remember how that came about?

MARK: At the time, Marvel’s Epic line featured properties that were creator-owned, which was a real break from the Marvel tradition of publishing house-owned properties only. They were looking for creatorowned properties to publish or republish, and Denis Kitchen had always maintained good relationships with all of the major comic publishers. I can’t remember who at Marvel we originally dealt with, but they expressed interest in reprinting the first six issues of Xenozoic Tales colorized. Things worked out well, and Tom DeFalco, the editor-in-chief, really came to bat for us. We asked for specific contractual items— protections that allowed us to retain certain key rights—and he made sure that we kept them. MM: How much input did you have on the coloring process? MARK: Well, the coloring process was actually done through Kitchen Sink. We hired the colorists ourselves. In fact, I believe Denise did her first coloring work for that project. MM: I know that Ray Fehrenbach, who did some of the color work for the covers of Xenozoic Tales, did some of the coloring in Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. 47

I think it was the same coloring job. MM: How was this one-shot supposed to be displayed at the store? Was it something that sat on the shelf with the toys or was it something a customer would pick up at the cash register? MARK: I think the idea was that it would be on the shelf with the toys. It was distributed primarily, and perhaps totally, to Toys ‘R’ Us which was, at the time, the largest toy retailer going. There were one million copies printed. MM: Holy cow! MARK: Yeah, it had the potential to give us the greatest exposure Xenozoic Tales ever had. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really good follow-through. They were distributed to the stores, but I’ve talked to a number of managers through the years who have said they got the boxes of comics without any instructions about what to do with them. So most of the boxes were just dumped into storage, and the comics never hit the racks. I think some enterprising stores did put the comics out as point-ofpurchases at the cash register. MM: So they had a price—they weren’t free? MARK: No, no; they were giveaways. MM: So somewhere, there’s a treasure trove of.... MM: Were any of the stories in that oneshot repeats of any that were done for the Epic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs series? Above: Cover art for Epic’s Cadillacs and Dinosaurs #1. Next Page: Cover art for Cadillacs and Dinosaurs 3-D. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Xenozoic Tales, and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

MARK: The promo comic contained “Last Link in the Chain” from Xenozoic Tales #9. The second story is “The Opportunists” from Xenozoic Tales #1. I can’t remember if we used the same colorization for that second story or not. You know, another issue with the Epic series was that they used a really glossy paper that bounces the color back into your face, making it look garish. I like the look of a softer paper, because the color sinks in and looks more integrated. Looking at the one-shot, the coloring of the back-up story looks different because of the difference in the types of paper, but 48

MARK: I think some people in the various stores were in the know or savvy enough to take some boxes home. But as I said there were an awful lot printed up; it’s not exactly a rarity. MM: Well, it is somewhat, if all the copies are sitting in a basement somewhere. MARK: I guess, if people are looking for them. But I do signings and they show up fairly regularly. But, to get even more obscure, when the TV show came out, there was another one-shot associated with it. They took the 3-D comic that Kitchen Sink produced and put a new cover on that. MM: How was a customer supposed to get the promotional 3-D comics?

MM: It continues to sell?

MARK: It wasn’t meant to sell; it was another giveaway. It might’ve been distributed to toy stores to get kids aware of the TV show. Or it might have been something given away at trade shows. I forget.

MARK: Back when Kitchen Sink went belly up, they remaindered as much of the stock they had as possible. I picked up the remaindered 3-D books pretty cheaply. It was really popular when it came out; it actually went back to press at least a couple of times. It’s a cool gimmick, so it pulled in a lot of people who would not have picked up Xenozoic Tales on its own merits. They pick it up now either because they collect 3-D or they just see it as a neat package because it comes with its own glasses enclosed. I take it to shows with me and it continues to be a good seller, because it does appeal to such a wide variety of interests.

MM: Let’s jump back to what we were talking about before we got distracted by Xenozoic collectibles. Did you have input on the colorization process for the Epic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs series? MARK: I was busy trying to get out Xenozoic Tales as well as trying to be involved with the production of the animated show, so I really wasn’t on top of that stuff as much as I might have been otherwise. Also, at that point in my career, I didn’t know enough about the coloring process to have a lot of input. It was an evolving process for me too, and certainly the colorists we had knew more about it than I did. So I pretty much let it go.

MM: Did the glasses have some design from you as well?

MM: Not even looking over Denise’s shoulder? MARK: Not too much. Well... you know, she’s been incredibly helpful in different aspects of Xenozoic Tales but there’s always the fact we are married. It keeps us from having a truly professional relationship. Even though I try to explain to her that, while I always appreciate her opinion, when it comes to Xenozoic Tales, this is not a partnership—I am the boss, I am the decider. But that doesn’t wash with Denise. [Fred laughs] I say, “I appreciate your opinion here, but I am going in another direction. End of discussion.” And she says, “Yes, but...”. [laughter] MM: You mentioned earlier the Kitchen Sink 3-D comic. How did anyone come up with the idea of making a 3-D comic? MARK: Most of the schemes for keeping Xenozoic Tales in front of the audience by recycling and placing the content in different formats came from Denis Kitchen. He’s very creative about marketing and can get a lot of mileage out of any given piece. For that 3-D project, basically all I did was a new cover. The process to create the 3-D image, the anaglyph, was all done by Roger May. Roger did an excellent job; some of those panels have 13 layers. I did a new cover and that was it. It was a very good seller, and it continues to sell real well. 49

MARK: I would’ve liked them to, but no. We just ran out of time. The two stories we had anaglyphed were chosen because we thought they had elements that would translate well to 3-D. Everyone seems to agree that the “Green Air” story about the glider worked particularly well.

15 candy bars. So the idea was, if a retailer bought 15 candy bars, he would get the box free. He could choose to keep it for himself or put it up for sale or raffle.

MM: Was this about the same time that the candy bars came out?

MARK: I provided the artwork, most of which was preexisting. I created new artwork for the wrappers.

MARK: Probably. The candy bars were the first real bit of merchandising we did beyond print material. They were another one of Denis’ brilliant ideas. He had the notion that, since there’s generally nothing to eat at a comic book store, a candy bar at the point-ofpurchase is going to tempt hungry comic shoppers. All the better if that candy bar promotes your property.

MM: Let’s move on to a different mini-series that came from Topps, spinning off from Xenozoic Tales. Topps was a fairly new company when they started this?

MM: Did you work on the design for the box?

MARK: Yes. Most, not quite all, of their publications were licensed material. Len Brown, editor at Topps, had been working there for years, including on the Mars Attacks art cards. Len had also written some T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents for Tower Comics, so it was a real treat for me to work with him. Essentially, they wanted to license the property under the name Cadillacs and Dinosaurs to tie it in to the TV show and create new comics. They brought in creative teams of writers and artists to produce the comic.

MM: I remember that they were a real big seller when they came out. MARK: Kitchen Sink’s Cadillacs and Dinosaurs bars were the first, and based on their success, other properties went that route. That kinda caught me by surprise; I really didn’t think it would be as popular as it was. But, then, chocolate doesn’t do anything for me.

MM: The art line-up is pretty amazing. MARK: The books were put out in mini-series form: three mini-series of three issues each. The first miniseries has cover art by Bill Stout; they may be the best Xenozoic covers ever done. [laughter] Roy Thomas wrote all three mini-series, and the art was by Dick Giordano with back-up pieces done by Rich Buckler, Moebius, and Esteban Maroto. Joe Linsner did the covers for the third mini-series. That really is an impressive line-up.

MM: The thing that surprised me more than the candy bars was how popular the boxes that contained them were. MARK: It was a way of enticing retailers to order the candy bars. Jim Kitchen, Denis’ brother, sourced not only the company that made the candy bars, he also found another company that made varioussized boxes. And one of those boxes was a cigar box that perfectly encased

MM: What was it like to see other artists’ interpretations of your work? MARK: It depends. Some I thought really handled their jobs well, others not so much. Some had very nice storytelling, while others just 50

veered off in their own directions. Beautiful to look at, but not interesting. MM: Did you have any control over the stories that Roy Thomas wrote for the mini-series? MARK: I was involved with other things at the time, trying to get my own comic out and staying involved, even tangentially, with the TV show. So, basically, all I did with the Topps series was approve or reject story proposals. MM: What kind of issues would cause you to reject a plot? MARK: Primarily, there were a lot of proposals that fell into what I call the “Star Trek syndrome.” Star Trek, the original TV series,

started out gangbusters, with some very good science fiction concepts. Any episodic TV show is going to have failures, just by virtue of the rate they have to crank stuff out, but I think that the first year and a half of Star Trek had a much higher success rate than anyone would have guessed. But from that point on, they started to slip badly, and one of the worst habits they fell into was that of having the Enterprise discover an alien world, and that world would have a civilization that had evolved based on a bit of information about Earth’s past. They visited the planet of the Nazis, the planet of the Roman Empire, the planet of the Chicago mobsters. It was basically a way for them to reuse the sets they had on the back lot at Paramount, I suppose. So what you get are stories revolving around 51

Previous Page Bottom: Hannah and a young zeke. Previous Page Top: Final art for a candy bar wrapper design. Above: Roughs for more candy bar wrapper designs. Notice that Mark went to the extra trouble of drawing a rice plant on the chocolate rice crisp wrapper, and an almond tree on the chocolate with almonds wrapper. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Xenozoic Tales, and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

with Cadillacs and Dinosaur stories. But it’s an easy trap to fall into—it’s easy to come up with variations on the theme and if you are personally enthusiastic about some particular aspect of history or pop culture, it’s a good way to shoehorn that interest into someone else’s concept.

some sort of historical motif, with a ridiculous amount of coincidence thrown in. So I would get proposals that had Jack and Hannah stumble across a lost tribe in the jungle that worships the golden arches of McDonald’s, or someone has stumbled upon a cache of animatronic presidents from some place like Disneyland. I not even sure where that one would have gone....

MM: It seems like it would also be a way to do some moralizing.

MM: That was a real proposal? I thought you were making that up.

MARK: Oh sure, it’s also a way to comment on our current society very blatantly.

MARK: No, it was real. I laid out clearly in the bible for the series that the City in the Sea represents the only remains of previous civilization, exactly because I didn’t want this kind of storytelling in my world. I knew that this kind of story was a danger, in part because, when I was developing the Xenozoic concept, I was very aware that it had been grossly overused in other comics and TV series. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t fall into that trap. And I made a point of making it taboo for all other writers involved

MM: When a story got approved, does that mean that it is canonical for Xenozoic Tales? MARK: Oh, no. What I write is canon and everything else are “fantasies”; they didn’t really occur in the Xenozoic Age. I really appreciate the work of others on the series, and have enjoyed a number of them, but they of course took the world in their own direction while I have specific ideas about where my story is going to go. MM: Did you know Roy at all before he began working on the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs series? MARK: Not that I can recall, no. I think Len, Roy, Dick Giordano and I first sat down together to plan the series at a San Diego Convention. It was really good to meet Dick Giordano and Roy Thomas. I always admired Roy’s work; I had read his super-hero work as a boy but I especially enjoyed his adaptations of Conan. To this day, I think that Roy Thomas did the best pastiches of Conan in any medium because he understood Howard’s voice better than anyone else even though he had to deal with the comics code restrictions. He is just one of those people who is so versatile in general. MM: I’m guessing then that you liked the stories that came out of the series? MARK: To be honest, they varied. Some I liked better than others. The last mini-series, “The Wild Ones,” about a motorcycle gang, came too close to the Star Trek syndrome. I should add that there is actually a fourth three-issue mini-series that was never published, which is a shame since I think it is the very best. It was drawn by David Roach, from Wales, and he just did a knock-out job. He drew the entire story, but because Topps ceased publishing the series, it never appeared. Roy and I have talked about finding a way to get that work published. MM: Since the Topps mini-series were intended to come out at the same time as the TV show, let’s move on to that. Did you approach the creators about putting together the TV show or did someone approach you? 52

MARK: I forget when it all started; maybe it was 1989. Xenozoic Tales started getting noticed, and Denis was contacted by four different production companies, I think, all at about the same time. I think they were all interested in doing an animated series, but there may have been one who wanted to do live action. But we had to evaluate their proposals and choose which we thought would be best for the property. We ended up going with Sasha Harari and his Galaxy Productions. At the time they were involved with producing the movie, The Doors, directed by Oliver Stone. They in turn reached a deal with Nelvana, out of Toronto, to do the animation. They had done a number of shows on the air at the time, like the animated Beetlejuice and had some success in Europe with an animated version of Tintin. So it turns out that there are really several things going on at the same time. The producers of the TV show, the toy manufacturers, and animators don’t want anything to happen unless the other parties agree to it. They spent a lot of time waiting for someone else to commit to the property before committing to it themselves. When someone finally did sign on, everything got moving, but to get that first party to commit took time and work. Steven de Souza, one of the screenwriters for Die Hard, was looking for properties to develop for himself and he came aboard to write the pilot episode, “Rogue.” Tyco signed to produce the action figures and other merchandise associated with the show. And then, CBS agreed to broadcast the TV show. It really was a huge messy beast. Sadly, the end result was that it didn’t come together really well. The TV show debuted long before the toys and action figures were ready. That synergy necessary for a really successful children’s animated show—the toys and merchandising connecting with the animation connecting with the broadcast—didn’t happen and was a major factor in the show having the limited success it did. MM: You said earlier that we shouldn’t consider the show to be canonical since you didn’t write it, but did you create a bible for the series? MARK: I supplied a lot of material that I had written up, but I don’t think I actually sat down and created a coherent organized text that could be used for the TV show. I did express certain guidelines and concepts that I felt needed to be adhered to, but nothing so formal as a bible. My primary contribution to the TV show was that I looked at lots and lots of proposals for episodes and wound up rejecting most of them. What it comes down to, I think, was that Galaxy and Nelvana bought into the image of a Cadillac being chased by a dinosaur, that kind of very effective visual image, but beyond that, they really didn’t know where to go. So they were floundering about. They didn’t want me too involved, and I can understand that—what the hell do I know about producing an animated TV show? 53

Previous Page: Hannah, Jack, and friend. Above: Galaxy Films promo material for the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs cartoon series. Left: Rough art for a Cadillacs and Dinosaurs bookmark. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Xenozoic Tales, and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs cartoon series ©2008 Nelvana Ltd.

Below: Mark drew this Fessenden concept design for Nelvana for possible use in the cartoon. Next Page Top: “A Chance Encounter on the Veldt.” Art for a serigraph produced by Kitchen Sink Press. Next Page Bottom: Mark’s model sheet for “Wild Child,” the title character of a Marv Wolfman-scripted episode of the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs cartoon. Fessenden, Wild Child model sheets ©2008 Nelvana Ltd.

MM: Your college film not withstanding? MARK: Especially because of that film. [laughter] But there was nobody making decisions that had a vision for the show, either. At first they were trying to play up to me— “We can get it to look like your line work, we’re good enough to imitate your technique, the characters will look like they do in the comic book”—but I knew that was technically impossible. And while they are shoving this at me, the artists who are actually executing the production designs are basically rolling their eyes, because they know better. I knew darned well they couldn’t do it no matter what the bosses claimed and if they could, it wouldn’t look good anyway. My art

is done for a black-&-white comic book, not for television animation. How stupid did they think I was? So I would try to suggest cartoonists and looks that I thought would work well in animating my type of stories. Like Roy Crane. The feedback I would get was never very positive. So the result was that the show looked like pretty much any other Saturday morning animated show. And yet I know, from talking to the artists in production, that these are bright, talented people who knew what was possible and wanted to excel, but the people at the top sort of allowed it to turn into nothing. Although, about a year or two ago, after not having seen the show in a decade, I was reminded of some of the relative sophistication in the script concerning the environment. I was amazed that they put that element in there at all, but at the same time I was scratching my head and wondering if they thought those ideas were actually going to play well with their target audience, supposedly boys aged six to twelve. MM: Did you once tell me that there was a possibility that this was going to be a primetime series? MARK: It was talked about, but I’m not really sure how serious it was. There was some animated show on primetime that was getting lots of buzz—it may have been The Simpsons—and there was a general feeling in the air that animated shows could succeed during primetime. So there may have been some talk, but in order for it to work, they would have had to entirely change the tenor of the show. There again, there was always that indecision about just how mature they wanted to make the subject matter—did they want to make it appropriate for a mature audience or should it be for children? So nothing really came of it. MM: When I watched the pilot episode recently, I was surprised that they were pretty free about using the phrase “machinatio vitae.”

MARK: Exactly, that’s what I’m saying. My ego was stroked by their using my phony Latin phrase, but does it really make sense for what they were trying to accomplish?

Besides, for me anagrams would just be too arbitrary. But I did think to myself that I should probably go back and reread some of his work to see what I was missing!

MM: And while it was a Saturday morning cartoon, it was really late in the morning.

MM: Did you have any input on the design of the characters?

MARK: That was another problem: CBS scheduled it for 11 a.m. Apparently there was a policy—I’m not sure whether it is true for all networks or if it was a CBS dictum—that local affiliates could move away from network programming at 11 on Saturday mornings and substitute their own local programs. So a lot of them did, and we lost a lot of audience across the country that way. Also we had bad luck in that CBS had the broadcast rights to the Winter Olympics that year and so we were regularly pre-empted by the trials and then by the Olympics themselves. There was just poor communication among the different people responsible for putting it all together, and I’m not sure it isn’t like this for every TV show. I think it’s pretty amazing that anything works on series television. For all I know, the programmers at CBS gave up on the show when it became apparent that the show was not going to come out in conjunction with its toys.

MARK: I did some model sheets for them and I guess they used elements of them. At one point, they were having a lot of trouble with what was the central character in the story Marv wrote, “The Wild Child.” So I did something and offered it to them, and they liked it and

MM: Marv Wolfman wrote one of the episodes. MARK: He wrote what I believe was the best story in the run. I was a big fan of his work on Tomb of Dracula. I met him for the first time in Toronto at a story conference at the Nelvana studios. I’ll always remember the first thing he said to me, as a sort of ice-breaker, was that he had figured out that “Tenrec” was an anagram for “center” and he had worked out some anagrams for other characters. But he wanted to know what “Hannah Dundee” was an anagram for—he hadn’t figured that out. I had to explain that he gave me too much credit. I’m not that bright and my mind doesn’t work that way. 55

stuck with that design. Other than that, I gave them basic designs for Hannah and Jack and some of the other characters. But they were interested in making the characters more attractive to a contemporary, younger audience. So they cut off Jack’s sleeves and gave him a tattoo. And they were concerned about showing too much cleavage on Hannah. Or her navel. MM: Going a step further, did you have any input in the design of the toys associated with the show?

Above: Mark’s model sheet of Hannah Dundee done for the cartoon. Right: Mark drew this rough for the Tyco action figure of Hannah when the packaging artist asked Mark for help. Next Page Top: Tyco concept design art for Jack’s Cadillac in the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs toy line. Next Page Bottom: Mark’s design drawings for a Clay Moore statue of “Nemo Girl.”

MARK: None whatsoever. You know, we had to fight to even get Hannah in the TV show. Not too hard, but we did. Their target audience was very specifically boys six to twelve because they are the kids that scream the loudest to get the toys associated with a show. In fact when we got the first Nielsen numbers for the show, we were told that we had won the time period with girls from six to twelve. And we thought that was great news; we had fought to get Hannah in the show and the numbers bore us out— girls were tuning in. But the response from the producers was, they told us that we didn’t get it and that they didn’t care about the girls. They weren’t the ones who got their parents to buy the toys, and we weren’t doing well enough with the target demographic—the boys in that age group. The truth is that Saturday animated series are simply advertisements aimed at boys, 6 to 12. And then, with the toys, we really had to fight to get a Hannah action figure. We were told over and over that there was no market for a female action figure. In fact, there are apparently studies that show if you put the toys out in a room with boys and girls, and if there is an action figure that the girls like, the boys will drop the entire set like hot potatoes. Somehow we flexed what little contractual muscle we had, and they agreed to do Hannah. But if you notice the Hannah action figure, they pulled her hair back and made her look as masculine as possible. 56

MM: You got the villains, though— Wrench and Vice Terhune. MARK: Well, with action figures, you have to have conflict, so there had to be bad guys. That’s the strategy, to make heroes and villains available—to create “playability.” MM: I guess a Scharnhorst figure wouldn’t work out? MARK: I think she was supposed to be in the second wave of figures. MM: You mentioned earlier that the toys were late to the stores. Do you know why that happened? MARK: You know, I don’t. I think it had as much to do with the production company’s inexperience with the process; they didn’t give the production of the toys as much attention as others might have. The show came out in September, and the toys I think hit the shelves in November. There was no coordination. It turns out that they also came out the same season as the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. That show was that season’s phenomenon, and they clearly had their act more together than we did.

MARK: I’m not exactly sure of the proper terminology, but I’ve always thought of a statue as involving naturalistic shapes, either human or animal. But I have no idea what is the real differentiation between the two. We should ask Clay. When Denis Kitchen and I decided that we would like to see a Xenozoic sculpture produced, Randy Bowen was the big name who came immediately to mind. Denis got in touch with Randy, who agreed to produce a Hannah sculpture with me providing some conceptual sketches of the subject. As it turned out, Randy subcontracted the actual sculpting job to Clayburn Moore. So Denis and I and Randy and Clay got together to set things up at a San Diego Con—as so often seems to be the story! Denis and Randy worked out the business end of things while Clay and I had time to get to know one another and discuss the aesthetics of turning Hannah into a sculpture. Clay and I just really hit it off immediately—we have a lot in common and have become great friends over the years. He did a first-rate job on the statue and when he started his own sculpture and action figure companies, we stayed in touch and have continued to work together over the years.

MM: But despite the problems, Jack’s Cadillac was awesome. MARK: That was the best thing. It was, to me, the only really good toy. The story behind that was that because it was the image of a specific car, a General Motors Cadillac, Tyco had to get approval from GM for the image. The first design they did, which tried to save money by cutting out details resulting in a generic mess, was turned down by GM. The message was that if it had the name “Cadillac” on it, it better look like a Cadillac. So, for once we had the 600-pound gorilla on our side, and we got the image we wanted on that toy. MM: I guess that balances the Terhune tricycle and Jack’s war glider. MARK: Well, what are you going to do? It’s for kids. I understand if you’re going to step into that marketplace and profit from it, you have to give them the leeway to succeed. What bothers me was that they were poorly designed and badly made. They were generic looking and the quality was wretched. MM: Is there any conversation about collecting the episodes into a DVD collection? MARK: You know what, except for “When are there going to be more Xenozoic Tales,” that is the number one question I get asked at shows. I’ve heard absolutely nothing about it, and Nelvana owns the rights to the animation, so it would have to be up to them. MM: Tell me about how you met Clay Moore. MARK: I’ve known Clay Moore since about 1990, back when we started talking about the Hannah and the Sabertooth statue. MM: Now, he calls it a sculpture—is it a statue or a sculpture? 57

find the time to actually execute the whole deal. But more important than what we have actually released, we bounce ideas off each other all the time and look for the other’s opinion, because we do seem to be on the same wavelength.

MM: Was there a lot of conversation about minimizing technical difficulties in the sculpture? MARK: As it turns out, not so much. All of the sketches I provided Clay had Hannah in a supine position, and I don’t think there was really anything particularly technically challenging about it. All the limbs are integrated together, or grounded. There weren’t any dramatic extensions or balances that would prove difficult. Clay had done a lot of fine art sculpting and was just beginning his career as a comics-related sculptor. He had a commercial reputation to build, and was concerned about getting Hannah just right and especially getting the sabertooth right, because cats are just hard in general. He did a fantastic job.

MM: Was the sabertooth cub on the sculpture part of the original design or added through collaboration? MARK: No, that was added on the second edition. The sculptures that were done through Bowen, we did a coldcast sculpture that had a black veneer and a bronze. Some years later, probably the late ’90s, Clay suggested we reissue the sculpture through his company, but this time as a fully painted coldcast with a few additions to differentiate it from the first. Clay added the sabertooth cub and the scrolled banner on the front of the base. We added a new drawing by me on the certificate and Randy Dahlk did a beautiful job designing some very distinctive packaging. I’m pretty darn proud of the entire package.

MM: You’ve done other projects together?

MM: That leaves something I know you have a great deal of fondness for, the Songs from the Xenozoic Age CD. The CD was a lot of fun.

MARK: Well... lots of talk about other projects. [laughter] Let’s see, what have you seen that we have done together? Not that much. I helped design the Nemo Girl statue that Clay produced. It’s a cheesecake figurine. She’s in a Jules Verne-inspired, deep sea diver outfit. It’s a Victorian bikini—how’s that for an oxymoron? I also just drew a portrait of Robert E. Howard’s Kull, to accompany Clay’s new sculpture of the character. And we have a joint project in the works—a “space girl abducted by alien ape” subject. Sure, you’ve seen that a millions times before, but if we didn’t think we could bring something fresh and special we wouldn’t be doing it. We just need to

MARK: The CD was just a project between Chris Christensen and myself. Chris is a professional musician out in Los Angeles; he’s a studio musician, he’s played in various bands, he has a production studio right in his house, and he writes music. And, to my benefit, he likes Xenozoic Tales, as well. I met him at my first San Diego Convention. He had previously worked with Kitchen Sink by writing music for Will Eisner’s Spirit Picture Disc. He took lyrics Will had written as background for the strip and actually set them to music as well as coming up with some original music. 58

He approached me with the idea of doing something for Xenozoic Tales. Over a period of a year or so, I wrote lyrics and he put together music and played most of it himself. I designed the package and am pretty proud of how it turned out. Kitchen Sink wasn’t interested in producing it, but Bob Chapman at Graphitti was. Bob actually financed and produced it. MM: Is all the music on the CD original? MARK: We started out, in an effort to just get our feet wet, by throwing out our ideas for pre-existing music we thought represented Xenozoic Tales. We were both on the same wavelength, playing around with late ’50s and early ’60s rock ’n’ roll and rhythm & blues. I suggested Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Breathless,” which for a long time I had in the back of my head as having the right vibe, and the first thing he suggested was Link Wray’s “Rumble,” a great instrumental. So he laid down those tracks and a few others, but as it evolved, we decided that the original music we wrote was closer to what we wanted and so none of the covers made it to the CD. I think there would be much more of a market for something like this now, but in 1994 it was difficult to get customers to understand what it was about. We could do so much more now with the Internet—using downloads to promote it. MM: Is there a story behind getting Miguel Ferrer for the great spoken introduction on the CD? MARK: Chris had played drums in the band Seduction of the Innocent, which was for several years more or less the San Diego Comic-Con house band. The other members were Bill Mumy, Max Allan Collins, and Miguel. Chris has remained friends with all the members of the band. Miguel has a big, dramatic voice—very authoritative—and he nailed the reading dead on. It still gives me chills when I hear it and it complements Xenozoic’s vibe, I think. I’ve got to say I’m fairly proud of the lyrics I wrote for that as well. They communicate pretty exactly the tone I wanted to convey, and Miguel just did a magnificent job with the reading. His interpretations added so much to the recording.

MM: And of course, the CD featured the debut of you and Denise as recording artists. MARK: I was given one simple vocal assignment, which was to sing “Go!” at the appropriate beat, when the song goes, “Step on the gas and go.” For the life of me I couldn’t hit my mark. Denise had no problems. [laughter] I’m sure that Chris had to do some post-production work to make me fit in with everyone else. MM: Is there something on the CD that really stands out to you as a favorite? MARK: There are a number of things I really like. I love the instrumentals; “Cutter” and “Mammoth” are two instrumentals that are gems. “Ancient Eyes”—I’m happy with those lyrics. “Cadillacs and Dinosaurs” was a whole lot of fun. MM: Are there any that you would make changes to it now? MARK: Oh yeah. There are a couple on there that I find hard to listen to. It’s not Chris’ fault; I was just feeling my way through the lyrics. It’s a little different perspective looking back at it after 15 years.

Previous Page: A rear view of Mark’s design for Nemo Girl, a statue created by Clay Moore. Above: CD cover art for Songs of the Xenozoic, a soundtrack of sorts to the Xenozoic Tales series with songs written by Mark and Chris Christensen. Xenozoic Tales, and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz. Nemo Girl ™ and ©2008 Clayburn Moore.

Part 4:

Expanding Horizons MM: In 1993, you did a cover for Classic Star Wars involving a giant squid.

MM: I’d like to talk about the work you were doing unrelated to Xenozoic Tales. The first thing I found is a King Kong cover from 1991.

MARK: There’s an interesting story behind that—I drew the cover so that one of the tentacles and a spear overlapped the Star Wars logo, and Dark Horse actually printed it that way. But when Lucasfilm saw that, they made it clear that, going forward, no art could ever visually obscure their logo again. So I like to think that I created my own special place in Star Wars history by making such a terrible blunder that called for a policy notice.

MARK: There were two covers actually, one that I penciled and inked and one that Al Williamson inked over my pencils. They were done for Monster Comics, which was an imprint of Fantagraphics that had the rights to adapt the novelization of Kong. The comics featured a pretty good line-up of artists, including Bill Stout and Dave Stevens. MM: That had to be a dream for you, working on King Kong. I don’t recall seeing any other King Kong art you might have done.

MM: And this was a creature originally created by Al Williamson. MARK: Well, my version of a creature created by Al Williamson. I tried to draw it just like Al drew it but I just couldn’t pull it off. Al’s got his unique stylizations that I can’t do—I did the best I could.

MARK: I have done some commission pieces but this is my only published Kong. One of my favorite subjects.

MM: Al had been doing the covers until then, so how did this one come to you? MARK: Al asked me to do it. He had been doing the covers for the series and I guess had fallen a little behind or needed to create some free time, so I and a few other cartoonists did some fill-ins. It was my first contact with Lucasfilm and, as I worked with them a number of times after that, I guess they didn’t hold my logo gaffe against me. They probably didn’t even know who did it. MM: You wrote a short story for the third series of Death Rattle, called “The Probability Chamber.” MARK: Actually, I drew the cover as well as wrote the story, which was drawn by Roger Petersen. It was a science-fiction piece that ended up not making a heck of a lot of sense. I tried to play around with the idea of probability allowing a kind of second chance at redemption, but it ended up not hanging together very well. MM: Did you enjoy writing it? It sounds sort of like you were given a topic rather than having free rein. MARK: Oh, no, it was my idea and I enjoyed writing it. It just didn’t work particularly well. MM: You followed that up with a twoissue Flash Gordon mini-series, working again with Al Williamson. MARK: Yeah, that was so much fun. Al approached me about that. Al had been inking at Marvel for years and Tom DeFalco, editor-in-chief there, had been a fan of Al’s art since way back and wanted to figure out a way to get Al to draw again. Al told Tom that if he could get the rights to Flash Gordon, he would love to draw that again, and that Al would have me write it. So Tom got the license from King, agreed I could write it, and there you have it. Al had all these ideas for different scenarios that he wanted to draw, and my job was to take all of the scenarios and somehow tie them together in a story with some semblance of a plot. But if you know Flash Gordon, you know there’s not a heck of a lot of plot. It was a great experience because I got to see Al do panel-by-panel breakdowns

working from a full script, comparing how he drew it with how, in my mind, I would have drawn it. And we bounced ideas back and forth about what could be found in unexplored regions of Mongo. At one point, Al told me he had some reference art for an elephant charge, and he wanted me to work out a scene with Mongo elephants charging. So I did, featuring whatever passes for elephants on Mongo, and months later when he actually started to draw, he calls me and asks, “Why the hell did you put this scene in here? How am I supposed to draw this?” So I reminded him he had asked me to. He said, “Oh, yeah, I guess I did...,” laughed and eventually found the stampede reference he had pulled. But it worked both ways. There was a page I wrote that required, because of space restrictions, a lot of creative visual storytelling involving a sinking spaceship and people that lived underwater rescuing Flash. I knew when I wrote it that there was an awful lot of storytelling to be done in just a few panels, and it wouldn’t be easy to fit it all in. I didn’t think it would be pretty. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve stretched out the storytelling, but I just didn’t have the space. And I gave it to him thinking I was really asking a lot, and darned if he didn’t work out the storytelling just beautifully. The whole thing was just a lot of fun and I learned from Al at the same time. 61

MM: A couple of years later, you worked with Al again in a story for Dark Horse Presents called “One Last Job.” Below: On top of drawing the covers and writing 1997’s Predator: Hell & Hot Water miniseries, Mark also designed this proposal for the Predator diving armor. Next Page: Cover art for Predator: Hell & Hot Water #1. Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

MARK: Actually, that story was started in the late ’80s. Someone was starting up a science fiction anthology magazine, and had asked Al to contribute to it, so Al asked me to write a story three or four pages long. I did and Al started it, getting about halfway done, but the anthology never happened. So Al didn’t finish the art. Then much later, Dark Horse approached Al for a story for Dark Horse Presents. Al pulled the story back out of the drawer and finished it up. MM: Not long after that, or maybe even about the same time, you worked on a Predator mini called Hell and Hot Water with art by Gene Colan. You appear to be getting into a lot more licensed material about this time.

MARK: I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to continue Xenozoic Tales and make a living wage. I was casting about for work, and Dark Horse offered me the series. It was really great since it showed I could do work outside Xenozoic Tales. And it was great because I got to work with Gene, whose work I’ve always liked. MM: Did you work closely with him? MARK: Less closely than with Al. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Gene a lot, and most of the interaction went through Bob Cooper, the editor. MM: You didn’t get to tell him how much you had liked Tomb of Dracula? MARK: Well, of course I did. As we were working together, I remembered that he had worked on DC’s Sea Devils before he got to Marvel and I had enjoyed reading those. So it turned out to be really fortunate that we got to write a story where so much takes place underwater. MM: Did you have an inspiration for the creatures in this series? MARK: I have a fascination with organisms that live in extreme environments. Life that manages to flourish in such places as mid-oceanic volcanic rifts or in caves far below the surface of the Earth. So the creatures that the Predator is hunting in the series are based on them, as well as on the shapes of various microscopic organisms that exist all around us. MM: And then you went to the other licensed property, working on Aliens: Havoc, which had to present some unique writing problems. MARK: Yeah, that one turned into an awful lot of work. It was an ambitious concept that didn’t quite come off. The editor, Phil Amara—who I had worked with at Kitchen Sink before he’d moved over to Dark Horse—approached me with the idea of writing a story to be drawn by a different artist on every page. I thought about it and figured out a storyline that would make the change in artist with every page logical. I didn’t want the changes to be arbitrary— there had to be a reason. So I came up with

were others who didn’t get it, or chose not to. And those pages are jarring and disruptive to the concept we were trying to pull off. I must say that the ones who didn’t follow through aren’t particularly well known as storytellers, anyway. MM: It must’ve been difficult, as a writer, just to handle the number of characters this kind of story would call for. MARK: Well, we did allow the spirit to jump back into bodies it had been in before, but there were seven or eight characters, working salvage on an abandoned interplanetary cruise ship. And yeah, it was complex. MM: After that you did a twopart Superman story in the DC One Million crossover. MARK: That was a lot of fun. Joey Cavalieri, editor of Superman at the time, got in touch with me. I think, once again, my connections got me the chance; Joey had met Al Williamson, and Al had mentioned to him that I was looking for writing gigs. And I guess Joey thought enough of me to give me a shot. He had me create a two-issue spec script for Superman, without any continuity context, just to see what I could do. They’ll probably never publish it, but I guess they have it on file. Based on that, Joey offered me the Superman gig. the idea that the change in artist represented a change in point of view—the story’s narrator would look through the eyes of a different character page to page. So, the narrator became a disembodied spirit moving from body to body, taking control of that character for that page. It was supposed to be happening in real time; we built in a reason why the spirit couldn’t inhabit a single body for more than a page’s worth of space. Now, the only way this conceit was going to work was if every artist bought into the idea that they needed to tell the story from their character’s point of view only. The only things shown on that page could be the things it was possible for that character to see. I’d say 85% of the artists got that, but there

MM: You got to write a Superman of the far future, since the concept was to tell stories one million issues in the future, essentially one million months ahead. MARK: Grant Morrison had come up with the concept and had done a pretty thorough job with the background. But there were a lot of details that were left open, and I got to play with those. So I used wacky science fiction concepts that go back to the stories from when I was a kid, the Weisinger era. I got to put in some Metal Men stuff and some Hawkman scenes, basically the things that I really enjoyed when I was reading DC as kid. Even Lana Lang as the Insect Queen. 63

evolved into a sidewalk lecture on the coelacanth—with Michael adding some paleontological perspective—and when we were done, they put it back into its tub and wheeled it back into its crypt. A few of its scales—massive prehistoric scales—had flaked off, and I pointed them out. They told me that I could have them if I wanted, and so I now have a little piece of coelacanth at home with me. So, anyway, after that Phil, Michael, and I had a great breakfast while laying out the basics of SubHuman. And over the next few months, Michael and I worked out all the mythology and back-story.

MM: Basically you could throw continuity out the window.... MARK: Yep, yep—it was so far in the future, it wasn’t tied into the monthly continuity. We just had to stick to the basic premises that Grant had set up. In fact, I got to introduce the concept that in this far, far future Superman’s Fortress of Solitude was kept inside a tesseract. And then, a few years down the road, when I was writing Superman: Man of Steel, we needed to rebuild the Fortress. So the editor at that time, Eddie Berganza, suggested that we reuse the idea of putting it inside a tesseract as part of the continuity.

MM: With the intent that if the mini-series did well, it would become ongoing?

MM: You have already mentioned meeting Michael Ryan in Calgary and visiting Drumheller. You began publishing a series with him, SubHuman, in 1998.

MARK: Well, that was what he hoped, but to be honest, it failed to find an audience, and Dark Horse never expressed any interest in continuing. They never collected the existing mini-series into a trade paperback. Michael and I still think that we can make a go of it if we can find the right time and place. We really liked the characters and the concept. I think we made some big mistakes in trying to squeeze too much into the mini-series. We had so many ideas and we tried to cram too many of them into one series, there was too much there for readers to digest. It wasn’t a smooth read. It would have been better if it had been less dense.

MARK: Michael is a very good friend and one of my go-to scientific advisors when I am writing. Phil Amara and Michael had been talking about the idea of an underwater adventure series for a while. And they had gotten pretty serious about it. Michael had great ideas and a great potential for storytelling, but he didn’t have any experience writing comic books. So they asked me if I would like to join the team, and we all got together at a San Diego Con to work out the concept. I remember that we took a trip up to the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, in La Jolla. Michael’s connections allowed us to get in there and have access to the coelacanth body they keep in storage. The ichthyologists in charge keep the beast in a big tub of formaldehyde on wheels, which they roll around. Very convenient. They were very patient with us—they took the coelacanth out and put it in a big pan outdoors, because I was taking photos and needed the light. It turned into a kind of spontaneous “happening” with students attracted like flies to the sight of this truly weird fish. It

MM: There was a lot of text on those pages. MARK: There was. Poor Roger Petersen did a fantastic job of trying to make it work, but we didn’t give him much breathing room. Michael and I still talk about going forward with the adventures of Krill Stromer. We have a lot more story that we would like to tell; whether that takes the shape of comic adventures or as an illustrated text story, we’re not really sure, but we would like to continue telling her story. 64

in snow up to several feet deep, they have exceptionally attuned hearing that can detect prey under up to like four feet of snow. And when they locate their prey, they smash their extended wings down on the snow and literally stun their prey with the shockwave. I really liked the idea of a creature that could sense life it couldn’t see, probably through its hearing, and thought it might have some value in dealing with the aliens. MM: And you only had one artist to work with on this Aliens story. MARK: Yeah, Doug Wheatley did a fantastic job on that series. There’s a guy who pours himself into every page of his work. His pencils are so tight that they just reproduced from them. He did a great job of storytelling in that series, just gorgeous. MM: When I was reading SubHuman, I noticed some Lovecraftian touches; is Michael as much a fan of Lovecraft as you are? MARK: To a certain extent. Michael is a paleontologist and a biologist, so he’s thoroughly versed in the natural world. He has knowledge of all sorts of fascinating and unusual creatures that actually do exist. Then you make them really big, and there’s your story. [laughter] There are lots of really creepy, totally surrealistic, creatures, but they are generally extremely tiny. When you make them as big as a ship, they become “Lovecraftian.”

MM: You got to draw the covers, though. MARK: Yeah, I got to draw the owl. MM: About halfway through the run on that series, your writing on Superman: Man of Steel started coming out.

MM: Following SubHuman, you had another Aliens mini-series, The Destroying Angels. How did you think to put an owl in an Aliens story? MARK: I had read a great article, probably in National Geographic, about great gray owls. They are a far northern owl, the world’s largest species. Because they live in landscapes that are often covered 65

Previous Page: Model sheet of the cast of SubHuman. Left: You can’t have a good undersea adventure without a submarine. Mark’s design for The Nayad. Below: A lush sketch of some of the denizens of the world of SubHuman. SubHuman and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Michael Ryan and Mark Schultz.

MARK: That was the first time I got to work with Doug Mahnke. He’s another great storyteller. I’d send him his script and he would invariably find ways to improve upon it. The changes he would make were always thoughtful storytelling changes that made the story flow better.

Previous Page Right: Krill Stromer, the central character of SubHuman, is the main focus of this unused cover idea for SubHuman #3. Mark says he wishes he’d stuck with this one. Below: Model sheet drawing of Salamander. Next Page: Cover art for SubHuman #1. SubHuman and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Michael Ryan and Mark Schultz.

MM: You picked up Man of Steel as a result of your work on the DC One Million stories, but now you have to work within a fairly tight continuity. MARK: At the time, there were three other monthly Superman comics in continuity, and they all had to fit together. MM: That had to be difficult, but at least the story conferences were reputed to be a lot of fun—big brainstorming sessions at resorts. MARK: By the time I came on, they had stopped doing resorts. Those junkets were, I believe, predicated on sales figures that stories like “The Death of Superman” generated. Superman wasn’t seeing those kind of sales when I came on board, so we were all brought in to New York for a couple of nights, put up in a very nice hotel, and did our brainstorming at the luxurious DC offices. It was a fascinating experience, and I’m glad I had it—I learned a lot about working with other writers. Up until then I had pretty much been a free agent; when I was working on Xenozoic Tales, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. When I went to Dark Horse, it was much the same; there wasn’t any interference either from Dark Horse or Twentieth Century Fox, who owned the Aliens and Predator properties. But DC, especially because we were working with Superman, which is maybe their biggest merchandising property, ran a much tighter ship. I had to pass story ideas and concepts through various levels of a hierarchy starting with the editor and perhaps going higher depending on what was being done with the character. I also had to integrate with three other writers who had their own ideas for stories they wanted to tell. I don’t find it easy to fit into that kind of structure, so while it was interesting and a great learning experience for me, I can’t say I enjoyed it. I found it difficult to get across my proposals at those conferences. I’m not a good salesman in that kind of situation. Now, Jeph Loeb was 66

there and he is a very compelling salesman; he has a background in movies and TV and you could just see that he was very comfortable being in front of the group and selling his stories by almost play-acting them out. That’s a skill I just don’t have, but I really admire it. But that was okay, too, because I was happy to be the guy who took the big idea and started poking around, figuring out ways to implement it. There was a lot of give and take in the planning that eventually involved everyone, but I just don’t have the personality to initiate that kind of group process. MM: You also had the difficulty of not only having to tie in to the Superman titles but also being involved in company-wide crossovers. That has to be fairly restraining creatively. MARK: Yeah, I’m not sure any writer on any comic ever enjoyed the company-wide crossovers, at least not that I could see. Corporate fiat would dictate that a certain month would be dedicated to a crossover, and whatever threads and stories we were working on had to be set aside. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I don’t think anyone enjoyed the “Joker’s Last Laugh” crossover where every title had to take a character and turn him or her into a version of the Joker. Having said that, though, it was DC’s prerogative to make those decisions. I was getting paid to play in their toy box, and they know a lot more than I do about what’s best for their properties, so if that’s what they want or need, that’s fine. I worked on Man of Steel four and half, five years, which was probably a year longer than I should have stayed.

My work started tailing off creatively, because by then I had said about all I could say about Superman under the circumstances. I began to run out of steam. MM: Weren’t the Superman titles eventually divided by theme, and Man of Steel became the science-based title? MARK: When Joey Cavalieri brought me in on the title, I actually arrived in the middle of a big story arc, and I was getting up to speed while basically being the player brought in off the bench. Then Eddie Berganza was made the editor of the Superman line, and of course there was a shift in editorial direction. Eddie decided that he wanted to give each title a specific flavor. For example, one title would focus on Superman’s relationship with Lois. I was only too happy to take on the “science fiction” banner.

so I guess it was considered logical to put him back in MoS. I wrote him as Superman’s go-to science support who evolves into an actual friend. I liked the idea, because Steel was an engineer, and I played up that aspect of him. I really liked the character and had fun with him. I would have liked to have developed him and his relationship with Superman even further, but there’s never enough space. I loved that I got to create his base of operations, the Steelworks. I got to play to my interest in taking abandoned urban structures and putting them to new uses. Steel creates his laboratory and workshop, not in a bright and shiny pie-in-the-sky lab, but in an old brick and iron mill.

MM: Do you feel like you left a personal mark on the character? MARK: Probably not. I don’t know anything about the current continuity. I’m told that the tesseract Fortress of Solitude is gone. So I doubt there’s anything much left to mark my tenure. Maybe Krypto. We brought back Krypto as a character. Maybe our Krypto is still being used. MM: I would say that you made Steel a fairly essential character to the Superman family.

MM: You did an interesting story involving Superman and the effects of a hurricane....

MARK: That was something I was asked to do. He had had his own title which was being cancelled. He had originated in Man of Steel and DC wanted to keep him around,

MARK: It was called “What He Didn’t Do,” and I get asked about that often. I’m proud of that story—I got to wax philosophical as Superman works with Supergirl 68

dealing with a hurricane. It got to be a story not only about environmental issues, but also about one of the elements of Superman I find most interesting: evaluating the long term effects of what Superman can do, asking if there are times when maybe Superman should do nothing. Maybe the short-term benefits of an action he takes are outweighed by the long-term costs. Of course, there are parallels with current issues that our country—like Superman, the mightiest in the world— faces today. Sure, we can get rid of Saddam Hussein and maybe in the short run that looks like a good idea, but did we take into account what the long-term consequences might be? Apparently not.

after the script was finished, wanted a number of time-consuming changes that could have been easily taken care of in the proposal stage. So it cost me money for something they could have caught earlier, if they’d paid attention. That happened more than once, and I don’t like working with people who are that unprofessional. MM: Do you know if the story is considered to be canon for the Star Wars universe? MARK: I don’t know if it is or not. My impression of the Amidala story was that the stories were supposed to be taking place in the timeframe of The Phantom Menace, between the scenes. I remember that when I writing Jar Jar Binks’ dialogue,

MM: You had several Star Wars stories that came out at about the same time as Man of Steel. MARK: As a tie-in with the release of The Phantom Menace, they picked out four or five secondary characters and had writers to develop stories about them. I ended up working with Princess Amidala. To do that they had to send me the shooting script, and I had to sign an agreement stating that none other than I would see it, upon penalty of the direst consequences. Writing the Amidala story wasn’t a real pleasant experience. MM: Oh? Why was that? MARK: When you write a comic book, you get paid a flat fee for the work you do. So there are accepted procedures you go through as a basic courtesy which help keep the machinery running smoothly. I submit my proposal—and I make my proposals fairly detailed, because I don’t want there to be any surprises along the way. Any problems or concerns with the story should be discussed up front before the proposal is accepted. But Lucasfilm is used to working with motion picture screenwriters who are protected by a union. Whenever screenwriters do a rewrite, they get paid for that rewrite. So—to give them the benefit of inexperience—Lucasfilm isn’t thinking in terms of costing a comic writer money when they ask for a rewrite that could have been prevented by carefully vetting the proposal in the first place. Which is exactly what happened—they approved the proposal and, 69

Previous Page: Mark wrote the “sci-fi” Superman in Superman: Man of Steel, but Saturn Girl and the Legion of Super-Heroes didn’t make it into his run. Below: Cover art for Predator: Hell & Hot Water #2. Saturn Girl ™ and ©2008 DC Comics. Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

I was looking through the script trying to figure out if there was any sort of logic to the patois that he speaks. So, through my Dark Horse editor, I asked Lucasfilm if there was a dictionary of terms, or if a grammatical reference had been created. The question apparently traveled through the hierarchy until—and it took a while—I was told that no, George Lucas hadn’t created one. So I winged Jar Jar’s dialogue.

spore that travels around for months and attaches itself to a host, becoming a parasite before falling off and eventually taking the form of what we see in the movie. So Boba Fett eventually being fed to the Sarlacc starts its reproductive cycle again. I can’t remember the details, but I’m sure that the stages of the cycle are based on things I have read about the life cycles of real creatures. MM: You had a weekly comic strip called Batman: Shadow of Sin Tzu in 2003?

MM: You also had a story called “Fortune, Fate, and Natural History of the Sarlacc.”

MARK: AOL, which, I believe, has the same ultimate corporate owner as DC, had an online site aimed expressly at children. They wanted to try adding a daily Web comic. I was approached about writing a daily Batman strip, illustrated by Rich Burchett.

MARK: That was fun and the artist, Kellie Strom, did a bang-up job. It was a story where I got to speculate on the life cycle of the Sarlacc—how it reproduces. I made it up whole cloth. The way I wrote it, the last scene in my story is the scene in Return of the Jedi where Luke and Han are about to be fed to the Sarlacc, which was a mirror of the events that started my story. I had it so that being fed started the reproductive cycle of the Sarlacc, generating a

MM: How long was each strip? MARK: They gave me a certain format, and I can’t remember what it was. But I think I generally kept it to four or five panels. MM: And you never saw any of the results of your writing?

MARK: Not after the first week. I wasn’t a subscriber to the service that carried the strip, and DC never got copies of the art to me. MM: It was a year-long contract; an experiment to see what they could do with the format online? Did you actually end the story after 52 weeks? MARK: Yep, we finished the story out. Of course it ends with the hint that there could be more story, but it does reach a fairly satisfying conclusion. MM: Who was the villain? MARK: There were a bunch of them actually. Sin Tzu was a character given to me to incorporate into the story, and he was a puppet master who used the standard Batman rogues like Joker and Catwoman to do most of his dirty work. The tack I took was that he was a character that had a similar back-story to Batman’s, but after his father is killed he devotes his life to crime. MM: It sounds like you had fun with it. MARK: Well, I try to have fun with all the work I do. MM: Sure, but did you succeed with this one? MARK: I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask a Batman fan. Apart from Superman, who I relate to as a great science fiction character, I have a hard time understanding super-heroes. I had an easier time, for instance, getting into the Alien stories. MM: But you can write about a guy dressed up as a dimetrodon? MARK: I abandoned the Dimetrodon when I was nine years old. I knew even then it wasn’t working for me! Obviously, super-heroes work for a lot of people and they can relate to all the genre idiosyncrasies that I can’t get past. Beyond that, the current affection for angry, frustrated, revenge-driven heroes—not my cup of tea. MM: In 2004, you published a comicbased novel, Flash: Stop Motion. MARK: That was fun but it was also a lot

of work because I had never written a novel. I have years and years and years of experience reading novels, but as it turns out that experience doesn’t necessarily transfer to writing. Luckily, I had a really fine editor at DC, Charlie Kochman, who was very patient and instructive. He had a lot of faith in me, and I learned so much from him—and got paid for it. MM: It must have been something of a challenge because, as you’ve said to me in the past, you don’t like the Speed Force. You don’t like that it’s mystical in nature. MARK: Comics nowadays don’t seem to want to take the time and space to explain 71

Previous Page: Mark’s pencils along with Al Williamson’s inks for a Batman Gallery pin-up. Above: Preliminary sketch for the cover of Aliens: Apocalypse—The Destroying Angels #3. Batman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics. Aliens ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

their characters from a scientific angle, so they fall back on simplistic magical explanations. There are perfectly legitimate adventure heroes whose origins are magical, but there are so many more whose writers take short cuts by using magic to explain what had been based on science before. Jay Garrick, the original Flash, was a science-based character, even if there was an additional mythological overlay. And the silver age Flash that we talked about before was very science-based. Barry Allen was a forensic investigator for the police who solved his crimes aided by scientific research. I also liked how Barry’s wife Iris helped him to solve crimes, acting as his foil and counterpart at times. MM: So you worked to try to bring those elements back into the Flash story? MARK: Yes, given the context that I had to work with Wally West, who was the Flash when I was writing the novel. They allowed me to use Iris as a character. Luckily Charlie Kochman wanted me to write a story that was accessible to people who did not necessarily follow the comics, so I flattened out continuity issues that would confuse or intimidate those readers. And no one at DC batted an eye as I did this. There were some complaints from Flash geeks who didn’t like that Stop Motion didn’t follow the accepted continuity of the monthly books, but that was not the audience that I was writing for. I felt there was a really great story to be had between Wally and Iris, in part because I liked her character so much, and I wanted to expand their relationship beyond what I knew of it from the comics. I also incorporated some of the contemporary storyline that Geoff Johns was writing in the monthly comic. I kept some of the things that I found interesting and that complemented my story, and I dispensed with other things that I just didn’t have any place for. Again, fortunately, Charlie allowed me plenty of wiggle room.

detective, figuring out what is going on before anyone else can, whereas in the comics, usually someone else would figure it out and he would be more of a prop. MARK: Some Flash fans liked how I handled him, and others didn’t. Some people didn’t like that the other members of the Justice League appeared to be shuffled into the background, but other people applauded the fact that I pushed Wally to the foreground. I guess it came down the reader’s personal relationship with the Flash. MM: I thought part of the goal of the book is to highlight the Flash, when most of the target audience usually considered him part of a team. MARK: Right, so it would have been silly of me to have him rush off somewhere and then wait for the rest of the characters to appear to help him out. I have to give a lot of credit to Joey Cavalieri, who was editing Flash at the time, and who helped me get up to speed on current continuity. As I was talking to him, I told him I wanted to come up with a super-speed villain, and he suggested the idea of an artificial speedster that was the equal of Flash. I liked that idea, but then boosted him to be even faster than Flash, but needing to continue to move at superspeed to stay alive. The villain was essentially an evil mirror of Wally, and it was fun to use that to get into his psychology. MM: I think it turned out to be a really nice character piece.

MARK: Like he’s stupid.

MARK: I hope so. I really was trying to separate him out from the “big guns” within the JLA, making him something more than just the guy who runs fast.

MM: Well, yeah. He’s no Barry. And your novel gives him space to be something of a

MM: You had an eight-page short in Gotham Knights named “The Call.”

MM: Wally had a history of being treated as....

Previous Page: Cover art for Aliens: Apocalypse—The Destroying Angels #4. Above: Mark’s first novel, Flash: Stop Motion, part of the Justice League novel series, with cover art by Alex Ross. Flash ™ and ©2008 DC Comics. Aliens ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

generally work out as he has planned, but this story is about the occasion when things go wrong and are, in some ways, his own fault. That’s one super-hero story I enjoyed writing, and the artist, Claudio Castellini, did a bang-up job of storytelling. MM: Jumping forward a little further, you had another story with Al Williamson in Treehouse of Horror. They were doing a parody of EC Comics, so they approached Al first? MARK: Bongo approached Al several years before this actually came to pass. Al is a huge fan of The Simpsons and was scheduled to pencil and ink the story. But when the time actually came, he was unable to do both the pencils and inks, so Bill Morrison, the editor, brought me on board as penciler. The story was a send-up of one of Al’s EC science fiction stories, “The Aliens.” Al did a wonderful job inking it. It was a challenge for us because the Simpsons are done in a clear-line, very iconic style, and the hallmark of Al’s work and EC was highly illustrative with lots of lighting effects and hairy rendering that was awesome for creating the atmosphere of adventure. One of the charms of The Simpsons is that it is simple and intentionally two-dimensional, so trying to match up those two styles was a bit of a challenge. And you know, just drawing the Simpsons was a challenge for me; it’s hard to get the proportions right. They look simple, but if you don’t get the proportions right, like the space between the eyeballs, or whatever, then they become dreadful caricatures.

Above: Preliminary sketch for the cover of the Predator: Hell & Hot Water trade paperback collection. Next Page: Preliminary sketch for the cover of Action Comics #836.

MARK: That was satisfying because I got to play around with a largely-ignored situation that super-heroes—and action heroes in general—would logically encounter. They have these epic fights with all these bystanders around, and by and large, only the people who should get hurt—the combatants—are the ones who do get hurt. And to me, that always seemed to stretch reality to where I can’t accept the story any more. So I wanted to tell a story where there are consequences of such dangerous actions in a crowded environment. An innocent bystander gets hurt. Batman usually micromanages everything and things 74

MM: What do you think about Superman & Batman versus Aliens & Predators, the two-issue mini-series in the spring of 2007? MARK: I don’t think it’s particularly good, for no other reason than I had an awful hard time bringing all the properties together. I think the artist, Ariel Olivetti, did a fantastic job of working with what he was given. Beautiful painted work. There is some fun stuff where the characters go on a chase through the Fortress of Solitude. I’d always wanted to explore the Fortress in Man of Steel, but never could find the space or the right story, MM: Like one set inside of a volcano?

MARK: The set pieces were fun, but it was just so difficult to incorporate all these characters into a coherent story.

There was a ton of line drop-out. The colorist did a great job, however.

MM: I assume there’s a bible out there for the interrelationships between the characters? It’s become a fairly involved mythology over time.

MM: My wife thought that the train of Lois’ gown was particularly nice, flowing across the page. She thought the gown was especially evocative of the time period, with the split skirt and the open back.

MARK: I think there may be a bible for the Aliens-Predator crossovers, but that’s all of which I’m aware. I think the timing of this mini-series was somehow associated with the Aliens vs. Predators movie that came out a few summers ago. But I wasn’t given any kind of direction, and I certainly wasn’t asked to tie it in with the movie.

MARK: The one thing I’m not really happy about with that is Lois’ face, and I wish I could’ve spent more time working it out. Some people have mentioned to me that it just doesn’t look like my style. They weren’t expecting me to do a Superman cover, and then the UPC symbol covers up my signature. But I’m glad your wife likes it. It’s good to hear from someone who should know, having been a bride so recently.

MM: They handed you four characters and said, “Go.” MARK: Pretty much. I submitted a proposal like I always do, and it was approved. So I wrote it and the artist did the art, and then, for some reason, which I’ve never been given the full story on, it was mothballed. The film came and went, and then after a couple of years, Joey Cavalieri, the editor, informed me that it was finally going to press. I have no idea what the story was behind the delay.

MM: Well that’s it; 16 years of you rampaging across the science fiction universe. MARK: [whistles] Doesn’t seem a day over 15.

MM: And most recently, you did a cover for Action Comics in a pose we don’t often see Superman in. MARK: The Golden Age Superman getting married? MM: Yes, with cherubs on the cover. MARK: [laughs] What would you expect? It’s love! A couple of years after I had stopped writing Man of Steel, Eddie Berganza was preparing to leave the editorship of the Superman line and approached me about doing a cover—he remembered that we had talked a number of times about my doing one, back when I was writing Man of Steel. I put art deco skyscrapers in the background, as well as cherubs and rendered it all very dry-brush. A real mishmash of stylistic elements! MM: And Superman is smiling on the cover. MARK: I’m not fond of a grim Superman. MM: That’s what’s great; the storyline was about how the Golden Age Superman wasn’t grim and had a good life, including his long marriage to Lois. MARK: I was very disappointed in how they reproduced my art. I had done it with a lot of drybrush, and I was used to a publisher like Kitchen Sink or Flesk Publications who takes a lot of care in reproducing the art. Unfortunately, it looked like someone at DC had printed out the prepped scan I had sent them and made a bad photocopy of it. 75

Part 5: MM: Earlier, we talked about your love of Robert Howard and Conan. Is there a Conan story you could say is your very favorite?

MARK: Absolutely. “The Queen of the Black Coast.” For me, it’s one of the more powerful stories because, first of all, there’s a love interest. Conan actually has a personal relationship, and we get some insight into his character as well as the woman’s. And it really rises to high tragedy. The reader becomes invested emotionally in Conan’s relationship and when it concludes, it has an impact. MM: And you get flying monkeys. MARK: And you get flying monkeys. You get the best of everything: Howard’s penchant for lost civilizations, the great sequence where Conan learns the history by falling under the spell of the black lotus and having a sort of memory-dream. I think just for pure beauty of prose, the last chapter—which is only a page or a page-and-a-half long, just a kind of coda—is brilliant. Howard was capable of lyrical, powerful description. MM: When you got together with Wandering Star, the publisher of Conan of Cimmeria Volume I, did you ask to illustrate that story? MARK: It just worked out. Because Wandering Star was publishing the stories in the order that Howard wrote them, it just happened that the first volume included the story. But it made me very happy. I would have been a little disappointed if I had not been able to illustrate that one.

The Barbarian and the Prince MM: How did it come about then that you were asked to work on the book? MARK: Gary Gianni had been working with Wandering Star, having illustrated the Solomon Kane volume, and then he was working on the Bran Mak Morn book. Marcello Anciano, the publisher at Wandering Star, called me cold.

Actually, I think Gary had told me I might expect a call. Marcello had gotten my name from Gary and was aware of my interest in Conan and wanted to know if I would be interested in illustrating those stories. MM: I guess we should take a further step back: how did you know Gary? I don’t think you had done any work with him before then, had you? MARK: No. But, Gary and I had known each other for a while, from the early ’90s. I was, of course, aware of Gary’s work, but Al Williamson had met him at a convention, probably Chicago. And afterward, Al told me he had gotten to know him and had a wonderful evening talking with him. Al told me that Gary was going to be at that year’s San Diego Con and suggested we meet up. So Gary and I did; I think we may have been planning to get together anyway, but this was just a little extra incentive. Of course we have similar interests, and our aesthetics are in the same neck of the woods. We just got along really well. The fact that we get to work together on Prince Valiant is just an added pleasure.

MARK: They are oil paintings. Remember, my major in college was painting, and I had painted up to the mid-’80s. As I became more involved in being a graphic artist, working more in black-&-white and in ink, drawing comics, I abandoned painting. It was very difficult to keep up with both. MM: Was it like exercising a muscle you hadn’t used in a while or did you have to teach yourself all of that again? MARK: Pretty much, yeah. Because I had such a solid grounding in college, it wasn’t like learning a new language, but I was rusty and not used to it. I’m using a different part of my brain when I paint. When you draw, you’re thinking in terms of the line; since I work in black-&-white, I have to think in terms of contrast. When painting, you’re

MM: So Marcello Anciano approached you—was there any hesitation on your part? MARK: Not really. First of all, it was not that cut-and-dried; they did not yet have the rights to do Conan. Conan is not part of the Howard estate; it had been carved out as its own property in the ’70s. So, when Marcello approached me, he had a deal with the Howard estate for other Howard properties but had no deals with the people who owned the rights to Conan. It was a couple of years later that they got the rights to Conan. And over that time, Marcello kept in touch with me. Basically, I wanted to do it very badly, but it was a big project—it would take at least a year to complete—so it all came down to timing; I had to get the timing right with my other commitments. Luckily, it worked out very well; everything dovetailed nicely. MM: The Conan book has lovely colored paintings inside and on the cover, using what appears to be a different style than what you had used even on the covers of your comics. 79

Previous Page: Full page illustration for “Queen of the Black Coast,” from The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. You can’t go wrong with flying apes. Below: A rejected idea for the cover of a Bran Mak Morn collection. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC. Bran Mak Morn ™ and ©2008 Robert E. Howard Properties, LLC.

Right: Illustration for “The Scarlet Citadel,” from The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, depicting a grim King Conan escaping a dark dungeon. Below: Preliminary ink sketch of an illustration for “Iron Shadows in the Moon,” for The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, showing Conan and the escaped slave girl/former princess, Olivia. Next Page: Conan commission sketch. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC.

thinking of texture, color, and not so much the line, but areas of color working against each other. So there are different factors even though there is a lot of commonality in the composition and values. I’m still struggling to this day to teach myself painting and to think in terms of painterly technique instead of the linear graphic technique that I use in my drawings. It’s two different ways of thinking. It’s tough—tough for me anyway.

al paintings; in others, I took four, five, six passes at it until I and Marcello were happy. But that process, working through the preliminaries, wasn’t the real challenge. The real challenge came in making the paints do what I wanted them to do. It’s a medium in which, when I get down to working the finish, I’m really not as conversant as I’d like to be, as I am with brush and ink. I need to put the reps in; just like everything else, the more you do it, the better you get.

MM: Do you have a standard process for the paintings? I’m scared to ask how many preliminary sketches you go through before you put paint on canvas.

MM: Your Conan is different in some ways than most of the images of Conan that went before. Your Conan is grimmer, more square, stocky. Sadly, the image most people have of Conan now is Schwarzenegger, so it feels like you did something original but not necessarily away from the actual descriptions in the books.

MARK: Not too many, actually. Just like a drawing, sometimes it comes straight and easy—you get the compositions and drawing problems worked out in one shot—and sometimes it takes many preliminary drawings to work it out. I got the drawing problems resolved in one or two passes in sever-

MARK: I went back to the source— Howard’s descriptions of Conan. A lot of Conan’s devotees have an image of Conan based on their favorite artist’s rendition. The guy that everyone remembers and has had the greatest impact is, of course, Frank Frazetta. But after him, a lot of artists have done versions of Conan that have their fans—Barry Smith, Boris Vallejo, even Schwarzenegger’s in-the-flesh portrayal. There are a lot of expectations among the fans of how Conan should look, based on those depictions. Frazetta, of course, has a particularly rabid following—and he’s earned it. But, while Frazetta did an unapproachable job of capturing the violent, barbaric spirit of Howard’s fiction, he didn’t much follow Howard’s description of

the character. That’s one thing I wanted to address; I wanted my Conan to be more in keeping with Howard’s descriptions. So that was my jumping off point: I went back and read all the stories, taking notes on how Howard described him. My feeling is that these illustrated editions of Howard should be trying to reach a broader audience. There’s a very devoted readership for Howard, but it’s really pretty small. Howard deserves a much wider readership. Howard wrote a lot of lot of different genres; some of the stuff that is good, really good, stands up with London, or Kipling, or even Steinbeck, and deserves a larger audience. So I wanted my depiction of Conan to help make him accessible to that wider audience. By that I mean, instead of doing the muscle-bound, veins popping out of his arms, snarling with rage carica-

ture, I wanted to show that Howard wrote Conan as a very charismatic figure. He is the ultimate democratic hero; he comes from an isolated, highland village and there’s not a drop of pre-destined hereditary royal blood in him. He’s the son of a blacksmith and he rises to become king of the greatest nation of the Hyborean Age, mostly through sheer willpower. And he was theoretically the greatest warrior of his time along with everything else. Howard makes it clear that Conan is a charismatic leader and intelligent man that people want to follow. But the pictures of him are usually a glowering, angry guy. And to me, sorry, that just does not communicate the power and overall intelligence of the character. I tried to reflect those characteristics in my illustrations. MM: There are moments in your work where he appears thoughtful, which makes it stand out against the tradition. And as you say, Conan is described by Howard as muscular, not immersed in a steroidal rage. MARK: That drives me nuts, too: Conan being drawn as the model of contemporary bodybuilding. Sculpted to be reflective of current body-building aesthetics. The inverted triangle-look created by super-exaggerated pectorals and obliques is a fashion of contemporary beauty. It’s not based on strength; it’s based on an aesthetic ideal. A warrior has a very different physique—one created by the activities he performs in executing his job. Conan should be hugely muscled, but those muscles better be in the right proportions or he looks like a model pretending to be a warrior in a world of bladed combat. I took a cue from Frazetta and looked at the body-builders at the turn of the century, like Eugen Sandow. He is largely credited with popularizing the physical culture craze. But he didn’t have the shape of contemporary Nautilus machine bodybuilders. He’s very different: much smaller pecs and a much more powerful midsection, but he was an incredibly strong man. It wasn’t just for show; he would give incredible demonstrations of strength.

there’s a tree. You, on the other hand, put him in a place, giving a sense of culture and time around him that could actually exist—a temple with realistic carvings, for example. MARK: I’m glad you think so; that was important to me. I think Frazetta did a good job of that, too. He could create an almost claustrophobic feeling of very specific space. Going back to Howard’s writings, his Hyborean Age was supposed to be a predecessor of the early civilizations that we’re familiar with. So I wanted to have actual textures or elements of antiquity to inform my illustrations. MM: The piece that really leaps out at me is from “The Phoenix on the Sword,” where the columns seem to have snakes writhing up their surfaces. I’ve seen the preliminary sketches for this illustration, and you spent a lot of time working out the exact appearance. It feels very Cretan. MARK: Frazetta has little touchstones of antiquity as well, but then he tends to go off in his own direction. He has such an individualistic vision, but despite that, I buy the world he creates. But it certainly isn’t anything very real-world. He creates his own Frazetta-land, and I wanted to try to make my stuff feel like it fit in the world Howard was trying to communicate, a historical fiction. MM: How many paintings do you end up with in Conan of Cimmeria?

MM: I’m looking at a picture of him here, and I’m reminded of Johnny Weismuller. Above: Rejected preliminary sketch intended for The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. Next Page: Illustration for the ever-popular Conan story, “Rogues in the House,” from The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC.

MARK: Yeah, something like him. Look at how Frazetta did Conan, and the physique he uses—the physique he uses for a lot of his characters—is a lot like that. But different occupations lead to different physiques. He formed his version of Conan along these lines, but a lot of the folks that emulated Frazetta lost track of the source. MM: You also were able to do black-&-white illustrations within the stories that were able to take advantage of setting. The more traditional pictures of Conan could be set anywhere; he’s standing on a rock, or maybe 82

MARK: There are seven, including the end papers, dustjacket, and the slipcase. MM: And the plan was for that to take a year. MARK: It’s a little hazy to me now, but it probably took more like a year and a half. Actually, the thought was that I was going to do all three books in the series. I had doubts that I would be able to pull that off, and it became clear to me soon enough that that was going to be impossible. MM: So Wandering Star put out the three Conan books with different artists.... MARK: Actually, they only put out two books. The third book wound up being

published by Del Rey, after Wandering Star unfortunately closed shop. Here’s what’s happened to the best of my ability to interpret: up until the first Conan volume, Wandering Star was publishing deluxe, limited editions of the Robert E. Howard collections and that was the end of it—no mass market editions. Then they worked out a deal where Del Rey would reissue the books as mass market paperback editions. My Conan book was the first that was actually republished in paperback by Del Rey. You have to remember that, before Wandering Star, there was a real dearth of quality Howard collections. The Conan stuff itself had been badly edited and truncated, and Wandering Star went back to the manuscripts—or to the issues of Weird Tales if the manuscripts were not available—to reinstate Howard’s original, unexpurgated texts—an important service. Wandering Star’s mission was to publish the stories the way that Howard meant for them to be read, and they got the ball rolling in the current repopularization of Howard in general and Conan in particular. Mass market publication was needed to get Howard to a broader readership, of course, so the deal was made with Del Rey. Unfortunately, when affordable editions became available, the sales for the Wandering Star deluxe editions tailed off. I think that Wandering Star was probably overproducing their deluxe editions; they were expecting too many sales for editions that cost $200. They were a publishing house that

seemed predicated completely on selling to a very exclusive limited edition collectors‚ market. I think they hoped that their books would attract a growing customer base among Howard fans, but that didn’t happen fast enough. MM: And Gary did the second volume? MARK: Yes. It’s the last book that Wandering Star published. It’s unfortunate that Greg Manchess’ gorgeous work on the third Conan volume didn’t get the deluxe treatment—its initial publication was as a Del Rey paperback. Hopefully, it will someday get the deluxe edition it deserves. MM: So where are your paintings now? Do they belong to you or to Wandering Star? MARK: They’re my property, and I’ve a few. MM: Of the ones you’ve painted, which one are you the happiest with? MARK: To be honest with you, I’m not really happy with any of them. I mentioned earlier I was at a very early stage in remembering painting and there are things I would change about all of them. If I had to say, the one I think works best is the one on the dust jacket of the Wandering Star version. Also, the interior plate that was used for the cover of the Del Rey edition. I think it comes closest to showing Conan in the way I think Howard describes him. MM: Honestly, I didn’t think you would pick any. You always want to go back and fix things. MARK: It’s not that I dislike... well, that’s not true, there’s some I dislike. [laughter] MM: Maybe I should have asked which you disliked the least. MARK: Yeah, the ones I named, then. You know, I think they’re all decent enough, but there’s lots I could have done better. MM: After you finished the Conan work, you got an opportunity to work on an Almuric book? MARK: Well, what happened was that Marcello and I discussed my illustrating another Howard book. At that time it looked like Wandering Star would be in business for a long time. I expressed interest in doing Almuric, and Marcello considered that a real possibility. Actually Wandering Star had to work in agreement with Del Rey about which books they would publish, so a proposal had to be made. In the meantime, I was eager and had the time to get started on the project. So, to get a jump on the schedule, I started to do preliminary work, investing my own time, assuming the book would happen. And 84

I did one painting for Almuric which was eventually used in the Howard promotional book, The Art of Robert E. Howard. MM: We should point out that Almuric is Howard’s space-based fantasy writing. MARK: It’s a short novel. I guess what happened was, relatively late in his life, Howard’s manager approached him about doing an interplanetary story. His manager was Otis Adelbert Kline who was himself an author, well known for writing stories in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ work. He’s best remembered for his swashbucklers set on Venus. They’re well done, but it’s obvious they owe a huge debt to Burroughs. So Howard tried his hand at the form, and Howard being Howard, he did it on his own terms. It really didn’t matter what genre he was writing in, his heroes are all the reflections of Howard’s own beliefs and obsessions. The hero’s name is Esau Cairn, and he’s so physically powerful he has no equal on Earth. The poor guy can’t even play competitive sports because he always winds up inadvertently mangling his opponents. Howard describes him as being a throwback, a primitive specimen born out of his appropriate time. Somehow he winds up accidentally killing a crooked politician and going on the lam. He retreats to the laboratory of a scientist he happens to know, and by lucky coincidence, the scientist has just put the finishing touches on an interplanetary, interdimensional machine called the Great Secret. You never really learn what exactly the Great Secret is, but it projects Esau to another galaxy. And then you get down to the typical Howardian gripping adventures, but with some marginally derivative Burroughs stuff, somewhat like Pellucidar with its primitive tribes. It’s fun stuff but not great, and he never finished it. Someone wrote an ending to it that has been included in all publications. The likely suspect is Kline or another of Kline’s clients. But there is hope that someone, someday, will find the speculative long-lost ending in Howard’s notes! MM: Would you like to someday get back to Almuric? MARK: I’d love to do it. It’s just a fun story. Lots and lots of spectacularly visual

characters, scenes and scenery to choose from. MM: Let’s move to Prince Valiant. On the one hand you got to flex your artistic muscles doing the paintings for Conan and here you get to do some more work in the strip format. Again, how did you get started on working on it? MARK: Once again, it was Mr. Gianni. Gary Gianni had, several years ago, started assisting long time Prince Valiant artist, John Cullen Murphy. The plan was that Gary would take over when Murphy retired. And, indeed, he retired shortly thereafter. John Cullen Murphy’s son, Cullen Murphy, was writing Prince Valiant and he felt he was ready to move on, as well. So Gary recommended me as the new writer. I submitted some story ideas; King Features wanted to get an idea of 85

Previous Page: Some of Mark’s preliminary work for a new edition of Almuric, which was never published. Above: Mark’s sketch for what would become an Almuric painting that appeared in The Art of Robert E. Howard. Almuric ™ and ©2008 Robert E. Howard Properties, LLC.

what I would do with the strip, of course. I guess they liked what I gave them.

Below: More of Mark’s preliminary work for the unpublished Almuric. This sketch depicts some of the wildlife of the planet. Next Page: Prince Valiant doing what he does best. Pencils by Gary Gianni—the artist of the ongoing Prince Valiant Sunday strip—and inks by Mark—writer of said strip. Almuric ™ and ©2008 Robert E. Howard Properties, LLC. Prince Valiant ™ and ©2008 King Features Syndicate, Inc.

MM: We talked earlier about your yearlong Batman strip, where you had a single story-arc throughout a year. Did that turn out to be a good proving ground for writing Prince Valiant? MARK: You know it made me feel a little more confident that I could break things down that way. But they are very different in timing. The Batman strip appeared five days a week with three or four panels in each strip. So it had a different rhythm than that of Prince Valiant. The big challenge with Prince Valiant, of course, is trying to tell an ongoing story in a strip that appears only once a week. So you have an entirely different dynamic. But yeah, there are some correlations. MM: Were you a big reader of Prince Valiant when you were growing up? MARK: Absolutely. In fact, Prince Valiant was one of two or three strips I clipped and collected as a kid. MM: That would be when Hal Foster was doing it? MARK: Yeah. I started collecting in what turned out to be the final two years of Foster’s run. MM: Given its longevity, there has to be a bible for the strip, doesn’t there?

MARK: [chuckles] You’d be surprised. Unfortunately King Features couldn’t provide a great deal of history. But Gary and I are both fans and have our own collections of the Foster strips. King sent me proofs of what they could find of the Murphys’ work. So I’ve got a lot, but I don’t have everything that the Murphys produced, and nothing’s organized into what you might describe as a bible. But what I got from King was certainly helpful. I initially had several ideas for storylines that I discovered had already been done by the Murphys. MM: Like what? MARK: Well, I wanted to get Val back to the New World. Back in the ’40s, Foster took Val to North America. I wanted to get Val back there, but more towards Central America to encounter the Aztecs or Mayans. Turns out the Murphys did that decades ago. MM: How do you write a weekly strip— you have a plot and a goal for what you want to accomplish at the end of the arc...? MARK: The way that Gary and I work is that I come up with the basic story arc... I should say it’s more amorphous than that. We’re always throwing ideas off of each other: “Wouldn’t this be cool?” and “Here’s an idea.” So there’s a lot of both of us throwing out ideas; some get picked up later and some don’t. But it’s very much a collaborative effort. Based on all that, I’ll project a storyline and at that point we have no idea how long it’s going to go on. Essentially, after we have a general idea of what we want to do, I’ll come up with a plot and break it down into weekly segments. What I do is make descriptive notations for panel breakdowns on typewriter paper. And I’ll do like ten weeks’ worth, because we don’t want to get too far ahead, but we do want to get far enough ahead that Gary knows what’s coming so he can begin pulling together his reference materials or do model shoots if he needs to. Then we’ll bat it back and forth and refine things, but usually there are very few changes. Then Gary starts breaking it down, doing thumbnail sketches for a specific strip, and based on them I’ll finish the script. One of the frustrating things is,

because the strip is reduced so small in so many papers, we have to keep the text very brief, and the panel art very simple. That makes it difficult to advance the plot very much per week. MM: I hadn’t considered that; in my local paper, the strip takes up a third of a page. Is that unusual? MARK: I’ve seen it as small as a fifth of a page and our paper here carries it at about a fourth of a page. Yours is relatively large. We just can’t do a lot of the epic stuff that Foster did. We can’t fit in the amount of text that allows you to fill out the story and personalities, as well as putting a layer of descriptive texture around the illustrations. MM: I see. You can rely on Gary to do the physical descriptions in the art, but other descriptive passages have to be cut. MARK: That’s rough, too, because he can’t do as much as he would like to because the details would be lost when the strip is reduced. It’s frustrating because if you go back and look at Foster’s strips, he put a lot of detail about the characters in that text. He spent a lot of time developing the foibles of Prince Valiant. He enjoyed playing Valiant up as a very noble wannabe and then being taken down, like having his butt kicked by Aleta, his wife. It’s something that is fairly humanizing and makes the strip more accessible to the average joe because people could relate to what happens. What Foster is basically saying is that human nature is the same no matter when or where, and Gary and I both wish we had more of an opportunity to expand on that.

we don’t lock down an entire story arc. This adventure started out with Val being kidnapped by Norsemen and it has evolved so much. When it started out, Skyrmir was pretty much a throwaway villain, but Gary enjoyed drawing him. He’s a character we created ourselves—we weren’t beholden to any previous version. You know, Val has to conform to a certain preordained look, he has established features, a certain jawline and profile, the blue tunic, the haircut, of course. But Skyrmir was someone we got to make up whole cloth. Gary just enjoyed the fact that we didn’t have to write or draw him to any reader expectations, because there weren’t any. And because we were having fun with Skyrmir, he started to evolve into someone that we thought we should keep around. So he’s become a foil, a comedic sidekick, a counterpoint to Val. And that led the story in a different direction. That relationship between Val and Skyrmir has allowed us to humanize the characters a bit; we get to show that Val has some flaws, too. The princess Makeda is attracted to Skyrmir, and Valiant keeps wondering why she’s not attracted to him. He’s a bit egotistic and jealous. We’re having fun with that.

MM: Do you look at the strip when it comes in your local paper? MARK: Yes. I’m lucky that I get to see the printed result of our efforts. Gary, unfortunately, doesn’t have a local paper that carries the strip. MM: Currently Prince Valiant is on his way to Africa and has become a member of a bizarre potential romantic triangle with a princess and Skyrmir, the Viking captain. How much fun was creating that? MARK: Oh, a lot of fun. That’s a perfect example of why 87

Part 6:

The Shape of Things to Come

MM: Mark, tell me about Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards.

needed a cover, and he and I were sort of on the same wavelength, thinking it would be cool to do it in the style of the late 19th century lithograph circus posters

MARK: Jim Ottaviani, the publisher—are you familiar with Jim’s work?

MM: Were you familiar with the story of Cope and Marsh before Jim contacted you?

MM: A little bit. He’s popularizing science through comic books.

MARK: Oh yeah. It’s one of the great stories out of paleontological history—and out of the American West. I remember back in the ’80s, Steve Bissette did a great riff on the story that appeared in Bizarre Tales, one of those Marvel adventure anthologies. It was a fantasy version of the feud, involving the discovery of a living dinosaur. It was a pretty cool little story, which I don’t think has been reprinted since. It should be. The Cope-Marsh feud is a very dramatic story and only slightly less than the perfect story in truth, but Jim’s script adheres a little more closely to the facts than Bissette’s telling.

MARK: Exactly; I couldn’t have said it better. His company, G.T. Labs, has produced a number of graphic novels over the last decade, all aimed at getting the public excited about science. He’d been in touch with me, since ’89 or ’90, about the potential for working together. And he eventually approached me with the perfect project, a fictionalized history of the paleontological feud between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh that opened up the American West as one of the great hotbeds for dinosaur research. He

MM: Do you remember how many revisions you went through to get the look you wanted for the circus feel? MARK: Oh, it wasn’t too difficult. I just referenced some reproductions of actual circus posters contemporaneous to the period. I had a couple of concepts for the cover and ended up sending Jim two comps that could both work. He ended up choosing the one that I thought was the best. That’s one time I was able to come up with what both I and the publisher were looking for fairly quickly. MM: Did you have any harsh words for him for having such a long title for his book? The full title is Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards: A Tale of Edward Drinker Cope, Othniel Charles Marsh, and the Gilded Age of Paleontology. MARK: You know, it was a little difficult working out the lettering for the cover title, but it kept very much in the Victorian style of the time which tended to get wordy and ornate in its description. When I looked at posters for things like the Barnum and Bailey Circus, you’re talking about a relatively type-heavy graphic anyway. MM: And wasn’t there some associated work on Charles Knight at about the same time? MARK: While I was in the process of working on the Bone Sharps cover, Jim mentioned that he had another project going on which was actually not a comic. He had been in touch with Charles R. Knight’s granddaughter and estate holder, Rhoda Knight. And I’m not sure how it came to the surface, but she had discovered a manuscript for an autobiography that her grandfather had begun. It was in a rough state and only covered parts of his career. She and Jim decid-

ed that it should be published. Jim cleaned it up a little bit—I guess there was a lot of repetition in it—and then he asked me if I would like to illustrate it. So working on the Bone Sharps cover led to illustrations for this book, Charles R. Knight: Autobiography of an Artist. I did the plates in carbon pencil, using a technique that was popular back in the historical period in which Knight worked. So that was a lot of fun. MM: So, from that, you’re working on a book on genetics. Was there a logical step from this work to the genetics book? MARK: Not that I’m aware of. Other than the fact that I do incorporate science, especially the biological sciences, into a lot of stories I work on. I think that helped me get the work with Jim Ottaviani and then I think it probably also helped with the genetics book that was packaged by Howard Zimmerman. MM: First of all, what’s the title of the book going to be? MARK: The Stuff of Life: A Graphically Explicit Guide to Genetics and DNA. MM: Are you going for the mature audience by describing it as explicit? 89

Previous Page: Preliminary sketch for the cover of Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards. That’s Charles R. Knight holding the paint brushes. Though legally blind, Knight became renowned for his paintings of prehistoric creatures. The dinosaur battle depicted in this sketch is a take on one of his most famous paintings. His last museum piece was created for the Everhart in Scranton, PA, near Mark’s home. Above: An alternate preliminary sketch for the book cover which was not used. Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards ©2008 Jim Ottaviani.

MARK: Mature? No, just general prurient interest. [laughter] Howard Zimmerman, the packager, came up with The Stuff of Life, and I suggested the subtitle just because it’s a little titillating, although there’s pretty much nothing titillating in the text. Let’s just say the subtitle promises more than the book delivers. MM: Well, there’s the sort of winking reference to sexuality in the title, so what is the book really? MARK: Soft-core porn. [laughter] All the good stuff’s taken out. Seriously, it’s called a graphic novel, but it’s not fiction. It’s a graphic novel because that’s the publishing

world’s term for the extended comics format it takes. It’s 138 pages of science primer that gives you a solid, basic understanding of how genetics works on a molecular level—the level of DNA, that is—and on a cellular level. And how genetics transmits traits down generations— heredity. It discusses how our knowledge of all this is applied to better our health and our understanding of ourselves. And it talks about the potential for technologies that may or may not become reality. MM: You and I have talked some about the problems you’ve been having with the section on cloning. MARK: Yeah, we’re trying to defang the idea of cloning. I’m trying to get across some general messages through the course of the book, and one of them is that people have to learn to carefully read news reports about scientific research. Let me put it this way: news reports will take a very narrowly-focused study that implies something might be true, but requires much more study and verification before it should ever be accepted as fact, and presents the tentative findings of the study as proven, accepted fact. So people have to learn to pay attention and be skeptical about how the media misrepresents science. They also have to learn that there are segments of the media that deliberately sensationalize things. Imagine that. Sometimes misinformation is transmitted to us as an unintended result of a reporter or editor believing that they need to boil a complex story down to the point where it no longer communicates a difficult-to-digest truth. But sometimes it’s absolutely done simply to sensationalize. And a lot of news stories covering developments in cloning tech have been purposefully exaggerated to take advantage of the public’s understandable skittishness about the subject. Certain religious affiliations have muddied the waters with superstitious claptrap, too. MM: You’re writing The Stuff of Life, but who is illustrating it? MARK: It’s a group called Big Time Attic out of Minneapolis that’s comprised of Zander Cannon, Kevin

Cannon, and Shad Petosky. They illustrated Bone Sharps. I think it’s totally coincidence that we’re working together again on this, because Howard Zimmerman had approached me originally with the idea of working with another artist. But that artist had to pull out, so Howard called me and asked me if I had any knowledge of the Big Time Attic folks. I told him that my limited experience was very good, and they had already done other books than Bone Sharps that were non-fiction. I thought they would be good at it, and, boy, am I glad it worked out the way it did because the stuff they are doing is really sensational storytelling. It’s very complex stuff that we’re trying to explain, and I think they have done as clear and concise a job of storytelling as is possible.

liest talks were just about the format, like how to make this as easy to grasp for the largest cross-section of readers possible, trying to reach readers way outside the traditional comic book camp. We all agreed that the page formats should feature very standardized panel arrangements, nothing fancy, no overlapping panels, keeping all the information contained within panels that are simple and easy to read. This book will essentially be black-&white; there might be a single color added for accent, but mostly it will be monochromatic with the balance between black-&-white shapes being very important. Big Time Attic understands that completely. It’s just a very fortunate combination—we all seem to be pulling together. MM: I can’t help but think of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and how he advocates pushing the generally accepted boundary of what comics do.

MM: I’m looking forward to seeing illustrations of genetics.

MARK: Scott makes some good points. We want this genetics book—a comic meant to be an educational tool—to be as communicative and accessible as possible. Ideally, no potential reader will ever open it up and be turned away because they couldn’t easily interpret the visual language we are using.

MARK: It hasn’t been easy because a lot of genetics occurs on a molecular level, and heredity deals with probability. It’s very hard to make what are essentially abstracts visually interesting. There’s a lot of dependence on symbolic or iconic images but, boy, they’ve done a great job of making them very attractive and compelling.

MM: And if I’m not mistaken, if this works, it would be the first of what could become a series of books along similar lines.

MM: How are you working with them on this? Are you sending them scripts and they return art to you for your input?

MARK: Well, that’s what Howard, the packager, is hoping for. I can’t say what the publisher wants, but it’s a possibility; I think that’s what they’d like to see because they expressed interest in BTA and I developing the book’s narrator as a character that can be used in future volumes. We had invented an alien narrator to tell the story of DNA and genetics on Earth—we wanted the perspective of someone completely fresh to Earth. The publisher seems to think our totally unhuman character has possibilities. The closest analog he has on Earth would be a sea cucumber. Actually, it’s kind of Lovecraftian. I wanted someone to make the point that the process is guided by very specific environmental factors, and the chances of an intelligence from another planet duplicating our bipedal,

MARK: Pretty much. I send them the script, and I try to provide specific reference models they might not have access to otherwise. But these are guys that are very motivated, and they’ve boned up on genetics on their own. I wasn’t starting with blank slates. MM: I was wondering how you were making sure, if you’ll forgive the accidental pun, that you are on the same page. MARK: [laughs] From the beginning, we’ve discussed where we wanted to go with this stuff. Some of the ear91

Then I recruited Randy Dahlk—who is my go-to designer, to put the package together and make it look all pretty. Randy is printing savvy, too. But the more I got into the actual process of producing the book, the business end of it, having to start thinking about press releases and distribution, I was beginning to waffle on seeing the whole thing through. At the same time, John Flesk approached me, very aware I was doing this—in fact having tutored me on Photoshop—with the idea that he would very much like to publish my books under his banner. As I got more involved with all the aspects of publishing, I began to see the wisdom in having someone else handing the business end of it. I knew John and admired his production values and his business sense, so I took him up on it. It worked out really well, and I’m very happy I went that route.

symmetrically balanced internal-skeleton structure is pretty small. Our alien has radial symmetry rather than our bipedal symmetry and is aquatic rather than land-based. In order to keep him accessible, BTA has rendered him in a moderately Bigfoot cartooning style, but we still want the back story to be as scientifically, fundamentally sound as possible. MM: Let’s talk a little about the Various Drawings books, which I believe are having some success for you. MARK: Yes; they’ve been a happy surprise. MM: Did you approach John Flesk for this, or did he approach you? MARK: Well, I’ve known John going back to about 2001, having met him in San Diego right after he published his first book, Franklin Booth: Painter with a Pen. I was a huge admirer of that book and I liked John’s attitude and game plan. I spent some time in San Diego with him and came away with the feeling that this was someone going places. A couple of years after that, I was in a position to start thinking about putting together a collection of my own drawings, because I had finally learned how to use a scanner and Photoshop. [laughter] Well, in a limited sense—I learned how to manipulate the art to get the reproduction looking like I wanted.

MM: The Various Drawings books have really high production values, and the audience reception seems to be very good for them. MARK: Yeah! And actually, the reception, in terms of sales, seems to be increasing with every volume. I think the first volume might have caught people by surprise because it had been a long time since I had a body of artwork out there. You know, except for the Conan illustrations, I hadn’t done more than an odd cover or so in several years. I had been writing to the exclusion of almost everything else, and I think a new generation of readers and collectors came along who weren’t aware of my work. All of a sudden, I had something new out there, and it took a while for word to get around.

MM: I know. It’s just that for someone so deeply into science, you were a Luddite for so very long. MARK: Oh, yeah, and I still am. I’m still way behind the technology curve. I mean, I honestly just got a cell phone. I’m still trying to figure out how to make entries into the address book. But I am smart enough to know that I do need to learn how to use these things to control the quality reproduction of my work. So, three or four years ago, I got a handle on the scanner and Photoshop.

MM: Do you see a correlation between the success of the Various Drawings books and the success of the Xenozoic Tales reprint volumes from Dark Horse? 92

MARK: I’ve had so many younger people, people young enough to be my kids, for crying out loud, coming up to me and saying, “I’m glad Dark Horse put this together because I’ve heard about Xenozoic Tales, but I couldn’t find the comics or the earlier collections.” Some, when they were young, had seen the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs TV show, and now that they were older and interested in finding out where that had come from. And I think the Various Drawings books are having the same effect. People have discovered me through those, and now they are looking back at my earlier work.

MM: So it’s all an evil plan to build up the audience for future issues of Xenozoic Tales? MARK: Oh, absolutely. The idea is to try to keep the name alive until I can get new issues out there. MM: Do you have enough work in stock, if that’s the right term, to put out an annual volume of Various Drawings, or are you potentially approaching a

Previous Page and Below: Mark’s preliminary sketch and finished art for the cover of Xenozoic Tales Vol. 1: After the End, which collects the first six issues of the comic series.

point where you might have to let them go for a while? Below: Finished cover art for Xenozoic Tales Vol. 2: The New World. Next Page: Preliminary sketch of an illustration for the upcoming illustrated novella, Storms at Sea. Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

MARK: No, I don’t think so. As long as I am generating art, there’s always going to be preliminary or rejected drawings. Now that I know there’s a market, I’m going to keep putting together Various Drawings. However, we’re not going to have one out next year because I’ll be devoting my time to putting Storms at Sea together for a summer release. But, there are three volumes of Various Drawings, and once you get three volumes of something, that implies “series.” I think the impact is exponentially greater than two volumes, so I’m hoping that readers will be expecting more. MM: You mentioned Storms at Sea. What can you divulge about that?

MARK: It’s a little hard to describe. To be completely honest, it has morphed more than once as a conceptual project I had in mind. It started with a string of 30 unrelated images, all of which I had a hankering to draw. But that wasn’t good enough, so I figured out a way to tie them together in the framework of a hardboiled crime, a mystery/suspense story that ultimately reveals a historical conspiracy. The various images get incorporated into this hidden history of the Earth, not only of the past but also our future history, and the real mystery is where this future history comes from and whether or not this future is set and immutable. MM: Is it going to tie in to Xenozoic Tales then? MARK: There will be references that anyone who reads Xenozoic Tales could pick up on, but you won’t need to know Xenozoic Tales’ mythology to access Storms. MM: Would you describe this as a graphic novel? MARK: I’m not sure what to describe it as; that’s part of the problem. I’m calling it an illustrated novella, largely on the advice of Bud Plant. John Flesk and I had dinner with Bud and Anne Hutchison at the last Wondercon, and I tried to describe to them what I wanted to do. Bud and Anne know how to sell books, and I value their marketing savvy. I told him what the project was: a sixor seven-thousand word text, with every page accompanied by an illustration—I was calling it a storybook. But Bud cautioned us

not to use that term. He told us that it doesn’t sell well—customers probably relate the term solely to children’s books—and he and Anne suggested that a better marketing term would be “illustrated novella.” So that’s what I’m going with, whether or not it’s a technically accurate term; I think a true novella tends to be a little bit longer. But my experience is that “short story” is another kiss of death; people won’t buy short stories, either. As far as the format, each page of text will have a facing, full-page illustration and both will amplify each other. Instead of duplicating information between the image and its text, I want there to be complementary—or sometimes maybe even contradictory—information. They will obviously be linked to each other; I’m not interested in surrealistic or stream-of-consciousness exercises—it’s very much a narrative. If you think of an open book— and we’re not sure which will go to the left and which to the right—on one side will be the illustration and on the other will be the text that accompanies it. It’ll be consistent, even formulaic, as that pattern will repeat throughout the book.

MARK: It’s allegorical. But there are actual storms at sea as well, so you shouldn’t feel cheated. MM: A giant octopus? MARK: No giant octopus; not yet anyway. [laughs] I did say I like to keep things in flux until the end. The text I currently have is, I’d say, about 85% of what the final text will be. I’m still not happy with certain aspects of it, and I’m playing around with it and adjusting, looking for an inspiration that will take it to another level. I’m pretty sure that my ideas of the images will be how the images appear in the final product... but it might change. There are plenty of creepy-crawlies blown up to gigantic proportions. And you know, if the response to Storms at Sea is good, I can see using that format for other work, like continuing SubHuman. Of course, I’m hoping it works as a form that allows me to do more storytelling on a reasonable schedule.

MM: You said that the framework is going to be a little noir. Are you going to be looking back at Eisner? MARK: Oh, absolutely. I’ll be pulling from the same sources that Will pulled from. A lot of the framing and the writing will draw very heavily on some of his sources. Writers like Hammett and Chandler, and, of course, film noir, and German Expressionististic lighting. But also the illustrators, going back to the ’10s and ’20s, because they were working in black-&-white, where lighting and value are so much more important. Those elements become a lot more important when you’re not working with color. I’m going to be working with a tonal medium—washes and carbon pencil, mostly—which will allow me to get more tonal variations than I can with ink alone. So it’ll be like painting in black-&-white for me, which I’m excited about.

MM: Do you have a firm release date in mind for Storms at Sea? MARK: Yes, San Diego next year, July 2008. It’ll probably be available in stores early August. MM: So it’s not going to have the same fate as the print that was going to come out in San Diego of 2007? MARK: I hope. MM: This was going to be the 20th anniversary print?

MM: Does the title, Storms at Sea, give a hint to what’s happening in the book?

MARK: Twenty years since the first publication of 95

already expressed interest in publishing. And then, after we get those four issues out—and believe me, experience has taught me that we won’t even announce them until they are all done—we’ll collect that series in a trade paperback. Ultimately, we’ll collect the entire saga up to that point—everything— in one big set. MM: There’ll be hardcover and paperback versions of that? MARK: That’s what we’ve discussed. MM: That’s excellent. I won’t even ask about timeframes. Xenozoic Tales. The print is now scheduled to come out at Wondercon in February of 2008. And since Xenozoic Tales came out in February of 1987, it’ll be a 21st anniversary print, to the month. MM: What size is the print?

Above: Another preliminary sketch for Storms at Sea. Next Page: Endpapers for the limited hardcover edition of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC.

MARK: The board will be 18" x 24", so the image will be a little smaller than that. My experience has been that at 18" x 24" I get the size impact I am looking for, but it’s not so big that fewer people will buy it because of space restrictions. It becomes an issue finding space on a wall to hang something bigger than that. MM: Will there be more than one edition of it? MARK: There will be a limited edition print on archival paper, and a more affordable poster version. MM: Then I guess there’s not much left but asking for a description of your plans for Xenozoic Tales. MARK: I’m committed to finishing the current story arc one day. I will not rest easy in my grave if I do not get that done. What I have in mind, what I’ve plotted out, is a four-issue mini-series which John Flesk has 96

MARK: The way I feel now.... MM: Don’t jinx yourself! MARK: I know, I know. My master plan, which of course can change at any minute, is to have the mini-series out by 2010. MM: And then based on the success of that, we might see more stories? MARK: I would love to. And I have to think in terms of what format they will come in. A lot of it depends on how I do with the mini-series. To continue doing it as a comic would be my wish, but I think I could do an interesting story with it as a text piece with a lot of illustrations. MM: I guess the last question I have for you then is where the secret of why there are two moons will be revealed. MARK: That’ll have to happen sometime after this mini-series. Well, let me just say this: There might be a hint in regards to that situation in Storms at Sea. That book gets into a bigger picture of the world that I’ve created, and some of it does relate to Xenozoic Tales. But, just like the real world, the mysteries are never going to be completely solved. The journey’s the thing.

Mark Schultz

Art Gallery

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Page 98: Cover for the Wandering Star deluxe edition Robert E. Howard’s Complete Conan of Cimmerian, Vol. 1. Page 99: Cover for the Del Rey mass market hardcover and paperback editions of the above, retitled The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. Previous Page Top: “Bermuda dock,” watercolor, 1982. Previous Page Bottom: An experiment in traditional oriental brush technique, circa 1978. Top Left: Death Rattle #1—the first appearance of the Xenozoic universe. Top Right: Promotional material for the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs cartoon series. Left: Giveaway comic intended for promotion of the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs toy line. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC. Death Rattle ™ and ©2008 respective owner. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

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Previous Page: Two color sketches trying to work out the color scheme for the cover of Time in Overdrive, a Kitchen Sink Press collection of Xenozoic Tales. Above: Mark says this piece was “done with my XT colorist, Denise Prowell. A piece of amberlith is attached to indicate where the background color should be laid in mechanically.” The printed cover is included for comparison. Page 104: Mark’s color guide for Xenozoic Tales: The New World, including his numerous notes to the Dark Horse production staff. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

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Previous Page: Cover Art for Dark Horse Comics’ Tarzan the Terrible. This Page: Mark was mostly satisfied with this preliminary sketch for Dark Horse’s Tarzan #16, except for the female figure, which he reposed in a separate sketch and integrated into the final art. Tarzan ™ and ©2008 ERB, Inc.

108

Above: It starts with a thumbnail—or two—to work out the point of view and basic composition of this opening splash page to Xenozoic Tales #13. A preliminary sketch for a Batman pin-up (see page 70) was drawn on the same sheet of paper. Right: Another preliminary sketch, but with more details added. Next Page: Yet another preliminary sketch—a little cleaner this time, and with a few more details. More importantly, the foreground characters are made much more prominent to help distinguish them from the background. Xenozoic Tales and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Mark Schultz.

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

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MARK SCHULTZ The mid-’80s was the age of independent comics. It was also the age of the dinosaur, thanks to Mark Schultz and Xenozoic Tales! Evocative of the master illustrators of the early 1900s, but with a decidedly modern flair, Schultz’s artwork stood out like a beacon from the fare of the day. And it still does. Xenozoic Tales even spawned the Cadillacs & Dinosaurs cartoon and toy line. Schultz has also written various Superman, Aliens, and Predator comics, as well as a novel featuring DC’s Flash, and is currently writing the Prince Valiant newspaper strip. But his lush, exquisite artwork is enough alone to prove him to be a Modern Master! MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time. ISBN-13: 978-1-893905-85-6 ISBN-10: 1-893905-85-3

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