Modern Masters Vol. 8: Walter Simonson

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

All characters characters TM TM & & ©2006 ©2006 All Marvel Characters, Characters, Inc. Inc. Marvel

WALTER SIMONSON

By Eric Nolen-Weathington & Roger Ash

E I G H T :

Modern Masters Volume Eight:

M O D E R N M A S T E R S V O L U M E E I G H T:

WALTER SIMONSON edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Roger Ash designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Walter Simonson front cover color by Tom Ziuko all interviews in this book were conducted and transcribed by Roger Ash

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • July 2006 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 1-893905-64-0 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson unless otherwise noted.

Star Slammers ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson.

The Outsiders ™ and ©2006 Gerry Boudreau & Walter Simonson.

Captain Glory, Secret City Saga ™ and ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate.

Savage Dragon ™ and ©2006 Erik Larsen.

Bat Lash, Batman, Big Barda, Captain Fear, Darkseid, Dr. Fate, Eclipso, Hawkman, Hawkwoman, Hercules Unbound, Justeen, Kanto, Manhunter, Metal Men, Mr. Miracle, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, New Teen Titans, Orion, Robin, Sandman, Supergirl, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics Apocalypse, Archangel, Avengers, Balder, Beta Ray Bill, Dazzler, Dr. Doom, Enchantress, the Executioner, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Hulk, Human Torch, Invisible Woman, Iron Man, Jean Grey, Juggernaut, Justice Peace, Lady Sif, Loki, Lorelei, Madelyne Pryor, Mr. Fantastic, New Mutants, Odin, Phoenix, Silver Surfer, Storm, Surtur, Thing, Thor, Volstagg, Wolverine, X-Factor, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Star Wars ™ and ©2006 Lucasfilm Ltd. // Alien ™ and ©2006 20th Century Fox Film Corporation.

The Terminator ™ and ©2006 Sony Pictures. // RoboCop ™ and ©2006 Orion Pictures Corporation.

Battlestar Galactica ™ and ©2006 Universal City Studios, Inc. // Uncle Scrooge ™ and ©2006 Walt Disney.

Elric, Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse ™ and ©2006 Michael Moorcock.

Conan ™ and ©2006 Conan Properties International, LLC. // Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser ™ and ©2006 Fritz Leiber.

John Carter of Mars ™ and ©2006 Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate.

Lawnmower Man ™ and ©2006 Stephen King.

Prince Valiant ™ and ©2006 King Features Syndicate, Inc. Elementals, Gore Creatures, Jurassic Park ™ and ©2006 respective owner.

Editorial package ©2006 Eric Nolen-Weathington, Roger Ash, and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To Glenn & Marjorie Ash. Thanks for supporting your son’s crazy dream of being a writer.

And, as always, to Donna, Iain, and Caper.

Acknowledgements Walter Simonson, for the generous sharing of his home, his time, and his art archives.

Louise “Weezie” Simonson, for being a gracious host, a wonderful cook, and one heck of a nice person.

John Workman, for his participation and for making Walter’s work that much better.

KC Carlson, for his encouragement, support, and research & editorial assistance.

Special Thanks Brook Anthony, Sherill Anthony, Craig Fieschko, David Hamilton, Wayne Markley, Beau Smith, 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 Eight:

WALTER SIMONSON Table of Contents Introduction by Michael Moorcock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: “Well, This is Nice. What Else Can You Do?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Interlude One: Archie Goodwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Part Two: Enter Manhunter... and DC Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Interlude Two: John Workman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Part Three: In Space, No One Can Hear You Draw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Part Four: “It’s Nice to Be Best Known for Something” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Part Five: “X” Marks the Spot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Part Six: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Interlude Three: Star Slammers Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Part Seven: Gods and Champions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Part Eight: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

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Introduction regard as a skimped job. I want depth and texture and a dozen narratives working at once. Walter’s own models are some of the finest daily comic strip artists ever to be reproduced on cheap newsprint. In his own introduction to the On Stage strips of Leonard Starr, Walter shows how he understands both the problems and the solutions of keeping a narrative going not only on a day-to-day basis but also of incorporating a Sunday page which might or might not be seen by the same reader and had to be produced so that it could exist as a narrative of its own.

I have written and edited all kinds of comics since the age of 16, from 64-pagers to serial strips and have had the privilege of working with some of the greatest artists in the business, including Frank Bellamy, the Embleton brothers, Don Lawrence, Jim Cawthorn, Mal Dean, and Howard Chaykin, all of whom were also admired masters of their craft.

All of them taught me something. It was a joy to work with them and until I started working with Walter I had already enjoyed some great high points. With Walter it has all been high points. He is a greathearted man by nature, constantly entertaining at the house he shares with his wonderful wife Louise and their two dogs (and their vast library), and is notoriously generous with his time as he is with his hospitality. He has a tremendous work ethic but at root will always put human relationships first. His wide circle of friends and relations will confirm that.

I am always in awe of someone with a talent for draughtsmanship, something I value enormously in an artist. In fact I hate artists who, in fantastic art especially, hide their weaknesses with a lot of baroque flourishes or distorted perspective. I don’t know an incident where Walter has “faked it”... that is, obscured a panel’s weakness in some way. I don’t know a time when he has “lifted”... that is, copying another artist’s work because he is unable to draw what is demanded of him. I know, for instance, that if you want crows in a story, then by God Simonson

W

alter Simonson is the nicest guy in comics. It wouldn’t matter if he was the meanest man in comics. He is one of the masters of this genre, both as a writer and, of course, as an artist. Only his old friend and colleague Howard Chaykin is his living equal in original story-telling powers. They have quite a lot in common and I have had the pleasure of working with both of them. What we all three have in common is that if you want our best work delivered on time, you had better lie about the deadline. In fact Walter, like me, assumes you are lying about the deadline and once told me, in an aggrieved tone, to explain his lateness, “Hey, they gave me the right deadline... who does that ?”

Like me, he is used to using adrenaline not merely to get his work to the publisher, but also to solve narrative problems. My scripts tend to require a lot of narrative solutions and not only has he never let me down, he has always improved on the story, the character or the image. He is not only the nicest guy in comics, he is probably the most conscientious guy in comics, as far as interpreting another’s story is concerned. Many times he has called me and said modestly, “Tell me I’m an idiot for suggesting it, but how about if we—?” And I don’t remember ever turning a suggestion down. He is, in other words, an absolute joy to collaborate with.

Although I first met Walter in 1979, when Howard Chaykin introduced us at their old Upstart office, we didn’t start working together until the ’90s, when DC was doing a twelve-issue series, Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse, which still exists in collected form and which I’d recommend to anyone who wants to marvel at some superb artwork, even if they don’t think much of the writing or ideas. We became natural collaborators. I tend to demand a lot of work from the artists with whom I work, packing a lot of narratives into a very small space.

I get grumpy about artists who simplify or do what I 4

All characters ™ and ©2006 Michael Moorcock.

will go out and research crows until he knows every bit of the crow, every angle from which a crow can be drawn. If you ask him for a certain kind of dragon which doesn’t draw on generic models, then that’s what you’ll get... an original dragon which is only Simonson and no one else.

Equally, Walter has provided me with some of the best book illustration I’ve had, when he did the wonderful cover and interiors for the omnibus edition of Count Brass, the very best cover those stories have ever had and a joy to look at.

Of course, it won’t be long before lesser artists imitate Simonson and he suffers from what all original artists experience... from being swamped, sometimes, in copies of his own ideas. It’s fair to say that, in spite of Simonson’s own admiration of European, Asian and American graphic artists, including the hugely seminal Jack Kirby, you will find in him a constant quest for new ways of telling stories and composing a panel or a page.

His imitators are legion and not one of them has his skill or indeed his intelligence and creativity.

In short, Simonson is always worth waiting for, always worth examining for the many extras he invariably slips into a panel. Everything enhances the visual as well as textual narrative. In Europe, artists of Walter’s brilliance are honoured and feted and given the keys to cities, because readers and critics have learned how to appreciate an artist’s work. Slowly the American public is also learning how to value its great graphic story-tellers and I suspect the time will come when

Walter will be recognised by a very wide audience in this country as one of the finest popular artists of his age.

It is an honour to work with him as it is to know him.

Michael Moorcock, Lost Pines, Texas June 2006 5

Part 1:

“Well, This is Nice.

What Else Can You Do?” you’re just bored stiff and we didn’t have a television then, but we had a radio. My mom brought me pencil and paper to while away the time in hopes that I’d begin to draw again, which I did. After that, as far as I know, I never stopped. I really don’t remember not drawing.

MODERN MASTERS: You were born in Tennessee?

WALTER SIMONSON: That’s right.

MM: When was that?

WALTER: September 2, 1946, in Knoxville.

MM: When did you start reading comics?

MM: Then you moved to Maryland?

WALTER: I read them from as young as I can remember. My parents wanted to encourage both me and my brother to read. They thought comics were fine for that purpose, so they bought some comics for us and we bought some with our allowances. In the dining room there was a toy shelf that my father had built for all the different toys we had, and one corner of that was reserved for all our comics. We had a pile of comics about a foot or a foot-and-a-half high.

This was the ’50s, and in the ’50s there were comics about everything. Dell and DC were the ones primarily distributed where we lived. There were Western comics based on television shows like Cheyenne and Sugarfoot; Little Ida Iodine and Little Lulu; the Duck stuff—Carl Barks’ Ducks— all the Disney comics. We bought Classics Illustrated comics. We read super-heroes as well. Later on, some of the Mystery in Space. I was in high school by that time. I really read comics a lot when I was a kid. We had subscriptions to Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories when I was young. Then, when I was maybe a sophomore in high school, I had a subscription for a while to Turok, Son of Stone. Hey, Indians and dinosaurs, it couldn’t be better.

WALTER: My dad worked for the Department of Agriculture in Soil Classification & Correlation. He was promoted and we moved to Washington, DC. My parents took a home in the Maryland suburbs. I really grew up in College Park. I was just a little over two-and-a-half when my parents moved. My only memory of Tennessee is I can remember being in the back seat of a car on my knees and watching a white house disappear around a corner. I know, for whatever reason, that’s the house I lived in the day we moved.

MM: Any siblings?

WALTER: I have one younger brother named Bruce. He’s three-and-a-half years younger than I am. He’s a professor of Geology at Oberlin College in Ohio.

MM: Were you always into art when you were growing up?

WALTER: As far as I can remember. What my mom told me is that apparently I began drawing younger than I can remember.

And then I quit. My mom was very sad because it’s always nice to have artistic children. But when I was four years old, I had a barely diagnosable case of mono. Mostly mono just wipes you out and you’re in bed for several weeks while you’re recovering. Of course,

MM: Did you have any favorites?

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WALTER: I liked them all. I didn’t have favorites in that sense, but I clearly liked Turok because I got a subscription to it.

That was the work of Alberto Giolitti. He did a lot of comics for Dell. Incredibly solid drawing. Nice blacks, nice design, good storytelling. He was really a good comic book artist.

I was a big fan, without knowing who they were, of Carl Barks and John Stanley. I loved the Duck stories, both the Donald Ducks and the Uncle Scrooges.

And I love the Little Lulus. I think I particularly loved the Witch Hazel stories in Little Lulu, but I liked them all. Including her bouts with Tubby.

MM: Hearing you talk at conventions, you seem very much a storyteller. Is that something you’ve always wanted to do?

WALTER: I saw the movie Fantasia when I was in third grade. My dad took me to see it. I was entranced by the dinosaurs in Stravinsky’s

“Rite of Spring” adaptation.

From that point on, I wanted to be a paleontologist and study dinosaurs. My dad is a scientist, and although he’s younger than I am, my brother became a scientist as well. I didn’t know anybody who did art for a living. I had no idea how that could be done. I don’t think I ever thought about doing art or doing storytelling and such.

I was certainly chatty and told enough stories of my own when I was younger. I drew little spacemen climbing across my school notes, stuff like that.

It wasn’t really until the end of my senior year in college when I was a geology major that I decided that paleontology was not really what I wanted to pursue professionally. At the time, I had no other ideas. It wasn’t like I put it aside in order to do comics. I put it aside because I could tell it was not where I wanted to go.

Although I still liked dinosaurs, the outdoor life of the paleontologist I learned from experience just was not gonna be the kind of life I wanted to live. So I took some time off. I re-applied to college. I went back to school. I went to art school this time, again as an undergraduate—I was treated as a transfer student. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD]. I was an Illustration major there.

When I was in college the first time, that was the mid-’60s when Marvel was doing its “Golden Age” work. That was when Stan and Jack and Ditko and Don Heck and George Tuska and all these guys were doing just great work. I had kinda quit reading comics by the end of high school. At the end of my freshman year/beginning of my sophomore year I discovered Marvel Comics. In particular I discovered Thor. I had been a Norse mythology fan from when I was a small boy. My parents had, and I still have, a book from about 1893 about Norse myths.

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Previous Page: Back cover art for the Star Slammers: Chapter IV mini-comic, which was published as part of an effort to bring the World Science Fiction Convention to Washington, DC. Above: Before he turned pro, Walter often contributed artwork to various fanzines, such as this cover to Gore Creatures #18 and this illustration of the coolest creature of them all, Frankenstein’s monster.

Left: Walter shows he’s a bit of a “duck man” himself.

Star Slammers ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson. Uncle Scrooge ™ and ©2006 Walt Disney. Gore Creatures ™ and ©2006 respective owner.

MM: A noticeable element of your art is your signature.

How did you develop that?

So when I discovered the Thor comic, I was quite taken with it. Very quickly, I began reading all the Marvel Comics, which back in those days cost about 15¢. There were like eleven of them so you could literally buy all the comics and get everything. I began branching out; I read more DCs. By the time I went to art school I had begun to become interested in comic books and in trying to draw comic books. I hadn’t really quite thought of comics as a profession, but I began doing little bits of my own continuity—four pages of this, five pages of that. That was really my first crack at trying to do continuity and telling a story. I found I enjoyed it.

Once as a child, I had tried to do a comic. I couldn’t letter very well. My pages were the same size as comic book pages because who knew that comic book pages were drawn big? So I drew them small on manilla paper and I colored them with crayons. I put them in my dad’s typewriter and typed in the captions so the printing would look good. I made it through about a page-and-ahalf before I burned out on it. The comic was modestly entitled The Origin of Life [laughter], because I had read some stuff about the origins of life that I thought was really cool so I wanted to do a comic book of it.

WALTER: Pretty simply, really. Somewhere in the summer of my junior year in high school I had been drawing a lot of pictures. I drew tons of dinosaurs. Tanks. Big things that broke stuff. And it occurred to me that really cool artists have signatures that are really nifty. I decided that I needed a better signature. At the time, I was block printing the word Simonson with a dash at either end.

Just not very cool. I think I thought about maybe trying to fit it inside the silhouette of an animal somehow. My mom suggested a dinosaur since I was a big dinosaur fan. I drew some outlines of dinosaurs and tried to fit the word Simonson inside them. As you can imagine, it didn’t fit too well inside lots of them. But the first one I tried was what was then called a Brontosaurus—now it’s called an Apatosaurus. That worked okay. My early signatures were much more in proportion with the actual dinosaurs. Of course the signature drags its tail on the ground and we now think the Apatosaurus didn’t. What that really means is that my signature is the only remaining Brontosaurus in captivity. [laughter] MM: You did a whole “Thor Annual” at one point.

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drawings, if you get close to them, they’re full of dots and dashes and just slashes with the pencil. Yet when you back up from them, they coalesce and become a picture.

WALTER: I didn’t do the entire comic. I did 30some pages. Then I decided I didn’t like my inking. I was going to quit drawing it until I got my inking better, then I would go back and finish the comic.

MM: How old were you when you were doing that?

WALTER: I was a sophomore in art school so I was 22, 23 probably. Fourteen years later, I got the gig to do Thor at Marvel Comics—to write and draw it—and I told that story. That was the story I had done in the “Annual.” My inking was better. [laughter] MM: Who are some of your artistic influences?

WALTER: Oh, man. Kind of the usual suspects for reading American comics. Kirby and Ditko clearly. Not so much artistically exactly, but Archie Goodwin was really a mentor for me when I first got started in comics. I learned a great deal working with Archie; I took a lot from him. Jim Holdaway, who was the original artist on Modesty Blaise—an English newspaper strip—was a gigantic influence. It isn’t so obvious in my stuff in some ways, but there’s a lot of Holdaway, especially his approach to pen work that really is in my stuff. Moebius and Mezieres from France, Palacios from Spain. Many others.

Beyond that, American illustrators, especially out of the Howard Pyle school—the N.C. Wyeths and Pyle himself. They did work where you see the picture at two levels.

You see the picture both as depth—the actual picture you’re being shown—and you’re also aware simultaneously of the picture as surface because they use bold brush strokes.

The work of Van Gogh is a good example of that. If you’ve ever seen any of Van Gogh’s

MM: How did you go from the Rhode Island School of Design into comics?

WALTER: I was at RISD for three years.

My senior year we were required to do a degree project of some kind. As a junior I had a teacher named Tom Sgouros. Tom was the head of the Illustration department and taught the juniors. He had his students do a series of individual assignments over a week or two weeks, one right after the other. But Tom also had students do an over-arching project that you worked on over the two semesters.

I had spent the year between college and RISD living at home, working in a bookstore right across from the University of Maryland in College Park. While I was at the Maryland Book Exchange, I took care of all the science fiction. My ambition at the time—the field was smaller then— was to try and have at least one copy of every science-fiction paperback that was then in print in the store. I ended up meeting a few guys who came by to browse the collection who belonged to the Washington Science Fiction Association— WSFA for short.

Eventually I went to some meetings, I joined up and became a member. I knew a lot of the guys.

About the time I was a junior at RISD, about 1970, WSFA was gearing up to 9

Previous Page: Pages 24 and 25 from Walter’s “Thor Annual,” much of which was later used— though redrawn—when he took over Thor.

Left: Panel detail from Walter’s “Thor Annual.”

Below: The cover to the Star Slammers: Chapter IV mini-comic.

Surtur, Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Star Slammers ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson.

take a run at holding the World Science Fiction Convention in Washington, DC. The voting to select a convention city was to be held in 1972; the convention was going to be in 1974. Two years before the vote, cities that want to host the convention begin their campaigns to persuade fans to vote for them. I was thinking of doing a strip of some kind, some sort of space opera thing, to promote the idea of DC in ’74. Ultimately, what that became was a strip called the Star Slammers that I produced over the next two years from ’70 to ’72 in little chapter books. They were six or seven pages a chapter, something like that. I wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered the comic. The whole thing ended up being about 50 or 60 pages long.

I persuaded Tom to let me do the Slammers as my junior project. I was working on it and getting it published through WSFA and I was doing it as my junior project. When senior year came around, I was halfway through the strip. I was able to persuade Edgar Blakeney, who was the senior teacher, to let me continue the strip as my degree project. So the second half of that Star Slammers story, which in all is about 50 or 60 pages long, became my degree project. When I graduated from RISD, the second half of the series became my portfolio that I could take to New York and I could show to editors and try to get work.

MM: So you just started showing up at various publishers with your portfolio?

Above: Page 4 of the Star Slammers: Chapter IV mini-comic.

Right: Walter’s opening page of The Outsiders, written by his fellow RISD student, Gerry Boudreau.

Next Page: An example of the “wonky layouts” from Walter’s “Thor Annual” that Chuck McNaughton wanted to see in Walter’s first job for Warren.

Star Slammers ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson. The Outsiders ™ and ©2006 Gerry Boudreau & Walter Simonson.

Surtur, Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

WALTER: Pretty much. In my senior year at RISD I made an appointment and went down to DC Comics during spring break to get some idea of what I should be doing to try and get work. At that time, I’d maybe been to one comics convention. I really didn’t know much about the business. I wrote to, I think, Carol Fine. She helped make things happen. I was given an appointment with Sol Harrison. Sol, at the time, was the head of production. Later on I had some questions about why, as an artist, I had been shown to a head of production rather than an editor. I came to understand more about the mysterious workings of the politics within companies later on about things like that. In any case, I saw Sol, showed him the Star Slammers. His basic reaction was, “Well, this is nice. What else can you do?”

The reason—and I didn’t understand this at the time— was that there wasn’t much science fiction in comics.

Science fiction was kind of a small ghetto off in one corner.

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Even then, super-heroes were the main line. Mostly when people look at your work, if they see sciencefiction samples they don’t immediately think, “Wow. This guy’ll be great drawing Superman.” Which I understand fully, but I didn’t get that at the time.

Let me think about this for a second.... I believe I had actually gone to New York once before. I had gone to New York somewhere in my sophomore year—maybe spring break then, too. I had a friend living there then. I stayed with Doug and I had that “Thor Annual” I had drawn. I went both to Warren Publications and DC. I didn’t go to Marvel—I’m not sure why. I went to DC, but I wasn’t really looking for work. I was just trying to find out how people got work, or what was expected, or to get some sense of what the business was like. The day I was there I met Sal Amendola, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Neal Adams, Murphy Anderson... maybe Carmine Infantino, I don’t remember for sure now. I think Len actually took me around and showed me what the business was like.

I also went down to Warren. Jim Warren looked at my stuff, raked me over the coals about it, and then explained that if he gave me any work he’d have to pay me less because he was wasting his time looking at my stuff in the first place. I wasn’t old enough and smart enough to think, “Isn’t it part of your job as editor to look at new material?” But that was fine.

That was just Warren’s way. It was a riot.

I went home. I wasn’t expecting anything. Lo and behold, a while later I got a story in the mail to draw for Warren. It was a science-fiction short story with a horror twist by Gardner Fox. I penciled a version of it, sent it back in, and it was rejected.

There was a guy working for Warren back then named Chuck McNaughton. Chuck sent the artwork back with a nice note. He said I’d had kind of wonky layouts on the “Thor” I’d shown them. They were looking for these wonky layouts and I had done a very straight six-panel grid. What happened was, when I got the script, it was a typed script and next to each page was a small rectangle with the panel breakdowns. I took that to mean this was what they wanted. The story eventually was done. I think maybe Syd Shores did the art for it.

So after seeing Sol Harrison at DC, I went back to RISD. I finished off the artwork on the Star Slammers and bound it up in a volume. In August of ’72 I went to New York to try and get into comics professionally. I had a house-sitting gig up in the Bronx that just happened to fall my way when I was gonna be in town. So I was spared the necessity of scrambling for an apartment having no money.

I went to DC because at the time, DC was doing more comics I really liked than Marvel was. Marvel for me at that point had begun republishing old stories under new

titles. Galactus came back for the fourth time, this guy came back for the fifth time—it wasn’t fresh. DC was trying all this weird stuff with the Edgar Rice Burroughs material, Hawk and Dove, Angel and the Ape, Swamp Thing. A lot of books didn’t last very long, but they were a lot of fun.

I went to DC again—I had set up an appointment— and saw an editor. He looked over my work and said, “Well, this is nice. What else can you do?” And I thought, “I’m doomed. I’ll never do comics. I’ll be working at McDonald’s for the rest of my life.” When you’re on the outside, you don’t see companies as individuals.

But of course, everybody is an individual regardless of company policies, and there’s a company gestalt at all the companies. The two guys I talked to who said this were Sol Harrison and the editor was Archie Goodwin.

They’d both said the same thing. You probably couldn’t have had two guys who were farther apart on most spectrums than Sol and Archie. I went out of Archie’s office and down to the coffee room which DC had back then.

And then I had an incredibly lucky break.

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At that time, virtually every young guy who did comics lived in New York ’cause there were no faxes, there was no FedEx. And if you lived in town, you delivered your pages to the office personally. The day I walked in, it turned out that Howard Chaykin, Bernie Wrightson, Michael Kaluta, and Alan Weiss were all sitting at a table. I’d met Chaykin a year earlier at my first comic convention, so I knew him a little bit. I introduced myself, sat down, and started shooting the breeze. They were interested to see what I was doing. I said I was trying to get work. They asked to see my portfolio. I showed them the Star Slammers stuff that I had. Right behind me was a man named Jack Adler. Jack was the second-in-command in production under Sol Harrison. Michael said “Let me show this to Jack.” I said sure, so he showed Jack the work. Jack said “Let me go show this to Carmine.” I don’t remember Carmine’s official title at the time, but essentially he was the editor-in-chief. Certainly not the guy I would have had an appointment with if I had written for an appointment. Jack went off with my book and I sat there talkin’ to Howard and Alan and Bernie and Michael. I’m kinda nervous.

After a few minutes, Jack comes racing back into the room and he says, “Carminewantstoseeyoulet’sgo”—that’s how it came out.

I found myself in Carmine’s office for maybe five or ten minutes. I really remember nothing of the conversation now except that he asked if I’d been influenced by Bernie Krigstein. I’d heard about EC Comics, but I don’t think at that point I had ever really seen them. I didn’t know Krigstein’s work. My work had a strong element of design to it and a strong linear element and I can understand now why Carmine would ask that question.

In the end what it amounted to was that Carmine liked the work I showed him. He liked it so much he called in three of his editors and made them all give me a job. So I walked out of his office with three jobs. I wasn’t hip enough to appreciate quite how unusual that was. I say three jobs, but this was when comics still had back-up stories. It isn’t like walking out with three issues of some book, it was a six-page job here, a six-page job there.

The three editors were Joe Orlando, Julie Schwartz and, of all people, Archie Goodwin, whose office I had been in an hour earlier. They all gave me a job—they had a lot of full scripts in inventory for these short stories. I got assigned a page rate and went back and I drew my first job on a ping-pong table in the house I was taking care of up in the Bronx. It was called “Cyrano’s Army”—it was a job that Len Wein had written. Joe gave it to me and said “This was due yesterday.” I suspect it really wasn’t due yesterday but I didn’t know that at the time.

I went “Oh, my God!” and just ran home. [laughter] It was a World War II job and all the World War II reference I had was probably a few Russ Heath comics. It was a tough job to start off on when you didn’t have a lot of reference.

That job I penciled, inked, and lettered. I did a little bit of lettering in the beginning. I never felt it was quite professional grade, so I quickly dropped lettering the word balloons... but I kept doing the sound effects, the titles, the actual panel borders and balloon borders. Letterers loved my stuff because they got paid the full rate and all they had to letter were the captions and the word balloons. [laughter] 12

I did a job then for Archie called “U.F.M., the Ultimate Fighting Machine.” It was written by a friend from Rhode Island named Gerry Boudreau. Gerry had come to New York a few months earlier trying to get a job as a writer.

At the same time I was starting work for DC, I had visited Gold Key. Western Publishing was about three blocks south of DC, so I went down there and talked to an editor, a young man named Frank Tadeschi. Frank was editing Twilight Zone and eventually I ended up doing three Twilight Zone stories: two four-pagers and one six-pager. In the sixpager, I finally got to draw Rod Serling. That’s how I knew I had moved up. [laughter] They were unlike other companies.

They worked way, way ahead. The first Twilight Zone story I did was the second story I drew, but it came out months and months later. The other thing about Gold Key that was interesting was that they would give you your artwork back.

That was before art was being given back. The art from all three of my stories was returned to me after they were published. And nobody was returning artwork back then, so I was going off and getting photostats of all my artwork done before I turned it in so I’d have good copies of it.

MM: What was the third DC story?

WALTER: The third one was for Julie Schwartz, and it was a story about why Kryptonians wear headbands. One of the odd things about all this is that while DC was really the company I wanted to work for and I did work I’m very pleased with, I had gotten into comics as a Marvel reader. A lot of their stuff was a reaction to what DC was doing. The kind of story like why Kryptonians wear headbands. [laughter] It seemed to me rather typical of old DC—which I have more tolerance for now, but as a post-college student, it was the type of story I had no interest in doing. What happened was Archie liked the job I had done for him, so even though he had first said, “What else can you do?”, Archie kept feeding me small back-up stories. It was enough to make a living on along with the Gold Key work I was doing. What that meant was that Julie and I just never spoke about that story again.

I’m sure the kind of work I was doing at the time was appalling to Julie. It was certainly not the kind of work he published. I think he was probably just as happy to have this thing disappear quietly. [laughter] I think Dave Cockrum may have drawn it eventually.

13

Previous Page: Opening pages of “UFM” and its sequel, “The Return,” both written by Walter’s college collaborator, Gerry Boudreau.

Howard Chaykin and his then-wife, Daina, served as the models for the lead characters in “The Return.”

Above: Walter’s first professional cover art.

Left: A page from Walter’s second Twilight Zone story.

GI Combat, Star Spangled War Stories ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Twilight Zone ™ and ©2006 respective owner.

Interlude 1: MM: Archie was obviously someone who was very important to you as far as your development. I know you could go on about this forever, but what did you learn from working with him?

WALTER: Yeah. Forever’s right. The best way I could say—and I don’t know if it’s about what I learned exactly, but this kind of sums it up. By the time we were wrapping up the last

Archie Goodwin

couple of chapters of “Manhunter,” Archie had left DC and was working at Warren. I would go down to Warren to give him pages or get pages back so he could write stuff or I could pick up the script. At some point we were talking about wrapping up the series and both of us thought, “Y’know, we should probably retire now because it’s never going to be any better than this.” I can’t speak for Archie, but that’s sure the hell the way I felt.

There was a partnership between the two of us in that work that I really haven’t had with any other writer. I’ve worked with really good writers. It takes nothing away from them. That kind of stuff you can’t predict. You can’t design it. It happens or it doesn’t.

Archie and Anne saved my life when I was a young freelancer, because I was living on my own for the first time. I couldn’t cook worth beans. I still can’t cook worth beans. They would have me over to their apartment a couple times a week, which is probably the only time I had decent meals. It kept me alive.

They kept me going. I ate Hamburger Helper and all the rest of the stuff you eat when you’re a young bachelor living by yourself and can’t cook. Some really dreadful stuff. For the friendship and the partnership, I owe Archie more than I owe any other single person in comics. And for what they did for me personally, I owe Anne and Archie more than I owe any other couple except my parents.

Archie, in one of his introductions to “Manhunter,” wrote that the characters that appealed to him were never the Supermans or the Batmans; he liked the second- or third-string guys. The Green Lama, or someone like that. I think that’s kind of what “Manhunter” was about. He was minimally powered as super-heroes go. He had a healing factor, preWolverine. He fought ninjas preFrank. And he died. He did a lot of stuff that hadn’t been done much in comics at the time.

I learned a ton about pacing from Archie. Archie was really able to interweave exposition and character beautifully. In order to have a good story, you have to learn a bunch of stuff. You’ve got to set the scene. You’ve got to find out who these guys are in monthly comics in case you’ve got new readers. You don’t want to leave them behind, but you don’t want to do it as if you’re ladling the stuff out with a trowel. Archie was brilliant at doing that kind of stuff. I don’t do it as well as he did, but I certainly learned, if nothing else, that it could be done. That it was possible to tell these kinds of stories and explain the

stuff that needed to be explained without seeming like you were doing it.

All in all, it was really a peak of my career at a time when I hardly had a career to have a peak with. But that’s the way it worked out.

I think about Archie every day. I’m delighted to have been able to work with him. I’m still P.O.’d he left us, but I’m really glad for the time I had to work with him. The work we did together I’m still very pleased with. I think it really holds up quite well.

15

Previous Page: The wonderful world of Archie Goodwin.

Below: The page where it all began. From Detective Comics #437.

Archie Goodwin artwork ©2006 Walter Simonson.

Manhunter ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Part 2:

Enter Manhunter... and DC Comics job. One was that Don got an invitation to the Butler Bonham family reunion in Texas. The other was that— Archie told me this many years later; I didn’t realize it at the time—that job is what persuaded him that I could draw stuff besides science fiction.

He had had an idea for doing a back-up story for Detective Comics, which he was editing. He was going to do a lead Batman story and then have an eight-page short story in the back. He thought he would try to invent a character and do him in a way that contrasted with Batman. While Batman was dark and grim and very urban, this would be a guy in brighter colors and the whole world would be his stage. Where Batman was more or less an empty hand combatant, this guy would carry weaponry. He asked me if I’d be interested in drawing it. I liked Archie’s stuff. I was interested. I thought, “Cool!” I had gotten along with Archie really well, and we had become pretty good friends by that time. I was a big admirer of his work.

We spent some time working Manhunter out. It was a character DC owned. DC had published the Simon/Kirby “Manhunter” stories back in the ’40s, so they had a trademark on the name. Archie essentially came up with a new character with a healing factor, clones, and a lot of plot ideas. He showed me a long list of possible names he’d written out for the character.

Eventually, we settled on Paul Kirk because that was the name of the Simon/Kirby Manhunter in the ’40s.

We didn’t really do it at the time because we had planned to link the characters together. We did link

MM: How did you move from Archie being your editor to working with him on “Manhunter”?

WALTER: Archie, as I said, kept feeding me little stories.

Then I got a couple other gigs. I helped Howard Chaykin on Sword of Sorcery. He was penciling Sword of Sorcery, which was the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stuff of Fritz Leiber. Right after I got here, he was working on issue #3. I went out to his house in Queens and ghosted some panels for him. So probably the first stuff I ever had in print were three panels of ghost work that were in Sword of Sorcery #3. Eventually I did some other work for Denny O’Neil on Sword of Sorcery myself—I penciled and inked one issue. So I had other things I was doing in the middle of all this.

Finally, Archie gave me a little three-page job on the Alamo. A friend of mine named Don Krarr had written it. The Mexican army had come to the Alamo, but they hadn’t completely closed around them, and a guy named James Butler Bonham volunteered to leave the Alamo and find reinforcements.

Bonham went out and learned that there were no relief troops coming.

Instead of saying adios, he broke through Mexican lines and rode back into the Alamo to tell them that there was no help coming.

On the last day, he was killed along with the others. Two things came out of that 16

given our limited space.

Eventually, Archie was going to leave DC. He got a job at Warren, where he had been before, and Julie [Schwartz] was taking over Detective. He was going to maybe run “Elongated Man” as a back-up feature.

“Manhunter” was coming to an end whether Archie was there or not, and I didn’t want to do the character without Archie because the two of us worked so closely together on that character. We knew from about the fifth chapter on that the series was ending. We had already talked about doing a Batman crossover with “Manhunter” because he was in Detective Comics. “Let’s go out in a blaze of glory. We’ll put Batman in the story, we’ll use the whole 20-page story, and we’ll wrap up our series.”

MM: Could you talk a little bit more about designing Manhunter? them together later, but in the beginning we just thought one name is as good as another, and why the heck not?

The clone idea was Archie’s. I had no ideas as far as what the character was about or how he worked or any of that stuff. My input was in design; I designed the character. His face was a combination of Charles Bronson and Bela Lugosi. I used Bronson’s eyes, which are slightly turned down at the outside. I used the very strong nose, thin lips, and chin of Lugosi. That’s where the face came from.

Initially, “Manhunter” was full script, but eventually we were working Marvel style.

Somewhere around the third issue we thought it would be kinda fun to actually make it the same guy from the old Kirby “Manhunter,” because we only had eight pages. We were doing 20-page stories in eight pages. I was doing a lot of panels on the page. We thought making him the other character would open up his backstory,

WALTER: Some of the elements I can remember, some I have no idea where they came from. I have no idea where the boots came from. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. It’s comics, you don’t really have to run in them. You try to run in those in real life, you’d kill yourself in five seconds, I don’t care how much practice you’ve had. [laughter] The flared shoulder thing he wore came from the movie Yojimbo by [Akira] Kurosawa. I had a little black-&-white TV back then, and during the time I was working on the Manhunter designs, Yojimbo was on. Right in the beginning of the film there’s a kind of town crier who walks through the town.

He’s wearing a shoulder thing like that. I think it drops off as a cape in the back. I 17

Previous Page: Cover art for Sword of Sorcery #5, featuring Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.

Left: Page 3 of “Decision,” a tale of The Alamo in Star Spangled War Stories #172.

Below: Preliminary head sketches of Paul Kirk, the Manhunter.

Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser ™ and ©2006 Fritz Leiber.

Manhunter, Star Spangled War Stories ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

have an old drawing of Manhunter where I thought about giving him a short cape, but in the end it seemed a little too awkward. So I just made the thing symmetrical front and back.

Because we were giving him Eastern martial arts fighting skills, we gave him throwing stars.

Initially I drew him with nine throwing stars, because nine is a mystic number in the East.

He had three on each shoulder, he had one on his belt, and one on the back of each of his gauntlets. Somewhere along the way I realized that drawing nine of these every time I drew the character was just going to be a nightmare. [laughter] I quickly abandoned that for two throwing stars, one on each shoulder.

Archie had a book called Asian Fighting Arts, or something of that sort, with all kinds of stuff from China, Okinawa, and Japan. You name it, it was in there. They had weapons from India and they showed the Bundi dagger. That’s how Manhunter got that.

The idea was he might have different weapons at different times. The strip didn’t run long enough for that to really develop.

The Broomhandle Mauser came about because I had a friend, Steve Mitchell, who had a replica Broomhandle Mauser, and I think he may have suggested it. It looked great.

They even had a stock you could click into it to make it a shoulder fire if you needed to.

MM: Something that I think really worked for the story is that things got unveiled as you went along. Did that have to do with the way you were working together on the story?

WALTER: It was really Archie’s doing. The idea of creating a puzzle at the beginning and then gradually solving it, I think that was probably Archie’s initial idea for the story structure. It wasn’t created originally to be a limited series. Archie did not know when we started that he’d be leaving DC. I’m not sure how it would have played out if we’d done 25 episodes instead of seven. My work gets a lot better from the first episode to the last episode. I got control of the figure work and my inking in a way that’s clearly visible by about the middle of the third episode. The difference in the inking between the first and last episode is quite strong.

MM: Did you ever hear any reaction to killing Paul Kirk?

18

WALTER: Not from fans. I think we might have gotten some letters, but I wouldn’t have seen them. Most of the reaction I got from that strip was professional. We got a lot of professional recognition out of the strip. That’s what made my professional reputation. When I started that strip I was just one more new guy doing comics. When it was over, people knew who I was professionally. I didn’t have any problem finding work after that.

MM: And you won a few awards for that, too.

WALTER: The Academy of Comic Book Arts (ACBA) was awarding the Shazam Award. It was a block of lucite with a little Shazam arrow inside. In ’73 and ’74, between us Archie and I won six awards, all really because of “Manhunter.” Archie won “Best Writer” two years in a row. We won

“Best Short Story” two years in a row. We won “Best Long Story” for the final story with Batman. Jim Starlin and I shared “Outstanding New Talent.”

MM: You did eventually return to Manhunter for the Special Edition. That seems like it would have been a tough story for a couple reasons: You were telling it wordlessly, and you were working on it after Archie passed away.

WALTER: Those are good reasons why it was tough. It was difficult. DC had asked Archie when he went back to work for them in ’89 or so if we would do a new Manhunter story together. They could reprint the original series and put a new story in for the new packaging. That seemed okay except that we couldn’t think of a new story that we wanted to do. The problem is that the original series ends in a rather final note. Neither one of us wanted to undo that 19

Previous Page: Early Manhunter design sketch featuring a short cape and nine strategically placed shuriken, and the death knell for Paul Kirk in Detective Comics #443.

Above: By the time Detective Comics #440 hit the stands, Walter’s art had improved by leaps and bounds. The first two pages of that issue’s chapter of “Manhunter.”

Manhunter ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Right: Pencils from Walter’s silent epilogue to the Manhunter saga, based on Archie Goodwin’s plot.

Below: Cover art to 1983’s Baxter format reprint collection of the Manhunter saga.

Next Page: Pages from “A Tale of Sword & Sorcery” (Star*Reach #1), and “Temple of the Spider” (Thrilling Adventure Stories).

Manhunter ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

in any way. We talked about it occasionally, but not seriously. We never had any ideas. I sure didn’t.

One day, probably in ’97, Archie called me into his office.

He’d had an idea for a story. He told me what it was. I thought it was pretty cool, because it would not undo what we had done. We talked for an hour or two, I took some notes. It was like the old days. By the time I left there, I had a plot for what was going to be an eight-page chapter, just like the old chapters. It would be an epilogue.

Then I went home. I had other work I was doing on deadline. This was no deadline, a dangerous thing for a freelancer. Every so often I’d go back to “Manhunter.” I’d do a little fiddling with it. I did a couple of drawings for covers and some practice sketches.

In the meantime, we got into ’98. One morning I got a call a from Paul Levitz to tell me that Archie had died. He had gone to the hospital a week earlier. I had seen him on his last day at the office. He’d been battling lymphoma for about eight years. In retrospect, his death wasn’t surprising given what he was going through, but it was a real shock at the time. I pretty much wrote “Manhunter” off. I didn’t want to do the project and script it myself. That was Archie’s job.

Two or three months went by. I’m sure I was whining about it off and on, but somehow it came up and Weezie [Walter’s wife, Louise] said, “Well, maybe you could do it as a silent story.” I thought about that, and the more I thought about that, the more I thought I might be able to do it. I talked to DC about it and they were game to have me try it. The only thing I didn’t know was how long the story was going to be. Most times when you do comics, you know how long your story’s going to be. You’re working against a limit.

This one I found was very difficult to start when I had no idea how long it was going to be. I must have restarted it four or five times.

I’d thumbnail three or four pages and go, “No, the pacing’s not right.” Eventually I began to get a sense of what I wanted to do. In the end, I think the new story was 23 pages long. Denny O’Neil edited it. I showed him every stage. In a few places where you would have covered stuff in a couple of balloons, it took me a couple pages to show the same material visually The pacing and page design is very different from the original series because of the lack of words, but it’s constructed to work on its own terms.

20

And in that regard, it’s similar to the original series where we were cramming 20 pages into eight. The design solutions grew out of necessity.

MM: I was impressed at how seamlessly the flashback worked.

WALTER: In ’83, DC reprinted the series in a Baxter book. Baxter paper was different from newsprint. It took ink differently. If you colored for a regular comic, you got really garish hues. You had to use a different approach to it. When that was reprinted, Archie got Klaus Janson to recolor it. When we were going to do this new story, before Archie died he had talked to Klaus about coloring it. When it became clear I was going to be able to do it, I talked to Klaus. He was still game to do it even though some time had passed. He colored the last story really beautifully.

In the flashbacks we did some stuff with clocks to indicate the time. I used slightly different panel shapes to indicate the flashback, and Klaus used a different color key for the flashback sequence. Hopefully, you can read into it and understand pretty quickly what’s happening without a little caption going, “Four hours ago.”

MM: Of course “Manhunter” was not the only project you were working on. You had a goofy story in Star*Reach called “A Tale of Sword and Sorcery.”

WALTER: [laughs] I did have a goofy story in Star*Reach.

That was actually done before I went to New York. That was the tail end of my RISD career. We had a break between the end of classes and graduation—maybe a week or two. I had a friend, Ed Hicks, whom I’ve never been in touch with since. Ed was kind of a freak back in those days when that meant something out of the hippie freak era. He wrote a short story and I drew it.

When Mike Friedrich started up Star*Reach he talked to Chaykin, Starlin, me, and Steve Skeates. I had that story sitting around, and I showed it to Mike. He wanted to run it, but it wasn’t proportioned quite right for comics. Because I’d just done for the heck of it, it was too wide. So I drew a little strip inspired by the Preston Blair Animation book. I drew a picture of a little faceless guy running faster and faster and tripping on a banana peel and slamming into the panel border on the last page. It was proportioned to take up the extra space beneath the “Tale of Sword and Sorcery.”

In the original story, I don’t think the guy ends up being Jimmy Cagney at the end. I don’t remember why I changed that. I think I just thought it was goofier. [laughter] MM: You also did a story you’ve mentioned as one of your favorites, “Temple of the Spider,” for Thrilling Adventure Stories.

Why is that one of your favorites?

WALTER: I thought it was a good story. I thought I drew it well. It’s one of the very few stories I’ve done just for black-&white. I did a lot of texture work in there. I did toothbrush 21

WALTER: I think Seaboard went under and that’s why the book never came out. It was begun as a series of stories while Jeff Rovin was still there. The idea was they were going to do an homage, shall we say, to Japanese monster films. It’s cheaper to do your own monsters that look kind of like those monsters than to license those monsters. I’m not sure that was the reason they were doing it that way, but that’s the idea.

There was one story that involved a Rodan kind of creature. There was one story that involved a Godzilla type.

Then those two met and fought and had a big monster throwdown the way Japanese monster movies do.

The odd thing about the three stories is they were all done by different artists and the monsters were completely different in all three stories. [laughter] As I remember it, Howard Nostrand did the first one, which was the Godzilla creature, and he drew a pretty straight Tyrannosaurus rex.

Then Enrique Romero drew the Rodan story, and the version he drew was a pterodactyl with three tails, about the size of a jet fighter. When I drew my story I drew a straight Pteranodon, but it was the size of five buildings, and the Godzilla character I drew was really Gorgo. Gorgo was a British version of Godzilla from a movie from the late ’50s I had seen in the theatre as a kid.

spatter. Stuff I almost never do for color work. And Archie wrote it, beautifully.

I got a lot of reference. Larry Hama was a big samurai fan. I was, too, but he knew a lot more about it than I did.

He loaned me a whole bunch of glossy 8" x 10"s from different samurai films. I’d learned by that time in my professional career—this was about two years into it—the effectiveness of reference in making your drawings better.

That may have been the first time I used a real person as a model for a character. A single person I should say. The story’s about an old samurai and a young samurai who meet as ronin on a field of battle. They decide it’s not worth killing each other. They go off and have a fantastic adventure in which the old guy survives. The old guy is based on Takashi Shimura. He was the leader of the Seven Samurai in the Kurosawa film. I shamelessly swiped his face. I’m not a real face lookalike kinda guy.

MM: I actually noticed that because I had watched The Seven Samurai a couple days before reading the story.

WALTER: I’m glad I was close enough. He was one of the guys at the end in that movie who survived. He wasn’t necessarily the fastest or best swordsman, but he was one of the canniest. And that was the character I wanted in “Temple of the Spider.” Here was a warrior who could survive.

I also had mono in the middle of that story, so it took me longer to do than normal. I had mono again after I had it when I was four years old. I took about six or seven weeks on the story. There were times I couldn’t do any work. I’d roll out of bed, ink one panel, and roll back.

MM: You also did a giant monster story around that time that wasn’t printed. What was that about and why did it never show up?

22

I drew it, turned it in, and I had not gotten copies of that artwork, which I normally did. Jeff arranged to get me full-size stats of the art. I went in, picked up the stats, and Jeff was either fired or left Seaboard that same day. The original artwork never surfaced, but I still have the stats.

MM: You were also working on “The Hyborian Age” in Savage Sword of Conan. Were you a sword and sorcery fan?

WALTER: I enjoyed Robert E. Howard. When the Lancer Editions of Howard’s books came out with all the Frank Frazetta covers, I sucked ’em up and read them. That was the mid-’60s. I read The Lord of the Rings. I read Michael Moorcock. I read Howard.

The “Hyborian Age” job itself, I think Roy Thomas talked to me about doing the adaptation of an essay that Howard had written. It was his faux history of Earth before Sumer. He had it worked out in some detail going back to Atlantis and the time of Kull. The way we would do it was we both had a copy of the essay. Roy would call me up and say, “Do up to the end of this paragraph.” I would mark off the paragraph. I would read from where we had ended the last time and I would convert that into pictures. Then I would give it to Roy and he would write it all. That work I also lettered. I penciled, inked, and toned it. In the end we had a nice visualization.

Every other paragraph was the fall of another civilization with thousands slain and flood waters rising. Army after army. It was just a bear to do. And to try and do it so it didn’t look like the same army being flooded out every episode. If you go back and look at it, I have very rococo panel borders and caption borders that involved using a bow compass. I came to bitterly regret doing that because it was such a pain in the neck to have to draw. I will say when I was done it looked great, but it was really a labor to get through all that stuff.

MM: The next big thing you worked on was the First Issue Special with Dr. Fate. How did you hook up with Martin Pasko for that?

WALTER: [laughs] I don’t know if that was so big. It had a long-lasting effect on Dr. Fate which was kind of cool, but it was the ninth issue of First Issue Special. It was DC trying to fake people out into thinking every issue was a first issue. I don’t know for sure how we hooked up. My guess is that I knew Marty from DC. I have no idea why we got picked to do Dr. Fate. I kind of liked the character from the old days. We probably proposed it. I don’t know now.

I was a big fan of the Ditko “Dr. Strange” material. I still am. I love what Steve did with creating a visual system of magic. In my young, hubristic days as an artist I wanted to create my own visual system of magic, but not base it on vectors and circles the way Steve had done. I based mine on typography using the ankh as the core symbol for what I was doing. I thought the ankh would be a good symbol for Fate because it was a symbol of life in ancient Egypt and it was also a nice graphic symbol. You could do mirror images and you could do end on end on end patterns. I still ended up doing Steve Ditko-y 23

Previous Page Top: A nice likeness of Takashi Shimura of Seven Samurai fame.

Previous Page Bottom: Page from chapter 3 of “The Hyborian Age,” which appeared in Savage Sword of Conan #12.

Above: This panel from page 17 of Dr. Fate’s appearance in First Issue Special #9 displays Walter’s use of Egyptian typography and imagery.

Conan ™ and ©2006 Conan Properties International LLC. Dr. Fate ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Right: Sketch done for Rand Hoppe as a prize for coming up with the winning name for Walter’s old Internet forum, “Simonson Sez.” Below: Wraparound cover art for The Immo rtal Dr. Fate, a Baxter format collection which included Walter’s story from First Issue Special #9.

Next Page: Walter’s splash page layout for Hercules Unbo und #7 and the finished art by Wally Wood.

Dr. Fate, Hercules Unbound ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

type things in a lot of ways, but I was at least able to think about the stuff a little bit differently and explore doing magic graphically in a slightly different way.

It was challenging, but a lot of fun.

The thing I do remember about Dr. Fate that was funny was that we were in the middle of our story when DC said, “We’re cutting back two pages.”

We were in the middle of the story and Marty and I had to go back and figure out where we could shorten up the story in order to fit the new editorial guidelines. That’s the reason Inza Nelson, Kent’s wife, finds the magic tablet inscribed with the mummy’s name in, like, four seconds. It seemed a little convenient for her to do that, but it worked out okay in the story.

MM: This was also the first time that you started dealing with myths with the appearance of the Egyptian gods. It’s something that has followed you throughout your career. Has mythology in its various forms always been something of interest to you?

WALTER: It has. That probably is the first thing in comics that I did with it. It was really expressed when one of the gods shows up. I used the Egyptian graphic for him rather than trying to draw a realistically jackal-headed god. I used the graphic approach as his visualization in the comic because I feel that when you see the gods, it’s more than you can really bear. It’s more than humans can see.

What you see instead is some kind of symbol that you can interpret and not be driven mad by.

As far as myths, I like myths a lot. I liked Norse myths way before I discovered the Thor comic.

I’d read the Greek myths and some other stuff as well.

When I was at RISD I took a course in Myth and Philosophy. It was about the period in Greek history where they were moving from a mythological explanation for the world to a philosophical one. That 24

was really interesting. A lot of what I got from that has stayed with me in one form or another. We had to read one scholar named Eliade. He had very strong ideas about what myths meant and how they function in society. They were very cool ideas and whether or not they really apply to how myths function in real societies, they certainly gave me a lot of food for stories.

there. It was really a good place to go.

This was a chance to put my name on my résumé with Wally Wood. Or as he would say, Wallace—he didn’t call himself Wally. So I took the gig. I did two issues.

Woody was apparently very happy with the layouts I gave him. They were probably pretty tight for layouts.

He did a lovely job inking them, then he got off the book. I never had a chance to ask him why he bailed.

Maybe he was tired of doing it. But the reason I had gotten on the book had suddenly gone away.

I was already on the book so I kept doing it. The book went four more issues. I did two issues that I believe were Bob Layton’s third and fourth professional jobs. They were really right at the beginning of his professional career. Somewhere in there we were told the book was going to be cancelled with issue #11. Cary Bates and I thought it would be really cool if we wrapped the whole thing up somehow. We worked out a storyline that would go back to the beginning, explain all this stuff, and wrap up. We did that but we couldn’t do it in one issue.

By this time, Jenette Kahn was the publisher at DC. We went to DC and ended up talking with Jenette, Paul Levitz, and Joe Orlando. We said, “Here’s what we want to do. We can’t do this in one issue.” They thought about

MM: One of the next series you worked on was Hercules Unbound. You started with that because of Wally Wood?

WALTER: I did start because of Wally Wood. Woody was inking the book. José Luis García-López was the original penciler on that book. That was the first of José’s work I saw and I was really knocked out by it. I think José is one of the two or three best draftsmen comics have ever had. He is just phenomenal.

Denny O’Neil was the editor and asked me if I would be interested in taking it over and doing layouts for Woody. I think at that point I had never done anything that I hadn’t inked myself. I was a little uncertain about doing layouts. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

That’s one of those things where it’s a nebulous concept.

You kind of have to do it for a while and eventually you get the idea of what it really means. But it was Woody. I knew Woody from meeting him at Continuity, which was Dick Giordano’s and Neal Adams’ studio.

Continuity was the boys’ club. For comics in the early to mid-’70s, that’s where we all hung out: Terry Austin, Bob Wiacek, Alex Jay, Mike Hinge. A lot of guys at different times rented space from Dick and Neal, so they’d be 25

it and they said, “Okay, do it in two.” They gave us one extra issue of this book that wasn’t selling well to wrap our story up. I went ahead and inked those final two issues. I gave Hercules a whole new costume, just because if you’re going to go down, you may as well go down in flames. I gave him a costume that was ridiculously hard to draw.

I’ve done that since. I’m still an idiot. I don’t what I’m thinking. [laughter] But we wrapped everything up and we were able to bring the whole thing to a conclusion. I was always grateful to Jenette, Paul, and Joe for letting us do that.

MM: Going back to something you said before, how do you differentiate between pencils and layouts?

WALTER: There’s less graphite on the page.

There’s probably not any better way to describe it.

Generally, layouts are looser than pencils. You’re not putting in all the detail and, most importantly, you’re not spotting the blacks. The idea is that you’re giving the inker the composition in terms of shapes in the panels and he is putting in the detail and laying in the blacks and doing the rendering and stuff like that. Essentially, you’re composing the pictures that do the storytelling.

MM: At roughly the same time, you were also doing Metal Men. Was it tough balancing the two?

Above: The debut of Herc’s new duds. Page 1 of Hercules Unbound #11.

Right: Tina’s newly repaired responsometer doesn’t perform as anticipated. Lucky for us!

From Metal Men #46.

Next Page: This splash page to Metal Men #48, shows just how playful the typography and subtitling had become.

Hercules Unbound, Metal Men ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

WALTER: Probably. I know I was really late on Metal Men. Metal Men was strange because DC had a script in the drawer from Steve Gerber. Gerber, I believe, had gone back to Marvel at some point. Carmine was still in charge of DC at the time. I guess what happened was that Carmine decided he wanted the story drawn and I got the nod to draw it. I like the Metal Men. They’re kinda goofy. Also, I had done this very grim, straight “Manhunter,” so doing Metal Men was a complete departure. Very cartoony characters, very bold lines. I thought it would be kind of fun to do.

Somewhere along the way a decision was made to make this the first of a new bunch of Metal Men stories. DC got Gerry Conway to be the new writer. We got together, talked about a bunch of plots, got some ideas going, started doing issues, and two things happened.

One of them was that winter some really bad flu was going around. If you got it and you got better and you got up and started doing things, you’d get sick again immediately. You had to be very careful. I think Gerry got sick three times. By the time he was done, we were really late. We did two issues then I think 26

WALTER: I was just doing layouts in those books instead of tight pencils. There was just no point with Alfredo doing it. I had done a little work for Marvel about three years earlier when they had a couple of pulp horror magazines called The Haunt of Horror. It only ran, like, two issues. I did some spot illustrations for it. That was my first work for Marvel.

Doug Moench wrote Rampaging Hulk. We were doing it in the early ’70s, but it was set in the ’60s. It was a slight period piece. It was fun to go back and try to capture some of the old Stan Lee/Jack Kirby goofy monsters from the ’50s. The original X-Men appeared in their suits from that time.

Marvel has since gone back and written that whole book out of continuity.

Not my continuity. I used that book as practice to try and understand visual storytelling faster; to do layouts and solve those pages and get going.

Because it was the Hulk I wanted to move away from the 12-panels-apage Manhunter type stuff I had done at DC. I wanted to really get large panels and big action figures and big musculature and stuff like that which I had not done. That gave me a chance to practice that and get paid for it at the same time.

Gerry went back to Marvel.

After three issues I had a new writer—Marty Pasko took over. After two more issues I was burned out. I’d done five issues in about a year—it was a bi-monthly book. I had three different writers. We were getting very wonky with it with the typography and little subtitles and all sorts of weird stuff, which was fun but exhausting. But I had a good time.

MM: This is one of the first books where I saw you listed as co-plotter. What exactly gets you the credit of co-plotter on a book?

WALTER: I have no idea. I guess the writers were generous. [laughter] I did help out. I never saw myself as a writer. I didn’t get into comics to start writing.

But very soon I found with some of the writers I drew for, I would get in there and we would talk and work things out.

Some writers were more amenable to that. Some a little less.

That was cool. There were some stories over the first ten years of my career where I probably have a 50% stake in the story and some where I have a 3% stake and maybe less.

MM: Around this time, you went over to Marvel to do The Rampaging Hulk which was a lot of fun with the ’60s vibe it had. It was a very different look for you though with Alfredo Alcala inking it.

MM: Your next assignment for Marvel was your first run on Thor. How did that happen?

27

Right: Ad artwork for Rampaging Hulk.

Below: Walter’s layout and Tony DeZuniga’s inks for Thor #266, page 14.

Next Page: John says that the cover of Alien, was perhaps the most truly collaborative effort between Archie, Walter, and himself. But it might never have come about if John hadn’t liked Walter’s inks over Carmine Infantino, as shown here in a page from “Hitter’s Wind.”

Hulk, Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Alien ™ and ©2006 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

WALTER: Beats me. My best guess is that Len Wein probably talked to me about it. Len was the writer/editor on the book. I don’t know why John Buscema was getting off of it. Tony DeZuniga inked my run. Again, it was just layouts. Len and I talked out the stories. I did that for a year.

The thing that was useful to me in retrospect is that I did the Jack Kirby Thor like they’d all been up to that point. I did an Asgard full of ramps and sculptures and gleaming buildings and so on. The fact that I got my Kirby rocks off on that year meant that when I began doing Thor about five years later, I didn’t feel the necessity of staying close to Jack’s vision.

Asgard was probably the biggest change, where I decided to go back and use Scandinavian architecture as a way of depicting Asgard rather than making it a science-fiction city. I felt free to do that because I had done a year’s worth of Thor where I did the standard Marvel vision of Asgard and the Thor mythology.

We had a good time. I liked working with Len. We enjoyed doing the book.

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Interlude 2:

John Workman

MM: When did you and Walter first work together?

JOHN WORKMAN: I met Walter in, I think, 1975 up at DC. I was working in the production department. He was freelancing, of course. I knew him from “Manhunter,” which was well before that. I did some production work on a Metal Men issue that he drew. I remember being intrigued by the coat that he gave to Doc Magnus. It had these sort of cross-hatched lines on it that weren’t in perspective at all, but it worked beautifully on the thing. And I thought that was really surprising. Just before I went over to Heavy Metal—now my memory’s a little hazy on this, but I know Walter was doing a back-up, “Captain Fear,” in Unknown Soldier. I lettered it, and it didn’t appear for quite a while. I even kind of forgot to bill for it. I remember by the time I got around to billing DC, they had upped the lettering rate by another dollar, so I got an extra dollar per page for that one. [laughter] I think that might have been the first thing we did together.

Alien was really the first big thing that we did together. There’s kind of a strange story with that. I was responsible for putting together the comics version of Alien while Mike Gross was doing the book for Heavy Metal about the making of the movie. I thought that Carmine Infantino would be perfect for Alien. I always liked Carmine’s artwork and he was always one of my heroes.

Actually, he was the one who hired me at DC. I thought a good combination would be Carmine and Walter because Walter had inked Carmine on a story for Warren, for Creepy or Eerie or something. I liked the look of it. I thought that Walter would give Alien the proper look over Carmine’s pencils. I called Carmine and his phone was busy, so I thought, “Well, I’ll call Walter and see if he can do the inks on this.” I talked to Walter for quite a while and as the conversation progressed, he suggested that he do the entire art job. So I agreed to that. He brought in Archie Goodwin, who adapted it. That book went on to be, as far as I know, the first comic book to hit the New York Times Best Seller List. And it stayed on it for seven weeks.

Then after that, Walter was working on Star Slammers for Marvel and, of course, Thor. I started lettering Thor and really enjoyed it.

MM: Going back to Alien for just a second, a lot of people consider that one of the best, if not the best, movie adaptations. Why do you think it worked so well?

JOHN: The movie script was wonderful. The second I read it I knew it was going to go over very, very well. Walter and Archie—what we did was just get out of their way and let them work. And what they did, we printed. The two guys were perfect together and they were both just tops. You can’t find a better writer than Archie and, of course, Archie was a good artist, too. He really understood how to do comics.

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turned them over to me as we went along on Alien. He did all the balloons himself. I filled in the lettering. It was a strange thing to be doing it that way, but it worked out beautifully. He’s a good letterer. He had lettered stuff prior to that.

There’s always been a wonderful connection with Walter. He’s done everything in comics, and that’s what I always tried to do. Years ago when I was going to college, I met Basil Wolverton and we used to have long talks about comics and such. He told me one time that I should try to do everything, to learn everything about comics and not just get into one area. It’s kind of funny, because over the years, of course, I got into lettering more than anything else. It was easy to do. But I’ve done everything else, too. So Walter and I are similar in many ways.

MM: Getting to the actual pages, who determines the placement of the word balloons?

JOHN: It comes from Walter. There’s something that’s virtually disappeared in comics, unfortunately. It used to be that when an artist got a script from a writer, or if he wrote it himself, or whatever, and got it okayed by the editor, all the words were there and it was as if the words became a part of the art. The balloon placement was very important to the design of the overall page and the penciler did those. They would rough in the lettering. Now, unfortunately, even people who try to work that way are told, “Oh, don’t do that. An assistant editor will put them in,” or something like that. It really loses a lot when the artist isn’t the one to place those. All the time that I’ve worked with Walter, he is the one who’s placed the balloons. It’s very, very rare that I have to move a balloon or maybe break one into two, or something like that, in order to make it work, because he knows so well how much space to allow for the number of words. Al Williamson was the same way.

So I’ll get the artwork from Walter and it’s in very, very rough pencil form usually. He’s spotted the balloons on tissue overlays and then it’s just a matter of lining the pages with the Ames Lettering Guide and having a go at it.

He’s also very aware of the importance of the thickness of lines. He likes to have, for the most part, a slightly thicker border on the panel than the border on the balloons. He loves this one thing which I’ve done since I was a kid and that’s breaking the border of the panel and letting the words go out and form the edge of the panel border. It makes for a far more interesting panel than just having lines around it if you have a line suddenly turn into the curve of the balloon. It works very well.

It’s funny. I was disappointed when the book came out. Not in the book, but in the fan reaction to it. In the real world it was doing very well. It sold like crazy and, like I said, it was on the New York Times Best Seller List. It was almost ignored by comics fans and the comics press of the time.

We planned for international versions of Alien. I held back Walter’s original artwork in black-and-white and we had those shot so that, depending on what country it was in and what company and what printing methods they were going to be using, they could either put in their own colors or run it in black-&-white. There’s a Japanese edition and a Spanish and, I think, Italian and several others. It really was quite a thing.

MM: When did you and Walter realize that you worked well together and that it was a collaboration you wanted to continue?

JOHN: I guess it was after the Star Slammers stuff. It worked out so well. And Alien did, too. Walter did some of the initial sound effects, I think, himself, and then he 30

MM: I know what you mean about the balloon placement. There are times when I’m reading Walter’s work that the word balloons really lead me around the page.

JOHN: That’s really important. I’ve seen some stuff, even some things lately, where the balloon placement is so bad that you don’t know whether to go to this balloon or that balloon. It really messes up the reading experience. Walter has such a great knowledge of how you can use the balloons to lead people to where they need to go that it makes for a really smooth reading experience.

MM: Speaking of words being a part of the art, Walter’s use of sound effects is often integral to the art. How closely do you two work on planning the sound effects?

JOHN: Walter will roughly indicate the position of the sound effect on the tissue overlay. It might be “Kraka-KaBlammmmmmmm!” or something like that, with eight m’s in the blam. I’ll rough it in and then I figure, well, we only need three m’s on that—“Kraka-Ka-Blammm!”—so I’ll make some changes like that.

The sound effects were always fun for me. I’ve done them in different ways. I’ve tended toward a more, I guess you’d call it a more organic method over the past few years. It used to be a lot more mechanical looking. I like them both and sometimes I’ll revert to the more mechanical look. I thinks that’s probably our biggest similarity. Walter and I both have a love for typefaces and playing with them and making them more human. You can design interesting things with type, but there’s only so far you can go with it as it is, so you have to make changes in it and make it more human, more interesting. All those sound effects are an example of taking something that could be very mechanical and cold and making it fun.

MM: How do you decide which typeface to use for a specific sound effect?

JOHN: If it’s an explosion, you might want a jagged look to it. Sometimes it depends on what it is. If it’s a space ship exploding, let’s say, then you might want to go a little more mechanical with it. If it’s a bomb and there’s a lot of earth flying

about, rocks and such, then you might want something a little less mechanical. It just depends on the situation.

MM: And Walter leaves that up to you?

JOHN: Usually. Sometimes he makes suggestions. Sometimes I’ll totally miss what he has in mind for something. He’ll call me up and say, “Uh, John, can you re-do that one more like this?” And he’s always right. The original idea that he had always works better. Sometimes he’ll make a point of explaining that he wants a certain feel about it, but otherwise he just leaves it up to me.

MM: You two have worked together for quite a long time. What do you think makes your collaboration so successful?

JOHN: I think it’s that we do think alike as far as creating comics. The story is the most important thing. It has to be clear.

You can have some fun doing it though. I’ve always had a good time working on Walter’s stuff. He’s been at it for a long time now, but he’s nowhere near getting jaded or looking on it as just a job. It’s always a fun thing to do and it’s like he can’t wait to get to the next page.

31

Previous Page: Page 20 of Alien. During the inking stage, Walter placed the balloons for John’s lettering.

Below: Pencils for Orion #3, page 14. After Walter has penciled the page, but before he begins inking, John places the lettering and sound effects.

Alien ™ and ©2006 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Orion ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Part 3:

In Space, No One Can Hear You Draw WALTER: Alien was one of the best experiences I ever had in comics doing a movie adaptation. Charlie Lippincott was our liaison with 20th Century Fox and Charlie was a comics fan. What that meant was he kinda knew what we needed to do a good comic book. They didn’t want a lot of stuff out there, but Archie and I had three different script revisions a couple months apart each.

We ended up with some photographs. Early on, 20th Century flew me over to England to see a rough cut of the film. I saw a two-hour version of the film in December of ’78. That was all principle photography—they were still doing the special effects. We got a tour of the model shop. We could have taken pictures, but I didn’t have a camera. I was kicking myself later for that, because they got kind of stroppy about sending us reference. We had reference on the actors. Honestly, as far as I’m concerned, it made all the difference in the way the stuff looked.

The other thing that was very cool was nobody had likeness approvals back then or nobody exercised them. Now, that’s one of the difficult things in doing movie adaptations because everybody has likeness approvals and a lot of your creative energy goes into making these guys look like they think they look. I want to tell the story. I think the important part of this is the story, but I’m an old retro guy. [laughter] In Alien I was able to draw these characters as comic characters that looked kind of like the actors and actresses without going

MM: You worked on a couple of movie adaptations with Archie, Close Encounters and Alien. You’ve said that Close Encounters was a tough experience. How so?

WALTER: It was the worst experience of my comics career. However, if that’s the worst experience, I’m in fine, fine shape. In my humble opinion, I think Columbia was really, really concerned about doing everything that Steven Spielberg wanted done. And because there was a lot of secrecy around the film, there was a berserko concern about keeping everything under wraps. What it amounted to was I was drawing Close Encounters with no reference.

The film company allowed us to see a couple minutes of footage of the scene were Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon see the UFOs on the country roads zooming around. We saw some stills of the actors in their costumes. And we saw some really, really blurry 8" x 10"s of pieces of the mother ship. That was it. And I wasn’t given any of the reference. I could see it, then go home and work on the comic the next month-and-a-half remembering clearly what I had seen. Also, Marvel didn’t have likeness rights, so we couldn’t use Dreyfuss or Teri Garr or anybody else in the comic. We just had to work from nothing. We had a script and that was it.

Even the script we had wasn’t the final script. It made it very difficult to do. On the balance it worked out pretty well, all things considered.

MM: How did that compare with your experience on Alien?

32

berserk trying to make the likenesses work as rendered versions of these people.

20th Century wasn’t really nuts about whether the comic was exactly like the movie. What that meant was we were able to take bits from different treatments and put them together in what we thought was the best story. In the end, I thought we got a comic that was a really good adaptation of the film, both in spirit and of most of the stuff that was in it. But it was nuts at the end. We did the last 20 pages in a week. It had to come out when the movie came out. It’s something I’m really proud of. And even better, it’s the first comic ever on the New York Times Best-Seller List. I’m not claiming any credit—it was Alien.

Anybody could have done it and gotten up there. It was still kinda cool to do.

MM: Alien was also important to your career in that it was the first big project you worked on with John Workman.

WALTER: That’s right. I really did Alien because of John. He was the art director and letterer at Heavy Metal at that time. John got

a hold of me about doing Alien, and I believe his original idea was to have Carmine Infantino, who was no longer at DC, draw the book and have me ink it. For some reason I don’t remember now, I did two sample pages from one of the Alien scripts—two different scenes, a page each. I had no reference so it’s not drawn as if it’s any of the characters. Somewhere along the way I was given the job of penciling as well inking.

John was the letterer on that and that was the first time we’d worked together. I still did some of the sound effects. Right in the beginning there’s some stuff where you’re getting this binary code. In the movie it’s on the helmet visors. I did that. The other sound effect is the weird screaming beacon when they get the signal from the planet. I took some press type and cut a bunch of it up and rearranged it and made it red on blue to get as much vibration out of it as I could.

MM: Around this time—late ’78, early ’79—you helped found Upstart Studios.

WALTER: Several of us were looking for a place to work that wouldn’t be in the middle 33

Previous Page: Before Walter was hired as the penciler for Alien, he drew up two sample pages. He had no photo reference at this point, only a script, and drew the Alien with long tentacles.

Next Page: On the left is Walter’s pre-reference sample page, and on the right is the same scene as drawn for publication.

Alien ™ and ©2006 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

of our own apartments. We thought we could split the cost on something. The initial members were Howard Chaykin, me, Val Mayerick, and Jim Starlin. I’m not sure, it’s possible that Howard’s wife at the time was the one who came up with the name Upstart. Maybe Starlin.

We looked around for a while and found a place on West 29th Street. We had about 1000 square feet. It was on the front of the building, and it had these big, old windows and a big, clunky tile balcony out front with a giant wall you could kind of peek over and see down to 29th Street. You got a lot of views of the roofs of New York. It was very cool. It was a nice place to work.

The membership rotated some over the years. Within a year of our being there, Val Mayerick decided to move back to Ohio. Jim Sherman came in. We knew Jim from Continuity. Not long after that, Starlin moved upstate and Frank Miller took that spot. That was the stable for a while.

Frank was doing his Daredevil work at that time, Howard was doing American Flagg, I was doing Thor—it was a cool place to be.

We were all somewhat competitive.

Somewhere around the time Ronin started, Frank left and Gary Hallgren moved in. He was a good guy. Howard moved out to the West Coast about ’85. We just kept the three of us, then I moved in ’87. Ultimately, I think Gary moved out to Long Island and Jim Sherman stayed and took it over as his apartment. He may still be in the building. That’s a short history of Upstart. Some cool work came out of there.

MM: What were the advantages or disadvantages of working with all the other guys around?

Above: This 1975 Batman illustration was done for a Street Enterprises portfolio.

Right: A page from Batman #300. Inks by Dick Giordano.

Next Page Top: Upstart Studio compadres Howard Chaykin and Walter (with an assist by Frank Miller) came up with some very funny one-pagers for Heavy Metal.

Next Page Bottom: Walter enters the world of Battlestar Galactica.

Opening splash of Battlestar Galactica #4.

Inks by Klaus Janson.

Batman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Battlestar Galactica ™ and ©2006 Universal City Studios.

WALTER: Mostly it was the advantage of the location. And it was mostly fun, at least for me. It was inspiring to see Daredevil coming along. It was inspiring to see American Flagg getting done. It was annoying on both those counts as well. [laughter] Mainly it was getting to see other guys at work. If you had problems, you could talk ’em over with them.

When you’re a freelancer, if you’re working at home it’s kind of a lonely life.

You’re used to your own company, it’s not lonely in that sense, but you spend a lot of time with yourself and your wife and your dogs. Being part of a studio means that you get out and you get to interact with other creative people. That can fire your own juices up.

MM: You did a few issues of Detective around this time with Steve Englehart, where you introduced Dr. Phosphorus.

WALTER: In two chapters, yes. I think it was done as layouts rather than tight pencils. Allen Milgrom inked it. I don’t 34

remember how I got that gig. The Dr. Phosphorus character was somebody I suggested. The guy I mentioned a long time ago, Tom Sgouros, my major illustration professor at RISD, had been a comics fan when he was a kid. He and his brother had invented a bad guy named Phosphor. He touched stuff and things burned. I talked to Tom about this, he was cool with it, and I suggested Phosphor as a bad guy. Steve was game for it. Julie thought that Phosphor just didn’t say enough about who the guy was, so he named him Dr. Phosphorus, which sounds like an old ’30s pulp character. It sounds like Julie Schwartz.

I only did those two issues. I don’t know now why just two and not more. Of course, after that they had the classic run with Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin picking up these characters Steve introduced. They did brilliant work.

MM: You also drew the first appearance of one of my favorite ladies in the Batman books, Silver St. Cloud.

WALTER: At the time, who knew? It was just one more babe that was dating Bruce Wayne. [laughter] MM: You also did a few episodes of “Shakespeare For Americans” for Heavy Metal.

WALTER: Between us we did about eight or nine of them. It was probably Howard’s idea. It sounds like his sarcastic approach to things. That’s part of the advantage of being in a studio. We were just shooting the breeze and came up with the idea. He knew the editor of Heavy Metal—as did I—Julie Simmons-Lynch. The idea of “Shakespeare for Americans” is that you would do Shakespeare plays as onepage genre fictions. Julius Caesar: one-page private eye film noir. Midsummer Night’s Dream: an episode of I Love Lucy.

Hamlet as a Western. [laughter] We should have done all the plays and gotten a whole book out of it, but we never did. It was goofy and fun. My favorite in terms of the writing was Merchant of Venice, which I did as a Ronald Reagan press conference about supply side economics, which were very big at the time. It would have dated very badly by now. Julius Caesar was Frank’s idea. I was talking about it and he had an idea for what I should do. I said, “I’m gonna use that. That’s cool. Great!” That’s exactly what I did. No credit, no money. Sorry, Frank. [laughter] MM: The next continuing series you worked on was Battlestar Galactica for Marvel. What attracted you to that project?

WALTER: A regular paycheck, I suppose. [laughter] I liked the show. It was kind of a goofy show. I didn’t think it was fabulous, but I thought it would be fun to do as a comic. Ernie Colón did the adaptation of the movie. I drew the “Lost Gods of Kobol” adaptation. One of the things that Roger McKenzie, who wrote it, and I found really weird is that it was very clear from the show that the ragtag fugitive fleet of the humans all ran on essentially impulse power or whatever you want to call it.

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not credited, and that was my first actual writing in comics. I had done a couple “Battle Album”s for Archie back in ’72, ’73—I wrote the paragraphs that went in there with the art. That’s my first real writing in comics. But my first story writing was the last page or two of Galactica #16.

They were slower-than-light ships, whereas the Cylon Basestars were all running on faster-than-light drives.

Which means that the chase of the Basestars running after the ragtag fleet would have taken less than a nanosecond. One of the first stories we did after we got away from the adaptations was to circle the wagons and the humans all upgraded their ships to fasterthan-light drives.

They were kinda cool characters.

Marvel didn’t have likeness rights on Galactica. We didn’t let that stop us much; we pretty much tried to draw the guys. I think we had one objection, but generally we just sailed through.

I did one issue that I inked and colored myself, which had the Cylon Mark III. The Cylons were like all those bad guys in bad movies, where they can shoot a million shots at you and nothing happens and you go “Bam!” and knock them right out of the sky. We invented a really tough Cylon Mark III. They built a few of them and they were so bad they had to all be dismantled or kicked into exile or gotten rid of in some terrible way because they were going to take over the Cylons.

Two things about that one. One is that the Cylon Mark III is really Baron von Richthofen. If you go back and look, he’s wearing jodhpurs, a flight suit, a long scarf, aviation goggles, and boots. He’s really a World War I flying ace. I colored his ship red with white trim, which is kind of what Richthofen’s plane was. It was an all red triplane but there were white flashes for the German crosses and stuff. The other was right at the end of that book, Roger left. I ended up scripting maybe the last two pages,

MM: The Cylon Mark III story was my favorite issue in your run. What was there about that that made you want to do all the art on it?

WALTER: I think I liked the story, too.

Also, because it was Baron von Richthofen, fighter planes. I was a big World War I fighter plane fan when I was younger. I loved the airplanes and thought it would be fun to do. Klaus Janson had been inking it and doing a really nice job with it. I guess I must have bumped Klaus off for an issue.

Maybe I was more callous when I was younger. I wanted to do the whole thing, so I colored it. I had colored a few comics here and there—not very many, but a few.

MM: Why didn’t you do more coloring?

WALTER: It took time and didn’t pay very well. Also, I wasn’t that comfortable in my own color sense. I think my color sense actually isn’t bad, but I’m just very slow at trying to sort out that stuff. I never practiced enough to become facile with it.

After that story, there are a couple of issues with jungle stuff. What happened was there was an issue of Tarzan that Sal Buscema had penciled and they wanted it turned into a Battlestar Galactica story. Marvel would sometimes end up with an issue of some comic that had been cancelled. They went through a phase where they 36

began wanting those issues used as other comics. Steven Grant and I sat down and figured out some way to do it. We wrote from the artwork. I made a few changes in the art here and there where we just couldn’t use what was right there. So we turned a Tarzan story with some weird fruit in the jungle into a Battlestar Galactica. [laughter] After that, with issue 19, I became the writer. That was my first writing in comics; my first full issue where I plotted and wrote it. Of the last five issues of Galactica, I wrote four of them. I had a lot of fun doing that. I had all these characters to play with. They were all fun characters and I really enjoyed fiddling with them. And I brought back Starbuck. He had been left behind for a while, so we got to do “The Daring Return of the Space Cowboy,“ my first story title.

MM: How did you end up writing Galactica?

WALTER: Well as it happened, the editor was a good friend of mine—my girlfriend.

She knew Roger and I had worked pretty closely together on the plots. That’s a book where on some of the issues I did a fair amount of plotting. When he left the book, she offered me the gig as a writer. I’d done a lot of issues of the book and I felt I had gotten the characters and I was willing to take a crack at doing it. Then the book died five issues later, but it was already going down the tubes. What it really was for me was a great place to practice.

MM: What did working on those few issues teach you?

WALTER: I think what it really did was it gave me the confidence to think I actually could write and that I could write stuff that

would be amusing and interesting. The next thing I wrote was the Raiders of the Lost Ark adaptation for Marvel. The reason that happened is because Archie, who by this time was working over at Marvel, was supposed to write the adaptation. He was buried in work, as he often was. He stopped me in the hall one day and asked if I’d be interested in writing this adaptation of a new movie about to come out called Raiders of the Lost Ark, because he’d read the issues of Battlestar Galactica and he’d really liked them. With the adaptation, you’ve got the script already, so it’s not quite starting from scratch. It was very nice. That gave me some more issues to write, and I liked those as well.

MM: What was it like writing for the first time without doing the art?

WALTER: Raiders was writing over John Buscema. John is one of the two or three best storytellers and draftsmen comics have ever had. He told stories like they were “buttah.”

When I got 37

Left: The Cylon Mark III Imperator Series prototype was basically a cybernetic stand-in for the Red Baron. From Battlestar Galactica #16.

This Page: Starbuck was MIA for a few issues of the series, but once Walter took over the writing chores the first thing he did was get the space cowboy back in the lineup.

Battlestar Galactica ™ and ©2006 Universal City Studios.

Below: Enter the ninja!

Has Captain Fear met his match? From Unknown Soldier #255.

Next Page: Two wars and a wad of loot! An awesome splash page from the “Captain Fear” chapter of Unknown Soldier #254.

Captain Fear ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

that artwork back, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. It really was. I had the script, I had John Buscema’s layouts; it was hard to go wrong. It was really a delight.

MM: Around this time a project you had been working on for quite a while finally came out, “Captain Fear.”

WALTER: [laughs] Yeah, that took a long time.

MM: Why did it take such a long time?

WALTER: Because there was no deadline.

You always have jobs that are on deadline,

and they always take precedence over jobs that have no deadline. Since it was pirates, I really wanted to draw these ships. I began accumulating reference to draw the ships and the pirates and all the rest of the stuff. It’s an 18-page job, and I ended up with a bookshelf of reference probably about two feet long, which is really stupid for 18 pages. [laughter] I have two regrets about that job. One was that in its original printing, the plates were way over-inked, so it’s very, very heavy.

It damaged the way it looked in print. The other was when DC finally printed it again in The Art of Walter Simonson, we had just moved here to this house at the time that book came out. I loaned DC almost all the artwork in that book to re-shoot, but I couldn’t find that job. That job was reproduced from the stats they had and the stats were very heavy. That job has never been reproduced in a way that’s made me happy considering what went into it. The other thing was that in the Walter Simonson book, they transposed two pages each in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 into the wrong chapters. That job has kind of a cursed history, but I really liked the job a lot. David Michelinie wrote it.

The original “Captain Fear” is ahistoric. It was a short series than ran in ’72 or thereabouts. Alex Niño drew it beautifully. But for a strip that’s about pirates, there is maybe one recognizable ship in the entire series—a 16th century ship. The heyday of pirates is about 1715, 1720. There are some guys in conquistador helmets. There are some guns that look great, but they’re not historically accurate. In our story, we deliberately set it a bit later than when pirates were around. We set it in maybe 1748 because we wanted to include some stuff happening in Japan. We fudged on the history ourselves a bit, but we tried to make the ships, costumes, and guns appropriate for the time and place. I used one gun in the climax that was made to put down mutineers. It was a fan gun that had seven or eight barrels. You could fire all of them at once in a fan pattern by pulling the trigger once. We used that to nail the ninja.

That was based on something I’d come across somewhere.

MM: How did you come up with combining pirates with a ninja? That doesn’t seem like a natural combination, but it works.

38

39

WALTER: Maybe I just wanted to draw some ninjas or maybe David wanted to write some ninjas, I’m not sure. I think we wanted to do something we thought was cool, and yet would work historically but be a bit different from your standard pirate story.

MM: Somewhere in here you did the “Lawnmower Man” adaptation. What about that story appealed to you? It seems different than other things I’ve seen by you.

Above: A departure in style. A page from the comics adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Lawnmower Man”— which appeared years before the movie adaptation.

Right: Add Edgar Rice Burroughs’ name to the list of authors whose characters Walter has drawn. Page 21 of Marvel’s John Carter, Warlord of Mars #15. Inks

by Rudy Nebres.

Next Page: Walter not only provided the breakdowns for this issue, but co-plotted with David Michelinie as well. From Star Wars #61. Finishes

by Tom Palmer.

Lawnmower Man ™ and ©2006 Stephen King. John Carter ™ and ©2006 Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate. Star Wars ™ and ©2006 Lucasfilm Ltd.

WALTER: That’s probably one of the reasons it appealed to me.

Also, Denny O’Neil asked me about doing it. Denny was the editor of Bizarre Adventures, which was a black-&-white Marvel magazine. I had read some Stephen King, not a lot. I’d read the book that story came out of, I had read Salem’s Lot—liked both of them. Marvel had the option of doing some of the stories from that collection. They didn’t have the rights to all of them. I think Denny picked the “Lawnmower Man” as being the one that was the most visual. He suggested it. I read it, liked it. We did it Marvel style. I broke the whole thing down, did all the pencils. They sent the originals off to King. I never talked to Stephen King myself directly. They came back with a script. He’d written a great script. Not everybody who doesn’t do comics to start with does a good comic script their first time. He did a really nice script. He amplified just enough stuff to make things that needed to be there work. What was really funny was he wrote the entire script in pencil on the artwork around panels. It killed me because after it was lettered, I had to erase all of Stephen King’s writing because it was all in and around the panels where it would get reproduced. It just killed me to erase all that writing. [laughter] There’s a lot of Sergio Toppi in that work. That’s another artist whose work is a big influence on mine. Has been for many years. The last shot with the big head of the Lawnmower Man as the lawn, the rendering on that is right from Sergio Toppi. I apologize to Sergio for swiping him so boldly.

MM: In ’81 and ’82 you did some work on Star Wars. You did a couple issues with Carmine. What did you do on those?

WALTER: [laughs] That was the same deal as the Battlestar Galactica/Tarzan. Marvel had an extra issue of John Carter of Mars that Carmine had penciled. Chris Claremont and I tried to work out a plot and then use most of the artwork from it. All I remember now is there were some panels in Carmine’s work I had to change.

40

I tried, I think rather unsuccessfully, to imitate Carmine’s compositions so the artwork I drew wouldn’t be too much at odds with his. I did do a thing with these giant Storm Troopers that I think in the actual comic used to be Tharks. [laughter] That was how that issue got done. I’m not sure they’re great comics, but that stuff’s a lot of fun to do. The challenge is so interesting.

MM: You did ink Carmine on some stuff for Warren.

WALTER: Weezie was the editor at Warren from ’76 to ’80. I did a little work for Warren while she was there. I penciled, inked, and toned one story and I did one that Terry Austin inked. “Relics” and “Quirks” were stories by Bob Toomey. I inked three of Carmine’s jobs. One was a baseball job that Roger McKenzie wrote called “Hitter’s Wind.”

Then there was some Abominable Snowman job that was done in like four seconds. Weezie called me up. An artist had flaked on a story. She was having to grab stuff to squeeze into the magazine to fill the space up. She had several Carmine jobs in inventory and she fired them off to various inkers. I took one of the stories. It was four pages or maybe six. Really inked it in a frightful hurry to try and get it done. Later, I inked a job called “The Ark.” I owed Carmine my professional career to some degree and it was a pleasure for me to be able to go back and ink him.

MM: How much direction did you get from Lucasfilm on Star Wars?

WALTER: We didn’t get much direction I don’t think. What did happen was they were very free about letting us do what we wanted to do with certain exceptions. The exceptions were because of what the movies were doing. I was drawing it right after the second film and before the third movie had come out. I did one issue that Mike Barr wrote called “The Last Jedi,” which was a really cool little story that got the worst printing I’ve ever had in comics. The press was so over-inked the comic was like blotting paper. Then there was the 50th issue that Al Williamson did most of and some of us pitched in to help to get it done. Then David Michelinie took over as the regular writer. David had seen the first two films, as had we all, and he thought that a logical story that they had not done in the comic would be to have the Empire, presuming they aren’t dummies, build a new Death Star. They would put chicken wire over the exhaust ports or something like that.

Word came back from Lucasfilm that we couldn’t do a new Death Star. They couldn’t tell us why, but we couldn’t do one. I went, “Oh, gee. I guess I know what the third movie’s gonna be about.” So we said, “How about if we do a giant

cannon floating in space.” They said, “Okay, that’s fine. As long as it’s not a big sphere, that’ll be cool.” [laughter] So we did a giant cannon floating in space and we called it the General Tarkin and we got our story in.

There were some other oddball things. They aren’t oddball in retrospect, but we understood them. We couldn’t have Luke and Leia develop any kind of romantic interest. At the time it was not known they were brother and sister. We couldn’t use Han Solo because he was in carbonite. We also were told that we couldn’t show Darth Vader face to face with Luke. What it amounted to was we had stories with characters where the lead characters, boy and girl, couldn’t get together, the hero couldn’t meet the major villain, and the other major hero was unavailable. It was an odd time to be doing Star Wars.

Tom Palmer did a great job with the finishes. He had a lot of references for the Star Wars stuff. His son, Tommy, who is now an assistant editor at DC, was young, maybe under ten, and he was a huge Star Wars 41

fanatic, as he still is today. He was really his dad’s technical expert.

If stuff wasn’t drawn right, Tom heard about it.

MM: A character I really like that you brought in is Shira Brie.

WALTER: I think we were trying to find ways to create characters to interact with the established cast of Star Wars that we could actually tell stories about. The established cast was so unavailable in a way to do anything with them as characters. She was one of the characters David created so we could tell an interesting story that would still feel like it was part of the Star Wars universe.

MM: You drew the X-Men/Teen Titans crossover. How did you become involved with that since you weren’t known for drawing either of the books?

WALTER: I had connections. My wife was the editor. [laughter] I walked into Weezie’s office one day when she was talking with Chris Claremont, who would be writing it. Weezie got the assignment because she was the X-Men editor at the time. The artist who would have been on it was Dave Cockrum, because he was the X-artist at the time. My memory is that Dave was

doing the regular X-book and wasn’t far enough ahead to take on a 64-page project in addition to doing a regular monthly title. I happened to walk into Weezie’s office when she and Chris were discussing what to do about the story. Marvel was using as much of the X-Men team on the book as they could. In the end they used Chris, Glynis Wein to color the book, Tom Orzechowski to letter it, and Terry Austin was the inker. As I went into the office I heard “mumble mumble mumble Darkseid.” I said, “If you guys are using Darkseid, I’m drawing the book.” [laughter] That was really it. There was just no question.

Chris came over to our apartment—we lived in the city at the time. We shot the breeze, Weezie and Chris and me, and tried to work out plots. We thought wouldn’t it be cool: Darkseid, Dark Phoenix. What a wonderful villain duo for this book. Then we ran into a problem. The problem was that DC’s liaison didn’t want us to use Darkseid. The objection to that was that Darkseid wasn’t a Teen Titans villain, which I understood.

My problem—and I don’t know about Chris and Weezie—my problem was that the only cosmic 42

villain the Teen Titans had was Trigon. He was a red-skinned, four-eyed, antler-horned villain. He just looked weird. No offense to anybody who was involved with the design, but he just looked silly. He did not look like a cosmic kind of villain and was not a guy I wanted to draw at all. I was kind of stroppy about it. We had lunch with Marv Wolfman.

Marv suggested that instead of using Trigon, we could use Darkseid and use another Titans villain. He suggested The Terminator, who later became Deathstroke, but he was called the Terminator back then before the movies

had come out. That worked really well because Darkseid often works through intermediaries. The Terminator was a gun for hire and that seemed like an appropriate way of doing it. Weezie had no problem with having two DC villains and one Marvel villain.

That gave us our Darkseid/Dark Phoenix pairing. Introducing Terminator was no big deal. He worked out very nicely as part of the strike force for Darkseid’s team.

We worked out a plot involving those three guys and the Titans and the X-Men. Boy, that was a lot of guys and gals. It was fun. We had a great time doing it. The book sold really well. I still think that was a really good crossover story to work all those characters in. I thought Chris did a really excellent job of capturing all those different characters and working out ways so they could interact in a way that made the book more than just a big cosmic fight.

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Previous Page: Cover art and a thumbnail of page 22 from Star Wars #62. This is as close as Luke and Darth Vader would come to meeting in the comics until after the theatrical release of Return of the Jedi.

Left: Lt. Shira Brie was introduced as Leia’s competition for Luke’s affection—since they weren’t allowed to touch the relationship between Luke and Leia.

Below: Wraparound cover art for the X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover.

Star Wars ™ and ©2006 Lucasfilm, Ltd. Darkseid, New Teen Titans ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Dark Phoenix, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MM: You returned to Star Slammers in 1983 with a new graphic novel. How did that compare to the story and characters of your earlier work?

MM: Was that your first time working with the New Gods?

WALTER: It probably was. I drew Metron and Darkseid and a bunch of Parademons.

WALTER: My idea for the Slammers I never really followed up on. My idea had always been to do sort of a Cordwainer Smith Instrumentality of Mankind approach. In Cordwainer Smith’s SF stories, they range over thousands of years across a big timeline. My idea with the Star Slammers was to do different stories over time, jump forward, jump back, whatever.

The story I did when I was in art school was a story of when the Slammers were really a going concern. When I was going to do a graphic novel—one of the graphic novels for Marvel when they were doing creator-owned material—I thought it would be fun to go back and do an origin story about where the Slammers came from.

MM: Were there any characters you had a tough time with since there were so many?

WALTER: I wish George [Pérez] had done a simpler costume on Cyborg. [laughter] Not really. No one guy was in the book every panel. I thought it was a cool story. As far as working with the actual characters, the biggest problem is just drawing that many characters and trying to give them all some face time. You have to make sure they all have their character bits and try not to lose the reader when you’re threading through 15 or so different characters with the two teams. That’s a problem with page design and choreography, which is more about walking a tightrope than just drawing somebody’s character. Getting the storytelling right is tougher than drawing the characters.

MM: How difficult were the Silvermind pages where the Slammers are linked telepathically? Those are pretty amazing.

WALTER: [laughs] I have to say I had done the Silvermind first in the original thing back in art school.

Not that I had the one page like that. Not as elaborate.

The one page with the 8 billion little squares and all the different heads wasn’t hard conceptually, it was just time consuming. Once you sort out what you want to do, and that you have to draw out the 85,000 heads, then you’re on your way. Really if you look, it’s storytelling on a grid rather than more regular panels. Once you get into the grid, the actual design of the pages are simpler because you don’t have to futz around with stuff. The idea of breaking a page up like that was a cool idea.

MM: There were a lot of political overtones in the graphic novel. Was that intentional?

WALTER: The nature of the characters, the nature of their situation dictated that. I don’t think I came at it with a political idea in the beginning. I wanted to establish theses two peoples and races and planets on some rational basis for this enmity and why things had worked out the way they had.

You don’t have to look far in human history to get a lot of examples of that kind of stuff. I just tried to make as convincing a case for both sides as I could make in that book. That involved a lot of political thinking.

MM: Had you planned for this to go into a series or another graphic novel?

WALTER: I had thought originally about doing a series of Slammers stories, but with different characters that were in different parts of the timeline.

Fourteen years later I did a Star Slammers mini-series that Malibu and then Dark Horse published.

44

Part 4:

“It’s Nice to Be Best Known for Something”

MM: You were kind of offered Thor out of the blue?

WALTER: More or less. Mark Gruenwald offered it to me. Mark and I had talked about a Thor idea that I had had back when I was in college. I was a big Thor fan back then—this was the mid-’60s. I came up with an idea for a big Thor story. I combined Norse mythology with “Marvel Norse mythology” with “Walter mythology” and put together a storyline.

The idea was that in the summer when the annuals were available, one month the story would start in Thor. The rest of the story would come out the same month in all the other Marvel Comics, which at the time was about ten or eleven titles. A month after these eleven issues came out, the Thor Annual would come out with the climax of the story.

The basis of the idea was that Stan and Jack had in the Thor mythology in the comics the Odinsword. It was a big, honking sword that sat in the middle of Asgard.

Their story was that if it were ever withdrawn from its scabbard, the universe would end. My story was that the nature of the Odinsword had moved into folk legend among the gods. Only Odin really knew what the sword was at that point. The other thing that Jack and Stan had done was create an Eternal Flame burning in Asgard. The

gist of my idea was that the Odinsword, in actual fact, was the blade that Surtur would use to destroy the Nine Worlds when the time came.

The general idea for my original story was that Asgard wakes up one morning and the Odinsword is gone. Odin had guarded the sword, had kept it from Surtur all these millennia. It was not just a sword, but in some way part of Surtur’s essence. Surtur, in the meantime, lusted for the sword and built up spell after spell in Muspelheim, where he lived, until eventually the sword winks out of existence in Asgard and into Surtur’s hand. But the Eternal Flame with which he has to light the sword is not part of Surtur, 45

Previous Page: Page from the Star Slammers graphic novel.

Above: Promotional art from Thor #336 heralding Walter’s new direction.

Star Slammers ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson. Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Right: Surtur plans come together. Page 29 of Thor #345.

Below: Pencils for Surtur’s entry in the Marvel Universe series.

Next Page: There’s a new sheriff in town! Page 25 of Thor #339.

Beta Ray Bill, Surtur ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

so he now has to go to Asgard to light the sword.

Surtur finally reaches Asgard, breaks the rainbow bridge. Much of what’s actually in the confrontation with Surtur, Thor, Odin, and Heimdall in the comic is right from the “Annual” I drew as a student. I was delighted to do the book. I thought I would do my Surtur story. I had to make some adjustments because the Odinsword had been destroyed in Thor #300. I knew more about writing by then, so I didn’t try to write one 13- or 14-episode story. I tried to write shorter chapters that were complete stories, and they would advance the overall plot toward Surtur, which I did with Beta Ray Bill, Malekith the Accursed, and others that I did over that batch of issues.

When Mark gave me the book he really gave me carte blanche.

I think what was going on is the book wasn’t selling so well. How much in danger of cancellation it was, I don’t know. It wasn’t a bad place to be. It’s the kind thing where if the book had not sold and gone nowhere, nobody would have said, “Simonson, what a terrible guy.”

They would have said, “The book was tanking anyway. Nobody could have saved it.” As the book did better, they go, “Wow. Simonson. What a brilliant talent!” [laughter] It was a no lose situation in that regard.

Mark emphasized that he didn’t care what I did with the book.

He thought it should be shaken up. He gave me a piece of paper that had about five or six of his ideas for Thor. I remember none of them now except in one of them Thor died and somebody else found the hammer and became the new Thor. I don’t think I swiped that for Beta Ray Bill literally, but it’s similar in some ways.

The other basic idea was that when I get on books, I try to do some story that’s about the book’s core concerns. Most comics have thematic material that runs through them. I’m probably most familiar with Thor. In Thor, for example, almost anybody who stayed on Thor for any length of time did a Ragnarok story. It’s bound up in Norse mythology. I did it myself twice in the time I was doing the book. I did “Ragnarok and Roll,” a title Howard Chaykin provided me with, which was the Surtur story, and I did “The Midgard Serpent,” which was part of the Ragnarok story. Those are the great themes and they need to be re-done from time to time. They need to be rethought. In a way, I think super-hero comics tell a few simple truths. There’s evil in the world that needs to be fought. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. I think 46

I’ve said elsewhere that I used a horse’s skull for the basis of Bill’s facial design. That’s because I wanted to combine the aspects of death that a skull represents with the beauty of the living horse. When Bill’s own hammer was forged I used a more Norse motif, a war hammer motif, for the design. When Bill and Thor went out to fight their duel without hammers, Odin slightly stacked the deck in Bill’s favor by putting them in a fiery world. Thor’s a Norse god. He’s from the land of ice and snow. He would have been more comfortable in an icy, snowy realm. Bill comes from a fiery place. What Odin’s really doing is hazarding the life of his son to try to find another warrior to stand by him at Ragnarok. I thought that’s the kind of guy Odin was. He was very powerful, but he thought long term. He was always planning. He was really trying, even knowing they were doomed in the long run, to set the odds more in his favor when the Twilight came. He’s willing to gamble in the face of fate. He’s willing to gamble his son’s life.

those themes are bound up in the comic through the mythology. I think that’s why the story eventually comes back. Each book has its own themes and its own identity.

When I did Thor, I thought about what I wanted to do, and I also prefer to do some story that hasn’t been done before if that’s possible. In Thor, I thought it would be fun to do a story in which somebody else picked up the hammer. The very first issue of Thor shows an inscription on Thor’s hammer suggesting that anybody who was worthy could possess the power of Thor. The idea is the inscription on the hammer suggests that somebody besides Thor and Odin could pick it up. Stan and Jack once had Loki pick it up. He had some extra juice from the Norn Queen.

Apparently that just nullified the inscription and he walked around carrying the hammer. At the time I was going “Wait a minute. Does this actually work like that?” I just ignored that. [laughter] My own feeling was that there weren’t any characters in the Marvel Universe who could pick it up or they would have by that time. I thought I needed to invent somebody new to pick up the hammer. That’s where Beta Ray Bill came from. I know existing characters have picked up the hammer since I wrote my story. I knew that writing my story would be letting the genie out of the bottle.

Once you do a story and people like it, somebody will go back and do their own version.

I chose an alien because that seems further away from humanity. He’s got a little humanity in him, but that seems more exotic. I made him look like a monster because in short form comics, symbols are very important. You use symbols to get at meaning.

One of the ways that manifests itself in simple form is that, mostly, bad guys are ugly and good guys are handsome. Except, of course, if they’re bad girls, in which case they’re beautiful but don’t wear a lot of clothes. [laughter] I drew Bill as a monster, because readers would think he was evil. In fact, that was pretty much what happened. When Beta Ray Bill appeared and picked up the hammer, I got a lot of crabby letters. Fans knew the inscription. They knew that only the worthy could pick up the hammer. I didn’t get any letters from people saying, “You’re toying with us. This guy must be worthy.”

Nobody. There may be 85,000 guys out there now who say, “I knew that,” but really, nobody got it.

It turns out Beta Ray Bill really was a noble guy who had gone through hell to become what he was. He served a noble purpose and was a being for whom the hammer was going to be incredibly useful in the defense of his people. I designed him as a monster to mislead the reader. What you want to do many times is play fair with the reader but mislead them at the same time, so when you get where you actually want to go, they’ll be surprised by it, but it won’t seem like a deus ex machina.

47

MM: Where did Beta Ray Bill’s name come from?

Right: One of the most memorable covers of all time—Thor #337.

Below: Pencils for the Beta Ray Bill entry in Marvel Universe.

Next Page: Bill gets a hammer of his own in Thor #339.

Beta Ray Bill, Thor and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

WALTER: A lot of old science fiction.

When aliens and humans meet, everybody can talk because everybody’s carrying universal translators which somehow seem to be able to work under any conditions, which I thought was great. I loved that stuff. But I think there are some words that just wouldn’t translate.

I didn’t know what the machine would do. Would it give you gobbledygook?

I wanted a couple different things for a name for Bill. One is I wanted a common name even though Bill is, as a representative of his own people, not a common guy. He went through hell to become chosen as a gladiator for his people, but he was kind of an everyman. In that regard, I wanted an everyman kind of name. My original idea was to call him Beta Ray Jones. I picked Beta Ray because it has a science-fictiony sound to it. I didn’t go with Jones, because at that time there were too many Joneses in the Marvel Universe. There was Rick Jones, Marvel was doing Indiana Jones, they had Louise Jones as an editor. I don’t know if Bruce Jones was writing for them at that time, but there seemed like a lot of Joneses floating around. I thought one more Jones was one Jones too many. [laughter] I thought Bill was a very common name. Also, it had the advantage of having that Marvel alliteration that so many names had. I just liked Beta Ray Bill.

I figure that whatever Beta Ray Bill’s real name is, it doesn’t come out of the translator in any kind of comprehensible form. It comes out as Beta Ray Bill. Whatever his real name is, that’s not it. It’s something that human vocal chords can’t pronounce.

MM: The cover to Thor #337 has become one of your most recognizable pieces.

WALTER: [laughs] And it’s so simple, too!

MM: What do you think there is about it that caught people’s attention?

WALTER: Maybe I hit on all the right symbols at the right moment. I’m not sure. It’s a very simple cover.

It says in one gesture exactly what the book was about.

At the time I was doing it, I remember being told that Thor had the only logo that Marvel had left from the ’60s that was unchanged. I knew a guy named Alex Jay who was a graphic designer. I talked to him about doing a new logo for Thor. He 48

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did a really nice logo for me based a little on old Nordic letter forms. So I had a picture of Beta Ray Bill smashing the old logo which seemed like a good way to go.

I don’t think I sat there going, “This will be the most recognizable cover I’ll ever do.” That stuff doesn’t happen. You do something and then later on you get the reaction to it.

MM: Did you get any reaction to the Beta Ray Bill/Sif romance?

Above: Lady Sif expresses her admiration for Beta Ray Bill, which leads to more as the series progresses.

Right: 2005 convention sketch.

Next Page Top: Walter used Volstagg’s “talents” to great effect. How would you like it if he sat on you for three issues?

Thor #339, page 10.

Next Page Bottom: Balder and his would-be betrothed, Karnilla.

Pencils for the Marvel Universe series.

Thor and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

WALTER: I did occasionally. I got people who thought it was pretty cool. I got people who were kind of creeped out by it. [laughter] It made sense to me as a storyline. I pursued that for a while. It gave me a place for Thor and Sif and Beta Ray Bill and the other characters to start. They could all have something to do in the comic, and I could interweave their stories and make something bigger out of that than just the individual stories.

MM: One of my favorite bits in your early issues of Thor was his run-in with Clark and Lois. [laughter] WALTER: That’s one of those things that was under the radar when I did it. Obviously Mark knew what was going on there. That was something you could do back then and nobody minded too much. I don’t think you could do it now. I don’t know what inspired it. I just thought it was funny. Thor is Marvel’s Superman in some ways.

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MM: And it made sense because you were giving Thor a secret identity.

WALTER: I gave him a ponytail. The glasses were a tip of the hat and a bit of a parody of the Clark Kent business. I love the idea that you can put on glasses and nobody knows who you are.

MM: You really cut back on the use of archaic language when you were writing Thor. Was that intentional?

WALTER: It was very intentional. Len Wein is like one of three guys I know that actually know how to use thee and thou correctly.

He knew the rules for it. I never quite got them down, I’m embarrassed to admit. But I felt the issues prior to mine, at least a bunch of them, the Old English Shakespearian dialect had gotten out of hand. It had become very difficult to read. I thought too difficult. I like the archaic quality of it. I think it’s appropriate for Thor. The idea there is not that these guys happened to speak Old English because they were around when Shakespeare was around, but rather it’s a way of rendering into English the idea that their own language is an archaic language. I like that symbolic rendering even though I think, as a god, Thor could speak colloquial American without batting an eye.

MM: Aside from Thor, you focused on the other Asgardians.

One I was happy to see you use a lot was Volstagg. Is he a favorite of yours?

WALTER: [laughs] I like all the Warriors Three. I was reading the comics about the time they were introduced. They were introduced in the “Tales of Asgard” Odinsword story. Volstagg, and maybe to a lesser extent Fandral, has great character value. Volstagg has the best character value because he’s such a funny character. He’s obviously a Falstaff character. Even when

you see a lot of him, he’s still fun. Hogun has rarity value. Hogun’s a one note guy, but it’s a great note. You don’t want to overuse Hogun, whereas with Volstagg it might be hard to do that. He’s just such a funny guy. Much of his humor is not that he delivers a lot of snappy one-liners, but that he’s funny as a character.

As I went along in the stories he became a guy I found I could use because he has elements of a buffoon, but something else is going on beneath that. Even in the earlier issues, he was apparently a pretty doughty warrior in his early days, then became overweight and less doughty. He kind of bumbles his way to victory at this point. He seemed to be rife with story possibilities, or scene possibilities. I made use of those as I went along pretty much from the beginning. I had that thing with Agnar, a fast gun who wanted to take on Balder and Balder wasn’t interested in fighting. Volstagg comes along and basically picks Agnar up and sits on him. [laughter] You get a certain amount of physical comedy out of Volstagg because of his nature, but at the same time, it’s not that he’s ineffective. He sounds ineffective, yet when you look at what he actually does, he gets the job done. That’s a nice character bit.

MM: Another character you really focused on in Thor was Balder, who had literally been to Hel and back. What was there about that character that made you explore him more?

WALTER: I think Balder was just a goody two-shoes. He had had an experience that, in the comic book, nobody else had had. I thought there were story possibilities in that. Also, he had a bad girlfriend, or a bad non-girlfriend in Karnilla. I thought it would be fun for him to get his own act together and then maybe help redeem Karnilla to a certain extent. As Thor’s best friend, I thought he’d be a fun character to expand on and learn more about.

MM: You eventually spun Balder out into a mini-series. Was he that popular or did you want to do more with him than you could within the regular Thor title?

WALTER: I think the second choice. I don’t know how popular he was. Marvel was game to do a mini-series. What I did was tell Balder’s story threaded through the Thor book. The idea was you’d read an issue of Thor, then you had to read the first issue of Balder, then you had to go back and read the next issue of Thor, and so on. When the work was reprinted

by Marvel, they didn’t include 51

Right: Cover art to the first issue of the Thor spin-off mini-series Balder the Brave.

Below: Differences are put aside to overcome the greater evil. From Thor #353.

Next Page: Walter’s run on Thor ranged from the deadly serious end of the Executioner to the fanciful Frog Prince of Asgard storyline.

Thor and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

the Balder mini-series, which I thought was too bad because it was part of that story.

I thought it would be fun to examine Karnilla and him a little bit more. I was moving in the direction of giving Balder a new power aside from being a really good swordsman. That was in the fourth issue where he became like the sun. That’s based on the Norse myths where he’s the sun god. He doesn’t exhibit that kind of power, but this is comics. I liked that. In a Norse world I thought it would be cool to have Thor fighting the ice giants, a god of cold, and his best buddy’s the sun. I thought that was a nice pairing.

MM: One of the things I liked about the Surtur saga was all the gods coming together, good, bad, and indifferent.

Loki, for example wants to take over Asgard, but he doesn’t want to serve Surtur.

WALTER: It was a question of finding an agenda for everybody and then putting a story together where all those agendas could be served. I thought that was true of Loki. Loki was a bad guy; Loki wants to rule. But if there’s nothing left, there’s nothing left to rule. In a sense, Surtur wasn’t so much a character as an elemental. He’s the personification of complete destruction. That’s never going to partner up very well with good or evil. Both good and evil want to survive to do their thing.

Surtur does not want to survive. He wants to take everything with him.

Loki could be partners with him for a while, but in the end their agendas were different enough they really could not be served together and they became opponents.

MM: While the Beta Ray Bill and the Thor frog stories are probably the best remembered tales from your run, one that really stood out for me was the Executioner’s sacrifice. I thought that was one of the most powerful moments in your entire run.

WALTER: Me, too. [laughter] The Executioner was a guy I thought had been kind of a minor player. I had a chance to do something with him and I thought it would be a neat story and to some extent redeem the character. He was always kind of a foil for the 52

Enchantress. I thought it would be fun for him to stand on his own two feet and make a few of his own decisions. I built the story in that direction where I could reach that final story of the Executioner.

frogs, because in fairy tales the enchanted prince is always turned into a frog—it’s certainly one of the standard enchantments that happen to princes. [laughter] In Thor #365 there’s a scene where he has to pick up the hammer. That’s a tip of the hat and a bit of a parody of one of my favorite Spider-Man scenes. There’s a great scene in the Ditko/Lee Spider-Man right before the end of their run.

Spider-Man is in Doctor Octopus’ underwater lair as it’s leaking, and this big piece of equipment has slid down on top of him and he’s trapped. There’s a fabulous sequence where Ditko drew Spider-Man straining to lift this thing and he couldn’t do, and he couldn’t do it, and he couldn’t do it. Finally he begins lifting it and there’s this full page splash where he throws this giant cast iron thing off of him. I did a light parody of that scene. There’s some dialogue that’s very similar. That’s where that came from.

One of the things I learned from Stan and Jack was that you could do anything if you kept a straight face. You don’t break faith with the audience. You don’t nudge them in the ribs and say, “Hey look. Isn’t this stupid? Aren’t we amusing?” You just tell the story and you tell it straight. As funny as turning Thor into a frog was, the story itself is hopefully told humorously, but in a very straight fashion.

MM: Where did the Thor frog story come from?

WALTER: Carl Barks. When I’m working on a book regularly, ideas will occur to me that have nothing to do with what I’m doing in the storyline, but I’ll say, “Gee. I’m doing Thor. I could do something with this.” I write those down and keep them in an idea file. One of the ideas I’d had long before that story got done was to do some kind of tip of the hat to Carl Barks, since he was my favorite guy when I was young. I wrote that down. I may have even written “change Thor into a duck.”

Fairy tales, folk tales, legends, and myths are full of transformations. In Norse mythology, Loki puts on a bird suit and flies off as a hawk. I don’t know why at that particular juncture I went, “Oh. Y’know, this idea would work really well right now.” That’s what happened. I got to the point in the storyline where I could make that story work. I decided not to go with ducks. I went for

53

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that I can capture, not a likeness, but a pretty drawing. That still seems to be true. I don’t try to get likenesses. I don’t want to get sued. Note that please. [laughter] I find that makes it easier for me to render up a character like that in a way that’s consistent.

MM: Why did you stop doing the art?

WALTER: I was just tired. Two years of writing, penciling, and inking a book is a lot of work. Sal Buscema had done an earlier issue about Thor’s great-grandfather.

I’d gotten Sal to do it. He did an absolutely lovely job. I really enjoyed working with him, so I was delighted to ask him to get onto Thor regularly.

MM: You brought in the new character of Justice Peace.

MM: Was your look for Sif based on Sigourney Weaver?

WALTER: Oh yeah, absolutely. Only after about the second issue. In the first issue I was trying to draw a Jack Kirby girl inked by Vinnie Colletta. In the first couple of issues she looks kind of nebulous and I didn’t really have a handle on her.

We used to live in New York City and I had drawn Sigourney Weaver when I was doing Alien.

One night when my wife and I went out to a restaurant in the evening, we walked past Sigourney Weaver. She was standing in front of a different restaurant wearing a long red coat that was almost to the ground. Seeing her, I suddenly thought, “Wow. Sif.” I hadn’t thought about it before. After that I used her as the basic model for Sif. I used Debbie Harry as the basic model for Lorelei. Guys I don’t have a problem with, I don’t need models so much. Women, especially pretty women, I find I usually need to find some model to make me feel

WALTER: It was a tip of the hat to “Judge Dredd.” They were great stories. Mick McMahon had drawn a bunch of those— Brian Bolland. These are guys that I knew. I had been over to England and met all these guys. I enjoyed the character. It was hysterically funny and really brutal. It was really black comedy. So I did Justice Peace as a tip of the hat in that direction.

The other person I want to mention from that story is Thug Thatcher. I used him because Danny Fingeroth loved the name. He was a character from the early, early days of Thor. There was a bit of a time warp in the story. Thor and Justice Peace go back in time briefly. They take on Thug Thatcher who ends up lying on a park bench with a newspaper over his face. Somewhere in that job, before everything happens, you can see Thug Thatcher in the background lying on the park bench with the newspaper on his face because of the time loop.

MM: You came back and did layouts for the “Midgard Serpent” issue.

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Previous Page: A climactic moment from Walter’s tribute to Carl Barks. Thor #365, page 29.

Left: Sigourney Weaver became Walter’s inspiration for Sif, as evidenced in this panel from Thor #337.

Below: Likewise, Lorelei was modeled after singer Debbie Harry of Blondie.

At left is Walter’s model sheet. The pencils shown directly below were for Lorelei’s Marvel Universe entry, but were altered for publication.

Thor, Lorelei, Lady Sif ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Cornerbox art for Thor.

Right: That’s one big serpent! Thor takes on the Midgard Serpent in these pencils from Thor #380.

Next Page: These pencils were intended for page 22 of Thor #380, but Walter decided to redraw the page.

Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

WALTER: In actual fact, I penciled the issue. It’s listed as being layouts. What that was is it was an issue I really wanted to draw. I had been working up to it for a while. When I got to it I really wanted to draw it. So I talked to Sal and he was very gracious.

Basically I was taking money out of Sal’s pocket. In the end, the way we worked it out was, I penciled it and Sal inked it, but I took credit for layouts because that meant I got paid a little bit less and Sal got paid a little bit more.

I think there was a $20 difference between pencils and layouts back then.

I wasn’t sure how to do the “Midgard Serpent” story originally. As often happens with the stuff I’m working on, I don’t know why, there’re always problems of scale. The Midgard Serpent is enormous and Thor is tiny by comparison. I thought about it for a long time. I thought about doing something like having subplots going, show a couple pages of fight, then cut away to a subplot, then go back to the fight.

When you cut away like that it implies the passage of time. That way I could make it seem like more was happening. I wanted it to seem longer than one issue but I didn’t think I could sustain it for more than one issue.

Somewhere along in there, John 56

Byrne did a Hulk story that was all splash pages. It eventually came out in Marvel Fanfare, I think after the “Midgard Serpent” issue. I hadn’t seen it at that point, but we’d all heard about it. One day my wife and I were leaving the same restaurant I was going to when I saw Sigourney Weaver, but it was not the same night. As I was walking out of the restaurant, a light bulb went off in my head. Bing! All splash pages. That was the way to go with the “Midgard Serpent” story. We had to walk around three or four blocks before we went home just because I was thinking about this and how it would work. If John hadn’t done the full splash page Hulk issue, I don’t know if I would have thought of it.

I wrote all the captions in this faux Viking poetry. Mainly because when you read poetry, at least in my case, I read it

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Below: Pin-up art for Marvel Fanfare.

Next Page: Rogue gets a chilly reception at the X-Men Mansion.

Thor, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

slower than I read prose. So it was a way of slowing the audience down when there were so few pictures in the comic.

I did all splash pages up to the last page. The last page is four panels. I did that because, as a kid, I had a book about American Indians, Native Americans, which included a bit about the Navajo rug weaving. One of the stories about that—and this was a kids’ book from

the mid-’50s, so I don’t know if it was true—is when the Navajos wove rugs, they always wove an imperfection into the rug.

The idea was that only the gods were perfect and only the gods could make perfect things. You’d expect there would be a mistake in the rug, but you didn’t want to take the chance that you would accidentally create a perfect thing. You’d be doing something reserved for the gods. In this all-splash page issue, I wove my imperfection into it by doing a four-panel page at the very end so it wouldn’t be perfect.

MM: Why did you stop working on the book?

WALTER: Marvel was gradually becoming a different place to work. I found more of my energy seemed to be dealing with office politics and stuff that was going on around Marvel than went into the comic. I didn’t feel that I could direct enough of my creative energy into the book and do the kind of stories I wanted to do and make them as good as I wanted. I had been on the book for three-and-a-half years and thought the time had come to step out.

MM: After all this time, Thor is probably what you’re best known for.

Does that bother you at all? Surprise you?

WALTER: Neither one, really. It’s nice to be best known for something. It may as well be Thor. It was certainly a comic I loved when I was reading Marvel Comics in the ’60s, and I enjoyed working on the book immensely.

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Part 5:

“X” Marks the Spot

MM: During your run on Thor you also drew one of the most reprinted issues of X-Men, issue #17, where Rogue joined. How did that happen?

together really easily. That would turn out to be true whether we were writing the same comic, as in the case of Meltdown, whether I was drawing and she was writing, or whether I was writing and she was editing. Working with her was just a breeze. It was really such a pleasure.

I’d love to do it again sometime.

WALTER: Pretty simply, actually. It was a complete coincidence that was the issue I did. Weezie was editing the X-Men back then. Paul Smith had gotten on the book. As I remember it, Paul could do one issue a month.

Somewhere in there they decided to do a double issue. The problem with that was that was almost two books. I guess the expectation was that Paul would not be able to do that much work in a single month, so they were instantly a month behind and needed a fill-in. Weezie called me to see if I would draw an issue of the X-Men. It was a fill-in in terms of the art. It was not a fillin in terms of the writing. Chris just wrote what would have been the next issue. I did the pencils and Bob Wiacek inked it. That’s exactly what happened. It was just the luck of the draw it happened to be the issue where Rogue quit being a bad girl and became a good girl.

MM: Could you tell me some about creating the Death/Archangel character?

MM: Also during your run on Thor, you started your run on X-Factor. Did that happen because Weezie was writing it?

WALTER: Yeah, I think so. She was writing it and Jackson Guice had gotten off the book. I don’t think there was a regular penciler after Jackson, so the book was open. I don’t know if Weezie asked me or if the editor asked me. In any case, I got tipped as the regular penciler from issue #10 on.

One of the reasons I did it was because Weezie was writing it. I’d worked with her as an editor on Galactica. I watched her write other stuff and watched her as an editor. I really liked what she did and XFactor allowed me to have a chance to work with her as a writer.

MM: How did you two work together on the book?

WALTER: Very easily. We probably talked over plots, but Weezie was the writer and I was the artist. We worked 59

WALTER: When we were doing X-Factor, one of the things that we thought about pretty early on after I’d got on as the penciler—and maybe Weezie’d thought about this before—was that the original X-Men who became X-Factor were very much like the guys they’d been back in the early ’60s. The Beast was a guy who could leap 15 feet into the air and grab hold of a bar.

Angel’s a guy who could fly for an hour at 60 miles an hour.

Iceman could do ice. Jean Grey was telepathic, and Cyclops had his beams. What they seemed to us at that time was somewhat underpowered for where comics had gone. They really seemed out of sync in some ways with where the bad guys were by the mid- to late ’80s. One of the projects we undertook was kind of a reclamation project where we decided to juice up the characters in a way that would make them more powerful on their own terms and therefore more in sync with how we viewed the Marvel Universe at the time.

Some of the characters like Cyclops and Jean Grey, you didn’t have to do anything. In the old days, Cyclops could knock over a toothpick, these days he could knock over a building. In other words, since his was a visual power of that sort, you didn’t actually have to stick his finger in an electric socket and juice him up any more. You could do whatever you wanted to do and that would work. With telepathy and telekinetic powers, Jean Grey was the same way. But we needed something else for the other characters. Archangel’s story was our Angel story where we cut off his wings. We did horrible things to him. He got kidnapped by Apocalypse and came back as this new guy with these techno wings and a new outfit and was much more powerful.

We did that with Iceman. His was in a crossover with Thor.

We did the same sort of thing with the Beast where we turned him back into the furry Beast and he could then be more powerful and faster.

The Angel/Archangel storyline was neat, but it wasn’t isolated in the context of what we were doing with XFactor in general. It was part of this retraining program, if you will, to get these characters upgraded to new levels.

MM: One thing I found interesting for the time—it’s more common now—was you had this huge battle with Apocalypse in issue #25, lots of destruction. Then in #26 you actually had the clean-up.

WALTER: [laughs] You’d have to ask my wife. She was the writer.

It just seemed reasonable. I don’t know what else to say about it, but it seemed like it was a nice follow-up.

Something I will say about those issues is if you go back and look at issues #24, #25 and 60

#26 of X-Factor, the covers all fit together as a triptych. All of the “Fall of the Mutants” covers do. Marvel was going to do a poster of it. Then they decided after we had done it that it wasn’t worth bothering about. Six to eight months later, they were doing cover enhancements like crazy.

We were just a little ahead of the curve on that. I had to get that in here somewhere.

MM: What was it like dealing with the mandated crossovers you had here or in any of the other books you worked on?

WALTER: Some of them were okay. Some of them were a pain in the neck. We were all kind of moving that direction. When I was doing Thor, I wrote about the Casket of Ancient Winters. The idea was when it was opened, winter took over the Nine Worlds. Mark Gruenwald sent a memo around saying, “Here’s the deal. It’s going to be winter in the Marvel Universe whatever month that issue’s coming out. If you want

to do something with that, that’s cool. If you don’t, that’s okay, too.”

I think Chris Claremont had the XMen cruising around in Australia, walking around on the beach in their thongs and Speedos and suddenly, it’s freezing. I think Roger Stern found out what I was going to do with the demons attacking New York and he had a whole issue of The Avengers that involved fighting the demons. Those are the two that I remember.

Later, Chris and Weezie got together. Generally, at that time, September selling books didn’t do that well on the newsstand.

The theory about that is that’s the month kids go back to school. They’ve got less money to spend. She and Chris began talking about this.

Chris had an idea for the X-Men and the Morlocks, these characters who were underground in New York.

Chris wanted to cut their number down. He was writing a story where he was going to kill off a bunch of them and leave a handful that would be the Morlocks. Weezie said, “Cool 61

Previous Page Top: Walter penciled and inked the cover of X-Factor #1, but it was reinked by Joe Rubinstein for publication. This version has never been printed in the US. Previous Page Bottom: Apocalypse trading card art.

Left: Walter’s turnaround design for the souped-up Archangel.

Above: The triptych covers for X-Factor #24-26.

Apocalypse, X-Factor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Right: “The Mutant Massacre” line-up.

Below: A light-hearted moment in the aftermath of “The Mutant Massacre.” Page 20 pencils from X-Factor #27.

Next Page: X-Men both new and old face off against Madelyne Pryor, the Goblin Queen, all thanks to a love triangle.

New Mutants, Power Pack, Thor, X-Factor, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

idea, but that sounds like too nifty an idea just to throw away in one issue of X-Men.” “The Mutant Massacre” as this big crossover grew out of that. The notion was that it would be coming out in September. They were going to try and fight the drop of sales in that month and see if we could make something work. In the end, we did a crossover that involved the X-Men, New Mutants, X-Factor, Thor, and Power Pack, which were the books the three of us were all involved with. The books sold really well. The next year there was a mandated crossover, which became “The Fall of the Mutants.” It wasn’t mandated that it was “Fall of the Mutants,” it was mandated that there would be a crossover in that same month or two. That’s kind of where the massive crossover thing began.

The first one we did really grew organically out of the stories that Chris and Weezie were telling, and to a much lesser extent, the stories I was telling. But we were able to build it into that stuff. I was only on for two more crossovers: There was “The Fall of the Mutants” the next year, and “Inferno” the year after. They were mandated and they were a little more difficult to arrange, because we didn’t have storylines that we had naturally drawn together.

MM: Did you guys get any grief over killing Madelyne?

WALTER: I still see on the Web that people are crabby about that. But on the Web somebody’s crabby about everything. [laughter] Madelyne was really there because she was Chris’ substitute for Jean Grey. Essentially, the editorial edict was that you couldn’t use Jean Grey after she was killed in X-Men #137. You couldn’t bring her back. Chris invented a Jean Grey lookalike, so he had the character 62

and maybe earlier, Weezie and Chris decided to work out the whole Madelyne Pryor/Scott Summers conundrum. One of the problems editorially was that when XFactor was created, it was mandated that Madelyne Pryor and the kid would stay in the X-Men book and Scott Summers would stay in the X-Factor book. You had a situation that didn’t have anything to do with the stories.

A guy who had been a happily married man, whose old girlfriend came back, dumped his wife, ran off with his old girlfriend, and then never went to see his wife, didn’t try to get a divorce. We couldn’t do anything with that. So we did some stuff in XFactor where we made it appear that Scott believed Madelyne had died. That was because we couldn’t touch Madelyne.

back in a form that was not Jean Grey, but it really was Jean Grey. Eventually, when X-Factor got started, lo and behold, the real Jean Grey came back as she was never supposed to. Suddenly you had Jean Grey and the Jean Grey lookalike. It led to a lot of complications.

It also turned out to be remarkably fertile ground for stories. One of the things that happened was Cyclops, who was this straight arrow character, suddenly dumped his wife and kid and ran back to Jean Grey in the first issue of X-Factor. It really made no sense for what the character had been, but it made a lot of stories trying to figure out what that meant for the character. He became a much more complicated character after that.

I think from the time I was on the book, 63

Right: X-Factor #39 cover art.

Below: Wolverine sketch used as a Marvel give-away for an annual ABA gathering.

Next Page: Now that’s a gun! Cover detail from Fantastic Four #342.

Fantastic Four, Wolverine, XFactor, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

That’s where the “Inferno” story eventually came from.

It was also a mandated crossover, but by that time Weezie and Chris were heading in a direction to try and resolve the Maddie Pryor business and did so in the context of the existing characters.

MM: You also did some other mutant work with Weezie on Meltdown, which was a bit more adult than the other work you’ve done. Was that intentional?

WALTER: We were doing it for Epic, so we had a little more room.

Meltdown came about because Kent Williams and Jon J Muth, who are friends and painters and storytellers, wanted to do a story together. J was a big fan of Havok; Kent was a big fan of Wolverine. They came to us and asked us if we would write them a Havok/Wolverine story. We went to Marvel and got permission to do it. One thing got added by the artists. Kent had to do a scene where Wolverine came up behind a guy and clocks him. Kent had Wolverine come up behind him and pop his claws right through the back of the guy’s head. We didn’t ask for that. We thought it was pretty cool, but we didn’t actually ask for that. It gave the book a different tone.

MM: Who did what as far as the writing went?

WALTER: We probably couldn’t sort it out now. Weezie’s probably better at character than I am and I’m probably better at snappy patter. What literally happened during that book was one of us would be writing on the computer until you just couldn’t type anymore. You’d say, “Okay, I’m done,” and you’d get up and walk away. The other person would sit down, read over the stuff, and start typing. By the end, the work the two of us did was so locked together I couldn’t even tell you who did what. Even in the plotting stage we were going back and forth and talking about this and talking about that, trying to figure stuff out. It really was the two of us working as one person.

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Part 6:

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

MM: Also in ’89 you began working on Fantastic Four.

You started out only writing that. Had you always intended to draw that as well?

advance. I got to issue #300, where I was going to do a new team, and I was told right about then, “Oh, by the way, we’re putting Reed and Sue back in the FF. You can use them for an issue, and that’s it.” End of story.

I was pretty annoyed. I’d been working up storylines with permission for months, and watched it be eviscerated. So I thought, “This just isn’t working out. Whatever you have to have to write this book, I don’t have it. I don’t know if I’m not flexible enough or if the conditions have changed, but I simply can’t write stories like this.” So I got off The Avengers with issue #300 having just put a new team together. I had a whole bunch of stories lined up to do. About five seconds after I quit, I was offered Fantastic Four, because Steve had left the title. The editorial powers that be had decided that the Fantastic Four should be Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben. I think it was Ralph Macchio who offered me the FF. Ironically, I had all these stories lined up for Avengers. They were stories that, among other things, involved Reed and Sue. I just pulled the stories over to the Fantastic Four. For the first story arc, a lot of which would have been in The Avengers, I borrowed Thor and Iron Man. Because it was a guest-star situation, unlike The Avengers, I got to use some of the original Avengers in this story the way I couldn’t have used them in The Avengers itself. I did

WALTER: Yes. What happened was I had been the writer of The Avengers. I wrote eleven issues of The Avengers, but I had a problem. The problem was Marvel had reached an editorial position where if characters were in other books, you had to take into account what was happening in the other books. From my days on Thor, I kinda like having a long-range story idea. I write shorter stories but I’ll be heading for some goal.

What happened with The Avengers was I found very quickly that I kept having to alter my stories in the midst of writing them. I’d have an issue out, be writing a new plot, and they’d say, “Oh, by the way, next issue Thor’s out in space.

You can’t use him.”

The breaking point came because I put Reed and Sue in The Avengers. Steve Englehart had been writing the FF for some time. He wrote Reed and Sue out of the FF. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to have these guys in the Avengers?”

You’ve got Captain America and Reed, both accustomed to the habit of command. You’ve got some interesting character interactions.

I got permission to do this six months in 65

my initial story with Galactus and the Dreaming Celestial. Then I just blew Thor and Iron Man off the time sled.

They presumably went right back to Earth, because they were in their own books the next month. Then I was off and running with the Fantastic Four.

MM: You talked before about not wanting to bring back Galactus for the 43rd time unless you could do something different with him. You did definitely do something different with him by having him eat the universe.

Above: Iron Man and Thor drop in to say hi.

Panel from Fantastic Four #337.

Right: Not long before he took over Fantastic Four, Walter was able to warm up on Galactus in this cover to Silver Surfer #10.

Next Page: The Thing kicks some Jurassic in FF #345.

Fantastic Four, Eternity, Galactus, Iron Man, Silver Surfer, Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

WALTER: He was doing what he was built to do—eat everything. [laughter] It gave me a shot at that. It also gave me a shot to do something that hadn’t been done before, which was use the Ultimate Nullifier. It was a device from the original Galactus story. I think it had been mentioned a couple of times, but I don’t think it had ever been used before.

The FF are in an alternate universe where Galactus is devouring the entire universe and it turns out that the Ultimate Nullifier is Galactus’ last failsafe against 66

destroying everything. He sends them back to get it. They get it from his headquarters, bring it back to him, and he uses it and destroys everything in that universe, but not every universe everywhere else. Reed and the crew get out just in time.

When they use the Nullifier, stuff just gets white. I have a big circle expanding with nothing in it until finally a double page spread of nothing except down in the corner is the time sled racing away trying to get out of the boundary of the universe before it all disappears. Two things about that. One is that on the back of one of those pages was an ad for the Dick Tracy movie with Warren Beatty which was all black, so it shows through this blank page beautifully. It’s like, “Hi! We’re racing away from a giant

fan, but in fact I’ve very rarely drawn dinosaurs in the comics I’ve done. What that story was, aside from being a treat to draw dinosaurs, is that when I was a kid I belonged to the Weekly Reader Book Club. One of the books I read back then was called Dangerous Island.

Essentially, three little kids on a raft get washed out to sea by accident. After drifting for a time, they end up on a little island. One morning they wake up and they discover the island is sinking back into the ocean. It was very scary. I loved the book and when I did the FF I thought of that book and the sinking island, or in this case the time-displaced island. That’s what that was inspired by.

picture of Dick Tracy.” [laughter] The other thing is that Marvel reprinted the story a few years ago in some paperback and they dropped the extra page, which I have to say I was very annoyed about. It’s a doublepage spread. I know there’s nothing there. That’s the storytelling decision to make that sequence more powerful. Half a space of nothing is not as effective.

MM: You had a lot of fun playing with time in your run on Fantastic Four. Are time travel stories things you’re interested in?

WALTER: I always loved time travel stories. I love The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells. When I was a kid I read a book called Twists in Time, by Murray Leinster. It’s six short stories that are probably the first time stories I ever read. The year-and-a-half I was on the Fantastic Four I was able to do a lot of time fiddling. The entire run turns out to be one giant time fiddle in order to get back to where they started.

MM: And you got to draw the Thing fighting a T-rex.

WALTER: What could be better, honestly? [laughter] MM: One of your better known Fantastic Four stories was the one drawn by Arthur Adams.

WALTER: That was fun. We did a three-issue arc that was supposed to buy me some time. In actual fact, I did other stuff and didn’t end up getting any time out of it. [laughter] I talked to Arthur about doing it. We were old pals. He was game to do it.

MM: One of my favorite parts in the time travel story was the dinosaur island with the FF and soldiers.

WALTER: It was great. I’m known for being a dinosaur 67

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MM: Why those four characters?

WALTER: Luck of the draw, in a sense.

When I talked to Arthur about doing it, I asked him what he wanted to do. He said he’d like to draw some of the old Marvel monsters. He’d like to draw the Hulk on a motorcycle. He wanted to draw all the Mole Man stuff.

Somewhere in there, I was down where Carol Kalish used to have her office. She was in charge of direct sales at Marvel. Kurt Busiek was working there at the time. I’d gone down there to talk to Carol. I can’t remember anymore, but I might have had the idea to put Spider-Man in the book. At that time he was a very hot character. At this point, there are two different versions of what happened. Kurt Busiek remembers this a little bit differently. What I remember is we were sitting around and I said I was thinking about doing Spider-Man as a guest-star. Kurt said, “Then you should do all the hot guys. You should do SpiderMan, Ghost Rider, the Punisher, and Wolverine.” Kurt remembers including the Hulk in that and I don’t remember the Hulk being his suggestion. He’ll tell you he said the Hulk, but he’s wrong. [laughter] It was a facetious remark; it was made as

a joke. We all cracked up. I got home and I started thinking like Jon Lovitz on Saturday Night Live. “Yeah, Punisher.

That’s the ticket. Yeah, Spider-Man. That’s the ticket. Yeah.” [laughter] Anyway, I thought that would be kind of fun to do. I called Arthur and ran the idea by him.

Arthur said, “I don’t really want to do the Punisher.” I said, “I don’t care. Who do you want to do instead?” He said, “I want to do the Hulk.” I remember the Hulk coming from Arthur. I said, “Okay, fine. The Hulk.”

MM: After that, you brought back the real Dr. Doom, because robots of him had been running around. You turned Ben back into the Thing and had a big time battle between Reed and Dr. Doom.

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Previous Page: The Thing versus T-rex! FF #346, page 9.

Above: Splash page from FF #350 in partially inked and fully inked forms.

Dr. Doom, Thing ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

WALTER: That’s one of my favorite issues of any that I’ve done. The business with Doom and the Doombots—when John Byrne had been doing the book he had suggested that some of Doom’s appearances were robots. It was John’s way of saying, “If there’s some appearance you don’t like, it was a robot.”

By the time I was doing the book, Doom was out.

He’d been exiled from Latveria. Kristoff, his protégé, was running Latveria and Doom was walking around holding his hat in his hand looking for handouts. Honest to God, there’s not a chance in hell Dr. Doom’s going to be walking around with his hand out going, “Please help me get back to Latveria.” He would go back and he would kick Kristoff’s ass. That’s all that would have happened.

So I brought Doom back and gave him a new suit of armor. He took care of Kristoff in four seconds and then turned his attention to the Fantastic Four. It was never my intention to negate every appearance of Dr. Doom from “The Battle of the Baxter Building” on. I’ve seen that suggestion made. However, I did a much worse thing for many readers, which is I left the reader to figure out which appearances were true and which ones weren’t. As far was my story was concerned, I didn’t care what was true and what wasn’t.

You have to decide. My own feeling is that everything Stan and Jack did was the real Dr. Doom.

After that, it’s up for grabs.

The issue where Reed and Doom battle was inspired by two things: Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness, and the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. Zelazny has a passage where two entities are fighting through time in a ruined city, which was probably ruined by their combat. They fight by jumping back and forth in time. I thought that was a marvelous image. I decided a fight in time between Reed Richards and Dr. Doom would be a very different fight for them to engage in. That was where that came from. The actual mechanics where you have to jump from page to page through the book is based on the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. You’d read to the end of a page and have to go through Door A or Door B. If it’s Door A you turn to page 57, if it’s Door B you turn to page 83.

That’s how I thought of an idea to work out the time fight.

WALTER: Yes, the Time Variance Authority. The name comes from the Tennessee Valley Authority which was a Depression-era project in the Tennessee River to bring cheaper electricity to rural areas. I always liked the name TVA, so when I had a chance to do an organization that ran time, I thought the Time Variance Authority, the TVA, was a good place to go.

I was also doing a bit of a satire of where I thought Marvel was moving at the time. They were becoming more corporate, more of an organization. I made an organization, the TVA, which presumably looks after time. They themselves were in some

MM: You then introduced the TVA. 70

kind of null time zone. They had oodles and oodles of desk jockeys. Each one of them was presumably monitoring a particular timeline. There were no CEOs. There’s no upper management. The highest you ever saw was middle management. I used Mark Gruenwald as my middle management guy. Mark was delighted. It was left rather nebulous as to whether these guys in fact had anything at all to do with monitoring time. The TVA was just this giant corporation and you were never quite sure what it did except exist.

MM: You also brought back Justice Peace for this story.

WALTER: Since he was a time patrol guy, he seemed like part of the enforcement division or whatever the heck he was. It gave me a chance to draw him. I designed him, but I didn’t draw him except for on the covers when I was doing Thor.

MM: Speaking of time, the next project you worked on was the RoboCop/Terminator book.

WALTER: When I got off the Fantastic Four, I started looking for work outside of Marvel. I had worked at Marvel for 17 years and decided the time had come to look around a bit. Frank Miller called me up. He had this project at Dark Horse. It was serendipity. I couldn’t have asked for him to call me at a better time.

MM: The time stuff in that was rather interesting.

WALTER: That was Frank. I was just the artist on that. I loved doing it. I thought Frank did a great job with the time stuff. The idea that time acts as a wave, you make a change and it waves its way along the timeline. If you can get in front of or behind the wave you can still do something. It gives you a limited amount of time and some drama in which to get stuff done.

MM: You mentioned before that you wished Cyborg wasn’t quite so detailed. Did you run into that with RoboCop or Terminator as well?

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Previous Page: Often, Walter will make structure drawings before penciling.

Left: While Walter drew Justice Peace in the pages of Fantastic Four, he didn’t draw his creation the first time around in Thor. But he did send Thor’s then-penciler Sal Buscema a model sheet of the character.

Below: RoboCop Vs. the Terminator #1 cover art.

Dr. Doom, Justice Peace, Thing ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. RoboCop ™ and ©2006 Orion Pictures Corp. Terminator ™ and ©2006 Sony Pictures.

black-&-white artist. I’d seen a series he did called The Horizon Seekers. He had these army ant-type aliens. There were a billion of them marching across the landscape. I got a look at the originals and they had all these paste up and stats of all these figures. It worked out great. I borrowed that idea for that particular page.

WALTER: I did, but I was able to nail down some good reference thanks to a couple of friends of mine. John Byrne and Arthur Adams had models of the characters. I borrowed these large models from Arthur and John and kept them through the run of the series. It made it far easier to draw them than if I had only been looking at photographs and trying to decipher them. I bought a couple of the models myself and left them unbuilt. That way I could take the head and move it all around and get a good look at all sorts of angles I couldn’t see when they were built.

MM: After that you did a couple projects with Topps Comics. How did you get involved with them?

WALTER: I think Jim Salicrup called me up. Jim was the editor at the time. They’d gotten some Kirby properties and were doing The Secret City and some other stuff as well. I did a short story. Roy Thomas wrote it based on concepts that Jack created. They were kind of fun to do.

MM: I loved the double-page spread in the final issue with all the zillions of RoboCops and Terminators fighting.

WALTER: That was funny. A lot of that was Xerography. I did not try to draw eight million little Robocops. [laughter] I drew several then Xeroxed and reduced them and made a pattern.

Leo Durañona, who was an artist that worked at Warren when Weezie was there, was a wonderful

MM: You also did Jurassic Park for them.

WALTER: They asked if I’d be interested in writing it. They had Gil Kane penciling and they had George Pérez inking. In Jurassic Park, I did what Roy Thomas did with me years earlier. We had the screenplay and I 72

told Gil the first issue will be from page 1 to page 50. In the first two issues that worked out pretty well. In the third issue we ran into a problem. At about the middle of the comic was that fabulous scene with the Tyrannosaurus rex where it escapes and tries to eat the car and eats the lawyer. Gil got to that scene about the middle of the comic and it occupied the rest of the comic. By the end of the comic we still weren’t finished with the scene. We only had one issue left to finish that scene and tell the rest of the film. For the fourth issue I went through and broke the book down page by page as to what had to happen on each page in order for us to come out on page 22 at the end of the movie. We did. It was a little dense, but it was all there.

MM: Were you asked to be one of the founders of Legend?

WALTER: That’s a little blurry to me. I’ve certainly seen that written down. I don’t think so. I think that I may have talked to Dave Olbrich or Malibu or a couple of the guys that ended up in Bravura before anybody from Legend got ahold of me and asked about it. By the time Legend was around, I felt that I had given my word to go this other direction. That’s as much as I remember. I joined up later when Bravura went away.

MM: What appealed to you about working with Bravura?

WALTER: It’s like having a club house—a virtual clubhouse. I think the same with Legend. You try to establish a brand. It may get noticed more than a book put out by an individual. This was in the wake of Image Comics, which was hugely successful. I don’t think any of us expected that kind of success. We weren’t doing those kinds of comics, but I think we all liked the idea of working shoulder to shoulder with our friends.

MM: You brought back the Star Slammers as your Bravura book.

WALTER: That book was about the Slammers once they’d become a going concern. Maybe even further down the timeline than the art school story I did, although I’m not sure about that. In this book, instead of using 73

Previous Page: A trio of once and future goodies: a page from Jack Kirby’s Secret City Saga #0, the cover to Jurassic Park #2, and RoboCop walking tall.

Above: Preliminary sketch of a Rojas illustration.

Left: Col. Phaedra meets Rensselaer Lustgarten in the first issue of the Star Slammers mini-series.

Captain Glory, Secret City Saga ™ and ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate.

Jurassic Park ™ and ©2006 respective owner. RoboCop ™ and ©2006 Orion Pictures Corp.

three characters or the whole army, I brought it down to one guy, Rojas, and he wasn’t really with the Slammers once the Slammers invasion occurred and they went away. I like that character a lot. I based him visually on my sister-inlaw’s dad, a nifty World War II vet named Ernie Mareske.

MM: One of my favorite characters in the series was Phaedra. Could you talk about her a bit?

Above: Phaedra may be short, but she can take care of herself just fine... except maybe when it comes to Rojas.

Right: Pencils for a Phaedra trading card.

Next Page: Images of past and future for old Rojas.

Star Slammers and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson.

WALTER: I just thought she was fun. A midget courtesan. I still like Rensselaer Lustgarten, who was the little boy telepath. I had some bizarro names. [laughter] I picked Phaedra because of the mythological connotations to a certain extent.

And it was just a cool name.

Not only that, but of all things there was a somewhat opaque Nancy Sinatra song called “Phaedra.” I loved it. I’m guessing somewhere inbetween mythology and Nancy Sinatra is where the name came from. [laughter] I gave her the military rank of colonel, which is a good rank.

You’re high up the food chain but you’re not a general, so you can still get out there and do stuff. Then I gave her a backstory that seemed appropriate. The guys who made her made a joke out of her height, but she was still completely effective. Her height had nothing to do with her abilities and she was pretty kick-ass. [laughter] I enjoyed that she was a fan of old Rojas.

MM: The mini-series finished at Dark Horse and there was quite a gap between the fourth and fifth issues. Were you worried about people forgetting about the book?

WALTER: Oh sure. I always am, but somehow it never seems to matter. After Bravura and Malibu went away—they ran out of gas and then Marvel picked them up and dismantled them—I got the last issue done and signed on with Legend. Dark Horse called it a Star Slammers Special rather than issue #5. I understood that, but it confused some people. I still meet people who go, 74

“Why didn’t you finish that series?”

Since it was coming out so late, I drew a one-page summary of each of the four preceding issues. In theory, you could pick up the special and still have your whole backstory by the time you got to the splash page and read the rest of the comic.

MM: You also did a Dark Horse Presents story that bridged the graphic novel and the mini-series. It also set up the story of Rojas’ missing wife.

WALTER: That’s exactly what happened. It’s a prequel to the miniseries, but it does suggest that when this mission is over there’s something else Rojas wants to do. The mini-series ends in such a way that it would free Rojas up to go do this, which is to try to track down the fate of his missing wife. That was the MacGuffin for the next story I’d like to do with the Slammers.

MM: You’re looking at going back and doing a new Rojas story?

WALTER: I have the plot for a Rojas story in the drawer. I did do one other Rojas story. Bravura put out a Bravura Zero comic filled with four-page ditties by each of us in Bravura. I did a four-page coda to the Star Slammers mini-series that implies another line of stories involving, if not Rojas, then the Slammers and the mind-readers from the original mini-series.

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Star Slammers ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson.

Interlude 3:

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Slammers Gallery

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Star Slammers ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson.

Star Slammers ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson.

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Star Slammers ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson.

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Star Slammers ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson.

Part 7:

Gods and Champions

MM: The next series you worked on was Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse. Did Michael contact you about that or did DC?

MM: I just have to ask: How did it feel to help save the multiverse?

WALTER: I think probably Stuart Moore at DC called up out of the blue and asked if I’d be interested in doing it. I knew Michael’s work and I’d read his books back in the ’60s and ’70s. I’m a big Elric fan, and I’d met him at Upstart some years earlier. I jumped at the chance to work with him and do some new material rather than doing an adaptation of existing work.

MM: Did you work Marvel style on this?

WALTER: That was full script. The way we ended up working, I pretty much had complete freedom to break the stuff down as I saw fit. I had the script so I could make sure that all the words were there and everything read properly.

MM: You did some rather interesting page designs in that book. For example, you had Rose walking down a road and the road became a panel border.

WALTER: Michael’s stuff is pretty high concept and I thought it seemed appropriate. I worked pretty hard to make the page layouts unusual, but I thought they fit the story he was giving me. He was doing three stories at once with three different artists and the “Moonbeams and Roses” story I was doing was in some ways the spaciest. I was trying to reflect that to a certain degree in the way the book was laid out.

MM: The art itself was very complex. Did it take you longer to do than other projects?

WALTER: It took as long as a regular issue and I was only doing eight to twelve pages a month. I could never have done the whole comic in a month with all that stuff in it. I was just barely able to keep afloat with the shorter chunks. The last issue I did all but one page because the stories all collapsed into one thread by the end of it. I did the entire thread where it all came together.

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WALTER: It felt great. Y’know I got a headache when that was done. Playing a game with the gods. It was tough. [laughter] It was really fun. That was a riot when Michael put me in the comic.

All characters

™ and ©2006

Michael Moorco ck.

MM: You did nearly all the covers for Jack Kirby’s Fourth World.

WALTER: Yeah. John Byrne asked me to do the covers for the book. And I said sure. New Gods stuff? I love it.

Right: Cover art for Jack Kirby’s Fourth World #3.

Below: Walter tells the story of Kanto’s origin.

Next Page: Justeen’s first appearance—from Orion #1, and Darkseid and Orion have at it in a two-page spread from Orion #5.

New Gods and all related characters ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

MM: When you’re only the cover artist, what kind of direction do you get about what to do with the covers?

WALTER: It varies as the times, places, and circumstances dictate. I think on that stuff John was far enough ahead we mostly knew what the stories were going to be. I tried to find a good hook in the story, I probably talked to Paul Kupperberg, who was the editor, and I probably talked to John. John may have had some ideas. I don’t remember now. I would do up a sketch from whatever the ideas were, show it to Paul and be off and running.

MM: In Jack Kirby’s Fourth World you did a “Tales of the New Gods” back-up. Was that something John asked you to do?

WALTER: He did a few back-ups himself and we were talking on a regular basis because I was doing the covers. I don’t know now if he asked me to do a Kanto story or if I brought Kanto to him. I like the character Kanto. I thought it would be fun to do a semi-origin story about why this New God was walking around in Renaissance clothes and with Renaissance manners. That gave me a chance to do it.

MM: That led into you doing Orion. You went for the big stuff right away with the Anti-Life Equation and the battle with Darkseid. Did you just want to get that out of the way so you could move onto something else?

WALTER: That’s exactly right. I picked up from the end of John’s run and took care of some story threads. John had some stuff he suggested. I wanted to get the Darkseid/Orion fight out, because once that’s done, then you’re not sure what going to happen next. That’s the condition every comic book reader should be in. You should not know 82

what’s going to happen next.

same motions a million times. I thought having her younger, cuter sister as part of the Thor mix would give me a bit different quality to the stories when she was involved with them rather than just using the Enchantress.

Eventually, when I cleaned Desaad’s clock, then I had Justeen to step in. [laughter]

MM: You added a new character to the New Gods pantheon—Justeen. What can you say about her creation?

WALTER: I borrowed the title of one of the real de Sade’s books. I’ve never read the books, but I used to work in a bookstore in the late ’60s when Grove Press was issuing all that stuff.

So I knew the titles.

Desaad was a character who had been around a long time and I thought Justeen was a little like doing Lorelei in Thor. She served some of the same purposes as Desaad, but you give her a different spin. She obviously has a crush on Darkseid. She’s ruthless in pursuing what she wants, which is to be Darkseid’s righthand girl. You could have her do stuff that Desaad would be doing, but when she’s doing it, it’s new and it’s a little different.

The same’s true with Lorelei. I introduced Lorelei into Thor because the Enchantress had been around for so long and gone through the

MM: Your page layout was a bit more ornate in Orion. Was that a result of doing Multiverse?

WALTER: Some yes, some no. I had some longrange plans for Orion that never came to fruition.

We had two years and I’m delighted, but I had about a five-year plan. Part of that involved bringing back the Old Gods. We were going to find out who the Old Gods were, what they were about. So, especially in the early issues of Orion, I have all these heads in the corners watching.

Those were the Old Gods watching before they would send one of their representatives back to discuss things with Orion. That’s what that was about. It was ornate but it had some story value that was never used in the comic.

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MM: We talked about this a bit with Thor, but it’s ramped up here because everyone on Apokolips has an agenda.

WALTER: Isn’t that the nature of Apokolips? [laughter] It’s really just a creepy place. They’re all jockeying for position and there’s no forgiveness. The New Gods in general is a tougher book than Lee/Kirby’s Thor in part because the characters are tougher. Orion’s a much less user-friendly character than Thor is. Orion in many ways is not a likeable guy. He’s admirable and maybe a tragic figure, but he’s probably not a guy you want to live next to.

Orion’s a difficult character and probably my favorite character in the Fourth World stuff, because he has this dichotomous nature. Born on Apokolips, raised on New Genesis. He’s the son of the Devil, raised in Heaven. That makes him pretty interesting as far as characters go.

MM: You got some grief in the letter page over the Darkseid/Orion battle because there were very few word balloons in that issue. Was that a more difficult issue to draw since it was done without words? And the strips at the top and bottom of the page had a lot going on in them, too.

WALTER: The strips were a pain in the neck. The choreography was challenging to work out, to get stuff to read from panel to panel. There are one or two panels I wouldn’t mind going back and fiddling with even now to try and make a little clearer. The strips at the top and bottom were a pain in the neck, where I showed the audience watching. The top strips are the good guys from New Genesis and the bottom strips are the bad guys from Apokolips. I included a lot of characters in there. I tried to put in every character Jack ever drew in the Fourth World. I also had Jimmy Olsen and the Newsboy Legion running around from strip to strip taking pictures of babes or trying to get pictures of the fight, or whatever it was. That took a while to work out.

MM: You also had some cameos such as Mark Gruenwald.

WALTER: Yeah, Mark was there. Archie Goodwin was there, Jack’s there, I’m there, some people I won’t name are in there. [laughs] MM: And it was here that he became Red Orion.

WALTER: I thought that was just a cool name for the character in general. Once he presumably killed his father and became ruler of Apokolips, he became Red Orion to separate those stories out.

MM: What I found interesting was Orion’s enforced peace.

WALTER: Y’know, when you’ve got something called the Anti-Life Equation, that should probably be your clue that it’s not going to work out very well. [laughter] But Orion so wanted to make things right. He’s been broken himself for so long, he wasn’t aware for a long time of what he was really doing. Eventually with the help of the Black Racer, who turned out to be some other character, he understood what it was that he had done, which was pretty terrible.

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Previous Page: The death (temporarily) of Darkseid (Orion #5, page 20), and a death of sorts for Orion (Orion #11, page 17).

Left: Two-page spread in pencil form from Orion #11.

Below: Orion squares off against death itself!

Or at least a reasonable facsimile. Orion #15, page 22 pencils.

New Gods and all related characters ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

I think you start down certain paths and you just walk down them and don’t really realize how dark it’s getting and what’s happening. Orion wasn’t hip to begin with about what was happening. In the end, he had to face a certain amount of redemption to get back to where he’d been. That’s what those 25 issues were about. They were about the fall, punishment and redemption of Orion. He ended up being a greater threat and more effective than his father had ever been, but in trying to do good things. That was pretty creepy. I liked that.

MM: Then you introduced the Clockwerx character.

WALTER: Yeah. That was really Cain, of course, if you read his backstory.

MM: I know Jack did this too, but you did weave other mythologies in with the New Gods. Clockwerx/Ecruos were Cain and Abel, you brought in the Fenris Wolf. It was fun picking out the mythological things you were drawing from.

WALTER: It was fun. As you probably know Ecruos is Source spelled backwards because it was the Anti-Source.

In some forms of witchcraft, spelling words backwards gives them power or negates other things or whatever.

Not that I’m an expert in witchcraft.

I liked borrowing all that stuff. The Abysmal Plane— a play on the Abyssal Plain on the ocean bottom—which is the place where the big tree grows, is the location of the mythological cosmic axis, which is the World Tree from Norse mythology. The fact that the Ecrous was trying to destroy it reflects the fact that in Norse 85

Right: Orion meets Clockwerx! Orion #16 cover pencils.

Below: While on the Abysmal Plane, Orion comes across statues of Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa among others.

Next Page: Line art for Walter’s Orion pin-up from the DC Universe 3-D Gallery.

New Gods and all related characters ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

mythology there’s a dragon that chews at the roots of the World Tree trying to destroy it. There was a lot of Norse mythology disguised but clearly in the background there.

When they’re on the Abysmal Plane, I tossed in statues of people that had disappeared and were never seen again. One of the statues is Amelia Earhart. I might have put Jimmy Hoffa in there. It was a null zone where stuff could get lost. If you fall through the cracks, this is where you end up.

MM: Something else you did in Orion was the back-up stories. What was the impetus behind them?

WALTER: The Fourth World is my favorite Kirby stuff. I thought that it would be fun to have other guys come in and do back-up stories and they would then get to do the New Gods if they wanted to. The trouble with short stories is they’re almost as much a pain in the neck to do as long stories.

In some ways they’re more difficult. You’ve got to really boil it down and in something like the New Gods, if you’re not that familiar with them, you’ve got a lot of homework to do. It’s not worth doing a lot of homework for a fivepage story. I found, and quickly, I wasn’t sure stories were going to develop that fit the tone of the book. Eventually, I decided to write the stories myself for the most part because I knew what the book was about. I tried to use the back-up stories as an adjunct to the lead story. I got to work

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with some great guys and they did some great work.

MM: After the cosmic adventure in the early issues of Orion, you brought things down to a more personal story, the conflict with Arnicus Wolfram, at the end. Was that intentional?

WALTER: I like to jump around. Context counts for a lot. If you get all big stories, they kinda seem the same after a while. A big story then a small story and then a big story will seem larger once you set back to it. I’d been setting up the Arnicus Wolfram story for a while, so I was really paying off on a backstory I’d been running for a time in the book.

It was Orion back on Earth. He had his eyes put out, which was a terrible thing to do to him. That

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he is like he is. I think one of two things will happen with that story. Either it’ll get ret-conned out of existence, or someone will have him use the Anti-Life Equation. The thing is, he can’t use it. They may have him do it, but the point in having it is to never use it. If he does use it, that’ll be a strategic error of character. It may make a good story but it would be an error of character in my view.

was part of Orion’s self-flagellation where he’s almost letting these things happen to him. He hadn’t really recovered his equilibrium once he had the self-knowledge of what he’d become. The beginning of his recovery was to go through this hell.

MM: I liked the homeless girl in that story.

WALTER: She was fun. Her name was Melissa. The war vet guy, Gene Swift, was named after a friend of mine from high school who was killed in Vietnam. I didn’t make it Vietnam in the comic. I didn’t want to tie the comic to time quite that tightly.

If you re-read the book in 20 years, he can be a Gulf vet.

Another thing about that job: I haven’t done a lot of first person narratives, which this was once Melissa took over the narrative. It was first person from her point of view. Once she begins narrating, I went to a straight grid layout. That issue and the next issue are all six- and eight-panel grids. Occasionally I had to fudge the grids.

She’s a little kid. She’s telling the story as straight forward as little kids tell stories. The design of the issue reflected the nature of the storyteller.

MM: That’s got to be a terrible burden for him.

MM: Then, unfortunately, it ended with #25 with this big bombshell about Mister Miracle having the Anti-Life Equation. [laughter]

WALTER: I just threw them in there. I don’t do that very often. There were some civilians in “Manhunter,” a couple and their young kid in the fifth chapter, “Cathedral Perilous,” and when I did the first issue of Thor I wrote and drew, the couple are walking in the background in Central Park. They show up later at the end of one of the issues. The father and the kid show up and they talk to Mr. & Mrs. Power from Power Pack, and those characters were based by June Brigman on Weezie and me. So we’re trademarked Marvel characters. [laughter]

WALTER: Oh, horrible. I think he will tell Barda what’s going on so she can help carry the burden. It’s never easy. It also seemed to me that it made Scott and Orion more equivalent again. It made Scott more dedicated than Orion.

He was actually able to hold what Orion had held and not be seduced by it. It made him an iron character in a way we had never seen before. I liked that. It made the two of them opposite ends of the spectrum, but brothers in a way they weren’t before.

MM: On a lighter note, I liked the appearance of the frogs from Thor in that issue. [laughter]

WALTER: Yeah, well. That was an idea I had before I began my first issue of Orion. If you ask people who their favorite New God is, most of the time they say Scott Free. I like Scott, too, but really, he’s kind of a dull guy. He’s kind of sweet. He’s got a nice wife. He doesn’t have any conflicts.

The question arises, here’s this guy who was born of Heaven and raised in Hell—to put it mythologically—and yet when he comes out of Hell, he’s a normal guy. Orion’s a guy who was born in Hell and raised in Heaven and look what happened to him. So what’s the score with Scott? The revelation in issue #25 was my answer to why

MM: You’ve obviously been influenced by Jack Kirby.

You’ve worked with a lot of the same characters. This book more than most. What is there about his work that appeals to you so much that you want to revisit it and put your own mark on it?

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WALTER: A couple things are at work there. One is that when I got into comics, that was what was done. There were no creator-owned comics. The field has changed immensely since those days. Now you can get into comics and never touch anybody else’s work.

In Jack’s case, Jack was such a Promethean talent that a grillion characters have his fingerprints on them. He and Stan Lee started Marvel Comics for all intents and purposes. Almost all the major characters that started Marvel, Jack worked on in some way or another, with the exception of Spider-Man. To do a Marvel Comic was to do a character that Jack Kirby had touched somewhere along the way.

When Jack went to DC, I was eagerly awaiting his comics. I bought the first issue of Jimmy Olsen probably the minute it came out. I was completely blown away by it. Of the major characters in comics, the New

Gods were the last guys I hadn’t really done that I was dying to do. Partly it’s because I thought Jack’s stories were so cool. Partly because the runs are so short, eleven issues for the most part, that there’s a lot of unfinished business. It’s not like there are 100 Kirby issues of New Gods as there are 100 Kirby issues of the Fantastic Four. There are many unanswered questions, and those are the best questions to answer, aren’t they?

MM: Speaking of Stan, you had the opportunity to work with him on the Just Imagine... Sandman book. What was it like working with him?

WALTER: Y’know, it was fun. It was like working with a pro. The plot came in, it was a fairly straightforward plot. My only concern was that Sandman didn’t have a lot of powers. I thought we could upgrade that. I had some ideas, I wrote them down.

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Previous Page: Blind Orion preliminary sketch.

Below: In this two-page spread from Orion #2, Walter harkened back to the wild Kirby Koncepts introduced during the King’s run on Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen—such as the new (and cloned) Newsboy Legion and the Whiz Wagon.

Orion, Newsboy Legion ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

I called Stan with the idea of getting his fax number and faxing it to him. He said, “What do you want to do?” I said I was thinking about doing this, this, this and this. He said, “That sounds great!” That was really it.

I was surprised in some ways at how minimal the writing was. I thought it was pretty effective, especially the opening sequence. I don’t know what I expected, maybe a lot of purple prose, but the opening with the astronaut floating in space got a real minimal treatment. That’s one more guy I can put on a résumé along with Wallace Wood: worked with Stan Lee. That’s pretty cool.

MM: You got a chance to work with another of DC’s iconic characters when you wrote Wonder Woman. She seems like a natural for you. Why did it take so long to come around?

WALTER: I never went looking for her, mostly. In this case, Ivan Cohen, who was the editor, came to me and asked if I’d be interested in writing six issues. I couldn’t draw them, as I was working on Elric, as I’m still doing now. Phil Jimenez had been doing the book for a couple of years. Ivan had lined up a new team. Greg Rucka was writing it and Drew Johnson was drawing it. There turned out to be a schedule gap where Phil was getting off the book, and when Greg could start.

Jerry Ordway volunteered to draw it and we got Craig Russell to ink it.

It was odd. Diana had a friend named Trevor from Phil’s issues. It wasn’t clear if they were going to become boyfriend/girlfriend or just friends. I began writing my issues when Phil was probably two or three issues from the end of his run. I wrote Trevor as a little more boyfriend than friend. It turned out at the end of Phil’s issue that he was just a friend. I also knew that Greg was not going to be using Trevor. What that did for me was it put the focus on Trevor as a character in my issues. I hate throwing away characters. I wanted to use him in a way that would make sense—that would be dramatic. And hey, nothing’s more dramatic than death. [laughter] So I decided I’d work out some way to bring Trevor’s story to a conclusion.

I was trying to think about Diana as Wonder Woman and how she’s different from Superman or Batman. One of the things that seems to be different is she’s a collaborative character rather than a go-it-alone type character. She’d rather bring people together than beat the crap out of them and make them do what she wants. That’s why I chose to do a story where Diana’s existence is responsible for the evil that comes into the story and then her existence is responsible for its destruction. She’s a lynchpin. She’s able to put together a coalition to deal with the Shattered God. That story didn’t have the ending you would have gotten if it had been Batman or Superman. But even though she put it all together, she couldn’t save Trevor, because victory often has a high price.

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MM: You worked on the DC Comics Presents story that was a tribute to Julie Schwartz. Did you know Julie?

WALTER: I did. I don’t know if I knew Julie really well, although I probably got to know him better during his retirement. After he retired, they had an office for him at DC until he died. He came in and chatted to people. The last time I saw him he called me into his office and sat me down and showed me all these old photos of his wife and of his friends. All the stuff from back in the ’30s and ’40s. Julie was talking about old times and I was delighted to listen. I was pleased to be able to do one of the stories in DC Comics Presents.

MM: Was that your first time working with the Hawks?

WALTER: I think so. I loved the work Joe Kubert did back in the early ’60s when Julie relaunched the book. I thought Kurt Busiek wrote a really charming Hawkman story. I went back and dug out Joe’s issues, and without trying to become Joe, I drew the long, lanky figures. When I drew Thanagar, I drew some of his buildings. I tried to get that old Hawk feel into that particular story.

MM: Now you’re working on the Hawks again with Hawkgirl with one of your oldest acquaintances in the field, Howard Chaykin.

WALTER: That’s right. One of my old pals with whom I’ve almost never worked.

Mike Carlin talked to me about writing the Hawks. He suggested Howard as the artist. I thought that would be pretty far out. Howard was game to do it, so we became the new team.

MM: You’re also working with Michael Moorcock again on Elric.

WALTER: I have three issues done. I’m a fourth of the way through inking the last issue. I’m hoping in another three weeks to be done with the fourth issue.

MM: You’re working larger than normal on your Elric art. Why is that?

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Previous Page Top: Pencils to Walter’s pinup for Wonder Woman #300.

Previous Page Bottom: Enter, Sandman... as created by Stan Lee with Walter Simonson, that is!

Above: A drawing done as a gift for the late Julius Schwartz.

Left: Walter also drew those lanky, Kubertesque Hawks on the cover of Action Comics #757.

Batman, Hawkman, Hawkwoman, Sandman, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

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WALTER: I’m working roughly twice up on the Elric pages. I’ve never done that before.

I’m doing it because Michael’s writing to me has always been incredibly visual work. When I read it, I see a million pictures. That was true in Multiverse. I could easily have done more pictures in Multiverse. I felt that was going to be true on Elric. Once I read the scripts, I could easily have done each of these 48-page comics as a 96-page comic. I thought if I drew them twice up it would give me a larger stage to play on. Maybe more detail. I thought I would be able to capture the visuals better in Michael’s stuff that I really wanted to get a hold of.

mit a proposal after I finished Elric. [laughter] Honestly, I felt that was a pretty reasonable request.

Previous Page: Pencils for Elric #2.

Below: Elric #1, page 14.

Elric ™ and ©2006 Michael Moorcock.

MM: Once you have Elric done, do you have plans for something else?

WALTER: I do.

I’ve got three different things that are all up in the air waiting for me to finish Elric, and I don’t know where those are going to go. In one case, Dan DiDio at DC expressed interest in a project I’d like to do, but he asked me if I’d sub93

Part 8:

Storytelling and the Creative Process If I’m working for another writer, I put more in than that.

When everything’s traced off, I’ll take tracing paper, put one sheet on each page of the art, tape it at the top with masking tape, and then spot all the copy on the overlay. I indicate where all the word balloons are going to go, about how big they’re going to be, sound effects, titles—anything that has to be lettered. All the word balloons are numbered, all the sound effects. I’ll number those on each piece of tracing paper. And when I’m laying the copy down in that way I’m also making final edits on the copy. Finally, I have the balloons where I want them and I have a finished script.

At that point, I fire the drawings off to John Workman, for the most part. John letters them, which includes the small lettering, all the display lettering, the panel borders, the balloon borders, all that kind of stuff. The lettering is on the board over really loose layouts.

Then I’ll go to pencils. At this stage of the game I have no problem changing some composition if it turns out the balloon placement or sound effects are covering something I have there.

The way I pencil is I get rid of the tracing paper overlay. I put the page back on the lightbox. I put a piece of typewriter paper over a panel with the loose layout of a figure on it, and I’ll start drawing the figure on the typewriter paper; I will draw a structure drawing. Instead of it being a loose layout, I’ll structure out the proportions, the gesture, the head, the body— not in super-tight pencils and not just a skeleton, but it’s all there. It’s all the forms. When that’s done, I reverse it. I put the typewriter paper on the lightbox.

I put the drawing paper

MM: Take me through the process of putting together a page.

WALTER: If I’m working from a plot, the first thing I’ll do is diagram the whole book, which means I draw 22 small boxes on a piece of paper. I label them 1-22. I go through the plot and I start writing simple notes in each of the boxes. It paces the story for me.

When the diagram is done to my satisfaction, I’ll thumbnail the whole book. One page of thumbnails for me is one piece of typewriter paper. For thumbnails, I do no more than stick figures and a sketched-in background. My thumbnails are very light. They create the composition for the panels as well as the page and they establish the storytelling.

If it’s something I’m writing myself, I will write the script from the thumbnails. My feeling is that the more drawing you have on a piece of paper, the less you want to erase it. If a drawing’s going wrong, you have to learn to erase it and get rid of it as early as possible. At the thumbnail stage, I can erase anything. If I’m writing a scene that’s not working in the drawing but the writing’s going well, I may finish writing the scene and then go back and re-lay it out. It doesn’t often happen but I like to keep things as flexible as possible.

After I finish my thumbnails, I Xerox them up and put the Xeroxes on the lightbox. I put a piece of drawing paper over them, usually a 2-ply Bristol. I like to buy my own paper because I like paper I can erase, erase, and erase, and still be able to ink on. I trace everything off on the boards.

I rule out the panel borders. I square everything up. In the panels themselves I may have fewer lines than I put in the thumbnail—just the bare bones of the composition.

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on top of it and I trace over the structural drawing and pencil it as I’m going. The structure drawing gives me the armature I need to build the finished pencil drawing on top of it.

At the same time, I’ve worked out backgrounds and any other details in the drawing the same way. By the time I’m done, I have a lot of small drawings on typewriter paper and 22 pages of pencils with the lettering already there, which means I can go right to inks.

MM: Do you prefer to ink your own work?

WALTER: Generally. I like seeing the stuff as I’ve envisioned it. I’ve often worked with Bob Wiacek, who’s done a wonderful job inking me. I’m happy to have Bob ink it, but I do like inking my own stuff just because it’s fun to see the drawing come up under your hand.

MM: Do you write out the plot differently when you are writing for yourself versus for another artist?

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Previous Page: Cover preliminary sketch for FF #334.

This Page: A page from the Manhunter epilogue, from thumbnail to pencils to inks. Note that the movement in the top tier of panels becomes much more horizontal in the pencils, thereby speeding up the pace of the story.

Fantastic Four ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Manhunter ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Left: The initial thumbnail sketch. Very little detail here, as this stage is primarily to pace the story and block in the figures.

Right: Structure drawing of Songbird. Walter will usually do structure drawings to set the forms of the figures.

Below: While Walter’s pencils show everything that’s needed, he will do much of the drawing in the inking stage, often tweaking things as he goes along.

Notice the change of expression in Songbird’s face.

Star Slammers and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson.

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thing you laid on top of the drawing afterwards.

They were elements you married the drawings to in order to make the whole panel a complete unit.

MM: You’ve done a lot of work with letterer John Workman. What do you like about your collaboration?

WALTER: If I write it for myself I don’t bother breaking it down. In the case of Hawkgirl, Howard likes to have me give him at least a rough guesstimate on page numbers, so I’ll break it down by pages for him.

When he gets it he’s completely free to change stuff around, which he does sometimes, but he has an idea of what I thought about the pacing of the whole thing.

MM: Going all the way back to “Cyrano’s Army,” you do something I find to be unique to your art. On the last page, you have a box bordered by a character’s scream. You use lettering and sound effects as an integral part of the page.

Where did that come from?

WALTER: The bottom line is, I think John’s lettering looks really good on my art. His little letters are beautifully formed and his display lettering draws on both calligraphy and typography, so it has a heavy design element. The pictorial elements of John’s lettering seem to fit what I do hand-in-glove. I use him whenever I possibly can.

MM: You’ve also done some teaching.

WALTER: At the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I taught there for six years

WALTER: It probably came from art school. I took a typography course. It led me to regard type and lettering as one more element of design— something you play with. I saw the word balloons, the lettering, and display lettering as part of the pictorial elements in the drawing itself, not as some97

Left: Walter relaxing at his drawing table.

Below: Preliminary sketch and finished inks for the cover of FF #353.

Notice Walter has tilted the Torch somewhat in the final version for a more powerful image.

Next Page Top: A page from Avengers #300 in its various stages of finish.

Walter left quite a bit of the drawing for the inking stage, particularly the bottom tier of panels.

Star Slammers and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Walter Simonson. Avengers, Human Torch, Loki ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

in the ’90s. I’ve been teaching there for the past three years. I teach a Senior Portfolio class. A lot of them want to get into comics professionally, and they’re trying to put together a portfolio so they can start showing their work.

MM: Have any of your students gone onto a career in comics?

WALTER: Oh, yeah. The first year I taught was ’92. It was a phenomenal year. I had John Paul Leon, Brett Lewis, Kevin McCarthy, Shawn Martinborough. Jerry Ma self-publishes with some other stuff on the side. Ken Knudtsen just did a Wolverine story for Marvel.

MM: He also created My Monkey’s Name is Jennifer.

WALTER: Yeah! A great comic.

MM: Do you think you’ll ever draw a monthly comic again?

WALTER: Y’know, time and circumstance permitting, I would do one.

There’s no reason I wouldn’t. I guess it depends on what it was and if I had the energy. I really like monthly comics. They’re a lot of fun to do.

It’s fun to have that regular feedback. It’s also fun to do continuing characters that you get to live with for a while. I’ve always enjoyed that.

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W. Simonson

Thing ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters., Inc.

Art Gallery

Unused pencils for a cover to a reprint collection of the “Manhunter” strip.

Manhunter ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

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Illustration from a Robert E. Howard The Grey God Passes chapbook.

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Hercules Unbound ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Iron Man ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Dr. Fate ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

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Metal Men ™ and ©2006

DC Comics.

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Metal Men ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Hulk ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Hulk ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Star Wars ™ and ©2006 Lucasfilm Ltd.

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Star Wars ™ and ©2006 Lucasfilm Ltd.

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Storm, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Dazzler, Juggernaut ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

112 Jean Grey ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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X-Factor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Savage Dragon ™ and ©2006 Erik Larsen.

Unused cover for an aborted relaunch of Elementals.

Elementals ™ and ©2006 respective owner.

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Jurassic Park ™ and ©2006 respective owner.

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Batman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

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Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Batman, Supergirl ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

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Bat Lash ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

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Batman, Robin ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Manhunter, Orion ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Prince Valiant ™ and ©2006 King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Enchantress ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

THE MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!

And don’t miss the companion DVDs, showing the artists at work in their studios!

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH GEORGE PÉREZ DVD

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD

Get a PERSONAL TOUR of George’s studio, and watch STEP-BY-STEP as the fan-favorite artist illustrates a special issue of TOP COW’s WITCHBLADE! Also, see George as he sketches for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues—including MARV WOLFMAN and RON MARZ—share their anecdotes and personal insights along the way!

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.

(120-minute Standard Format DVD) $29.95 (Bundled with MODERN MASTERS: GEORGE PÉREZ book) $37.95 ISBN: 9781893905511 • UPC: 182658000011 Diamond Order Code: JUN053276

(90-minute Standard Format DVD) $29.95 (Bundled with MODERN MASTERS: MICHAEL GOLDEN book) $37.95 ISBN: 9781893905771 • UPC: 182658000028 Diamond Order Code: FEB088012

Bundle the matching BOOK & DVD for just $37.95!

Modern Masters: ALAN DAVIS

Modern Masters: GEORGE PÉREZ

Modern Masters: BRUCE TIMM

Modern Masters: KEVIN NOWLAN

Modern Masters: GARCÍA-LÓPEZ

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905191 Diamond Order Code: JAN073903

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905252 Diamond Order Code: JAN073904

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905306 Diamond Order Code: APR042954

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905382 Diamond Order Code: SEP042971

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905443 Diamond Order Code: APR053191

Modern Masters: ARTHUR ADAMS

Modern Masters: JOHN BYRNE

Modern Masters: WALTER SIMONSON

Modern Masters: MIKE WIERINGO

Modern Masters: KEVIN MAGUIRE

by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $4.95

by Jon B. Cooke & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905566 Diamond Order Code: FEB063354

by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $4.95

by Todd DeZago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905658 Diamond Order Code: AUG063626

by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905665 Diamond Order Code: OCT063722

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we’ve been unable to complete our planned volume on Darwyn Cooke as originally scheduled. Please visit www.twomorrows.com for updates as they become available.

Modern Masters: CHARLES VESS

Modern Masters: MICHAEL GOLDEN

Modern Masters: JERRY ORDWAY

Modern Masters: FRANK CHO

Modern Masters: MARK SCHULTZ

by Christopher Irving & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905696 Diamond Order Code: DEC063948

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905740 Diamond Order Code: APR074023

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905795 Diamond Order Code: JUN073926

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781893905849 Diamond Order Code: JUL091086

by Fred Perry & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905856 Diamond Order Code: OCT073846

Modern Masters: MIKE ALLRED

Modern Masters: LEE WEEKS

Modern Masters: JOHN ROMITA JR.

Modern Masters: MIKE PLOOG

Modern Masters: KYLE BAKER

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905863 Diamond Order Code: JAN083937

by Tom Field & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905948 Diamond Order Code: MAR084009

by George Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905955 Diamond Order Code: MAY084166

by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490076 Diamond Order Code: SEP084304

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490083 Diamond Order Code: SEP084305

NEW!

NEW!

Modern Masters: CHRIS SPROUSE

Modern Masters: MARK BUCKINGHAM

Modern Masters: GUY DAVIS

Modern Masters: JEFF SMITH

Modern Masters: FRAZER IRVING

by Todd DeZago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 97801605490137 Diamond Order Code: NOV084298

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490144 Diamond Order Code: NOV090929

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490236 Diamond Order Code: AUG091083

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490243 Diamond Order Code: DEC101098

by Nathan Wilson & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490397

More MODERN MASTERS are coming soon, including RON GARNEY! Check our website for release dates and updates!

OTHER BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

STAN LEE UNIVERSE The ultimate repository of interviews with and mementos about Marvel Comics’ fearless leader!

(176-page trade paperback) $26.95 (192-page hardcover with COLOR) $39.95

CARMINE INFANTINO

SAL BUSCEMA

MATT BAKER

PENCILER, PUBLISHER, PROVOCATEUR

COMICS’ FAST & FURIOUS ARTIST

THE ART OF GLAMOUR

Shines a light on the life and career of the artistic and publishing visionary of DC Comics!

Explores the life and career of one of Marvel Comics’ most recognizable and dependable artists!

Biography of the talented master of 1940s “Good Girl” art, complete with color story reprints!

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95

(176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $26.95

(192-page hardcover with COLOR) $39.95

QUALITY COMPANION

BATCAVE COMPANION

FLASH COMPANION

The first dedicated book about the Golden Age publisher that spawned the modern-day “Freedom Fighters”, Plastic Man, and the Blackhawks!

Unlocks the secrets of Batman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, following the Dark Knight’s progression from 1960s camp to 1970s creature of the night!

Details the publication histories of the four heroes who have individually earned the right to be declared DC Comics' "Fastest Man Alive"!

(256-page trade paperback with COLOR) $31.95

(240-page trade paperback) $26.95

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95

(280-page trade paperback) $34.95

MARVEL COMICS

AGE OF TV HEROES

EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE: INDISPENSABLE EDITION

HOW TO CREATE COMICS

Covers how Stan Lee went from writer to publisher, Jack Kirby left (and returned), Roy Thomas rose as editor, and a new wave of writers and artists came in!

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!

Definitive biography of the Watchmen writer, in a new, expanded edition!

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95

(192-page full-color hardcover) $39.95

Shows step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and art, to printing and distribution!

(240-page trade paperback) $29.95

(108-page trade paperback) $15.95

IN THE 1970s

IMAGE COMICS

THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE An unprecedented look at the company that sold comics in the millions, and their celebrity artists!

FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

FOR A FREE COLOR CATALOG, CALL, WRITE, E-MAIL, OR LOG ONTO www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

WALTER SIMONSON Out of the back pages of Detective Comics came the suprise hit of 1973, “Manhunter,” and its illustrator, Walter Simonson. The series garnered awards and accolades, and the artist quickly became a star sensation. Ten years later he cemented his name among the legends of the comic book field with his epic saga, Thor. From Fantastic Four and X-Factor, to Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars, to Conan and Elric, Simonson can handle any genre with ease, and his stylized, dynamic artwork is an influence on many of today’s top artists. This, along with a grand sense of adventure and powerful storytelling, makes Walter Simonson a true Modern Master.

MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

51495

$14.95 In The US

9 781893 905641

ISBN

1-893905-64-0