Modern Masters Vol. 19: Mike Ploog by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

N I N E T E E N :

MIKE PLOOG

by Roger Ash and Eric Nolen-Weathington

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TwoMorrows.Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. (& LEGO! ) TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

Modern Masters Volume Nineteen:

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME NINETEEN:

MIKE PLOOG edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Roger Ash front cover painting by Mike Ploog all interviews in this book were conducted and transcribed by Roger Ash proofreading by Fred Perry

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • November 2008 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-007-6 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2008 Mike Ploog unless otherwise noted. The Artfull Dodger ™ and ©2008 Mike Ploog. The Stardust Kid and all related characters ™ and ©2008 J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog. Abadazad and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Disney Enterprises, Inc. Dr. Strange, Ghost Rider, Man-Thing, Monster of Frankenstein, Sludge, Weird World, Werewolf by Night, Tomb of Dracula ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. The Spirit and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Will Eisner Estate. The Perhapanauts and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Todd Dezago and Craig Rousseau. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC. King Kull, Thulsa Doom ™ and ©2008 King Kull, LLC. Lone Wolf and Cub ™ and ©2008 Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. Eerie ™ and ©2008 Jim Warren. Connie Rodd, PS Magazine ™ and ©2008 Department of the Army. Planet of the Apes ™ and ©2008 Twentieth Century Fox. Wizards ™ and ©2008 Ralph Bakshi. Shrek and all related characters ™ and ©2008 DreamWorks Animation, LLC. The Thing ©2008 Universal Studios. Gremlins, Little Shop of Horrors, The Witches ©2008 Warner Bros. Editorial package ©2008 Eric Nolen-Weathington, Roger Ash, and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To K.C. Carlson for his assistance and encouragement, but mostly for being a good friend. — Roger To Donna, Iain and Caper — Eric Acknowledgements Mike Ploog, for laughter-filled conversations and allowing us the pleasure of talking with him. Jim Warden, for contributing many hitherto unseen treasures and for being a Caps fan. Heritage Auctions, for providing access to their archives or orignal artwork. Please visit them at www.ha.com. Special Thanks Glenn and Marjorie Ash, Terry Austin, Dave Ballard, Jerry Boyd, Leonard Chuah, Sean Clarke, Ferran Delgado, J.M. DeMatteis, Todd Dezago, Scott Green, Scott Reno, John Roche, Craig Rousseau, Juame Vaquer, David West, Scott Williams, John Yon, Tom Ziuko, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Nineteen:

MIKE PLOOG Table of Contents Introduction by J.M. DeMatteis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Part One: A Cowboy in the Marines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Where There’s a Will... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Part Three: Marvelous Monsters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Part Four: A Life in Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Part Five: Creating Fantasy Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Part Six: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

Introduction The truth is Mike is a kind of Paul Bunyan—but instead of an axe, he’s got a giant pencil slung over his shoulder; and he uses it to create astonishing worlds of imagination. Mike is one of the greatest fantasy artists on the planet: There may be some artists out there who are as good, but—take my word for it—there’s nobody better.

Paul Bunyan With A Pencil

thought he’d be taller. I’d been working with Mike Ploog for a couple of years—communicating through phone calls and e-mails—but I didn’t actually meet him face-to-face until the spring of 2006. We were in New York City to meet with the folks at Hyperion Books for Children, publishers of the Abadazad books, and then we were heading to Washington, D.C. for the official launch of the series at Book Expo America. We made a plan to meet outside a restaurant in Union Square. I’d seen photos of Mike—bushy white beard, mischievous twinkle in the eyes—so I didn’t think I’d have a problem recognizing him; but when I arrived at the Union Square Café, I couldn’t find him. Oh, sure, there was this man standing there who kind of looked like Mike—but he was so much smaller. Understand: it’s not that Mike’s short—he’s not—it’s that the Ploog I’d imagined in my head was about thirty feet tall. Talking on the phone; listening to that booming laugh; hearing those amazing stories of Mike’s boyhood adventures in Minnesota and Burbank (think Huck Finn in the l950s), in the Marines (where he was part of—no kidding!—the Marine Corps rodeo team), in Hollywood (where he worked with everyone from Terry Gilliam to Roman Polanski), and in the comic book business (this is a guy who started his career working with Will Eisner), I’d imagined a kind of Paul Bunyan character: a towering giant striding through the Manhattan streets.

I’ve been a Ploog fan since his Marvel Comics work of the 1970s—especially his extraordinary run on Man-Thing with the great Steve Gerber. I always responded to the flow of Mike’s art, the almost palpable texture, the impeccable storytelling and—most important—the heartfelt humanity. But being a fan and working well with someone aren’t always synonymous. I’m happy to say that, from Day One, Mike and I have had a wonderful creative interplay, both professionally and personally. (I think what really cemented our friendship was the fact that we both still believe in Santa Claus. And, no, I’m not kidding.) Watching him bring both Abadazad and The Stardust Kid to visual life has been one of the great joys of my career in comics. Time after time I’d get new pages from Mike and be stunned by what a brilliant job he’d done. Hell, I was absolutely giddy. “This looks just like Mike Ploog!” I’d say to him—and he would laugh that remarkable laugh. I don’t think he realized that I was paying him the highest compliment possible. J.M. DeMatteis 8/08

Part 1:

A Cowboy in the Marines called Man of a Thousand Faces. I think Leo G. Carroll played the part of the guy. I loved that character because he was everyone. There was something magic about him.

MODERN MASTERS: You were born in Minnesota in 1942, correct? MIKE PLOOG: Right. Mankato, Minnesota. It’s a pretty remote place. Well, not any longer. It used to be.

MM: You mentioned in your Moonshadows sketchbook that you used to draw pictures at the local store and get a grape soda, and you always drew the same picture. What was the picture you always drew?

MM: Do you have any siblings? MIKE: Yes. I had two brothers and a sister.

MIKE: It was Roy Rogers. [laughs] Whoever was doing Roy Rogers in comic books at that time only drew him from a 3/4 profile. I got that down pat. Basically, I would draw whatever was on my mind at that particular time, but Roy Rogers was my staple.

MM: When did you start drawing? When did you become interested in art? MIKE: To be honest, interest was different than starting to draw. The main entertainment as a kid was the radio. I spent endless hours in the evening listening to the radio and the old radio shows. That’s what stirred my imagination. I needed to see a face. I drew on everything. I drew on the walls. I drew on the radio. I drew continuously. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon was one of my favorites. I drew him over and over again. The day that Quaker Oats brought out a Quaker Oats box with a picture of Sergeant Preston, I was absolutely shattered because it didn’t look anything like what I thought he was going to look like. I think the radio was the first incentive to sit down and make a picture. It seems like I’ve always drawn.

MM: Did you see many comic books or comic strips growing up? MIKE: Not really. I saw a lot of comic strips. I don’t think we ever really got a newspaper because where I was being raised, I was raised in St. Thomas, Minnesota, there was just a church, two stores, and a very small school that I went to. People used to save the comics for me. I was quite a fan of newspaper comics, not comic books. We didn’t get to town all that often and the only books that were really on the drug store’s shelf were things like Donald Duck and Archie and Roy Rogers, obviously. I can’t remember super-heroes. If they were there, I had very little interest in them. MM: What comic strips did you particularly enjoy? MIKE: I loved Li’l Abner. I liked Flash Gordon and Hal Foster’s work on Prince Valiant. The goofy thing is that I can never remember reading them. [laughs] I’d just sit and look at the pictures.

MM: What sort of radio shows did you like listening to the best? MIKE: Oh, dear! I loved the Westerns like Gunsmoke, and Sergeant Preston. There was one called Bobby Benson B-Bar-B Riders, Red Rider, and Little Beaver. Things like that. The other ones that I loved were the scary ones like Inner Sanctum and Tales of Horror. And the detective shows. I think I pretty well covered the gamut. There was one

MM: So it was the art in these strips that attracted you? MIKE: Oh yes. Definitely. Still, to this day, I buy comic books and I don’t read them. I have a lot of friends who are writers who’d probably shoot me for that. [laughter] 6

MM: Eventually, your family ended up moving to L.A. MIKE: Yeah. My mother and father separated when I was about ten years old. We left the farm and piled into a brand new Chevrolet. I’d never been in a new car before. When my mother and dad sold the farm, mom bought a brand new Chevy and the five of us piled into it and drove across country. A very leisurely drive, mind you. We stopped everywhere. Anywhere that took our fancy, we stopped. I think that has always given me this strange wanderlust because the most exciting period of my life was that trip from Minnesota to California. MM: What sort of places did you stop? MIKE: Everywhere. We took turns choosing motels. Any time we saw a national monument sign or something, we had to stop and read it and take our picture by it. Every state that we went through, at the border where it says you’re now leaving Iowa and going into Kansas or whatever, a picture had to be taken. The biggest memory of stopping was in the Southwest when we got into Arizona and New Mexico because that was my fascination. That was Indian country. My first sightings of an American Indian absolutely blew my mind because there they were, The American Indian. That wonderful person that fascinated me all my life. MM: Did you see the opportunity to see many movies?

MIKE: I think Le Suer had a movie theatre, but I don’t remember going to it. St. Thomas obviously didn’t have one. It wasn’t until I got to California. We went to a lot of drive-in movies. My poor mother. She used to have to sneak us in because of the fact that we couldn’t really afford to go to movies that often. So what we’d do is we would pop all of our popcorn and put it in buckets and big bags and hide under a blanket. They probably knew that when they let us in the damn theatre [laughter] because this woman is going to a movie theatre all by herself, and in the back seat on the floor board, is this lumpy blanket and the smell of popcorn. Obviously the drive-in movies at that time let us get away with it. We used to go to drive-in movies on a regular basis. Television was the thing that blew my mind. When we got to California, my mother acquired a used television with a round screen. There were pictures to these stories. For somebody that had tried all of his childhood to picture stories, to actually see pictures with stories was absolutely wonderful. MM: How old were you when you moved to California? MIKE: I was about ten or eleven. MM: Did you enjoy the same sorts of movies and TV shows as radio shows? Westerns, for example? MIKE: Oh yes. The whole family was into Westerns. We ran a relatively poor farm. We did a lot of horse trading and there were a lot of animals through the farm. I loved the horses, I really did. That was my first love. The whole family loved the Westerns and from the first time we turned the TV on, we were seeking out the Westerns.

Previous Page: Mike loves Westerns, so here’s one of his cowboy drawings. Above: Another cowboy, this time as part of a birthday greeting. Left: Okay, not quite a cowboy, but the samurai genre isn’t all that different from Westerns, really. Artwork ©2008 Mike Ploog.

MM: Did you ever get into the movie serials like Flash Gordon?

man’s shoes to school. Just like today, unless you’re cool, you don’t fit in. Obviously, I didn’t fit in very well.

MIKE: Oh yes. Definitely. They were absolutely fascinating because of the imagery. A lot of these things I’d seen portrayed in comic strips, but to see people actually walking around them and using them, you can only imagine what a thrill it was to see something like that. Buster Crabbe was doing Flash Gordon at the time, and to see him coming in and out of that spaceship, even though when it flew through the air sparks were just dropping off the back of it, it didn’t matter to me. It worked. It was a real spaceship. And inside that spaceship, no matter how primitive it was, he had these levers and dials and everything.

MM: When you were in school, did you study art? MIKE: No, but oddly enough, I did do some art because they had a school newspaper and I did do a little spot art for it. It wasn’t actually an art class, but it was a class that you could draw in. The teacher wasn’t really an art teacher, but I could draw better than anybody else in the class. That was my first taste, I think, of finding attention through my work. And finding a way of communicating with other people that normally wouldn’t want to communicate with me. MM: You eventually joined the Marines. How did that come about?

MM: Obviously it was a big change for you moving from a small Minnesota town out to L.A. Did you have any trouble fitting in?

MIKE: A lot of things led up to it. Basically what it was was I didn’t get on with school at all. I didn’t fit in. I just didn’t feel like it was a place that I belonged, although I did go to school for quite a while. I went to school for six or seven years while I was there. During that period, it was an absolute struggle. I had one or two friends and that was about it. Going to a party was absolutely out of the question. I kind of drifted away from school and I drifted down to the river bottoms in Burbank, California, just off of Riverside Drive, because there was nothing there but stables. Down there, I knew how to talk to people. I knew about animals. I was a country boy. They liked me. I found people that I could relate to. When I first got down there,

MIKE: I didn’t fit in very well. There was no two ways about it. You can’t come from a relatively poor dirt farm and be thrown into Burbank, California. It was American Graffiti time. It was black peggers and pink mandarin colored shirts and hot rodders. What did I know from that? That, and we were still kind of living on the cusp financially. As opposed to putting me in Levi’s, my mother would put me in corduroys that were one size too big because she knew I was going to grow into them. I don’t think I still have, actually. I wore my Uncle Harold’s shoes for several years because he was a very small man. We had a lot of his shoes for some stupid reason. [laughter] I’m wearing an old 8

the thought never crossed my mind of actually leaving school and moving there, but as time went by, I spent more and more time down there until finally I just said, “That’s it. Mom, I want to go down and live at the stable. Old Tommy Cloud will give me a job cleaning stalls and taking care of the horses. He’s got a place where I can stay.” Which was nothing more than a box stall that had a wood stove in it that was converted over to someplace somebody could sleep. My mother figured at least he’s not going to be wandering around the streets and getting in trouble. Let him go. And she did. She called the school and said “Michael is having a difficult time. Is it alright if I take him out of school and he gets a job?” They said it would probably be for the best. So off I went. I went to work at Studio Stables. MM: How old were you at that point? MIKE: About 16. That was a fantastic experience. Studio Stables rented horses out to the average person off the street, but their main income came by renting horses to film productions. One of my jobs was to go to these film productions with the horses and take care of them; to groom them and saddle them and have them ready for whatever they were needed for. That was my first introduction to films being made. That blew my mind. MM: Do you remember any of the movies you did that for? MIKE: Oh, hell yes. We did Death Valley Days and Tales of Wells Fargo. These were TV shows. Mostly we did TV shows because they were very reluctant to take me out on locations. Eventually they did. There was a production called 26 Men which was about the Texas Rangers. A lot of them were just small, little assignments where I Love Lucy would want a pony or something. It was wonderful. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. We went up and did a thing with Clint Walker called Yosemite or something like that. I can’t quite remember what that was. We went to Mexico on The Treasure of Pancho Villa with Rory Calhoun and Shelley Winters. [laughs] I won’t forget her for a long time. MM: How did you go from there to the Marines?

MIKE: I did a couple of years working down there with those guys, and we used to do a lot of things. We used to go out for the weekend rodeos and things like that. By that time, even though I was only about 17 years old, I felt very adult because I was being more or less treated as an adult, or a young man. Like anybody, we’d have a tendency to be a bit adventurous at that age, and I started accumulating a lot more friends that were outside my normal circle of friends. I had a tendency to get myself into a bit of trouble from time to time. It was not always the best kind of trouble. One day, they just merely approached my mother and said, “Listen. He’s got to do something. He’s either going to have to join the service with your permission or go into some kind of boys home.” When they mentioned it to me, the obvious choice was into the service I go. The Marine Corps was the best choice because I’m afraid I was influenced by John Wayne. I was easily influenced by outside influences. John Wayne survived I don’t know how many battles, and I figured if he could do it, I could do it. So off we went into the Marine Corps. When I first went into the Marine Corps, I got out of boot camp and I came out with pretty high marks. They sent me to what the Marine Corps referred to as CSchool. C-School is a really spit and polish kind of group that were like orderlies for Admirals. When you see a Marine standing at the door of the White House, opening and closing doors, standing there in his dress blues at attention looking smart as hell, those are all C-School guys. I think I told them in the very beginning this is not my kind of scene, [laughter] but they seemed to think that I was going to fit in there. So they spent an enormous amount of time and effort trying to make me fit in there. I went through 9

Previous Page and Below: Designs for Hatchet Jack and one of his band of mercenaries for a Lone Wolf and Cub project.

Above: More Lone Wolf and Cub artwork, featuring Hatchet Jack and crew. Next Page: The only type of uniform Mike might be comfortable with these days.

at least two or three classes where they would just say, “Oh God, Mike. You did it again. We’re going to start you at the beginning and we’re going to try it again.” I’d say, “I’m sorry, but I’m not spit and polish. I hate this.” [laughs] Finally they said, “Sorry, you’re just not working out.” I thought, “God! What a relief!” At this point, I’d been six to eight months away from infantry and I’d have to go up to Pendleton and join an infantry unit. They thought, “Maybe there’s something else we can do with this guy.” They looked through my record book and they saw my civilian occupation. They actually had an MOS for a horse handler. MOS means Military Occupational Specialty. It was like a job description. It went back to the days of the cavalry, obviously, but they still had it in the books. They said, “You’re a horse handler.” I said, “Yeah. I can handle horses.” They said, “We can send you up to Camp Pendleton where they have stables. They also have a rodeo grounds.” I said, “Oh, wow. Send me to the rodeo grounds. I used to ride bucking horses and I know about this kind of stuff.” So off they sent me to the rodeo grounds, and I spent almost two years there and loved every minute of it. 10

MM: Did you get involved with art in the Marines? MIKE: Not at that particular time. They had gotten wise to me at the rodeo grounds and said, “Okay buddy. You’ve been here for almost two years, which is like a year-and-ahalf longer than you should have been here.” I was working for this wonderful oldworld colonel called Colonel Bowen. He used to wear one of these great, big, tengallon Stetsons. I can see his face right now. He had the handlebar mustache and everything. He was absolutely brilliant. He liked me. He pulled every trick in the book to keep me at the rodeo grounds, right up until the time when I was transferred out of it. He told me as I was packing my bag, “Don’t you worry. I’m gonna get you out of this. You’re gonna be back here tomorrow.” So I showed up at the unit, I think it was Mike Company, Third Marines. I walked in and this lieutenant was sitting behind the desk and he said, “Why aren’t you in uniform?” I said, “Actually, to be honest, I’ve been at the rodeo grounds for like the last two years and I don’t have any uniforms left. They just got lost.” He went bananas.

Leatherneck magazine for about a year, and stayed there until I got out of the Marine Corps.

Obviously, I’m still a Marine. [laughs] I should have some kind of a uniform. I said, “But don’t worry. Colonel Bowen is going to arrange everything and I’ll be out of here in a couple of days and back at the rodeo grounds.” Well, that was it. I was on his list. This was the Marine Corps. [laughs] You’re not going to tell the lieutenant sitting behind a desk when you’re standing there scruffier than hell, “Don’t worry, I don’t need a uniform.” Obviously, it didn’t work out. Then, they tried to make a Marine out of me. That’s when my drawing came into the picture. I was suddenly doing drawings for the company. I did a mural once on the staff mess wall. My time was nearly up in the Marine Corps. I’d almost done my four years. I decided I was going to stay in because I really didn’t know what I was going to do if I got out. That was terrifying. To have to go out into the real world again and have to deal with things. I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do. So I figured I’d ship over, which is military slang for reenlisting. They said “If you do ship over, we’ll make you an illustrator.” Well, that was cool. “That’ll keep me away from getting shot at least.” You don’t hear of that many illustrators getting shot. So that’s how I ended up working in Training Aids.

MM: You were doing art there as well? MIKE: Yeah. I was doing art for the book and laying out the book. I learned a great deal about publishing there. It was a good experience. MM: Why did you end up leaving? MIKE: Leatherneck magazine is at Marine Corps headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. Because of the nature of the magazine, you had access to a lot of information that very few other average troops have—even officers. You were going to meetings, and you were doing a lot of traveling with the military. You started to realize what it’s like once you rise above the enlisted man rank. It becomes an old boy corps. At that particular time, it was in the heat of the Vietnam War. These guys didn’t even feel like military men. They felt more like politicians. I got so disillusioned by the whole military attitude that I had to go. I really had to get the hell out of there. Colonel Shuan was running Leatherneck at the time, I think. He brought me in and he said, “Mike, you don’t want to be here anymore.” I said, “If I could get out of here tomorrow, I’d be outta here. But I can’t. I’ve got another six months.” He said, “We’ll get you out of here.” And so, they got me out of there.

MM: What did you do as an illustrator? MIKE: I went to work in San Diego at MCRD [Marine Corps Recruit Depot] working in Training Aids. I would do transparencies and slides and posters for classrooms for teaching you how to tear down a weapon, or how to maintain a jeep or something. It was fun. I enjoyed it. Whenever I got bored with it, they would ship me over to the swimming pool where I could work as a lifeguard. I took a test where I became an instructor at the swimming pool.

MM: From there, the next thing I know you did was work for Filmation. Was there something in-between? MIKE: Yeah. There were a few jobs. I drove a truck for UPS for awhile. One day, I pulled into the yard with the truck and a guy comes up and he says, “Hey you! The beard has to go.” I thought, “Here we go.” The fact that I was back in a uniform was the thing that really irritated me the most. I thought, “Oh no, you don’t. I’m outta here.” [laughter] I even applied to become a policeman at California Highway Patrol. I passed all the tests, and it wasn’t until the day that I had to go down there for a swearing in that I finally thought, “Wait a minute. I’m going back into a uniform. I don’t want this. I don’t need this.” I tried a lot of things before I finally thought I could actually make a living at being an artist.

MM: When did you leave the Marines? MIKE: I left in 1968 after ten years. I spent 10 years in the military. For many years, I thought it was the biggest waste of my life. It was only after many years away from the military that I realized how much I’d actually gotten out of it. I was a great experience. Eventually, I went to several bases working with the Training Aids units and also as a swimming instructor. Finally, I ended up at 11

Part 2:

Where There’s a Will... MM: Was that one of the few times in your career that you’ve worked on super-heroes?

MM: How did you end up at Filmation?

MIKE: I can’t tell you how it came about, I attribute it to an old friend at Leatherneck magazine named Duane Wells. He was a dear friend. He still is a dear friend. He kept telling me, “Mike, you can really make a good living at this. You’ve got the ability to make a living at this.” That was always in the back of my mind. One day I decided. “That’s it. I’m going to try it.” I spent about a week putting together a portfolio of drawings. Obviously, during a week you’re not going to put together anything that’s going to knock anybody’s socks off, but it was an example of what the hell I could do. A lot of things I ripped off out of comic books. [chuckles] I stole things wherever I possibly could to put them in this portfolio. I went down to Filmation and I showed Don Christensen my portfolio. He said. “Okay. You’re hired.” It blew my mind. It was that easy. I was hired. He put me in the back doing cleanup where I would clean up other people’s drawings. Don did me a wonderful favor. He said, “We want you to do other things, but you’re going to have to learn how to do them.” Don would stay late with me in the evenings and show me how to do layouts, which is kind of the next step up from cleanup; to actually do the layouts yourself. He got me doing layouts which was absolutely fantastic because it was more money than I’d ever made before in my life. That blew me away. I spent one season with Filmation. That’s how loyal I am. [laughs] I spent one season with them and Hanna-Barbera offered me more money and so I left.

MIKE: As a matter of fact, it was the only time. MM: Once you went over to Hanna-Barbera, what were you doing for them? MIKE: I got over there and that season they were doing all this goofy stuff. I worked on Wacky Races and Motormouse and Autocat. The only good thing was that towards the end of my tour there, they were doing the pilot for Scooby-Doo and I got a chance to do some drawings for Scooby-Doo. Prior to that, I was doing goofy cars and goofy airplanes and things like that. Anything that could carry Autocat and Motormouse around. [laughter] MM: Were you still doing layout for them? MIKE: Yeah. It was mostly layouts. Towards the end, they were having me do more detailed drawings for some of the designs on the cars and things. But talk about boring. [laughter] MM: Did you happen to work with Alex Toth while you were there? MIKE: No, I didn’t. I only met Alex on a couple of occasions and, for some strange reason and I don’t know what it was, Alex took an instant dislike to me. At evening cartoonist meetings, we nearly went outside for a fist fight. I found Alex a very difficult man to deal with and talk to. I once called him for some advice, and he cut me off so quickly that I thought I must have said something terrible. He was his own man. I had an enormous amount of respect

MM: What did you work on at Filmation? MIKE: Batman and Superman were the things that I worked on when I first got there, then they put me off onto other things. The Batman/Superman Hour was the major thing. 12

for his work. He was a brilliant artist. Absolutely brilliant. Personally, he was a very difficult man to get on with. And fortunately, I didn’t have to work with him. [laughter] MM: Tell me about your move to PS Magazine. MIKE: One day—I wish I could remember the guy’s name, he was a hell of a good artist—a co-worker came in and said, “Mike, I belong to the National Cartoonists Society, and we just got this newsletter where Will Eisner has put an ad in saying that he’s looking for an artist with military experience and who has a tendency to draw in his style.” He showed me the letter and it had a Will Eisner PS Magazine drawing in it. I said, “I know this work.” Little did I know that I’d spent four or five years drawing Will Eisner’s stuff. He was the guy who was doing PS Magazine and PS Magazine was like the Training Aids stepping off point. Everybody went back to PS Magazine, so I was continuously emulating Will Eisner’s style without even knowing who Will Eisner was. He wanted somebody to come to New York. I didn’t send him any artwork, I called him up and said I’d be interested in doing this. He said, “What have you been doing?” I told him that I had been working in Training Aids, and the goofy thing was, I’d been drawing his stuff for years. He said, “I’m gonna be in L.A. in about a week. Can you meet me at the Beverly Hills Hotel?” Somebody else must have been paying for it because Will wouldn’t have sprung for the Beverly Hills Hotel! Anyway, he said, “Bring some drawings along.” So I met him at the hotel. I brought the drawings and I had to do some new because I had nothing to show from my Training Aids days. He looked at them. We sat and chatted for a while. He said, “What day is it? It’s like Monday or Tuesday, right? Can you be to work next Monday in New York?” And I said, “Sure!” [laughter] I was single. The idea of going to work in New York next Monday? You’ve got to be joking! This was absolutely amazing. So that’s what got me from Hanna-Barbera to PS Magazine. MM: I think a lot of people have heard of PS Magazine, but it usually doesn’t go

beyond the fact that Will Eisner was involved with it. What is PS Magazine? MIKE: PS Magazine was a postscript to the military manuals. The military manuals covered everything. There was a manual three to four inches thick for every vehicle and every weapon that the military had. PS Magazine’s job was to break down these manuals into the simplest cartoon form so that the actual guy in the military who can’t even read this stuff—the people who wrote it can’t even really read it—could understand what this manual was saying. You were literally doing a monthly book 13

Previous Page: Caricature of Mike’s former boss, Will Eisner. Above: One of Mike’s contributions to PS magazine, featuring Connie Rodd.

Below: The second page of Mike’s piece for PS. Next Page: Mike’s character, The Artfull Dodger, introducing The Spirit. The Artfull Dodger ™ and © Mike Ploog. Connie Rodd, PS ™ and ©2008 Department of the Army. The Spirit ™ and ©2008 Will Eisner estate.

that was helping the average GI or Marine to understand what this vehicle that he was responsible for, or this weapon that he was responsible for, was really all about. How to take care of it. How to repair it. How to maintain it. That’s what PS Magazine was about. It was done in a cartoon form, but it was done in a Will Eisner cartoon form which meant that the GIs you saw working on these things were real GIs. The GIs

could relate to them. They could recognize themselves in the characters. They understood the humor because it wasn’t putting the guy down. It was more aimed at the establishment. “They say it’s a smoo.” “No! It’s not a smoo, it’s a smerack! Don’t they know their smoos from their smeracks?” [laughter] And a lot of times, if they wrote those manuals, it was a smoo but, six months later, they realized a smoo didn’t work so they replaced it with a smerack, but they didn’t bother to tell the poor guy. It was our job to keep up to date and to portray this information to the lowest common denominator, the guy that really didn’t want to read the manual and didn’t really totally want to understand his machine. Suddenly, this cartoon would get him interested. And it worked. It’s still running, I think. MM: Did you do any writing for the magazine or were you strictly doing art? MIKE: The only writing I would do for it was the gags. I would be given a list of different assignments in the book, and I would have to come up with a gag that would fit the situation. How to keep sand out of an M-16, or how to check the oil pressure, things like that. What’s the pressure of the tires on your jeep whether you’re on a hard road or a dirt road? You’d have to come up with a gag that would lead you into that particular situation. Let’s just say the tires on a jeep. You let some of the air out if you’re in sand. You pump the tires up if you’re back onto a hard road. So you’d have a GI standing there next to an Arab on a camel. He’s asking the Arab, “What can you do to get this camel moving faster across the sand?” Well, obviously, he’s got to have bigger feet, so you have to have bigger tires and more surface. It was goofy things like that. I don’t know how goofy that was. [laughter]

MM: Did you have recurring characters in these strips? MIKE: The only recurring characters were Connie Rodd and there was an old Sergeant and I can’t remember his name. All of the characters that you were drawing to help the GI understand what you’re trying to get across, those you had to make up. Will was a stickler about what these guys looked like. They had to look like the average guy. They had to look like a guy that you felt like you might know. He might be a caricature of somebody in the unit. He was a real stickler about the character, which sometimes would drive you nuts. [laughter] MM: What was Will like as a boss? MIKE: I loved him. He was my father figure in many, many ways. As a boss, he was very easy going as long as you made your deadlines and you put in the amount of effort that he felt was needed to accomplish the job. He was one of the cheapest men I’d ever known. As a matter of fact, I never really knew anybody like Will before. Will introduced me to things like pencil extenders. I didn’t even know a pencil extender existed until one day I saw Will picking pencils out of the trash saying, “This is still a good pencil.” I said, “But I can’t hold it in my hand anymore.” He said, “Ah-ha!” From his pocket he pulls out this little device that fits on the end of the pencil and now I can use that pencil again for two or three days. It was amazing. I thought, “Will, you’re a genius.” [laughter] I loved him, I really did. I respected him enormously.

MM: You got to see a lot of his Spirit work at this time too, didn’t you? MIKE: Yes. Will never threw anything away. He kept everything. In the back of the office there must have been ten tons of lead. Years ago they used to make the printing plates out of lead and they had all these lead plates. I asked somebody, “What in the hell is all this stuff?” If it was sold and melted down, it probably would have made a fortune. He said, “These are all of Will’s old Spirits.” I said, “You’re joking.” I’d never seen The Spirit. There were a lot of old black-&-white copies of The Spirit. Tons of them. Reference copies, press pulls, and 15

awarded the contract. Will had been awarded this contract for 20 or 30 years. Somebody must have been going through papers and said, “Wait a minute. The same guy has gotten this military contract for 30 years. Something is awry!” They finally said, “Sorry, Mr. Eisner. We literally cannot award you this contract again because you’ve had it for so long. We just can’t do it.” Will called me in the office and said, “Mike, I’ve got an idea.” And he lit his pipe and puffed away for about five minutes before he got down to the idea. “Why don’t you bid on the contract?” I thought, “Wow! This is neat! I can get this contract!” The bids were put out and everybody was on pins and needles and, sure as hell, we got the contract. We moved into an office across the street. It was a lot bigger than the office we just left and actually a lot cleaner. It had running water that didn’t have insects and strange fish and things swimming around in it. We get over there, and I think we do about three issues, and I realize that I’m not making any money. A good example. One day, I’m sitting at my drawing board working away, and I can see the front door from my drawing board. From the front door, you come through a little glass walkway, and then into the shop. I see these two characters come in, and they were right out of Mickey Spillane. There was this big guy with a bent nose, and there was this little guy in a camel hair coat that looked like he borrowed it from his bigger brother because it nearly reached the floor and his hands were hidden under the sleeves. [laughs] And they walk in, and there was some dialogue out in the art department. I’m looking out there thinking, “What the hell’s going on?” I see everybody point at my office and I’m thinking, “Who are these dudes?” So they come in and they say, “Are you Mr. Ploog?” I say, “Yes I am.” “Well, we’re from Suchandsuch and Brothers, and you’re not taking the garbage.” I thought, “What does he mean, I’m not taking the garbage?” He says, “You have four bags out in the hall and that’s where you’re supposed to put your trash.” I said, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Because of the finances around here, what we’re doing is we’re not taking the trash pickup. We’re taking all of our trash over across the street every evening and putting it in the trash across the street.” They look at one another like, who’s this guy? He says, “Hey! You gotta put your trash in the bags over here! And you have to take the trash.” I said,

things. I spent hours and hours and days and days going through all of those. It amazed me. MM: Was working with Eisner and seeing the Spirit material your first big education in comic book storytelling? MIKE: It was my first education into sequential storytelling. I had done some storyboards at Hanna-Barbera, but they would be more or less concept boards. Real hardcore sequential art I had never really gotten into. I still had not gotten into comic books at that time. It was kind of an eye-opener into exactly what sequential art was really all about. MM: Who else did you work with at PS Magazine? MIKE: I wish I could remember all their names. Bob Sprinsky is one name that comes back right away. Bob was the head of the layout department. He had an assistant and I can’t remember what his name was. Ted Cabarga was the editor. He made sure everything worked. I was the only artist. Once in a while another artist would come in. I remember Wally Wood came in once and sat at the desk next to me. I’d seen a lot of Wally’s work because, at that time, I was picking up comics and Mad was one of the major comics that I was picking up. Wally Wood just jumped out at me and slapped me in the face because his work—ah, my God! What a talent! The day that he walked in and sat down at the desk next to me, [laughs] I never looked out of the corner of my eye so much in my life. I couldn’t actually turn around and say, “Hello, Wally! How are ya? My name’s Mike Ploog!” We became great friends, but at that first meeting, I was absolutely terrified that this man was actually sitting next to me. It was a very small shop. Not counting Will’s personal secretary who had been with him for something like 30 years, there were five of us, and that was it. We put out that magazine every month. When you think about it, that was quite amazing. MM: Why did you leave PS? MIKE: It’s kind of a goofy story. What happened is that the government decided that Will had more or less a monopoly on this magazine. He had had this magazine at that particular time for about 20 years. I think every three years you had to reapply and submit a budget to get 16

“But trash is going to cost me over $200 a month and we can take it across the street!” He said, “You take the trash!” I said, “Okay, okay.” So away they go. I call Will up and I said, “Will, I had these two goons in here in camel hair coats telling me I have to take the trash.” And Will just very calmly says, “Well, looks like you’re going to have to take the trash.” I said, “But Will, it’s going to cost me 200 bucks a month to take the trash.” “Mike,” he says, “you best take the trash.” I said, “To hell with it. I can’t afford 200 bucks a month.” So I didn’t take the trash that week and sure as hell, they were back again. Then I decided that this was crazy. I’ll take the trash rather than have my arms broken. I said, “I’m not making any money, Will. This is killing me. I can’t operate the magazine like this.” That was how I left PS Magazine. [laughter] That was a long story wasn’t it, just to get to the point? I could no longer afford to do the book.

There’s a story connected to that. I worked my tail off on that one. I came in and I said to Jim, “I need some more money.” Oddly enough, it had been the day that I’d come into New York to pick up my check from PS Magazine and I took it to the bank and cashed it. I had about $500 in my pocket in $50 notes. So I go in and I ask Jim for more money per page. He had just gotten back from lunch with Bill DuBay. He obviously knew how much money DuBay had in his pocket, and he knew how much money he had in his pocket. So he turned to me and he said, “Mike, how much do you want?” I said, “I’d like $50 a page for pencil and ink.” He just went into hysterics. “$50 a page? You’ve gotta be joking! $50 a page is a lot of money.” And he calls DuBay in. He

MM: Did you start working for Warren while you were still at PS? MIKE: It was after. Murphy Anderson picked up PS Magazine right after that. I was still doing artwork for PS. Murphy’s outfit was in as much financial trouble as mine was, so I’d rush down to the bank immediately and cash the check. At that time, the guy that was doing the lettering for PS Magazine, Ben Oda, told me, “Mike. Why don’t you go over to Warren? They’ll give you work right away.” I thought, “A comic book? Why not?” So I went over to Warren and Jim Warren looked at my work and we had a long chat. I told him about my Marine Corps days. Jim would really love to sit and chat. He was a nice man. Again, cheaper than hell, but a nice man. [laughter] Jim said, “I love it! $25 a page. Pencil and ink.” I thought, “That’s not much, but I’ll do it. I was still doing spot art for PS and immediately running to the bank and cashing the check. It was kind of filling in while I was doing this work for Jim. I think I did four stories for Jim; a “Vampirella” story and a couple of horror stories in Eerie and one in Creepy. In the final one, I did kind of a caricature of Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. It was about a hand that kept people asleep if you burned it. 17

Previous Page: Cover to PS #225, which was published near the end of Mike’s involvement with the magazine. Bottom: Page 1 of “The Tower of the Demon Dooms,” from Eerie #35. Connie Rodd, PS ™ and ©2008 Department of the Army. Eerie ™ and ©2008 Jim Warren.

funniest thing he’d ever seen in his life. He went into hysterics. He says, “Okay, Mike. You got it. You’ve got your 50 bucks a page.” And I never worked for him again. [laughter] He never gave me another assignment. But that was Jim. I really liked Jim. He was a real character. One of a kind. MM: Did you enjoy drawing horror stories? MIKE: I loved it because it was melodrama, and I loved the old black-&-white horror movies. To me, comics were the old black-&-white horror stories. The staging, everything. They didn’t have to have a particular light source. You just lit what you wanted to light. It was like stage lighting. I loved doing it. I still love horror comics. MM: You had mentioned earlier that you had started buying some comics when you were working at PS. What sort of stuff were you getting into?

Above: Mike drew this illustration for art dealer Jim Warden’s volleyball team’s t-shirt. This guy looks like he’d fit right in at Warren though, doesn’t he? Next Page: Page 1 of Marvel Spotlight #4, featuring Werewolf by Night. Werewolf by Night ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

says, “Bill get in here! I’ll tell you what. I’ll bet you anything that between the three of us, we don’t have 50 bucks in our pockets.” DuBay is digging in his pocket and putting his change on the desk. Jim digs in his pocket. I’m sitting there thinking, “This is the greatest poker hand I’ve ever had in my life. I’m sitting here with 500 bucks worth of 50 dollar bills.” [laughter] They’re through and they said, “What have we got here? We’ve got seven dollars.” So I dig in my pocket and I bring out one 50 dollar bill. Then I dig in my pocket, and I bring out another 50 dollar bill. And Jim Warren thought that was the 18

MIKE: It was mostly really well drawn comics. It wasn’t super-heroes so much. Obviously I was following people like Bernie Wrightson and Jeff Jones and all of the guys that were just doing brilliant work. It was anything well drawn because, being who I was and where I came from, I had this horrible feeling that I had to keep up. I had to know what was going on out there. I had to know what the art was like and absorb what these people were doing. Still, no matter what, I had this strange inferiority complex because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just winging it. It was like, any day there was going to be a knock at the door and they’d say, “Are you Mike Ploog? The ‘artist’?” And I would look around and say, “Yeah. That’s me.” And they would say, “I’m sorry. We’re going to take away all of your credentials. You’re no longer an artist. You have no credentials. These are all forged.”

Part 3:

Marvelous Monsters

MM: What made you decide to approach Marvel for work?

I started doing the werewolf book and everything else is more or less history.

MIKE: I didn’t. Actually, they approached me. They gave me a call and asked if I would be interested in doing some work for them. I thought, “Woah!” But I didn’t know what it was going to be. So what I did is, I did up a presentation story and it was a Western, which they were obviously not interested in. [laughs] Westerns were dead in the water at the time. When I came in there with this Western story they must have thought, “This guy’s living in another world.” They didn’t like the story. I went home. A day or two later Roy Thomas called me and said, “Hey, Mike! Sorry I wasn’t there when you came in. I loved your Western story by the way.” Still, Roy wants to do the damn Western story.

MM: The early issues of Werewolf By Night really had a noticeable Eisner influence. How much of that was your style and how much of it was a result of working with Eisner at PS Magazine? MIKE: Oddly enough, my style of drawing was very much like Will’s anyway because of the fact that I’d

MM: Was the Western story “Tin Star”? MIKE: Yeah! I ran into Roy about two or three years ago and he said, “God! We’ve got to do that ‘Tin Star’ story.” I looked at him like, “What in the hell are you talking about?” He says, “The Western.” I thought, “God, I can’t remember that.” He told me the story because he remembered it. I thought, “Damn! That would make a good book.” At that time, I was really hot on doing a Western because I loved the mountain man sagas: the Jeremiah Johnson stuff and things like that. Man against nature and the Wild West villains. That was one of my favorite subjects. One of these days I may do it. If it’s up to Roy Thomas, I’ll end up doing it tomorrow. Anyway, he says, “We’re thinking seriously about doing a series of horror comics. We’d like you to do one.” I said I’d love it because I needed the work, and it was either do comics or go back to L.A. and do animation. I went in and they pitched me this werewolf book. I thought it was a great idea. I went home and I gave it some thought. I took a look at a video I had of I Was a Teenage Werewolf. I thought, “That’s great. That’s perfect.” So 19

copied so much of his work while I was in the military. Then working with him, he was such a heavy influence and it was such an easy style for me to slip into. The thing was, I kind of fought the style. I didn’t fight it in the sense that I didn’t like it. I loved it. It was easy and it was flowing, but it was rather soft. I spent a great deal of time trying to develop something that was a little bit harder and a little bit more oriented to horror, which is not easy. I’m kind of a natural cartoonist, and in horror, you have to have a sense of reality to it to make it believable. The only way I could really do that was through acting. Somehow or another involve the reader in the emotions of the characters and just hope like hell that I was pulling it off. MM: Looking back at Werewolf, it was actually a fairly violent book. People died in it quite often. Do you think your style helped you to get away with being that violent? MIKE: I’m not real mad about violence unless I can justify it within the context of the story. I think my style helps soften violence. I didn’t pull people’s throats out or anything like that. Most of the violence was done over the back of somebody and you didn’t actually see it. I’m a real firm believer that what you don’t see is scarier than what you do see. If you see tendrils and blood and guts and gore, where are you going to go from there? Nothing’s going to be more frightening than that. Then the second time you use it, it’s got nothing. You use it sparingly and I think it has more impact. MM: Did you do any character designs for the book?

MIKE: I did all of them. I just started drawing and they said, “Don’t stop. Just keep drawing.” MM: With this, and later with Frankenstein, were you given any direction to make them look like the classic Universal versions of the characters? MIKE: That was more or less my idea; good, bad, or indifferent, I felt Frankenstein was a recognizable character 21

Previous Page: Statue by Night! Opening splash page of the debut issue of Werewolf by Night. Above: Just a little violence from Werewolf by Night #14. Werewolf by Night ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

and he had his identity. To try to change his identity, I felt that was a big mistake. You can change his personality, you can change a lot of things, but the look of him—when people see him, they know exactly who he is. I felt that was necessary. Today, if I was doing Frankenstein I’d probably do him totally differently, but back then I thought that was important. The identification factor. MM: And you carried that through with the werewolf as well? MIKE: I wanted the werewolf not to look like your average, run of the mill werewolf. I gave him a face that I could work with. I gave him a shorter nose. He probably looks more like a pug than he does a wolf, [laughs] but it worked for me. Nobody complained about it so I just kept going with it. It fit more within the character that I was trying to give the werewolf. There was something soft about the werewolf, in my mind anyway. It may never have come across in any of the art or story, but I felt there was something there to him.

Above: Convention sketch of Frankenstein’s monster. Right: Mike’s approved final design for the star of The Monster of Frankenstein. Next Page Top: Hooray for Hollywood, part of the werewolf’s stomping grounds. Panel from Werewolf by Night #2. Next Page Bottom: Dracula “vamps” it up in the crossover issue, Werewolf by Night #15. Monster of Frankenstein, Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: Werewolf was your first monthly comic. Was that challenging for you jumping into that? MIKE: Not really, because I’ve always been a bit of a work horse. I enjoy having the deadlines and having to sit down and go to work. I’m an early morning person. I get up early in the morning and I go to work, and sometimes I work into the evenings. In those days, I was working both day and night just keeping up with those things. MM: The story in Werewolf was set in L.A. Did your growing up there help you with any of the settings for the book? MIKE: Roy decided to put it in L.A. because of the fact that I knew L.A. and it was something they had never done. Marvel Comics is more or less based in New York City. L.A. and the palm trees and the bikers and all of that stuff, it was more conducive to what I knew. It was kind of an automatic thing to base it in L.A. for some goofy reason, if I remember correctly. I have to admit, my memory of the ’70s is rather vague. [laughter] 22

MM: You also got to draw Dracula as part of a crossover. Was that fun for you? MIKE: I enjoy the Dracula character because he’s pure melodrama. He never says anything without pulling his cape up across his face or taking a pose. I really like the Dracula character because of the fact that he’s a poser. MM: And you got to draw a Dracula black-&-white comic later as well. MIKE: I don’t recall that. MM: In Dracula Lives! #4, you did a story where Dracula was angry with an actor who’s portraying him. MIKE: Oh, that’s right. I remember that now. It was on a film set. MM: Yeah. MIKE: [laughs] I vaguely remember that now. I remember the opening panel. It was a film set. You have no idea how much artwork has gone across my drawing board in the last 30 years. The fact that I might forget one of these... MM: Why did you leave Werewolf? MIKE: I think I was just spent. I think I just needed something else. I was excited about Werewolf, and I enjoyed doing it. While I was excited and enjoying it, the work was coming naturally out of my pen. As soon as the excitement and the enjoyment leaves, then all of a 23

Right: Ghost Rider convention sketch. Below: Ghost Rider on “a bloody motorcycle!” Panel from Marvel Spotlight #7. Next Page: More motorcycles! Marvel Spotlight #6, page 3. Ghost Rider ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

sudden you’re struggling with it. You’re not putting something of yourself into it. I think when that happened, I decided that I needed a change. It was starting to become a job as opposed to a real exercise in storytelling and character. I think basically that’s the reason why I left. Not that I disliked the character. I still like the werewolf character. I love people that have tortured torment that they can’t control. The anxiety of living with something that you really don’t know how to handle. MM: Your next work for Marvel was Ghost Rider, correct? MIKE: Yes. I believe so. MM: How did that come about?

MIKE: Actually, it was when I was voicing my discontent with the Werewolf stories. Each issue was getting to be much like the last story I did. They asked me if I would be interested in doing the Ghost Rider. I was familiar with the old Ghost Rider comic when he was on horseback. Being someone who wanted to do a Western, I got very, very excited. I thought, “Perfect! I love the idea of it. I could see it all flashing before my eyes: this ghost-like creature riding across the plains, dealing with these uncivilized barbarians that were trying to occupy the West. I was quite amazed when they told me that he wasn’t on a horse, he was on a motorcycle. [laughter] My heart dropped. A bloody motorcycle? They said, “Do up some sketches and we’ll talk ’em over.” I sat down and did up some sketches of the Ghost Rider character himself and his motorcycle. They said, “Great! We’ll send you a story next week.” I thought, “Boy, that was easy enough, wasn’t it?” So off we went. Now, there’s been all kinds of dialog about who was the creator of Ghost Rider. Gary Friedrich was the writer on it. I don’t remember any real guidance on it, but my memory is not that great about that particular period of time. Gary was going through a lot of legal battles, I think he still is, saying that he was the creator of Ghost Rider. He asked me to get in touch with his lawyer, and then his lawyer threatened that if I didn’t answer all these questions, I was going to get a summons. [chuckles] And I thought, “Who is this ass? Don’t threaten me, buddy.” For God’s sake, I’m 24

[laughter] Actually, I can’t remember why I left so quickly, to be honest with you. But I did hate drawing those bloody motorcycles. Some people are just mechanically astute and I wasn’t. There were only a few ways I could show the motorcycle that I could figure out how I could easily draw it. If I spent a day or two drawing a motorcycle, that would be one thing. But if you have to do a page, page and a half a day, you’ve got to figure out a way of drawing this damn thing to where you could get through it quickly. I like the character. I like the character a lot. I think what it was was we were stuck in this L.A. syndrome again of too many motorcycle gangs. Too many chases by other motorcycles and things like that. How many ways can you show that the Hell’s Angels are

just an artist. I just sit down and draw pictures. The flaming skull. That was the big area of dispute. Who thought of the flaming skull? To be honest with you, I can’t remember. What else were you going to do with him? You couldn’t put a helmet on him, so it had to be a flaming skull. As far as his costume went, it was part of the old Ghost Rider’s costume with the Western panel front. The stripes down the arms and the legs were there merely so I could make the character as black as I possibly could and still keep track of his body. It was the easiest way to design him. That’s the Ghost Rider story. MM: This was your first work with Gary Friedrich at Marvel. Did you enjoy working with him? MIKE: I did. I just love Gary as a person. He drove me nuts sometimes because he’d send me the outline of the story, and I’d do the story. When it came back, it would be a totally different story! [laughter] He must sit down and have everything laid out in front of him and just start writing. He’d fill the panels full of descriptions. I would read it later and I’d think, “Where in the hell did that come from?” But it all worked. The readers loved it. There’s nothing greater than “a whirling, raging, cesspit of water.” How many other ways can you describe this piece of water? [laughter] Gary could come up with twelve different ways to describe it. Those were the good old days. They really were. MM: Since Evel Knievel was really big at the time, was his popularity any influence on Ghost Rider? MIKE: It may have been on Gary’s part, but it wasn’t on mine. I was very much aware of Evel Knievel, but he was such a rhinestone cowboy that he really didn’t fit into the Ghost Rider image. The Ghost Rider wasn’t someone that I felt should be a tongue-incheek kind of character. The only way you could have added the rhinestone was by turning him into the tonguein-cheek character. He was a very, very sinister character. MM: You didn’t stay on the book very long. Why did you leave so quickly? MIKE: I hate drawing motorcycles. 25

he was going to see. Everything he saw was something new. A flower was new. Seeing a child was new. Seeing a woman was new. I love that concept. I tried like hell to push it, but they kept coming up with a villain of the month. It was too much of a soft concept to satisfy the editors, or the general public, I think. MM: Frankenstein started with a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel. What challenges did doing the adaptation present for you?

bad guys? We just did too much of that. And with the Hell’s Angels, every one of them rides a bloody motorcycle, don’t they? It’s bad enough drawing one motorcycle. Above: Mike’s initial designs for the monster. Next Page: A pencil cover recreation of The Monster of Frankenstein #6. Monster of Frankenstein ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: You moved onto Monster of Frankenstein next. MIKE: I really enjoyed Frankenstein. I love the Frankenstein story. I love this great manmade monster that suddenly is born with the size and the strength that he has, with no knowledge of the outside world. Every adventure that he had, he was learning something. He went out there with no knowledge. He just wandered out into this Victorian countryside with no idea of what 26

MIKE: Actually, those were the least challenging. What was challenging was when they started to try to turn him into a Marvel super-hero. That’s the reason why I left the book. They were going to do crossovers with Dracula and everybody else. Then they wanted to bring him into New York City and have him crossover with Spider-Man. I couldn’t see Frankenstein doing that. I thought we had enough material to carry this Frankenstein book on forever with just him terrorizing the countryside. Each thing that he ran into was a conflict, I don’t care what it was. Just getting hungry was a conflict for him because where was he going to eat? The sound of music was a conflict. I felt there was a lot more that we could do with him than to have him team up with SpiderMan. I don’t know if he ever did team up with Spider-Man. Maybe somebody else realized that it was a bad idea. That’s when I left. They were starting to do these teamups, but that was the fad at the time at Marvel. In some cases it was a good idea. In others cases, it was really stupid. MM: You received a plotting credit on one of the issues where the monster goes to find the last Frankenstein. What did you do differently to get the plot credit? MIKE: I don’t think I did anything differently. Plotting a comic book with a writer is a teamwork thing. I don’t know where the writer and the artist separate when it comes to the plot. Most of the writers that I’ve worked with, due to our respect for one another, one of us says, “Here’s what my idea is.” And the other says, “Well, no. What if we did this?” Then he makes another suggestion. It’s a team that puts together a book. The flow of the artwork

Above: Pages 2 and 3 from Kull the Destroyer #13. These pages were done on a single board and evidently had to be corrected to fit the proper dimensions. Next Page: Conan #57, page 23. Conan ™ and ©2008 Conan Properties International, LLC. King Kull ™ and ©2008 King Kull, LLC.

is up to the artist. It has to be. He has to utilize the plot in a manner that is going to best tell the story without the dialog. I’ve always been a firm believer that you can tell a story without the dialog, with just nothing but the pictures. The reader can look at it from one end to the other and know exactly what happened. I think they just graciously gave me a plotting credit. MM: You also did Kull the Destroyer. Your first issue on that looked to me like it had a Barry Windsor-Smith look to it. Were you influenced by him? MIKE: Not necessarily Barry. Barry had a style that was so much his own. I had to be influenced by all of those guys up there. The talent was just overwhelming. I was like a sponge at that particular period of time in my life. I was absorbing as much as I possibly could from everyone that I met, and all the artists that I’d always admired. I 28

suddenly realized that I had to take this art business very seriously because this was probably going to be my job for the rest of my life. Suddenly, I was being influenced by everyone, but I had to adapt it to what I knew how to do, which at that particular time was relatively limited. I could actually take someone’s attitude towards a particular situation, or a particular character, and I could turn it into mine. In my eyes, I thought nobody will ever recognize it in a million years because it’s so badly done. [laughter] Nobody would think, “Oh my God, that’s a John Buscema.” If they saw that in my work, that would be one of the biggest compliments I’d ever been paid. I was a sponge. I was soaking up everybody’s work. I also did a couple of Conans, too. You can’t do Conan without being influenced by Frazetta. Still, the stories that I was doing had a different attitude towards Conan. I

Below: Kull versus Thulsa Doom! Kull the Destroyer #11, page 30. Next Page: Mike had a hand in plotting this twopart story in Man-Thing. Page 6 of Man-Thing #10. Man-Thing ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. King Kull, Thulsa Doom ™ and ©2008 King Kull, LLC.

had to put my own work into it. I had to put the expression into it. I had to put my own attitude towards how a character would act and react to a particular situation. MM: Kull was also your first non-horror title at Marvel. Did it appeal to you to do something different? MIKE: Oh, yeah. It did. I enjoyed doing Kull. Kull was special. He was this sulking emperor. He’s surrounded by evil. It appealed to me because of the fact that the horror comics all had these characters that wore capes and there were shadows and everything. Kull was different. I enjoyed doing Kull.

MM: Were the sword-&-sorcery stories interesting to you? MIKE: Being someone that never read any sword-&-sorcery, to me they were fresh. They were different. I definitely wasn’t influenced by Robert E. Howard. I never read any of his books ’til years later. When I read his books, suddenly images were going through my head like crazy. MM: Your next project was Man-Thing, which was probably about the most offthe-wall thing you did at Marvel. Was it fun working on the book? MIKE: Man-Thing was a bit of a nightmare. [laughter] Steve Gerber. I loved Steve. I really did. I adored him, and he’s a fantastic writer. He had an enormous task with Man-Thing because Man-Thing is a character that lives in a swamp and he doesn’t talk. He only thinks. That means that all of the story has to come to him. It has to evolve around him. He doesn’t necessarily get involved until somebody is in danger. When they said they were going to make a Man-Thing movie, I thought, “You’re going to make a movie about somebody who doesn’t talk? He only thinks? How do you do a thought balloon in a film?” Steve really rose to the challenge of it. Again, it was monster-of-the-month kind of thing. We did most of our plotting over the phone. Steve would call me up and say, “Oh, Mike, I had such a terrible week. I’ve been sick. I’ve got a horrible cold.” I thought, “That’s good Steve. What are we going to do?” Or, “Mike, my wife has just left me and I wrecked my car and the house is on fire, but I haven’t got the energy to go put it out.” I learned more about Steve’s personal life when I was working with him than I did about Man-Thing. [laughter] Every time I saw Steve I hugged him because you can’t help it. You gotta love him. And he’s a fantastic writer. MM: The Man-Thing issues that stick in my mind are the ones with the old couple and the dog [issues #9 and 10]. MIKE: [laughs] Oddly enough, that was more or less one of my plots. On television, there was a Gunsmoke character, a haggy kind of a woman who hung out in

Dodge City. I can’t remember her name. I fell in love with this character. Jack Elam’s character falls in love with her. I told Steve, “We’ve got to do a story with this old lady that lives in the swamp with this Jack Elam kind of a guy.” It just ran off from there. MM: In Giant-Size Man-Thing #1, there was a villain that looked like Richard Nixon. Was that your idea or did it come from Steve? MIKE: That was my idea. I got a lot of response to that. I had professors writing in. I didn’t know these guys read comic books. Political analysts and professors wrote to me about this Nixon character. The good thing about it is that it’s so poorly drawn that I didn’t get any kind of repercussions from the U.S. Government. MM: Why did you make him look like Nixon? MIKE: I don’t know. I think it was just a spur of the moment type of thing. Maybe I was watching TV and there he was and I thought, “God, I hate that guy.” [laughter] My favorite Man-Thing story was the clown story [issue #5 and 6]. To me, that was a stroke of Gerber genius. Having the whole story take place in a flashback that was acted out in the swamp was absolutely fantastic. You can see people sitting at the breakfast table and they’re knee deep in swamp water. I love that story. MM: One of your main inkers at Marvel was Frank Chiaramonte. Did you like working with him? MIKE: I did, because I liked Frank personally. Frank and I worked together at Will Eisner’s office. Frank did nothing but mechanical 32

drawings. He was a fantastic mechanical artist. He could make any piece of machinery look as simple and crisp and understandable as anybody I’ve ever known. When Eisner’s folded, Frank didn’t want to go to work with the guy who took it over. I asked him if he’d like to ink some of my stuff. I would pencil very, very tightly because Frank was not good with figures and rendering folds and things like that. He had too many straight lines. There was nothing organic about him. Very, very quickly he picked it up. Then I felt kind of responsible for him. I felt that I had to keep him working with me as long as possible. Some of his stuff worked better than others, but overall it made a good comic. It was clean. It was crisp. At that time, my inking was a lot looser and not quite as crisp. As a matter of fact, it was downright impressionistic in places. I loved Frank. He was really a sweetheart of a guy. Oddly enough, Frank’s father was a very, very famous comedian in Cuba. He was like the Bob Hope of Cuba. His father never left. Frank’s family was split up because of the whole Cuban thing. He had a lovely family. I think he had about twelve kids. I just liked Frank. I felt that it was good working with him and I could trust him and I knew what I was going to get from Frank.

You couldn’t have met a nicer, sweeter guy in your life. He was creative to the point of people not totally understanding what he was talking about until he finished the story. I really enjoyed my time working with Steve. MM: How did you come to work on Planet of the Apes? MIKE: I haven’t a clue. [laughter] I think because of the fact that I had done some black-&-white work on Conan. They were going to do the black-&-white book and I said, “Well, great, but I want to do it in pencil.” They said, “Fantastic. Do it.” So off we went with Planet of the Apes. The coincidence was one of my best friends, Mentor Huebner, was one of the storyboard artists on Planet of the Apes. He had given me a lot of the old storyboards.

MM: Getting back to Steve Gerber, you worked with him years later on the Sludge: Red X-Mas book. Was it fun to reunite and work with him again? MIKE: I didn’t get a chance to talk to Steve at the time. They just called me up and asked me if I wanted to do a Christmas issue. It was fun. It was a good issue. It had good locations and everything. I enjoyed doing it. MM: Steve, unfortunately, passed away recently. Is there anything you want to say? MIKE: It’s so strange. Whenever I think about Steve passing away, I get a chill up my spine. It shouldn’t have happened. Here he is, this talented man, a young man, and something as terrible as that happened. I felt so bad when I heard it. It was unbelievable. There are not that many Steve Gerbers out there. He was a good soul. 33

Previous Page: Cover recreation of Giant-Sized Man-Thing #1, a Man-Thing convention sketch, and Power Records’ audio production of Man-Thing #5, complete with that issue’s art. Below: Pencils for the cover of Sludge: Red X-Mas.

MM: That’s cool. MIKE: Yeah. And I had a lot of ape reference from the films. I enjoyed doing Planet of the Apes, but we ran out of story ideas.

one of the heads on Mount Rushmore. I think Doug Moench was running out of territory. [laughter] I really enjoyed working with Doug on that. Doug is a very, very clever writer also. I’ve been very lucky over the years with writers. I’ve always had good writers.

MM: I noticed that the story never seemed to end.

MM: Why did you want to do this in pencil?

MIKE: Yeah. It didn’t go anywhere. It was a continuous chase. It’s hard to keep a continuous chase going without changing locations. Finally we went up the nose of

MIKE: I think what it was is I was getting tired. I was doing an awful lot of work. Suddenly, I realized that I could actually make this pencil line look like ink and I could get it done in a hurry. I did so many characters that had nothing on them but hair. Every time they decided they wanted somebody to do a character with hair on it, they’d call Ploog. I was getting sick and tired of doing all of these characters covered in hair. With pencil, oddly enough, I found it easier to do hair. I think it had to do with the hair. MM: Did 20th Century Fox ever have any comments about the comics? MIKE: No. Once Fox licences something like that, they’re not interested in it anymore. They’re interested in the next movie they’re doing. MM: Thematically, a lot of the stories dealt with prejudice between the humans and the apes. Was that a topic that was of interest to you? MIKE: Yeah it was because it was pertinent to what was going on in the world. Prejudice is something that we live with on an everyday basis. I don’t think it will ever go away. I think it’s just human nature. But it was a fantastic element 34

because prejudice can work within the different sectors. There was prejudice of apes against apes. It wasn’t just the humans and the apes. That was good. I loved the relationship that we had with the human boy, Jason, and the apes. He was also on the run. It’s kind of an old premise actually, but it worked real nice in the Apes. MM: With the changing locations of the story, you got about as close to a Western as you’ve ever gotten in comics. MIKE: I love the mountain men. I can’t remember how it came about, but suddenly here we had them dealing with mountain men. I think it was Doug just trying to satisfy my insatiable appetite for the Wild West. MM: You were doing a new story. Were you ever approached by Marvel about doing a comic adaptation of any of the movies? MIKE: No.

MM: Did Fox ever approach you about working on one of the films? MIKE: No. I was a long ways away from film at that particular time. Film is a very strange business. If you’re not in the business, and if you’re not working, nobody thinks to call you. If you’re not in sight, you’re out of mind. If you’re working, you get calls left, right, and center. As soon as you leave and start doing something else, then immediately they’re getting somebody else to do it. You’ve got to be there, and you’ve got to be in their face. MM: You did some work at this time for Atlas/Seaboard. You did a strip for them called “Luke Malone, Manhunter” in Police Action. Do you remember how that series came about? MIKE: There was a shakeup up at Marvel; I don’t remember what happened because I never got into the politics of any of this craziness. The publisher, 35

Previous Page: Jason the human and Alex the ape on the run. Planet of the Apes #2, page 17. Above: The kiss! One of the more head-on comments on prejudice of the book. Left: Convention sketch of an ape mountain man... or would that be mountain ape?

Right: Another Planet of the Apes con sketch. Below: Jason takes on the lawgivers in Planet of the Apes. Next Page: Originally, Mike was going to paint this story. Unfortunately, that never happened. In fact, Mike didn’t even finish the story. The great Alex Niño provided inks over Mike’s pencils. Marvel Premiere #38, page 22. Weird World ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Planet of the Apes ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox.

Martin Goodman, asked me to come over to work at this new publishing company which they were setting up. They were paying better and I thought, “Cool. I’ll go.” It goes back to the days when I didn’t have two beans to rub together. If somebody was paying me more, the hell with loyalty. I’m out the door. [laughter] It was all mercenary as far as I was concerned. They wanted me to come up with a comic book story. Being an old radio show freak, I thought, “Okay, what’s the thing I can do the easiest?” I thought, “Luke Malone. A radio detective.” I only did three issues but they’re literally old radio show kind of stories. MM: I noticed your art on that looked a little bit different. Were you just doing layouts or was that the inking?

MIKE: They were inked by Frank Springer. I was very flattered that he wanted to do it. He’s one hell of an artist. I also did another story that never got published. It was about a street urchin called the Artfull Dodger. It was a takeoff on the character from Oliver Twist, but it was in modern times. Still to this day, it’s never been published and I’d love to know where that artwork is. I really put an enormous amount of work into it and I loved that story. If anybody’s got it, let me know. MM: You teamed up with Doug Moench again a few years later on Weird World. Do you recall how that came about? MIKE: I don’t recall for sure. I had just finished working on The Lord of the Rings with Ralph Bakshi. I can’t remember how it happened, but Doug wanted to know whether I’d be interested in doing it. I’m sure I didn’t contact Doug. I think Doug contacted me. I said I would love to. It’s my kind of story. I love the fantasy stuff. I did Wizards and The Lord of the Rings with Ralph. I love that kind of material. So off we went with it. I think we did two issues. MM: The Marvel Premiere issue of “Weird World” is a very dense story. Was that 36

Below: Page 4 of Marvel Fanfare #24, with inks by P. Craig Russell. Next Page: Mike’s cover art for Marvel Premiere #5.

originally intended as a one-shot? MIKE: I think it was a one-shot in the beginning and they liked it. It was in the back of another book, Marvel Super Action, with the Punisher in the lead story. It was weird putting a fantasy story in the back of a Punisher book. They liked it and said “let’s do more.” I really wanted to. I loved the characters. I loved everything about

the scenario. They decided they wanted to do a big book and they wanted me to paint it. I was going to pencil it and paint it. I was very excited about that. This was virgin territory for me. I really wanted to do this. It was going to be a 62-page book, or something like that. Doug wrote the story, or at least plotted it out in detail, and I started penciling. I had penciled more than half of the book and painted about six or eight pages just to show them exactly what I was going to be doing and where I was going with it. Then they called up and said, “We’re not going to go 62 pages. We’re only going to go 32 pages,” or whatever it was. I said, “How can you do this? You can’t just cut the book in half. I’ve already got more than half of it done. This is absurd. Why are you doing this?” They gave no reason. Then they came back and were actually going to cut it back further. That’s when I said “stuff it.” I was living on a farm that I had bought in Minnesota at the time. I had had it with the farm life and I’d had it with Jim Shooter and his Marvel Comics craziness, so I just bolted and went back to L.A. and the animation business. I had the original artwork with me. I got all these threatening letters and then one day at the studio I was working at, I got a call from Stan Lee. He said, “Mike, don’t make us do this.” I said, “Stan, do what? You don’t want the book. You’ve made it very clear by jerking us all around with this damn thing. And I don’t have the pages anymore.” He says, “Mike, I know you do. Don’t make us do this to you. We don’t want to take this to court. I have teams of lawyers just sitting around waiting for something to do. We don’t want to give

them your case.” So I thought, “Oh screw this.” I sent back the pages and that was the last I had to do with Marvel. It was just craziness. I think it was just the period of time they were going through. MM: Overall, did you enjoy your time at Marvel? MIKE: I did. They were wonderful people. Some of my finest memories are from that period of time. Beautiful, beautiful people. It was a good period of time. And it was a period of time that came just at the right time for me. As an artist, as someone that wanted to be an artist, it was part of my learning curve that started me off on everything. One of my dearest friends, John Verpoorten, big John, ol’ giant John, worked there. He passed away a very young man. He was on the phone with me almost every day because I was always late. He’d say, “I don’t care what it looks like, Ploog. I just want the damn stuff in here.” I said, “Thank you John. That’s encouraging. I’m sure Renoir had the same problem. ‘We don’t care what it looks like, just get it into the gallery tomorrow.’” [laughter] But I loved him. I did. He was a wonderful, wonderful character.

MIKE: No. I was never approached by DC. It’s odd now at this particular time as I’m doing work for them. My style of work was not DC material, actually. DC was very slick. They had a look that was their own. My work, I didn’t feel, fit in with their work. I never pursued working for DC, and they never approached me.

MM: During all of the time you were at Marvel, did DC ever approach you about working for them? 39

Part 4:

A Life in Film

MM: You left Marvel for a few years to work with Ralph Bakshi.

So it was kind of a trick just to get me over there to get me to work on Wizards. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. He called them “history drawings,” or something like that. They were just still drawings. They would put voice-over on it and then they just plugged the still drawings in. It was to fill in the story gaps he’d skipped over while doing the regular animated part of the film. It was great fun. I enjoyed it, but it was very strange.

MIKE: When I left Marvel, I actually went to work with a guy by the name of Takashi who was doing an animated film called Winds of Change. I’d worked with Takashi at Filmation many, many years ago, and now he was producing. I worked there for about six months, I guess. One day I got a telephone call from Ralph Bakshi. Ralph said, “Mike, I’m you’re biggest fan. I love ya. You’re the greatest. [laughs] I want you to work on a special project. It’s right down your alley. It’s Lord of the Rings.” I said, “Wow. You’re kidding.” “We’re starting pre-production on it. Get over here. I gotta talk to you. You gotta go to work for me next week.” I went over and I talked to him. He didn’t have anything done yet on Lord of the Rings, but I was going to start next Monday on design and concept. I got over there and he said, “Well, yes, Mike, I’d like you to do the Lord of the Rings stuff, but first I’d like you to help me finish off Wizards.” [laughs]

MM: How long did it take you to do all of those? MIKE: It didn’t take all that long. I worked on them off and on because we were holding meetings for Lord of the Rings. I even did some background drawings. It took about six months, I guess. MM: Once you did get going on Lord of the Rings, what was that like?

MIKE: [chuckles] It was like any other Ralph Bakshi production. It was genius chaos. Ralph is one of the most creative people I think I’ve ever worked with, except that it’s totally unharnessed. It’s totally out of control. I really enjoyed working with Ralph. Lord of the Rings was great fun. I did an awful lot of different things on Lord of the Rings. I did character designs. I did a lot of backgrounds. I did storyboards. I even played the part of Gimli in several sequences. And I was a ringwraith on horseback, which was great fun. I enjoyed it because Ralph had no idea where to get these horses, so I went to a lot of old friends and they brought in all the horses. I designed the costume. We shot it out on the Salton Sea on the salt flats so that there would be no background. It was hot. Really hot. And I designed these things so that you weren’t going to see any face in the helmet. There was a big cowl that went way up, almost to the horns of the helmet, so you never really saw a face. They were made out of a heavy, woolen sort of material so that it would flow when the horses were running.

Inside

that cowl, it was like an oven. Better men than I were passing out from heat exhaustion in those damn costumes. Ralph was absolutely terrified of horses, so when all of the scenes with horses were shot, he was directing from the trailer. It was a lot of fun because I was involved in a lot of different parts of the production. I really felt we were going to make a damn good animated film, but what happened was that too many people started to influence Ralph. We’d taken characters out because we didn’t have time to introduce them properly and you wouldn’t know who in the hell they were. They’d just pop up and then disappear again, which would make no sense. It would just confuse everything. But people would say, “You have to have this character in there. It’s a must.” So Ralph would come in the next day and say, “Okay guys, this character’s back in.” And we’d go, “Oh, no!” [laughter] It was quite an experience. I’ve got to tell you one story. We had shot this sequence with this young bull rider. It was shot on a horse that wasn’t used to the particular bridle that we had on it. The kid was Frodo and it was the Flight to the Ford. The ringwraiths were chasing him. He pulled up to stop in front of the camera and, because of the bridle, the horse’s head

went up in the air and it fell. Everybody panicked because it was a kid that was on the back of it, but this kid knew more about falling off of horses and bulls than anybody in the place. He was totally unhurt, but that sequence was rotoscoped and it was beautiful. Saul Zaentz, who was the producer, would bring in other people that were interested in putting money into the film. He’d bring them in, and he’d ask Ralph to show him a sequence that they were working on. He always showed Saul the same sequence for like three years. Saul would come back and say, “What is going on? The only thing I ever see is this damn horse falling over. It’s a great sequence, but you guys must be doing something else.” [laughter] Actually, Tim Burton worked on the film as a rotoscope animator. He sat kitty-corner across from me. He drove me nuts because I was doing the backgrounds and he was doing the rotoscope, and the horses hooves weren’t matching to the backgrounds. It was old film that they were using to rotoscope. An old Eisenstein film, I think, and the camera was moving, so obviously the horses hooves were always going to be at different levels. He drove me nuts until finally they moved his desk. I ran into him when he was working on Batman. I went up there to talk to the production designer and he was sitting over in the corner. I looked over and it looked like somebody who was just there in a costume, so I didn’t pay that much attention to him. I was sitting there shooting the breeze with the designer and then the designer turned and said, “You know this guy.” I didn’t. Burton said, “I used to work for you.” I said, “You did?” He said, “I was sitting right across from you, remember? I was the guy who complained about the horses hooves.” I thought, “Oh, God.” And all of a sudden, it clicked. I said, “You’ve got to be joking.” [laughter] It’s a small world we live in.

MM: Bakshi is kind of known as a renegade in the animation world. What was he like to work for? MIKE: To sum it up, he would fire me about every two or three months. I would actually leave. Then he would call me up like three days later and he’d say, “Ploog! Where are you? We’ve got all kinds of stuff we’ve got to do.” He was a maniac. His films were much like he was. He was a renegade. He and I got along very, very well. I haven’t heard from him in about six or eight months now, but I usually hear from him about every six months. He calls me up with some kind of a wild, crazy project. I say, “Ralph, just send me a script,” and he never does. I enjoyed working with Ralph. I more or less could tell him he was full of it and he wouldn’t explode. MM: Did you work on any other films with Bakshi? MIKE: Just bits and pieces of things like Hey, Good Lookin’. There were so many things going on there that everybody jumped in and did something on things. But mostly it was Wizards and Lord of the Rings. MM: After Lord of the Rings, you went back to Marvel to do Weird World and then ended up leaving. Where did you go when you left Marvel that time? MIKE: After Weird World, I went back to Hollywood. I was just doing spot things for commercials and stuff, if I remember right. I had an office with a couple of friends of mine. They had a place called Animation Camera. And I worked for a guy named Dick Brown. Dick was a producer. He had the rights to do Flipper. He also had the entire library of Republic Studios shorts. We were trying to make animation out of some of those. That’s when I was approached by the guys to work on Heavy Metal. MM: You worked on the B-17 sequence. Did you do more as well? MIKE: I did a lot of work on the Taarna sequence. I was going to direct the B-17 sequence. I really tightened up the boards and got a handle on what the B-17 sequence was all about. Then they had to change it to a Canadian director because it was a Canadian film being financed through the Canadian Film Board. They had to have a certain amount of Canadians working on it. It was done with some kind of a strange point system where if you have a producer, 42

you have five points. If you have a director, you have another five points. You have to have so many points for it to qualify for this money. So I got bumped. MM: What all did you do for the Taarna sequence? MIKE: I designed a lot of secondary characters. I did storyboards on it. I did quite a few goofy things. MM: Was Heavy Metal different to work on from other films, since it was an anthology? MIKE: Not really. It was just that the drawing style was different. It was obviously more of a comic book kind of a style, but the approach was the same. MM: You also did a story for Heavy Metal magazine, “Water and Power.” Was that a result of working on the film? MIKE: No. That was years later. They were coming out with a special issue and called me up and asked me to do a piece. I was going to do a big piece, like a 10pager, and paint it. I started doing it and I thought. “This is going to take me forever and I’ve got other things I’ve got to do. So it ended up being that short black-&-white piece. MM: Around that same time, you became involved with Superman II. How did that happen?

MIKE: I had taken a job at Universal Studios working on a TV show called Cliff Hangers. It had three parts to it; it had a Dracula part, it had a Western, and it had a “Perils of Pauline”-type thing. I was working on the Western and the Dracula one. Dave Jonas called me up and said, “Mike, they’re looking for some storyboard artists in England to work on Superman. They asked me to give you a call and see if you’d be interested.” He was going to go over if he could get out of whatever it was he was doing. I thought, “Geez, that’s fantastic,” so I just merely gave them a call and jumped on an airplane and there I was. MM: Did you stay in England then, or is your move there now more recent? MIKE: What happened was, I came over and worked on Superman, and I left and came back to the States. I think I worked on The Thing at that time. When that was over, I got another call from England saying, “Would you like to come back over and do another film?” I said sure, so off I went 43

Previous Page: Artwork for Heavy Metal. Left: One of Mike’s storyboards for the “Taarna” sequence of Heavy Metal. The “Taarna” story was inspired by the Arzach stories of legendary French artist, Moebius. Below: Creepy production art for John Carpenter’s The Thing. Heavy Metal ™ and ©2008 HM Communications, Inc. The Thing artwork ©2008 Universal Studios.

and worked on another film. And then it was another film, and another film. I ended up spending more time in England than I was in Hollywood. England kind of became a second home. MM: Is working on a film in England different than working on one in Hollywood? Below and Next Page: As one of three production illustrators for The Thing, Mike produced storyboards such as these for the film. The Thing ©2008 Universal Studios.

MIKE: Yes. I absolutely loved working with the English crews. They were very laid-back. They liked their vodka and tonic at five o’clock, and they liked their darts in the afternoon at tea time. There was an atmosphere of real professionalism, but it was an easy going kind of a thing. All of these guys were real old pros. It was a very small business over there. They all worked together on different films for like 20 years. Everybody knew everybody, and everybody knew exactly what the other guy was capable of doing. It was just a real pleasant place to work. It changed, though, over the years. It’s not the same 44

kind of business anymore. It’s much the same as it is in Hollywood. MM: Since we’re talking Superman, let’s talk super-hero movies. You haven’t done super-hero comics, but you’ve done a few super-hero movies, a couple Supermans and the first X-Men movie. Do you see a difference in working with the super-hero characters as movie characters and their comic book counterparts? MIKE: I thought I did. [laughter] Working on Superman was great. I was working with a director called Richard Lester. After that, I worked on several films with Richard because I really, really liked the guy and I liked his approach to making movies. He had this wonderful sense of humor. It was kind of dry and campy. It was an attitude more than it was a comedy. Working with him was a dream because he would we would sit there and just talk about sequences. He’d say, “What are we going to

do here?” You’d say, “What if we did this?” “No, but we can do that and that.” So you’d go back and you’d just do it. Very seldom did he ever come in and say, “This doesn’t work.” He’d come in and say, “Okay. We could change this to here and change that there, and it’s perfect.” The opening to Superman III, where there was this strange series of events that happened during a bank robbery, he just came in and said, “Do something for me. And make it feel like Charlie Chaplin. Just one thing happening after another thing. Just goofy things.” For about three weeks I worked on boarding up that sequence and brought it in. He loved it. He changed a couple little things. Instead of having a couple people standing around, he decided he’d like a nun standing there. I really enjoyed working with Richard. I thought I knew how to handle it because of the Superman experience. You could do it without comedy, and not make it too camp, and make it feel like it is a comic. It almost had a pulp feeling to it with attitudes, and body language, and different cuts, and things like that. Working on X-Men was a bit of a chore. It wasn’t anything like working on Superman. I didn’t enjoy X-Men as much as I did Superman.

character. He didn’t talk something out, he acted it out. He leapt around and waved his arms and screamed and made strange noises. [chuckles] I loved him. He’s still a big kid. I enjoyed working on The Thing because they gave me an awful lot of free rein. I just sat down and did it as if I was doing a comic book. The script was there, but you just took the script as the bible and kept inserting what you felt would really work.

MM: You’ve mentioned that you’re not a big fan of gore, yet you ended up working on The Thing, which is a rather gory film. How did you become involved with that project?

MM: Did you like the end results?

MM: You did more than just storyboard on that. MIKE: I’ll tell you, it was strange. Working with those guys, we were working as a team. When you work like that, you do all kinds of strange things. You’re designing characters. You’re designing effects. What is it going to look like when a head pops off a body and spider legs pop out of it? So off you go and you’re doing drawings of spider legs coming out of heads. You’re doing concept work, but you’re doing it as a team. Right down even to sculpting. You got to a point where you didn’t feel like you could draw it, you had to sculpt it. You just do a little bit of everything. It’s a great atmosphere when you’re working like that. Everybody’s involved and everybody’s ideas are taken into consideration.

MIKE: To be honest, when I first saw it, I didn’t like it. I was there while they were filming an awful lot of it. You can’t always tell when they’re filming what it’s going to look like once it’s all cut together. When I first saw it, I thought, “These characters. I can’t tell one from the other. They’re all flat.” I really didn’t care if any of them got killed. I didn’t like any of them. [laughter] So he got his head ripped off. Big deal. I never liked him anyway. That was my first impression. Then I saw it again like a year later or so, and I really liked it. I thought this has the feeling of classic written all over it. For the time it was done, it was really well done. The effects were good. The editing was very good. The camera work was brilliant. I just felt that the characters weren’t developed enough to where you really felt emotionally involved with them. Other than that, I thought it was a great film.

MIKE: I was back at Universal. I had done a couple of films there. I did Where the Buffalo Roam and Melvin and Howard. While I was there, The Thing was starting up and it was Rob Botin that said, “Hey listen. That guy over in the art department did monster comics. We’ve got to go over and talk to him.” John Carpenter and Rob came over and we sat down and talked about it. The next thing I knew, I was up to my armpits in K-Y Jelly, or whatever it’s called, and sticky, gooey, green stuff. [laughs] And working with Rob, that was a charm. Rob and I are still the best of friends. Rob Botin, at that time, was about 18 years old, but he was like 12' tall and had a beard that a family of four could live in. He was just a 45

MM: Speaking of special effects, a lot of the stuff that was done in The Thing would be CGI now. Do you like the advances that have been made in that area? Right: A design sketch for Gremlins. Below: Storyboard art for The Witches, which was produced by The Jim Henson Company for Warner Bros. and based on the Roald Dahl story. This scene shows Anjelica Huston’s character, the Grand High Witch, transforming into a mouse. Next Page: Storyboards for the Frank Ozdirected adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors, as Audrey meets Audrey II. Little Shop of Horrors artwork, The Witches artwork ©2008 Warner Bros. Gremlins artwork ©2008 respective owner.

MIKE: That’s a hard question to answer. My first answer would be no, I don’t, because it leaves nothing to the imagination. You’re not involving the audience in any way if you’re not involving their imagination. This is my thinking anyway, and I’m a cynical old fart. You do something so grandiose that the audience goes “Wow!” Then the next time you see something, that also is grandiose, well, the audience now doesn’t have that big a wow. And the third is even less of a wow. And the fourth—“So we just blew up Manhattan. It’ll come back again.” That’s why I don’t particularly care for overusage of the CGI stuff. I’ve often had the feeling that what you don’t see is more frightening than what you do see. Or what you think you saw. It keeps you on the edge of your seat. But if you see it, it’s like the first time you saw the alien. “Oh God, that was scary.” The second time you saw him, it wasn’t as scary. It’s overused. Each film tries to have bigger effects

than the last. The best usage I think I’ve seen of the CGI work is on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. That was brilliantly handled. It gave you the flavor of the illustrated book and it made you feel like this is The Lord of the Rings. The rest of the CGI stuff drives me nuts. My son keeps asking me, “Now, how did they do that?” I think, “Who cares how they did it? The fact that it was done, isn’t that enough? Shut up and eat your popcorn.” [laughter] MM: You did a lot of work with the Henson organization starting with Dark Crystal. How did you become associated with them? MIKE: When you’re working in England, as crews get hired, you get calls because these guys worked with you. Set designers depend on storyboard artists as much as directors do. A set designer, until he knows what’s going to be happening in the set, he doesn’t know where to put a door. “Can we

have steps in there? Should there be a window? What’s the action?” Many years ago, I worked on a film with a young production designer. Larry Turman, one of the producers on The Thing, was producing this movie, and I can’t remember what it was called. I was working very closely with him because he wanted me to storyboard the entire movie. There wasn’t anything special about it. That was just his way of keeping control of it. This designer had designed this set and was in the middle of building the damn thing. It was a nice looking set, a beautiful set, but it had to have two doors in it because we had people coming in two different doors during the action. He only had one door. He actually came in the office and he threw his newspaper at me he was so pissed off. He said, “What are you trying to do? Ruin my career?” [laughs] “I’m sorry buddy, but you’ve gotta have two doors. We’ve got two people coming in two different places.” That’s just it. If you’re not working closely with your storyboard artist, you’re not quite sure what’s going to happen in there. So your crews get hired because the designers like working with you because of the fact that you pump information to them all the time about what’s going to be going on in the scene. So, Terry Ackland-Snow was one of the art directors on it, and he called me up and he said, “Mike, we’ve got a movie. You’ve got to do this.” I came over and I talked to him. I met everybody and I loved the concept. And off we went. MM: Did you ever have any dealings with Jim Henson himself? MIKE: Oh, yeah. Everybody did. If you’re working for the company, you’re dealing with Jim, because Jim was a very hands-on producer. He more or less approved everything, which really was a nightmare in many ways. Everybody would battle for his time and his attention, and his attention span wasn’t always that great. You’d end up going in and asking him about a talking tree and he would say, “Forget the talking tree. I want all the rocks to sing.” And you’d walk out and think, “Wait a minute. We have to have a talking tree because it’s in the story and it’s an important prop or character. Now does he want the singing rocks and the talking tree?” So a lot of times he was as confusing as much as he was helpful. MM: What sorts of things did you do for Henson? MIKE: I went to work on Dark Crystal on one side of town, and the Henson Organization were over on the other side of town in the Creature Shop building the creatures. I had to go back and forth to the Creature Shop because Jim and Frank Oz were doing a Muppet movie at that time, so I didn’t get that much time from them. I had to storyboard straight ahead as if I knew what I was doing. The only person who really came in from time to time, in his 47

inevitable way, was Gary Kurtz. [chuckles] I love Gary, but he used to drive me nuts. He’d come into my office very quietly and he would just stand there behind me. I’d be working away, a million miles away, working on Skekses and things like that. All of a sudden, I’d just feel the presence of someone standing behind me. I’d turn and there he’d be with a big, dumb grin on his face. One of my jobs was to coordinate between the film people, who were making these huge models of these sets that were very elaborate, and the creature people. I would be storyboarding and they would be building the models to my storyboards. I had to make sure that the creature people understood what I needed from the creatures. For example, we had the old mystic going up this ramp up to the cave. He lies down on his bed, and Jen comes in and the old mystic tells him about the shard. I had storyboarded the entire sequence, and the mystic went from right-toleft up this track up to the cave and laid down onto his bed right-to-left. They’d built this huge model. You stood in the model. You crawled under this great big series of tables and you stood up inside the model. You could get three or four people walking around inside this model, that’s how elaborate it was. I went over to the creature shop and I saw the puppeteers. They were working with this old mystic. I thought, “Wait a minute. The puppeteers are on the wrong side.” You could only shoot the mystic from one side because the puppeteers were behind it on the other side manipulating it. They were on the puppet’s left-hand side, so that meant if the puppet went up the ramp, the puppeteers butts would be facing you. You wouldn’t even see the mystic. I said, “Guys. What happened? You were supposed to be on the other side.” “Well, it didn’t work as well so we flipped it over and it works better on this side.” I said, “You can’t do that. There’s been hundreds of thousands of dollars spent over there on the puppet going right-to-left on the camera. You’re making it where it’s got to go from left-to-right, which makes a whole world of difference, because now they have to change the set all around.” I was not always very popular over in the Creature Shop. I was barred from the Creature Shop at one time. I went over there to look at the model of the Landstrider and the gal that was working on the model was doing a beautiful job. I just merely said, “Okay now. Where do you envision Jen and Kira sitting on the Landstrider?” She turned and looked at me as if I’d come from outer space. She says, “Nobody rides on the Landstrider.” I says, “Yes they do, dear. That’s why we have a Landstrider. It’s for transportation.” That’s when it hit the fan. They came over and told me that if I was going to come over there and cause trouble all the time, and upset everybody, I was going to get barred from the Creature Shop. In the end, Frank Oz came in and smoothed everything over saying that I was just trying to do my job. [laughs] It was like two 48

different worlds. The Creature Shop weren’t worried about what the creatures had to do in the movie. We were worried about the movie and getting these things to do what needed to be done for the film. It was an experience. MM: You did quite a lot of work with the Henson people over the years. Were they enjoyable people to work with? MIKE: They were wonderful people. They’re very creative and once they know what the problems are going to be, they’ll go to any extreme to solve the problem. It’s like on Little Shop of Horrors, the Henson people did the plant. There were sometimes 30-some people operating this damn man-eating plant. They were fantastic to work with.

ences working on films. Frank was just a jewel. That was one of Frank’s big independent movies where Frank jumped off on his own. He wanted me to literally storyboard the movie almost as if it was animated, because during the song sequences in particular, we had to do special cuts to get the characters in there. A lot of times the camera was over-cranked. The plant couldn’t move that fast, so we had to cut to get Seymour into it. Frank and I worked very closely together on the song sequences. It was absolutely fantastic. I really enjoyed working on that. MM: What was Frank Oz like to work for?

MM: You also worked on The Storyteller TV show with them. Was there much of a difference between working on the TV show versus the films? MIKE: Not really. I was freelancing at the time and I was working from home. They’d send me a script and I’d just send them back a storyboard. Basically, that’s all it was. MM: Was it your association with them that lead you to working on Little Shop of Horrors? MIKE: Yes, because Frank Oz was the director. That’s one of my alltime favorite films. That was one of the most enjoyable of my experi49

Previous Page: More of the storyboard sequence for Little Shop of Horrors. Left: Mike’s final head design for Shrek. Mike left the production after two years on the job and well before the movie was finished, but his designs still show through in the film. Below: Shrek storyboard with Shrek and Donkey. Little Shop of Horrors artwork ©2008 Warner Bros. Shrek ™ and ©2008 DreamWorks Animation, LLC.

MIKE: He’s a gentleman among gentleman. He and Richard Lester are the same kind of characters and approach film the same way. Frank was the first person on any film production I ever worked on that walked into the art department and said, “Now listen folks. Family comes first. If you’ve got something that is pressing at home, take time. Do it. Family comes first, movie comes second.” Never did I ever hear that out of anybody else’s mouth. When you went to work on a film, it was like committing yourself to a monastery. You had to shave your head. You had to wear gowns. [laughter] And you couldn’t leave the premises. It was a total commitment. Nobody even got sick on films. MM: Did you work with Frank on any other films? 50

MIKE: Yes. I did some work on Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. We’ve been friends for a long time. He sends me e-mails with goofy jokes all the time. I went and visited him on the set when he was filming his latest film, Death at a Funeral. MM: You worked on Disney’s Black Cauldron, which, from what I’ve read, was kind of a mess of a movie. What can you say about that? MIKE: I think I can sum it up. I worked there for about a year and we went to a screening where they had partial animation. Some of it was inked and painted, others were just storyboards. As I walked out, the producer, Joe Hale, said, “Okay, Mike. What’d you think?” I told him, “That was the best two movies I’ve ever watched.” They had two different directors working

[laughter] On that footage, you might see my hand. He did that to everybody though. He’d walk in and he’d totally ignore everybody, and then he’d start talking and he would start explaining what he liked about certain things. This was the first time he ever saw these things. He was talking as if he had guided my hand through the entire process. He was at least three times bigger than I was, so I was in no position to say anything. It was strange. But I’ll tell ya, just working with the guys over there was great. Such talent. Unbelievable. MM: More recently you’ve worked on a few DreamWorks pictures. MIKE: Yeah. I worked on Prince of Egypt and Shrek. MM: Shrek has become quite popular, obviously. Did that surprise you, or was that something you knew from the beginning had a chance of being big?

Above: More boards from the witches sequence for Shrek. Next Page: Storyboards for Return to Oz, featuring Tik-Tok’s army. Unfortunately, this scene was cut from the final script by the Disney higher-ups. Shrek ™ and ©2008 DreamWorks Animation, LLC. Return to Oz artwork ©2008 Disney.

on it, and these two directors didn’t like one another, so they really didn’t talk. Each director has his own storyboard crew, so that meant it was two different movies. [laughter] It was a strange time. That was when—what was the football player’s name that worked at Disney? Disney’s son-in-law? MM: Ron Miller. MIKE: He was in charge at the time. We had a special day where Ron was going to come through the art department, so they wanted me to pin up all my designs: the three witches, and the King, and the skeletons, and all that kind of stuff. The room was covered with stuff. The press was in there, and they had cameras going, and they had flashbulbs flashing. I was sitting at my drawing board when they came in and Joe said, “This is Mike Ploog and this is Mike’s work. Mike, you want to come over here and tell us what we got here?” The football player literally body blocked me. 52

MIKE: I thought it was a brilliant idea from the very get go. I loved the idea of Shrek. The only thing that surprised me is that they ever got it done. I worked on it for like two years. It went through different stages. At first, I was just working on design and concept. Then I was working on story and in story development. Story development in some of these animation studios is very interesting. What it is is, they don’t have a story and you just start storyboarding gags and situations. You’re working with some script writers who, at that time, were the two Terrys. They would weave them all together and put in other stuff in-between. The first scripts, oddly enough, were very good. They were very funny. That’s when we were kind of making fun of fairy tales and making fun of Disney. That was funny. That was working. Shrek was great. He was funny. He was a bit more klutzy in the beginning than he turned out to be. They just said, “No way. We don’t want anything to look like Disney. We don’t like that.” And they went off on I don’t know how many scripts, and how many script writers, and how many directors, and how many producers on that thing. Until one day I walked into the new producer’s office, in fact he hadn’t even unpacked his boxes of books yet. I just merely said, “I’ve given you guys

two years of this. It’s all I’ve got in me. I haven’t got any more Shrek in me.” He says, “Okay, Mike. Go on. Take off.” So I left. They more or less turned it over to PDI, and PDI went back to our original concept which was way back two years earlier. MM: You mentioned before how much work animation is, yet you seem to keep coming back to it. What’s the appeal for you? MIKE: I think it’s the contribution that you make. For an artist working on a movie, when you see the movie, you see your action being done, but your art isn’t there and your timing isn’t there. Actors do their own timing and editors cut it and time it themselves. On animation, when you’re doing storyboards, your timing is very important and your art is very important. You see your attitude up on the screen, it’s not just an actor’s face, it’s your attitude, your piece of work. I think it was just the desire to see my work doing something. MM: Do you actually do animation as well? MIKE: No. I can do layout where I can go from one pose to another and have someone else come in and in-between it and animate it, but that’s about it. MM: You’ve worked in animation from the late ’60s up to the computer animation work of today. Has what you do in animation changed that much? MIKE: Animation has changed a great deal because of CG. Ink and paint don’t exist any longer. They can do it all by computer. But what I do hasn’t changed all that much. Good animation still works, even if it is CG. I worked on a thing called Valiant. MM: The carrier pigeon movie? MIKE: Yeah. If they hadn’t messed with the budget, that could have been a knockout movie. I’ve worked on several movies where this has happened. They pulled out the guts of the film because they felt like it wasn’t driving the story forward. It really was pertinent to the story because it served an enormous purpose. Sometimes it served multiple purposes. On Valiant, if they just would have had more of the war going on in the background, you would have felt the danger that these pigeons were in. You could have felt the frightening atmosphere that they were working in. Because of budget, they pulled that out. They did the same thing to me on Return to Oz which really broke Walter Murch’s heart. They took out the Army of Oz. Walter’d written the script and he knew how important these characters were. They were Tik-Tok’s army. There were four guys, and they were the Goons—Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, that crew. They were the humor. From the time that they were introduced in the film, and they were introduced fairly early, they were in the film right on through. The person that pulled them out was Jeffrey Katzenberg. That was the 53

MIKE: It was a good experience. Working with Michael was great. I had a fantastic art department. Working with the producer and Michael’s manager at the time, I can’t remember what his name was, was a nightmare. An absolute nightmare. They were trying to watch Michael’s money. Michael would say, “Mike, I want at least twelve guns that actually fire in this scene.” I’d say, “No problem. I can get that for ya.” I’d go off and I’d order the twelve guns and the producer would get me on the phone and say, “Excuse me Mike. You can’t have twelve guns. You can only have three.” I’d say, “I can’t shoot the scene with just three.” “Well, you’re just going to have to cut around it and make it look like more.” Then I would go to Michael and say, “Michael, we’re screwed. We can only have three guns.” He’d say, “Oh no, no, no. I want twelve.” [laughter] This went on continuously through the entire production. I don’t know why they were guarding Michael’s money so closely. It was a bit of a struggle, but I really enjoyed working with Michael. I don’t think it’s an experience I’ll ever be able to repeat. MM: And you were going to do some acting in that.

Above: More storyboards for the witches segment of Shrek. Right: Mike in his “Moonwalker” outfit. He looks tougher than Joe Pesci, don’t you think? Next Page: Design work for the castle in which the princess is being held. You can see Shrek and Donkey silhouetted in the doorway in the upper right corner. Shrek ™ and ©2008 DreamWorks Animation, LLC.

first time I ever laid eyes on Katzenberg, and I didn’t realize it until I got over to DreamWorks and there he was sitting behind a desk. I thought, “Ooh. I don’t like you.” [laughter] He didn’t recognize me, not in a million years. He was the guy that I felt really changed that entire movie and turned it into a very dark movie where it didn’t have to be. It could have been a much more enjoyable film if they had kept the Army of Oz in. But it was a budget thing, and I understand the restraints of budget.

MIKE: I was going to play the bad guy. They did tests and everything and I did all kinds of stuff on it. Michael’s manager is the one that got Joe Pesci to do it. I’m glad I didn’t do it, because Joe was fantastic in it. I kept thinking I was going to be Orson Welles. [laughter] MM: Do you enjoy the collaborative nature of film? MIKE: Yes. Right now, I’m back working on comic books in my studio. There are days that I just sit there and think, “If only I had a roomful of other artists working with me.” I love playing off of other talent, other artists. It’s stimulating. It helps to develop a thought. I miss it, but I’m not going to go back to film now. Unless I’m offered a lot of money. [laughter]

MM: An odd thing I noticed looking through your film work is that you worked with Michael Jackson on his “Moonwalker” video. What was that experience like? 54

can work around that. Well, you can make some things work. I’ve always said that the best thing about learning to be a director is learning how to compromise. You’re continuously compromising. You’re compromising with your locations, you’re compromising with your actors, you’re compromising with your budget, your producers. On and on and on. You have to learn how to do that. I can’t stand stupidity. Blatant stupidity. And I’m not very bright, mind you, and if I can spot stupidity, it has to be pretty damn stupid. [laughter] Basically, that’s what it was about. What I told them was certain parts of it I can deal with and certain parts of it I can’t. I’m just an artist. I’d rather be a good artist than a mediocre director.

MM: What was the last film you worked on? MIKE: Tomb Raider. I quit it because I got into a shouting match with somebody about vacation pay. I thought, “I have to leave because my life is going to be hell around here if I don’t.” That was the only movie outside of Shrek that I ever walked off of. MM: I read that you were asked to direct and said no. Why did you turn the offer down? MIKE: It might have had something to do with the time in my life. I think it was more that I love the creative part of directing, putting it together and making it work. I did do second unit directing on a couple of occasions. I like being behind the camera. The one thing that I couldn’t deal with was the politics that you had to deal with when you’re a director. It’s worse now than it’s ever been. Your average film has at least six or seven producers. I worked on K-19 where they had about twelve producers. Every one of them had input. You have to be the politician and you’re continuously arguing the same points over and over again. “You need this because this is what your movie’s about. Now if you don’t give me the money to do this, you haven’t got a movie.” They don’t care because they’ve seen you working out there and they think you

MM: Do you remember what film you were asked to direct? MIKE: It was a TV series. They weren’t going to trust me with a movie. MM: Do you have a favorite film that you worked on? MIKE: I have to go back to Little Shop of Horrors. I think that was my favorite. It was just fun. I worked with the design. I worked with the sets. I did second unit work on it. It was just an enormous amount of fun. 55

Part 5:

Creating Fantasy Worlds

MM: You didn’t do much comic work in the ’80s and ’90s. Was that intentional or were you just really busy working on movies?

kind of went through the roof. Everybody’s taking themselves very seriously. The films just weren’t fun to work on anymore. There were too many people in charge. It was nothing to work on a film to where you’d go to work on it and you’d find that they didn’t have a script. You, as the story department, and the director, more or less sat down and worked out the script, or at least worked out the sequences. I worked on films where there were six producers, and each producer was looking out for his own interest. As soon as you felt like you’d gotten someplace, then suddenly it would go before these producers and each one of them would have something to say about it. Many times you’d have to start from scratch again. There was so much money involved in the production of a film that everybody just kept their heads down. There was just no fun on the sets. There wasn’t any fun in the art departments anymore. Everybody was just taking everything very, very seriously. I guess when there’s that much money involved, you have to take it seriously. It’s supposed to be a job where you’re dealing with an art form of some kind, but it doesn’t seem that way.

MIKE: I was really busy with the movies. They all came one right after another during that period of time. In film, it’s kind of a goofy thing. They kind of know when you’re coming to the end of your project and the phone starts to ring. Which is good. MM: What made you decide to get back into comics? MIKE: The film industry changed enormously; about ten years ago it really changed. It was changing prior to that, but ten years ago it just

MM: One of the books you did do during the ’90s was the Classics Illustrated version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. How did that happen? MIKE: I think I was approached by First Publishing and asked if I would be interested in doing a Classics Illustrated. I said I would love to do one, and I’d love to do Mark Twain. They said, “Would you like to do Tom Sawyer?” I said, “I’d love it, and I’d also like to do Huck Finn.” Actually, I wanted to do Huck Finn 56

first, but they wanted me to do Tom Sawyer first. That was just great fun. I really enjoyed that because I’m a big Mark Twain fan. I think those two stories are just absolutely magical stories. MM: After hearing a bit about your childhood, I’m curious if you feel an affinity for Tom and Huck. MIKE: Oh, yes. Definitely. I was reliving my childhood. The funny thing is, when I wrote and illustrated that book, I drove everybody in the building nuts. I had a studio above a coffee shop in a small town in Wiltshire, England. I played “Dueling Banjos” over and over and over. I had it on a loop, and it just kept going over and over again. Believe it or not, I paced that entire book—the artwork, the dialog, everything—to “Dueling Banjos.” MM: You did some interesting layouts in the book. In the whitewashing sequence, for example, you just had the fence in the background instead of traditional panel borders. What led to that experimentation? MIKE: It really wasn’t experimenting because I did quite a bit of that when I was working on PS Magazine. That’s kind of an old Will Eisner stunt: leave the page open and just get into the acting. What always comes to mind for me is that wonderful Saturday Evening Post cover that Norman Rockwell did called “The Gossips,” and it’s just people’s heads. I like that kind of feeling. If you don’t have to confine the panel, it’s really great fun to do it. You have to give a lot of thought to it, so it does take a lot more time. MM: Why did Huck Finn never happen? MIKE: First Publishing went out of business. That was about the size of it. I had worked it all up, and broke it down. The hardest part of it is taking a big story and breaking it down to however many pages you had. They had even given me extra pages on that, if I remember right. I did want to get in the hucksters who picked Huck up and took him through town and the old lady he ended up living with. I no more got it broke down and was ready to go to work, than they went out of business.

MM: Around that same time, you also did the adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. What attracted you to that story? MIKE: Santa Claus. I always wanted to do a Santa Claus book. That book was brought to my attention years and years before. When I read it, I found that it’s a 57

Above: Santa checking his list. A panel from Mike’s adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. Next Page: A page from Mike’s unfinished and unpublished adaptation of Washington Irving’s short story, “Rip Van Winkle.” Artwork ©2008 Mike Ploog.

bit of a jumble. It spans a long period of time, so I ended up having to knit things together and put my own work into it. That was great fun because I took the material that was at hand and just tried to weave a story with it. It’s very difficult to tell a man’s entire life story in one book. MM: I thought the published book had a European feel to it. Was that intentional on your part? MIKE: Not really. If it did have a European look, that’s really a compliment, because I’m a big fan of the European books. That’s very nice if it had that feel to it. MM: The story is a bit more violent than your usual Santa story. Was that part of the story’s appeal for you? MIKE: In the original story, he doesn’t have any deep troughs that he goes into where he finds himself in a terrible place and has to work his way out. It’s pretty much a candy floss story. I put that in because there were places in the story that had an opportunity to have him being 58

confronted with the Awgwas. I thought if he got confronted with them, we really need to have him do something about it. I had a battle with the Awgwas, but if you notice, nobody really gets killed or hurt. The chief falls backwards off a cliff. As far as Santa Claus was concerned, he had hit the bottom of his barrel now because he’d lost his monkey, Toy. The monkey wasn’t in the original story. That came about more or less by accident. I needed to have something that Claus could talk to. He was by himself for many, many years until he acquired the elves. He needed someone to talk to and I thought, “I can’t give him a cat.” I just kept going to see if I’d stumble across something. I was having him make a toy for a child in the village, and it was one of these old-fashioned, Victorian-type toys, where you pull a string and the arms and legs move. I thought, “It looks like a monkey. That’s it! His partner’s going to be a monkey, and the monkey’s name’s going to be Toy.” When he makes this thing, the kids asks him what it is, and he says, “It’s a toy.” So that was the origin of the toy. [laughter] Hokey as hell, ain’t it?

it tongue-in-cheek. It was fun, but I don’t know if I’d want to do it again.

MM: Doing what you know to be right seems to be a theme of the book. Is that a message you feel strongly about?

MM: What was the appeal of doing adaptations?

MIKE: I don’t believe in writing down messages. I leave it to other people if they want to get a message out of it. My main objective is to tell the story. My story was about a baby who was found and taken to the woods and raised by these little wood nymphs. Then, he was taken away by this flying giant and shown the world. After he’d seen the world, he had to leave the woods. When he left, he had to form a life of his own and he just formed a very righteous life. He spent his entire life helping other people and then he had to die. We couldn’t let him die. He had to become immortal, so the people of the forest actually fought for his immortality. They went before the Gnome King of the mountain and pleaded with him, “Let him have the mantle of immortality.” In the end, after he’d heard the story of this mortal’s life, he decide that yes, if a mortal was ever meant to have it, he should. That’s how he got the mantle of immortality. That’s why, still to this day, Santa Claus lives someplace— not necessarily at the North Pole, but someplace that he can’t be found very easily. I write to him all the time.

MIKE: I really wanted to write, and the stories that I seemed to be writing were stories that I’d read by other comic artists, or they were stories that no one had any interest in. [laughter] So I kept thinking to myself, “This is absurd. Why can’t I use my imagination and just write something?” It was lack of confidence, lack of ability, whatever. It was so much easier to adapt somebody else’s work and put my work into it—try to bring something to it. In film, that was my major job. You’d sit down and

MM: You were also going to do an adaptation of Rip Van Winkle. What happened with that story? MIKE: I did an enormous amount of artwork on it and I can’t remember whether something came up and I never finished it, or the publisher decided that he no longer wanted to do it, or what. I’ve still got a lot of the Rip Van Winkle pages floating around. MM: Is that something you’d like to go back to eventually? MIKE: No, I think I’ve pretty well done that. It was fun the first time around. I was doing 59

read a script and do an adaptation and hope like hell that you’ve got the same ideas that the director’s got. Usually, if you sit and talk to a director long enough, you get into his head and you know where he’s going with the story. So when you read a scene in a script, you kind of know where he’s going with it. When you storyboard it, you take a positive direction and see if he pulls you back, and where he pulls you back. After a while, you’ve got a pretty good handle on what he wants. So I’m pretty good at adaptations. MM: I find it interesting that your project after the Santa Claus adaptation was Abadazad, which owes a lot to that type of story. Was that intentional or just plain luck? MIKE: Mark Alessi, who was running CrossGen at the time, got in touch with me. He had read John Marc’s Abadazad and liked it very much. They were trying to decide on what artist to do it, and Mark is the one who decided that I should do it. Above: Convention sketch of Abadazad heroine, Katie—excuse me... Kate. Right: A sketch of a character who was promised to be much more dangerous than appearances would first indicate. He was slated to appear in the third volume of Abadazad. Next Page: The cover art for the unpublished fourth issue of the Abadazad comic series, featuring Mary Annette.

MM: How much input did you have in the development of the story? MIKE: It was J.M.’s brilliant story, there’s no two ways about it, but I could take it different places because of the characters. I would design a character. J.M. would say, “We need this big, fat lady.” I would sit down and I would design it. Suddenly, he’d start to alter the story around her. My contribution was strictly as an artist and a designer, and he opened the story up and took it places that he hadn’t thought about taking the story after the designs were done, which is the way that it should go. I look at it a lot like you’re casting an actor. You cast an actor, and suddenly you realize that he’s got to have a bigger part. You can’t just have this actor appear and disappear. He’s got to have a bigger part, so you develop him further. MM: Do you enjoy your collaborations with J.M.? MIKE: Oh, very much. The strange thing is that we think a great deal alike. We have the same kind of take on humor and fantasy. When you’re working, you never feel 60

like you’re wasting your time putting that extra effort in, because you know the other guy’s going to do something with it. MM: The more cartoony side of your art really shines in Abadazad. Was that a choice you made or just how your art’s developed over the years? MIKE: I think it was just that it developed that way. It was the natural way to go with it. It was a story about emotion and emotional characters. It was a matter of just sitting down and starting to draw. In order to get the animation that I wanted to get into it, and that emotion that I wanted to get into it, these characters had to look like that. They had to be designed in that way. There had to be a softness to them. Kate’s a hard character and she needed that softer look. As a matter of fact, I did the entire book in just pencil. I didn’t ink it. MM: Was that to give it a softer edge? MIKE: Yeah. MM: What was it like working for CrossGen? MIKE: It was interesting. I think Mark was a very clever man, but he was full of it. I never talked to anybody who could just rattle on with accolades, one after another,

and then tell you, “Well, Mike, nobody’s heard of you. You haven’t done anything in umpteen years.” And you’d think, “Well, why do you think I’m so brilliant and then suddenly turn around and say nobody’s even heard of you?” [laughter] Somebody out there has. My mother, at least, will buy a book. They did really top notch work. It was a quality company. I enjoyed it and they paid on time. What more can you ask? Except they went out of business. It seems like I have a bit of a curse on people. I start to do a book for them, and they go out of business. First First Publishing, then Tundra, and then CrossGen. I know it’s not my fault entirely. I may add to it a bit, but not entirely. MM: The reaction to Abadazad was very positive. Since American comics are very super-hero oriented, did that surprise you? MIKE: It didn’t, because I knew it was good. Everything was in it that was needed to catch a reader’s imagination. It had action. It had great looking characters. It had great dialogue, and people said things the way people actually talk, with emotions that they really have. It brought to the front a young girl that was snappy and sharp with a chip on her shoulder. It was good. I’m still very proud of it. Abadazad. It was wonderful. Brenda Bowen, who was the head of Hyperion books at the time, was really behind the book. It was announced with a huge fanfare, but the problem was that’s where Disney stopped promoting it. It went into book stores with no promotion. People said, “What is this Abadazad?” I’m not saying that Disney let us down, but they certainly didn’t help us any. So we ended up doing three books and then they canceled it. At least they didn’t go out of business. [laughter]

MM: Things seemed to be going well, and then CrossGen went out of business. What can you say about the move to Hyperion and the decision to do Abadazad as a book? MIKE: Hyperion was looking for material and they saw Abadazad and they liked it, but CrossGen was giving them all kinds of trouble. So they decided they would buy the entire CrossGen line. I’m not saying that out of ego. They bought the entire line just to get 61

MM: When you were working on the book, how did you guys decide what to leave as traditional comic sections and what to do as an illustrated story? MIKE: J.M. would break it down into comic sections. If I felt that that comic section wasn’t going to work as well as another one which was more highly visual, then we’d work it out. J.M. put an enormous amount of work into that book. He spent many, many sleepless nights, I’m sure, working on that book. MM: The books also expanded on what was in the comics. Were those additional scenes written specifically for the book, or were they scenes you had talked about before and just didn’t have room to do? MIKE: Those were written specially for the book. Turning a comic into a book is like turning a comic into a film. Things have to be added because of the fact that the medium is totally different. Things had to be described that you could just see in the comic. It was natural that he had to develop certain things further in the Hyperion books than we did in the comic book. MM: You got to design a lot of cool fantasy characters for the book. Do you have a favorite? MIKE: I’ve always loved the villains. Even in movies, I like the villains more than I like the heroes. With villains, you can really work on body language and body structure so they have a nice silhouette. You can add things to them that make them even more evil. With a hero, you’re stuck with it, aren’t ya? He’s gotta look like Robert Redford or somebody.

unlucky number for this book. Are there any plans to try to finish the story? MIKE: J.M. is, as we speak, working on trying to get it put back into a comic book. So we’re all keeping our fingers crossed that we’ll be able to finish the story. That’s what we really want to do, just finish the story. Here we’ve got this poor kid, Matt, floating around in this tube of green goo, and his poor sister, Kate, is wandering around looking for him. You want to finish it because there are so many great characters and great sequences to come. This whole world of Abadazad is so big. It can be so dangerous, and so interesting, that you just feel that you have to put it into words and pictures. MM: And the third book did end on quite the cliffhanger. [laughter] MIKE: Yeah it did, I’m afraid. MM: How did Stardust Kid start? MIKE: When Abadazad folded up on us, there was always the chance that it was going to start up again. J.M. and I wanted to continue working together on an all ages fantasy book. Not just children, but any age.

MM: So the Lanky Man was one of your favorites? MIKE: Yeah, I’m afraid he was one of my favorites. MM: Three seems to be an 63

Previous Page: Pencil art for the cover of Stardust Kid #1. Above: Cover pencils for Stardust Kid #2. Left: A “demented tree.” Stardust Kid was full of ’em. Stardust Kid and all related characters ™ and ©2008 J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog.

ably a very equal collaboration, which is the way it should be. Too many times, writers try to write to artists and artists try to draw to writers, and it is just not a marriage made in Heaven. MM: Stardust Kid is a bit darker than Abadazad. Was that intentional? MIKE: It just worked out that way. Abadazad was going to get darker, I’m sure, because we had a whole world to explore. In The Stardust Kid, we had only a few books to do it in, so it seemed to get darker faster just because of the fact that it was dealing with evil trees, and evil places, and you never knew what was going to turn up next that was going to try to harm the kids. It had that dark side. I enjoy the dark side of things because it’s a great contrast. It makes the good even better. You need those contrasts. The Stardust Kid’’s got plenty of that. MM: Do you have a favorite character from there? MIKE: I think my fish man. I like him. I think we could have done a lot more with him. He had a big role to play, but you’ve only got so much material you can stick in the book. MM: Both of these projects, and the Santa Claus book, were creator-owned. Was that important to you?

Above: Every story needs a villain, and “the Woman” certainly fit the bill in Stardust Kid (though, as with most good stories, things aren’t always what they seem). Next Page: Pencils for Stardust Kid #3, page 18 and the cover of Stardust Kid #4, featuring Mike’s favorite character of the series, Ruchh the River Giant. Stardust Kid and all related characters ™ and ©2008 J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog.

He had this Stardust Kid story, and he sent me an outline of it. I read it and I liked it. I just started doing drawings. I must have done maybe 15 or 20 drawings of characters and stuff. I had a bunch of old drawings of characters as well. All together, I sent him a huge wad of drawings. Between the drawings and his outline, The Stardust Kid was born. It was a real collaboration, which I enjoyed doing. MM: Would you say that you had more input into the story on this than you did on Abadazad? MIKE: It’s always a hard thing to say when you’re talking about a collaboration. The artwork is a stimulus to the writer, and the story’s a stimulus to the artist. It was prob64

MIKE: It wasn’t important, but it felt good that you were doing something that actually was your material and belonged to you. Good material is good material whether somebody else owns it or you own it. Right now, I’m working on The Spirit. Everybody under the sun seems to own the Spirit, but I love working on him. I put an enormous amount of work into the stories. MM: Stardust Kid started out at Image then moved over to Boom! Studios. Why did that happen? MIKE: It wasn’t really at Image, it was at Desperado. At Desperado, Joe Pruett, who’s the nicest guy in the world, just had too much on his plate. He wasn’t taking care of things properly. The books were printed way, way too dark. There would be big mistakes in the copy. He wasn’t there to really

look after it and nurture it the way I felt it should be. After the third issue, I thought, “That’s it. The color is way off. It’s way too dark. It doesn’t look anything like it’s meant to look.” Nick Bell was doing beautiful color work on it. We had the option to pull out if we wanted to. J.M. had been doing work with Boom! before that, so he said, “Let’s take it to Boom!.” I said, “Let’s take it someplace where somebody’s going to watch out for it and just do some checks on the proofs.” So it went to Boom! and Boom! finished it off rather nicely. We’re coming out now with the paperback. We’ve collected all the stories, so now all five are going to be in one book, and it really looks good. MM: And the colors have been corrected to look like you want them to? MIKE: The colors have all been corrected. Everything has been corrected. It looks great. MM: Do you plan to do more Stardust Kid stories, or is that story told? MIKE: No story is ever really told, particularly if it’s a fantasy story. Fantasy lives on another world. There’s a good possibility of doing more Stardust Kid. The thing is, we need to see how it’s received once we get the album out. It should be out soon. That’s what they tell me anyway. MM: You obviously like this type of story. What’s the attraction for you? MIKE: Imagination. I like stories where I can actually put my imagination to work. It bores me stiff if there’s nothing in there that I cannot create. I need my imagination to get stirred for me to really get behind it. I love things that have imagination to them. MM: You also had your own trading card set. How’d that happen? MIKE: I tell ya, that was one of the finest experiences in my life. I loved doing those. What happened is I left England in the late ’80s because the film industry just dried up. I had done the Santa Claus book. Mike Freelander, God love him, calls me up and says, “Mike, I have a company that does trading cards. We do them on different artists. Would you like to do a trading card set?” I thought about it and I thought, “What in the hell would I put in it?” I said, “I would love to do a trading card set, but I haven’t got any material.” He said, “I want you to do 90 or 100 paintings.” I said, “You’re kidding!” He said, “No.” I said, “What do you want me to paint?” [laughs] He said, “Anything. Anything that comes into your head. But I do want some of your monster stuff.” So I sat down and just started painting. I had a ball! I absolutely loved it. I never had so much fun in my life. To be honest with you, I’d never painted that much in my life. I’m not really noted 65

Below: The kids are reunited with their friend and protector, Treesa. Pencils for Stardust Kid #3, page 6. Next Page: Stardust Kid gathers his allies for the final confrontation with the Woman. Pencils for Stardust Kid #5, page 11.

as a painter, and rightfully so. But to sit down and pick up the paint brush, and actually fake your way through painting something was a hell of an experience. After about a hundred and some paintings, it actually started to come fairly easily. It should after all of those. [laughter] I really, really enjoyed it. After that, I did one of these role playing card games called Guardians with Michael. That was great fun. Originally, all he wanted me to do was just draw characters. Just sit down with a pencil and draw. I must have done two or three hundred characters. In the end, I ended up painting a great deal of them too. I really enjoyed that period.

MM: Your most recent projects are kind of taking you back to your roots. First off, you have a new horror book out, Thicker Than Blood. What can you say about that project? MIKE: To be honest, I started that project because of the fact that I was making dollars. The dollar exchange rate had just gone to hell. I’d get a dollar check in and after I exchanged it for pounds, it was like less than half. I thought, “I can’t go on like this.” Simon Reed met me at a convention and said, “How would you like to do a werewolf story?” I thought, “Hey. This is pounds, isn’t it?” [laughter] So, to be honest with you, the first thing that was appealing about it was the fact that I was going to get paid in national currency. I started it with him and, God love Simon, he only writes like two pages at a time and then I scan the artwork and send it off to him. That inspires him to write the next three pages. That makes it really tough on a continuity artist because you’re never quite sure where you’re going and what the character’s going to be doing. It’s hard to design the character and it’s hard to get a rhythm going. After the first book, I actually got used to it. The second issue is very, very good, I think. The first book I felt I was just feeling my way through it. Simon Bisley painted it, and Simon is a genius. He really is. You can say what you want about Simon, but he’s an artist among artists. Simon Reed wanted Simon Bisley to color it. I was very unsure about exactly what it was going to look like. On the first book, Simon went crazy painting. You wouldn’t even know there was an ink line on the page. He painted like a maniac. It looked great. It was very dark and sinister. On the second book, he went through with just washes and I really like the hell out of it. That one really sings. It’s a good job. Going back and doing werewolves and things, if it wasn’t for the fact that the story started to change into a direction that suddenly was catching my imagination.... It’s a story about two brothers. One of the brothers gets bitten by a werewolf trying to save his older brother. The older brother is a scientist and he’s trying to find a cure for his younger brother. The

younger brother turns into a horrendous werewolf and leaves because he realizes that he can’t control himself any longer, so he heads up to the wilds of Scotland. While he’s up there, his older brother’s still working on the cure. He has nobody to experiment on, so he tries it on himself. Well, it turns him into this Mr. Hyde-like demon. He’s got to go find his brother, so off to Scotland he goes. The second book is strictly about what happens to the older brother. The third book is what happens to the two of them when they get together. I don’t want to tell you about the third book, because it’s a really great twist of an ending. You’ll have to buy the book. [laughs] So we’ve got werewolf vs. Mr. Hyde, which works out very nicely. MM: You’re also drawing The Spirit now. What’s it like to be working on that after having known, and worked with, Will? MIKE: It’s wonderful. I absolutely love it. I’ve done one story. It was written by Sergio Aragonés. He plotted it. To be honest, it drove me nuts because I hated the story. [laughs] It wasn’t Sergio’s fault. We just have different ideas about the Spirit. I spent so much time trying to reorganize the plot that I thought, “Why don’t I just write the damn thing?” So I called up [editor] Joey [Cavalieri] and said, “Joey, I’m having a hard time with Sergio’s plots, particularly after I got the second plot. He’s not taking the Spirit where I want to take him. He’s not dealing with him the way I’d like to deal with him.” So Joey said, “Okay, write it.” So I sat down and I’ve just written a two-part story. I’m penciling the first part now. It’s great. I love it. I’ve got a different kind of an attitude towards what happens with the Spirit than what was happening before. To me, the Spirit is a fantastic character but, being a detective, a vigilante, a crime fighter, the story has to be brought to him. It has already had to have happened. You have to build a story, and then take

it to the Spirit. Then, the Spirit works it out and solves all the world’s problems. The story has to be taken to him, but they weren’t doing that. They were having him too involved with too many people. You end up with talking heads and they’re talking theory. I really enjoy working on The Spirit. It’s a fantastic character. You can have wonderful characters around him, and that’s what it’s all about. He’s in this world of people that have more or less fallen out of the picture. They’re not normal people. They’re people that are living on the edge of society that somehow get them67

Below: The Spirit amidst some of his many foes. Next Page: A 1974 unpublished illustration intended for one of the Marvel magazines.

selves entangled in crime, or they somehow get involved with even stranger characters that are also not within the picture. I like those kind of characters. I like the people who don’t live in the wonderful picture that we’ve created called the 21st century. MM: Are you doing more beyond that two-part story? MIKE: Oh, yeah. They want me to do as many as I have time to do. 68

MM: What’s next for you? MIKE: I don’t know. Something always comes down the pike. I think it’s books. I love doing comics. I’ll keep working on The Spirit as long as they’ll tolerate me. I love writing it because, suddenly I realize I can write Spirit stories, and I have a hard time writing a grocery list. I wrote this story and everybody loves it, so that’s a good sign. That’s the thing we all look for— appreciation. As long as it continues, I’ll keep doing it.

Part 6:

Storytelling and the Creative Process of the writers I worked with did it like that. Believe me, some of them took advantage of it. [chuckles]

MM: What artists influenced you? MIKE: That’s always a trick question. It depends on what I’m doing. Painting-wise, I fell in love with N.C. Wyeth so long ago that he’s always been a big inspiration. There are so many other artists. If I’m doing watercolors, I look at different artists. If I’m doing oils, I look at different artists. As far as line art and comics go, I think that Milton Caniff was a big influence. He used these great blocks of black, and everything was so dramatic. I loved that. Even before I knew what it meant, I loved it. And his storytelling was very good. There was a lot of emotion in it. I always have to go back to Caniff, but there have been so many others that it’s impossible to name them all. Everybody influences me in some way or another. It’s like I walked into this life with no identity and I just borrowed it from so many different people and so many fantastic artists. Hopefully, one of these days I’ll find my own style. Then I’ll probably be out of work, so it won’t do any good.

MM: How so? MIKE: Sometimes it wouldn’t even be a written plot. It would just be a telephone call. Most of these stories are monster of the month or villain of the month. They gave me an idea of what the villain did and I had to get to the villain and, somehow or another, defeat him. It could be nothing more than a ten-minute telephone call and then I’d sit down and start drawing. That’s not to say that any of my writers were lazy, because they weren’t. They were damn good writers. MM: Could you tell me a bit more about how you broke down the plots? MIKE: I’m somebody that has to think with a pencil. I’ll read a script or a plot just to get the impression of where it’s going, what it’s going to do, and what’s going to happen. Then I sit down with a pencil and I go through one scene or situation or page at a time and let it build, always keeping in mind where I have to get to. I’m just building up to a point, then I build up to another point, until I end the story. So it’s all in thumbnails.

MM: When you were working at Marvel, did you mostly work Marvelstyle off of a plot, or were you given full scripts?

MM: Do you transfer the thumbnails up to your completed pages?

MIKE: I was working off plots, which made it a lot more comfortable for me. I’d worked in animation and film, so I had a good sense of laying out a story knowing that I needed a beginning, middle, and end. A plot would allow me to pace the book. I could start it off with the introduction of the story, and then in the middle have them come into the conflict, and then wrap it up in the end. I enjoyed working that way. Most

MIKE: Sometimes I do, if I’ve got a good layout. Thumbnails aren’t always good compositions. What you’re doing is you’re just trying to tell a story in pictures. You’re not always thinking about composition and how you’re filling the space. If you’ve got a good one, you throw it on the computer, blow it up, and just trace it off. Nine times out of ten, it’s not a good composition. Something always has to be changed. 69

Sometimes you’ll do a panel and you’ll realize that it shouldn’t be one panel, it’s two panels, so you have to re-lay out the entire page just to get your storytelling. As far as I’m concerned, the story is everything. I put a lot of work into the art because of the fact that I want people to find it interesting, and I want them to like what they’re looking at. I’ve always believed that if I could tell a story without any words at all, I would be successful. If you could do that, you did your job, and you did it very well. But it all starts with the thumbnail. MM: How conscious are you of trying to leave space for word balloons or captions? MIKE: I try to be. I even try to have the person that’s speaking first in the right

place so that balloons don’t cross. It doesn’t always work out that way, but I try to keep it that way. I try to consciously make it so the dialogue is going to work within the context of the drawing. Sometimes, it’s very difficult because you realize, “My God! I’ve got an enormous amount of dialogue in this particular panel.” Then you think, “Well, maybe it’s not one panel. Maybe it’s two panels. Wait a minute. If I do that, then I’ve trapped myself because now I’ve got to do something else.” It’s trying to think ahead and trying to keep the reader involved as much as possible without any difficulty. MM: Do you prefer to ink your own work, or do you prefer to have someone else do that? MIKE: I prefer to do my own inking. When I put the pencil down and I’m making a line, it might not be the line that I really want. When I’m inking, I’m still drawing. I think what happens with some inkers is that they don’t draw. The penciler is drawing and, if you’re a half-way decent inker, you continue drawing when you pick up the brush or the pen. You never stop drawing. MM: When you know someone else is going to be inking your work, do you do more complete pencils? MIKE: Yes I do, particularly when I’m spotting my blacks. To me, the blacks on a page are very important. They have to lead from one panel to another. They have to be positioned in a place where it helps convey whatever you’re trying to say within that panel. Within every panel there’s a message, and you have to get that message across. That black ink is your best friend to getting it across because you can emphasize, you can push things back, you can pull things forward, you can eliminate backgrounds. There’s a whole lot of tricks you can use to get that one little message across. Which is your job. Your job is to get the message completed within that panel. And it leads to the next message. Right now at DC I’m doing the Spirit book. For some goofy reason, which I can’t understand, nobody’s been able to explain it to me, if I’m writing it and penciling it, I can’t ink it. [laughter] Have you ever heard of anything like that? I know there has to be some

ciler” who is “the artist” and here you are. You’re getting paid a lot less than he is and you’re working your tail off to get the damn thing done so that you can pay the rent. And still to be expected to bring something to it. When Al Williamson stopped doing penciling, he decided just to ink. I thought, “Damn! That’s a great idea.” If nothing else, it loosens you up and you’re using another part of the brain. Particularly if you’re working on someone else’s work that’s not really your style. I thought it was a brilliant idea when he did that. Problem is, I never thought I’d like to do it. [laughs] Maybe one of these days.

kind of a legal thing. Like I told Joey, “I just want to complete my work.” I’m putting an enormous amount of work into the pencils on it because of the fact that the story that I wrote has got a lot of characters in it. I want the personality of the characters to come out. You’re very careful about how you pencil it so that it’s very readable. You’re putting all the blacks that you want in there because, when you’re actually inking your own pencils, you don’t always follow your own layout. As you’re inking it, something else happens. As you’re penciling, you’re drawing. When you’re inking, you’re drawing. And it’s two different ways of drawing. One drawing is rendering and you can see the lights and darks, and even greys in there. When you’re inking, it’s stark black-&-white. When you’re doing that, suddenly you realize that you’d treat something totally differently. You don’t ever stop drawing once you start inking. Hopefully. [laughs] I’m hoping my inker won’t stop drawing.

MM: When you’re painting a book like Tom Sawyer or Santa Claus, do you approach the pages differently? Do you stop at an earlier point and say, “Okay, now I can start painting?” MIKE: I approach them much the same as I would an inked book. Like in Tom Sawyer, I found a system where I was just doing very little blacks and just putting in a line. It was working better, and a lot faster, and it looked a lot crisper. You can busy things up very easily when you’re painting a book. The system was all the same. Both Tom Sawyer and Santa Claus, I wrote. The hardest work, and the most work, was put into the thumbnails and working on the dialogue so that things moved along and making sure that my page count was going to be alright. I had to break things down into acts and say, “I’ve got ten pages to get to here, so I have to eliminate this. I have to put this in, so how am I going to put it in in just a half a page?” Actually, I find that fun. I find that a fun way of working. With Tom Sawyer, I had a big book that I had to break down and put it into a very small book. Santa Claus was a bit of a nightmare because Frank Baum’s story was a bit on the scattered side, so I had to make a lot of things up. The strange thing about it is that not that many people noticed the things that I made up. With a lot of books, you read the book and you put it down. Two years later you think about it, and there’s a lot of things that are left out in what you remember, but your mind fills them in.

MM: Is Mark Farmer inking you on that? MIKE: Mark inked the first one. I think they’re going to give me another inker on this. I’m not quite sure who I’m going to get. I’m very curious. Hopefully I’ve got everything in there and they could put anybody on it and they could pull it off. I’m hoping to get somebody absolutely brilliant. More brilliant than me, actually. You’re always hoping when you’re penciling that the inker is going to bring something to it. And he should. At the end of the day, he’s an inker and he’s also an artist. You feel that your inker should be bringing something to that piece of art, as opposed to just merely doing the lines. They have to bring something to it so that there’s something more than what I put in. I’m not so precious about my work that it has to be my original thought and my original idea. I really love the idea of when somebody is finishing your work, whether they’re inking it or painting something that I’ve done, they bring something to it. Make me look good! [laughter] I’ve got a lot of respect for good inkers. It’s kind of a strange job because you’re following in behind the “pen71

Everybody’s mind fills in different things. If you meet them half-way, everybody’s satisfied with it. I had to fill in immediately. I couldn’t wait. I filled in a lot of places and I had to make things up in order to move the story along and give reasons for why things were happening. Fortunately, they fill in in a way that everybody felt wasn’t that far off of the story and it made sense. It was like the glue that took you from one situation to another. I love adapting. I think it’s like making a movie. You’ve got a script by a writer, and you have to adapt it because you’re taking the written word and putting it into pictures. It’s a process that I really enjoy. And you’re editing all the time. You’re sitting there editing as you’re going along, and making sure that the cuts are right and that you’ve fulfilled the information that needs to be told within that particular scene. And you can very quickly jump something, and move on to something else. MM: Are there other stories you’d like to adapt? MIKE: Oh, yeah. Hundreds of them. One of them that I would love to do is Jamaica Inn. Have you read it? MM: No, I haven’t. MIKE: Do yourself a favor. It’s written by Daphne Du Maurier. It’s a story about a girl, which I like because there’s not that many really good adventure/suspense stories involving a girl in comics. Jamaica Inn is so brilliant. Another one, much in the same period, is a book called Moonfleet by John Meade Falkner. It’s about ship wreckers. The coast and the pirates. It’s got great villains. I’m a big fan of stories that have great villains. One of my favorite books is Treasure Island. What better villain could you have than Long John Silver? You love him and you hate him. You want him to be your father, but you can’t trust him. MM: When you are painting a book, what do you use? MIKE: Watercolors. I’ll use some gouache if I need a nice bright sky or something like that. Now I’ve discovered these soft acrylics. They’re brilliant. MM: What’s a normal work day like for you? 72

MIKE: I’m a workaholic. I love to sit at my drawing board. As a matter of fact, I cannot go into my studio without first sitting at the drawing board. If there’s something on the drawing board that suddenly catches my eye, then I’m stuck there for the rest of the day. Usually I go to work about eight o’clock in the morning. I take a break about one o’clock. I like to watch a movie or something for about an hour. Then it’s back to work till about 6:00. Then I go down and have a sherbet and sit down and try to relax. It takes me a good hour to unwind from it because you really get into it. You don’t even realize that you’re putting that much pressure on yourself. That’s my average work day. MM: You’ve worked with a number of fantastic writers. Was there a collaboration that you particularly enjoyed? MIKE: I really enjoyed working with Doug Moench. Doug was great. And I’ve gotta say Steve Gerber. Steve drove me nuts, there was no two ways about it, but he was clever. I will take clever over talent any day. I’m not saying Steve didn’t have talent, because he did. But he was also very clever. I very seldom followed what he wanted to

do. [laughs] He was clever enough to where he would use me as a springboard. We did some great stories together. It was much the same with Doug. Doug is a fantastic writer. But right now, working with J.M. DeMatteis is a dream. It’s almost like we’re Siamese Twins joined at the imagination. I don’t know whether he’s on top, or if I am. [laughter] Maybe we’re back to front. I don’t know. We think alike. When he writes something, I see it immediately. When I draw something, even if it’s off-script, he sees it immediately and he appreciates it. I’ll send the pencil drawing to him and immediately I’ll get an e-mail back and he’s excited. Really, truly excited. You like that excitement. You think, “My God! Look what I just did today!” That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? It’s getting someone excited. If an artist paints a picture and hangs it on the wall, he wants everybody that walks in there to go “Wow!” Even if they say, “What the hell is that?”, you say “Wow!” [laughter] You may not recognize it, but it’s exciting. That’s what you’re looking for. You’re looking to stimulate people. If you can stimulate your writer, and have your writer stimulate you, you’re really doing your job. 73

Previous Page: Watercolor cover for Dark Horse’s Lone Wolf and Cub #38, reprinting the seminal manga series. Above: Rough sketch for a Peter Pan painting (see pages 98 & 99 for the full-color final piece). Lone Wolf and Cub ™ and ©2008 Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima.

Mike Ploog

Art Gallery

Tomb of Dracula, We rewolf by Night ™ and

Ghost Rider ™

Inc.

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

Pages 74-75: Mike likes to draw girls. Pages 76-81: Various pages from Marvel Spotlight and Werewolf by Night featuring everyone’s favorite lycanthrope. The image on page 78 is a commissioned cover recreation. Page 82: A sample page Mike drew before locking down the Ghost Rider penciling chores. Page 83: Various pages from Marvel Spotlight featuring everyone’s favorite flaming-skullheaded motorcyclist. Pages 84-85: Two pages from Monster of Frankenstein #6, which was actually shot straight from the pencils, long before that became a common practice. Pages 86-88: Various pages from Kull the Destroyer. Page 89: Commissioned cover recreation of Kull the Destroyer #11. Page 90: Page 31 of Man-Thing #7. Pages 91-93: Various pages from the Planet of the Apes black-&-white magazine.

Pages 94-96: Plates done for 1976’s The Nightcap portfolio. Page 97: A painting of everyone’s favorite jolly, old elf. Pages 98-99: A painting of Peter Pan and company. Page 100: A painted page for Mike’s unfinished adaptation of Rip Van Winkle. Page 101: Mike loves stories about the mountain men of the old frontier, as evidenced by this painting. Page 102: One of Tolkein’s ringwraiths, as imagined by Mike. Page 103: This Frankenstein’s monster versus werewolf scene was painted for a set of trading cards. Pages 104-107: Early character designs, scene designs, and storyboards for Shrek. Pages 108-109: Mike’s pencils and inks for the cover of an issue of The Perhapanauts. Left and Below: Mike likes to draw monsters.

111

112

Left: Preliminary sketch for a painting which was done as part of a set of trading cards. This Page: Big, scary sabre-tooth cats. Pages 114-115: Two different takes on a lion warrior theme — one more symbolic, the other quite literal. Pages 116-117: Beautiful women and their big, scary cats.

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

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Go behind the scenes and into Michael Golden’s studio for a LOOK INTO THE CREATIVE MIND of one of comics’ greats. Witness a modern master in action as this 90-minute DVD provides an exclusive look at the ARTIST AT WORK, as he DISCUSSES THE PROCESSES he undertakes to create a new comics series.

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COMICS MAGAZINES FROM TWOMORROWS ™

A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n

No. 3, Fall 2013

BACK ISSUE

ALTER EGO

82658 97073

COMIC BOOK CREATOR

DRAW!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR

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

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

COMIC BOOK CREATOR is the new voice of the comics medium, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics, focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. Edited by JON B. COOKE.

DRAW! is the professional “How-To” magazine on cartooning and animation. Each issue features in-depth interviews and stepby-step demonstrations from top comics professionals. Most issues contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; Mature Readers Only. Edited by MIKE MANLEY.

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby and his contemporaries, feature articles, and rare & unseen Kirby artwork. Now full-color, the magazine showcases Kirby’s art even more dynamically. Edited by JOHN MORROW.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazines) $8.95 (Digital Editions) $3.95

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Editions) $4.95

BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: The 1950s

BILL SCHELLY tackles comics of the Atomic Era of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis! (240-pages) $40.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 9781605490540

1960-64 and 1965-69

JOHN WELLS covers two volumes on 1960s MARVEL COMICS, Wally Wood’s TOWER COMICS, CHARLTON, BATMAN TV SHOW, and more! 1960-64: (224-pages) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-045-8 1965-69: (224-pages) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 ISBN: 9781605490557

The 1970s

JASON SACKS & KEITH DALLAS on comics’ emerging Bronze Age! (240-pages) $40.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 9781605490564

us new Ambitio FULLseries of DCOVERS AR COLOR H nting each e m cu o d f comic decade o tory! book his

The 1980s

KEITH DALLAS documents comics’ 1980s Reagan years! (288-pages) $41.95 • (Digital Edition) $13.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-046-5

AGE OF TV HEROES Examining the history of the live-action television adventures of everyone’s favorite comic book heroes, featuring the in-depth stories of the shows’ actors and behind-the-scenes players! (192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95

MARVEL COMICS:

LOU SCHEIMER

VOLUMES ON THE 1960s & 1970s

CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION

Issue-by-issue field guides to the pop culture phenomenon of LEE, KIRBY, DITKO, and others, from the company’s fumbling beginnings to the full maturity of its wild, colorful, offbeat grandiosity!

Biography of the co-founder of Filmation Studios, which for over 25 years brought the Archies, Shazam, Isis, He-Man, and others to TV and film!

(224-page trade paperbacks) $27.95

(288-page trade paperback with COLOR) $29.95

HOW TO CREATE COMICS FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

Shows step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and art, to printing and distribution! (108-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95 (bundle with companion DVD) $29.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

MIKE PLOOG In the 1970s, horror comics were huge—and no one drew werewolves, swamp creatures, and demonic motorcyclists better than Mike Ploog! Though already well established in the fields of magazine illustration and animation, Ploog endeared himself to comics fans with his creepy yet beautiful artwork on such titles as Werewolf by Night, Ghost Rider, and Man-Thing. After an all too brief stint at Marvel Comics, Ploog returned to the world of animation and film, working on such classics as Ghostbusters, Dark Crystal, and Shrek. Now he’s back in comics illustrating Abadazad and The Stardust Kid, as well as The Spirit, and proving he still has the chops. MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

$14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-007-6 ISBN-10: 1-60549-007-5

51495

In The US ISBN-13:

978-1-60549-007-6

9 781605 490076