Mike Grell: Life Is Drawing Without An Eraser by TwoMorrows Publishing

Life Is Drawing Without An Eraser

by Dewey Cassell with Jeff Messer

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Life Is Drawing Without An Eraser

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MIKE GRELL:

Life Is Drawing Without An Eraser by Dewey Cassell with Jeff Messer

Edited by John Morrow Introduction by Chad Hardin Design, Production, and Editorial Consultation by Jon B. Cooke Transcription by Steven Tice Proofreading by Rick Welch and Scott Peters

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & COPYRIGHT NOTICES Brenda Starr is TM & © Tribune Media Services; Aquaman, Batman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, The Legion of Super-Heroes, Longbow Hunters, The Warlord and associated characters are TM & © DC Comics; Tarzan is TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.; Sable, Savage Empire, Starslayer TM & © Mike Grell; James Bond 007 TM & © The estate of Ian Fleming;

APPRECIATION The author expresses his appreciation and gratitude to those generously contributing to this book, including Keith Bradshaw, Catskill Comics (Scott Kress); Shaun Clancy; Tim Easterday, Nick Fatica; Tom Fleming; Brent Frankenhoff; Mike Gold; Michael Grabois; Chad Hardin; Heritage Auctions; High Quality Comics/Kevin Van Horn; Bill Hillman; Dan Jurgens; Paul Levitz; Jeff Messer; Denny O’Neil; Mark Ryan; Robert Sodaro; Darrin & Ruth Sutherland; Rick Welch; Stuart Wells; and, of course, MR. MICHAEL JON GRELL

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 U.S.A. www.twomorrows.com • email: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • August 2018 • Printed in the USA Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-088-5 Limited Edition Hardcover (1000 copies) ISBN: 978-1-60549-087-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword........................................................................................................................................ 4 Introduction.................................................................................................................................. 5 One: Origins.................................................................................................................................. 6 Two: Brenda Starr........................................................................................................................ 13 Three: Aquaman......................................................................................................................... 15 Four: The Legion of Super-Heroes................................................................................................ 20 Paul Levitz Interview.......................................................................................................... 26 Five: The Warlord......................................................................................................................... 30 Spotlight: The Savage World of The Warlord.................................................................. 36 Dan Jurgens Interview......................................................................................................... 39 Savage Empire........................................................................................................................ 41 Six: Batman................................................................................................................................... 45 Seven: Green Lantern/Green Arrow............................................................................................ 48 Denny O’Neil Interview...................................................................................................... 53 Eight: Tarzan................................................................................................................................ 60 Nine: Starslayer: The Log of the Jolly Roger................................................................................ 70 Spotlight: The Cosmic Exploits of Starslayer................................................................... 74 Ten: Jon Sable, Freelance.............................................................................................................. 78 Spotlight: The Double Life of B.B. Flemm........................................................................ 86 Mike Gold Interview........................................................................................................... 88 Sable Television Show Episode Guide............................................................................... 94 Eleven: The Longbow Hunters.................................................................................................... 96 Arrow: The Television Series............................................................................................. 104 Twelve: James Bond................................................................................................................. 108 Thirteen: Shaman’s Tears.......................................................................................................... 112 Spotlight: Shaman’s Tears................................................................................................. 118 Fourteen: Marvel Comics........................................................................................................ 120 Fifteen: Other Stuff................................................................................................................... 124 Mark Ryan Interview......................................................................................................... 128 Sixteen: Retirement.................................................................................................................. 132 Seventeen: Inspired by Grell—A Personal Story................................................................. 134 Eighteen: The Mike Grell Method......................................................................................... 137 Mike Grell Comics Checklist................................................................................................ 142 Mike Grell Gallery of Art...................................................................................................... 146

FOREWORD

Chad Hardin

ease. “If you can draw horses like that, you can draw anything, but your swords aren’t balanced.” That was the beginning of my tutelage under Mike. I didn’t know it then, but I was beginning my own hero’s journey when I met him. Over the next year or so Mike would coach me on everything he knew about art: layouts, composition, page flow, panel flow, lettering, human anatomy, animal anatomy, monster anatomy, etc., and so my art improved, and it didn’t end with comics. He introduced me to my rep. Scott Kress, he got me my first table at a convention with Steve Miner (a convention I literally showed up to with nothing), he coached me through asking for my first “rate” increase. The best part was, Mike never got impatient with me either. He sometimes teased me and call me “Son.” “Son, come sit and learn at the feet of the master!” he would say in his gregarious voice, and learn I did. Around issue 12 of Warlord we got the news that the book was on the chopping block, and we had to wrap up what was supposed to be a 5-issue arc in two books. With morale low, we ended our “run” on Warlord, but I never went back to filling in. Mike had taught me how to be a series artist. He was “The Mystic” who embedded in me all his secret knowledge of comics I would need to go on to do such books as The Traveler, Dragon Age, and Harley Quinn. After Warlord I would still call Mike whenever I had a crucial decision, especially involving comics or my career, and Mike always had time for me. Even when he was sick my calls never once went to voicemail. In 2016, I took a job teaching as an Assistant Professor of Art at Utah Valley University. Now I teach kids about drawing comics. I like to think I do something “noble,” but it’s my job. I get paid for it. I often wonder what Mike got out of teaching me, why he did what he did. He sure as hell didn’t have to. Regardless, I’m thankful. When I was approached by Jeff Messer, who asked me if I would be interested in writing this foreword for Mike’s book, “Of course” was my answer. It’s not often I get a chance to repay the kindness Mike has shown me through the years. I am happy to do so, in fact I can’t think of someone more deserving. Mike, I raise my glass to you good sir and toast your continued health, happiness, and celebrity. Your student and friend,

I didn’t read a lot of comics as a young kid. The only ones I had access to were books my older brother picked up from his trips to the 7-Eleven. I remember I had to sneak into his room and break into his stash to read them. It was the early ’80s, the fantasy genre was exploding in popularity, but contraband in my house. My mom was one of those parents who were convinced that fantasy was “of the devil.” That’s probably what made The Warlord stand out from the other comics. It was the one comic in that limited, but priceless, collection that was taboo. I read as many of them as I could, the images swarmed inside my head, they fueled my imagination. Soon my Pee-Chee folders became filled with my own drawings of winged helmeted heroes, evil sorcerers, and tantalizing royal maidens, all swiped from Warlord’s pages. The good old days. Until my mother discovered my brother’s stash. She burned his copies of Warlord along with his first edition Dungeons and Dragon books. My brother, who was becoming more interested in sports, just shrugged; I wept. Fast forward to the late ’00s (middle of the great recession). I had quit my comfortable in-house illustration job a few years before to take a swing at doing comics fulltime. My timing was perfect. No sooner had I quit than what seemed like every illustration job on the planet dried up. I remember I was doing finished pencils for small publishers at $25 a page, when I got a call from Joey Cavalieri. I had been bugging Joey with constant emailed samples for years, and one day out of the blue he called my cell with an assignment for DC Comics. I was saved. I remember being so happy I skipped home to tell my wife. She had been making homemade bread and soap (yes, soap, not soup) for a year because we were too poor to buy store bought. That night my young family celebrated at the best restaurant in Cedar City Utah: Applebee’s. That first assignment from Joey turned into others. I bounced from book to book until I got an assignment for no other than Mike Grell’s The Warlord. Mike was unlike any creator I had ever worked with. He called me. He called me and discussed everything about the book with me. Nobody had ever done that. At first, I thought I had done something wrong (and I had) but Mike put me at

Inset top: Chad Hardin at the 2017 WonderCon in Anaheim, California. Photo by Gage Skidmore. Inset above: The Warlord #3 [Aug. 2009] cover, with art by Mike Grell. Interior art is by Chad Hardin, his first on the title.

Chad Hardin

INTRODUCTION

Dewey Cassell

“Life is drawing without an eraser” is not only a motto or mantra for Mike Grell, it is a succinct description of his approach to living. It doesn’t mean that you are always going to get it right. So, you could play it safe, take the assignments you are given and do each one to the best of your ability. A lot of artists have made very successful careers of playing it safe. Or you could live boldly, challenge the status quo, and exert your creativity to blaze new trails, making your mark on the industry and leaving behind a legacy of work that continues to entertain for generations to come. That is an elite club that includes icons like Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, Howard Chaykin, and Mike Grell, among others. Grell is a master storyteller, as is evident from the stories he tells about his life and art in this book, some of which you may have heard before and others of which will probably be new. The book is presented roughly chronologically, which makes it clear that his artistic journey has not been a straight line, but rather a meandering path with lots of interesting side trips. You will notice, too, that once he gets attached to something, he may revisit it from time to time, like an old friend. He is equally adept at writing and drawing, which means that fans of Grell run the gamut. Some fondly remember his work on The Legion, others were drawn to The Warlord, and still others consider The Longbow Hunters to be his best work, while many are devoted fans of Sable. This book touches on them all and more, providing insight into his long and distinguished career as told by Grell himself, as well as several of his colleagues. Sincere thanks to Mike and those colleagues—Paul Levitz, Dan Jurgens, Denny O’Neil, Mike Gold, and Mark Ryan, as well as Chad Hardin—for their contributions to this tribute. Thanks also to Tom Fleming, Nick Fatica, Darrin and Ruth Sutherland, Keuth Bradshaw, Shaun Clancy, Brent Frankenhoff, HighQualityComics/Kevin

Van Horn, and Tim Easterday for the artwork they provided, as well as Heritage Auctions. Rick Welch not only supplied artwork, but proofread the book and provided helpful feedback. A special thanks to Scott Kress, Mike’s representative for art sales through www.catskillcomics.com. Thanks, too, to Steven Tice for the interview transcription, Jon B. Cooke for the great layout and design, and publisher John Morrow for his commitment to the project. And especially, thanks to Jeff Messer, whose contributions and support to the book were invaluable. Not only did Jeff interview Mike Gold, Dan Jurgens, and Mark Ryan, but he also provided the Sable TV show episode guide and excerpts from his 2015 radio show interview with Mike Grell appear throughout the book. I apologize in advance for any errors of omission or commission herein, the fault of which lies with me alone. Rest assured they were not intentional. As Mike himself might say, that’s life. Hope you enjoy the journey as much as Mike obviously has. Dewey Cassell

Top: Commissioned by a private collector, this Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters painting was created by Mike Grell in the late ’80s/early ’90s. Left: Jon Sable commission piece by Grell.

CHAPTER ONE

Origins Most of the comic book artists from the “Golden Age” really wanted to be illustrators. Many drew comic books because it was the only work they could find. And many used a pseudonym, so no one would know they were drawing comics. But their true aspirations remained to one day become illustrators such as the great J. C. Leyendecker and James Montgomery Flagg. Over time, the success of artists like Al Capp, Milton Caniff, and Hal Foster brought an allure to drawing comic strips. The work was steadier than comic books, which could rise and fall on the whim of the editor, and your work was seen by millions of people across the country, most of whom were adults. There was a respect afforded artists drawing comic strips not found with comic books. Michael Jon Grell was part of a new breed of artist who, while they may have still aspired to be an illustrator or have their own comic strip, actually enjoyed drawing comic books. They were fans of the medium and wanted to be a part of bringing the four color stories to life. For them, drawing comics was not just about making a living, it was about making your mark in the industry. And through the success of their work, drawing comic books became not only respectable, but cool. Here, then, are the “origins” of artist and writer Mike Grell. Dewey Cassell: Let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? Mike Grell: I was born September 13, 1947, in Iron Mountain, Michigan, but my hometown is Florence, Wisconsin. Iron Mountain’s the nearest town hospital, and that was across the border, in Michigan. Cassell: Tell me a little bit about your parents. What did they do? Grell: Mom was a barmaid and later worked in an electronics factory that made components that went into Telstar, the first communications satellite; Dad was a lumberjack. They were very fortunate to have any jobs at all. In 1961, during the Kennedy Administration, the government did a survey of the 10 most depressed areas in the United States. My hometown area was tied for first with Appalachia. I was very much a child of the ’50s, and we grew up without television. I never saw a TV until I was eight and we didn’t get one until I was 11, but it was great because, for one, we had no context of what we were missing. Number two, we had radio, we had movies, we had comic books, comic strips, and learned to read real books. We were sent outside to play and told, “Be sure to be home before the street lights come on.” Cassell: Do you have any brothers or sisters? Grell: I have two older brothers, and I survived them both. I mean, I survived their best efforts to take me out when I was four years old. They once dug a pit trap in the backyard and covered it over and told me there was buried treasure on the other side. They said, “Anybody who digs it up can keep it.” And I said, “What’s the treasure?” They said, “It’s money.” I said, “How much?” They said, “It’s, like, a dollar!” Well, at four years old, I

knew what a dollar was, so I go to find the treasure, and down I went straight into the bottom of the pit trap. They dug that thing deeper than I was tall. I’ll tell you what, I had sand in my everything. They finally hauled me out and filled it in before the folks got home. My crowning achievement as a little brother was, 35 years later I told that story at Thanksgiving dinner and my mom got pissed off at both of them. She said, “Why am I just hearing this now?” I said, “Are you kidding? They said if I told you, they’d throw me back in!” My oldest brother laughed and said, “You’re just lucky bamboo didn’t grow in Wisconsin.” Now that I think about it, I probably am. I used to stand up against the side of the garage and let Bob and Dick shoot arrows and throw knives around me, and I was probably 16 or 17 before it dawned on me that they might not have been missing on purpose. Cassell: It sounds like you had a colorful childhood. Grell: Yeah, it was great. Around town I was known as Tarzan. Cassell: Really? Grell: Yes, absolutely. I had a series of ropes and platforms strung in all the trees in the neighborhood, outside of town, up in the

Previous page: Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest in action by Mike Grell. Top inset: Mike Grell meets Robin (actor Burt Ward) in a photo appearing in The Amazing World of DC Comics #12 [July 1976].

have been nine—they were pretty much left in charge of me back then because, hey, that’s the way it was done, right? The town was small enough and my grandparents moved just across the alley from us, so if there was any kind of trouble, it was a five-second run to get to their place, which is way better than any emergency response you’ll ever get anywhere else. So Bob and Dick would stay faithful to their chores until the taillights disappeared out the end of the driveway, then they were off playing someplace and they would leave me pretty much on my own. One night they gave me a comic book and sat me down on the couch next to the radio. There was one light on, right next to the radio, but it wasn’t quite dark yet. It was twilight. And they ran off to play and left me sitting there listening to the usual stuff, Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Jack Benny. But after the comedy shows were over, then came Lights Out. It was a story about a werewolf, and I’m sitting there bug-eyed because it’s scaring the crap out of me. Now, at four years old I was not allowed to touch the radio. I’m not allowed to touch the knobs at all, and it had two. (It also had a switch to turn it on.) It had one knob for changing stations and one knob for volume. I had no idea which one was which. But at the point where it’s scaring the bejabbers out of me, I just took a gamble and turned this one knob, and I picked the wrong one, because just as I crank the volume all the way up, the werewolf howled, “Arroooooooooo!” Mom and Dad came home an hour later and found me sitting at the opposite end of the couch, because the room is dark by now and I’m not going off anywhere into the dark, so I’ve got to stay close to the light, but as far from that damned radio as I can get. By then I’m sitting listening to something, probably Andre Kostelanetz and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, at full volume. And people wonder why I’m a cartoonist. Cassell: That explains a lot. What kind of comics were you reading?

forest. I spent hours swinging back and forth, trying to be Tarzan. I could do the Tarzan yell and everything else. The first full novel that I ever read was Tarzan the Terrible, and I was pretty much hooked by then. It was kind of natural that later on I got into the Tarzan comic strip because I could speak the Ape/English language. I even tried Ape/English out on a chimpanzee in a circus that came through town. It must have been my northern Wisconsin accent, because I talked to that chimp for 20 solid minutes and he never said a single word back. Cassell: I’m sure that was it. Grell: It was great growing up in a small town like that. Everybody knew everybody else. Every kid in town was welcome in any home in town, and if there was trouble or a problem, the whole community pitched in to make sure that it got solved. That’s just the way it was. My grandfather had been a sheriff at one time, so he was well known for probably 200 or 300 miles around as my dad’s father. My mom’s father had been a constable. But before that, back in the 1930s, they had both been rum runners. So I had a very colorful family history. Cassell: Well, that’s good. They worked both sides. Grell: Right. Cassell: You mentioned listening to the radio. What did you like to listen to on the radio? Grell: Oh, I loved shows like The Lone Ranger, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, all kinds of stuff like that. Lights Out was a little on the scary side. My brothers, who could be absolutely relied upon to babysit their baby brother when I was four years old—Dick would have been eight and Bob would Top: Montage of Mike Grell’s influences during his formative years, including Russ Manning’s Tarzan, ERB’s Tarzan the Terrible, two influential art books, Lights Out, Prince Valiant, and Green Lantern/Green Arrow.

Li’l Abner and Pogo, stuff like that. That’s kind of the angle that I was aiming at when I first decided to get into comics. That came after a whole bunch of other career choices that didn’t pan out. First, I decided I wanted to be Tarzan, but then that whole thing with the chimp at the circus didn’t pan out. Then I decided maybe Zorro, but it turns out that there was no call for that as a job description. So then I wanted to be a lumberjack just like my old man, and, God bless him, when I was 16, he got me a job working in the woods, and as soon as I found out how hard that old boy had been working all those years, I decided there had to be a better way. So the first thing that occurred to me was to be an architect, and I still love designing houses, buildings, and habitats for my characters. Every character that I have ever drawn, I’ve also drawn the space that they live in, Sable being one of my favorites just because it was exotic. There are all kinds of screwy stuff that you can put into a place where you don’t have to worry about it falling down around your ears, which was the real thing that kept me from becoming an architect, because you had to be able to do a thing called “math.” There were no CAD programs back in those days, no computer to help you calculate stress loads and everything else. You were pretty much on your own. So then I decided on commercial art, because it had the word “commercial” in it, which means you get paid, while you’re still alive, to draw stuff. And it had the word “art” in it, which meant you weren’t really working for a living. You were being an artist. So I went off to the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay hoping to get an education that would do me some good, but it didn’t. After a year, I dropped out to work and save money for a private art school, but before I got rolling on that, I wound up getting caught up in the draft. And, given the choice of either enlisting or spending two years in a rice paddy, I thought, “You know what? Four years behind a desk is probably better than two years in a rice paddy.” So I enlisted in the Air Force and managed to BS my way into a job as an illustrator. While I was in basic training, I ran into a guy by

Grell: As kids, we got a dime each to buy a comic every week. Bob was into EC horror comics, Dick was into anything that had to do with movie adaptations, and I was pretty much all over the board. Dick had a big collection of Tarzan comics that had the photo covers and Westerns like Roy Rogers. I was probably buying Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. And then, after we were done with them, we’d go across the street or down the block or two to the other kids [and trade them], so a lot of really great comics passed through our hands. I used to torment my mom by bringing home a copy of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and showing her what that box of comic books that was under my bed when I went off to college would have been worth. Of course, I had all the number one issues featuring the whole Marvel lineup, Amazing Spider-Man, The Hulk, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, all that stuff, and probably an equal number of DC comics with Batman and Green Lantern, and others. Cassell: She didn’t keep them? Grell: No. Down the road they went, probably out to the dump. Cassell: That sounds familiar. Grell: It’s just as well, though, because at that time, who knew? This was before everything was collectible. Kids traditionally got away from reading comics about the time they got seriously interested in girls, which in my case was pretty darned young. The fact that I had comics when I was a teenager may have been a little on the odd side. Cassell: Did you read newspaper comic strips? Grell: Oh, yes, absolutely. When we were little, when I was too young to read on my own, my dad used to read the comic strips to us, and I remember thinking that my dad was Alley Oop because he looked like Alley Oop. He was a lumberjack. He used to swing a chainsaw that weighed 37, 38 lbs., and he had massive arms. And he had that five-day growth of whiskers by 10:00 in the morning. He’d do all the voices and everything else. Once I was able to read on my own, Prince Valiant was always a favorite,

the name of Bailey Phelps who told me that I should forget this commercial art stuff, and I should become a cartoonist instead, because, according to him, and this is a direct quote, “Cartoonists only work two or three days a week and they make $1 million a year.” Forty-three years in the business now, and somebody owes me $42 ½ million dollars and a hell of a lot of time off, I’ll tell you that. But it was too late, the hook was set, and I was in for the duration. While I was in the Air Force, I took the Famous Artists School correspondence course in cartooning, which is actually a great course. I highly recommend it if anybody out there wants to obtain the books and do the study program. The course in cartooning was written by guys like Al Capp, Milton Caniff, Rube Goldberg, and Bill Mauldin, an incredible list of very talented guys. And I wanted to do comic strips. Cassell: Had you drawn when you were younger? Grell: Oh, yeah. Like I said, absent television in our lives, we entertained ourselves. My mom was a terrific artist, and there was always a stack of paper and a pencil handy, and we’d go to movies and come back and draw things we saw in the movies. My brother Dick drew the entire movie of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from memory. He was an amazing artist, in fact. Both of my brothers were better artists than I was, it’s just that neither of them pursued it or felt like they could make a living at it.

Cassell: So, while you were in the service, what kind of things were you illustrating? Grell: It was graphic art stuff: charts, briefings, graphs. Stateside, I had a very interesting job. I worked for a combined intelligence and operations outfit and I actually drew maps that our B-52 pilots were supposed to use in the event we ever had to fly over and bomb Russia. All I can say is it’s a lucky thing we never had to, because our guys probably couldn’t have found their butt in the dark with both hands and a flashlight. Certainly not from anything I drew. When I was in Saigon, I did a lot of commemorative cartoons and caricatures for visiting dignitaries. Some congressman came over and met with the general and got a cartoon. I also did escape and evasion tips for downed pilots that are actually still being used at the Fairchild Air Force base survival school that all air crew members have to go through. I had no idea this was going on, but apparently they’re still using my drawings. A while back, long after I got out of the military, one of my comic fans, whom I met when he was about 16, went to the Air Force Academy and became a fighter pilot, and they sent him to Fairchild. So, we’re talking 15 or 20 years after my time in the service. And he came back and said, “They’re still using your drawings at Fairchild.” And I said, “My drawings?” He says, “Yeah, E and E tips.” I went, “No way!” He said, “Well, they have your signature on them.” So apparently the U.S. Air Force is too cheap to pay for a new cartoon. But it’s nice to know that some things have become classics. My other claim to infamy was that when I was expecting to get my discharge early so I could be home for Christmas,

Top: Early Mike Grell rendition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ legendary Ape Man. Mike, of course, realized two dreams early on in his career: Getting his own syndicated newspaper comic strip and working on Tarzan.

Lost World. I think he was singled out by Arthur Conan Doyle for praise for the sales of his book. He had a great linear, textured style. The other book that I bought was called The Pencil by Paul Calle. Calle had a similar linear rendering style except he worked strictly in pencil. Once I saw that I went, “Aw, man, this is it.” It’s like a light bulb switched on in my brain. You look at the cover to Sable #1 and the cover for Sable #2, and there’s a gigantic difference that happened right there. It was like night and day for me. That eventually led me to experimenting with drawing strictly in pencil and reproducing from pencil, which I began doing with Sable #19. I was lucky because photocopiers had just become dramatically more efficient, more precise. We didn’t have computers and scanners back in those days, but the quality that you’d get from a photocopy was every bit as good, and maybe a little better, than what you’d get from a Photostat 10 years earlier. So I started doing all of my art in pencil. It’s still my favorite medium. If I had to throw away everything else in the studio and just keep one item, I’d keep a pencil. Cassell: So, tell me about the correspondence course, because I’ve seen them advertised before. Did you have to prepare work and then send it in for somebody to review? Grell: That’s right. You could work at your own speed. They had assignments at the end of every chapter. They would coach you through what you were learning at the time. At the end of the chapters were assignments and they gave you an envelope to mail your work in. And every time you sent in your envelope, you

my orders were redlined at the last moment and I had to stay behind, and spend my Christmas 1970 in Saigon preparing a top secret briefing for the President, the Joint Chiefs, the Vice-President, the Secretary of State, and some commanders, just really a handful. There are only 12 copies of that briefing in existence, and it turned out to be the outline for the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. I got the assignment because I had the highest security clearance of any illustrator in southeast Asia because of my work stateside. Cassell: Holy cow. Grell: That’s one of the reasons I hate politics. As soon as I opened the material to start preparing the booklets, I realized that, number one, we were going home, which was a great joy, and in the same minute, I read the dates and saw that the withdrawal wasn’t going to start until ’73 and it wasn’t going to finish until ’75, and that it had all been skillfully timed to coincide with the elections. It was the Nixon Administration that planned the withdrawal, but one is as bad as the next. The only thing I hate worse than politics is politicians. Cassell: Who would you say were your artistic influences? Were there artists or styles that you tried to emulate? Grell: Oh, yeah, absolutely. First was Russ Manning. I used to copy all the Tarzan covers that Russ Manning did. He was the first artist that I learned to recognize. I could do a fairly decent rendition of Russ’s style, which was quite clean, elegant. Without question, the strongest influence on my early style has to be Neal Adams and Dick Giordano because they were the guys who did Green Lantern/Green Arrow, and it’s almost impossible to shake the influence of the guys who basically brought you into the business. Frank Frazetta, to his dying day, still drew like Al Capp when he did all the caveman drawings. His big, buxom girls, cave men, and his lion drawings are kind of cartoony, they all looked like inhabitants of Dogpatch, U.S.A. If you take a look at Neal Adams, he still draws just like Stan Drake. He worked for Stan when he was a kid, probably all of 18, 19 years old. For me, I’ve had two big epiphanies in my art style. The first was discovering Neal and Dick. The second was about the time that I started doing Sable. In fact, you can actually see it happen. Between the time that I did the cover for Sable issue #1 and #2, I had bought two books. One was called The Magic Pen of Joseph Clement Coll. Coll was the illustrator on a bunch of great turn-of-the-century novels—King of the Khyber Rifles, The Top: Wildlife drawing by Mike Grell. Right: This text page from 1st Issue Special #8 includes Grell’s autobiographical essay, a self-caricature, and proof that a Warlord title was planned even before the character’s debut.

got another one back. When your work came back to you, there was a correction sheet that went over top of it. A professional artist would put a tracing paper sheet over top of your work and redraw it, making corrections and notes on that to show you how you could do better. Then you could do those corrections and send it in again if you wanted. It was just a great way to learn. The guy who was the head of the graphics shop in Saigon when I first arrived there had taken the course in Commercial Art and Illustration early on, almost when it first started. He said, “You’ll never guess who my instructor was.” I said, “Who?” He said, “Norman Rockwell.” So he would send in his homework and he’d get corrections back from Norman Rockwell. Cassell: Wow! Did they teach you things like anatomy and perspective and all of that? Grell: Yeah, absolutely, how to produce everything from comic strips to gag panels, the whole nine yards. Each artist had a description of how he worked and what his day was like, how he approached his business. It was terrific because you could see the stuff just laid out for you. It was a fantastic experience. Cassell: What types of things were you drawing? Grell: All different kinds of stuff, up to and including comic strips. Not comic books, but comic strips.

among their alumni they boasted Bill Mauldin, the famous World War II editorial cartoonist, Hal Foster, and Walt Disney. Now, Foster and Disney did go there, but, of course, Disney got thrown out, and Hal Foster actually attended every single art school in Chicago. He and his buddy would bike down from Winnipeg, Manitoba, and they would attend classes at an art school for as long as they could get away with it before somebody got wise to the fact that they had never paid their tuition. So they’d get pitched out into the street and they’d just move on to the next one. They never paid a penny of tuition. Jeff Messer: Do you still go by the nickname “Iron Mike”? Grell: Well, I still have art school chums who call me Iron Mike because there were five guys named Mike in the same class and by the time I arrived every other variation of the name had been taken. Messer: There are legends as to why you got that nickname. I heard a story once that the name “Iron Mike” was because you were such a tough guy that could drive a nail into a piece of wood with your bare hand. Can you enlighten us on that? Grell: No. That was a one-time stunt that hurt like hell. Iron Mike was the name of a comic strip that I was trying to peddle at the time, a private detective cut in the vein of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.

Cassell: Where were you at that time, when you were doing the correspondence course? Grell: I started while I was still stationed in Arkansas and I carried on through my time in Vietnam, took the books with me. So I had those at my disposal over there, and I’d mail stuff back and forth. Cassell: From Vietnam? Grell: Absolutely. Cassell: Amazing. How long were you over there? Grell: I was over there just over nine months. Cassell: You mentioned that you had to stay in Vietnam over the holidays. Did you get discharged shortly after that? Grell: I got discharged in January, either fourth or fifth, 1971. And immediately went to the Chicago Academy of Fine Art. Cassell: Why that school? Grell: Mostly because

And that is the origin of “Iron Mike” Grell. Speaking of comic strips, the decision by Grell to attend art school in Chicago proved to be a wise one, since it led to him being introduced to a certain well-known redhead. This page: Grell pinpoints a leap in his artistic development taking place between producing covers for the first two issues of Jon Sable, Freelance, in 1983, when he was exposed to the work of illustrators Joseph Clement Coll (top right) and Paul Calle (left).

CHAPTER TWO

Brenda Starr

assistant, John Olson, who would do most of the layouts and all of the lettering, and most of the city backgrounds. My job was to re-pencil John’s figure drawings into Dale’s style and then ink the figures, leaving Brenda’s head for Dale to ink. When I finally get around to writing my autobiography, it’s going to be called Doing Brenda’s Body. Cassell: Were you working out of her studio? Grell: I would pick up a week’s worth of strips on Friday evening and turn them in on Monday morning. Her style was so loose and flexible. If you ever watched her work, she was amazingly quick, and drew only with a brush. Eventually I learned that the only way that I could imitate that style was to wait until the last possible moment and then ink the entire week’s worth of strips in about three hours. Because the brush, the hand, just had to move so fast. It worked out well. In later years, I happened to be at the Society of Illustrators in New York, and they were having an exhibit of comic strip art. I walked in and there was an entire week’s worth of Brenda Starr that had actually been done while Dale, John, and everybody else were on vacation, and I had drawn every single line of it, including forging Dale’s signature. Cassell: Oh, you’re kidding. Grell: Nope. Cassell: I’ve talked to Ramona Fradon and she said that, when she took over the strip from Dale, it was a bit of a challenge. Dale was kind of reluctant to let it go, and that was difficult, I think, for Ramona. But it sounds like you found her very pleasant to work with. Grell: Well, you have to remember that Dale had to have been into her eighties before she stepped down from the art and handed it over to Ramona. But Dale’s mother took up painting and at 90, 91, had a one-woman show in a gallery in Chicago. This is not a woman who is going to put down her brush lightly.

Mike Grell may not have sold his own comic strip, but he did work on a famous one. Brenda Starr was created in 1940 by Dale Messick for the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. During the peak of its popularity, in the 1950s, the strip appeared in 250 newspapers. It proved to be a great training ground for a young artist. Cassell: What led to you working on Brenda Starr? Grell: When I was going to the Chicago Academy of Fine Art, I was moonlighting a bunch of different jobs. I had one job at an ad agency that was paying a nickel and a dime, and another job at a printing outfit that produced throwaway sales newspapers that was paying a bunch of money. Then I had to make a choice between the two because they both offered me full-time employment at the same time. I was earning more on the job than I was going to school, so I picked the one that was teaching me the most but paid the least. So I did commercial art for a studio on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and while I was doing that job, I was trying to sell my first comic strip, which was called Iron Mike. That didn’t go anywhere, but it did get the attention of the editor at the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, Willard Colston, who said, “You know Dale Messick, the artist who does Brenda Starr, is in need of another assistant, and I think she might be interested in putting you on.” So I go over to Dale, and, man, what a lady. She was incredible. She was pushing 70 at the time, but vivacious and sparkly. She had red hair and big blue eyes, sort of a Lucille Ball of the cartoon world. In her day, Dale had been a great beauty. And we got along just great. She hired me right off the bat and gave me a bunch of stuff to do, so I worked with her until it was time to move on to the comic book business. She had another

Top inset: Vivacious cartoonist Dale Messick in a 1975 publicity shot. Above: Mike Grell may have assisted on this specific 1973 Brenda Starr strip.

It must have been very difficult for her to step back and give up the strip. And knowing her personality, she probably would have been more content if she had had a massive heart attack and died with a pen in her hand. Just the kind of person she was. The other edge that I had was that Dale liked men. I told her later on, “You know, if I had been 20 years older, I would have taken a run at you.” And she said, “Honey, if you had been 20 years older, you would have been too old for me.” The last time I saw her, she was 87, and she said, “I’ve got a new boyfriend and he’s only 75!” She told me the secret to the story of the mystery man. I don’t know if you ever read the Brenda Starr strip, but Brenda had a mystery man in her life named Basil St. John. Cassell: Sure. Grell: The mystery man had a black eyepatch and this rare disease that prevented him from making a commitment to Brenda. So they loved each other, but they could never be together because his rare disease could only be temporarily cured by an extract derived from the black orchid. Dale told me that she modeled Basil St. John after an assistant that she had hired early on in the strip. He had the dashing good looks and he was a great artist, she said, “but I had to fire him after three weeks.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “I wasn’t getting any work done. I’d just stare at him the whole time.” But after that, every time the mystery man appeared in the Brenda Starr strip, Dale would receive a delivery of black orchids. Now, whether that was from her former assistant, the real Basil St. John mystery man, or it was her editor being very clever and a great PR guy, it doesn’t matter. Somebody sent her black orchids every single time. With the experience of working on Brenda Starr under his belt, Grell felt confident he was ready to sell his own newspaper strip to a syndicate. But fate was to have other plans.

This page: Two mid-1970s prints by Dale Messick featuring her signature comic strip character, Brenda Starr, with the red-headed reporter’s mysterious love interest, Basil St. John, who is plagued by some weird illness that has kept the couple from marrying over the decades. Note the inclusion of the black orchids (even in the wedding bouquet!), which are vital to her enigmatic fiancé’s very existence.

Aquaman Among the heroes in the DC universe, Aquaman frequently garners the least respect. Perhaps it’s the orange and green outfit or maybe the part about talking to fish, but until Aquaman recently made it onto the silver screen, he had a serious PR problem. However, Mike Grell always liked the King of the Seven Seas. So, it seems somehow fitting that it was with Aquaman that Mike Grell first dipped his toe into the world of professional comic books. Cassell: How did you get your start at DC Comics? Grell: When I was in Saigon in 1970, a guy by the name of Ed Savage came from back in the States carrying a small stack of his favorite comic books with him. In his pile Ed had Tomb of Dracula and Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Daredevil, and holy crap, I was blown away. I had stopped reading comics when Batman still had a square jaw and a chest shaped like a barrel. Maybe not quite that bad, but the stories were all bug-eyed monsters and super-villains and stuff that didn’t hold a lot of appeal to me, but with Green Lantern/Green Arrow, here was terrific artwork by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano and some amazing stories by Denny O’Neil that dealt with real-world issues. And I went, “Ah, this is it for me. This is the kind of work that I want to do.” But I still was aiming at comic strips, not comic books. That all fell apart when I took my samples to New York, in 1973. I attended the New York Comic Con, but part of my purpose was to sell my stuff to newspaper strip editors. I couldn’t even get an appointment. I couldn’t even get my foot in the door. As soon as they found out that I had an action/adventure strip, they just hung up the phone or slammed the door in my face, so that was it. But at the Comic Con, I met two guys from DC Comics who told me in no uncertain terms to get my carcass up to Julie Schwartz’s office and show him my stuff. One of the guys was Allan Asherman and the other was Irv Novick. Irv would always say, “Tell them Irv sent you.” I had no idea Irv was a Batman artist. There was one other guy there who was reviewing portfolios, Sol Harrison, and I left a copy of my comic strip with him. It was called Savage Empire and it dealt with an archaeologist who was transported back in time and winds up in Atlantis before it sank. I had six weeks’ worth of Sundays and two weeks’ worth of dailies in my bag, and I had the entire storyline all written out, and I showed that to Sol and never thought anything about it at all for years afterward. So I get on up to DC Comics and I go in there with my prepared encyclopedia salesman speech, which goes: “Good afternoon, Mr. Schwartz. Could I interest you in this deluxe 37-volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica complete with annual calendar?” And if you get interrupted anywhere along the line, you have to go all the way back to “Mr. Schwartz…” Well, that’s exactly as far as I got when Julie said, “What the hell makes you think you can draw comics?” And I unzipped my portfolio, put it on his desk, and said, “Take a look and you tell me.” He flipped through the pages, called Joe Orlando in from next door, and they put their heads together and I walked out a half-hour later with my first script in hand. Right: Tightly cropped vertical splash panel by DC newcomer Mike Grell in his Aquaman assignment for Adventure Comics #437 [Jan.–Feb. 1975].

CHAPTER THREE

his head and said, “I know you can do this. What’s wrong?” Without even thinking about it, I had drawn Aquaman mooning the audience. He said, “I’ll try and get this through, but just be aware that the Code may bounce it back at us.” “Aw, maaan.” It actually went through as is, but I did do a correction on one of the pages where it has Aquaman sitting on a stylized sort of chair, not really a throne, but a chair of some sort. And I hadn’t accounted for how far his butt would sag down below the chair, so it looked like he was sitting on a toilet. For months I was known as the guy who drew Aquaman on the toilet. Cassell: So, other than that, did you enjoy drawing Aquaman? Grell: Oh, yeah, quite a bit. Number one, I was very excited to have a job in comics. Number two, I was always a huge fan of Jacques Cousteau and TV series like Sea Hunt and the old movies, anything that dealt with underwater stuff. My brother Dick and I were in the lake all the time. When I was in school I could actually swim five-and-a-half lengths in an Olympic-sized pool underwater. Cassell: Wow! Grell: Yeah, that was a bunch. I just loved everything about it. I still do. I love to snorkel. Diving on the reefs and stuff like that has been very exciting for me, getting to see some of the undersea life first-hand. I guess it goes along with the dreams and fantasies of a kid who grows up in the north woods of Wisconsin, two things I wanted to do were dive in the oceans and climb mountains. Cassell: And have you had a chance to do both? Grell: Well, I’ve climbed on mountains. I’ve never climbed a mountain, but I have snorkeled in the ocean, and just really enjoyed it. If I had grown up somewhere near the coast, I probably would have gotten into a field having something to do with oceanography. Cassell: I think that would be a fun thing to do for a career. Grell: I would think so. The only thing that put me off of trying to become a crew member on the Calypso, Jacques Cousteau’s ship, was that you had to be fluent in French. Of course, you can learn French just like you can learn so much of anything else. Cassell: I’ve noticed that after you started drawing Aquaman, then it seems like very quickly, you got an opportunity to also draw some covers. For example, you drew a couple of covers for Justice League of America. Was that unusual, to have the opportunity to do covers so quickly? Grell: It may have been. I don’t know. We’re talking about the bumblebee who never read the book that says he can’t fly. Part of it in those days, I think, was the luck of being in the right place at the right time. If I came in on a Friday and delivered pages and they had a cover that needed to be done and delivered by Monday, I would drop into Carmine’s office and go over the cover design, then take it home and do it. Sometimes it would be overnight. Cassell: I’m sure that they appreciated having somebody they could count on to be able to turn stuff around quickly. Grell: That was a lot of it back in the day. The simple fact of being in the right place at the right time has always been part of the luck of the draw for me. I’ve just been phenomenally lucky that way. Being on the scene

Cassell: What was your first comic book assignment for DC? Grell: Aquaman. I did a seven-page Aquaman back-up story in Adventure Comics #435. It was entitled “As the Undersea City Sleeps,” written by Steve Skeates, who was obviously heavily into the letter “S” at the time. That was courtesy of Joe Orlando, who could always be relied upon. Joe had a number of books that he was editing, and, back in those days, you had the main feature and then you had a back-up story, and the back-ups were always good for making sure that you had enough extra work to hand out to whoever might need it at the time, and to give young guys like me a break. And that paid off, certainly for me. I did a couple of Aquaman stories back-to-back—three, I think— and turned in my first batch of pencils. Joe used to mentor me and give tips, sometimes correct my drawings on a sheet of tracing paper over the top of my drawing to show where I had made a mistake. And the very first page he opened up, he shook

Top left: Mike Grell’s “mooning” opening panel image of Aquaman, Adventure Comics #435 [Sept.–Oct. 1974]. Above: “Commode” panel from same.

Grell: No, I’m not kidding. And when Joe let me know that it was going to be published, it was the same time that he published one by Howard Chaykin. I think it was Howard Chaykin’s first story and my second story in the same issue, with both our names on the cover for promotion. And we were both appalled, “Oh, no! Please, God! Don’t publish this!” And he just had this evil grin on his face, and he went, “No, I’m gonna. And I’m gonna put your names on the cover.” It was funny. I think that was the first time DC ever used an artist’s name on the cover of a comic.

keeps you in the eye of the people who are handing out the work. Cassell: For years, DC relied heavily on artists like Nick Cardy and Neal Adams for covers. Cardy drew some 500 covers for DC. I think it’s a testimony to your drawing ability that you were doing covers for them very early on. Grell: It may have been the fact that I was getting paid less than everybody else, too. I’m not trying to make too light of the fact that I was given some terrific opportunities, but it could very well have been that they were looking to save a few bucks. I know I was not getting what Neal Adams was getting paid. That’s just one of the simple facts of life. Cassell: It sounds like Joe Orlando was good to work for. Grell: Well, I’ve got one for you. We were talking about Joe Orlando and being able to hand out assignments. My second story for Joe was a science fiction story called, I think, “The Alien Among Us,” and it appeared in Weird War Tales. But, because Joe had the ability to make assignments and would frequently stockpile stories, my second story stayed in the can for about two years before it was published. Cassell: Oh, you’re kidding!

Aquaman might be a good place to start in comics, but an artist didn’t usually become famous drawing the ruler of Atlantis. For Mike Grell, that would come with his next assignment. Top: Nifty panel from an early assignment for artist Mike Grell, the Aquaman episode in Adventure Comics #435 [Sept.–Oct. 1974]. Below: A slight Neal Adams influence is apparent in this recent Aquaman commission by Grell.

Mike Grell Picture Gallery

This page: From clockwise top left are Mike Grell’s parents at the end of World War II; Grell’s brother Bob (left) and brother Dick in undated photos; Grell in 1970, when he was stationed in Saigon; and Grell’s high school senior class taken prior to his graduation, in 1965.

This page: Various examples of early Mike Grell artwork. From clockwise top left are Grell’s painting based on a photo in Playboy magazine, about which the artist commented, “Mom called this one ‘Big Red’”; Steve McQueen; Clint Eastwood; an early Iron Mike study; and two unsold gag cartoons.

The Legion

CHAPTER FOUR

Cassell: How was it working with Cary? Grell: It was great, especially on a killer book like The Legion, because Cary’s a very visual writer. He would think things through and stage the action so well in his script that it saved a lot of time. If he felt there should be a close shot with certain action going on in the background, he would explain it to you. He would give it to you in the nuts and bolts. And it was pretty easy to work with Cary. Cassell: So then you find yourself working with Jim Shooter. Jim’s got a tremendous amount of history on the book. How was that? Grell: Yeah, he had worked on the book from the time he was about 12 years old until he was 16, and then he retired. I had no idea who he was, and I had never read that book, even though he was on it. Everybody was very excited that he was coming back. The whole staff was all in a tizzy, “Shooter’s coming back!” As far as working together goes, it was okay. It wasn’t as much fun as with Cary because Jim has a tendency to overwrite and sort of micro-manage in his writing. A typical Cary Bates script would be a page, sometimes maybe a page-anda-half, for every page in the book, and a typical Jim Shooter script was the New York telephone book. I would say that Jim probably averaged 90100 pages on a 25-page book. Cassell: You’re kidding! Grell: Nope. Cassell: Every month? Grell: Every month. Let me be charitable and say 60–90 pages, but I would say 60 pages would be incredibly light for him. He would generally write a half-a-page per panel. Cassell: Holy cow. Did that include thumbnails, because I know he used to do that, right? Grell: Ah, yeah. He’d do that. He sent them early on, but once he found out that I was ignoring them… Cassell: So, during your tenure, in addition to killing off a Legionnaire, you actually created a couple of Legionnaires, didn’t you? Grell: I did. Well, I get credit for co-creating several, mostly because I was the artist on

The Legion of Super-Heroes is a team of super-powered teenagers from the 30th century, defenders of the United Planets. Their adventures began in 1958 and grew in popularity, thanks to the creative talents of artists like Curt Swan and Dave Cockrum and writers like Otto Binder and 14-year old Jim Shooter. While not perhaps as iconic as Superman, Batman, or Wonder Woman, the Legion has always had a loyal fan following, fueled by an ever-changing roster of characters, each with a unique ability. How then did this priceless property of DC Comics get entrusted to newcomer Mike Grell? Cassell: How did you get started on the Legion of Super-Heroes? Grell: I picked up my second script from Joe Orlando and was headed back to my studio. When I got there the phone was ringing, and Joe was on the line. Murray Boltinoff was the editor on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, and Joe said, “Murray’s on vacation. He doesn’t know it, but Dave Cockrum just walked off the book and he’s minus an artist. So would you mind if I recommended you for the job?” Would I mind? I had packed up and moved to New York, so I was really grateful for the opportunity, that’s for sure. I got a seven-page story from Murray to ink. It was Dave Cockrum’s pencils, and it was basically my tryout for the book. When I turned that in, Murray said, “Okay, there’s good news and bad news. Good news, you got the job. Bad news, you can expect to get hate mail.” I hadn’t even done anything yet! He said, “It doesn’t matter. For starters, you’re replacing the most popular artist we’ve ever had on the book. And to top things off, we’re going to kill off one of their favorite characters in your first story.” And he was right. The mail that came in was mostly of the vein of “Grell, you suck.” Cassell: Oh, that’s great. Grell: Yeah. Not much you can do, though. I stuck with it, and I was working with Cary Bates first on the book, and later on with Jim Shooter.

that every one of the Legionnaires had to have one special power that made them completely unique, even if nobody else on their planet had any kind of super-powers, or even if they were all super-powered, there had to be something that set her apart. So I’m pretty sure that the power to track anything across space was Murray’s idea, kind of a mandate from on high. And I would give Paul Levitz at least part credit on the name, because I gave him a list of six that I liked, and I told him that the one I liked best was Dawnstar, but to take his pick if there was anything else that struck his fancy. And he said, “No, Dawnstar is good.” In order to come up with that name, what I did was I created a grid. Basically, you write down nouns in a vertical column and adjectives on the horizontal and you go through and combine them as you go. So if you have six of each to start, you will end up with 36 possible names. Out of those 36, I picked the half-dozen I liked the best. I mean, some of them were utter crap. Some of them come up kinda cool. Cassell: That’s a great idea. Is that how you normally would approach coming up with a new character name? Grell: Normally. Sometimes the character is named because of their circumstances or the superpower that they have. Cassell: You created (or co-created) another Legion character, right? Tyroc: How did that come about? Grell: I tried to do the design work on Tyroc but I didn’t create

the book at the time. The only Legionnaire who I created more or less from whole cloth was Dawnstar. I came up with the idea for the character, and basically everything except for her super-power. When I designed her, I was telling Murray Boltinoff all about her and he says, “Well, what’s her superpower?” I said, “She’s a girl with wings and she can fly.” And he said, “Yeah, they all fly, big deal. What’s her power?” I said, “She’s a girl with wings and she can fly!” I was a little put out that they didn’t just leave her at that, but Murray felt very strongly

Previous two pages: On left, Mike Grell’s cover graces The Amazing World of DC Comics #12 [July 1976]. Inset on right, Grell self-caricature from Superboy #205 [Nov.–Dec. 1974], and, on bottom, cover detail from same. Top: Original art from All-New Collectors’ Edition #C-55 [’78]. Left: Grell cover detail, Superboy #216 [Apr. ’76].

after Fred “the Hammer” Williamson, and gave him pixie boots and little bolted-down gloves long before Michael Jackson started wearing the glove. I’m sure people are looking at it now and going, “Oh, yeah, it’s like Michael Jackson.” No. Every now and then, from the vantage point of time, you wind up being accused of copying something when you might have even been there first. Cassell: Do you think they really were planning to do a black Legionnaire, or was he just trying to put you off and then came up with something later? Grell: I honestly don’t know. He did a pretty convincing job of explaining the position on it, but I think it may have been something that Cary had been pushing for, or it had at least been discussed at some point in the past, but I don’t know. It certainly met with a lot of resistance as we went along. I kept urging him to do the black Legionnaire. I would have liked him to be cooler. Cassell: Well, that’s what I was going to say. It seems to me that had they really been planning it that long, that he would have been a cooler character. Grell: Yeah. Ah, well. He certainly has been popular over the years, though. I can’t fault the popularity of the character. So, obviously, I wasn’t the target audience for that character. I thought it was stupid and a bit insensitive, but who am I? One man’s opinion. Cassell: To your point, though: I think part of that may have been that the character survived long enough to get some decent back story and be developed a little bit more, so he was able to contribute in a more meaningful way to the team. Grell: Yeah. In recent years, I’ve had to rethink my position. A friend pointed out to me that when Tyroc appeared, it was the first time he had ever seen a comic hero that looked like him. That counts for a lot. Cassell: So did you like working on the Legion of Super-Heroes? Grell: Oh, God, it was a nightmare. I was grateful as hell for the job. It’s not something that you turn down. When I came to the book, sales were kind of borderline, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the writing or certainly not the artwork on it, but it was just a reflection of sales in general

the character. What happened there was that I had done a story [“The Rookie Who Betrayed the Legion,” Superboy #207] and I made the character black, because it had long since occurred to me that we had every color character you can imagine in the Legion of Super-Heroes, but there were no black people, ever. Not featured in the story, not members of the Legion or anything at all. Cassell: Yeah, it did seem very odd. Grell: So I did the character as black. And Murray Boltinoff said, “Oh, no. We can’t do that.” I said, “Yeah, but here we are, and there’s never any black people in the Legion.” He says, “Well, it’s kind of a negative character. We’ll get mail.” And I said, “Oh, really? You’re concerned about getting mail because you actually feature a black person?” And he said, “Well, he’s kind of a negative character,” and we argued and argued. Then he pulled out his ace in the hole, which was, “Anyway, we’re getting ready to introduce a black Legionnaire, and it’s going to be a big deal.” “Oh, crap. Okay.” So when I inked the book, I changed things ever so slightly, and it’s funny. They got mail all right, and it all said, “You ain’t foolin’ me, man, that’s a brother painted pink.” So month after month went by, and I kept hounding Murray to do the black Legionnaire. “When will you do the black Legionnaire?” Finally, I think it must have been maybe six months down the road, and what they came up with was, in my view, a silly character with a stupid power and a silly name. Tyroc? You might as well have named him Tyrone, right? I was always upset the way people didn’t seem to understand how offensive this could be, but I was also pissed off because they had given him a stupid power. And then they came up with the explanation for why there were no black people in the 30th century, which is that they had all gone to live on an island somewhere, and then the island was put in another dimension. I mean, is that a racist’s dream or what? We had just come through the ’60s, and racial equality was something that was pretty foreign to most of the United States, and I think there was a certain—I won’t say prejudice, but almost a blissfully ignorant bias to the point where I don’t think people were aware how offensive it could be. But I was offended. And so, when I had to draw Tyroc, I made him as ridiculous as possible. I gave him Elvis Presley’s Las Vegas costume, added a few chains to it like Luke Cage. I actually modeled him

Top: Mike Grell’s most enduring contribution to the Legion of Super-Heroes mythos must be his design of Dawnstar, a descendant of Native Americans, depicted here in a Grell commission. Left: Grell’s cover for Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-49 [Oct.–Nov. 1976] featuring the LSH.

at that time. But, as luck would have it, during the time that I was on the book it rose up to the point where it was the topselling title at the company. I’m not claiming credit for that in any way, I just think one of the really great things about the Legion of Super-Heroes is that it’s a terrific entry-level book for young readers. I think that’s more of a reflection than anything else. It’s about young people. It’s made for young people, for a young audience. Lots of bright, colorful costumes, and the stories are uncomplicated. In general, it’s a book that’s easily understood by younger readers, and it attracts them. As a result, Legion of Super-Heroes fans, they are just rabidly loyal. I think it has mostly to do with the fact that you’re always going to have a soft spot in your heart for that comic book that caught your eye when you were a kid. A lot of people come to me today for autographs, and they’ll have an old Legion book, and usually it’s the first book they bought, or the first book that their dad bought for them. Cassell: I’m not surprised. That was the appeal to me, certainly, when I was reading it. It was very relatable. In fact, I never read Superman, because, to me, it was about a guy who basically can’t be beaten.

Grell: I never thought much of Superman, myself. It’s actually the reason why, when I moved over to Iron Man, I changed that character around because Iron Man had become basically a mechanical Superman, unbeatable, unstoppable, untouchable. You’ve got to have some weaknesses in order to make the character interesting, either character flaws or some kind of a physical limitation, to make him relatable to an audience. Nobody cares about Superman. You basically have to care about the people around him because they can be touched and hurt or killed. But, back in those days, nobody ever died in comics, so there was no danger of that. You just didn’t have an emotional investment in the character. With Superboy, though, you at least had some of that teenage angst. Not as much as Spider-Man, of course, but you could still get him involved with different girls and have those moments of insecurity that every young person faces. Cassell: You’re right, and he had less experience, too, so you could relate to that. He was still learning. Grell: Right. Cassell: You did a bunch of Legion covers, too. One of my absolute favorite Legion covers is the first one that you did, for #207. That is a great cover. Grell: Thank you. I appreciate that. Cassell: Did you request to do the covers for the stories you were working on, or was that just expected because you were on the book? Grell: No, I really wanted to do the covers. You know, a comic cover is like a movie poster, and it used to disappoint me as a kid when I would see a really flashy cover, pick up a book, and find it was drawn by somebody who wasn’t up to it. Cassell: True, or that what you’re seeing on the cover bears no resemblance to what’s going on in the story. Grell: Right. Carmine Infantino was designing almost all of the covers back then. Cassell: Oh, really? Grell: Yup. He would sit down and do a thumbnail and talk you through what it was that he wanted. Cassell: So you said that you were glad to get off The Legion. Why is that? It was a top-selling book, right? Grell: Well, yeah, but back in those days there was no royalty involved. That’s number one. And, number two, it was a killer. I mean, just an absolute crusher to draw. Every issue had eight or nine major characters in it plus the villains, and at some point you have to draw them all in the same panel. And panel after panel on a page. And you’re getting paid the same amount for drawing a page that has 40 characters on it as you are for a page that has nine. Cassell: When you were doing the Legion, at least early on, were you inking your own pencils? Grell: Yes. Cassell: I can understand why that would be tough. So is there anything that you wish that you’d had a chance to do while you were working on the Legion that you didn’t? Grell: You mean, story-wise? Cassell: Yes. Grell: Well, I sure wish I’d had a chance to draw the rookie as a black kid. Apart from that, no. I will say that I treated it as professional assignment, and I don’t think there was any point in time where I had an emotional investment in the book or the characters at all. Cassell: That’s understandable. It was a way to pay the bills, right? Grell: Right.

Cassell: So how did you eventually get off The Legion, then? Grell: It was by hook and by crook, and by the grace of God and Jenette Kahn, that I got off The Legion. Back in those days there were a lot of books that were bi-monthly, and when the famous DC Implosion occurred, everything that was not canceled was made into a monthly book, and there was no way I could handle the chores on as many books as I was working on. I had The Legion of Super-Heroes, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, and The Warlord. Something had to go, and I wasn’t about to give up The Warlord, and I didn’t want to give up Green Lantern/Green Arrow, so I dropped The Legion. In addition to Legionnaires Dawnstar and Tyroc, Grell co-created several memorable villains, among them Grimbor. He also redesigned the costumes of a couple Legionnaires, the most notable of which was Cosmic Boy. As Grell commented in The Legion Companion [TwoMorrows, 2003], “Yeah, and most of the fans have still never forgiven me for the Cosmic Boy costume.” Grell has also drawn covers for a number of Legion related comics, including the Karate Kid mini-series. It is a testimony to his professionalism that Grell’s tenure is still regarded as one of the high points of the Legion. Grell’s dynamic drawing style, coupled with the writing talents of Cary Bates, Jim Shooter, and Paul Levitz, produced stories that have withstood the test of time. One of those writers, Paul Levitz, shares his insight into working with Grell on the Legion in the following interview. Previous page: Upper left is Mike Grell’s original art for the cover of Superboy #207 [Mar.–Apr. 1975] Bottom inset is panel detail from the same issue. This page: LSH artwork by Mike Grell that appeared in The Amazing World of DC Comics #12 [July 1976], and a photograph of the artist with his Superboy editor, Murray Boltinoff.

Paul Levitz

INTERVIEW

Paul Levitz is a legend at DC Comics. He rose through the ranks from a per diem assistant editor and writer to president and publisher, all the while maintaining a creator’s perspective on the business of comics. Ironically, Levitz’s first super-hero writing assignment for DC Comics was an Aquaman story drawn by Mike Grell. However, that is not the collaboration that most fans remember. Though it was only for a few issues, the best remembered pairing of these two talents was on The Legion of Super-Heroes. Levitz talks about his work with Grell in the following interview. Dewey Cassell: What had you been doing at DC prior to working with Mike Grell? Paul Levitz: I was Joe Orlando’s assistant editor at that time, and had just started doing some script writing. Cassell: How did you get the job to write the Aquaman story for Adventure Comics #437? Levitz: Bill Finger had come in one Friday afternoon when Joe was on vacation, delivering one of two scripts that were on a check that was waiting for him. I let him have the check for both, and he never delivered the other, dying that weekend. By the rules of the time, I owed the company the 6 pages, and I asked Joe if I could at least get to do a super-hero story instead of a mystery job, since I was working for free. He let me do the next Aquaman back up instead of Steve Skeates (sorry, Steve). Cassell: When did you first meet Mike Grell in person? Levitz: Probably when he came around to show his portfolio to Joe. Cassell: When you got the Aquaman assignment, Mike had been working for DC for several months. Were you familiar with him and/or his work at the time? Levitz: I knew Mike from the halls—DC was a very small place at the time, and there were only a few of us in editorial. He’d done another assignment or two for Joe before Aquaman, but as a super-hero fan I was disproportionately interested in his work on Aquaman and Legion. I still have pages from that Aquaman story which he kindly gave me. Cassell: How did you get the opportunity to write the Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes series? Levitz: Jim [Shooter] left to take a staff gig at Marvel, just as Denny [O’Neil] was taking over as editor. Denny wasn’t a Legion

fan, and wasn’t familiar with the complex background, so he was happy to have me volunteer to write the series. As a lifelong Legion fan, I might have killed anyone else in my path. Cassell: I know some artists found the Legion challenging because of the number of characters to draw. How was it writing for The Legion? Levitz: The Legion’s great fun for a writer—so many characters whose lives you can play with, an infinite canvas of worlds. Cassell: How did the idea come about for the All-New Collector’s Edition of Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes featuring the wedding of Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad? Levitz: We were doing a few original tabloids each year at that time, and as the person who principally assembled the ‘master schedule’ I suspect I made the case to Jenette [Kahn, publisher] that we should do one on the Legion, based on the success of the reprint Legion tabloids and the sales momentum of the title. Cassell: Why did Mike get picked to do the Collector’s Edition, given that he was mostly just doing Legion

Levitz: I think it was in favor of Warlord, which had just been restored to the schedule after its early, premature cancellation. Cassell: Would you like to have worked with Mike longer on the Legion series? Levitz: I wish he’d had a chance to do some Dawnstar stories. He created that visual and I wrote around it, and he never had the fun of really bringing her fully to life. Cassell: What is your favorite non-Legion work that Mike drew? Levitz: Hmmm… probably the first batch of Jon Sable stories. He put so much of his passion into them. Cassell: Are there any stories or anecdotes about Mike you could tell? Levitz: Well, there was the time when he inked an issue of Warlord which was supposed to go to Vinnie (Colletta) ’cause he was so pissed at the job Vinnie was doing on his work… not a negotiating technique I recommend, but…

covers by then? Levitz: Mike was the “star” Legion artist still at DC at the time, with Dave [Cockrum] having departed for Marvel a while before and Jim Sherman not yet having achieved enormous popularity. It was a good opportunity to play to our fans, and nice to give Mike a bigger page to play on. Cassell: Was the Collector’s Edition well received by readers and fans? Levitz: I think so… I don’t recall the sales specifically and there weren’t that many letters coming in for the tabloids since they didn’t have letters pages, but I recall some positive reactions. Cassell: You worked with a lot of different artists on The Legion. How did Mike compare to the other Legion artists? Levitz: I only got to do a couple of stories with Mike, so I don’t have very clear memories of how our process may have differed. My memories of him are mostly of a very jovial young guy, having fun making comics and trying to depict his characters as lively and sexy. Cassell: Why did Mike leave the regular Legion series?

Previous page: Top right is undated photo of former DC executive and writer Paul Levitz. At bottom left is Grell panel from Adventure Comics #437 [Jan.–Feb. ’75]. Right inset: Lightning Lad Commission. Below: On left, The Legion of SuperHeroes’ Cosmic Boy in his new costume as designed by Grell [Superboy #215, Mar. ’76]; and, on right, Grell’s cover art for Karate Kid #1 [Mar.–Apr. 1976]. Pgs. 28–29: Mike Grell’s spectacular wraparound cover for All-New Collectors’ Edition #C-55 [’78].

Mike Grell’s work with Paul Levitz and other writers on the Legion has been reprinted in various formats, including Showcase Presents, DC Archive Editions, and Omnibus volumes, allowing new generations of readers to enjoy what many consider to be the heyday of The Legion of Super-Heroes.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Warlord After breathing new life into established DC characters, Grell brought his creativity to bear in a new, original sword-&-sorcery story that proved to be the longest-running title of his career. The key to a good fantasy or science fiction story is the ability to get readers to suspend their disbelief, to set aside what they know (or think they know) and entertain a new, more fantastic vision of what is possible. We all learn in school that the earth is made up of several layers of rock and sediment, in between which lie reservoirs of oil and natural gas, and beneath which lie pockets of magma that give rise to volcanoes. So, when Travis Morgan is flying his Air Force plane over the North Pole and finds himself pulled into a world within our own, a land of perpetual sunlight filled with dinosaurs and sorcerers and shape-shifters, we don’t challenge it based on what we know. Thanks to the gifted writing and artistry of Mike Grell, we simply suspend our disbelief and enter “the lost world of the Warlord.” But the origin of the defender of Skartaris was not a smooth or simple one, as Grell explains in the following interview. Cassell: How did you come up with the idea for The Warlord? Grell: I was working on developing Savage Empire and I took it to New York, hoping to take the town by storm, only to find out that the storm hatches were all securely battened and I wasn’t let in the door. But all’s well that ends well, because, eventually, after I had been at DC for a while and had a few other things under my belt, I got wind that a company called Atlas Comics was firing up, and they were looking to woo away a lot of the artists from the major companies. To that end, they were offering $100 a page versus DC Comics, which had I think, $65, $70 a page top rate at the time. They were also promising that you’d own the copyright on all your material. You could own your own property. Now, the $100 a page was an honest promise, but the ownership of the properties was a bold-faced lie, because Atlas ended up owning virtually every single thing when the smoke cleared away. But I went over to Atlas Comics carrying my Savage Empire strip, and I showed it to Jeff Rovin, who was editor at the time. Jeff took a look and he really liked it, and he said, “Okay, yeah, we’ll do this.” I asked him to just, “Please keep it under your hat until I get the first two issues completed because, number one, I have assignments at DC that I have to finish off. Number two, I don’t want to just walk out the door and alienate these guys. I want to maintain that relationship.” He said, “No problem.” So I walked from Atlas Comics across town to DC Comics’ office, 20 minutes, and when I walked in the door, Carmine Infantino was waiting for me. Jeff Rovin had picked up the phone as soon as I walked out of his office, called Carmine, and said, “I got your boy Grell tied up.” And Carmine was pretty darned upset. He said, “Why didn’t you bring it to me first?” Carmine pretty much regarded himself as somewhere between the Pope and Don Corleone, except with the Pope, you only had to kiss his ring. Carmine took things like that very personally. And I said, “Well, honestly”—and I was honest about it—I said, “For starters, DC Comics hasn’t had much luck with sword-&-sorcery kind of action books, so I didn’t think you would be interested, and, number two, they’re offering $100 a page and creator ownership.” And he said, “Well, I can’t give you creator ownership, but I can give you our top rate,” which was better than what I was getting

at the moment, “and I will give you a year guaranteed if I like it. Why don’t you show it to me, let me be the judge.” So, as we were walking into his office, the telephone was ringing. He excused himself for a couple of minutes to take the call, and at that moment my brain engaged and said, “Dummy. If he buys it, you lose it!” So, in two or three minutes, I jettisoned almost everything except a basic framework from the story, changed everything around, and when he said, “Okay, tell me your story,” I said, “It’s about an SR-71 spy pilot who’s flying over Russia, his plane gets damaged, and it winds up entering the opening at the North Pole that leads to the world at the center of the Earth.” He said, “What’s it called?” I said, “Skartaris.” Skartaris is actually the name of the mountain peak that points to the correct path to the center of the Earth in Jules Verne’s book, Previous page: Mixed-media painting, with oil on illustration board, from 2008 by Mike Grell depicting The Warlord riding a winged horse named Firewing. Above: Commission art of Travis Morgan by Grell.

I changed the name of the character from Jason Cord to Travis Morgan and threw out all of the names [from Savage Empire] except Deimos, because I could not think of a better name than Deimos. And Carmine said, “Well, take this to Joe Orlando, and if Joe likes it, I’ll give you one year guaranteed.” That was about what Atlas was offering in my book, and I made the right choice, because Atlas did pay the initial guys the fabled $100 a page, but they pitched them off the books after three or four issues and hired foreign artists who were working for $30 a page. And all the guys who had taken their properties over to Atlas wound up losing those properties to Atlas. So I walked into Joe’s office and he gave me the one question that I hadn’t been prepared for. Joe said, “What’s this guy’s name?” I said, “Ummm, Morgan.” He said, “Morgan what?” I said, “Morgan the Raider, you know, like the pirate, Henry Morgan?” He said, “Well, what’s his first name?” I said, “Henry.” And Joe said, “You can’t do that. There are two actors by the name of Henry Morgan. That would have been Harry Morgan from M*A*S*H, and Henry Morgan, who was a comedian on What’s My Line, I think. So I delved into the back of my brain, and my brother had just had a baby boy and named him Travis, so I pulled that one out. And Joe says, “Travis?” I said, “Yeah, you know, like at the Alamo?” And he went, “Oh, yeah, that could work! There you go.” So I started writing and drawing my new feature, Warlord. It began in 1st Issue Special #8 and was the only feature that began in one of the 1st Issue books that actually went on to its own series. But with issue #3 of the Warlord title, I came in to look at the pages, pick them up, and take them home to ink. I’m proofreading them as I go, and as I come to the last page, imagine my surprise when it says, “The end.” I said, “Joe, this isn’t the end. It’s supposed to say, ‘next issue.’” And Joe says, “Yeah, I know. Carmine canceled the book.” I said, “He promised me a year’s run.” And Joe says, “Yeah, he lied. He does that.” And there was no talking him down from it. But, fortunately, within just a couple of weeks, Jenette Kahn walked in the door and canceled Carmine Infantino. Jenette was a very astute cookie who knew not just the publishing business but the DC publishing lineup like the back of her hand, and she asked to see the publishing schedule, and glanced through it and said, “Where’s Warlord?” It turns out it was her favorite book. They said, “Carmine canceled it.” And she said, “Carmine’s not here any more. Put it back.” So the kicker and the upshot of the whole Warlord thing is that, several years later, I was sitting in my studio back at Wisconsin at the time, and through the mail slot drops this big package with a return address from DC Comics, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I opened it up and there is my Savage Empire portfolio, complete with a form letter rejection slip from DC Comics that read, “Dear artist, thank you for your submission. However, it does not meet DC’s current publishing needs. DC Comics.” It was hysterical because at that moment Warlord, which was the revised Savage Empire, was DC’s number one-selling title. Waste not, want not. Cassell: What was your inspiration for the character Shakira, the shapeshifter? Grell: I was inspired by an episode of Star Trek, the Gary Seven episode [“Assignment: Earth”]. I don’t know if you remember that. Cassell: Sure.

Journey to the Center of the Earth. I pulled that one out of my hat because I had just finished reading the book The Hollow Earth the week before. And Journey to the Center of the Earth was one of my favorite movies as a kid, probably tied for first with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I think we saw it in the theater maybe 20 times back in the day, which is not as exorbitant as you might think. Twenty times at 10¢ is $2.00. At any rate, we loved that movie as kids, and I had read the book, I think, eight times when I was in high school. So I drew on that. And I’d always been a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar series. So in creating the world out of my BS, I went, “Okay, here is this world, and it’s inhabited by the survivors of sunken Atlantis”—I got my Atlantis thing in there—“and because there’s never been an Ice Age down there, dinosaurs still wander the world. And magic or science fiction works. You can do any kind of story that you want at any place. Plus, there is no means of measuring the passage of time, so all the characters are basically locked in the moment. They have no concept that time is passing.” Top left: 1st Issue Special #8 [Nov. 1975], debut of The Warlord. Center inset: Cover detail, Warlord #51 [Nov. ’81]. Next page: A page from The Warlord’s introduction, in 1st Issue Special #8.

Grell: There was a guy from the future who has a companion who, when you look at her, one moment she’s a cat, and another moment she’s a woman. I was just fascinated by that, and so I came up with Shakira. As I was writing that story, I was watching The Man Who Would Be King, and the girl who ultimately becomes the downfall of Sean Connery’s character because he can’t keep his hands off of her is a woman who married Michael Caine. They met, I think, during that production, and he married her, and her name is Shakira Caine. So it was sort of inspired by her exotic beauty and I loved the name right off the bat. I have resisted all attempts to pry the secret out of me of whether she’s a woman who turns into a cat or a cat who turns into a woman. I know the answer, but I’m not saying. The other funny part about Shakira is if you take a look at her costume or lack thereof, she’s got this huge cutout in the center of her cleavage, and it’s basically some little fur strips that barely covers much of anything. And, for the longest time, the DC production department would fill that in with black. So if you saw Shakira after the production department got hold of it, you’d see that her cleavage was covered up, despite the fact that Power Girl has got a huge boob window. I would argue with them all the time. “Oh, no, it’s a bit too much.” Still, though, they never caught onto the fact that her bottom is nothing but pubic hair. Really! It’s nothing but pubic hair with strings attached. Because you can bet that there’s almost always strings attached. Cassell: Oh, that’s great. Grell: When Chad Hardin and I worked on the Warlord revival together two years ago, Chad first drew it as a long flap like a loincloth, and I explained it to him, and he laughed. He got the joke, and went, “Okay.” So he changed it and it went back to pubic hair. Cassell: I found it interesting; first that you chose that his companion would be a woman, and second that there would be no romantic thing. There’s some interplay there, but he still pines for Tara. Grell: That’s really the gist of it. I’ve had more women friends in my life than men friends, and some of them are astonishingly beautiful, and I have no interest in having a romantic relationship with them, but I also catch that sort of catlike feature with Shakira where, without saying that they have ever slept together, it’s entirely possible, because of her nature, not of his nature. You know what I’m saying? Cassell: Sure. Grell: She’s very catlike. She’s just as likely to spot a handsome tomcat in an alley and off she goes. She actually did that in one issue. Coming into town, there’s a big, orange, fluffy cat down an alley, and she turns into a cat and off she goes. She’s just that way. And I did a lot of catlike things with her. In one of the issues Morgan is asleep, and he’s sleeping in the nude, with Shakira in cat form curled up on his crotch. Because, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a cat, but they are drawn to the warmest spot in the room, and they have a tendency to want to sleep on your crotch. That’s just a cat for you. And when I wrapped the series, I very much did a handoff to Morgan’s son, and just like I handed off the mantle of the Warlord, Shakira basically goes with him. And Tinder’s got a woman in his life, but she still goes off with him, and it’s going to be that same kind of a relationship. Cassell: So what about the Warlord’s costume? It changed over time. Grell: Oh, yes. Initially, I don’t know what in the world I was thinking. Well, actually, I do know what I was thinking. I was inspired by Kirk Douglas’s costume for part of the movie Spartacus, where he was addressing his troops in the camp. He’s got that dark wool cloak and a jerkin with a broad leather belt that’s strapped around it, and that was really the initial inspiration. But, as I said before, I had modeled Warlord on my

comic strip, Savage Empire. Well, Savage Empire, being a comic strip, it didn’t matter if there was nothing evenly remotely related, so I didn’t have to worry about costumes being a little on the close side, and I wasn’t looking at the likelihood that anybody would compare a comic strip character to Green Arrow. So he even had yellow hair like Green Arrow had. Well, when I turned in the first ad drawing to Joe Orlando, that night I watched a made-for-TV show called The Count of Monte Cristo with Richard Chamberlain, and at the end of that movie, Chamberlain has silver hair, and he wears nothing but black and silver. And I corralled Joe as soon as I got to the office the next day and said, “I’m changing everything. He’s going to have silver hair like Richard Chamberlain did, and everything about him is going to be black and white. And Joe went for it big time. As time went on, I made him a little bit more barbaric, and I went with the skull pauldron on his arm and the chain across his chest, and keeping that black and white theme, got him a snow leopard loincloth. Just because. Cassell: Well, it was always hot there in Skartaris. Grell: Yeah, although the first story he wears that in has to do with an abominable snowman. So he’s in the snow, but he’s got a cloak. But, yeah, it was going to be mostly in a tropical world where a minimum amount of clothing made sense … Which gave me an excuse to keep the ladies as naked as possible. There was a young lady who showed up at a convention in Ottawa, I think it was being held over Halloween weekend, and she was wearing Tara’s costume. Cassell: Oh, really?

Grell: Yes. And she complained bitterly about, number one, how cold it was, and number two, how totally impractical it was, because she had to sit and stand with her back arched and her ribcage thrust out in order to keep everything from falling out. And, for the life of me, I couldn’t see what the big problem was. Cassell: So, you’ve probably explained this somewhere along the way, but where does he get all the bullets? Grell: The truth is, I never explained it. And I’ve been asked so many times. At the Atlanta Science Fiction and Fantasy Fair years ago, in a roomful of maybe 400 people, somebody said, “Where’s he keep his bullets?” I said, “It’s just a comic book.” And they went, “Boooooo!” Hey, if you’ve got to know that bad, just think of it as 240 grain full metal jacket suppositories. Now, where he gets all those bullets is that there was a supply of ammunition on board his plane, which, when it crashed, he ultimately went back to that wreck, and that’s where he picked it up. Cassell: I like that. It’s the untold story of the Warlord. Grell: It was actually told, but people just kind of ignored it. And then they go, “But he doesn’t have, like, a gun belt or a bullet belt. He doesn’t have magazine pouches or anything like that.” Well, no. He has as many bullets as he needs plus one. I mean, that’s all there is to it. Cassell: Of course, it’s just like in the old Westerns, right? In the old

Westerns they’d take their six-shooters and fire off nine or 10 shots. Because they were counting on you not counting. Grell: Yes, exactly. Cassell: So tell me how the Remco Warlord action figure came about. Grell: Are you talking about the one that was done from the models of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe where everybody looks like they’re constipated? Cassell: Exactly, yes. Grell: I had nothing to do with that whatsoever. Cassell: Oh, really? So that was all DC marketing? Grell: Right. I think they did the Warlord and Deimos. I think they even had the warhorse. Cassell: They also had, in the same series, Arak, Hercules, Mikola, and Machiste -- Is that how you pronounce it, muh-SHEEST? Grell: Mah-kiss-tee, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve heard it pronounced muh-CHEES-tay. Cassell: Ah, that’s probably right. Grell: I have no idea. Cassell: The character Machiste was one that really appealed to readers. Grell: Yeah. There was a lot more to the character than met the eye on the surface, that’s for sure. For starters, when Morgan meets him, they’re both prisoners, and both basically gladiators. He’s a king of his own country, and he’s a loyal friend to Morgan, but winds up in possession of a battle axe that has the spirit of a demon trapped in it. And because the demon has got a hold of him, and he’s got a hold of the axe, he can’t put the axe down, he can’t let it go, and it’s changing him as it goes along. Morgan

Top: Warlord #13 [June–July 1978] title spread by Mike Grell. The creator/artist/writer maintained a design format to feature a doublepage spread on the second and third page in each issue.

winds up cutting off his hand in order to save his friend. Which was kind of a harsh thing to do for a pal, but they managed to get through it quite nicely. Then I created a triangle between the Russian girl, Mariah, who comes down to the world in the center of the Earth and is smitten with Morgan. She falls for Morgan, but Morgan is loyal to Tara, and, at the same time, Machiste falls for Mariah. So you’ve got this “never the twain shall meet” sort of thing until later on. Cassell: It worked really well. So about 50 issues into the series you stopped drawing it. What prompted that? Grell: I stopped drawing Warlord when I started working on my own material, books that I owned. I started doing Starslayer and Sable. Something had to give. Cassell: When that transition first happened, Mark Texeira was the guy who was doing the penciling and I wondered if somebody told him to make it look like Mike Grell, because there seemed to be a strong similarity to the artwork. Grell: I have no idea. It wouldn’t be unusual or unreasonable to want to maintain as much continuity as possible. If you weren’t going to have the same artist, you would want someone whose style was similar enough that it wouldn’t be jarring to the readers. So they’d still pick up and read it. We were all working on a sort of bastardized 1970s style then, anyway. Certain artists defined certain eras. The ’40s and ’50s was Jack Kirby. The early ’60s, Steve Ditko and Gil Kane and guys like that came in and things changed up a bit. But then, in the late ’60s, when Neal Adams came along, his style basically defined the ’70s the way John Byrne’s style defined the ’80s, and Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee defined the ’90s. The 2000s, it’s flavor of the month, anybody who can copy a photograph. Cassell: When you started doing the Warlord, you were inking your own pencils, but later on the inking was being done by other people. Did you have a preference for one or the other? Grell: I wanted to do it all myself, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t pencil, ink, and write Warlord and still pencil the Green Lantern/Green Arrow. It was a case of not wanting to give up Green Lantern/ Green Arrow more than anything else. Inking for me always took the longest. It was always the hardest part. It still is. I thought of myself as a pretty decent inker, but it’s basically like pulling teeth. There are other things I’d rather be doing. Cassell: Well, I know you put an incredible amount of work into the pencils. Warlord was a very successful series. Was there ever any discussion about a feature film? Grell: Oh, there’s been a lot of discussion. I’ve been approached probably a half a dozen times by people in the film industry, and every time I tell them, “I don’t own it. You have to talk to DC Comics and Warner,” and their eyes glaze over and they walk away muttering to themselves.

including back-up stories, starting with #37. The first back-up series was OMAC, based on the Jack Kirby creation, initially written and penciled by Jim Starlin. OMAC was followed about a year later by Claw the Unconquered; and then Dragonsword; Arion, Lord of Atlantis; and finally The Barren Earth, the longest-running of the back-ups, which continued in its own mini-series after the back-ups ended with #88. Grell even wrote and drew his own two-part back-up story called “Wizard World,” featuring characters from Warlord and introducing Mongo Ironhand. With #53, Grell relinquished penciling the Warlord stories, first to Mark Texiera and then to Dan Jurgens. Issue #71 was the last issue written by Grell, who was succeeded by Cary Burkett. (Grell’s former wife Sharon was ghost writer on Warlord circa 1982-83.) Grell continued to draw the Warlord covers through #70, returning to paint the 100th issue cover and several more before the series ended with issue #133. Warlord stories have been reprinted in several formats, including the 1981 DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #10; the 1992 trade paperback Warlord: The Savage Empire (reprinting the first 12 issues), and a 2009 Showcase Presents volume, featuring the first 28 issues in black-&white. Grell returned to the character for a six-issue mini-series in 1992 and a new Warlord series in 2009 that ran for 16 issues, featuring the death of Travis Morgan and passing of the Warlord mantle to his son, Joshua.

Continuing from 1st Issue Special #8, Warlord started out as a bi-monthly, with Grell doing the writing, penciling, and inking, including the covers. Grell started a tradition early on of drawing a two-page splash for the title page of each Warlord story. After a couple of years, the title went monthly and Grell gave up inking the stories to veterans like Vince Colletta and Bob Smith. Warlord continued the DC tradition of Top right: Mike Grell’s cover painting for Warlord #100 [Dec. 1985]. Inset right: Grell’s cover for the #1 of the 1992 Warlord mini-series.

The Savage World of

Premise

use of the dagger. He can use the spiked mace he wears at the end of his right arm as a formidable weapon.” [Who’s Who #14, Apr. ’86].

Lieutenant Colonel Travis Morgan, U.S. Air Force pilot, is on a secret mission to spy on the Soviet Union and, when his jet is disabled by Russian missiles, he parachutes over the Arctic Circle and descends into the magical realm of Skartaris, where Morgan becomes the legendary leader and warrior called The Warlord.

SHAKIRA, Shapeshifter: Frequent and platonic companion of the Warlord, with the ability to transform into a black cat, though she retains “great cat-like agility” while in human guise [Who’s Who #20, Oct. ’86].

Main Characters TRAVIS MORGAN, The Warlord: Pilot and Vietnam veteran, father of grown daughter and sorceress supreme Jennifer and of Skartaris-born son Joshua (a.k.a. Tinder), widower of first wife Rachel and current husband of Tara. An adventurer and “brilliant military strategist and leader, formidable hand-to-hand combatant, a superb marksman with a gun, and an extraordinary swordsman” [Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #25, Mar. ’87].

DEIMOS, High Priest: Major nemesis of The Warlord, possessor of the “Scrolls of Blood,” and would-be conqueror of Skartaris, who has been repeatedly resurrected from death to again do battle with his archenemy. MARIAH ROMANOVA, Adventurer/archaelogist: Late of Russia and an archaeologist, she is only the second person from the outer world to reside in Skartaris, and is an expert with sword and saber, and is married to Machiste.

TARA, Queen of Shamballa: Ruler of a great city, mother of son Joshua, second wife of Travis Morgan, and is “a superb hand-tohand combatant, swordswoman, horsewoman, and athlete. She has been said to be the most fearless warrior in all of Skartaris” [Who’s Who #23, Jan. ’87].

Setting SKARTARIS: Earth’s fantastical “inner hollow world” of perpetual daytime and prehistoric monsters, a land populated by descendants of Atlantis. “Skartaris is a well-conceived place, eventually revealed to be in another dimension accessed through Earth.

MACHISTE, former King of Kiro: Former gladiator, chief ally of The Warlord, husband to Mariah Romanova, and “a superb warrior, brilliantly skilled in hand-to-hand combat, swordsmanship, horsemanship, and the

There’s permanent daylight, and time passes at a considerably slower rate, as Morgan discovers every time he returns home.” [The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide, ’97].

Commentary

Spotlight

Though Marvel Comics was achieving considerable success with its Robert E. Howard-infused barbarian genre line in the 1970s, the House of Ideas’ main rival was having a difficult time in its attempts to take advantage of the Conan craze. Sword of Sorcery, Weird Worlds, Stalker, Beowulf… nothing seemed to stick for DC Comics, once the confident industry leader but now frantically watching its dwindling market share as Stan Lee and company were on the rise. Even their second most popular foray into barbarism, Claw the Unconquered, couldn’t make it past a dozen issues. No sword-wielding DC character held staying power… until, that is, Mike Grell unsheathed his creative weaponry. The multi-talented creator presented DC with Warlord, a sword-&-sorcery series brimming over with male hormones, scantily-clad females, and magical bedevilments, a series that would last an impressive 12 years and 133 regular issues and six annuals, subsequently becoming a property the publisher would revisit over the decades to follow. Grell, late of Aquaman and The Legion of Super-Heroes, was Skilled as a writer as well as artist, and described by The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide [’97] as, “in his element [with Warlord]. His artwork suited a sword-&-sorcery feature far better than it did his super-hero series, and he was able to come up with, if not original, certainly entertaining ideas to keep the action flowing.” In 1985, The Comic Book Heroes declared, “[Warlord] was the brainchild of Mike Grell, one of the first of a new breed of creators who, functioning at once as originators, writers, and artists, would guide their comics according to their own personal visions. Grell’s vision was clear and strong, and Warlord would prove not only a fresh and daring series, but one of the very few of the mid-1970s to last until the present day.” The Comic Book Heroes authors Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones cited the cartoonist’s strong, long-running creative viewpoint (and a little-known fact about Grell’s writing credit in

latter issues). “Grell held to his personal vision of Warlord for his entire tenure, resisting crossovers with other DC characters and incorporation into the company mainstream. He finally left the strip as penciler in 1981, although he would be credited as writer until 1983. According to Grell, however, much of the writing in those later years was handled by his [then] wife, Sharon. She brought a depth and quality of characterization to The Warlord which Grell felt exceeded his own, and her work would inspire some of his most important future creations.” After the late 1988 cancellation of the regular series, The Warlord was resurrected for a six-issue miniseries in 1992 (written by Mike Grell), and then a 2006–07 reboot (ignoring prior continuity and written by Bruce Jones) lasting ten issues, and, finally a 2009–10 “return-to-the-Grellverse” revival (written by the creator, who also contributed interior art to half of the 16 issues). Recently ruminating on his creation, Grell shared with comicbook. com, “I really made it my practice throughout my career to not so much follow in somebody else’s footsteps, but try to blaze a trail as much as possible, as well. The creation of The Warlord was an extension of my desire to do my own thing as much as possible. I used to say that I spent the first 25 years of my career trying to drive editors kicking and screaming into the 20th century… Back then, we were trying to create something that would last.” And The Warlord has endured, even into 2018, as Morgan of Skartaris—and rival, Deimos—remain a strong presence in today’s DCU.

Previous page: Cover detail from Warlord #48 [Aug. 1981]. Top: Map of Skartaris from Warlord Annual #4 [’85].

Warlord: The Action Figures

Deimos, Warteam/Mighty Stallion and Machiste, Warteam/ Mighty Stallion and Mikola, Warteam/Mighty Stallion and Warlord, Warpult version A (dark wheels/light structure), Warpult version B (light wheels/dark structure), Galaxy Racer, Arak Water Gun, Hercules Water Gun, Warlord Water Gun, and Journey Through Time (playset). The Warpult included a stand-up cardboard backdrop. In 2009, Mattel produced a cartoony version of Warlord action figure, packaged with Deimos and Supergirl as part of the DC Universe Justice League Unlimited series, each measuring 4 inches tall. The Warlord action figure most faithful to the Grell comics was 7 inches tall, released in 2007 as part of DC Direct First Appearance Series 4.

In 1982, Remco released the “Lost World of the Warlord” action figure series. Although artwork from the Warlord comics was used in the packaging and promotion of the Remco figures, they serve as a reminder that the characters belong to DC Comics, not their creator, Mike Grell. Included in the Remco series were figures of the Warlord, Deimos, Machiste, and Mikola, as well as DC’s Arak and Hercules, each packaged with one or more accessories. Hercules and Arak were not part of the Warlord comics, but were presumably included because they were similar properties. The Warlord action figures were 5½ inches tall, based on the “Masters of the Universe” series by Remco. In addition to the single figures, Remco produced several accessories and sets, including Warteam/Mighty Stallion and

This page: Clockwise from top left is a page from the 1983 Remco toy catalog featuring “The Lost World of Warlord” action figures; comic book ad touting the line; Mark Texeira’s cover for the ultra-rare Warlord “Battle Beneath the Earth” mini-comic included with some figures; posed Warlord figure from the Remco set; likely in an attempt by Remco to replicate Mattel’s success with their He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toy line, other barbarian-like DC Comics characters Arak and Hercules were a part of the set; and a posed 2007 DC Direct First Appearance Series 4 Warlord figure.

Dan Jurgens

INTERVIEW

Dan Jurgens has had a long and distinguished career in comics, primarily working for DC. Like Mike Grell, Jurgens is both a writer and an artist. He is perhaps best known for his work on the “Death of Superman” storyline. Jurgens and Grell collaborated on more than one occasion at DC, though Jurgen’s first professional comic book work was drawing Warlord. Jeff Messer: When did you first meet Mike Grell? Dan Jurgens: I first met Mike in 1981. He was doing a local appearance at a comic store and I stopped by to meet him and show him my work. He was very approachable and friendly, and he took a good long look at my stuff and we chatted for a bit. Messer: Were you a fan of his work prior to meeting him? Jurgens: Oh, I had been a longtime fan of his work, since I first saw his art on Aquaman in Adventure Comics and, of course, Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes. Messer: Warlord is where the world first discovered you as an artist. How did you get the gig, and how intimidating or exciting was it to draw that book? Jurgens: When I met Mike that day, he explained to me that they were actually looking for a new artist on Warlord. Mike suggested I send my work to the book’s editor, Laurie Sutton, which I did, and DC gave another artist and me a tryout on the first few pages of script. They liked what I did and the next thing I knew, I was on the book. This started with #63—Mike writing and me drawing. Really—it was a dream come true! It was both exciting and intimidating all at the same time. Messer: What was the process like, working with Mike on Warlord? Jurgens: Mike wrote full script, which was fine as he is a very visual thinker. It was a great way to train and quite interesting. Because Mike had drawn the book for so long, it was rather easy to understand what he wanted in the art. Messer: How did that change years later on Green Arrow? Jurgens: By then, I was more accomplished as an artist. So, rather than just try to serve Mike’s script, I tried to elevate and enhance it. Not sure if that makes a lot of sense—but I probably exercised a little more freedom with what I was given. Both Mike and editor Mike Gold encouraged that. Of course, we had Dick Giordano inking so it was a strong project, again coming off what Mike built earlier as artist and with Ed Hannigan. Messer: You got to work on Warlord and Green Arrow. You also

worked on The Legion of Super Heroes, where Mike had been a trailblazer a decade earlier. Did you ever want to try your hand with other Grell characters, like Jon Sable? Once Mike had left the art chores on that title, it was in dire need of a great artist. Jurgens: It had actually been mentioned to me at one point but I was under exclusive contract to DC at the time and was unable to

Messer: How much of it do you attribute to the time you spent working on the Warlord, learning the business from inside a book that was decidedly an outside-the-mainstream title? Jurgens: It was outside the mainstream, but it sold very well. I remember meeting Curt Swan up at the office very early during my run on the Warlord and he told me the book was outselling Superman, which was a bit of a shock. But it was a good place to learn and a good way to understand, very quickly, that I wanted to write as well as draw. Messer: How often do you and Mike see each other or talk? Jurgens: Not often enough, I’m sorry to say. I last saw Mike at a convention—Seattle, maybe?—about a year and a half ago. Messer: You are one of the key architects of the DC Rebirth and are, no doubt, busy for years to come. But, if Mike Grell called you tomorrow and said, “Hey Dan, let’s do a project together. You pick!” What would that project be? Jurgens: Well, Mike probably wouldn’t want to do it, but I think the world would turn upside down if he did some kind of Legion project. Unfortunately, that means dealing with 25 characters and therein lies the problem. Messer: Do you have a personal favorite Grell creation or character? Jurgens: I think Sable takes gold, Morgan takes silver and the incredibly lovable Mongo Ironhand brings home the bronze! Messer: What’s next for you? Jurgens: Currently writing Action Comics, which comes out twice a month, and Batman Beyond. On top of that, I just drew Kamandi Challenge #7 and wrote a very special Sandman story to celebrate Jack Kirby’s 100th birthday. Messer: How do people reach out and/or follow you online? Jurgens: Best place to find me is @thedanjurgens on Twitter!

do it. It would’ve been fun as I could’ve continued to perpetuate the connection with Mike. Messer: I’ve heard that it was your suggestions to have Green Arrow meet the Warlord, when you penciled the GA book that Mike was writing. Tell us about this idea and how that came about. Jurgens: I’d been drawing Green Arrow for a bit and realized there was a very obvious similarity between the characters. As I recall, I mentioned something—half serious, half joking —about one being mistaken for the other in a meeting. I believe that was how the seed was planted. It was great fun and very popular because Mike had always resisted the idea of integrating Travis Morgan into the DCU. Messer: I was instantly a fan of your work, from the first time I saw it. I loved your Flash Gordon and Booster Gold. I really loved your Legion work, too. You have now achieved a level of “legendary” status that is in the same category as people like Mike Grell. Do you often look back on how you got here? Jurgens: You know, from time to time I look back on it and realize that’s it been a pretty damn good run. I’ve been very fortunate to work on some great projects with some great people and they haven’t yet found a way to get rid of me. Quite honestly, it’s been a lot of fun. If I hadn’t met Mike that day, who knows how it might have turned out? Previous page: Recent photo of Dan Jurgens and, at bottom, panel featuring Jurgen pencils and Dan Adkins inks from Warlord #91 [Mar. 1985]. Top left: Jurgens and Dick Giordano’s cover for Warlord #82 [June 1984]. Right: Travis Morgan pays Oliver Queen a visit in Green Arrow #28 [Jan. 1990]. Cover art by Jurgens and Giordano.

CLOSE-UP

Savage Empire As Mike Grell explained earlier, Savage Empire was the story he originally planned to pitch to Carmine Infantino at DC Comics, changing his mind at the last minute and pitching the Warlord instead, which allowed him to retain ownership of Savage Empire. In Back Issue #46 (TwoMorrows, 2011), Mike Grell summarized his original comic strip idea, “Savage Empire is the story of archaeologist Jason Cord, who, while exploring the ruins of the ancient city of Akrotiri buried for thousands of years under volcanic ash, stumbles on a portal to the past and is cast back in time to the lost continent of Atlantis. It has all the elements of high adventure: lost cities, dangerous jungles, strange beasts of myth and legend, beautiful warrior women, evil wizards, and a modern-day protagonist trying to survive in a savage, primitive world.” It’s clear from Mike’s remarks below, you can’t keep a good idea down. Cassell: There was a Mike Grell portfolio called Warriors published in 1980. How did that come about? Grell: That was done by a kid whose dad was an entrepreneur. I don’t remember the young man’s name, but he was a high school kid, and obviously had money to invest and a specific idea in mind, and we got together and did it. Cassell: It had five color plates, and it was deliberately not any

This and next two pages: The Warlord’s origins date back to the early 1970s, when Mike Grell, fresh from a stint as Dale Messick’s assistant on her newspaper comic strip, Brenda Starr, created his own property, Savage Empire, replete with daily and Sunday samples, which are reproduced on these pages. Alas, the effort was met with syndicate indifference, as they had no interest in adventure continuities. Undaunted, Grell put some of his Savage Empire concepts to profitable use when he successfully pitched The Warlord to DC Comics.

way back. Cassell: Have you been in talks with anybody in particular about the Savage Empire movie? Grell: It comes up from time to time and I’ll be kind of surprised and pretty disappointed if I don’t get something to fly here in the next couple of years, but any time you’re dealing with Hollywood, you’re talking about being in it for the long haul. It took Mike Uslan 15 years to get Batman made. Cassell: Yeah, but I really think the time’s right for it. People want something different. The standard super-hero fare is getting old. Grell: From your lips to God’s ears. Or maybe Spielberg’s.

published characters, right? Grell: That is correct. Cassell: But it included one of Jason Cord from Savage Empire. It seems like Savage Empire would make a great movie. Grell: You bet. In fact, I have a screen treatment downloadable for Savage Empire. Cassell: I would love to see that made into a movie. Grell: It’s a different story [from Warlord], but it’s got some really slick stuff in it. We’re talking Atlantis. Once again, it’s fantasy, it’s anything you want it to be, anything you need it to be. I’m about halfway through the first novel, and I’m planning it for a series of three, possibly four, depending how things go. Cassell: That sounds great. Grell: Yup. It’s fun. I’m having a ball. It hearkens back to my love for the Edgar Rice Burroughs kind of stories, the lost worlds, and the heroic men, and the beautiful women. In this case, the girl that he ties in with is an ass-kicker from

Inset left: Jason Cord of Savage Empire was featured in Mike Grell’s 1980 Warriors portfolio set of color plates. Below: At the 1977 Chicago Comicon, Mike Grell (right) with one of his greatest artistic inspirations, Neal Adams, whose work on Green Lantern/Green Arrow motivated the young artist to take up cartooning.

Batman

CHAPTER SIX

When you think of DC Comics, three major characters come immediately to mind: Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman. They are the legendary crown jewels of DC. It was a coveted role to illustrate these icons of comics, the kind of opportunity that could make (or potentially break) an artist. The same month that Warlord debuted in his own title, the first Grell Batman story appeared in Detective Comics. But the ride with the caped crusader was not an altogether smooth one.

Cassell: We haven’t talked yet about your work on Batman. Grell: Probably for a good reason. I always felt that I had done kind of a crappy job on Batman while I was on the book. There was one particular story that had to do with a vampire [“Heart of a Vampire,” Detective Comics #455], and that one was probably the best of my Batman in the 1970s, but I can’t really take credit for it because the story had been plotted and broken down by Bernie Wrightson. Bernie had drawn thumbnails of every page, and by thumbnails I mean serious thumbnails. They were maybe two inches wide by three inches high, something like that, but so clearly drawn and the story told so beautifully in those tiny little panels that really all I had to do was re-pencil his thumbnails and do the finishes over the top. I followed his layouts on virtually every panel, and I got credit for it and Bernie didn’t, which I thought really stank. What was kind of funny was the vampire that I used. I was a big fan of Christopher Lee as Dracula. The first monster movie that I had seen since I was a kid that actually scared me was Christopher Lee’s Dracula. He was just such a commanding presence, and seemed like he had the power and the evil to go with it. So I did a bunch of research and found many reference photos so I could model the vampire after Christopher Lee. I got just as close as I could to the likeness, and took the pencils in to [DC editor] Julie Schwartz, and Julie said, “Well, it’s good except for one thing.” I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Your vampire looks just like Christopher Lee.” I went, “That’s the point!” He said, “Yeah, no, you’ve gotta change that.” So I was upset. He said, “Why don’t you give him longer hair, like your hairstyle, instead of having it brushed back. Why don’t you give him a broken nose like yours, and maybe a scar.” I was like, “Oh, God.” So, in order to please my editor, I made those changes, but it came off looking like I was ripping off Christopher Lee instead of making an homage to Christopher Lee, which I had intended it to be. Sometimes it jumps up and bites you, you know. It doesn’t always come off the way you hoped it would. Cassell: What was it in general that made you unhappy with your work on Batman? Grell: Well, at that given time I think every single book I ever published I always felt like I could have done better. And on such an iconic title as Batman, I felt like I fell short, so I always

Top right: Evocative Batman commission by Mike Grell. Above: A clandestine meeting between the Dark Knight and Catwoman, drawn by Grell in 2010. Though the artist’s delineations of the exploits of Batman have been somewhat rare, Grell’s work is always memorable.

made it Two-Face, where instead of being a prosecutor, Harvey Dent is a stage actor whose costume catches fire and he’s burnt, disfigured on one side of his face. That was, I think, a good story partly because I aimed it at exploring the reason why Bruce Wayne never got married, and it is because he is so obsessed with being Batman, he doesn’t really have any room in his life for another kind of relationship. Cassell: Yes. It’s kind of a solitary existence, I think. Grell: Yeah, that’s for sure. I don’t know how many they actually published of the thing. It was one of those books that I think was more or less slipped into the lineup without fanfare. Even some of the comic dealers didn’t know it was coming. I had my issues with some of the people in charge of public relations at DC Comics. Rather, they had issues with me, I should say. And that was one of the end results. Cassell: Well, that’s a shame, because they should have heavily publicized that. Grell: I wasn’t in charge of it, and the people who were also pretty much saw to it that we never got any advertising or promotion for Green Arrow, either. But Green Arrow was so popular, they couldn’t kill it with a stick.

wanted to get another whack at it. I didn’t get that chance again until the mid-’90s, when I did a graphic novel called Batman: Masque, which was basically set in Gotham by Gaslight. It was my spin on the concept of the Phantom of the Opera, except that, as I originally pitched it, I saw Bruce Wayne as the Raoul character, the lover, and Batman as the Phantom. And the girl was caught in that three-way triangle with two different characters, but really only one man. She was infatuated with Batman, but Bruce Wayne was in love with her. So he was trying to protect her, shield her, from the darkness that was the Batman, and Batman in return was trying to protect her from other evil forces that were surrounding her. Archie Goodwin was on board with this. He was all for doing it the way I had originally written it. Ultimately, when Archie passed away, Denny O’Neil took over as editor on the book, and he felt that from a commercial standpoint, it would be more successful—more saleable, I guess—if it also included a member of the standard Batman lineup of villains, which worked out well enough. I

There are a number of similarities between Batman and Green Arrow, so it would not be a surprise that Grell’s work on the Caped Crusader would lead to an assignment drawing the Emerald Archer. But it was less a logical progression than a happy circumstance that led to Grell’s long association with Oliver Queen.

This and next page: More Mike Grell renditions of the Caped Crusader. This page, top, is the artist’s cover for The Comic Reader #121 [Aug. 1975]. Left is a commission. On the next page is Grell’s cover for Detective Comics #455 [Jan. ’76] and a page from the interior story—”Heart of a Vampire,” written by Elliot S! Maggin, drawn by Grell—reproduced from the original art.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Green Lantern/ Green Arrow Cassell: Was it really? Grell: Yup. Green Lantern, I liked well enough, but it took me forever to figure out that the ring wasn’t just dragging him around. I thought, “This guy’s gotta have the strongest finger in the world.” Of course, it didn’t dawn on me that the ring makes him fly; the ring doesn’t just drag him from place to place. Cassell: When you were drawing Green Lantern/Green Arrow, did you have a favorite villain that you liked to pit them against? Grell: No, I was just so excited to be working with Denny O’Neil, it didn’t matter. Cassell: What was it like working with Denny? Grell: It was great. I learned more about good writing from working as the artist for Denny than anything else. I learned not to be so damned verbose. I learned the difference between text and subtext. Denny had hard and fast rules that he broke all the time, but knowing what the rules are allows you the freedom to break them. And his rules were no more than 12 words in a balloon, no more than 100 words on a page. Denny had a natural gift for breaking down dialogue as you would in normal conversation. It’s the difference between a natural speech pattern and one that just crams as many words as possible into a balloon. For instance, take a phrase, “I loved a woman who promised she’d never leave me; she died,” or, “I loved a woman who promised she’d never leave me.” Beat, or space, a new balloon. “She died.” That beat in between, that second balloon, creates that pause in the dialogue that adds meaning to it. The other thing that Denny taught me was never, ever have the characters talk about the action that’s going on in the panel. It’s two different things. One of my best bad examples of that was a Conan book. I don’t remember when or where I came across it, but it was an old one. Conan is standing on the deck of a ship, and there’s a tidal wave about to smash down upon him, and Conan’s dialogue is, “Lo, yon mighty wave doth raise above the deck like the very hand of Crom itself!” Really? People just don’t talk like that. It’s a waste. There’s no point in doing that. Good acting, bad acting, text and subtext. A great example of that would be the scene in Pulp Fiction where Sam Jackson and John Travolta are getting ready to go visit the college kids. They’re talking

Although Mike Grell got an early opportunity to draw The Legion of Super-Heroes, like most new artists, he also did his fair share of backup stories featuring characters like Aquaman, Green Lantern, and Green Arrow. He drew a half dozen Green Lantern back-up stories in The Flash and almost a dozen Green Arrow and Black Canary stories that appeared in Action Comics. For other artists, it might have just been paying your dues. For Grell, it proved to be paving the way for a new golden—or should we say emerald?—opportunity. Cassell: At what point did you get involved with Green Lantern/Green Arrow? Grell: I had done back-up stories featuring both Green Lantern and Green Arrow, separately, but never together. As luck would have it, I just happened to be in the office the day that Denny O’Neil announced that he was going to resurrect the Green Lantern/Green Arrow title, and since that was the title that got me interested in working in that genre in the first place, I went straight to Denny’s office and said, “Okay, who do I have to kill?” And he basically said, “Hey, if you want the job that bad, put the gun down. The job is yours.” I was at the right place at exactly the right moment. Cassell: Was there any trepidation about doing Green Lantern/Green Arrow? The previous guy on the title, admittedly several years before, had been Neal Adams. Grell: Well, that’s just it. Neal’s run on the book had been several years before and, in the meantime, I had worked on both of those characters, so I actually had some history with them, and the fans were accustomed to seeing my work associated with both Green Lantern and Green Arrow, so I think I had an easier transition than I might have had. Cassell: Did you enjoy having an opportunity to do that book? Grell: Oh, absolutely. In terms of comics, to me that was the gold standard. Cassell: I agree. In fact, when I was a kid, my favorite comic book character was Green Lantern. Grell: And mine was Green Arrow. Previous page: In resurrecting the legendary Green Lantern/Green Arrow title, editor Julius Schwartz chose Mike Grell to succeed the legendary Neal Adams as artist. Here’s the cover of #90 [Aug.–Sept. 1976]. Above inset: Grell recreation of his GL/GA #97 cover.

Denny was the boss. If we had a disagreement on something, I always had the feeling that if I could talk him into my point of view, he was willing to go along with it, and if not, we did it his way, because, hey, he’s the boss, right? That’s the way it should be. Cassell: Back in that time period, were you doing prelims for Green Lantern/Green Arrow and giving them to him to review? Grell: No, I just did pencils. Cassell: Did the script include the dialogue? Grell: Yes. It was full script, but he was very Spartan in what he wrote, and in that way it was very much like a good screenwriter, things that I didn’t learn until years later. Sometimes it’s as important what you don’t put on the page as what you do put on the page. If you read screenplays much at all, you’ll see that some screenwriters are very visual in their writing without being heavy-handed. They can conjure an image with their words well enough that the director would have to be something of a moron not to be able to understand what it is that they had in mind. Like the best screenwriters and their relationship with directors, a comic writer is very much like a screenwriter, and the artist is the director, and it’s up to the artist to interpret what the writer has to say. The better the writer, the closer the final result is going to be to what the writer had in mind. You don’t have to write volumes in order to be descriptive. You can write a few words that describe the emotion and the effect. Cassell: You stayed on Green Lantern/Green Arrow for about 22 issues. Do you recall why you stopped doing it? Grell: Well, the simple answer is that, if my memory serves me, I had several things going on at the same time. I was doing Starslayer, I was doing the Warlord, and I had just begun drawing the Sunday Tarzan comic strip. Cassell: I think Warlord went monthly right at that time. Grell: Right. Once you’re dealing with a monthly book I was writing and drawing, it’s a tough nut to crack.

about something other than what they’re doing. They’re getting their guns ready. They’re getting ready to go into this room and shoot some people. But that’s not what they’re talking about. They’re talking about Marcellus Wallace’s wife and how he had a guy thrown out of a fourthstory window through a glass greenhouse or whatever it is just because the guy touched his wife’s seat. The real intent of the dialogue is to let you know later on just how much trouble Vincent Vega is in for having taken Mrs. Wallace out and provided the drugs she O.D.’d on. So Denny’s ability to tell a story was just fantastic and working with him was so good because he would give you the bare bones framework and leave the rest up to you. He would say things like “CU2” shot (close-up two-shot) and leave the artist to his own imagination to figure out how to frame that panel. If he had something specific in mind, he would write it, but for the most part, he left, I would say, 50% to the interpretation of the artist. That gave you a lot of freedom to experiment with different layouts and different types of visual storytelling. He understood that the visual part of the storytelling was my job, and the verbal part was his side. Earlier we talked about the difference between Cary Bates and Jim Shooter writing The Legion of Super-Heroes. A Denny O’Neil script generally ran about a half-page to maybe one page for every page in the book. And if it was talking heads, it was short and sweet and to-the-point. Rarely more than one page. It was very much a cooperative effort. I felt like I was part of a functioning team with Denny, and that mutual respect that we had for each other continues to this day. I think he’s tied for first place among the best comic writers that ever sat at a typewriter. I rank him dead even with Archie Goodwin, and everybody else is in second place. Cassell: Was there ever any time when you got a script from Denny and after reading it over, thought there was maybe a better way of doing it, and approached him about that? Grell: Yes, absolutely. And, to his credit, he always considered my suggestions. We had the kind of mutually respectful and cooperative relationship that I always felt that he was considering what I had to say. The thing of it is that, because Denny was the writer and the editor,

Evidence of the lasting impact of Grell’s run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow can be found in popular culture, when years later on the hit television series, The Big Bang Theory, the character Sheldon Cooper wore a t-shirt featuring the cover to Green Lantern/Green Arrow #90. However, this wasn’t the last time that Grell would draw the adventures of the Emerald Archer. The best, in fact, was yet to come.

Top inset: Grell’s sketch studies for his cover and printed cover to DC Special #17 [Summer ’75]. Bottom insets: The Green heroes, drawn by Mike Grell and appearing in The Amazing World of DC Comics #12 [July ’76]. Next page: Original art for Grell’s splash page in The Flash #242 [June ’76].

INTERVIEW

Denny O’Neil When you think about the most influential writers in the history of comics, Denny O’Neil would be near the top of that list. He is so well respected that he taught writing and editing classes at DC Comics. O’Neil collaborated with Grell on a half dozen Green Lantern backup stories in The Flash before the Green Lantern/Green Arrow title was relaunched with issue #90 in 1976. They spent most of the next two years weaving tales of these two unlikely allies. In the following interview, O’Neil provides insightful background on the characters that provided the basis for his association with Grell. Dewey Cassell: When did you first meet Mike? Denny O’Neil: Oh, lord… 30 to 40 years ago. I have no idea because it was such a casual business and you ran into people, and they swam in and out. You went to work for Marvel; you went to work for DC. I guess I became aware of him intensely when he did that world under the earth— Cassell: Warlord. O’Neil: Yeah. And we worked together on the Green Lantern/Green Arrow, volume 2. And I have run into him here and there. Very cordial relationship. I saw him just about a week ago in South Dakota, and he was very nice. He was very flattering and told my wife that I taught him how to write. I don’t believe that’s true, but it was nice of him to say. Cassell: Well, he certainly gives you credit for it. In my conversations with Mike, he’s very complimentary of you, and all that he learned from you in terms of how to write and how to dialogue. He’s definitely a fan of yours. O’Neil: Yeah. I gathered that. Cassell: So let’s talk a little bit about Green Lantern/Green Arrow. I’m going to ask you a little bit of background first, because I know that you worked on the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series with Neal Adams, and had a tremendously successful run. O’Neil: Yeah, I don’t know. There were a lot of secrets kept in those days. The editors did not see sales figures. When I became an editor full-time later, that was a pretty good tool to gauge if you were going in the right direction, finding an audience, or if you were not finding an audience. I have a rather cynical hunch as to why that was. It meant that any decisions that were not wise, well, you as the editor just had to believe what you were told, which I think was one of the problems with Dick Giordano with his job. So we were tremendously successful in that it is now many years later and that stuff is more or less still in print, and we got a lot of publicity, and then after about a year, Julie told me that we were going to discontinue the book. It had started because Julie said that Green Lantern as a solo character was on the bubble, and he was probably not going to last much longer, and did I have any ideas? And the first one I had was to integrate my real-life husband/father identity with my professional concerns, and so we did what we did. I don’t think Julie ever got permission ahead of time for anything he did,

any of the many and very important revisions he made to the super-hero genre. The conventional wisdom was “no continued stories” because of an erratic newsstand distribution, and yet, almost from the beginning of his revision of the DC Universe, he once a year had the Justice League meet the Justice Society, and that was a two-issue story. And I said, “How did they let you get away with it?” He said, “I didn’t say a thing to them, and they never said anything to me.” You cannot imagine anything like that happening today. But that’s what we decided to do, and all of a sudden, we had lots of publicity, 90% of which was favorable. Then the last liberal Republican mayor of New York got in touch with us and asked if he could write a text page. Well, that was still in the years when authority figures were much respected. Now, if my kid told me he wanted to be a politician, I’d have him Shanghaied to China. But I think Mayor Lindsay was basically a good guy, and he probably put a real stamp of approval on the project as far as the guys whose faces I never saw in the big offices were concerned. And then, all of a sudden, Julie said, “We’re going to discontinue it.” His last gasp was to have me do three back-up stories that ran in The Flash. And they were not torn bloody from the headlines. I did a panel with Paul Levitz at Princeton University and I said on that stage that those three back-ups were my first character-driven stories. Comics [were] derived from the old pulps. You can draw a pretty straight line from the slightly disreputable pulps to, for a time, very reputable comics. Sometimes it was the same company, DC and Fawcett to name

Previous page: This page of original art, published in Green Lantern #92 [Dec. ’76–Jan. ’77], gives off a Neal Adams vibe with that GL profile. Upper right: Denny O’Neil photo by Luigi Novi taken in 2009.

good second choice. Maybe he was the first choice, I don’t know. And my working relationship could not have been more cordial. Cassell: That’s terrific. What made it a good working relationship? O’Neil: We were both pros, and I think, in a nutshell, that was it. There were two ways to write comic book scripts. One was the way I learned from Stan [Lee], write a plot. That could be anything from two paragraphs, or in the case of Stan and Jack Kirby, I don’t even know if anything got written down. They just talked about it. And then the artist would go home and pencil. Back then we didn’t get copies of the artwork, we had the [actual] artwork. You went home and you wrote the copy off the artwork and added where you thought the balloons should go with blue pencil (which would not photograph). Then that went back to the editor, who did his job and sent it on to the inker, and it went on into the process. The way I always preferred was to do something that looked like a TV script. The format was different, but some way of indicating what the artwork should be, and then the captions and dialogue added below that. There were a lot of reasons I liked to work that way. If I were working with old-timers like Kirby or Ditko, as Stan was, who knew how to do visual narrative, I might want to work Stan’s way, because they would do a lot of your job for you. But, if you got people who were brand new, 10 minutes out of art school, or had their own very strong ideas about what they were allowed to do, then you could have problems, in that elements of the story that very often did not involve action were kind of neglected, because a lot of those guys, who used to be fans, were interested in action. But one of the deep, dark secrets of writing comics is the quiet panels, which are harder for an artist because there’s nothing flashy or fancy, and they’re absolutely dead necessary to telling a story. So many of us, Doug Moench for example, have little stories about that, where the artist took it upon himself to not draw something he didn’t feel like drawing, which meant that the writer had to really work hard. And sometimes you can tell if a comic book story is very heavy on exposition in the dialogue, it may have meant that the writer wanted to do something visual and he didn’t get it, and it’s his responsibility to make the story work, so sometimes you had to write a lot more copy than you may have wanted to. And there was the deadline question. If the artist is getting real temperamental and doesn’t feel like working very much this month, he will miss the deadline. If you’re working Marvel style, you will have to make up the lost ground, and if you screw up and don’t do it, then somebody else down the line is going to get stuck maybe not being able to do their best work because they don’t really have the time they’d like to have. So I eventually decided for me it was better just to do the job, and send the script off to the editor, and get on to the next job. And I could therefore forget about it until the thing was in print. I didn’t have to worry about involving myself in somebody else’s job. It was just a very comfortable way to work, and now I’m told that it’s become pretty much universal. Almost nobody works Marvel style any more. Somebody

two. Anyway, Paul afterwards said, “No, Green Lantern #76 was your first character-driven story.” And I thought about that, and he’s absolutely right. Green Lantern #76 starts with a kind of smug Green Lantern going into the ghetto and getting bopped with a can and bawled out by an old guy for the things he wasn’t doing, the people he wasn’t helping. And that started that whole continuity. So that was the background. It came, it went, life went on, and then several years later I was asked to revive it, which surprised me because, well, if it wasn’t selling three or four years ago, why do we think it was going to sell now? I don’t know why a lot of those decisions were made, and if I’m feeling charitable, I’ll say there were elements I didn’t know, I wasn’t aware of. If I’m not feeling charitable, I might have a very different opinion. But they asked me to revive it, and there was no reason to not do that. I don’t remember why I decided not to do so-called “relevant” stuff. I thought, “This is going to just be a comic book. We’re going to do science fiction, and we know how to do that, and it’ll all work out.” By that time, Neal had moved far beyond, I think, wanting to truly work with anybody. Certainly, although we were a very successful team, I don’t think he was asked or even considered to do the job. But Grell was a This page: Published DC Retroactive: Green Lantern—The ’70s [Sept. 2011] cover along with artist Mike Grell’s initial pencil sketch. Note that he and writer Denny O’Neil share credit in the printed cover.

like Doug Moench is so conscientious that he preferred to work plot-first, but his plots for a 22-page story could be 25 pages. And Frank Miller was one of the artists he worked with. So you get it back and the artist, despite the fact that he had a full script, decided not to draw the car, because cars are boring. Or in one case I had a page of a character talking on the phone. This was important to the exposition and the plot. The artist didn’t feel like drawing the phone, so you had a character walking around the room talking to himself. But, anyway, back to Mike, none of that was ever a consideration. One job we did a few years ago, it was a one-off, and I was trying to make a very mild anti-violence statement, so the story ends without the two antagonists bashing each other as so much super-hero stuff ends. And Mike questioned that, because he was right. The way comic books are normally constructed, that’s the way the story would have ended. But he didn’t take it upon himself, as certain people who have already been mentioned in this conversation might have done, he called the editor, and the editor called me, and I explained why I wanted it the way I wrote it, and there was no problem. That was the last I heard of it. Mike is really a pro, and that’s the way professionals do it. You’ve got to put your ego on ice, ideally, and, as the late, great Alfred Bester said, “Among professionals, the job is boss.” It’s not about you. It’s about telling this story, at this time, with the resources you have. I think not everybody completely believes that. I don’t know what the situation is when I dip my toe into the world of professional comic books now. A lot of it is alien. The business has changed in the 13 or 14 years since I had a desk job. It’s changed a lot. One of the things that we did as a matter of course is you would go in, if this was geographically possible, and talk to the editor, and you would both get on the same page. He knew what story you were going to write, and you knew what he wanted from you, and that doesn’t seem to be part of the process much any more at all. I had a frustrating job a few years ago because they asked for one thing, I did that script, and they said they changed their mind. They wanted a different villain. It’s not like you can just take Villain A and slot him into a script for Villain B. That meant going back to square one and doing a new story, which I did, and they hung on to it, and hung onto it, and then decided they wanted something else. Anyway, the job ran really late, and then the assistant editor called up and said, “Well, because you were so late getting the script in, we had to take some shortcuts in the editing.” That’s one of two times I ever lost my temper with an editor. They were so unprofessional. They hung onto the stuff, and a lot of it could have

been handled by a phone call. Anyway, it’s become a business, as far as I can tell, where you can make a lot more money than we made, but it’s like working in television. Yeah, you’re paid very well, but it’s a very erratic business. It’s not smooth and comfortable. Anyway, as I said, none of that applied to Mike Grell. He did his job and he did it well. Cassell: Green Lantern and Green Arrow seemed to be mismatched in terms of their abilities. Why did DC pair them together? O’Neil: The reason that those two characters got yoked, and you’re absolutely right, they have different skill sets and so forth, but you could say the same thing about Superman and Batman. Did you see that egregious movie? When I heard they were going to make that, I said, “Do these guys have any idea how hard it is to write those two characters in the same story and still be logical and consistent?” Well, I think that the movie was probably slaughtered by the studio. The guys who made it are not idiots, they’re skilled professionals. They probably saw what I was objecting to, and they were overruled. I’d done a few stories like that before, one of them for Julie. But the reason that we put those two Greens together is that, having made the decision in collaboration with Julie that Left inset: Panel detail by artist Mike Grell in DC Retroactive: Green Lantern—The ’70s [Sept. 2011]. Top right: For Green Lantern’s centennial issue, Grell was tapped to draw the cover. GL #100 [Jan. ’78].

I was going to do this kind of series, we were going to put that stuff center stage, and we needed somebody for Green Lantern to argue with. So you look around the DC Universe and you see Green Arrow, who just underwent a great remake by Neal Adams for a Bob Haney story. He was a nothing character, allegedly created by Mort Weisinger in 1940. I’m sure Mort actually wrote the script, but it’s pretty clear he was meant to be another Batman. The arrow business, well, that was a serial about the Green Archer, and, like the Green Arrow of television, he didn’t seem to have much qualms about killing people. I saw seven of the chapters. It was shot just across the river from where I am now. But he was this guy who put on a mask and used an arrow and went around Westchester County taking care of crime. So you add that to the fact that by then they knew that they had another success with Batman, and you have a character who was something inconvenient. Never popular enough to justify his own book until Grell did it years later, but he was a sort of utility infielder. You could find uses for him, but you could not justify centering a whole series on him. So he was, for all those years, pretty much a cipher. You had Speedy, his red-clad pal who looked a lot like Robin if you squinted. So, I did a story in Justice League in which he lost his fortune because I wanted to make him a little bit less like Batman, and I thought there are so many rich guys wearing super-hero costumes. So, we had a character whom very few people had an emotional investment in who suddenly looked good, after

looking like a guy who sweats for all those years, and he was available. He didn’t have a personality, so I could give him any one I wanted. So it was for those reasons that we yoked together two characters who apparently didn’t belong in the same story. But it worked out well. I wouldn’t change it if I [could] go back and redo it. Cassell: Oh, it worked out extremely well, I think. O’Neil: Yeah, 30 years afterward, it comes out in a slipcase hardcover $75 edition. One of the local arts collectives, for reasons I still can’t fathom, honored me about a year ago. They had a fundraiser. You paid some money and you got in and you saw Paul Levitz and me talk. It was probably a huge thrill. But DC was very cooperative, and one of the things they gave us was five or six of those Green Lantern/Green Arrow hardcovers. I’ve still got five of them. If I find someone who hasn’t read them, I have a hell of a Christmas present in the basement. I can’t believe after those have been reprinted so often and in so many formats, anybody who wants to read the story surely doesn’t have to pay $75 to do it. But thank God I don’t have to worry about that stuff any more. That’s editor stuff. Cassell: You worked with a lot of different artists over the years, Left: Xudarian member of the Green Lantern Corps, Tomar-Re, as rendered by Mike Grell for a commission drawing. Top right: Grell cover, reproduced from the original art, for Green Lantern #104 [May ’78]. Next page: Top is commission by Mike Grell; bottom is preliminary pencil page for DC Retroactive: Green Lantern—The ’70s [Sept. 2011].

right, so you have to make up your own mind. And, if you have a conscience, you have to act, if you can, on whatever conclusions you come to. And then, you add a few funny hats, and [Denny’s wife] Marifran reminded me that Ollie loved chili—I don’t know where that came from, but it wasn’t a bad little ornament on the tree. Anyway, he was kind of fun to write. Heck, the whole series was kind of fun to write. So those characterizations were partially created the way they were to serve the plot needs. I did not start with characters and then build the story around them. It was the other way, and that was the way it had been done for years. In popular fiction, even if you listen to the old private eye stuff on the radio, there’s very little characterization. It’s an attitude. He’s tough, and he cracks wise. That was generally considered to be enough. We have gotten a little better there, and the problem now is I think a lot of young writers start with the characterization and neglect the plot. Well, no matter how charming this guy is, he has to do stuff. And, if you’re trying to teach this, it’s tricky because, in an ideal world, there wouldn’t be any difference between character and plot. Plot is what characters do, if you want to define it that way. But, in this case, it all came together, and in a time when, as I said, Julie didn’t need to get anybody’s permission. Well, the first thing that I saw in print about the series was in The Village Voice, which was kind of my newspaper. Norman Mailer was one of the editors. And it mentioned the series. It said nothing about Julie, or Neal, or myself, and it’s pretty obvious that some staffer at The Voice was told this thing was happening in comic books, which were cute, but not in anybody’s mind very much. And he probably called DC and asked for the editorial department and maybe got his equivalent at DC who didn’t really know what was going on, and did the best he could. But we were the anonymous figures, and I think if credit went to anybody, it would have gone to our boss.

including Neal Adams and Dick Dillin on Green Lantern. What did you think of Mike Grell’s drawing style (and was it well suited to Green Lantern/Green Arrow)? O’Neil: You might detect some Kirby influence in Mike’s stuff, or some Adams, or you might not. Mike is Mike. Cassell: So do you have a favorite, Green Arrow or Green Lantern? O’Neil: Well, my own politics would of course favor Green Arrow. I didn’t want to make Green Lantern any kind of villain, or any kind of boob, or fool, or foil. So as I conceived the character, he was the best cop you ever met. I once saw in a voting line, on the Lower East Side back in my hippie days, a young… I’ll be quasi-charitable and say a hippie girl… was giving a cop, who was standing, keeping order, a lot of sh*t, and finally he walked over to her and he said, “You don’t know me and I don’t know you. Why are you doing this?” She said, “I never met a cop who was any good.” And he stuck out his hand and said, “Hi, my name is Ralph.” It was that cop that was Green Lantern. A good guy, a nice guy, but at the end of the day, he does what his blue-skinned bosses tell him to do, and he doesn’t very much ever question that. That was one of the things that bothered a lot of us about the way the world was evolving. I think that MAD was one of the most important cultural phenomena of that time because very little was telling kids that you don’t have to believe authority figures. Being obedient and a conformist was considered virtuous back then, and that probably partially explains why we’re in the mess we are. Even if it doesn’t, it’s really not a good idea if you look at history, but that’s what we were told, and that’s what most of the kids probably internalized. Well, I didn’t want to make Green Lantern any kind of fool, as I said, but he had what most people would consider a virtue, and what I considered a flaw, in that he tended to do what he was told. So that was the way that characterization evolved. It didn’t contradict anything that had been earlier established by any of the Green Lanterns. And, as for Green Arrow, well, he was a rebel and he was a humanist. But he had seen enough of life by then to know that just because somebody has a uniform or a title or a PhD, it doesn’t mean they’re

Not long after leaving Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Grell got an opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream—drawing the Tarzan newspaper strip. And his best known association with Green Arrow was yet to come.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Tarzan

Magnus: Robot Fighter. Originally Russ Manning was doing Brothers of the Spear, and that was a back-up in the Tarzan book. My real moment as a Tarzan artist came when I was at San Diego Comicon and I got to meet Russ Manning and Doug Wildey, who followed Russ on the Tarzan comics. I had met them on a Thursday or Friday, and later on, during the weekend, I was sitting doing a commission sketch of Tarzan and the Golden Lion, and Russ Manning walks up, looks over my shoulder, and goes, “Hey, Wildey! Come over here! Take a look at this! See this? That’s how you draw a lion. See how he’s doing that? Your lions look like hairy dogs.” And they proceeded to hover over my shoulders like a pair of vultures, and every line I put down they would comment on. I got so flustered I broke into a flop sweat, and a big bead of sweat rolled off the tip of my nose and dropped right into the middle of the page, and they laughed their asses off. About three years later I told that story to Dodie Manning, Russ’s wife, and Dodie says, “Russell! Were you being mean to this poor boy?” I said, “Yeah, mom, they’re pickin’ on me!” And Russ said, “Yeah, well, later on we’re going to take you out in the alley and kick the sh*t out of you, you little brat!” Cassell: So obviously Tarzan has meant a lot to you ever since you were a kid. How did you get the assignment to draw Tarzan in the newspaper? Grell: Archie Goodwin and Gil Kane had been doing the Tarzan comic strip, and they were leaving it to take over Star Wars. Archie knew that I was a huge Tarzan fan, and not wanting to simply walk away from the strip and abandon the syndicate with nobody to take it over, Archie phoned me one day, and it was the second time in my career that someone phoned me up and asked me if I would mind them recommending me for a job. Of course, would I mind? Comic strips had been my dream in the first place when I became a cartoonist, and it was a Tarzan comic strip. The only strip in my estimation that is the equal to the Tarzan strip, of course, would be Prince Valiant. So I took over. I had all the background that I needed, so there was no question about whether I was the right guy for the job, but it just happened to fall into my hands at that right exact moment. I wrote it and

Tarzan is arguably one of the most recognized literary characters of all time. He was created by Edgar Rice Burroughs and first appeared in the novel Tarzan of the Apes, published in 1912. Burroughs wrote two dozen novels starring Tarzan and the character has been adapted on radio, film, and television, as well as in comic books and newspaper comic strips. The Tarzan comic strip debuted in newspapers in 1929 and continues today (albeit currently as reprints in limited circulation). Some of the stories that appeared in the strip were based on the Burroughs novels, but others were original. Hal Foster was the first artist to draw the Tarzan strip and many others have followed. At the time Grell began on Tarzan, it was a Sunday only strip and Gil Kane had finished his run six months earlier. As noted previously, Grell originally began his drawing career with hopes of having his own strip, but if you couldn’t sell your own idea to a syndicate, landing a classic adventure strip like Tarzan was the next best thing, especially for a fan of the Lord of the Jungle. Grell’s artistic style was well suited to Tarzan, but not all of his comic strip stories met with universal acclaim—some diehard fans did not appreciate seeing Tarzan in Wisconsin—but others applauded the idea of Jane fighting against drug smugglers to protect an injured Tarzan. And Grell used his understanding of how Sunday newspaper strips are printed to produce some very creative layouts, including large sweeping panels and narrow vertical panels that enhanced the storytelling, as he describes in the interview below. Cassell: Let’s talk about Tarzan. I know you were a big fan of the character from when you were a kid. Grell: Absolutely. One of the first movies I remember seeing was Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan the Ape Man. When he did the Tarzan yell, he scared the crap out of me. It was just an amazing character, the imagination that lay behind it. Edgar Rice Burroughs came up with the concept and he created the Ape/ English language. I had a buddy who was like me. We were really original nerds, which means we were just weird. And we could speak Ape/English back and forth to each other. At some point I realized that there was really just a small difference between reality and fantasy, but it never stopped me from continuing to be a huge Tarzan fan. I just enjoy the character, saw all the movies at least once, read all the books probably three or four times each. Cassell: You were reading the comics, too, right? Grell: Yes. The Tarzan comics were being done by… First it was Jesse Marsh back in the early days, and then it was taken over by Russ Manning. Russ Manning’s art was actually the first guy I learned to look for in a comic book. If something was drawn by Russ Manning I would pick it up, which of course led to the

Previous page: Reproduced from a black-&-white printing, Mike Grell’s second and third Tarzan Sunday comic strip (respectively, July 26, Aug. 2, 1981, #2606–07). Above inset: Detail from Grell’s artwork gracing the May 9, 1982 Tarzan Sunday strip, #2647.

Everything was drawn half-page standard, which is three rows of panels, and if you broke them down into small panels, you had basically the equivalent of nine smaller panels. I learned that within those nine smaller panels, there were certain patterns that were always repeated, and once I figured that out, it was possible to create pages where I had vertical panels on a Sunday page. I also had big rectangles, as well, or square panels. Square was something that Hal Foster had done on Prince Valiant, but I think I was the first one ever to do the vertical panels, and how I did it, of course, was by taking that big, square scene that I discovered and putting vertical panels into that. Cassell: I’ve got several of the published Tarzan strips, and I was fascinated by the fact that you had vertical panels. Grell: You never saw it before because nobody figured it out before. It was always possible, but it’s just that nobody had sat down and done the math and the brainwork that was necessary in order to calculate how to bring it about. It was a question of understanding the rules so you know exactly how to break them. Cassell: Well, it’s very effective. I think it enhances the storytelling when you’ve got a variety of panels, or you’ve got this one large, square panel of Tarzan standing there. It did a lot, I think, for the effectiveness of the storytelling. Grell: Well, thank you. I made it a point to vary things as much as possible, and that ability to experiment made it a lot more fun. Cassell: What was your inspiration for the storylines that you wrote and drew in the Sunday strip? Grell: Oh, everything. I started off doing a story featuring the Lost City of Opar. I wanted to go back and do traditional Tarzan stuff.

drew it, lettered it, and did the coloring on it. And while I was doing the color guide for the first Sunday page, I got so excited, the realization struck me that, in a few weeks, this was going to be all over the world, and it was going to be my moment as a newspaper comic strip artist. I got so excited I started to hyperventilate, and then I started to laugh, and finally I just had to go lie down. I couldn’t work any longer. Cassell: I take it at the time the strip was only appearing in the paper on Sunday? Grell: That’s correct. Well, it was also a daily, but it was reprints of the old stuff from the ’50s and ’60s. Cassell: So your continuity was from Sunday to Sunday, right? You didn’t have to worry about what was going on during the week. Grell: Right. Cassell: When you put the strip together, did you have to run it by an editor to get it approved? Grell: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I would script the entire story well out in advance and send the storyline in to be proofed and edited, and then send in the weekly pencils and lettered pages for approval, and once they were approved I would ink it and color it. Cassell: Did you ever run across instances where the editor wanted some type of changes made? Grell: Occasionally. Usually it was along the lines of copyediting my dialogue or cutting down the number of words in the balloons. I learned very quickly that everything that Denny O’Neil had tried to beat into my head very much applied to comic strips. “Less is more.” The real trick was to get accustomed to the idea that you had to throw away a part of the strip every week.

Previous and this page: “Tabloid” and (above) “half” formatted Tarzan Sunday comics page by Mike Grell from Sept. 26, 1982 (#2667).

Grell: Not particularly, because, compared to comic books, you’ve got the equivalent of a page-anda-half a week. And I was producing a page-and-a-half a day. That was my typical output in comics. Cassell: Have you done anything with Tarzan since leaving the strip? Grell: I recently did a story for Dark Horse, sort of a return to Tarzan, actually, called Tarzan and the Gods of Opar. It was a three-part story that I wrote and drew, and it was a chance to revisit the character again, and that was just an absolute kick in the pants. I had a ball with that. It ran in Dark Horse Presents. Cassell: When you’re doing a comic book, assuming it sticks around for a few issues, you get letters coming in, and you start getting some feedback about how it’s received by the readers. Did you ever get any feedback on the Tarzan newspaper strip? Grell: Oh, yes. The Tarzan fans, my lord, they are probably the most rabidly loyal fans in the world, with the possible exception of The Legion of Super-Heroes, and I think if a fight comes right down to it, the Tarzan guys have got the edge. The Edgar Rice Burroughs Circle of Friends they call themselves. They have been so dedicated and loyal over all these years, and it’s because it’s something that they came to love when they were kids, and just like I said with The Legion of Super-Heroes, you’re always going to have that soft spot in your heart for the thing that you loved when you were a kid. Some of them that I met are big businessmen, and one guy’s a retired general, and they get together on a regular basis and are just phenomenal in their support. Once they embrace you, they never forget you. Cassell: I have a T-shirt from one of the conventions that has an image of Tarzan that you drew. Grell: That was probably from the ECOF, the Edgar Rice Burroughs Circle of Friends. I also did an appearance at what was called a “Dum-Dum,” because a Dum-Dum in the Tarzan books is where the apes gather and dance around a big earthen drum under the moonlight. They have an annual get-together that’s called a Dum-Dum, and they bring back guys who were former Tarzan stars, Tarzan artists, and you get to hang out with some really incredibly cool people.

Then I also incorporated things that other people seemed to have forgotten about. For instance, I had one story that took place on Jane’s family farm in Wisconsin. Not everybody knew that there was a Wisconsin element there. Cassell: I didn’t remember that. Grell: Yeah, Jane was from Baltimore, but in the book The Return of Tarzan, it takes place primarily in Wisconsin during a forest fire. At that time, there were two forest fires that were big in the news in Wisconsin. One of them was the Peshtigo Fire, and the other one was the Tipler Fire. My mom was in the Tipler fire. Her family had a place that burned to the ground. Cassell: Oh, no. Grell: She said she spent three days wandering with her little brother and little sister by the hands not knowing if they were orphans or not. Cassell: But her parents survived? Grell: Yup, they survived. They had to do head counts. The older kids had gone off somewhere else to actually help the family move their belongings. Back in the day, there was no cell phone service, and very little telephone service in the area at all. There might be one telephone in a town, so there was no way for people to contact each other. Mom had no idea whether or not her parents had survived, but they did. Cassell: Did you just remember all of this stuff about the Tarzan novels, or did you have to go back and do some homework? Grell: At that point I could probably call all of the details up purely from memory. A few things I did have to look up. There were a couple of words in the Ape/English language that had escaped me over the years, but I still know bits and pieces of it. I probably know more Ape/English than I do my high school Spanish. Cassell: How far in advance did you have to work? Grell: Nine weeks. It’s six weeks for dailies, nine weeks for Sundays because of the time that it takes to do the color separations. Cassell: At that time, were you doing other things, as well? Grell: Oh, yes. I was still doing some work on Warlord, and I was doing Starslayer. It began partway into ’81, and I basically did about two years’ worth of the strip, around ninety-some-odd strips. I left in early ’83 because I was starting up on Sable. Cassell: It was just too much to do Tarzan and Sable? Grell: That’s right. That and the fact that I discovered the syndicate was paying me the same amount that they’d been paying Burne Hogarth in 1963. Cassell: Well, that answers another question I was going to ask you about whether it was a lucrative thing or not. Grell: It was a labor of love. Cassell: Did you ever have a circumstance in which you got behind and needed some help with the strip? Grell: On the Tarzan strip, no, I did all of that myself. On other rare occasions, I’ve had an assistant help me out. Cassell: I’ve talked to other artists who have done strips, and typically most of them seem to have reached some point at which they found it just grueling to keep up with. Did you ever find that?

Grell wrote and drew the Tarzan Sunday strip from July 19, 1981 to February 27, 1983, with the exception of February 13, 1983, which was written and drawn by Thomas Yeates (and two drawn by another artist—see checklist). When Grell left the strip in 1983, Gray Morrow took over as artist on Tarzan. Several of the Grell strips were reprinted in Comic Strip Preserves #4, published by Blackthorne Publishing in 1986, and all are available for viewing online at http://www.erbzine. com/mag22/2292.html. Grell also wrote and drew two original Tarzan comic book stories for Dark Horse Comics. Tarzan The Savage Heart was published in four issues in 1999, and “Tarzan and the Gods of Opar” appeared in three issues of Dark Horse Presents in 2015.

Inset top: Mike Grell submitted this sample Tarzan illustration to the syndicate after being recommended by Archie Goodwin.

Mike Grell Tarzan Storylines

Following is a list of the Tarzan newspaper strips Mike Grell wrote and drew, as well as the original publication dates. (Courtesy of Bill Hillman and www.ERBzine.com.)

Story Title

Original Dates of Publication

Strip Numbers

Return to Opar

July 19, 1981–September 20, 1981

2605–2614

The Mercenaries

September 27, 1981–December 13, 1981

2615–2626

A Wisconsin Christmas

December 20, 1981–March 7, 1982

2627–2638

The Wildlife Artist

March 14, 1982–May 30, 1982

2639–2650

Jane Awakens

June 6, 1982

Strangers in Pal-ul-don

June 13, 1982–August 22, 1982

2652–2662

Space War

August 29, 1982–November 14, 1982

2663–2674

Christmas with Meriam

November 21, 1982 – February 6, 1983

2675–2686

Tarzan and the Crocodile

February 20, 1983–February 27, 1983

2688–2689

2651

NOTES: The Sept. 13 and 20, 1981 (#2613–14), strips were ghosted—against Mike’s desire—by an artist (possibly Frank Bolle) as directed by the syndicate. According to ERBzine, Grell’s strips were lost in the mail, which is why the replacement strips were ghosted. The February 13, 1983 (#2687), strip was written and drawn by Thomas Yeates.

Above: The original art, complete with guidelines for the colorist, for Grell’s Tarzan strip of Sept. 6, 1981 (#2612). Note the innovative panel layout. Pages 66–69: Respectively, Tarzan “tabloid” formatted strips from 1982: Feb. 14 (#2635); June 6 (#2651); June 13 (#2652); and Oct. 3 (#2668).

Starslayer

CHAPTER NINE

Grell: It sure felt like it. Yeah, every copy of the portfolio was signed. Cassell: So Starslayer was your first creator-owned project? Grell: Yes. I was the first artist to sign with Pacific Comics. Jack Kirby was second, and I think Neal Adams was third. Jack’s book came out ahead of mine because Jack could probably write and draw a page while we’ve been talking here. I can’t really tell you when Neal’s came out, or what the success of it was. I just know that Pacific Comics tanked. Cassell: After how long was it? Grell: I got six issues’ worth of Starslayer out of the deal. Cassell: But you retained the rights? Grell: Yes. Cassell: So what happened when Pacific Comics folded? Grell: That’s what enabled me to take it over to First Comics. I was already doing Sable with First Comics, so we relaunched Starslayer over at First. Cassell: I know you wrote two issues at First Comics and then handed it over to John Ostrander, who worked with several artists, including Tim Truman. Do you still own the rights to Starslayer? Grell: Yes, I do. I have since written a screen treatment for it, and who knows? If the world turns exactly right and God’s holding his mouth right one day, maybe I’ll get a movie or TV show out of it. Cassell: Starslayer also had backup stories with other characters, right? Grell: Yep. If you look at Starslayer, you’ll find the origin of the Rocketeer. Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer premiered in the back of Starslayer #2.

Mike Grell has always been prolifically creative, so it is not surprising that his creativity would ultimately exceed the capacity of a traditional comic book company like DC Comics. However, it was DC that unintentionally gave Grell the impetus to seek other pastures when it came to a “Celtic barbarian in the far-flung future.” On the inside front cover of the premiere issue of Starslayer: The Log of the Jolly Roger, Grell explains how it started: “Starslayer began as everything does, with an idea… Then came the task of creating an entire world, a universe of sparkling cities and distant planets, populated by heroes and villains to delight the imagination, an endless progression of model sheets and character studies, spaceship and weapons designs, scrawled on envelopes and paper bags until everything worked and the characters became more than twodimensional and began to live.” According to Grell, that creative process took threeand-a-half years. Cassell: You mentioned that Starslayer: The Log of the Jolly Roger and Jon Sable came about at roughly the same time. Which came first? Grell: Starslayer was first. Cassell: What was the genesis of Starslayer? Grell: Starslayer originated as a concept that I pitched to DC Comics. It was intended as a direct counterpart to Warlord. With the Warlord, I had a modern man in a very primitive society, and with Starslayer, I had a primitive man in an ultra-futuristic world. He’s a Celtic chieftain who gets transported basically into the middle of Star Wars, if you will. A shorthand description would be Braveheart meets Star Wars. And it was actually on DC’s schedule when the Implosion hit in the ’70s and it got shelved. That’s how I was able to get it back. Cassell: What did you do then? Grell: When Pacific Comics was getting ready to launch their lineup, [publisher] Bill Schanes knew that I had Starslayer and he contacted me and asked me if I was up for it, and I said, “Sure.” Cassell: Starslayer actually started with a limited edition portfolio of six black-&-white plates, right? How did that come about? Grell: It was the lead-off for Pacific Comics. Back in those days, before they got into the actual comic book business, they were publishing portfolios. It was fairly lucrative. In fact, it may have inspired the nature of the independent publishing business as it ultimately developed, because portfolios were generally low budget. The expense to the publisher was minimal, and the potential for gain was pretty darned high. Cassell: It was a nice portfolio and I understand it sold out. And you hand-signed all 1,200 copies?

Starslayer served as a forum for several characters that appeared in back-up stories. In addition to the debut of the Rocketeer in #2, #5 featured the second appearance of Sergio Aragones’ Groo and #10 featured the first Grimjack by John Ostrander and Tim Truman. When Starslayer moved to First Comics, the numbering continued with #7 and 8 written and laid out by Grell with finished art by Lenin Delsol. Ostrander took over writing the title with #9, collaborating with a series of artists including Delsol, Tim Truman, Hilary Barta, and Tom Sutton. The title ended in 1985 after a total run of 34 issues. In 1995, Windjammer/Valiant published a “Director’s Cut” of the original Pacific Comics Starslayer, expanded over eight issues. The first and last issues featured new art and all eight featured new covers. A trade paperback collection was published by Dark Horse in 2017, comprising the Valiant series. A signed-and-numbered limited edition Starslayer poster was produced at the same time to promote the book. Starslayer proved to be a valuable learning experience for Grell, since his foray in creator-owned comics was just beginning.

Pages 70 & 71: On left is Mike Grell’s colored illustration of his Starslayer characters, which was used for the cover of a 2017 IDW omnibus collection of the Acclaim/Valiant “director’s cut” version. On the inset right: promotional illustration from 1981 for Grell’s creator-owned series (also used as a plate for the Starslayer portfolio). Previous page: Top is the final two-page spread by Grell from Starslayer #1 [Feb. 1982]. Bottom is another two-page spread from the same issue. This page: Clockwise from above is Starslayer (with S.A.M.) commission drawing; Grell 1981 promotional illustration; and color art commission of Tamara, Starslayer’s bodacious ally.

The Cosmic Exploits of

Premise During the height of the Roman Empire, rebellious and one-eyed Celt Torin Mac Quillon (a name meaning “of the sword”) of ancient Britain defies Caesar’s invaders, which intend to force Torin and his family into servitude. The savage decides to seal his own fate and, rather than live in chains as a slave, the sword-wielding barbarian leaps to certain death toward the enemy spears and, a micro-second before being impaled, the Celtic berserker is somehow transported into the far future aboard the starship Jolly Roger. Inexplicably, he has traversed the eons upon being “chosen to embark on a mission to save an endangered Earth. [The crew] become involved in a cosmic struggle for a series of mysterious amulets that have been seeded on ancient outposts across the solar system” [Starslayer portfolio, 1981].

Main Characters TORIN Mac QUILLON, Starslayer: “Half-breed Scythian” and Celtic barbarian from the days of the Roman occupation of Briton, father of Brann, husband of Gwynyth, and, zapped into the future, now a cyborg space pirate, freedom fighter, captain of the Jolly Roger, and companion of both Tamara and S.A.M. TAMARA, Starslayer ally: “Beautiful” scientist, crew member of the Jolly Roger, descendant of Torin’s wife, Gwynyth, and Starslayer’s fighting companion. S.A.M., Starslayer’s robot companion: The Symbionic Android Mindlink is a mobile computer given to Torin to help him adjust to his new environment. S.A.M. learned English from Humphrey Bogart movies whereupon the monkeylike android adopted a “Bogie” affectation.

Setting THE JOLLY ROGER: A former luxury cruiser that resembles a seafaring Spanish galleon of the 17th century and now a cosmic warship in the far-flung future. The massive spacecraft was, as Tamara describes to Torin, “built centuries ago after interstellar travel had become a simple feat. Some people felt it was more… romantic… to take a leisurely cruise of several days than leaping from star to star at warp speed. They built it for luxury—we built it for war! The weapons were added, and [so too]… the warp-drive engines that the old ones scorned.” [Starslayer #3, June ’82].

Above: Detail from a Pacific Comics house ad in Starslayer #1 [Feb. 1982) of the titular hero in a pose seen repeatedly of the timedisplaced Celtic warrior (and his robotic companion, S.A.M.).

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Whatever one can say about Starslayer, it was a landmark comic book of its day, if but for two important aspects. First, it was among the initial releases of Pacific Comics, the (albeit short-lived) publisher which emerged in those nascent days of the direct market, when newsstand comic book sales were on the wane and comic shops ascending. A testament to his popularity, Grell was the first to sign on with the new outfit, soon joined by no less talents than Jack Kirby and Neal Adams, all producing their respective creator-owned titles. Second, in a back-up story, Starslayer #2 significantly featured the debut of The Rocketeer, Dave Stevens’ delightful ’30s-era adventure series that exposed to the world Dave’s exquisite artistry and was eventually adapted as a well-received Disney movie. On its own merits, Starslayer is an entertaining science-fiction/sword&-sorcery romp, though the creator was, after the initial six-issue run, only intermittently involved with the title. About its genesis, the creator told Comic Book Artist #8 [May ’00], “I got the opportunity from Pacific Comics to create a project. I was approached by the Schanes brothers, Bill and Steve, who had this concept for a new company that would allow people to create and own their own characters, and thereby sharing a larger portion of the earnings on it. You’d keep the copyright… and it was exactly what I was looking for.” He continued, “I had Starslayer originally planned as a DC project, and it was destined to be a direct counterpoint of Warlord; instead of a modern man in a primitive society, I decided to go the other way around and take a primitive man and put him into the middle of a very futuristic society, and watch what happened there. It was actually on the schedule at DC at the time of the Implosion, and it had been announced, but it fell by the wayside. So Steve and Bill knew about Starslayer, and they said, ‘I understand you have a project, and we’d be very interested in having you come over and do it.’” Interestingly, before its comicbook run, Starslayer and company were first seen by Grell fans in a portfolio of limited-edition prints published in 1981. Some of the plates appeared in the subsequent series, which, by 1983, would move to First Comics after the Schaneses ran into insurmountable financial difficulties.

Describing Torin’s co-star Tamara as an “Earth super-agent on a mission to save our solar system,” The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide [’97] cheekily offers, “Why she needs a hairy, middle-aged swordsman is never really explained to anyone’s satisfaction, but she does, and they do, but not without chucking the Earth into the Sun to ‘reignite’ it, which pisses off the Earth’s rulers, who promptly chase them across the universe for the rest of the series.” Confessing he leapt at the chance to join up with Chicago-based First Comics, Grell explained to CBA, “I signed on to do Sable, created the concept for Sable, and agreed that, after that, I’d stay with Starslayer and do the launch with them, write the first few issues for them, and turn it over to the able hands of John Ostrander.” Ostrander would write the title from #9 until its last issue, #34, and also, in its back pages, introduce Grimjack, his co-creation (with Tim Truman) which itself would have a healthy 81-issue run at First Comics. “On an interesting side note,” the website internationalhero.co.uk revealed, “when Jim Starlin was preparing to introduce Dreadstar, his original title for the series (and its main character) was originally meant to be ‘The Starslayer.’ Grell had to inform Starlin that the name was already taken and thus Jim came up with the name ‘Dreadstar’ as a substitute.” Starslayer reemerged in 1995 published by Acclaim/Valiant, a “director’s cut” reprint remastered by Grell, which was recently collected in an omnibus edition by Dark Horse.

Top right: The Jolly Roger in Grell’s twopage spread in Starslayer #3 [June ’82].

This and next page: Mike Grell joined in the portfolio craze of the late ’70s/early ’80s with two editions. First, in 1980, the Warriors: The Mike Grell Portfolio, published by Oracle Enterprises, which featured five color plates (including Sagittarius, seen on next page). Next, in 1981, the Schanes Brothers released the Starslayer portfolio (envelope and the first two plates below), which interestingly preceded Starslayer #1.

Jon Sable

CHAPTER TEN

signing, and then he puts on a pair of nerd glasses, and a Harpo Marx wig, and a fake mustache, and a tweed jacket, and goes by the name B. B. Flemm. When you look at it written out it doesn’t look bad, but when you say it, it’s that stuff that you hock out of your throat when you have a nasty cold. And it was a lot of fun. Cassell: Other than making the character the opposite of Batman, were there other inspirations in creating Sable? Grell: You’re always inspired by the things around you, at least in my estimation. It’s just impossible to live on the planet and not be affected by something or other. I did stories that were similar to the approach that I took later on with The Longbow Hunters and Green Arrow, which was I drew heavily on the headlines. One of the things that Sable did for me, though, was it gave me the freedom to do just about any kind of story that I wanted. I had the high action/high adventure stuff, the African hunter in the urban jungle, and I could do mysteries, murder mysteries. I did one called “The Hard Way,” and I found I had written myself into a corner. Honestly, I was working on part two of a two-part story and I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to solve it. And one day, as I’m sitting there, it was almost as if Agatha Christie had leaned over and whispered in my ear because all of a sudden, there it was. I had the solution. And it was pretty cool. One of the key things that I always did in any of my stories is that, with the exception of one time—okay, maybe two times—I always gave the reader all the information they were going to need. I didn’t spring any surprises on them. There was the one story that I did where Sable is helping out a girl who’s hiding out, working as a stripper. As the bad guy is trying to kill her, she pulls out a gun and shoots the guy right in the face. And Sable asks the question, “Okay, where did you keep the gun?” Because she’s just standing on the stage with her clothes off. One other time Sable has this plush townhouse and he’s fighting with a bad guy and they fall off a balcony on the third floor, land in the swimming pool, and as Sable is being shot at, he dives into the swimming pool and he comes up with an Uzi submachine gun. Where does he get it? While he’s under water he opens his Acme underwater gun safe. I think everybody went, “Oh, okay. We get it.” Where is he going to get a gun underwater?

The year 2018 marks the 35th anniversary of the first appearance of Jon Sable. In a post on his website, Mike Grell credited the late “great white hunter” Harry Selby with inspiring his creation, calling him the “real Jon Sable.” Sable is arguably the best of Mike Grell’s creator-owned projects, and certainly the most enduring. Over the years, it has been a comic book in various formats and multiple publishers, a prose novel, and an ill-fated television show. Grell’s level of involvement in each of those permutations has varied, but it remains the character closest to his heart. And if Mike has anything to say about it, Sable isn’t done yet. Cassell: How did you come up with the idea for Jon Sable? Grell: Oh, that was actually easy. I wanted to do something that would bring out the best in me, and I combined my love of the outdoors with my love of Africa and wrote the kind of stories that I wanted to do. I was a big fan of detective fiction. Mickey Spillane was my hero when I was a kid, and I wanted to do that kind of a story. It was a labor of love right from the start. My overall concept for Sable was really simple. Sable is the opposite of Batman. Messer: Right. Grell: He doesn’t work for the greater good or the common man. He works for money. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you are, if he’s working for you, you’ve got to pay up. That’s all there is to it. He’s a former African professional hunter, game warden, a mercenary, whose family was slaughtered by butchers in a reprisal raid. He goes off his nut, tracks them down mercilessly wherever they are, and slaughters these guys in some really bloody, violent methods. And if all you have left to live for is vengeance, what do you do when your vengeance is done? Sable becomes a drunk. And then he falls in with a pack of mercenaries, and is used and abused, cast aside, and winds up in jail. They threw him out of the country. He was deported back to the United States, where he becomes, basically, a bum on the street until an old friend picks him up, stands him back on his two legs, and he actually tries to rebuild his life, and becomes a children’s author, of all things. His deep, dark secret is that he writes children’s books about a troop of leprechauns living in a fairy mound in Central Park. The only time he ever wears a disguise is when he has to appear at a comic convention or a bookstore

Previous page: Jon Sable in his “battlemask,” rendered by creator Mike Grell. Top: The Complete Jon Sable #3 [’05] cover. Above inset: Sable button.

company. He was the editor there and called me up and gave me the opportunity. Here was my chance to do something completely unique and completely mine. I wasn’t bound to any particular genre. I could do whatever style book I wanted. Cassell: It seems like First Comics and Mike Gold gave you a lot of leeway. Grell: Yes, a lot of leeway. Cassell: And you weren’t constrained by the Comics Code, right? Grell: Oh, we ignored the Code altogether. Sable was one of the books that carried a “mature reader” label on it. Cassell: Did you enjoy having that freedom about the kind of story you could tell? Grell: Absolutely. It made a huge difference. I was only edited— not edited, censored—once, and it was not a happy situation. I had turned in a Sable story where, after two-and-a-half years, Sable and his lady friend Myke Blackmon finally wind up in bed. [#27, “Torch Song”] And, lo and behold, when the final book comes out, my artwork had been redrawn, badly, and somebody had put blankets over them that looked like a sleeping bag to cover up as much as possible. That art has since been corrected in the Sable Omnibus editions that are out now. But originally, it looked like they were wearing a damned sleeping bag. And I wasn’t told. That’s the part that really irritated me the most, I think, is that I was not told until it was already in print. Cassell: Was that Mike Gold’s doing, or somebody else? Grell: I have no idea who made the decision on that. At the moment I blamed Mike, but he was the last person in the world who would ever cave in to pressure. The story that I got was that they had changed printers, and the new printer was the same outfit that printed all the material for the Billy Graham crusade, and it’s a bunch of Midwestern ladies running the line, and they had just had a gigantic collective heart attack over Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg, and, I think, in order to mollify this group, they decided to make the changes on the art. But, of course, they didn’t tell me because they knew that I would have a screaming cow. Messer: It seems like a lot of your original “Iron Mike” strip later translated into your Jon Sable character. Grell: To a certain extent, yes. As a matter of fact, I used one entire storyline from the comic strip for Sable. Waste not, want not. Messer: There’s no such thing as a useless line of dialogue, right? You can always put it in the drawer and go, “I’m going to use that later.” Grell: Hopefully, yeah. Messer: In this case, you used the whole story. Do you remember which story it was? Grell: I don’t remember the title of the story, but it had to do with an old friend of Sable’s who is accused of burglary, and for some reason people start trying to kill him. It turns out the reason why is because before that person was caught up in all of this, they actually did break into the safe, but they mailed the incriminating evidence to Sable. It had to do with a terrorist plot. Messer: That’s right. It was issues #8 and 9 of the original series, as I recall. Grell: It was? Okay. There you go. Cassell: So the initial run of Sable at First Comics lasted for 56 issues, about five years, right? Grell: That would have been the extent of my run on the book. Cassell: But there was another run of Sable at First Comics. Were you involved in that, as well? Grell: No, actually. When I walked away, I walked away for good. The reason was that I was having sort of an ongoing dispute with First Comics over money that they weren’t paying me. My contract specified that they were to have a ten-year publishing option provided it remained in print, and if they

From the same place the coyote got all of his stuff. Acme supplies everybody. Cassell: That’s a great answer. So were the characters in the Sable stories ever based on real people? Grell: Some of them were. I featured Ronald Reagan in the first issue. And there’s a story that centers around the Olympics. In it, Sable is traveling by train across the United States, and he is wounded and knocked off the train, and he’s picked up by a lady and her mule. The lady in the story is Bonnie Shields, who is a friend of mine, and she was known as the Tennessee Mule Artist. Bonnie got a kick out of it because I gave her kind of a fun part in the story, and the only thing that she objected to was the fact that somehow Sable managed to escape. Messer: You were one of the pioneers that jumped ship first and took the plunge, taking the risk of going into the creator-owned industry. Grell: Right. I was the second artist to sign with First Comics. Joe Staton was the first and he was their art director, so he was sort of handy. But, I was fully aware of what we were doing at the time. It was a crapshoot. It could either succeed wildly or blow up in our faces. Within a year I’d wind up in really great shape, or possibly wind up unemployed. Messer: How is it that you chose to bring Sable to First Comics? Grell: Well, how I chose to bring it to First Comics is really simple. My old friend Mike Gold had gone to First Comics to start up the Top left: Original art by Mike Grell for the cover of Jon Sable, Freelance #41 [Oct. 1986].

stopped publishing, the rights would automatically revert to me after a three-year period. So I left knowing full well that it was going to be, ultimately, the death knell. It wasn’t that the guys that followed me didn’t do a good job. Marv Wolfman came on as writer and Denys Cowan as artist. I mean, my god, you can’t get any better than Denys. And Mike Mignola. These guys were all either at the top or approaching the top of their game. So that was really cool about it, that’s for sure. Cassell: It lasted another two years or so. Did you get the rights back after that? Grell: Yes. It was the same situation with Starslayer. Starslayer continued on for several years, but First Comics was doing basically the same sort of thing that they were doing with Sable, and the guys were getting tired of not being paid for their work. Cassell: I don’t blame you. That defeats the whole point of a creatorowned property. Grell: Right, especially when they seemed to have plenty of money for other things. At one point they had a party at Chicago Comicon with basically an open bar, and that upset me to no end because at that point they owed me close to $30,000, and I regarded that as my money they were spending on a party with free booze. So I was out in the hallway grabbing people and telling them to go in there and drink up as much as possible. I wasn’t going to see the money anyway. Cassell: More recently, there have been some additional Sable stories that were done by ComicMix. How did that come about? Grell: I did two complete graphic novels with ComicMix. The first story I did was a six-parter called “Bloodtrail,” which was basically a reintroduction of the Sable character. I invented a story that really covered all the bases, and I think it did a pretty good job of reintroducing the character to an audience that might not have read it before. If anybody has not read Sable and they want to be able to pick up a story and catch

up as far as they need to be, they should pick up “Bloodtrail.” And the next one after that was called “Ashes of Eden.” Cassell: That’s a great one. Grell: That was an interesting story to do because I did a lot of research on it before I tackled the thing. Mike Gold and I worked back and forth for several months developing that storyline. I had to have my details correct. Mike Gold was the one who pointed out that the communication lines, the power grid, everything in New York runs under the Diamond District. I already had a plot in mind to use a nuke to blow up the spot with the diamonds in it, but then I had to figure out how to go about it on a technical level to make sure that it was possible and even conceivable to blow something like this up. In doing so, I researched, basically, what are the necessary components that are required in order to build a dirty bomb. Gold and I had exchanged maybe four or five emails when we realized that we’re probably not the only ones reading these emails, especially when you take into consideration we’re talking about terrorist attacks and dirty bombs. So one day I get an email and it says, “To whom it may concern, you should be aware that Mr. Grell and I work in the comic book business. We’ve been plotting a storyline for Jon Sable, Freelance. You can research us and, honest, we’re good guys,” which was actually a pretty smart thing to do. But that’s part of what goes into creating a good, This page: Imagery from the Sable TV show. Top right is from Amazing Heroes #125 [Sept. 15, 1987]. Center inset and bottom left are cast members (including movie star Rene Russo in her first major role).

I’m taking credit for it. If it hadn’t been for guys like me, Jack Kirby, Todd McFarlane… Credit where credit is due. We took a chance and we did what we felt was the right thing, and it led to the right place at the right time. Messer: Oddly enough, in the mid-’80s, Gene Simmons got involved, and there was a short-lived TV series based on your Jon Sable character. Grell: Gene Simmons’ involvement in Jon Sable was pretty easy to spot. I think Gene was attracted to the face paint that Sable wears for his battle mask and, in ’87, he obtained the rights to the character. Sort of roundabout—he had his agent go to my publisher, and the next thing I know, there is going to be a television series starring Gene Simmons. He played the role of Sable for, I guess, about eight or nine days, until something came up and it was obvious that he was not going to be able to pull it off. So he stepped out, quite graciously, I think, and was replaced by Lewis van Bergen. But then—and Hollywood always does this sort of thing—they felt that they had a better idea of how to do the story than I did. My take was the reverse of the standard comic book, right? Where you have by day the mild-mannered fill-in-the-blank, and by night the Dark Avenger, right? I’d reversed that for Sable, where he’s 24/7 Mr. Blood-and-Guts, and only occasionally the mild-mannered children’s author. And they reversed my reverse. They said, “No. You’ve got it all wrong. What it is, see, by day he lives as a children’s author under this fake name, and by night he becomes the Dark Avenger. This is going to be totally unique in the annals of entertainment.” Messer: Completely defeated your entire intention. Grell: They made it exactly like every other comic book character that had ever existed. Messer: And it didn’t really catch on. It didn’t have the same spirit and the same soul as the books. Grell: No. I will say that when they did the test audience, it rated number one in the 18–35 year old male market. So when did they put it on? They put it on at 8:00 on Saturday night. Messer: The kiss of death. Grell: Yup, inside of two weeks the series had already been canceled. Cassell: It’s a shame they didn’t run it the way you wrote it. Grell: But Rene Russo made her acting debut as Eden Kendall and that was worth the price of admission. When I met her, I told her that I knew she was going to be a big star. And she, a sweet girl, blushed right down to her toenails, and thanked me profusely. I said, “Look, I have nothing to do with it. It’s just a fact.” When she was onscreen, you couldn’t take your eyes off of her.

believable story is that it should be feasible, it should be something that is just possible, barely on the side of the realm of probability, but within the realm of possibility. It wouldn’t have been the first time that we raised eyebrows, either. Years before that, when I was doing the Green Arrow comic book, I was writing and Rick Hoberg was drawing and I did a story where a group of terrorists takes over the Space Needle. Rick being not just a fantastic artist but dedicated beyond belief, if I gave him something that called for a specific location, he was out the door with his camera in hand. He couldn’t wait. He made it a point to be as absolutely authentic as was humanly possible. So off he goes to the Space Needle to take photographs, and one of the employees noticed him and asked him what he was up to, so he told them the truth, “We’re doing this comic book.” And the Powers That Be had a conniption fit. The president of the Space Needle, Mr. S. Needle himself, I’m sure, called Mike Gold and said, “What are you doing? You can’t do this.” And Gold listened to him patiently for a while and then finally said, “I gather from the tone of the conversation, that you believe there are terrorist groups active in the northwest.” And the guy said, “Well, anything is possible.” And Gold said, “I agree. Tell me this. Do you think that it’s possible that a terrorist group in the northwest does not currently know of the existence of the Space Needle, but they’re liable to discover it by reading a comic book?” And the guy said, “Print your f*cking comic.” Messer: I think a lot of people could tell that, given that freedom, you were really writing from a true, inspirational place when you wrote Sable. Grell: Well, I think we all write basically for an audience of one. That’s what writers do. They write the kind of stories that they like to read. Messer: We’re living in a world now where comic books are mainstream, where TV and movies are filled with comic book characters. It took 25 years for that to become the standard, going back to 1989 when the Tim Burton Batman movie came out and suddenly comic books were cool. But you were ahead of your time with Jon Sable, because this had applications that went beyond just comic book pages, and I think people saw that. Before it was cool, you were already doing it. Grell: Yup. I’ve been spending probably all my career trying to drag people kicking and screaming into the 20th century, and I’m still working on that 20th century part. I take a certain amount of pride in being on the leading edge of a lot of stuff. I’m proud of the fact that guys in the industry are getting paid royalties. That never would have happened if it hadn’t been for guys like, well,

Inset top: Mike Grell’s cover painting for the novelization of his mercenary character, Jon Sable, Freelance, published in 2000 by Forge. Next page: Top right is a reproduction of the original art for the last issue of Grell’s Jon Sable, Freelance title, #56 [Feb. 1988]. At bottom are various covers.

Messer: I guess it was a good learning experience. And, of course, Gene Simmons popped back up a little over a decade later, when you had written the novel version of it and had written a screenplay, and you were looking to get it back on track as a major motion picture. Grell: Right. As a matter of fact, Gene phoned me up and said, “Who’s got the rights to Sable?” I said, “I do.” And he said, “Well, I’m producing movies now, and I’d be interested in doing something with the character.” I said, “It’s strange you should say that, because I’ve just finished a screenplay, and I’ve got a novel right here in my hands that I’m in the process of editing right now.” So he optioned the property for a film. Of course, he was never going to make my screenplay, but he hired Steven De Souza, who did Diehard and Commando, and a bunch of other stuff to write the screenplay, and Souza did, I think, a pretty good job. There were a lot of things in there that I would never have done, but to each his own. He had a few rather unique elements that I’m sorry I didn’t think of them. That’s one of those things. But that year there was a pending Screen Actors Guild strike in the works, and everybody was concerned that anything that wasn’t green-lit and basically in front of the cameras by March 15 would not be finished enough before the strike deadline of the first of July to get it out before the first of the year. So there were a lot of things that were rushed into production at that time. That was the year that I’m pretty sure we got such stalwart motion pictures as Beverly Hillbillies and Starsky and Hutch. Messer: Classics. Grell: Yeah. Anything that was related to an old television series, or was a remake of an old movie, was safe material. Somebody was not willing to take a chance or bet their job on something brand new. The Sable screenplay was about 90% there. They felt that it was probably close enough to get a green light, but when they started looking at the volume of work that would have to be done in just a three month period, they decided that it would be better to hold off and wait until October to shoot, until after the strike. And, of course, on 9/11, the towers came down, and Gene lost all of his backing. Messer: Wow. Grell: Yeah. Gene’s backing was all offshore capitalization. Nobody was investing money in the U.S. at that time. They didn’t know what was going to happen next. Messer: So that torpedoed the project right then and there. Grell: Yup. For not only Sable, but four other films that Gene had on his slate. To his credit, he’s always been a staunch backer, and he mentioned Sable in his book and has always said that he would love to see it get done. Cassell: When they were working on the movie, had it gotten far enough that they were talking about casting? Grell: They never got beyond the pie-in-the-sky stage with

casting. They were waiting to see what shook out of the bushes. Johnny Depp was mentioned at one point, actually by me, and they said I think the only way you could get Johnny Depp interested in doing a movie was if you could absolutely guarantee that it wouldn’t make money. There was that time, you know. Cassell: It’s true, before Pirates of the Caribbean. Grell: It was not for lack of skills and abilities, that’s for sure. I doubt that it was the type of movie that Johnny Depp would ever be interested in doing. It’s not his kind of character, I don’t think. Cassell: So if Sable were to be made into a movie today, who would you want to play Jon Sable? Grell: Colin Farrell.

Cassell: Well, it certainly would be nice to see Sable on the big screen. The stories seemed to have an almost cinematic feel to them. Grell: When I was doing Sable, I had a story that was set around Christmas time, and the plot was that there was a gang of terrorists who had taken over a skyscraper, and Sable had to make his way up to the top of a building past all the obstacles they had put in his way. And about six months later, the movie Die Hard comes out. And I said, “Dang it!” I would almost claim that they had copied me except there’s no possible way that they could have read a comic book and gotten a movie made in six months. The same thing happened with another Sable story called “Green Hell,” where he’s working with a lady archaeologist and they’re in a tunnel that gets flooded, and about two or three months later, here comes Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and it had a scene very similar in there. One that I know they actually copied from me was an episode of Magnum, P.I., because Donald Bellisario, the producer, had been working on another vehicle for Tom Selleck, and we sent him Sable. When I saw Magnum renewed for another season on his contract, one of the first episodes that they did was about a lady cat

Cassell: Really? Grell: Yup. He’s my number one pick. Cassell: Why is that? Grell: Because he’s a terrific actor who’s right for the part. He’s the right age, the right shape, and he’s ripe for a good role that would put him in the franchise business. Sable has the capability of becoming a franchise. It just requires a good actor, and after I saw Colin Farrell in the movie In Bruges, where he plays an Irish hit man hiding out with his partner after one of their jobs goes horribly wrong, he’s got the range and the scope. He can do humor, he can do drama, and he’s got a certain romantic quality that the ladies seem to love, and that’s pretty much what Sable needs. Cassell: He’s not who I would have thought, but I can see why you would like him for the role. I am a fan of his. Grell: Yeah, he’s good. There are other things that Farrell has done recently, too. He was in the movie Crazy Heart where he did his own singing. He hasn’t had a lot of commercial success, which is why I think he would be interested in it, and I think he would be more than right for the job. I have high hopes to one day meet Colin Farrell on the set.

Top: A dramatic, double-page spread by Mike Grell from Jon Sable, Freelance #42 [Nov. 1986], reproduced from the original art. Above: Detail featuring Jon Sable from the cover of Mike Grell Sketchbook, Vol. 1, from 2003.

burglar, almost a straight rip-off from Maggie the Cat. Cassell: Oh, wow. Grell: But such things happen. Cassell: I think Tom Selleck would have been a good Sable. Grell: He would have been, but things like that happen in Hollywood on a regular basis. When Pierce Brosnan was all set to sign for James Bond, somehow word got out that he was going to do that, and with less than 24 hours left to go on his contract, NBC found out and they immediately renewed his contract for [TV drama] Remington Steele thinking that they’d be able to cash in on him playing James Bond. But when the movie studio found out, they dumped him. They gave it to Timothy Dalton, and Brosnan had to wait another seven years to play the role. Messer: Are you working on future projects with Jon Sable? Is

there a second novel coming? Grell: Yes. I have a second novel in the works, and I have interest in a few other things. I’m not going to give up. Not by a long shot. When Grell left Jon Sable, Freelance after 56 issues, First Comics relaunched the book with the title Sable, using a new creative team, and it ran for 27 issues. The Sable novel was published by Forge in 2000. The synopsis on the back cover reads: “Jon Sable had it all, including a lovely wife and family—until poachers took it all away from him, killing those he loved and leaving him for dead. But only the civilized part of him died, and a savage instinct and hunger for vengeance survived. Now Jon Sable is ready to even the score … and then some.” The paperback edition bore the additional caption on the front cover, “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture.”

Top inset: Top is one of a set of promotional pin-back buttons produced by First Comics during the ’80s. Above: Action-packed double-page spread from Jon Sable, Freelance #6 [Nov. 1983], drawn (naturally) by Sable creator Mike Grell.

The Double Life of B.B. Flemm Premise

JASON “SONNY” PRATT, Retired stuntman: Pratt is “[Sable’s] best friend is a lonely exstuntman with a drinking problem who attaches himself to Jon and won’t let go” [Tom Stewart, Back Issue #10, June ’05]. Pratt trained Sable in fencing for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

As superstar rocker Gene Simmons puts it, the basic concept of Jon Sable, Freelance, is: “Big game hunter in the concrete jungle.” The series, whose titular character is also a mercenary, bodyguard, and bounty hunter, has adventures, under the guidance of creator Mike Grell, that are a mix of Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming. “The storyline involves Jon Moses Sable, a freelance mercenary, in a high adventure series that takes him around the world,“ Robert Greenberger writes in Comics Scene #9 [May 1983]. In a twist on the Batman/Bruce Wayne formula, Sable retains a secret identity as a children’s book author who scribes a whimsical series of stories about a group of leprechauns who live in New York City’s Central Park.

LADY MARGARET GRAEMALCYN/ MAGGIE THE CAT, Burglar: British aristocrat Lady Margaret had her jewelry stolen by her adulterous spouse and became a skilled cat burglar to retrieve her treasures from her husband’s multiple mistresses. EDEN KENDALL, Literary agent: Though before engaging him as a client she rejects Sable’s autobiography, Eden encourages the writer to expand on the passage where he relates making up bedtime stories for his late children, leading to a literary career. (Eden is portrayed by Rene Russo in the short-lived TV series, the actress’ first substantial role)

Setting NEW YORK CITY: The Big Apple is current home to the merc, and also the center of publishing, a convenience considering his secret career in the publishing business. Sable goes where he is paid to travel, often all about the globe.

Main Characters JONATHAN MOSES SABLE, Mercenary/ Security/Children’s book author: Former Olympic fencing competitor Sable lost his family when they were slaughtered by ivory poachers in Africa. Today, as a gun-for-hire based in New York City, he lives a double life, one where he must sport a blond wig and false mustache to portray in public his alter ego, kid’s book writer Basil Bob Flemm.

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In The Comics Journal #102 [Sept.1985], editor provocateur Gary Groth devoted his entire editorial to slamming Mike Grell’s series, ending the piece, “[W]e may legitimately pose the question: if literacy leads us to charlatanism like Jon Sable, why bother?” Believe you me, in the mid-’80s, plenty of readers bothered with the title, reveling in the pulpish allure of its premise and cleverness of its stories, enough for The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide to assess that the series was “never bogged down by continuity,” and the stories “consistently well-plotted.” Fans of Jon Sable are a decidedly passionate lot. “The real secret to [Jon Sable],” Grell confided to interviewer Alex Fitch in 2015, “is that he’s got a death wish. Having outlived his family, when they were killed, he really regrets not having died with them. So, all this time, he’s been trying to find somebody to put a bullet in his head. And, of course, when it comes right down to it, instead of accepting his fate, he always

MYKE BLACKMON, Illustrator: Sable’s primary romantic interest, though they start off on the wrong foot and the romance is a slow build. She is described as “a six-foot tall woman who is in her early 20s, a terrific artist in her own right” [Comics Scene #9]. JOSH WINTERS, New York Police Dept.: Sable’s “very strong antagonist… a black police captain who detests vigilantes like Sable.” Grell said, “Winters objects like hell to all the good press Sable gets while the cops basically get a raw deal” [CS #9].

winds up fighting because he doesn’t want to admit he’s found something worth living for. He still carries that tremendous guilt around with him and that provides the chief motivation for the character, that drive to get himself somehow eventually killed” [Panel Borders podcast, Feb. 15, 2015]. Referring to the onslaught of “grim and gritty” re-invention of Marvel’s “Man Without Fear,” Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs write in The Comic Book Heroes [second edition, 1997], “Sable was the perfect bromide for the nausea of [Frank] Miller’s Daredevil, a blithe evocation of a conservative America newly contented with its resurgent economy and saber-rattling stance, enjoying its greed and violence while playing at innocence. Ronald Reagan even appeared in its pages, munching jelly beans and giving instructions like everyone’s favorite boss.” Indeed, the 40th President of the United States did make an appearance in Jon Sable, Freelance, in no less than the very first issue. But Grell looked to another continent, albeit through the prism of the “Great White Hunters” of past eras to find inspiration for his mercenary adventurer. The creator told Comic Book Artist magazine, “Jon Sable is a reflection of all the great African adventure stories I’d read when I was a kid, and my dreams of going to Africa and hunting big game. And I suppose a combination of all those things plus the idea that people were—at least I was, at that moment—tired of drawing costumed super-heroes. I was tired of drawing musclebound guys in skin-tight suits, and I wanted to do something else that would allow me to do more stories that dealt with the real world. In order to do that, I needed [to create] a character that broke all the rules, so I did!” [CBA #8, May 2000]. Indeed, Grell, himself a veteran of the Vietnam War and in actuality the highest ranking security-cleared illustrator in southeast Asia, one who was privy to disturbing top-secret briefing material that would haunt him for years afterward, drew upon his own real-world Saigon experience for Jon Sable. “In later years, I wrote a story in Sable that had to do with POWs and MIAs,” he told Comics: Between the Panels [1998]. “To write that story, I immersed myself in the war. For about three months, it was like living in the battle zone again. I used to look up from my drawing board and be surprised by my surroundings.” Grell continued, “I remembered very clearly what it was like to be in the war zone and to read about the protests going on in the United States and to feel like I was betrayed by the people back here. Over the years, I’ve come to regard that viewpoint as totally wrong. The people who stayed here and fought against the war were the true heroes. While working on that story, I had all that come back to me.” That “MIA” story arc, in Jon Sable, Freelance #12 and 13, elicited a strong response from readers, particularly from Grell’s former comrades-in-arms. “Those who appreciated it the most Previous page: Vignette of Jon Sable from the 1987 trade paperback collection cover. Top right: Opening spread from Jon Sable, Freelance #1 [June 1983].

Spotlight

were veterans,” he told Amazing Heroes [#120, July 1, 1987]. “I’ve had dozens of people come up to me and say they were pleased to see it so others could see what they were going through. They related to the characters.” In a hushed voice, Grell added, “That’s probably the highest compliment I have ever received.” Another notable development in the series was the introduction of Broadway performer Gray Adler, perhaps the first openly gay character in mainstream comics, who was Jon Sable’s friend, though first introduced as a gag. “I certainly had no agenda,” Grell told criticalblast.com. “The honest truth is that I was basically going for the joke, because I felt that Sable, being ‘Mr. Macho,’ putting him in that situation, it would be so funny to just watch him squirm. And the joke was when he mistakes Gray for Myke Blackmon’s boyfriend, and she tells him, ‘No, I’m not his type.’ And Sable says, ‘Well, what’s his type? Short, fat, and ugly?’ And she says, ‘No. Tall, dark, and handsome.’ That moment, that was the whole purpose of it.” Adler would stay on to become, in Grell’s estimation, an integral part of Sable. Jon Sable, Freelance ran for 56 issues, ending in February, 1988. “I only left the series because the publisher was not paying me my royalties I was owed and I was tired of having to fight for every cent,” Grell wrote on his website. “At the time, I was offered to revamp Green Arrow for DC Comics and I took it and moved on, knowing that attempts to continue Sable without me would fail, triggering a reversion of rights. Eventually, publication was suspended and all rights reverted to me.” Grell has returned to the character in Shaman’s Tears and with two miniseries published by IDW a few years ago, and, in 2000, the creator adapted Sable into a prose novel, which was optioned and prepped as a movie production in the following year, but investment dried up after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A sequel to the novel, titled Freelance, was planned but never published. Jeff Messer (a major contributor to this very book) has recently written a stage adaption.

Mike Gold

INTERVIEW

Sometimes the people you work with remain simply colleagues in a shared vocation. Other times, such colleagues become good friends. But only on rare occasions do those friendships end up lasting a lifetime. Mike Grell and Mike Gold are fortunate to be that kind of friends. We chose to place this interview with Mike Gold in the chapter on Sable, but as you will see, it touches on a variety of projects the two Mikes worked on together over the years. Jeff Messer: When did you first meet Mike Grell? Mike Gold: I believe it was in 1976. We first met at the Playboy Hotel during the first Chicago Comicon. Messer: Did you connect instantly? Gold: Absolutely. We shared a worldview. And some donuts. Messer: What was the first project you worked on together? Gold: That’s an amusing question. I think it was on Starslayer back in 1978, when it was supposed to be a DC project. But I wasn’t working with Mike directly; I was consulting with the project’s then-editor, Ross Andru. When the DC Implosion happened, Warlord was made a monthly retroactively and Starslayer was cancelled. Mike was late on Warlord due to that retroactive monthly promotion; your classic “good news/bad news” situation. We did some work together on Starslayer, but not on an editorial basis. When First Comics happened, we started working on Sable with plans to bring Starslayer over from Pacific. Mike wrote the first two for First Comics, and we brought John Ostrander in to follow Mike. I believe it was John’s first ongoing monthly gig. Messer: You were a founding father of the independent comics revolution, and a founder of First Comics in the early ’80s. Gold: Yeah? I demand a blood test! Messer: Talk us through how all of that happened, and why you brought Mike Grell into the fold as one of the primary players. Gold: That’s easy. Mike was a good friend, a neighbor if you perceive a 300 mile drive neighborly (I’ve driven further for good barbecue), a major talent in the medium, and a guy who knows how to tell a story. Messer: It was revolutionary what happened, and it clearly paid off, changing the industry forever. What was it like in those early days, and did you think it would be as successful as it was? Gold: We sure hoped so. It was a fun time. We’d set terms for creators that were revolutionary at that time, and DC and Marvel went about two-thirds of the way to match them. In some cases, that backfired on them: they had been told in the past that DC and Marvel couldn’t afford to do things like offer royalties and, faced with some real competition for the first time in about 25 years, they flipped in a heartbeat. So a lot of talent started asking why that couldn’t have happened sooner. We’re still waiting for that response. But, it turns out it had happened sooner. Guys like Bob Kane, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, and William Marston got deals like that back in the 1940s. Messer: Tell us what you remember about the origins of Jon Sable? How involved were you in the creation process with Mike Grell? Gold: Mike drove down from the northern forests of Wisconsin and plopped a handful of sketches on my living room carpet, all

the while explaining the concept to me. I asked a lot of questions, we had a wonderful development conversation, and then we had a deal in principle. Jon Sable Freelance was exactly what I was looking for as our third project: a brand new series by a major talent doing something that was outside of his perceived wheelhouse at that time—Mike was known for super-heroes (Legion, Aquaman) and SF/fantasy heroes (Warlord, Savage Empire). Sable was way outside of those perimeters and we had no reason to believe it would be a big success, except for the obvious fact that it was the best thing Mike had done to date. At least, in comics. Messer: Is that the process you guys use on every project? Gold: It’s been a while since we’ve developed a new project, and the latest is a three-pager for a charity book—but I wrote it, and Mike drew it! Our process, though, has been to talk on the “telephone” (they were popular back then) and blither out about six months worth of plots so we knew the direction of the series, and then sort of back-fill the first story in the batch which, usually, was a two- or a four-parter. We’d make midcourse corrections as necessary. With projects like Sable and Green Arrow, occasionally real-world realities would raise their extremely ugly heads and we would make changes or delay stories as appropriate. Messer: You told a story once about how something you did in real life ended up being a major part of a Jon Sable storyline. What was that? Gold: Yup. That part was true. I played a role in the 1969 POW

Gold: Not for Howard; he wanted to move on to other things. Mike always had lots of great ideas percolating as well, and it’s not hard to entice a creator to move on to something new, bright, and shiny. By that time I was senior editor at DC Comics and I wanted to resurrect Green Arrow. Mike didn’t want to work for DC back then; there had been some minor animus as he was leaving Warlord years before. So I said to him two words: Urban Hunter. And he changed his mind. Of course, this was before Beetlejuice, so I only had to say it once. Messer: Books like Jon Sable helped lead to DC’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, both of which caused massive industry changes. Was this a part of the discussion when DC and Marvel started working to actively lure talents like Grell back to their stables? Gold: The timing was a bit different. DC had already started working on Dark Knight and Watchmen and, in fact, Longbow Hunters originally was supposed to be a six-issue miniseries. When I saw how DC was packaging Dark Knight Returns, I suggested we go into that format, first to editorial director Dick Giordano, and then to Mike. Both were enthusiastic. I daresay that DC wanted as much top talent as they could get, but neither Mike nor Howard “returned” to DC’s stable. They signed on for individual projects and were free to do whatever they wanted outside of those projects. They couldn’t be taken off a project in order to become the new guy on Justice League or whatever. They were contractors who had earned the right to those freedoms. Messer: When you went back to DC as an editor, all those guys followed. That speaks highly to your skills, talents, and you as a person. Do you have illicit photos of all of them in a First Comics hot tub party gone awry, or are you just one of the best damned editors and friends in the business? Gold: Well, of course I agree with your observation. Some talent, though, believe it’s better to simply do the project than it is to argue with me. Strong-willed is just another term for assh*le. Messer: How did The Longbow Hunters come about? Gold: I always liked Green Arrow, at least since the Denny

release during the Vietnam War. At that time, the Hanoi government wanted to release a bunch of prisoners as a sign of good faith, as the peace talks that began the previous year had stalled out. But they were unwilling to release those POWs to the U.S. government; instead, they wanted to work with the U.S. anti-war movement. And that’s what happened. My role was to help get our “negotiators” to Hanoi, which was difficult as a couple of them were on trial, the Conspiracy Trial to be exact, and their bail arrangements did not include travel to North Vietnam. We knew the trial judge, Julius Hoffman, wouldn’t agree to a change, so we geared our efforts to the appellate judges. I was on the defense staff and I wrote the letters asking for permission and explaining why getting American POWs released was a good thing. Later on, completely unbeknownst to either the U.S. or the Hanoi governments at that time, some of the POWs who were not released wrote letters to their families and we helped get those letters out and into the hands of our soldiers’ loved ones. Essentially, what Mike wrote and drew was accurate—yes, I really did look like that at the time. Messer: You worked with a number of others, notably Howard Chaykin on his American Flagg book. How was it working with Howard versus Mike (and others) as an editor? Gold: The dynamic with every creative team is different and unique. Howard and Mike are both master storytellers, and I put a lot of faith into their instincts. Howard designed Flagg as a 12-issue mini-series, so we knew where it started, where it ended, and had a good idea of what to do in-between. With Mike, we structured Sable as an endless series of story arcs with sequential character development providing the long-term continuity. Very different approaches, each with their own needs. Both guys are total professionals, both are remarkably short on ego when it comes to professional collaborations, and both have a sense of humor that is compatible with mine. Messer: What happened at First Comics after a few years that caused Grell, Chaykin, and others to step back from their own creations? Chaykin left American Flagg as artist first then writer, as did Grell with Sable. That must have been a hard decision to make for them.

Previous page: Mike Gold, one-time editor at DC Comics and First Comics, who worked with Mike Grell on myriad projects. From back when Starslayer was first considered by DC Comics through Jon Sable Freelance (seen above in commission drawing), into The Longbow Hunters and Shaman’s Tears, then a brief Sable revival and up into the present day with a collaboration to benefit Planned Parenthood, Gold has worked with Grell over the decades.

bow and arrow himself. Messer: I always felt like The Longbow Hunters and some of the early Green Arrow storylines were perhaps previously intended for Jon Sable, and were repurposed for the new edgier GA title. Am I crazy or am I onto something? Gold: Well, I can see where you’re coming from and you’re not crazy, but you are mistaken. Nothing we had ever discussed for Jon Sable Freelance wound up in Green Arrow, and I don’t think it would have worked as a transplant. Sable was James Bond in a rented tux; Oliver Queen was Peter Pan. A rather geriatric Peter Pan, and we purposely made him one of the older heroes in the DCU at the time. Black Canary was the adult, even though she was quite younger than he was. Messer: Was it strange seeing Sable made into a TV show around the same time Mike Grell left the title? Gold: No, but it was kinda strange seeing my pals Rick Obadiah, Rick Oliver, and Kathy Kotsavas in that last scene, the funeral scene. By this time I already had worked on movie and TV transitions starting with Superman: The Movie, so it wasn’t weird. The show also wasn’t very good. Messer: How much did you know about the whole process of the TV show getting optioned, then made? Did you or Mike Grell talk about what they wanted to do? Were you consulted at all? Gold: By the time production had started I was back at DC Comics, but I believe Mike was consulted. Messer: What was your impression of the TV show when it aired? Gold: My initial impression was “ick.” Second was “You mean Gene Simmons was actually worse than Lewis Van Bergen?” But, then again, even Gene didn’t like Gene’s work on the pilot. Sable was a no-brainer: it was exactly like many of the great action series from the 1950s. Have Gun, Will Travel, without Paladin’s “I can get you from San Francisco to Texas before the commercial break” magic horse. It was T.H.E. Cat. It didn’t need special effects or any such enhancements. In other words, I don’t think the producers had a clue what made Jon Sable Freelance work. Grell’s screenplay is much, much better. Messer: What were conversations with Mike Grell like after the TV show failed? Were you still confident that it could be done right on TV or the big screen? Gold: I’m confident it can be done right in either medium. The type of character development we have on television today, particularly on non-commercial broadcast platforms, is fantastic and Sable would fit right in. Mike would love to see it happen as a movie, but I think there’s too much good stuff in the back story to squeeze into a two-hour film. A 13-part streaming series, you betcha. Messer: There has been more than one attempt in the past 20 years to get Sable made into a movie. Have you been aware of those?

O’Neil/Neal Adams days—although Jack Kirby’s run a decade prior to that was great fun. Mike had drawn GA before and for quite some time, and when I wanted to bring the character to the forefront he was the only guy I thought of. What we had been doing in Sable, in terms of establishing a real-world political and emotional environment, was not only consistent with what had been going on with the Green Arrow character the previous couple years but, given what we had just been doing, we could double-down on that environment and use that as the backbone for the series, the “Urban Hunter” direction. Again, Mike Grell was the perfect guy for the job. He also was pretty good with a Top left: A notable story arc in Jon Sable, Freelance, was “MIA,” #12 and 13 [May, June 1984]. Cover for #12, repro’ed from the original art.

Gold: Yes, and I was involved in a couple of them. Spent a lot of time with Gene Simmons, who really wanted to produce the movie. Might have been interesting, but KISS went on tour about 30 years ago and they have yet to come back from it. Messer: When Mike Grell wrote the Sable novel, did he consult with you as his longtime friend and editor? Gold: No. He had an editor at the publishing house, but it was all based upon work that we did together. I’ve edited a few novels, including one about two years ago, and the experience is okay but nothing like working in the visual media. Messer: You have continued to work with Mike Grell on projects long past the heyday of you both being comic revolutionaries and legends in the field. Why do you guys still do so much together? It seems like you like each other or something. Gold: Mike is family. I’d take a bullet for family. Amusingly, Mike would fire a bullet for family. So I guess we’re compatible. Messer: How many projects have you guys planned or discussed that we have yet to hear about or see? Gold: Possibly something like 100. At our age I doubt we’ll get to them all. Messer: I think I remember reading or hearing, back in the ’80s, that Mike Grell had in mind a final Jon Sable graphic novel that would tell the final story of Sable. Am I just entertaining my own fanboy notions, or was this a real thing? Gold: I don’t recall such an animal, but I think many writers think along those lines. Robert Kanigher had an idea for a 500 page Sgt. Rock graphic novel (I think he called it an annual) wherein Rock would die on the last panel of the last page at the last second of World War II. That didn’t happen, obviously, but the prospect of 500 pages of Kubert and/or Heath still excites my inner-fanboy. Messer: Sable, for my money, is the definitive work of Mike Grell, and you as his editor. Why has it endured so long? Gold: Because we keep on reprinting it, I guess. When I do conventions—and I just did a hell of a lot of them—I get people of all ages asking me to sign Sable. We must have done something right. Personally, I love working with Mike because of his innate ability to be a “campfire storyteller.” That’s timeless, and for the reader it’s a nice switch from the überangst prevalent in contemporary comics. Messer: We’ve seen far too little of Sable in the past decade. He came back in Shaman’s Tears in 1995, then got his own mini-series in 2005, and again in 2010 (though it ran online with ComicMix first). When will we see a new Sable mini- or ongoing series? Gold: I don’t know. I’d love to work on another story, and we’ve got a few plots we’ve talked about over the ages. I still remember them, so they must be worthy of revisiting. Messer: ComicMix was a great idea, when it launched, and landing Sable and Grell for one of the series was genius. I also loved Demons of Sherwood. Tell us about how that whole thing came about, and will we see those online serialized comics from ComicMix again? Gold: I can’t say. As I’m writing this, I am 24 hours away from leaving ComicMix after almost 12 years. Mike owns Sable, and it is not ComicMix dependent in the least. There’s always hope. Messer: Over your career with Mike Grell, what has been your favorite project?

Gold: A dinner we had in Chicago with about 20 people, including the great Del Close. Mike gave us the best spit-take in the history of that art form. I wish it was filmed. One to the best nights of my life. Messer: What is the one project you are most proud of having worked on with Mike? Gold: Tough question. Probably Mike’s anti-white supremacist story in Sable. He literally put his life on the line for that one. Messer: What is next for Gold and Grell, the Iron Mikes? Gold: Well, let’s see. We’re both on Medicare now… Our next project will be published in a 300-page hardcover anthology called Mine!, which is a benefit for Planned Parenthood. It’s a three-page story that I wrote, Mike drew, John Workman lettered, and Adriane Nash edited. I’m really proud of that one. A solid team-up for a worthy cause. It is supposed to ship before the end of the year. This page: Jon Sable, Freelance, was among the (ahem) first titles— along with E-Man and Warp—published by First Comics. Top right is drawn by Bruce Patterson; inset center is by First art director Joe Staton.

Previous and this page: Various Jon Sable, Freelance-related sketches and covers by Grell.

Sable TV Show Episode Guide Debuting on ABC on Nov. 7, 1987, the Sable television show (seen on Saturday nights) was produced by Gary Sherman and starred Lewis Van Bergen, Rene Russo, Ken Page, Holly Fulger, and Marge Kotlisky. The final episode aired on Jan. 2, 1988. The TV production made several major changes from the comic book, including:

EPISODE 2: “HUNT” Nov. 14, 1987 Written by Steve Feke, Gary Sherman, and Allan R. Folsom; directed by Ron Rapiel PLOT: The son of a man Sable killed in Africa is determined to hunt him down and kill him. A reporter contacts Sable with this info and pretends to help Sable find the man. As it turns out, the reporter is really the man who is trying to kill Sable.

• Sable is the secret identity and Nicholas Fleming (not B.B. Flemm) is the real-world persona. He works in Eden’s office alongside her, with sassy secretary Cynthia between their offices.

ASSESSMENT: Apparently Sable has sworn off using bullets and killing, and this episode shows him being tested in his resolve. The rogue FBI agent returns, from behind bars, to consult with the man hunting Sable, but he is not seen again after this episode.

• Sable has a blind computer whiz sidekick named Cheesecake, who eats cheesecakes and carries a hand-held tape player with a laugh track that he plays when he makes jokes.

STAND OUT MOMENTS: Sable is tricked into an abandoned building that is a maze of traps, which lead him to a room where the death of his family in Africa is recreated with mannequins. This is the closest we come to seeing the “origin” story on screen. Sable uses a cell phone in one scene. This being a very early mobile phone, shows how wealthy he must be, as well as being funny to watch now. It is literally as large as a brick. The final confrontation is in a large botanical garden setting, which is pretty cool to watch.

• Sable and Cheesecake met as soldiers in Vietnam, even though Sable was a Vietnam vet, but not a combatant in the original stories. • There is no Sonny Pratt, no Josh Winters, and no Grey Adler. • Myke is portrayed as an overly flamboyant and ditzy young artist.

TRIVIA: Tom Amandes stars in an early career role as the man looking for revenge against Sable. Currently he plays Arrow villain The Calculator on the CW Network’s Arrow TV show.

• After avenging his family’s murders, Sable vowed to never kill again. PILOT EPISODE: “TOY GUN” Written and directed by Gary Sherman

Nov. 21, 1987 EPISODE 3: “EVANGELIST” Written by Jim Trombetta; directed by Robert Becker

Nov. 7, 1987

PLOT: A missing orphan and a murdered worker from the orphanage lead Sable to discover the church run orphanage is selling children to wealthy couples looking to adopt.

PLOT: Sable is hired by a wealthy toymaker who is being blackmailed. His granddaughter has been kidnapped and they want him to commit suicide by jumping off his balcony by the end of the week. He hires Sable to either find his granddaughter, or push him over the balcony if it comes to it.

ASSESSMENT: This is too much of a standard plot from something like Spenser for Hire and The Equalizer. It feels too much like a stereotypical ’80s private eye show plot. Easily one of the weakest episodes.

ASSESSMENT: There are lots of twists and turns, including a plot about a rogue FBI agent who is looking to make plastic guns through the toy factory. It isn’t a bad plot or episode. Sable (played by Lewis Van Bergen) is mysterious and brooding, and plays the role well, in spite of being too tall and lanky, and having incredibly long hair (possibly because Gene Simmons of KISS was to play the role originally, after having been instrumental in the development of the show). Lara Flynn Boyle is the kidnapped granddaughter (an early role for her), and Rene Russo makes her acting debut as Eden Kendall.

Nov. 28, 1987 EPISODE 4: “SERIAL KILLER” Written by Judy Burns, Steve Feke, Gary Sherman, and Michael Halperin; directed by Gary Sherman PLOT: Women are being stalked and killed in the park. Sable is being lured into the killer’s web, and answers an ad that brings him face to face with the killer’s next victim. The killer challenges Sable to save her before it’s too late. ASSESSMENT: Cat and mouse episode that is mostly clever, but has some glaring problems. First, the color palette overdoes it with neon colors against nighttime in Chicago scenery. It feels like it is dark all the time, but then when we see lights, they are garish. Perhaps the design was put in place to give a “comic book” look about it. This aesthetic is consistent throughout the series, but really seems to stand out more here. There are romantic sparks between Sable and the woman who is caught between Sable and the killer. A hot young author tries to steal Eden away from Sable. This could have easily been too much like Evangelist and felt like a re-tread of Spenser for Hire or The Equalizer. It avoids that narrowly, and shows potential for the show. However, the killer is far too melodramatic in how he is played and presented.

STAND OUT MOMENTS: Sable gets the drop on the FBI agent in a snow-covered park, wearing a white jumpsuit. This is a look that we never saw in the comics, and was very effective. Sable, as Fleming, goes to the toy factory, and gets Mr. Waterston in a dark room where he pretends to be knocked out by Sable. He then shines a light in Waterston’s face and interrogates him as Sable. When the lights come on Fleming gets up and says, “Who was that masked man?” TRIVIA: Some shots of Sable at night are actually Gene Simmons, who started filming in the role, before producers decided to replace him. If you look closely, you can tell, based on Simmons being bulkier than Van Bergen.

EPISODE 5: “COPY CAT” Dec. 5, 1987 Written by Arthur David Weingarten, Steve Feke, and Gary Sherman; directed by Robert Becker

EPISODE 7: “MOB” Jan. 2, 1988 Written by Ron Koziol and Steve Feke; directed by Gary Sherman PLOT: Perhaps it was meant to follow Sable’s emotional reunion with his stepmother in the previous episode or perhaps it was an attempt at a soft reboot of the show, which fell in the ratings after the pilot. Either way, Sable is now mask-less, and looking to get his life on more solid footing. This is interrupted when an old pal runs afoul of the mob. Fortified in a security-laden apartment, he asks Sable to help clear his name when a mobster is robbed and only a handful of thieves could have pulled it off. Sable agrees to help, only to end up pulled into a web of lies that ends up getting him killed. That’s right, Sable is gunned down. Or so we are led to believe. The episode ends graveside with people who he had helped mourning Sable. Fleming and Eden pay their respects, and a vow that “Jon Sable isn’t dead.”

PLOT: Someone is dressing up as Sable and actually killing people in the streets of Chicago, in the name of justice. Of course, Sable doesn’t use a loaded gun (one of the worst aspects of this version of the character) and has to find out who is pretending to be him and bring the vigilante killer to justice. ASSESSMENT: A weak episode that does little to move the characters beyond a generic ’80s action hero show. TRIVIA: Neil Flynn (of TV shows “The Middle” and “Scrubs”) appears in an early career role as a security guard. EPISODE 6: “WATCH DOGS” Dec. 12, 1987 Written by Steve Feke and Gary Sherman; directed by Kees Van Oostrum

ASSESSMENT: It tidily wraps up the series with an ending. Most shows that get cancelled don’t get the chance to end things so cleanly, if that’s what they were doing. One can only imagine that they had hoped that Episode 8 would be a “return of the hunter” or some such re-branding move to jumpstart the show’s ratings.

PLOT: Cheesecake and a friend get mixed up with a neighborhood watch group that turns out to harbor racist tendencies. When Cheesecake and pal decide to call out these thugs, said thugs don’t take it too well, and decide to take care of the duo before they can make problems. Meanwhile, Sable’s stepmother is dying in a hospital and he rushes to her side, despite their difficult and estranged relationship. At her bedside, they make peace with the past, and connect over the mistakes that they made, and how they missed opportunities to know each other better. Sable reveals more about his family to her.

OVERALL SUMMARY: While the series strays far from the core concepts that made Sable an attractive property to bring to the screen, the approaches employed by the producers aren’t bad taken on their own. Perhaps it was a lack of faith by ABC to bring a fully authentic Sable to screen, or perhaps they couldn’t get past it being a comic book based show on their network. Networks were not taking comic books seriously at the time, and even though ABC shouldn’t have approached it as just a comic book property, they did, and that’s what ultimately hurt the show. When you look at how seriously and respectfully comic properties are treated in today’s TV and film markets, you can’t help but think that Sable would be a huge hit today, and likely more true to the characters and concepts of Mike Grell.

ASSESSMENT: The familial subplot is wonderfully written in comparison to the incredibly inferior main plot, and delves deep into characters and relationships. Of all the scenes in most episodes, this one felt more inspired by the source material when it veered away from action and got more personal.

Above: KISS frontman Gene Simmons was originally cast as the titular player in the ABC television adventure show Sable, based on Mike Grell’s comic book series. Before the role was recast, these promotional pix of Simmons were taken before the Chicago skyline in February, 1987.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Longbow Hunters On more than one occasion over the course of his career, Mike Grell was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, to be given an opportunity to do something different, unusual, extraordinary. And he took advantage of that opportunity to change the landscape of the comics medium, setting a new standard for generations to come, and cementing his place in comics history. The penultimate example of that good fortune for Grell was The Longbow Hunters. Cassell: How did The Longbow Hunters come about? Grell: Well, from the time that I left DC Comics, I had done Starslayer at Pacific Comics, and then when Pacific Comics tanked, another company called First Comics was established. They were based in Chicago, and the editor at First Comics was Mike Gold. Mike and I worked together on Sable, and I also brought Starslayer over to First Comics. I had been doing Sable for several years over there, until the relationship deteriorated with the publisher. Mike Gold then left First Comics, and he phoned me up and said, “Look. Is there anything over at DC Comics that you like well enough to bury the hatchet and come back to work over here? Any character that you like well enough?” I said, “Well, I always felt that I had done such a crappy job on Batman in the ’70s that I’d like to have another crack at it.” But I had just run into Frank Miller the week before and, over dinner, Frank told me his entire plot for The Dark Knight Returns, and he had just finished writing, I think, the first issue. And I said, “I know Frank’s working on The Dark Knight Returns, and when he’s done with this, you can put a period at Previous page: Grell redesigns for the Green Arrow, 1986. Right: Green Arrow (and just plain Arrow) through the ages.

times, and that worked out pretty well. The rest of the story I based on news events and stories that were in local newspapers. I made a bunch of changes to the Green Arrow character. For starters, I removed him out of the mythical Star City and into Seattle, Washington. The reason for that was twofold: one was that I wanted to put him in a real world city so that people could read my stories and think that it was something that was happening in the real world instead of something that happens on Planet Mongo. I had an ongoing discussion with people at DC when they were all flummoxed with the idea that my continuity didn’t fit into any of the standard DC Comics continuity. There were no bug-eyed monsters, no space aliens, no super-powers in The Longbow Hunters or Green Arrow. When Hal Jordan appeared, it was as Hal Jordan, not as Green Lantern. The friendship and the relationship were still exactly the same, but there was no mention of him being Green Lantern, having this magical, powerful ring. I kept everything as rooted in the real world as possible, which then brought about a couple of other changes. But, the choice to make it Seattle instead of someplace else was actually pretty simple. I was born and raised in a tiny little town in northern Wisconsin, 100 miles north of Green Bay, population, I think we had about maybe 1,200 or 1,500 people in that county. So the only cities that I was familiar with were New York, where I had worked, and Chicago, where I had gone to art school. I had already done New York as the backdrop for Sable. I didn’t feel like I wanted to do it again. Chicago? I’m going to say it’s just not as exciting, even though it’s an international port of call, it doesn’t have all the elements that Seattle has. Seattle is on the coast. It’s surrounded by mountains. It’s got the ocean. It’s got everything you can possibly imagine. It’s close to Canada, an international port of call, and everything else, plus it’s got a really

the end of the Batman sentence for the next 20 years.” Well, I’m off by, what is it, 10 years now? I mean, we’re 30 years from The Dark Knight Returns. But I was right about that. Gold said, “What about Green Arrow?” And I said, “Well, Green Arrow was always my favorite comic book character, and still is.” And he said, “Think about this: Green Arrow as an urban hunter.” Six words: Green Arrow as an urban hunter. And that is the entire basis for The Longbow Hunters and the continuing Green Arrow series. It was inspirational. I had done a story for Julie Schwartz, a spec plot for a Green Arrow story years before that involved a female counterpart to Green Arrow. I was going to call her the Black Arrow for lack of anything better. The character was a survivor of the Holocaust, and she was basically going around tracking down Nazi war criminals. She had been a child in one of the camps. You’ve got to remember, at the time it was probably 1974, so it wasn’t that far beyond World War II. So it was entirely possible that a woman 35 years old could be a Holocaust survivor. And Julie was in a rather heavy-handed mood that day, or so I felt, and said, “No, I’ve got another idea. What it is, it’s not a girl. It’s a young boy. And he’s not using a bow and arrow. He’s using a sling, and he’s a reincarnation of King David.” I kind of shook my head and said, “Look. If that’s the story you want to tell, get somebody else to write it, but I don’t want to write that story.” So I put my story in a file drawer, and after my conversation with Mike Gold about coming back to DC and doing Green Arrow, I pulled it out and revised it. And that became the source and inspiration for the Shado character in The Longbow Hunters. Updated, changed around to create a character who fit into the This page: More costume redesigns by Mike Grell produced as he was preparing the mini-series Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters [1987].

particular guy a background that led him back to being a tunnel rat in Vietnam. And I did another angle on the story that involved the CIA and a drugs-for-guns plot that actually beat the Oliver North/Iran-Contra scandal into print by six months. I got a phone call from a New York radio station wanting to know if I’d be willing to go on the air live and talk about how it was that I managed to break that story six months before it hit the news. I said, “Sure,” so they got me on the line, live on the radio and said, “So how did you come up with this?” And I said, “For starters, I had a military background, and I’m familiar with certain machinations of the intelligence community. But, basically, the truth is, all I did was I took the general situation, plugged in all the players, and then asked myself one question: what would be the stupidest thing these guys could possibly do if they were dead certain they were going to get away with it and never be caught? And that’s what I wrote.” Cassell: I think one of the other differences in The Longbow Hunters was that you didn’t refer to the character as Green Arrow. Was that also part of making it more realistic? Grell: Yeah, it was actually. And I always thought that the name was stupid. Now, this is pure speculation on my part, but I think

cool cityscape. It’s just a great spot. The other thing that it has, of course, is an abundance of rain, which is why I put the hood on the character. I changed the costume for practical reasons because you’re not going to be running around with bare arms in Seattle in the wintertime. You just aren’t. It’s not real cold, but generally in the low to mid-40s, and from September until May, you can bet you’re going to get a lot of rain. It doesn’t rain all the time; it only feels like it does. So that was another change that I made. The reason for the particular look of the costume is that when somebody reads a new comic for the first time, or picks up an issue of a comic book for the first time, and they don’t recognize the character, they might get turned off. I wanted somebody who had read Green Lantern/Green Arrow in the past to pick up the book and recognize, “Oh, this is Green Arrow with a new costume.” The color patterns, light green, dark green, the tunic, the boots and everything else were basically the same except that he had sleeves on his costume. Then came the storylines, and I drew on a lot of stuff. Part of the general plot of The Longbow Hunters has to do with a serial killer, and there were several quite famous serial killers active in the United States around that time. I gave this

Top: Oliver Queen and Grell creation Shado face off in this two-page spread from Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters #3 [Oct. 1987]. The graphically violent mini-series was a controversial one in its day and Grell’s refinement of the Green Arrow character is one that has stood the test of time.

I’m pretty accurate. Green Arrow was created in 1941, and it was after the Robin Hood movie. So [The Adventures of] Robin Hood comes out in 1938, hits the movies around the country probably throughout 1939 because sometimes it took six months for movies to make their way from place to place back then. And the Robin Hood movie was extremely popular. Well, there was another great classic title called The Black Arrow, and I think the idea was that they were going to try and combine the image of the Black Arrow with Robin Hood and make it Green Arrow. That’s what I think. And it just struck me as a stupid name. So I only used that name one time in print, and the rest of the time I just ignored it. In fact, I got rid of the mask as soon as I could, because, let’s face it, just because you can’t see somebody’s eyebrows doesn’t mean you’re not going to recognize the rest of their face, especially if he happens to have a blonde moustache and a goatee! The idea that he was fooling anybody just seemed a little on the ludicrous side. It’s one thing if he’s in the same DC Universe with Green Lantern. Green Lantern’s got the ring, he’s got the mask, and everybody just goes, “Okay, a masked hero kind of belongs there.” Back in the old days, somebody asked Julie Schwartz, “So where does the Warlord fit into the scheme of things? Where does The Longbow Hunters fit in the scheme of things?” And Julie said, “We have Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-Prime, and Earth-Grell.” And they said, “What’s on Earth-Grell?” And Julie pointed to me and said, “Him!” Cassell: One of the other distinctions about Green Arrow in that story was that he killed people. Grell: Yes, he did. Denny had written a story years before where Green Arrow accidentally kills a guy and basically goes off and joins a monastery and becomes a monk and vows that he will never again take a human life. Well, that’s not the kind of

stories that I wanted to write. I wanted to write hardedged stories where the bad guys really, truly get their comeuppance when they deserve it, because my Green Arrow was more of a Robin Hood type, or even a Black Arrow type, more vigilante justice than anything else. He wasn’t like he was with Denny. Denny’s version I always appreciated because there was this contrast between Green Lantern and Green Arrow. Green Lantern was the letter-ofthe-law. He’s the sheriff in town. But Green Arrow was the spirt of justice. Sometimes justice demands a little harsher retribution than using a trick arrow on somebody or locking them in the slammer. So I wanted to find a logical way to bring about that change in the character, and how I did it was to put him into a position where Dinah’s life is on the line and she’s already been brutalized when he sees her for the first time strung up from a forklift in a warehouse. We had already demonstrated his skill as an archer. He could have shot the knife out of that guy’s hand. It wouldn’t have been any kind of a problem at all. But the son-of-a-bitch just absolutely deserved to die, so he shot him through the heart. And that act changed the character. The decision that he made in that moment changed his life forever. I did a visual metaphor in another story where I likened it to jumping off a cliff. You can’t un-jump. You can’t make that decision in the moment halfway to the ground that, “Oh, wait a minute. I shouldn’t have done that.” It’s too late. It’s a decision that you cannot go back from. And unlike what usually happens in comic books, I didn’t ignore it after that. I made it an ongoing part of the character and his growth and development, and gave him problems over it. And his relationship with Dinah changed because of it, because of that decision that he made, and their relationship also changed because she was tortured at the hands of these guys and couldn’t stand to be touched. She had gone through a terrible, traumatic time, and it affected her relationship with Ollie, and his own actions affected his relationship with Dinah. Now, you’re going to ask me about the rape, right? Cassell: Well, I’ve read that’s not what happened. Is that true? Grell: Absolutely not. I mean, it is true, she absolutely was not raped. For starters, I wrote that character from my heart, and I was more than a little in love with Dinah, just like Ollie. So why would I do something like that? But the other thing is that people interpret things that they don’t see, they swear they saw in the comic book. I had a young artist confront me a couple years later at a convention in Chicago, I think, and she said, “I really resented the fact that you showed Dinah being raped.” I said, “Whoa! Hang on for a second. Where the hell did you get the idea that she was raped? I never said that. I never showed that.” She’s tied to a forklift and she’s all beaten up, and, yes, she’s wearing nothing but a shirt, but rape? That wasn’t part of it. If you think that the only way you can torture a woman is to rape her, you’re wrong. And I even wrote that in the course of the Green Arrow series when Dinah is talking to a psychologist, there’s a line of dialogue

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that says, “People say things like, ‘at least you weren’t raped,’ as if that’s the worst that someone could do.” Believe me, it’s not the worst. As horrific as it is, you only have to look at the way that women are brutalized on a daily basis. Pick up your local newspaper and you will find things that people are doing to one another that are worse. It’s a terrible thing to say, but things could be worse. And she was subjected to that. Here’s a strong woman who has always been in command of herself and her life, and suddenly she’s tied up and she’s beaten to a bloody pulp. That’s pretty horrific, in my view. So then a guy said, “Well, I didn’t like that you showed her being slugged in the face.” I went, “Where did you see that? Because you sure didn’t see it in my book.” The only person who touches her on any one of the pages is the guy with the knife, and he takes her by the hair and lifts her head up and brandishes the knife, and one second later he’s got an arrow through his heart. That’s all I ever showed. Everything else is in the eye and the mind of the beholder. People just assume the absolute worst. So then they felt it was necessary to do explanations of this and explanations of that, like why didn’t she use her sonic scream? It’s her superpower. In Earth-Grell, there are no super-powers. That’s just all there is to it. The only time I finally relented and agreed to do any kind of a crossover at all was when Dan Jurgens was doing Green Arrow and I was writing and I got a phone call from Mike Gold, and he says, “Dan wants to do a crossover with the Warlord.” And I went, “Oh, no. No way.” I had done everything I could to keep from dragging the Warlord into the DC Universe. And Gold said, “No. Wait a minute. Just listen to me for a second. It’s based on the well-known fact that you only know how to draw one face.” And I laughed my ass off and I went, “Okay.” And we did the story [Green Arrow #27 & 28], and it turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun. Oliver Queen one night hears a knock on the door, and he opens it and there stands Travis Morgan, the Warlord, who proceeds to knock him on his ass, because Morgan has been in Seattle for just a few days, and everywhere he goes, people are trying to kill him because they think he’s Oliver Queen. And he says, “Whatever you’re doing to piss people off, cut it out!” Cassell: So when you decided to undertake The Longbow Hunters, was it always intended to be a one shot deal or did you hope to carry it forward? Grell: No, initially it was a one-shot standalone, which if I had to hang my hat on something right now, it would probably be The Longbow Hunters. But it did really well and because of the sales spike, they decided that they were going to launch Green Arrow in his own title. It was the first time Green Arrow ever had his own comic book. Cassell: Green Arrow launched shortly after The Longbow Hunters came out, but you weren’t drawing it. Grell: I was writing and doing covers. Cassell: Was that because you just had too much going on? It looks like you were still doing covers for Jon Sable at the time. Grell: I remember that around that same time period I was also doing James Bond. Cassell: Do you have a preference for writing versus drawing? Grell: No, I’m a storyteller, period. I tell them with pictures or I tell them with words, sometimes both. Today if you ask me where my greatest skills lie, I would say that I am probably a better writer than I am an artist. If not better, then certainly more Previous page: At inset top is an unused Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters cover design by Mike Grell. At bottom left are profiles of Green Arrow, the Black Canary, and Shado. Top right: Grell’s art for Green Arrow: The Wonder Year #2 [Mar. 1993] cover.

capable of producing more material as a writer than as an artist. After all these years, the fun part is in creating the story. The hard work part comes when I sit down at the drawing board, because it’s a brutal schedule. You have to turn out your page a day or your editor hates your guts. That’s no way to build a relationship. Cassell: So is there a Green Arrow story that you haven’t had a chance to tell yet? Grell: Well, of course. I’d love to get another crack at the character. I have a few things still left in my quiver that I haven’t fired off yet, and I’m hoping I do get the chance.

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Cassell: I know you played with a bow and arrow as a kid, but I’ve seen more recent pictures of you with a bow and arrow. Was that strictly for a shot to help in the illustration, or are you actually an archer? Grell: I’ve been an archer since I was a little kid. If you look at the first issue of The Longbow Hunters, there’s a shot of Oliver Queen as a little boy running around. He’s got a stick bow and arrows stuck down the back of his T-shirt. Well, that little kid was me. We made bows and arrows out of any kind of a stick and string that we could find. My brother had a nice bow that I was hoping to grow into one day, but it was just too strong for me to string. It had a 50-pound draw, and I only weighed about 45 lbs., myself. My oldest brother had a Howard Hill bow. Howard Hill was the guy who did all the trick shooting for the Robin Hood movie, Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. I featured Howard Hill in The Longbow Hunters, and I did a poster that was distributed and it was hanging in the window of a comic shop in San Francisco. A gentleman was walking down the street, spotted the poster, walked in, asked about the book, took a book, and when he saw it was Howard Hill featured in there, he contacted me. It turns out he was an old hunting buddy of Howard Hill, and he sent me

as a gift an arrow that belonged to Howard Hill. Cassell: Oh, wow! Grell: I have three Howard Hill bows, two longbows and, believe it or not, a recurve. I have one of his quivers and I have that arrow. And they’re cherished items, but I shoot the longbows. I’ve shot all different kinds of bows, from stick-and-string to compounds, and everything in between, but I prefer the longbow. To me, the longbow is like a fly rod compared to a spincasting rod. It’s less technical, but it’s a really sweet weapon. And it’s something that anybody can learn. Archery is a terrific sport. If you went out and bought a bow today and practiced shooting 100 shots a day, in a month you’d be able to split arrows. Well, you’d probably split your first arrow within two weeks. It just happens. I’ve taught a lot of people to shoot, including one of my dear friends. I showed him the basics of it and left him to it. I said, “Now, when you split your first arrow, don’t take it apart. You just come and get me and we’ll superglue it together and you can have it for a souvenir.” And less than an hour later he comes in and he goes, “Sensei, you’ve gotta see this.” “What now? What did you do?” “You just have to come and see it.” And he had split that arrow half a length, and they were stuck together just like Robin Hood. Cassell: That’s cool. Grell: It doesn’t get much better than that. Like I said, it’s a terrific sport, and something that anybody with sufficient handeye coordination can learn. I’ve done all kinds of stuff, including horseback archery.

This page: Mike Grell’s pencil sketch designs and the printed covers for two issues of the 1987 prestige format mini-series, Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters.

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Cassell: Oh, really? Grell: Yes. I performed with a group called the Seattle Knights. For about 10 years we did live action medieval shows at Renaissance fairs, and part of it was horseback stuff. We did jousting. I was a jouster. Cassell: Oh, wow! In full armor and everything? Grell: Yeah. I wore a different kind of armor than the other guys did. But the difference between, say, Medieval Times and one of our shows is that Medieval Times is an indoor venue and they control the environment so they can have a lightshow along with it. But our guys wear real armor, use real swords, and hardly anybody ever gets hurt because it’s all staged and choreographed. Jousting is done for show as opposed to for real. In real full-contact jousting, the shield is held across the body for protection. In show jousting, it’s held well off to the side and held as a target, and once the lance contacts the shield, you get a nice, loud bang and it reflects off and over your shoulder, and everything else from there is just acting. I used to brag that I never fell off a horse in my life and, when I was 45, I bought a horse, and within three years I was falling off professionally three or four times a day. And part of it was also horseback archery, shooting from the back of a galloping horse. Cassell: Did you ever get hurt? Grell: Never been hurt falling off a horse on purpose, but I have been banged up a bit on accident. Cassell: So, what was the approach that you used creatively in doing The Longbow Hunters? How did you and the painter go about creating

the artwork that was then used to produce the three-volume set? Grell: That was an interesting method, actually. I had been working with Julia Lacquement, who was the colorist on the Sable comic book and quite a brilliant painter. Julia painted her color guides in watercolor, and it was a shame that they were never seen in their original state because it was just brilliant stuff. She would turn in the color guides with the coding and everything else for the color separators to make their separations on, and it wasn’t until they went to blue-line separation, or black-line on occasion, that you got to see what those colors really looked like. I just loved the quality of her work, and we were both in Seattle at the time, and the blend just really worked well. So I would pencil and ink and Julia would paint over the original on the actual pages. Cassell: That’s what I found unusual. The original pages of artwork are not only penciled and inked but actually painted on them? Grell: Actually painted, yes. Some of the pages and some of the panels on the pages were fully painted by me. Not very many of them. Cassell: Was there a reason why you chose to use that approach rather than the more typical one of making a reduced stat and coloring the stat? Grell: I wanted the absolute best quality I could get on the book, and I figured that was the way to do it. Cassell: Well, I know the artwork is very prized because of that. It’s very tough to find. Grell: Yeah, pretty much all that got snapped up into private collections immediately. The success of The Longbow Hunters not only led into Grell writing the new monthly Green Arrow series for 80 issues, but also drawing several of the stories (and many of the covers). He also drew several limited series like Green Arrow: The Wonder Year and DC Retroactive: Green Lantern—The ‘70s, featuring Green Arrow, as well as covers for the Arrow comic book based on the television show. To this day, the character with which Grell is most closely associated is Green Arrow. Inset top: Pencils for Green Arrow #34 [Early Jan. 2018] variant cover featuring Shado by Mike Grell. Left: Pointof-purchase display promoting Green Arrow in 1987. Art is by Ed Hannigan (pencils) and Dick Giordano (inks).

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Arrow on TV

CLOSE-UP

The television series Arrow, launched by the CW network in 2012, and starring Stephen Amell, owes a great deal to Mike Grell and The Longbow Hunters. Not only Arrow’s costume, but several other elements of the show were derived from or inspired by Grell’s vision of Green Arrow. In addition, the show has paid homage to Grell’s legacy, naming one of the judges before whom attorney Laurel Lance appears in court, “Judge Grell.” Grell also drew the artwork for the wanted poster of The Hood used in the first season. In this interview, Grell elaborates on his ties to the hit TV series. Cassell: Have you seen the TV show Arrow, and what do you think of it? Grell: Yeah, I’m horribly behind in my viewing, but that’s just because I rarely get next to a television set on a regular basis, so it’s hard for me to keep track of what the broadcast schedules are. But, yes, I have seen it, and I like it a lot. I think they did just a terrific job. Production values are extremely high. It’s like watching a minor movie every week as opposed to watching a TV series. The stories are good and the actors are just great. Cassell: I agree. It’s one of my favorite things on TV. Grell: I think Stephen Amell is the next big thing. I look at this kid and I see the same quality in him that I saw in a young George Clooney, which is that the camera just loves the guy. When he’s on screen, you just can’t take your eyes off of him. He’s got that charisma. He’s got the physicality, he’s got the acting chops that it takes. Now all he needs is a good break-out role and he’s on his way. I know he’s been offered a lot of different things that he’s either had to turn down or couldn’t fit into his production schedule with the series. But I did tell him that I thought he had dodged a bullet with Fifty Shades of Grey. He had been talked about for the role of Christian Grey, the lead role in Fifty Shades of Grey, and that didn’t come about. I don’t know whether he was disappointed or not, but I think if he had done that role, it would have been probably to the detriment of his career. Because, name the actor, right? Cassell: Yeah, I have no idea who it was. Grell: Neither do I. And that was really sort of my whole point. But when Stephen Amell steps in front of a movie camera, people are going to notice, for sure. And that’s where his future will be. Because the cast’s just terrific. They’ve got some amazing people in there. Cassell: I agree. I appreciated that they introduced elements that you had in the comics, like the costume and not calling him “Green Arrow,” at least for a while. Eventually I think they felt the pressure to tie it back to the comic book. Grell: I think it’s almost more to do with the success and popularity of The Flash and the other characters they introduced. And I can see why Warner and DC Comics, especially, would be interested in having the character more similar to the comics, because it cross-pollinates better that way. Cassell: They’ve done a nice job of cross-pollination. So you’ve met Stephen Amell? Grell: Yes. I’ve met most of the cast at various conventions. One of the things that I really like about him, and this is true of

everybody that I’ve seen at the conventions, is that the entire cast, they’re very friendly, they’re very warm and open to the fans. Stephen is quick to get up, take a picture, smile, shake hands, chat as much as possible, and the rest of the cast, they’re the same way. They’re just open and easygoing, not aloof like you see some folks, unfortunately. There are guys who are obviously there at the convention only for the paycheck, but what I saw with the cast of Arrow is that they all seemed to be really interested in building a relationship with their fan base. That pays off. Cassell: The Arrow television series has used other elements from your work on Green Arrow and The Longbow Hunters, right? Grell: Yes. They have featured a couple of my characters. They featured Eddie Fyers, who was actually inspired by Archie Goodwin. I modeled him after Archie Goodwin, not the nature of the character, but the physical looks. Archie was five-foot-nine, kind of wiry, had a mustache, and wore glasses, and didn’t look dangerous at all, but Archie was one of the best athletes you’d

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ever run into. You could be standing there talking to him and he could fall face-forward onto the floor, catch himself on his hands, do a couple of push-ups, and snap himself right back up again. How we hit it off was that the first time he did that while he was talking to me, I did it right back to him, and we got along great after that. Shado was featured on the show. I didn’t particularly care for the angle that they chose with the character because the name itself is Japanese, but the character on the show was Chinese, and they didn’t explain that, and I thought there was maybe a danger that there would be this perception that Hollywood doesn’t know the difference. When it comes to different Asian nationalities,

I can draw the difference between Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese. They have different facial structures, different physical looks. Korean is much different. But to Hollywood, Asian is Asian. Just like black is black. But I’ll often be in a strange city and my cab driver will have a particular look about him and a foreign accent, and most of the time I can tell him what country he came from, or what country his people came from, at any rate. I can recognize the difference between Somali and Nigerian and Zulu and Bantu, but it’s only because I’ve studied that kind of stuff and I was very interested in it. As an artist, you learn to pay attention to some things that in Hollywood shorthand they don’t always take note of.

Previous page: Mike Grell’s pencils for his cover of the Arrow Special Edition [2012] giveaway produced to promote the first season of the CW television series, Arrow. Above: Clockwise from upper left is a faux dossier used in the series, complete with Grell’s wanted poster depicting “The Hood”; three issues of Arrow sporting Grell cover art, and a promotional image from the successful first season of the TV show.

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Previous and this page: Various Green Arrow-related sketches, page, and a cover by Grell.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

James Bond Few intellectual properties have enjoyed the universal and enduring success of James Bond. Ian Fleming wrote 12 novels and two collections of short stories about Bond. The character has been adapted for television, radio, newspaper comic strips, comic books, video games, and film. The Bond movies are the longest-running series of all time and have grossed over $7 billion. Mike Grell has long been a fan of Bond, having based his character Sable in part on the Fleming creation. So, no one had to twist Grell’s arm when an opportunity presented itself to draw Agent 007. Cassell: I know you’re a James Bond fan. Who is your favorite actor in the role? Mine would be Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan. Grell: Yeah, me, too. If there was a guy who was born to play James Bond, you’ve got Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan. Cassell: We discussed Brosnan earlier. It’s a shame he had to wait so long to play Bond. Grell: Actually, I think he did great at the time that he came to the role. I think having a little bit more age to him gave him a bit of believability. We were accustomed to Bond being in his 40s at any rate, as opposed to in his early 30s. Cassell: How did you get involved with James Bond in comics? Grell: I got a phone call from a publisher in England. I’m sure that it was due to my work on Sable as much as anything else. They wanted to do a graphic novel, a joint publication with Eclipse Comics here in the United States. And they asked if I would be interested. Would I be interested? I loved James Bond. I had read all the books I can’t tell you how many times. I had the good fortune of a great cooperative relationship with the [Ian] Fleming people. We worked back and forth very closely, and I was only given certain limitations regarding some characters that had been created specifically for the movies, so I was not able to use Q, but I was able to use Major Boothroyd, who was the

quartermaster in the James Bond novels. Anything that was in the novels was fair game, and, for the most part, anything from the movies that wasn’t specifically created by the movie people I could use. I managed to sneak in the Aston Martin in tribute to various scenes from the films like Dr. No and From Russia with Love and Goldfinger. I had the greatest compliment paid to me by Raymond Benson, who is the author of The James Bond Bedside Companion. Raymond took over writing the James Bond novels somewhere in the 2000s, and I can’t tell you how many of those he wrote. I think it’s upwards of five. But, at any rate, Raymond described my James Bond graphic novel, Permission to Die, as—and this is a quote—“The best James Bond movie I ever read.” Cassell: Oh, that’s great. Grell: So, if it can be a movie is anybody’s guess, but there you go. I incorporated a lot of the standard stuff that you expect to see in a James Bond film. I managed to work a lot of that in there. The curious and oddball thing that came about was that, because Eclipse was having some issues with their printers, they were having difficulty finding anybody who would print their books any more. Whatever the relationship was, whatever happened, I’m not privy to it, so I can’t say with any kind of authority that it was a financial issue or maybe they just did not get along. But the third issue of Permission to Die stayed in the can long after it was finished. I think it was in the can for more than six months before the final issue came out. The end result was that, while the story dealt with a character who is trying to escape from behind the Iron Curtain, by the time the book actually came out, the Iron Curtain had fallen. So we actually had to write a little something in there at the end of the book to account for the fact that, once again, the world had changed. Like Sable in Shaman’s Tears, you

Previous and this page: Renditions by Mike Grell of Ian Fleming’s legendary British “double 0” MI6 espionage agent, James Bond. The artist illustrated an Eclipse Comics adaptation of Licence to Kill and wrote and drew the three-part Eclipse mini-series, James Bond: Permission to Die [’89–91].

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wake up in the morning and the entire world is different. Cassell: Before that, you also did an adaptation of Licence to Kill? Grell: Yes, the graphic novel adaptation of the screenplay. It was the only time I’ve done a film adaptation, and it wasn’t fun, I’ll tell you that. The movie people gave me a ton of stills to work from, and that was fine, but there was a lot of stuff that was left undeveloped at the point that I was given the shooting script. For instance, the script that I had to work from had no mention whatsoever of a character even remotely like the Wayne Newton character in the movie. Cassell: That must have been frustrating. Grell: And, needless to say, there were some things in the movie that were not likely to translate particularly well into comics. I had a discussion with Cary Bates about James Bond back in the days when we were working on The Legion of Super-Heroes, and I said, “I can’t understand why nobody has done a James Bond comic book.” And he said, “Well, remember that scene in The Man with the Golden Gun where the car does the ramp-to-ramp jump?” Cassell: Sure. Grell: It does a complete rotation along its axis, spiraling like a football when you throw it, and lands back on the ramp. He said, Upper left: Mike Grell based his rendition of Agent 007 on this 1940s photo of musician Hoagy Carmichael (inset), decidedly evident in Grell’s James Bond: Permission to Die penciled frontispiece.

“In a movie, that’s pretty darned exciting, but in a comic, it’s three panels. Who gives a damn?” And he’s right. Cassell: When you did Permission to Die, who did you model Bond after, in terms of his appearance? Grell: I was not given any restrictions there, although the character couldn’t look like Sean Connery or any of the actors because this was very much a horse of a completely different color. So I went to Ian Fleming’s original model, which was Hoagy Carmichael. If you take a look at the frontispiece of Permission to Die, you’ll see a shot on gray-toned paper of Bond. He’s leaning on something, he’s got the Walther PPK in his hand, and there’s a dancing girl off to his left. That shot is actually based on a photograph of Hoagy Carmichael leaning on a piano. All I did was I gave him a nose job. Hoagy Carmichael’s nose was pretty legendary. It was about three-quarters of an inch too long for any normal nose to be. So I shortened up his nose, gave him a somewhat different hairstyle and changed a few of the lines around the eyes, and gave him the legendary black comma of hair over his right eye, and I gave him the scar. Fleming described that scar as being a three-inch scar on Bond’s right cheek, and I saw that as a pretty shoddy way of disguising a secret agent. I mean, look for a guy with a three-inch scar and he’s your spy, right? But almost everybody I know who grew up in the ’40s and ’50s, back in the days before kids were protected by a foam rubber environment, we all have a scar on our eyebrow from taking a bad fall. You know, falling down the steps or crashing on your bicycle. I thought that it would be more logical, if this was a knife fight that Bond was in, if he dodged back from the knife as it flashed out across his cheek, and it put a slash to his eyebrow, and then about a one-inch scar on his cheek, so that, overall, from the top to the bottom, it’s about a three-inch distance, but it’s not a threeinch-long scar. Cassell: Ah, that makes sense. Grell: For the rest of it, I gave James Bond a new pistol that was actually featured in one of the novels that was called the Asp, which was a highly modified Smith and Wesson 9mm to replace the Walther PPK, but I did give him the PPK in a couple of the scenes just for tradition’s sake. The only editorial changes that I was ever given as a mandate were really pretty funny. I always write a full script, even if I’m writing for myself. But what a lot of people who are not in comics don’t realize is that, in the printed version, the only thing the audience gets to read are the captions and the dialogue, so anything that you put in a scene description doesn’t really matter. You can spell it wrong, it doesn’t matter. If you take a look at Quentin Tarantino’s screenplays, they’re full of misspellings, but who gives a damn? Nobody’s going to see it except Tarantino and his actors and students of movies and screenplays. So I wrote a panel where this girl has created an excuse to get Bond away so she can talk to him. She spills a drink on his jacket and drags him off into the men’s room or ladies’ room to supposedly clean his coat for him, but really she just wants to talk to him. To make sure that there’s nobody else in there, she bends over and looks under the stall doors. And in my scene description, I wrote, “Bond eyes her fanny appreciatively.” You would have thought I had committed the ultimate faux pas, because I get a phone call saying, “I’m sorry, you can’t write this.” I said, “Why not?” They said, “Well, in England the word fanny refers to a very particular part of a woman’s anatomy.” I said, “Well, over here it’s her bum.” And he said, “You can write ‘bum,’ but you can’t write ‘fanny.’” Nobody’s going to see this but me! But it was important to them, so I changed it. In fact, I think I wrote derrière instead of fanny. It’s why there are no fanny packs in England.

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Cassell: That’s good to know. And it was published both in the U.S. and in England, right? Grell: Yes. It was published in England by Acme and published in the U.S. by Eclipse. Cassell: Has it been reprinted in more recent years? Grell: No. We went back to the Fleming people with the idea that it would be a good to bundle up the graphic novels and republish them, and they are singularly disinterested. They are not interested at all. Cassell: You’re kidding! Grell: Nope, as far as they’re concerned, it’s a dead issue considered outside the canon, which is too bad. Cassell: Why would they not? They’re going to make money off of it. Especially considering the last one got published sometime later, it would seem to make a perfect reason to gather it all back together again and present it as a single story. Grell: Yup. It would be. You could perhaps start with a blurb that

says this is clearly a story of its times, just like From Russia with Love, which only holds up when you take into context it being a period piece. In fact, most of the Bond stuff only holds up if you consider it a period piece, until you got into some of the more recent films. At any rate, I was disappointed in that because I have to think that if they considered it part of the canon that it might be the kind of story they could tap into for a film somewhere on down the line. But, ah well. On to the next! James Bond: The History of the Illustrated 007 by Alan J. Porter includes entries for both of the Bond projects by Grell, as well as several examples of his artwork and a brief interview. Grell also wrote the introduction to the 1989 Titan Books volume reprinting the James Bond newspaper strip storyline of The Spy Who Loved Me. For Grell, the “next” story turned out to be an opportunity to work with Image Comics on another creator-owned project.

Top: Classic “looking down a gun barrel” image, a motif recognized by 007 film lovers everywhere. Pencil art by Mike Grell. Inset above: Echoes of earlier Bond adventures are apparent in this double-page spread from Grell’s James Bond: Permission to Die [1989–91] three-issue mini-series.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Shaman’s Tears By the 1990s, Mike Grell’s reputation in the comic book industry was well established, having set a new standard on existing series like The Legion of Super-Heroes and defining a whole new world with Warlord. With the success of Sable, Grell became known for creatorowned projects, too. So, it is not a surprise that Grell would be sought out by a publisher like Image Comics to make that magic happen again. This time around, the magic takes the form of Shaman’s Tears. Cassell: Let’s talk about Shaman’s Tears. First, is it pronounced SHAH-man’s Tears, or SHAY-man’s Tears? Grell: You know, I’ve looked it up in the dictionary, and Webster said, “Fight it out amongst yourselves.” It’s either/or. Cassell: What do you prefer? Grell: I say SHAH-man’s Tears, but other people are happy with SHAY-man’s Tears. It doesn’t matter to me. Cassell: So how did it come about? Grell: I was approached by Todd McFarlane to do a project for Image Comics. They had done their initial release with the original founders of the company, and they were looking to branch out from there. Shaman’s Tears was based on a lot of different things, including a lifelong passion I have for Native American culture. Where I grew up in Northern Wisconsin, anybody around there who wasn’t German, or Polish, or Italian, was one of the Midwestern Indian tribes. I wanted to be an Indian so bad when I was a little kid. I saw the John Wayne movie Hondo, which has a scene where Hondo is an army scout who finds himself standing between a mother and her half-growed young’un. The Apaches were raiding in the area, and something early on passes between the Apache chief and this young boy. The boy impresses the chief with his courage, so the chief takes up his knife, he puts their thumbs together and cuts them, and the blood runs down and makes them blood brothers. And the next day, every little boy in town had a Band-Aid on his thumb. I’ve still got a little crease of a

scar from mine. And I was disappointed because I thought that would actually make me an Indian, but that blood brother thing’s as close as I’ve ever gotten. I was always fascinated by our Native American culture, and used to speculate what America would be like if it hadn’t been invaded by the Europeans. When it was time to create a comic book to be published at Image, there’s no question that the hottest properties at that time were super-heroes, and I didn’t really want to do a muscle-bound super-hero, but I found a way to get my head around it and satisfy that sort of industry requirement of the times. I made this character, he’s a half-breed who grew up on the reservation in the Dakotas and hated it. He was never Indian enough for his Indian friends and family, and he was never white enough for his white friends. And so, at the age of 16, he runs off and leaves the reservation, leaving behind a pregnant girlfriend. When he comes back 12 years later, he now has an 11-year-old son and his girlfriend is married to his best friend, and his arrival back on the scene causes all kinds of trouble in the family unit. But instead of having super-powers, I went for mystical powers. He is tasked by his mother, who is dying, to undergo the ceremony of the sun dance, during which he is given a vision of the earth spirit woman, and he is bestowed with the powers of the animals and the earth. He can fly like a hawk, he has the strength of a grizzly, he can run as fast as an antelope, and he can also command the powers of nature. But the kicker is that he can’t just summon up these powers any time he wants. There’s a line in there that says, “You don’t call the power; the power calls you.” And when the power calls to him, three red tears flow down his face, which symbolize the three red stripes that the Lakota shaman paints on his face when he does the sun dance ceremony. The tears flow down from his right eye, and they turn red as they go, and he actually transforms into the physical embodiment of this great Indian warrior called Stalking Wolf. It’s the kind of story that I enjoyed doing because I was

Previous page: Opening page to Mike Grell’s creator-owned contribution to the early years of Image Comics, Shaman’s Tears, featuring lead character Joshua Brand, otherwise known as the mystical powered Stalking Wolf. Inset above: Wizard #24 [Aug. 1993] featured a Shaman’s Tears trading card.

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able to incorporate a lot of different things into it. For instance, nobody has caught wise to this, but all the names are basically a joke. I don’t mean a funny ha-ha joke, but it’s satire on my part. Everything is named for a copyright or a trademark. The hero’s name is Joshua Brand. The villains are a company called Circle Sea Laboratories. If you look at the circle with the C in the center, that’s copyright. The heads of the company are retired air force general Patrick “Pat” Pending, and rogue Soviet scientist Dr. Regus Patoff. How that came about was that I ran across a back cover blurb on, I think, a Batman novel. I don’t recall if it was an adaptation of a screenplay or something that was written after the Batman movie came out, but every time they would mention something about Batman, there was a trademark stamp in it. “Batman™ stalked the streets of Gotham City™. ™ and © DC Comics, U.S. Patent Office, Pat. Pending.” There were so many of those that if you actually read them as part of the block copy, it was total gibberish. I felt inspired by that. Brand’s best friend, his blood brother, is Thom Broadarrow. Broadarrow is the British trademark stamp. It is an image, an Top left: The final page of Shaman’s Tears #1 [May 1993] featuring Joshua Brand’s transformation into Stalking Wolf, protector of planet Earth. Next page: Inset top is the cover of Shaman’s Tears Ashcan #3. Bottom inset is a Shaman’s Tears commission piece by Grell.

actual outline of an arrow with an arrowhead and feathers on it. The supporting cast, Bar Sinister was how they were referred to, they were half-human/half-animal combinations that were created by Circle Sea Laboratories to be a new race of slaves. Mind you, this was 30 years ago, so I was a bit ahead of my time. The genetic recombinants that they’re doing now where they have bunny rabbits that glow in the dark, that’s on one level, but we also have really dangerous stuff like GMO corn and other things that are out there loose in the world now, and you just kind of wonder where it goes next. The inspiration for that actually came from another conversation with my old editor pal Mike Gold, who was telling me about a chat he had with a pal of his who was a trademark attorney, or patent attorney, and he said, “If I were to clone myself and then I patented my clone, and my clone were to then clone himself, could I sue my clone for trademark infringement?” Yes, it’s one of those we’re high in college smoking pot conversations, right? But I had that in the back of my brain when I was writing this, and I thought this is possibly the next logical thing, where the Supreme Court in my story rules that these creatures are not human and therefore have no civil rights, and they can be bought and sold. They are literally the newest slave, traded on the open market like commodities. And I had names in there like Sigil, and Signet, and Blazon, and Banner, and Docket, and all of those things have something to do with either a trademark or a brand name. And nobody ever caught on to it. At least, nobody ever came up to me and said, “Hey, I thought it was really cool that you did this.” I’ve always been the one who had to bring it up. “Oh yeah, wait a minute, you’re right, there!” It gave me an opportunity to draw the kind of stuff that I like, which I think also then makes me a better artist and a better storyteller. I’m writing for myself and I’m writing the kind of stuff that I enjoy drawing, so I do my best work at it. Lots of critters, lots of outdoor scenes, and stories that I think are fairly compelling because the crux of the entire thing is that mankind has done a hell of a hammer job on Planet Earth in the last 200 years, and we’re the ones who are suffering for it. For the first time, I think, probably in the history of mankind as we know it, we have the capability of destroying our own world, and we’re slowly but surely doing it. Cassell: So true. Did you have to do a lot of research to write Shaman’s Tears? Grell: A certain amount. As I said, I had a lifelong interest in Native American culture, and I had racks and racks of books on the bookshelf dealing with Native American mythology and the cultures of the tribes. Some of these books had illustrations dating back to the 1700s, so I was well-steeped in the lore before I ever started. One of the things that I was able to do, I contacted a lady by the name of Doris Leader Charge, who was the Lakota language expert who worked on [the movie] Dances with Wolves, and she was very helpful. She steered me toward a bunch of books that helped immeasurably, not only the Lakota language, but also the culture. Cassell: You wrote the series, but did you have anyone working with you on the drawing? Grell: Brian Snoddy worked with me on Shaman’s Tears, did almost all of the backgrounds. Brian was great. Not only was he a terrific artist, but he loved a challenge. If it was going to be something that I would just cringe at having to do, I could hand it over to Brian and he was like a kid in a candy store. He just loved something that was going to be difficult so he could show his skills, and he was a great asset to that strip. Cassell: I noticed that, in addition to the regular published versions, there were some ashcans, as well. How did that come about?

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Grell: Ashcans were very popular back in those days as a way of getting the word out. It was before everybody had a computer, before the Internet, and you wanted to be able to show people what they were going to get. So we published the ashcan editions and sent them out to key reviewers and journalists who were covering the comics industry, and that was how we got our advance review copies. Cassell: So they were not sold? Grell: In general, not, although I did keep back a few copies that I then signed and numbered and sold those. Cassell: They came out before the first published issue? Grell: Yes. And then the next one that we did was actually for #3. There was a lag, a gap, in the publishing. Image Comics dumped the title after the second issue. Sort of unceremoniously they decided that they weren’t going to publish it any more, and at that point we went out in search of another publisher. We actually found one, but things got really seriously messed up. They had some difficulties, and I was made aware that the printer up in Canada was not going to be printing any more of their work. Issue #3 had actually already been handed in, but because I had a good relationship with the printer, I was able to get that issue back into my own possession, at which point management over at Image changed, and the new editor who came in as head honcho recognized that one of the mistakes that had been made was canceling Shaman’s Tears, because the negative fallout was pretty huge. And they came back and said, “If you’re up for it, we’ll publish it.” So we were back at Image again. Cassell: I noticed that about halfway through, you brought in another one of your characters, Jon Sable. Grell: That was as much to put Sable back in the forefront in comics as anything else. The way I combined the two was to set the story in New York. You know about the urban myths of giant rats living in the sewers? Well, when Circle Sea Laboratories is destroyed, all of that genetic gunk that flowed down into the sewer systems eventually finds its way into the sewers in the city, and these less-than-successful experimental crossbreeds are living down there, scavenging off of human flesh and breeding with their wild progenitors. So you’ve got rat people breeding with rats. You’ve got alligator people, and various strange, weird combinations, living in the sewers in New York. My way of getting my brain around combining a real-world character like Sable with a fantasy world like Shaman’s

Tears was that if flying saucers land tomorrow, you’re not going to go to bed tomorrow night and expect to wake up to the same world the next day. The day that happens, our world will change forever, period. There’s no going back. So then, from that point on, everything that you do has to be done with the awareness that your world has changed. And I thought it would be interesting to toss Sable into that mix. Cassell: Was it always your intention that Shaman’s Tears would be 12 issues, or did that just turn out to be the case? Grell: It’s actually 13 issues. Cassell: The number zero, I forgot. Grell: Right. And the number zero comes after #12. If you read #0 first, it kind of blows the whole story. It’s a prequel, but it has information in there that you don’t want when you read #1. No, I had always intended to make it a continuous, ongoing series, but Shaman’s Tears was published at the moment, practically, that the comics industry collapsed in the ’90s. That big, giant wave of collectible craze that was going on had virtually destroyed the comics industry. They were selling comic books in plastic bags with collectible trading cards and toys and junk inside the bag, and they were boasting that people were so eager to buy these things that they would buy them and never even open the bag. Which is what killed everything, because if it’s a collectible, it’s only collectible, it’s only valuable, if you never open the bag. So you could never read the comic. You never gain a vested interest, or readership interest, in the character. And, of course, what happened was that as soon as some kid went back in about a year later to his dealer and tried to sell back a comic for more than he had paid for it, the dealer reaches under his counter and hauls up a longbox and says, “Kid, I’ve got all you want for a quarter apiece.” That big, giant thud you heard was the collectibles industry market collapsing, and with it went the comic book industry. Marvel Comics went bankrupt. From the time that I first got into comics, DC Comics would typically print 100,000 copies of a comic book, and, in order to break even, you had to sell one third of that. So 34,000 was pretty much the break-even point, and as long as the ink at the end of the ledger was black, there was no problem. Because as soon as it got into the red, that book was canceled, and that’s all there was to it. So the sales had risen from that 34,000 mark and went to 300,000, and to three million copies that some of those books were selling. And, just as fast, it got back down to the 300,000 level, and then to the 30,000 level, and then Detective Comics at one

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point, I believe, was selling about 8,000 copies a month, and it would have been canceled except that “DC” stands for Detective Comics. It’s the flagship of their line, and they weren’t going to cancel it. It would be like Ford announcing that they’re only going to make Lincolns from now on. So the sales on Shaman’s Tears started as high as it was ever going to get, and it dropped rapidly from that point on. The first book sold maybe 595,000 copies. The second issue was a quarter of a million. By the time the third issue came out, those numbers were down to about 80,000, which was right about where Green Arrow had been selling when I was writing it. And, interestingly enough, about 15,000 copies below what Sable had been selling at when I was doing it over at First Comics in the early ’80s. And it just dropped and dropped until it was evident that something had to change, and the change was in the form of Maggie the Cat. The why of it was real simple. Girl books were selling like gangbusters. When everybody else was scraping the bottom of the barrel, the sexy babes were selling like hotcakes, or at least selling better. So I dropped Shaman’s Tears in favor of Maggie the Cat. We brought out two issues of Maggie the Cat before I got a look at the books and discovered that we had been losing $4,000 a month for the last two issues of Shaman’s Tears and those two issues of Maggie the Cat were negative $4,000 a month, so I pulled the pin. I couldn’t afford a $4,000 a month hobby, not when I was paying everybody else a salary, that’s for sure. That’s why Maggie the Cat has never been finished. I have a screenplay that I’ve written for Maggie, and it’s started to get some fairly serious action in Hollywood, and I’m crossing my fingers and toes. Grandma said, “Spit in one hand and wish in the other and see which one fills up the fastest.” (Grandma cleaned it up for us kids.)

But hope springs eternal, and if this goes through and I’m able to get a deal on it, I am definitely going to finish out the graphic novel for Maggie. It’s undetermined at this point whether those first two issues will be reissued as a monthly comic and then continue on from there or if I’ll just go ahead and finish out the entire thing as a complete graphic novel and release it all at once. Cassell: Well, that sounds great. Do you have any thoughts on who you’d like to see play the lead? Grell: Well, I’ve got all kinds of thoughts, but they’re all ridiculous, or ridiculously expensive. At one point early on I would have chosen Connie Nielsen, who was the co-star with Russell Crowe in Gladiator. She had that kind of quality that I was looking for, of maturity and elegance, and, let’s face it, she’s an amazingly beautiful woman. Nicole Kidman. If money is no object, sure, why not? But reality has to rear its ugly head somewhere along the line, and somewhere we’ll find a young lady who is appropriate for the role and is hungry enough to make it into a possible franchise. Cassell: I hope that comes to pass for you. Is there anything else about Shaman’s Tears that we haven’t touched on? Grell: There was one thing about the guest-shot with Sable. The crossover with Sable was issues #5–8 of Shaman’s Tears. I drew a cover [#7] that I had so much fun with. It has Sable and Stalking Wolf in full battle gear creeping down an alleyway, and looming over them in the background is this strange-looking, weird monster with kind of buck teeth and bulging muscles and everything else, and you look at it close and it’s a giant rabbit. And the caption that I put to it was, “Be vewwy quiet. We’re hunting rabids.“ The creatures in the sewers are called rabids. In 1993, Wizard, The Comics Magazine #24 included a Shaman’s Tears promotional trading card featuring a great rendition of the lead character by Grell. In addition to Maggie the Cat, Grell did a Bar Sinister series in 1995 that lasted four issues. Shaman’s Tears was collected in an omnibus edition in 2011 by IDW. Mike also did some additional work for Image, which is discussed in the chapter “Other Stuff.”

Inset top: Two of the four Shaman’s Tears issues to guest-star Jon Sable, #6 and 7 [Feb., May 1995]. Inset bottom: Maggie the Cat #1 [Jan. 1996] cover. Next page: Evocative full-page panel from Shaman’s Tears #7.

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hybrids, also called the Blood, created by Circle Sea Enterprises. They are treated as possessions following a Supreme Court ruling stating that they aren’t human.

Premise As the son of an Irish mother and a half-Sioux father, Joshua Brand was chastised while growing up on the reservation, so he fled, leaving behind a pregnant girlfriend. He returned home years later, with his mother dying, only to learn he had been given the ability to transform into Stalking Wolf, possessing the powers of every animal and nature itself. Taking aim at the evil Circle Sea Enterprises, Brand becomes protector of the Earth.

THOM BROADARROW: Childhood friend of Brand who married his girlfriend Sadie and raised his son, Broadarrow is jealous of the powers bestowed on Brand, believing they should have been his. Exposed to the Circle Sea chemicals while in his taxidermy shop, he is transformed into a combination of animals. WAKAN TANKA: The Great Spirit of the Sioux, she selected Joshua Brand to be her champion and defend the balance of nature.

Main Characters JOSHUA BRAND/STALKING WOLF Brand seems the least likely person to possess mystical Native American powers, but an old shaman named Grey Hawk helps him to understand and embrace his newfound abilities through the sun dance ceremony. Now, when the power calls to him, three red tears of blood stream down from his right eye and he becomes the great Indian warrior Stalking Wolf. CIRCLE SEA ENTERPRISES: Retired air force general Patrick “Pat” Pending (right) and rogue Soviet scientist Dr. Regus Patoff (left) head up a company engaged in genetic engineering to create a new breed of slaves that are half-human and half-animal. BAR SINISTER: A group of genetically engineered, super powered human/animal

Setting MEDICINE HAT RESERVATION: A Lakota Indian reservation in the Dakotas and the surrounding area serves as the usual backdrop for Shaman’s Tears, although Brand travels to the city in search of “the Nesting Ones.”

Commentary

Having proven his chops with creator-owned characters like Jon Sable, Grell was approached by Todd McFarlane about doing a new series for Image Comics. Eschewing the typical super-hero type, Grell turned to his love of Native American lore to create Shaman’s Tears, which also served as a critical commentary on the use of animals in genetic research and abuse of the environment. Elements of the storyline were reminiscent of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau.

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Previous page: Inset top is detail from Mike Grell’s Shaman’s Tears #9 [June 1995] cover. Top right: Spread from Wizard, The Comic Magazine #24 [Aug. 1993], an article promoting Grell’s creator-owned Image Comics series.

Spotlight

Producing the book through his own Creative Fire Studio, Grell brought along old friend Mike Gold as editor and employed Brian Snoddy to assist with the art, as well as Julia Lacquement as colorist, with whom Grell had worked on Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters and Jon Sable, Freelance. It was popular at the time to launch a new title with an ashcan—a half-sized, black-&white version of the comic—and Shaman’s Tears followed the trend. The ashcan was not sold, but rather distributed as advance review copies to journalists. The debut issue in May 1993 featured the Shaman’s Tears symbol in red foil on a black cover. An edition limited to 500 copies were signed by Grell and included Shaman’s Tears sterling silver collector pins. Additional promotion came in the form of a Shaman’s Tears trading card bagged with Wizard #24. Unfortunately, the new series got off to a rocky start. Lacquement was forced to abandon her home in the face of Hurricane Emily, leaving four pages of issue #3 not yet colored, which resulted in a one week delay in printing. Lack of consistent, timely publication was common among independent publishers, a problem Image was determined to avoid, so they reacted by canceling the title. Needless to say, this did not sit well with Grell and friends, who decided to publish the third issue of Shaman’s Tears as an ashcan, while they worked on finding another publisher. In his editorial for #3, Mike Gold wrote, “Todd McFarlane’s statement that ‘We’re not going to sit here and make people rich by taking advantage of us… We felt that we were being used by some of these people, and we got rid of them.’ [Comics Buyer’s Guide #1037, Oct. 1, 1993] is as inaccurate as it is offensive. In Todd’s case, I think it’s also deeply ungrateful.” However, after a subsequent publisher had problems of their own, it was ironically Image that returned a year later, offering to resume publication of the book with a color version of #3. Comic Culture #10 [Sept. 1994] reported the reconciliation: “Asked about the change of heart between Grell and Image, [Mike] Gold responded, ‘They have made some personnel changes and matured. We haven’t made any personnel changes, but we have matured.’ With the new deal worked out with Image, Gold is very confident in the future. He hastens to point out the new direction that Image is taking. They are, ‘not a publisher, but a resource for selfpublishers.’ No one hopes more than Grell and Gold that these resources will

be sufficient to keep Shaman’s Tears alive.” Subsequent issues dealt with the fallout of Circle Sea experimentation, including hybrids breeding in the city sewers. Eager to get his favorite mercenary back into print, Grell wrote a four-issue story arc for Shaman’s Tears [#5–8] in which Joshua Brand meets Jon Sable while in search of “the Nesting Ones.” Shaman’s Tears ran for a total of 12 regular issues, concluding with #0 serving as a prequel. The Shaman’s Tears annual alluded to in #3 was never published. Gold mentions a possible Shaman’s Tears spin-off in his editorial in #1, which was realized in the four issues of Bar Sinister, written by Grell. A three-issue Shaman’s Tears/Turok: Dinosaur Hunter crossover with artwork by Brian Kong was solicited by Valiant in 1995, but was never published. However, hope springs eternal. On July 2, 2017, Grell wrote on his website, “I just got word that my screenplay for Shaman’s Tears made the quarter finals in the 2017 Stage 32 Fantasy & Sci-Fi Screenwriting Contest. Now, if I only knew someone with deep pockets and a devil-may-care attitude toward his money…” In his book, Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study, Michael A. Sheyahshe notes, “Shaman’s Tears appears to be just another example of the ‘Indian’s Plight’ as defined by Vine Deloria in his Custer Died for Your Sins. The central character, reluctant hero that he is, is mistreated on account of his mixed heritage. As we shall see later, with Grell’s help, the character is more complex than at first he appears and much less so than Grell may have originally envisioned. Extra ‘cool points,’ though, for (finally) having an Indigenous comic book hero who lives in modern times.”

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Marvel Comics Between DC and newspaper strips and licensed properties and creator-owned projects, Mike Grell managed a long, successful run working in comics, which explains why it wasn’t until 2002 that Grell found his way to the “House of Ideas.” But necessity is the mother of invention. So it was that Tony Stark found himself given the Grell treatment. Cassell: After working with DC for years and then doing your creatorowned characters, how did you end up doing work for Marvel? Grell: That was real simple. I needed a job. It sometimes is as easy as that. I wound up writing and occasionally drawing Iron Man for a couple of years, and had some fun with that. Tom Brevoort approached me in the mid-’90s and asked me to do a revamp of Spider-Man, and we went back and forth on that for about five months. Unfortunately, I did it without getting a contract upfront, and when Marvel tanked, that project also tanked, and I wound up not ever being paid a penny for five months’ worth of development work. It was just one of those things. But I think that was in the back of a lot of people’s minds when it was time to look around for a new Iron Man writer, and I think that’s how it came to me. For what it’s worth, a lot of what was done in the Spider-Man movie and ensuing storylines is pretty similar to what my approach was to be. We got a bit bogged down because the canon of Spider-Man is sort of fixed, and I was told that if there’s new material or changes that are made, you can only do it in between the panels. Anything that happened off-screen or off-panel was fair game, but anything that had already been published, you pretty much had to leave it alone. So certain things had to stay as they were. Of course, that’s changed dramatically these days because every time you turn around, somebody’s rebooting something or other. They’re either killing off a character or resurrecting him, somebody else is putting on the mask or they’re getting bit by another radioactive spider. I know Tom, himself, was a bit surprised to discover that I

had never been paid anything for the development work that I did on Spider-Man. But all of it did pay off. When I was given the opportunity on Iron Man, I think they were looking at my past history and record, and knew full well that I was going to bring them something that was different from what had been done up until that point. The first thing that I did was I changed Tony Stark physically. The suit, the Iron Man armor, had become so all-powerful that he was basically a mechanical version of Superman. Undefeatable. You could not beat him, you couldn’t touch him, inside that armor. So one of the first things I did was I changed that part of it. I made the armor less powerful than it was, and changed Tony Stark physically. Stark himself had become, physically, a more muscular version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you can picture Arnold Schwarzenegger on steroids. Now, wait a minute, that’s an oxymoron. But, basically, you had a physical portrayal of Tony Stark as a big, musclebound guy. He had gigantic, broad shoulders. He had a head the size of his fist, and a neck that tapered from his shoulders up to the point of his head. He was built like a football player. And that’s not Tony Stark. That’s one of the reasons that I loved the casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark. It was much more to the point. I concentrated on the man inside the iron. That was my approach. And I returned to the original concept that Stark had to recharge his batteries, literally, every 24 hours or it could run down and he could die. But I also added something else in there, which was that it was possible for him to expend all of his energy, including his heart battery power, through the armor in the case of dire need or emergency, which added a potential for self-sacrifice that I felt was important for the character. It’s one thing if the worst that’s going to happen is he’s going to get a bloody nose. Well, big deal. Nobody cares. The world has bloody noses all the time. But a man who can go from being inside this more or less impenetrable, invulnerable suit, but he still has an inherent weakness I thought was much more interesting, so I tried to make the stories as

Previous page: Mike Grell’s awesome pencil work for the Iron Man #60 [Dec. 2002] cover. Above inset: Grell’s cover art for Iron Man #54 [June ’02].

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human as possible, concentrating on the man inside the iron. Which, again, I really liked about the Iron Man movies. The first one, in particular, I was all set to hate it because I really hated the [Incredible] Hulk movie. When they did that first Hulk movie, there were all kinds of reasons why it should have been a good movie, but it was like watching a videogame. As soon as he turned into the Hulk, I was watching this green thing bouncing around the screen, and I was afraid that was going to happen with Iron Man. But they found a way to do it where you never lost track of the fact that Robert Downey Jr. is inside the suit. You never lost track of the man inside the iron, and I really enjoyed that. Plus the vindication of Robert Downey standing up and announcing, “I’m Iron Man.” It’s like, “Yes! Yes!” Because I am the guy who revealed Iron Man’s secret identity. Cassell: Oh, really? Grell: Oh, yeah! Cassell: I didn’t remember that. Grell: No, you didn’t, because they tried to sweep it under the carpet, pretend it never happened. There were two different factions that emerged when they did that. For starters, I had the full cooperation and approval of Marvel, the editorial department, to do it. And I discussed with my editor exactly how I was going to do it, but the emerging factions took two different sides. One was the side that was for what I did, and the other side just absolutely hated it, because they felt that for Stark to reveal his secret identity to the world should be something cataclysmic and earth-shattering, like there’s an asteroid about to smash into Manhattan if he doesn’t put the suit on and try to stop it. My story was a much more human story. I had created a situation where, as everyone knows, Tony Stark and Pepper Potts were in love, and should have been happily ever after, but Pepper winds up married to Tony’s friend Happy Hogan. And, in my storyline, I had Pepper getting pregnant, which right away set Stark off into an interesting reflective mood, because he’s thinking to himself, “Geez, I could have been part of a life like that.” But then, because of something that Stark has done, Pepper winds up being the victim of some severe physical violence and she loses the baby. And Stark sees that child as if it could have been

his. After that happens, there’s a press conference going on at Stark Industries on one of the upper levels, several stories up. Out on the deck, there are news cameras all over the place, and down on the street there’s a robbery going on, and a couple of cheap hoods in a getaway car come tearing down the street. And in the street is a little boy whose puppy breaks away from him and runs out in front of the car. Stark doesn’t even bat an eyelash. Over the edge he goes, turns into Iron Man on the way down, smashes the car to a stop. And all of his friends are really upset, “You bastard. You kept that secret from us for all these years and you gave it up for a dog?” And Stark says, “I didn’t do it for the dog. I did it for him,” pointing to the little boy. To me, that was the human way to do it. I’m proud of that story, and I’m proud to have been vindicated when Robert Downey Jr. stood up, read that card, and said, “I’m Iron Man.” Because how are you going to keep that a secret, really? Not terribly likely. So the war between the two factions broke out, and the haters were very vocal. There were people at Marvel who were staunchly in my corner, but there was so much verbal fallout that the next thing I know, I was out on my ear. And they seemed to try to sweep it all under the carpet and pretend that it never happened. But it’s out there now, out there in the universe. Cassell: That brings up an interesting question. In general, how was it working with Marvel versus DC, in terms of editorial styles? Grell: The only editorial quibble I ever had with Marvel was that occasionally there would be an editorial change made to my script without consulting me, and at DC, if somebody wanted to change even one line of dialogue, the editor would usually pick up the

Inset top: Mike Grell’s cover for X-Men Forever Giant-Size #1 [July 2010]. Inset right: Perhaps the first Iron Man movie took a cue from Grell’s script that had Tony Stark reveal his identity to the world. Here’s the “Out of the Bottle” moment in Iron Man #55 [July 2002]

telephone

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and give me a call and at least give me the opportunity to make the change. If DC disagreed with something and felt that it could be better done or better told in a different fashion, they would call up and say, “I think we have a problem with this page,” or that line of dialogue, or something like that, and we’d talk it over and mutually agree on the change. A lot of times with Marvel, there would be a small change, I think almost never a real material change, but there would be a small change that would be in there and it would be something that was done editorially on the spot without consulting me at all, and I felt that was less than a good working relationship between myself and the editor. Cassell: I don’t blame you. So when you were writing Iron Man, whether you were writing it for yourself to draw or somebody else, were you doing a full script? Grell: I always write full script, whether I’m writing for myself or not, because I always want to be working with an editor. I believe that every writer needs a good editor, someone they respect, someone they are answerable to, in order to keep them in line. Otherwise, you have some real harebrained schemes that come out that might seem like a great idea at the moment, but if you look at them in the cold, hard light of day, maybe they’re not the brightest thing you ever thought of. So I always want that feedback. I want the script to read more or less like a movie script so that the person who’s reading it can see it clearly in their mind. And part of it has to do with me being a visual storyteller to begin with, so when I’m writing for someone else, I write strong visuals, but I also try to adhere to that Denny O’Neil method of leave them the hell alone and let them do their job. Occasionally, I would write something that I knew was going to be a challenge, but I’ve had really good luck—in fact, pretty phenomenal luck—with the

artists that I’ve worked with. Michael Ryan, when I wrote the first story for him, I was surprised. The kid just blew my doors off. I had a scene where Stark is flying over a city in Eastern Europe and the plane that he’s riding in is blown out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile. And I expected a big explosion. I did not expect to look at this beautiful drawing of, literally, an exploded drawing of aircraft parts. I mean, it’s real aircraft parts, almost like the kid got out a Jane’s book of military hardware and looked inside what a jet airplane looks like. Not only that, in the city below, I described how the river divides the city, and on the one side you have the modern city all clean and bright and on the other side of the river it’s a bombed-out mess. And you could actually look down into the alleyways and see piles of trash in the alleys. It was like, oh my god. There’s never going to be anything that I could write that was going to challenge this kid beyond his capabilities. It was just amazing. We worked a little bit together. I coached him a bit to make his acting a bit more subtle. You have to remember that at that time the standard of emotion, in a lot of the Marvel comics in particular, was all teeth and eyeballs. If somebody was having an emotional moment, their eyeballs would bulge out, and they would grimace and you could see every tooth in their mouth. I worked with Michael a bit, just a few panels, to persuade him to go more subtle on his acting, more quiet moments. And, oh my lord, by the time we finished with that run, he was just brilliant. In fact, by the time we finished with the first two issues, he was caught up in doing everything I could possibly have asked. It was great. The other kid who I worked with and gave me far more than I asked him for was Chad Hardin on Warlord. Chad was another one of these very gifted young guys who you couldn’t seem to challenge him enough. If you gave him something ridiculously hard to draw, he would give you back something ridiculously great on paper. Cassell: It sounds like you’ve been fortunate to work with some good folks. Grell: Yes, I have been. Other artwork Mike Grell has done for Marvel includes several illustrations for The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe in 1983 and, more recently, three X-Men stories and covers for several Marvel titles.

Left: Grell’s pencils for a page from X-Men Forever Giant-Size #1 [July 2010]. Inset above: Grell depicts The Punisher in a commission piece.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Other Stuff Mike Grell’s first published work in comics, not including Brenda Starr, was in 1974 and it didn’t take long at all for him to make his mark. The artist received the Inkpot Award at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1982. We’ve covered a multitude of examples of Mike’s artistry and writing in the preceding chapters, and yet there are still others that don’t fit neatly into one of those categories, so the “other stuff” is discussed below. Messer: How was it in the late ’80s, you were asked to provide a dozen or so illustrations for a Donning Company repackaging of the Howard Pyle Adventures of Robin Hood book? Was that a dream come true for you as a kid who played Robin Hood? Grell: It was not so much dream-like as nightmarish. When they phoned me up and asked me to re-illustrate Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood, I said, “Are you nuts?” It’s like when they offered Mel Gibson the role of Hamlet. He said that same thing, “You’ve got to be crazy.” Of course, I’ll do it, because when are you going to get the chance again? And I did it. But I was appalled, number one, that they would want to re-illustrate that classic book, and I was thrilled to do it, but somewhat embarrassed by the quality of the work inside. Messer: Oh, I think it was wonderful. There are some great pieces in that book. The cover’s beautifully painted, and your interpretation of the famous N.C. Wyeth Robin Hood’s last arrow shot at the end is one of my favorites. It’s gorgeous, and it really does pay a nice homage to the classic. Grell: Well, thank you. That actually is my favorite piece in the whole book. Cassell: What are some of the other artistic projects you have worked on? Grell: I collaborated with a great friend of mine, Mark Ryan, on a project of Mark’s. He created this feature called The Pilgrim. Mark is a well-known actor of stage, television, movies. He is the voice actor who does the voice of Bumblebee, Jetfire, and Lockdown in the Transformers films. He starred in [the British television series] Robin of Sherwood. He played the character Nasir, which he created from whole cloth. There was never an Arab character in the Robin Hood legend until Mark Ryan created Nasir. He was nominated for the Olivier Award from London’s West End Theater, which is the equivalent of our Tony Awards in the United States. He was nominated for the Olivier for his portrayal of Elmer Gantry. He’s done Guys and Dolls, and he was in the original cast of Evita and played the role of Che Guevara for something like four-and-a-half years. He was the action director on the movie King Arthur with Clive Owen. He’s the guy who was responsible for teaching Keira Knightley how to swing a sword and shoot a bow. In fact, he also taught Christian Bale how to shoot a bow for his Gods and Kings movie, where he lives through the Exodus. With a bow that he borrowed. He phoned me up and asked if I had a bow of a certain weight, and a certain size, and everything else. And one of my friends actually had the bow, because everything I had was a little bit too powerful. We sent that on down to him, and Christian Bale shot that bow to learn archery. So Mark Ryan is a very talented, multifaceted kind of a guy.

He came up with this concept called The Pilgrim, and The Pilgrim is based on a real-life program that the British government was conducting during World War II. Now, anybody who’s seen Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark knows about the Nazi Ahnenerbe and their quest to collect various esoteric items, mystical contraptions, and things like that, everything from the Lost Ark to the Spear of Destiny. What a lot of people are not particularly aware of is that the British government had their own occult program that they were doing. You can argue that if you’ve got a guy who believes in voodoo, what you should do is get a voodoo doll and start sticking pins in it, and then send them a snapshot of you and the doll and the pins and let him create his own results based on that. You use your enemies’ fears and beliefs against them. During World War II, Churchill actually took part in druidic ceremonies that were aimed at putting protections up around Great Britain. Whether he actually believed it or not didn’t matter. The enemy did, and that was the important thing.

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Previous page: The artist’s favorite image in one of his odder assignments: providing art for an edition of Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood [1989].

One of the other programs they had created was very similar to a program that the U.S. government ran in the 1960s and ’70s called Operation Stargate, where they were attempting to use psychics as spies; guys like Uri Geller were part of that program. During World War II, a group of people led by Colonel Kim Seymour and involving others like Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley, were engaged in another kind of project where they were attempting to manifest a physical form of pure mental energy. Now, if you can do this, you’ve got the perfect spy, because if you can bring it to life, you can send it off to do your bidding wherever. You can cause it to appear wherever, to do something that you need to have done, and it disappears, perfectly deniable, untraceable, the ultimate clandestine operative. In the story The Pilgrim, it actually starts during World War II, and during the London Blitz there is a ceremony going on, and they are working on conjuring this physical entity. But, as they do and it takes physical form in the room, the building is destroyed by German bombs. Some of the people are killed, others are injured, and the entity escapes into the world. I see it very much as a Frankenstein type story, where you have this creature who has no past, no direction. He’s comprised of bits and pieces of a large group of people, some of this one, some of that one, and he is out there in the world trying to find his way, trying to figure out what he’s supposed to do next. In the course of the story, it comes forward into the present, and this entity has assimilated himself into the culture to the extent that he no longer really remembers who or what he was, but he’s starting to, and it’s that awakening consciousness of who and what he is that’s critical to the character and the storyline. Unfortunately, as things developed, the publisher was unable to fulfill the requirements that were laid at their feet. The project fell afoul of lack of funding, and ultimately Mark decided to pull the pin. It’s too bad, because it’s a ripsnorter, and, personally, I think it’s still a viable project that would make a terrific movie, or even a television series. This and next page: At top is a cover and interior art for Grell’s collaboration with Mark Ryan, The Pilgrim [2010]. Top far right is All Star Comics #58 [Jan.–Feb. 1976], cover art by Mike Grell, which features the very first appearance of Power Girl. Bottom right is the mini-bio on Grell’s Star Wars Galaxy New Visions 2 trading card.

Cassell: Was it a graphic novel? Grell: It was a graphic novel. We got the first two books finished. The third book was penciled and half of the pages were inked before the funds dried up. And when the checks stopped arriving, Mark pulled the pin. Cassell: So were you doing the drawing on The Pilgrim? Grell: Right. Mark was writing, and I was drawing it. Cassell: Wow, that sounds so cool. Grell: Yeah, it’s a great concept. Cassell: Does any of that artwork still exist? Grell: Oh, yes. Cassell: You also did some work on Spawn for Image, didn’t you? Grell: Yes, I did. I wrote and penciled a three-part story called Spawn the Impaler, and my layouts were airbrushed by Rob Prior. Cassell: How did that project come about? Grell: I had known Todd McFarlane since he was a kid, basically. I think the first time he came to my studio he was 17 or 18, and he showed me his portfolio, and I gave him a few tips to help steer him along his way. At that point, Todd’s style was quirky and slightly cartoony, but it was very distinctive, and his single weak point was that his backgrounds needed work. And the kid took the advice straight to heart, because a few weeks later he came back to the studio and his new work, with more concentration on backgrounds, was just absolutely brilliant. Cassell: Did he ask you about doing the Spawn story, or was it something that you were interested in doing? Grell: I don’t recall exactly how that came about. It may have been part of a conversation we were having, and I don’t remember if I pitched him. I know the concept was mine, of doing an alternate universe kind of story where I related Spawn to Vlad the Impaler. But I think the initial concept of getting together and doing something like that was something that we more or less came to at the same time. It probably came out of a discussion over dinner, for all I know. Cassell: It’s another interesting view of your work. Grell: Yeah, it was a chance to do something different from what I had done before, and actually show a bit of what I was capable of. The art that you see in the book, the flashback sequences are almost all done from my layouts, reproduced from my finished pencils with some special effects kind of stuff thrown in there

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to tweak them. The present day sequences that occur are all airbrushed by Rob Prior. Cassell: Finally, can you tell us about the story Swamp Angel? Grell: Swamp Angel is based on a combination of fact and fancy, lies, and legend, and the kind of stories you hear at family gatherings when you’re a kid and the grown-ups think you’re not listening. It’s the story of three generations of two immigrant families and is based on my own family history… sort of. The first-generation story is mostly true. My Italian grandfather came to America to work in the iron mines of the Midwest. He became a master mechanic and opened the first automobile dealership in the county. My English grandfather dreamed of becoming a cowboy. He had an eighthgrade education, but spoke five languages. He bought a book on how to build musical instruments, made a violin, and taught himself to play Mozart. He also hated Italians and Catholics. As I mentioned earlier, both men were involved in rum-running during Prohibition and later became sheriff and constable, and that’s how the two very different sides of the family got together. The second-generation story is half-truth. My father was a sax player before WWII, but somewhere in the midst of five major campaigns in the Pacific Theater of Operation he won a chestful of medals, but lost the music. My mother grew up in the middle of the northwoods, living on a bit of land between two swamps, and they called her “Swamp Angel,” because she was the prettiest girl for miles around. Growing up during the Great Depression was a daily battle for survival and in her later years, whenever The Waltons theme would begin to play on TV she would shout, “The Waltons were rich!” The third-generation story is mostly BS, but it encompasses the McCarthy era, the rise of rock ’n’ roll, and the Vietnam War, and ties the past to the future with enough truth to be interesting (my brother did marry the ex-wife of a Chicago Mafioso), but not enough to be incriminating… just in case the statute of limitations hasn’t expired. I pitched the story to DC Comics as a graphic novel project, and Jenette Kahn liked it because it broke the mold of standard comic books. I already had film interest in the story and was in negotiations with a producer for a feature film. DC approved the series and we decided it would be best to wait until the film was

in production before going ahead. As anyone who has ever dealt with Hollywood can attest, it can take a while to get its wheels in motion. We waited… and waited… and waited. It turns out the producer was waiting for the graphic novel—the graphic novel hinged on the movie deal, which hinged on the graphic novel, and the whole thing became a snake eating its own tail. Eventually, patience ran out on all sides. I had already written the scripts and began work on the art, but we had missed the crest of the wave and, sadly, the project was abandoned… but not entirely. If there’s one thing I learned from my mother, it’s not to throw anything away—you never know when it might come in handy. I’m currently working on a prose novel that tells the whole story of Swamp Angel, including—since the first generation is long gone—where the bodies are buried. Mike Grell has also drawn a multitude of specialty illustrations for publications such as The Comic Reader #121 (1975), Superman 400 Portfolio (1984), Edgar Rice Burroughs News Dateline #43 (1991), and a Princess Leia card for the 1994 Topps Star Wars Galaxy set. He also drew the cover to All-Star Comics #58, featuring the first appearance of Power Girl. For more “other stuff,” refer to the Mike Grell Checklist in the back of this book. You would think, after having produced such a prodigious body of work, Mike would be slowing down at age 70. But nothing could be further from the truth.

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Mark Ryan

INTERVIEW

In the Other Stuff chapter, Mike Grell enumerates the exceptional credentials of his friend Mark Ryan. Mike has drawn Mark into many stories, most of which have gruesome deaths, as a joke. In this January 2015 interview with Jeff Messer on “The Geek Brain Popcast,” Ryan elaborates on writing and his friendship with Mike Grell. Jeff Messer: In the late ’80s, in between doing theatre and all the other stuff you were doing, you got into comics books a little bit with our good friend and mutual acquaintance Mike Grell, who was doing Green Arrow over at DC Comics. Were you aware of Mike, how did you meet Mike, and how did it come about that you wrote this special issue of Green Arrow? Mark Ryan: It’s a bit like music to me. I was always writing at school. The best Christmas gift my mom could ever buy me was a blank book; a ledger or something. And I would write stories. I was just voraciously sitting there writing stuff at school. I was encouraged by my English teacher, Sue Herbert. I don’t know why, it was just always in my blood I guess, to write these little adventure stories. I decided to write my first script in 1980. It was called Pendragon, about King Arthur. Which I think still is one of the best ideas I’ve ever had, but that’s a whole other story. And we were trying to get that film off the ground, trying to see if we could raise money and at least get it in some serious development. It’s a different take on the whole King Arthur thing. It’s not even set in the past, it is set now, in the present. Messer: Oh, interesting. Now you’ve got my curiosity as well as everyone else’s. Ryan: Oh, yeah, it’s very different. I was talking about it at a convention in Seattle. I think it was myself, Ray Winstone, and Michael Praed. And this arm went up, and he started asking questions about it. And it was Mike Grell. Messer: Oh wow. Ryan: Mike said, “Can I talk to you about this?” I said absolutely. And so we met at the bar, as you do, and we became firm friends from that moment on. And he was obviously very knowledgeable and very interested. Messer: Tremendous guy, tremendous talent. Just one of the most amazing people. Ryan: You know, Mike is a tremendously generous person. Over the years, we’ve had so many interactions—I have hanging on my wall one of the pages from the James Bond graphic novel that he did. Messer: Right. Ryan: He wanted some insights into the whole Iranian embassy siege and the SAS and all that kind of stuff. I don’t know how it came about, but I’ve quoted it many times. I don’t know if he wrote it or I wrote it or who came up with it from what we were talking about. He was talking about the Walther PPK and why Top right: Actor, writer, and artist Mark Ryan, known not just for his creative collaborations with Mike Grell, but also voice work on the Transformers films. Next page: Top inset is cover to a Grell/Ryan collaboration, Green Arrow Annual #4 [1991]. Bottom is Grell art from The Pilgrim mini-series [2010], published by IDW.

it was a small gun and it’s pooh-poohed by many people. I’ve got the one that says: “A small gun you can hide is better than a big one that gets taken away from you.” It comes from the actual Iranian embassy siege, a police officer that was taken hostage with the rest of the people inside the building—Trevor Lock his name was—actually hid his model 10 Smith and Wesson revolver in his underpants. And even though he was part of the hostages and had been searched, he actually managed to hide his revolver on his person throughout the entire hostage siege. And I’ve got that panel hanging on the wall. Messer: Amazing stuff. So your fast friendship led to the Green Arrow Annual #4 story where it was a dream sequence that goes back to the time of Robin Hood. And of course you had an extreme amount of experience with Robin Hood. [Mark was one of the stars of the UK television show Robin of Sherwood in the mid-’80s.] Ryan: Yeah. He asked me if I’d be interested in doing it. And the legendary Mike Gold, who I had met in New York, said, “Would you come up with something?” And you know, it had all been done. I mean how many ways can you come at this story? I had done some work with Andy Collins, who has what you call a psychic questing group. I was very interested in this whole process of using what they now call human capabilities for these purposes, and so I had been out with him several times. One of the stories he had written about, and I was sort of on the periphery of, was The Black Alchemist. Sadly, Andy was going to get a credit for that, but for some reason DC never credited him, so every time I get a chance I say it publicly, yes, the story was based on some of the stuff from The Black Alchemist and some of the stuff I learned while I was out roaming around researching all of that; what they call human capabilities. Messer: You worked with Mike Grell again, with a story of your own that you’ve written. Tell us a little bit about The Pilgrim.

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Ryan: The Pilgrim fell victim to two things. There is a conspiracy theory out there that the reason it was killed was because I gave away too much material about where various people were in the world, one of them being Osama Bin Laden. Messer: Oh, my. Ryan: And the use of psychics to try and find where he was. The story basically grew out of American and Western and British research into the use of what they call human capabilities or psychic research. And that all grew out of the Second World War and the use of magical warfare, if you like, as a cover story for the Enigma decoding that we had. If you see [the movie] The Imitation Game, Stewart Menzies, who is the head of MI6 at that time in the film, is talking about “we have to come up with some cover story.” Well, the cover story they came up with for the fact that we were breaking the German codes was that we’d gathered the best magicians together to wage warfare on the SS. And sure enough Aleister Crowley and various people like Kim Seymour were dragged in to create the illusion that we were actually not reading their radio traffic, but were reading their minds. And that’s absolutely historically true. That’s what happened. Out of that grew the psychic research that carried on through the 50s and 60s. So The Pilgrim is about a group of talented psychics who

create this thought being, which is a creature they can send off to do various spying missions and is undetectable, can’t be tracked. It becomes an entity of its own and starts behaving in its own interest. And that’s what The Pilgrim is about. Messer: Is there any hope The Pilgrim will ever get finished? It’s kind of hanging in limbo now. Ryan: It is, yeah. Obviously I’d have to rewrite the ending now, but it was set out as 3 series—3 levels of 6 comics—so there’s two more to follow it. Anybody out there in the business that’s interested in a half-finished Mike Grell project … Messer: Exactly! Ryan: And the rights reverted to me, so I’m sure Mike would be very happy to take some shekels. We got two and half of the books done before the company imploded and the business changed forever. So somebody just needs to finance the other half to finish it off. Messer: Best of luck. It’s off to a great start, but it’s a cliffhanger. Ryan: Yeah, I’ve actually been asked by fans, “What did you put in it that they had to kill it?” And there’s a lot of stuff that’s in there which I suppose at the time was fairly risky. Some of it would be my background in the other world, that I learned while doing various things while in the British Army, and I just spun it into this sci-fi story.

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This and next page: Mike Grell wrote and drew (with the assist of co-artist Rob Prior) this spin-off from Todd McFarlane’s tremendously successful Image Comics character, Spawn. Grell’s take melded the legend of Vlad the Impaler with one of McFarlane’s Hellspawns. AtomicAvenue.com reports that Grell “does his usual fine job with the script, and the painted art by Rob Prior adds a strange, photo-realistic look to the series.” Here are the covers to the three-issue mini-series [Oct.–Dec. 1996]. On next page is Grell’s art for Spawn Trading Card Art #55.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Retirement In recent years, Mike Grell has received several awards for his lifetime of work in comics, including the Overstreet Hall of Fame and the Wizard World Hall of Legends. But it’s hard to tell whether Grell has retired. He seems almost as busy today as he did 30 years ago, between convention appearances, illustrating comic covers, and other special projects. His popularity has not waned a bit and his continued prolific output has garnered him a whole new generation of fans. In addition, comics drawn and written by Mike Grell have been reprinted in countries all over the world, making his a truly international following. Mike shares some insight into his “retirement” below. Cassell: You’ve obviously worked on a number of titles over the years, a lot of it DC, but also for Pacific and First, among others. Did you get back your original artwork from the publishers? Grell: Yes. It had not always been that way, but by the time I got started, it was. I think DC began doing it to cover the fact that Marvel paid a bit more. Rather than paying the artists a larger salary, they would say, “Well, you’re getting your originals back, you can always sell them.” And, for the most part, that was correct. You could get a cover and sell it for maybe a couple hundred dollars. But it didn’t sit very well with most of the artists because they regarded the art as theirs in the first place. So, in other words, DC wasn’t really giving them anything that wasn’t already theirs by right. And, of course, Jack Kirby had his fight with Marvel over artwork that was never returned. MAD magazine had a policy of not returning the artwork, but Bill Gaines compensated that by paying page rates that were astronomical by any other standard. You may not get your artwork back, but with Gaines paying you $600 a page, who cares? Cassell: That’s true. So did you sell your art when you got it back? Grell: Eventually I sold everything. When the industry tanked in the ’90s—I can’t remember the exact year, I’m guessing it was probably about ’93 that the comics industry went straight into the toilet—I sold everything I had just to keep a roof overhead and the lights turned on. Cassell: Well, it’s great that you’re able to continue to draw today. I know fans love it when you come to conventions. Grell: Well, thanks, I appreciate that. Everybody’s gotta be someplace, right? Cassell: What commissions are most frequently requested these days? Grell: I’m probably running six-to-one Green Arrow vs. the Warlord. Cassell: Well, with the popularity of the TV show, I’m not surprised about Green Arrow. Do you typically prepare things in advance to take

with you to the show? Grell: Yes. I try to get a few things done ahead of time. People who are interested in getting sketches sometimes don’t want to have to play that crapshoot of standing in line and hoping they can get in under the wire, so I just refer them to my art agent, Scott Kress, at www. catskillcomics.com. You can get advance commission orders, and that way people who do come are sure to be able to pick up their artwork on the spot. Messer: It sounds like you’re constantly on the road. Is this the new mode of life? What’s the future look like for Mike Grell? Grell: It doesn’t look as long as it used to. As time has gone on, you realize how much of it has slipped away. But, yes, the life on the road has become the norm. I’ve been to more conventions in this past year than I had at any time since 1982, when I did Sable. Messer: Is it possibly because of the fact that comic books are such a big part of the American pop culture now thanks to the films and the TV shows? Grell: Absolutely. Comics are mainstream. People will come out of the woodwork for the opportunity to meet and greet and get an autograph, pick up an original sketch. It’s great. I’m really enjoying it. Messer: And I know your website is www.mikegrell.com, but you’re not much on the social media, though. You’re not really into some of the ways these kids today communicate. Grell: No. I’m pretty sure Facebook is the Antichrist. I know people who use social media very well, but I also have friends who have lost the ability to communicate by any other means. They’ve forgotten how to dial a telephone. They don’t even answer emails any more, which is pretty alarming. Messer: I know. It’s so funny how quickly the technology is changing out there. But people can find your tour schedule on your website and when you’re coming to a convention nearby. It’s so funny, would you have thought, back in the day, that one day the geeks would inherit the Earth? Because I think we finally have done it. Grell: And more power to us. I’ll tell you. When I was a teenager, anybody who was reading comics when you were, say, 16 or 18 years old, with the exception of MAD magazine, you were definitely a geek, probably spending a lot of your high school time locked in a locker. And now, someone who’s reading comics into their 30s and 40s is not a geek any more. They’re an entrepreneur. Messer: That’s right. We were ahead of our time. Grell: Absolutely. Everybody else needs to catch up. Of one thing you can be sure, for Mike Grell, this is definitely not … the end.

Previous page: Travis Morgan, the Warlord, in his savage empire, as illustrated by Mike Grell and used as the cover for Back Issue #46 [Feb. 2011].

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Inspired by Grell A Personal Story It is said that the greatest testimony to a life well lived are the other lives we have touched along the way. Mike Grell has touched a lot of lives along his journey. A wonderful example is the one shared by Jeff Messer. It is amazing how much influence one person can have on your life. It all started when I was five years old, and my grandfather randomly picked up a comic book at the local corner store and brought it home to me. Who knew that one day I would call the artist of that book—Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes #219—a hero and a friend. When I was 12, the Comics Buyer’s Guide made me aware of Jon Sable, Freelance. Lacking access to a comic shop, I bought back issues from dealers listings in the CBG. The first Sable comic I read was #11, introducing Maggie the Cat. I was hooked. (And yes, I know that 12 was way too young to be reading those books.) Mike Grell’s art captivated me, but his writing and sense of storytelling fueled me as I began writing in my teens, eventually becoming a playwright. I almost met Mike when I was 16 and he was appearing in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find stores. I stumbled onto a store during a day trip with my family. I had no idea Mike was supposed to be there until I saw the flyers with The Longbow Hunters art on them announcing his in-store appearances. Sadly, I just happened to be in the wrong store on the wrong day, and it was closing time. Thanks to a sympathetic clerk, I purchased Jon Sable, Freelance #1, and left it there to be signed and mailed to me. It arrived in the mail the next week, complete with a Green Arrow doodle with an arrow through his head at the bottom of page one. Years later, after the Sable novel was published, I got bold enough to write to Mike’s website to pitch the idea of me writing a Sable stage play. I received a jovial reply from Mike that I was too dumbfounded to even reply to (though I still have a copy of that email exchange.) Finally, in 2011, I met Mike at Dragon Con in Atlanta,

Georgia, where I got to gush on and on about my love of his work and how it influenced me. I even showed him a flyer from that Charlotte store signing in 1987. I was beside myself meeting him for that first time, and it struck me how much time and attention he gave me in our conversations early that first day of the con. By 2014, I was a radio talk show host, also producing a few podcast shows. I saw Mike again, this time at Fanboy Expo in Knoxville, Tennessee, and this time I had a finished first draft of the Sable stage play. I gave it to him, with no expectation that it would even be something he would seriously consider. I told him I wanted to write it for him as a thank you for being such an inspiration to me for so many years. He was clearly taken aback that I had done this, and after being at a loss for words for a few moments, he came back with a twinkle in his eyes, saying, “This will be great bathroom reading.” We both had a good laugh. In 2015, I persuaded a local comic convention producer to bring Mike to Asheville, North Carolina, for that year’s con. I even got to host a panel with Mike and Steve Rude. I had commissioned Mike to do a surprise drawing for my wife’s birthday. It was a drawing of Green Arrow and Black Canary based on a photo of my wife and me cosplaying years earlier. Mike’s loving re-creation in his inimitable style is the pride of my collection. I was immortalized by Mike Grell! Mike was back in western North Carolina just before Christmas for a Con in Cherokee with Steve Scott and Mark Texiera. About a week prior to the Con, I got an email from Mike asking me if I was interested in working his table with him. I said yes, without hesitation. The Con, ambitious though it was (the first of its kind on an Indian reservation) was not well attended. So there was lots of down time to just get to know each other. Hanging out with Steve, Mike, and Gary (the organizer) over breakfast one morning we all were regaled with tales of infamous inker Vinnie Colletta and how exactly he ended up in such a position of power at DC, and how he got all those gigs inking Grell books.

Previous page and inset above: A commission piece drawn by Mike Grell for friend and fan Jeff Messer, based on the above pic of Jeff and his wife.

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At dinner, I watched as Mike, Mark, and Steve drew sketches on the paper tablecloths for the admiring wait staff. Laughs, jokes, and tales of the comic industry filled the evening. An emergency came up, and Mike had to leave the Con early, asking if I could get him to the airport in Asheville. Along the road between Cherokee and Asheville sat that little country store from my childhood where my grandfather had purchased that first comic book. I told the story to Mike, and pointed to the store as we passed. It was a special moment for me that words can hardly describe. Over that weekend something unexpected happened: I was now friends with one of my childhood heroes. And we have been friends ever since.

Now I’m an administrator for the Mike Grell fan Facebook page with Gus Ceballos, (Mike himself avoids using social media), and I’ve guested on the Warlord Worlds podcast by Darrin and Ruth Sutherland. There are no better fans than Mike Grell fans. As a kid, I looked to his work with awe and found inspiration from it as I became a writer myself. They say that you should never meet your heroes for fear that they will disappoint you. But anyone who has met Mike will tell you how amiable and generous he is with his time. He loves people, and greets fans with an eagerness that is unquestionably sincere. I not only met one of my heroes, I can happily say that he is my dear, sweet friend. Jeff Messer March 2018

This page: Clockwise from above is Superboy #219 [Sept. ’76], the first Grell comic book Jeff Messer encountered; from left, is Mike Grell, Jeff Messer, and Steve Rude at a North Carolina comic con panel; Grell sketch of Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance (with pic of the artist drawing the same at center); Grell and Messer posing with the artist’s drawing; and a photo of Grell in the 1980s.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Mike Grell Method

Most professional artists have a method to their “madness,” an approach to their work honed from years of experience. Mike Grell is no exception. But as Mike explains, it’s not like working in an office.

Cassell: You worked from home, right? What was your normal workday? Grell: Oh, when you talk about a cartoonist, there is no such thing as normal work hours. We are notorious for procrastinating. I do know some guys who have a terrific work ethic. They get up, they go to work, they do the job, and they take time off. Rick Hoberg, who I had the pleasure of working with on Green Arrow, shared a studio space with me for a while, and I’ve got to tell you, the guy was a machine. He starts work, and he does his work, gets it done, and then he’s got time for himself. Just about everybody else I ever knew, you get up in the morning, you scratch and belch for a while, sit down, and drink coffee for a while. Cartoonists are that creative personality. We are easily distracted by shiny objects. I start my typical day anywhere from 9:00, maybe 9:30, to as late as 11:00, and it usually goes until 1:30 in the morning before I crash. But my functional part of the day almost never starts before 2:00 in the afternoon. These days, morning is catching up on correspondence and doing the business of the business, and the creative juices don’t even kick in until about 2:00 in the afternoon. Once I get started, I’ll work until I’m done, or I’m done for. And even though after all these years I know better, it doesn’t stop me from still having to pull the occasional all-nighter. Cassell: Is your schedule five days a week or seven? Grell: It’s as many days a week as it takes. I’m trying to think of how to put this into a context. I always work better under pressure. I’m far more productive in the last five days of a project than I am in the first 15. Cassell: I have a couple of pencil prelims of yours from Warlord, and the amount of detail on the prelims is phenomenal. Grell: Yeah, even if I am the guy who is doing the finishes, I have a tendency to maybe over-pencil. Sometimes I get carried away. I can work from really loose pencils, but I always do tighter prelims because I want the editor to be able to see what it’s going to look like, and if I make a mistake, I want him to be able to see it and call me on it, because I’m my own worst enemy when it comes to self-editing. If you take somebody who’s a writer and then make them their own editor, I guarantee you’re going to get crap. If Inset above: Mike Grell poses at his drawing table in the late 1970s/ early ’80s when the artist lived in Wisconsin.

you’re not answerable to somebody, you’re going to perpetrate just some godawful stuff. And then that comes back to haunt you five years later. You open up the book and go, “Oh god, what was I thinking?” Cassell: Did you do prelims for all of the issues of Warlord? Grell: Yes. Sometimes I would do a tissue paper, tracing paper prelim, and then put it on a lightbox to do the finish. If you’re looking at prelims, they might have gone through two or three different variations before I settled on the final. But then it was always full penciled and then inked from there. Cassell: Was doing the prelims something that you chose to do, or was it an expectation of the editors at DC? Grell: No. The job was to do the pencils. The prelim was to get me to the pencils, to get me that far. And if you’re looking at prelims from earlier issues, like in the 30s, they’re probably drawn on an 8½" x 11" sheet. Cassell: Yes. Grell: Then I enlarged it using an Artograph projector. When you’re doing that, you can tweak things up and down. I have a tendency to make my figures a bit too large, and sometimes the best thing I can do is reduce everything by about 10 percent, or even more, in the final version, because it gives more air around the figure, it opens up the page so it doesn’t have that claustrophobic look where everybody’s on top of everybody else. Cassell: What was your setup for drawing? Did you have a studio? Grell: Yes, I had a studio. Initially my studio was in a little farmhouse. In fact, it’s the farmhouse that’s featured in the Tarzan comic strip. The kitchen was the only room that was really habitable at that point. I had my drawing table in there, and back in the days before technology caught up with everything else, the common thing was to do your layouts on a smaller sheet and then enlarge them using an opaque projector that would show the picture down onto the board that you were working on. But it’s hard on the back, and it wasn’t until later on that I switched to a lightbox. Dick Giordano is the one who encouraged me to do that, and once I saw what he was able to do and how he did it, I decided he was right, because once he had his pencils done in that smaller size, he could enlarge them with a photocopier and just use the lightbox to translate into the finished inks, and he would ink on the lightbox. That’s pretty much what I do today. The following images illustrate Mike Grell’s creative process as a page moves from preliminary sketches to published page. The examples shown on the next four pages refer to pages in Warlord #36 [Aug. 1980] and #37 [Sept. 1980], and the cover of Warlord #2 [July 2009].

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Previous page and left and right: Preliminary sketches and printed pages from Warlord #36 [Aug. 1980]. Below: On left is the preliminary sketch for Warlord #2 [July 2009] and, on right, the printed cover. Pgs. 140 & 141: Page 6 of Warlord #37 [Sept. 1980] preliminary sketch (left) and printed page (right).

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Mike Grell Comics Checklist Below is a checklist of Mike Grell’s work published in the United States. (Many of Mike’s stories have also been reprinted in other countries, appearance of which are not indexed here.) The checklist was compiled from several sources, including one created by Michael Grabois, as well as information from Jerry Bails’ Who’s Who in American Comic Books (www.bailsprojects.com/whoswho.aspx) and The Grand Comic Database (www.comics.org). To the best of our abilities, it is as complete as possible, as of the publication of this book.

Legend: a = Art (pencils, pencils & inks, paint), c = Cover Art, f = Finishes/inks only, i = Interview/article, nn = No Number, p = Pinup, r = Reprint, s&n = Signed and Numbered, w = Writing Publisher

Title (Year): Issues (role)

47 North

The Mongoliad Cycle (2012): nn [a]

Aardvark-Vanaheim

Journey (1984): 10 [a], The Puma Blues (1988): 20 [a]

Academy of Comic Book Artists

ACBA Sketchbook (1975): nn [a]

Acclaim/Valiant/Windjammer

Bar Sinister (1995): 1-4 [c/w], Starslayer: The Director’s Cut (1995): 1-8 [a/c/w], Turok the Hunted (1996): 1-2 [w], Turok Dinosaur Hunter (1995–96): 34,35,43,44 [w]

Aircel

The Southern Squadron (1990): 1 [c/w/intro]

Antique Trader Books

Comics Values Annual (1997): nn [a/c/i]

Apple Press

101 Other Uses for a Condom (1991): nn [a]

Atlanta Comic Con

Convention Program (1980): nn [a]

Blackthorne

Tarzan (1986): 4 [a/w/r]

Bluewater Comics

Jason and the Argonauts: Kingdom of Hades (2007–08): 1–4 [c]

Caliber Press

Kabuki Color Special (1996): 1 [a]

Chicago Comicon

Convention Program (1977): nn [c], (1980): nn [r], (1985): nn [c]

Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate

Brenda Starr (1972–73) newspaper strip (assistant to Dale Messick)

ComicMix/IDW

Jon Sable, Freelance: Bloodtrail (2005): 1–6 [a/c/w]; Jon Sable, Freelance: Ashes of Eden (2009): 1–5 [acw], TPB [r]

Creative Fire Studios, Inc.

Shaman’s Tears ashcan (1993): 1, 3 [a/c/w]

Dagger Enterprises, Inc.

Mavericks (1994): 6 [a]; Scorpion Corps (1994): 7 [a]; Variogenesis (1994): 0 [a]

Dark Horse Comics

Classic Star Wars: The Early Adventures (1994): 2 [c], Dark Horse Presents (2015): 8 [a/c/w], 9–10 [a/w]; Magic: the Gathering: Gerrard's Quest (1999): 1-4 [w] and TPB [r], Tarzan The Savage Heart (1999): 1–4 [c/a]

DC Comics

Action Comics (1974–76, 1998, 2008): 440–442, 444–446, 450–452, 456–458 [a], 601–606 [w], 861 [c]; Adventure Comics (1974–75): 435–437, 440 [a]; All-New Collector’s Edition (1978): C-55 [a/c]; All-Star Comics (1976): 58 [c]; Amazing World of DC Comics (1975– 76): 5, 6, 9 [a], 12 [ac]; Aquaman: Death of a Prince (2011): nn [r]; Arrow (2013–14): 1-2 [a/c], 4 (a]. 6 [a], 9–10 [a]; Arrow Special Edition (2012): 1 [c]; Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus (2017): nn [r]; Batman (1977,1986): 287–290 [a/c], 400 [a]; Batman Chronicles (1997): 7 [w]; Batman Family (1975): 1 [ac]; Batman in the Seventies (1999): TPB [r]; Batman: Masque (1997): 1 [acw]; Best of DC Digest (1983): 33 [r]; The Brave and the Bold (1991–92): 1–2 [w], 3–6 [c/w]; DC Retroactive: Green Lantern—The ‘70s (2011): 1 [a/c]; DC Special (1975–76): 17 [c], 20 [c]; DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest (1981–82): 8 [r], 10 [c/r], 23 [r]; DC Super Stars (1977): 17 [a]; Detective Comics (1975-1976): 445 [a], 455 [a/c], 463–464 [a]; Fanboy (1999): 6 [a]; 1st Issue Special (1975–76): 8 [a/c/w], 11 [c]; 142

DC Comics (cont.)

The Flash (1975–76): 236 [c], 237–238, 240–243 [a]; Green Arrow (1988–93): 1–4 [c/w], 5–9 [w], 10–11 [c/w], 12-39 [w], 40 [a/c/w], 41–43 [w], 44–80 [c/w], Annual 4 [c/w], 5, 6 [a/c/w]; Green Arrow (2010): 30 [c]; Green Arrow (2016–18): 18–26 [c], 28–38 [c]; Green Arrow: A Celebration of 75 Years (2016): nn [r]; Green Arrow: Hunter’s Moon (2013): 1 [c/r]; Green Arrow: Here There Be Dragons (2014): 2 [c/a]; Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters (1987, ’89): 1–3 [a/c/w], TPB [c/r]; Green Arrow: The Wonder Year (1993): 1–4 [a/c/w]; Green Arrow/Black Canary: For Better or For Worse (2007): nn [r]; Green Lantern/Green Arrow (1976–79): 90–100 [a/c], 101–105 [c], 106 [a/c], 108–110 [a/c], 111–112 [c], TPB [c]; Green Lantern Secret Files (1999): 2 [c]; Justice League of America (1975): 117,122 [c]; Justice Society (2006): 1 [r]; Karate Kid (1977): 1–8 [c]; Legion of Super-Heroes [v3] (1988): 45 [a]; Legion of Super-Heroes Archives (2000, ’01, ’03, ’12): 10–13 [r]; Legion of Super-Heroes: 1,050 Years of the Future (2008): nn [r]; Limited Collectors’ Edition (1975, ’76): C-35 (Shazam!) [c], C-49 (Legion) [c]; Ms. Tree Quarterly (1990): 1 [a/c], 6 [c]; Phantom Stranger (1974): 33 [a/c]; Robin the Boy Wonder: A Celebration of 75 Years (2015): nn [r]; Secret Origins (1989): 38 [w]; Shado: Song of the Dragon (1992): 1–4 [w]; Showcase Presents: All-Star Comics (2011): 1 [r]; Showcase Presents: Green Lantern (2011): 5 [r]; Showcase Presents: Justice League of America (2013): 6 [r]; Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes (2013): 5 [r]; Showcase Presents: Phantom Stranger (2008): 2 [r]; Showcase Presents: Robin the Boy Wonder (2008): 1 [r]; Showcase Presents: Warlord (2009): 1 [r]; Star Trek/ Legion of Super-Heroes (2011): 3 [c]; Superboy (1974–77): 202–224 [a/c], 225–230 [c]; Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes (1977–78): 231–237 [c], 239–240 [c], 243 [c], 246 [c]; Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes (2017): 1 [c/r]; Superman (1984): 400 [a]; Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes (2008): nn [r]; T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (2011): 7–10 [a]; Vigilante (1987): 36–38 [c]; Warlord (1976–87): 1–50 [a/c/w], 51 [c/r], 52 [a/c/w], 53–58 [c/w], 59 [a/c/w], 60–70 [c/w], 71 [w], 100–104 [c], 112 [c], 116–117 [c], Annual 1 [a/c/w], 5 [c]; Warlord (1992): 1–6 [cw]; Warlord (2009–10): 1–6 [c/w], 7–12 [a/c/w], 13–14 [c/w], 15–16 [a/c/w]; Warlord: The Saga (2010): nn [r]; Warlord: The Savage Empire (1992): TPB [c/r]; Weird War Tales (1978): 67 [a/r]; Who's Who (1985–87): 6 [a], 9 [a], 14 [a], 20 [a], 23 [a], 25–26 [a]; Wonder Woman (1975): 217 [c]; Wonder Woman: The Twelve Labors (2012): nn [r]; DC Calendar: 1977–78 [a]; Posters (Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters [a], Green Arrow: The Wonder Year [a], Ms. Tree Quarterly [r], Shado: Song of the Dragon [a]); Batman #400 pin-up [a]; Superman #400 portfolio (plate) [a]; T-shirt (Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters [r])

Donnar Publications

How to Draw: Tips from the Top Cartoonists (1982): nn [a/w]

Donning Company

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle (1988): nn [a]

Eclipse Comics

James Bond 007: Licence to Kill (1989): nn [a/c/w], James Bond 007: Permission to Die (1989, ’92): 1–3 [a/c/w], TPB [r]; Ms. Tree (1984): 6, 7 [a]

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

Tarzan: The Greystoke Legacy Under Siege (2017): 4 [a]

Fantagraphics

Amazing Heroes (1987): 115 [a], 120 [a/c/i], 143 [i], 144 [i]

Fictioneer Books, Ltd.

Battle Axe (1989): 1 [p], Comics Interview (1989): 69 [c/i]

First Comics

First Six-Pack (1987): 1–2 [r]; Jon Sable, Freelance (1983–88): 1–43 [a/c/w], 44–56 [c/w], TPB [cr]; Mike Grell's Sable (1990): 1–10 [r]; The P.I.'s: Michael Mauser and Ms. Tree (1985): 1–3 [a]; Starslayer (1983): 7 [a/c/w], 8 [c/w], TPB [r]; Jon Sable, Freelance: B&W front view T-shirt [a], 1984 Olympics t-shirt [a], logo pin [r], Jon Sable pins [r], promo poster [r], keychain [r]

Gemstone Publishing

Comic Book Marketplace (2003): 99 [i]

IDW

The Pilgrim (2010): 1–2 [a/c]

143

Image Comics

Inside Image (1993): 3 [r]; Maggie the Cat (1996): 1–2 [a/c/w]; Shaman's Tears: 1–12 [a/c/w], 0 [a/c/w]; Shaman’s Tears: promo poster [a], s&n print [a], logo pin [a], logo t-shirt (1995) [a]; Spawn the Impaler (1996): 1–3 [a/c/w]; Spawn cards (1995): 55 [a]

Krause Publications

Comics Buyer's Guide (1985): 600 [c]

Literacy Volunteers of Chicago

Word Warriors (1987): 1 [a/w]

Malibu Comics

Jackaroo (1990): 1 [intro]; Southern Squadron: Freedom of Information Act (1992): 2 [c/intro]

Mayfair

Mayfair Game Module: 219 (Green Arrow: Lines of Death) 1987: [c]

Marvel Comics

All-New Hawkeye (2016): 1 [c]; Captain America and the Mighty Avengers (2015): 1 [c]; Exiles (2009): 5 [c]; Herc (2011): 6.1 [a]; Heroes for Hope Starring the X-Men (1985): 1 [w]; Invaders Now! (2011): 5 [c]; Iron Man (2002–03): 50-53 [w], 54 [c/w], 55 [a/w], 56–57 [w], 59–61 [a/c/w], 62–66 [w]; Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe (1983): 6 [a], 9 [a]; X-Men Forever 2 (2010): 9–10 [a]; X-Men Giant-Size (2010): 1 [a/c]; Marvel Legends Reprint (2006): Iron Man 64 [r]

National Lampoon

National Lampoon (1974): 47 [a] (“First Lay Comics,” with Joe Orlando, uncredited)

New Media Publishing Co.

Comics Feature (1980): 2 [i]

Noble Comics

The Justice Machine Sketchbook Portfolio (1982): 1 [a]

Oracle Enterprises

Warriors (1980): portfolio [a]

Overstreet Publications

Overstreet's Price Update (1987): 6 [c]

Pacific Comics

Starslayer (1982-1983): 1–6 [a/c/w]; Starslayer portfolio (1981): [a] (Schanes & Schanes, publisher); promo poster [r]

Pioneer

Drug Wars (1989): 1 [c]; The Official Prince Valiant (1988): 7–8 [c]; Vegas Knights (1989): 1 [c]

Pittsburgh Comicon

Convention program (2007): nn [c]

Questar

Questar (1981): 3 [a]

St. Martin's Press

Great Comic Book Artists (1989): vol. 2 [i]

ShadowStar Press

ShadowStar (1985): 2 [c]

Shooting Star Comics

Shooting Star Comics Anthology (2005): 6 [c]

Southwest Conventions

Houston ComixFair Program: 1983 [c]

Starlog Press

Comics Scene (1983, ’96): 9 [i], 55 [i]

Street Enterprises

The Comic Reader (1975): 121 [c]

Ten-Buck

Space Beaver (1987): 6 [a]

Titan Books

James Bond [Book 3] (1989): The Spy Who Loved Me [intro]

Tom Sciacca Publications

Astral Comics (1977): 1 [c]

Topps

Art of Star Wars Galaxy (1994): Book 2 [r]; Zorro (1994): 4 [c]; Star Wars Galaxy II cards: 229 [a]

TwoMorrows

Back Issue (2005–07, ’11, ’13): 10 [i], 14 [c/i], 18 [i], 25 [i], 46 [c/i], 64 [c/i]; Comic Book Artist (2000): 8 [i]

United Features Syndicate

Tarzan Sunday newspaper strip (1981–83): 2605–2612 [a/w], 2613–2614 [w], 2615–2686 [a/w], 2688–2689 [a/w]

Westfield

Worlds of Westfield: April 1995 [i/r]

144

Wizard (1993, ’96): 24 [i], 54 [i]; Shaman's Tears: card (from Wizard 24) [a], gold card (numbered limited edition) [r]

Wizard Press

NOTES: Other artistic endeavors, the details of which are not known, include educational texts for the National Safety Council, product illustration accounts for Inland Steel (using super-heroes), illustration for a fantasy paperback book, educational film strips, and wildlife paintings.

Awards Year

Award/Honoring Organization

1982

Inkpot Award, San Diego Comic-Con

1988

Nominee, “Best Finite Series” (Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters), The Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards

2017

Hall of Fame, Overstreet

2017

Hall of Legends, Wizard World

Above: Undated foreign editions of Warlord flank Mike Grell’s Justice League of America #117 [Apr. 1975] cover.

145

Mike Grell Gallery of Art

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

Previous page: From top left clockwise is the cover of the 1977 Chicago Comicon souvenir book; sketch of Iron Man; Jon Sable T-shirt; and Mike Grell’s Tarzan art is utilized for a T-shirt commemorating the 2011 Edgar Rice Burroughs Circle of Friends gathering. This page: Clockwise from upper left is Grell’s version of the Man of Steel and alter ego, done for Superman #400; Jon Sable promotional button; page from Batman Family #1 [Sept.–Oct. 1975]; Warlord header card from 1983; and the page introducing Mongo Ironhand, from Warlord #28 [Dec. 1979].

157

158

BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

MONSTER MASH

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Celebrate JACK KIRBY’S 100th BIRTHDAY with an all-star line-up of 100 COMICS PROS who critique key images from his 50-year career!

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THE MLJ COMPANION

Documents the complete history of ARCHIE COMICS’ super-heroes known as the “Mighty Crusaders”, with in-depth examinations of each era of the characters’ history: The GOLDEN AGE (beginning with the Shield, the first patriotic super-hero), the SILVER AGE (spotlighting the campy Mighty Comics issues, and The Fly and Jaguar), the BRONZE AGE (the Red Circle line, and the !mpact imprint published by DC Comics), up to the MODERN AGE, with its Dark Circle imprint! (288-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $34.95 (Digital Edition) $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-067-0

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The creators of the Marvel Universe’s own words, in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and TV interviews, painting a picture of JACK KIRBY and STAN LEE’s relationship—why it succeeded, where it deteriorated, and when it eventually failed. Includes a study of their solo careers after 1970, and recollections from STEVE DITKO, WALLACE WOOD, & JOHN ROMITA SR. (160-page trade paperback) $24.95 (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-086-1

LOU SCHEIMER CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION

SWAMPMEN

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MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS

SWAMPMEN dredges up Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, Heap, and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou, through the memories of the artists and writers who created them! Features BERNIE WRIGHTSON, ALAN MOORE, MIKE PLOOG, FRANK BRUNNER, STEVE GERBER, STEVE BISSETTE, RICK VEITCH, and others, with a new FRANK CHO cover!

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AGE OF TV HEROES

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COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION

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In 1978, DC Comics implemented its “DC Explosion” with many creative new titles, but just weeks after its launch, they pulled the plug, leaving stacks of completed comic book stories unpublished. This book marks the 40th Anniversary of “The DC Implosion”, one of the most notorious events in comics, with an exhaustive oral history from the creators involved (JENETTE KAHN, PAUL LEVITZ, LEN WEIN, MIKE GOLD, and others), plus detailed analysis of how it changed the landscape of comics forever! (136-page trade paperback with COLOR) $21.95 (Digital Edition) $10.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-085-4

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID!

NEW! The 1990s (1940s coming soon!)

KIRBY CHECKLIST: CENTENNIAL EDITION

Detailed listing of all of Jack’s work through his 100th birthday! Published work, reprints, magazines, books, foreign editions, newspaper strips, fine art and collages, fanzines, essays, interviews, portfolios, posters, radio and TV appearances, and unpublished work! (272-page LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER) $34.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-083-0

COMICS MAGAZINES FROM TWOMORROWS

BACK ISSUE

ALTER EGO

COMIC BOOK CREATOR

DRAW!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR

BACK ISSUE celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through a variety of recurring (and rotating) departments, including Pro2Pro interviews (between two top creators), “Greatest Stories Never Told”, retrospective articles, and more. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

ALTER EGO, the greatest ‘zine of the ‘60s, is all-new, focusing on Golden and Silver Age comics and creators with articles, interviews and unseen art. Each issue includes an FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) section, Mr. Monster & more. Edited by ROY THOMAS.

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JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby and his contemporaries, feature articles, and rare & unseen Kirby artwork, showcased in dynamic full-color! Edited by TwoMorrows publisher JOHN MORROW.

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(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95

Remember when Saturday morning television was our domain, and ours alone? When tattoos came from bubble gum packs, Slurpees came in superhero cups, and TV heroes taught us to be nice to each other? Those were the happy days of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties—our childhood— and that is the era of TwoMorrows’ newest magazine RETROFAN! Edited by MICHAEL EURY. (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

THE MAGAZINE FOR LEGO ENTHUSIASTS OF ALL AGES! ®

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2019 RATES

BRICKJOURNAL magazine spotlights all aspects of the LEGO® Community! It showcases events, people, and models every issue, with contributions and how-to articles by top builders worldwide, new product intros, and more. Available in FULL-COLOR print and digital editions. Edited by JOE MENO. (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 • (Digital Edition) $4.95

SUBSCRIPTIONS ECONOMY US Alter Ego (Six 100-page issues) $65 Back Issue (Eight 80-page issues) $76 BrickJournal (Six 80-page issues) $60 Comic Book Creator (Four 100-page issues) $43 Jack Kirby Collector (Four 100-page issues) $46 RetroFan (Four 80-page issues) - NEW! $38

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Sorry, we do not currently offer subscriptions to DRAW! magazine, but individual issues are available in both print and digital editions.

TwoMorrows. The Future of Pop History.

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CELEBRATING THE CRAZY COOL CULTURE WE GREW UP WITH!

The Art of ‘Iron Mike’ Grell! Mike Grell: Life Is Drawing Without An Eraser is a career-spanning tribute to a master storyteller. From a seminal turn on Superboy and the Legion of SuperHeroes to creating the lost world of the Warlord, Grell quickly made his mark at DC Comics. But he is perhaps best known for his work on Green Arrow, first relaunching the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series with Denny O’Neil and later redefining the character in Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters. However, his greatest contribution to the comics industry was in helping pioneer creator-owned properties like Jon Sable, Starslayer, and Shaman’s Tears. Grell even tried his hand at legendary literary characters including Tarzan and James Bond. It all adds up to a remarkable career in comics. And Mike Grell is not finished yet. This is the story of Mike Grell, told in his own words, full of candor, optimism, and humor. Lending their own insight are colleagues and collaborators Paul Levitz, Dan Jurgens, Denny O’Neil, Mike Gold, and Mark Ryan, joined by a wonderful Foreword by Chad Hardin.

$27.95 in the USA ISBN 978-1-60549-088-5

52795

TwoMorrows Publishing 9 781605 490885

Raleigh, North Carolina

PRINTED IN THE USA

ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-088-5 ISBN-10: 1-60549-088-1

Full of illustrations from every facet of his long career, the book also includes a thorough checklist of his work and an examination of the “Mike Grell method.” Whatever your favorite character by Grell, you’ll find it in this book. It is a fitting tribute to the artist, writer, and storyteller who has made the most of every opportunity set before him, living up to his own mantra: “Life Is Drawing Without An Eraser.”