The World Of TwoMorrows

Edited by John Morrow & Jon B. Cooke

© Jack Kirby Estate

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THE WORLD OF TWOMORROWS Edited by John Morrow & Jon B. Cooke John & Pamela Morrow Founders & Publishers Design & Production by Jon B. Cooke • Proofreading & Micromanagement by John Morrow Transcribing by Rose Rummel-Eury “Treasure” Cover Art & Colors by Tom McWeeney This Book is Dedicated with Appreciation to The Loyal TwoMorrows Readership Special Thanks to Danny Epperson, Cory Sedlmeier, & Adam Cadwell and to all who helped TwoMorrows along the way, though are not represented in this book ©2020 TwoMorrows Publishing Copyrights & Trademarks

Ant-Man, Avengers, Bucky, Captain Maerica, Captain Mar-Vell, Darkhawk, Dr. Doom, Fantstic Four, Galactus, Green Goblin, Hulk, Human Torch, Ikaris, Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, New Mutants, Red Skull, Sentinels, Silver Surer, Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, Thing, Thor, Toro, Vision, Watcher, Wolverine TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. / Aquaman, Atom, Batman, Big Barda, Blackhawk, Blue Beetle, Darkseid, Demon, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Infinity Man, Justice League of America, Justice Society of America, Kamandi, Kliklak, Legion of Super-Heroes, Mary Marvel, Mr. Miracle, Nemesis, Orion, Shazam, Superman, Swamp Thing, Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics. / Alter Ego character TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas / Battle of the Planets TM & © Tatsunoko Production Co., Ltd. / Captain Action TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC / Captain Victory, Galaxy Green TM & © the Jack Kirby estate / Fighting American TM & © the Joe Simon and Jack Kirby Estates / Prime8, Tekeli-li! TM & © Jon B. Cooke / Skyman TM & © Dark Horse Comics, Inc. / Star*Reach TM & © Mike Friedrich / T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents TM & © Radiant Assets, LLC / Thunderbirds TM & © ITC Entertainment Group Limited / Vampirella TM & © Dynamic Forces, Inc. / Comics Buyer’s Guide TM & © Krause Publications. / Hand of Fire TM & © Charles Hatfield. / Woodplay catalog TM & © Woodplay Inc. / CaptiveAire logo © CaptiveAire. / Xal-Kor TM & © Grass Green. / Mr. Monster TM & © Michael T. Gilbert. / Comicology TM & © Brain Saner Lamken. / Archie characters and MLJ super-heroes TM & © Archie Comics. / Snoopy, The Phantom TM & © King Features. / Savage Dragon TM & © Erik Larsen. / From the Tomb TM & © Peter Normanton.

All pictured publications are © TwoMorrows Publishing, a division of TwoMorrows Inc. The characters shown on each cover are © their respective owners, as indicated on the original publications.

We have attempted to properly credit photographs included in the book, but even if photo credits are unknown, all images are © the respective owners.

Please inform of us omissions, and additional credits will be included in any updated editions of this book.

Alter Ego TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas / Back Issue, RetroFan TM & © Michael Eury & TwoMorrows Publishing / BrickJournal TM & © BrickJournal Media, LLC & TwoMorrows Publishing / Comic Book Artist TM & © Jon B. Cooke / Comic Book Creator TM & © TwoMorrows Publishing & Jon B. Cooke / Draw! TM & © Action Planet, Inc. & TwoMorrows Publishing / American Comic Book Chronicles, Modern Masters, Rough Stuff, Jack Kirby Collector TM & © TwoMorrows Publishing / Write Now! TM & © Danny Fingeroth & TwoMorrows Publishing.

TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 USA www.twomorrows.com • email: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • January 2020 • Printed in China Softcover ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-092-2 Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-093-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editors’ Prefaces................................................................................................................. 6 Introduction by Mark Evanier: “The Morrow ‘Kids’: Too Good Not to Like”.......................... 7 Foreword by Alex Ross: “In Praise of John Morrow”............................................................. 9 Ladies First: Pam Morrow, The Brightest of Two Morrows.................................................. 10 1994: John Morrow’s The Kirby Collector: To Honor the King............................................ 14 1998: Jon B. Cooke’s ‘Kirby Collector for the Other Guys’: Comic Book Artist..................... 54 1999: The Alter Ego Trip of Rascally Roy Thomas................................................................ 84 2000: Jim Amash: “If You Worked in Comics, You Deserve to be Remembered”..............124 2001: The Companion Books—Glen Cadigan’s Five Years of Yesterday..............................138 2001: The Fever Dreams of George Khoury......................................................................142 2001: Mike Manley and the Art of Making Draw! Magazine............................................148 2002: Danny Fingeroth: The (Not So) Secret Origin of Write Now!...................................168 2003: Mark Voger’s Monster Mash and More Pop Culture Fun........................................172 2003: Michael Eury on the Origin of Euryman and the Birth of Back Issue......................178 2003: Eric Nolen-Weathington and His Masterful Time with Modern Masters.................193 2006: Bob McLeod Gets Into the Rough Stuff..................................................................208 2008: Joe Meno on Building his BrickJournal.................................................................215 2009: Pierre Comtois’ Marvel Books: Through the Decades at the House of Ideas...........218 2012: American Comic Book Chronicles: Creating Chronicles with Keith Dallas..............223 2013: Jon B. Cooke’s CBA (Sort of) Returns: Comic Book Creator.....................................233 2018: Michael Eury on RetroFan: The Crazy, Cool Stuff We Grew Up With........................242 TwoMorrows Bibliography: 1994–2019.......................................................................246 Afterword by Paul Levitz: “The Deep Dive of TwoMorrows”..............................................251 Postscript by Jon B. Cooke: “My Yesterdays Today… and TwoMorrows”...........................252 Epilogue by John Morrow: “It All Comes Back to Jack… and Family”..............................254

EDITORS’ PREFACES

All Those Yesterdays of TwoMorrows When Jon B. Cooke started pestering me about doing a 25th Anniversary book, I’d already had my own ideas for one. But, as always happens, when my erstwhile collaborator takes on a project, it ends up far beyond (and better than) what I’d imagined.

This book’s title and stunning cover are great examples. The former sprang from Jon’s clever play on the motto of the 1939 World’s Fair, something I’d never considered. And Tom McWeeney’s cover art? Wowza! The combo was a perfect choice.

So as we began working on it, I saw how much I needed a “Jon B. Cooke” to make sure I didn’t sell my own involvement short in this history of the company I started in 1994. Y’see, I am what can only be described as “pathologically humble.” Even just typing that line makes me worry it sounds arrogant. My vision for this book didn’t have much about me personally in it— Cooke was having none of that, and I’m (dare I say it) humbled by the nice things he got people to recount about me herein.

My modest temperament is perfect for not making much money at publishing—but also for lasting in this business. On any given day, you might find me helping our assistant Eric Nolen-Weathington pack books and magazines to be mailed, logging customer information into our database, unloading pallets of books when the freight truck delivers them, dropping packages off at the post office or FedEx, answering phones and customers’ emails, manning our convention booth (including setup and tear-down), proofreading, fixing errors on our designers’ files, approving proofs from our printer, scanning art for and doing layout on my own magazine, preparing our subscriber mailing lists for our mail house… and mostly loving every minute of it. (Except for paying the bills each month. I hate doing the bills. But as several people in this book point out, I guess I’m pretty good at making sure they get paid on time.)

All our authors and editors have the same “we’re all in this together” mentality. Sure, we love accolades, but we’re in this to make sure our heroes get theirs. That’s why I started a modest, 16-page fanzine about Jack Kirby in 1994, with no idea I’d find my calling as a publisher because of it. This book has been a delightful experience for me, letting contributors refresh my memory of incidents and events that took place so many years ago.

TwoMorrows’ success wasn’t completely accidental—it’s taken a lot of forethought and planning (okay, and a little luck) on my part to stay in business for 25 years, but also an ability to recognize the potential in projects, and those that produce them. I’m glad to finally have this chance to document how TwoMorrows came to be, and credit all those who have helped us last so long.

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— John Morrow

In the pages of the book you’re now reading, I probably share the story no less than three times of how I first learned of the existence of TwoMorrows Publishing and The Jack Kirby Collector—and of the fellow who pens the preface to the left, John Morrow. I enthuse about that incident over and over and over because the memory of an event now 24 years old remains fresh and vivid, and it’s an occurrence that still amazes, as the consequences of that discovery radically changed my life and fortunes.

But, more importantly, the reality of TwoMorrows, its output, and its publisher has had an important impact on the overall world of comics, one that deserves to be explained in detail in this (admittedly self-congratulatory) volume. And, as we just last year marked the 25th anniversary of this small-press publisher, a longevity that’s mighty rare in the current “print is dead” paradigm, TwoMorrows certainly warrants a hearty celebration.

So we’ve put between covers—nicely bound and smartly collected for your perusal—a virtual company anniversary party, a shindig we’re calling The World of TwoMorrows, where many of the outfit’s contributors from over two-and-a-half decades can describe their own backgrounds, lay out their respective achievements at TwoMorrows, and share what the publisher ultimately means to them on a personal level. In this exhaustive effort, we can assure you that we did intend to get every single person who has participated with TwoMorrows and we’re well aware—and chastened—that we missed some and, for those failures, we preemptively send to those not represented herein our regrets.

To gather these recollections, we went about it in a few different ways. Mostly, we asked contributors—fellow editors, authors, columnists, comic strip participants, and many of the people you find listed in the mastheads and contributor credits—to submit a testimonial of whatever length they desired (some went long, some were brief). A few were more comfortable answering questions via email, which were molded together into statements, and the busiest of us agreed to phone interviews conducted by the editors. For our part, your humble party hosts—that’s John and me—interviewed each other, and I confess it’s a little bit of a free-for-all, but I think our chats will prove entertaining.

I was the first to join up as an editor with TwoMorrows after John and Pam started the company, and I’m proud to still be in the family, so to speak, 24+ years later. Little did I imagine the reverberations when, a year shy of a quarter-century ago, I first established my AOL account and typed the words “Jack Kirby” into a search engine, and up popped—yikes! There I go telling that story again! Enough from me. It’s time to start the party!

— Jon B. Cooke

The World of TwoMorrows

INTRODUCTION

The Morrow ‘Kids’: Too Good Not to Like Sometime not in this century, but the one before, the great playwright George S. Kaufman was quoted roughly as follows: “If you want to get revenge on a Broadway producer, convince him there’s an audience out there for revivals of Ibsen.” Much, much later in that same century, I ripped off his line and told someone, “If you want to get revenge on a publisher, convince them there’s an audience out there for books and magazines about comic book history.”

At the time I said it, I was probably right. I am, at least once a decade, twice if I’m lucky. There wasn’t much of an audience back then and there also wasn’t as much comic book history as there is today. TwoMorrows Publishing isn’t the only entity that has proven my joke obsolete, but it’s sure been an important one. I haven’t read the book you’re holding, but I expect to be staggered, as you may already be, by how many great and important publications that pair of Morrows has given us.

I have a vague memory of Roz Kirby—spouse/ protector of Jack and his legacy—phoning me up one day, telling me about this “kid” John who wanted to publish some sort of magazine or newsletter about her late husband. “Kid” was not meant in any negative way. To Roz, anyone younger than she was, was a “kid.”

She said, “I gave him your contact info. See if you can give him a hand in any way.” I agreed but I thought, “Well, this thing won’t last three issues… if he even by some chance gets that far.” That was not one of the two times I was right that decade.

What I’d failed to take into account was the tenacity and professionalism of John and the other Morrow, Pam. They were obviously skilled in graphics and publication

Introduction: Mark Evanier

Below: Mark Evanier (center) stands behind Steve Sherman, Jack and Roz Kirby in this 1980s photo.

design, but it takes a lot more than that to produce a magazine. What it does sometimes take is that great motive, so often present in tales of success: “I don’t care if we lose money on this. I want to do it!”

You need that. You also need skill and the ability to put a publication together and get it off to the printer. And you really need to be able ‘n’ willing to do the zillion and one other things a publisher has to do. They include handling the financial side, dealing with wholesalers and retailers, doing advertising and publicity and, most of all, the selling. Oh God, the selling! John and Pam had no idea that The Jack Kirby Collector would not only succeed, but that it would lead to a little publishing empire.

Nor did they imagine that a goodly part of their lives would soon involve shipping product and/ or driving crates full of it to conventions in faraway towns, setting up the TwoMorrows booth, staffing the TwoMorrows booth, taking down the TwoMorrows booth….

It’s a lot of work. A lot of work.

When I’m at a convention where there’s a TwoMorrows booth, I like to hang out at it. I meet people there who are serious about comics the

Mark Evanier Columnist, TJKC Born: 1952 Residence: Los Angeles, California Vocation: Television writer, comics scripter Favorite Creator: Jack Kirby Seminal Comic Book: Dell Giant #44 (“Around the World with Huckleberry and His Friends”) Mark’s start in comics with the Marvelmania fan club led to a role as Jack Kirby’s assistant in the early ’70s.

Despite his full Hollywood schedule, he has served fandom well ever since—and been especially helpful to TwoMorrows.

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INTRODUCTION way I’m serious about comics—generally less interested in heroes like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and Thor than we are in heroes like Gardner Fox, Steve Ditko, Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Simon and, of course, Jack Kirby. The stories of how men like that (and the occasional woman) created comics are more interesting to me than anything DC or Marvel ever published, even if they are at times less realistic. That story is told throughout most TwoMorrows publications. And let me tell you the main reason I am so grateful for TwoMorrows…

I got into comics in 1970, late enough to be part of a New Generation, but early enough that most of the First Generation was still meetable… and meet them I did, pestering all with question after question.

One thing I found most of them had in common—these folks who got into comics way before I did—was that few, if any, got in to get rich and/or famous. How could you? The field didn’t pay that well. In most cases, it only paid a little better than your immediate alternatives.

And you almost never heard from your fans… or even knew you had any. It wasn’t until the ’70s, when comic book conventions began swelling in size and frequency, that you could go to one, often at the con’s expense, to meet your readers and discover that, by gum, you had some. I remember how moved my dear friend Dan Spiegle was when he attended his first con and found himself surrounded by folks—grown men, in most cases—telling him how much they followed and admired his work.

Some of them were or were on their way to becoming professional artists. They wanted to tell him how he’d been an inspiration and a teacher. Some of them weren’t artists.

They were “just” fans who wanted to thank him for all the fine work and perhaps get beloved issues signed. Some in both categories were offering money for original art or maybe looking to pay for a commission.

Dan was a humble, soft-spoken gentleman who was quite overwhelmed by the attention. And, in his last days, one of the things that brought great joy and a few excited gasps was that there was a book about him.

A book! An actual book!

They don’t write books about your life unless your life has been important. They don’t

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publish retrospectives about your work unless your work has been important. And only a few years before Dan left us, he could hold in his hands a book about his life and his work.

The “someone” who wrote that book was John Coates. The company that published it was TwoMorrows and, as I assume you’ll see elsewhere in this book, they also published books about Dick Giordano and Marie Severin and Herb Trimpe and Kurt Schaffenberger and Don Heck and George Tuska and so many more who made quiet, long-term contributions to the art form. Some of those folks didn’t live to see the books, but their families did, and what they did has been recorded for posterity. And, of course, the creators who didn’t get books (or haven’t yet) have had their careers enshrined in the pages of Alter Ego or Back Issue or Comic Book Artist or other fine TwoMorrows publications.

I really like that.

I really like John and Pam, too. I am not prone to like publishers and many of them, for reasons of incompetence or improbity (or both) give you no possible reason to like them. Even with the able and honest ones, it’s sometimes wise to not confuse a business relationship with a personal one. But John and Pam are just too good to be true, too good not to like.

And that, dear readers, is one of the two things I’m right about this decade. Fortunately, this is a 2020 book and, if you go by the Gregorian calendar, the current decade ends December 31 of this year. So on 1/1/21, I can begin working on being right about a couple of things in the next decade. One will probably be a prediction that TwoMorrows Publishing will continue to grow and thrive and bring us plenty of wonderful, valuable books and magazines.

Now I just need one other to make my quota….

— Mark Evanier

Left: The three collections of Mark Evanier’s “POV” columns published by TwoMorrows, with cartoons by his best friend, Sergio Aragonés. They covered everything from comics’ leading practitioners—including Jack Kirby, Julie Schwartz, and Carl Barks—to convention-going, Mark’s old comic book club, and a diatribe on comic book numbering. No matter how far you go in the professional world, it’s impossible to leave your inner comics fan behind!

The World of TwoMorrows

FOREWORD

Alex Ross: In Praise of John Morrow I am an enormous fan of the work that publisher/ writer/historian/graphic designer John Morrow has dedicated his life to. The many magazines and books of TwoMorrows’ creation are always my favorite things to read. When one naturally becomes fatigued with the comics business status quo, TwoMorrows’ works are the relief we can find, reminding us of what we found inspiring and engaging with the whole art form to begin with.

The greatest historical review has regularly been achieved by Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego, which has always sought to illuminate all of the often-overlooked corners of comics’ formative years and the individuals who made them. It’s been a service to our shared knowledge to continue study and investigation into these areas, and I applaud all of the writers and contributors who keep this effort going.

With the later history of comic books that overlaps to my personal experience as a reader, I dearly adore Michael Eury’s Back Issue magazine, which makes me even more enthusiastic about comics with each issue.

Jon B. Cooke’s longstanding accomplishments of Comic Book Artist and, now, Comic Book Creator have continued to impress as the high standard for the deep-dive form of interview and subject focus.

All of these and more are thanks to the publishing effort of John Morrow and the objectives he has set out to achieve. I don’t know from my small part as a contributor or through any contact I’ve had with John, but my perception of his goals has been that he wishes to make my life better. I find genuine joy by reading the stuff of John’s publishing line. The collective works seem to accentuate the charm that comic book entertainment has already been capable of. The study of the craftspeople who made them and the stories behind the stories are engaging enough, but John’s line directive seems uniquely able to elevate the positive elements, even while critical truths are exposed.

I always find that I leave reading about a subject more interested than less. John, I feel, has made a positive contribution to the universe with the quality of these books.

There is a central connection I feel to John in

Alex Ross: Foreword

his dedication to the memory and analysis of Jack Kirby with the continuing publication of The Jack Kirby Collector.

This cornerstone of his company is a clear work of substance and passion. I have found myself made more of a fan of Kirby than I already was, and I have learned of a seemingly endless amount of characters and artwork that I continue to draw inspiration from. John has balanced the scales of justice by bringing more attention to the labors of this single most creative force of art in popular entertainment that extended beyond comics books. Do I claim too much? Maybe. This is what John Morrow has made of me: a fanatic.

Or at least he’s made me a happier one.

Thank you, John.

— Alex Ross

Above and below: Alex’s incredible cover paintings for Jack Kirby Collector #19 and Back Issue #61 (the latter a treasury-sized beauty).

Both are Ross’ versions of fanfavorite drawings by other artists.

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LADIES FIRST

Pamela Morrow

Co-Publisher, Morrow #1 Born: 1964 Residence: Raleigh, North Carolina Vocation: Graphic designer Seminal Comic Book: Are you kidding? (But I did read Watchmen and Maus) Below: In 1995, not long after The Jack Kirby Collector launched, Pam trained for and placed third in a bodybuilding competition.

You can see why John never talks smack to her, unless it’s about the across-the-state bicycle ride they took, as she recounts here. Yes, that’s “Incredible Hulk” Lou Ferrigno with our own “Little Barda” a week later at Chicago Comic-Con.

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The Brightest of Two Morrows Jon B. Cooke: So, how’d you and John get together to begin with? [laughter] Pamela Morrow: Wink, wink. Is this equivalent to, “What on earth do you see in this guy?” [laughter] I met John in the ’80s, at Auburn University, where we were both studying art. He hung out with a guy I thought was kinda cute and who seemed like someone I would like to get to know better, so he was actually my “in” to getting to this other guy.

As fate would have it, I got to know John better instead. The more time I spent with him, the less appealing the other guy came to be. What struck me most was his sense of humor; he was always making me laugh. John was easy-going, very down-to-earth, not pretentious like so many other guys I had known, and was someone who could always find the bright side in any situation. We both ended up attending a Christmas party where John convinced me to let him drive me home. His car was supposedly just down the street. As it turned out, the car was over a mile away, at his apartment, and by the time we walked there in the freezing cold, I could have walked home myself to my own apartment!

JBC: Well, John’s version is that he’d had a couple of drinks, and since he doesn’t drink very often, he wasn’t thinking that clearly.

Pam: That’s probably true. We laughed a lot along

that cold and blustery hike as he kept trying to convince me the car was just around the next corner. We did finally arrive and he did drive me to my apartment. I invited him in and while we thawed and continued to laugh, it did reach a point I thought he would never leave! Finally, we said good night and decided to meet for lunch the following day at an old Auburn haunt, James Brown’s Family Restaurant, a buffet-style set-up in an old converted funeral home. (Yep, you read that right.)

They had great food! Had comedian Bill Engvall been there, he would have definitely said to me, “… and here’s yer sign.” [laughter] We were pretty much an item from that point on and the rest is history. I couldn’t meet a better guy. He’s an amazing dad, a great husband, with a moral character that can’t be matched. And he still makes me laugh.

JBC: Did his comic book hobby give you any pause about dating him?

Pam: I didn’t think much about the comic book hobby. It was more of an “Isn’t that sweet… ” reaction. Not knowing the impact it would have on my life, kept me from running away screaming, I guess.

He also sold some of those comic books to help us buy our first house, so what’s not to love about comic books?!

JBC: In your early advertising days, where did you envision you’d end up in your careers?

Pam: Wow, I’m not sure I thought that far ahead.

I did think it would always be advertising. I never could have imagined publishing centered around comic books. I had hoped God would continue to bless us with work, which always seemed to just fall out of the sky. We never lacked for business. I feel our work was creative and of excellent quality, and we were recommended constantly by word-ofmouth. Work would start to thin out and before we could really begin to be concerned, a big project would come our way. I do have a theory: When you take care of the world, the world takes care of you.

Back to my hubby being a great guy, he has always given in many ways to those less fortunate or just down on their luck, and it has always come back to our family a hundredfold. It has never failed. I recommend anyone try it. It’s a cosmic boomerang of comic book proportions!

The World of TwoMorrows

JBC: Do you still cringe at how far the quality of typography has declined due to computers?

Pam: Yes, that was a hard one for me. In the old days, we ordered type from the typesetter and pasted it to mechanical boards. I came from an advertising agency that had us cut apart type letter-by-letter with an X-Acto knife—and not just large headline type, but tiny body copy as well.

We had to make sure it was visually balanced black-to-white, and the spacing was just-so. When that went by the wayside and computers took over and letter spacing was extra horrendous, I thought the world was coming to an end! All this type with letter spacing you could “drive a truck through”—how would I fix it?! Once I got off my high horse and realized I could actually kern letters on the computer much faster than by hand with an X-Acto, I calmed down. There was something special about crafting that old type to perfection by hand, though, that never really translated to the computer.

JBC: What do you remember about when he first told you he wanted to do a newsletter about Kirby?

Pam: Again, “Isn’t that sweet… ” comes to mind. [laughter] I had no idea how that little newsletter would change our world. Honestly, my biggest concern at the time was that it be a quality piece, even if it was just a little commemorative newsletter to a handful of Kirby fans. John wanted to fold it in thirds with a postage stamp on it and send it through the mail unprotected, to get ripped and run over by the postman! How could I allow this?!

JBC: What would he do without you? [laughter] Pam: I convinced him to get better quality copies instead of using our rinky-dink office copier, leave it flat, and mail them in 9" x 12" envelopes (because the one thing I did know about comic book geeks is they like their stuff in pristine condition!). We could even make the envelopes cute and copy art on the outside! Does anybody still have one of those awesome envelopes?

Pam Morrow: The Brightest of Two Morrows

JBC: You’d probably be surprised how many readers kept those. Even the one John cluelessly sent out with a Nazi super-villain on it, swastika and all.

The letters you must’ve gotten over that one…

Pam: And so it began. The newsletter got longer and more in-depth and finally became a printed piece going from 8½" x 11" black-&-white, to partial color, to tabloid-size, and finally full-color. It amazes me to this day that there is never a lack of art or information to fill up each issue. Jack Kirby’s body of work is astounding. It’s a mystery how a Kirby Collector comes together—things just seem to come out of nowhere in a kismet kind of way.

Jack seems to have his hand on every issue.

JBC: What do you remember most about that first summer after you had just started the Kirby Collector? In 1995, you went to San Diego, but also to the Dallas Fantasy Fair, and Chicago Comic-Con… Pam: Comic book conventions, oh my! That was a first for me! I did not know what in the world I had stepped into. Who were these grown people dressed up like Halloween in July? 25 years later, I am still taken aback by a lot of things I see at Comic-Con. When friends ask me to describe it, I am often at a loss for words.

I have met many famous comic book artists and writers and inkers at conventions over the years.

They have all been so nice and gracious.

JBC: On your envelope stuffing nights for each

Above: January 16, 1987, will live in infamy, as the day a beautiful young woman unknowingly committed to a life of comic-cons, fanboys, and looking daily at John’s muy macho facial hair.

APPROVED BY THE KIRBY ESTATE This is the publication Kirby fans have been waiting for!

The Jack Kirby Collector is a new 16-page publication by and for collectors of the artistry of the King! It features news of upcoming Kirby projects, reviews of Jack’s work, personal recollections, and plenty of great Kirby art (including rare and unpublished work)! And it’s produced entirely by Kirby fans!

Celebrate the career of the King of comics, Jack Kirby! Send $2.50 to: TwoMorrows, 502 St. Mary’s St., Raleigh, NC 27605.

Above: This first ad for The Jack Kirby Collector ran in an August 1994 issue of Comics Buyer’s Guide. Pam had no idea the effect it would have on her life.

Inset left: A major numbskull move was for TwoMorrows to thoughtlessly feature the Nazi swastika symbol emblazoned on the Red Skull on an early mailing envelope. Readers complained it looked to their postman like they were receiving neo-Nazi literature in the mail!

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Left: Fawcett Comics veteran Marc Swayze, a regular contributor to the FCA section in Alter Ego, generously drew and colored his co-creation Mary Marvel for a very young Lily Morrow!

sights, and finished up with the Golden Gate Bridge. We were already exhausted, but John [Modica] felt we could not leave without walking across the famous bridge. I don’t even recall making it from one end to the other. We were so out of juice.

JBC: And that’s after standing on the hard Comic-Con floor all week! [laughter] Tell me about the long bicycle ride you took.

Pam: I had been an avid exercise enthusiast for the first 15 years we were married and building our business. I saw a flyer at my gym for an event called “Cycle North Carolina.” It was a seven-day bike ride from the mountains to the coast of North Carolina, with over 1,000 riders. My super-fit self at the time thought that sounded really fun, and it would be even more fun if John did it with me! Now, he claims to be allergic to exercise, but somehow I convinced him he needed to do this bike ride with me. We trained for several months in neighborhoods with new issue of TJKC, what did you do while the guys were carrying steep hills around Raleigh, riding as much as 20–30 miles a day to get ready for the ride. We trained rain or shine, as we knew on downstairs? And did that drive you crazy? we would encounter a lot of weather changes on our ride.

Pam: In the early days, when we were mailing Kirby Collectors I remember telling the salesperson at the bike shop what we in those spiffy envelopes with the fun art, we would have the Kirby fans that lived in or near Raleigh over to our house to stuff were trying to do; he could see we were total rookies and must’ve figured we’d never make it. So, instead of long-distance bikes, he the envelopes and have pizza. What a great group of guys: Ed sold us cheaper ones that were just meant for riding around town.

Stelli, Glenn Musial, Pat Varker, Russ Garwood, and the others.

John struggled to go a half-mile the first week we trained, and the I helped out in the beginning, but quickly learned I had no idea most we’d ridden was 30 miles a day by the time the ride began. what anyone was talking about most of the time, and I think my We had no idea if we could actually make it 60–70 miles per day presence put a bit of a damper on guys’ night out. They would for a full week, but we did it! When we got to the end of the ride, never say that, but I finally decided to make myself scarce, sometimes going to the gym or shopping or just upstairs to read one of the organizers asked us, “Did you ride those bikes the entire way?!” Cause he could see they weren’t meant for that kind of a book. It was great fellowship for John and the guys. We so ride. It’s probably why so many senior citizens blew past us going appreciated their help as subscriptions continued to grow. I can up those steep mountain hills! [laughter] imagine Jack smiling down on them and being pleased that he It was an interesting ride in so many unexpected ways. First was responsible for bringing them all together. came the cold snap. It dropped from low 70s fall-like weather to JBC: Who were your favorite readers you’d regularly see at below freezing on the very first morning of the ride. We startComic-Con each year?

Pam: There were so many people that I loved seeing every year, ed at 6 a.m. in the mountains, much of that day being straight readers and professionals who just came by to thank us for what downhill. I remember flying down that mountain, tears freezing we do and to say hello. Comic-Con became like a family reunion to my face. I had never regretted anything more than committing to that ride, and there was no way out short of a heart attack, of sorts. Each July, I would hear about what people had accomwhich I thought I might have. My super-fit self, who had been plished that year, what their families were up to, health issues, working out for 15 years prior, could barely make it the eight new relationships, you name it. If someone was missing that year, it would feel like an empty spot at the table. I loved hearing hours of riding each day. In fact, I had to sit out one full day and take the “sag wagon” (how’s that for a humiliating name?) to stories about encounters with Jack and how he made them all feel. If Jack has a “most meaningful” legacy, it would be the way the hotel in the next town, where we would sleep. All the while, John, who barely got out of his desk chair on a daily basis, powhe made others feel worthy and important and valued. Every. ered through that ride like a champion, every single day! I have Single. Person. Jack knew how to level a playing field where no never wanted to smack him more! [laughter] one was more or less important than anyone else. It still makes But I got my revenge at the end of the ride, when John finally me take pause today, when I hear yet another story. got his first flat tire a mile from the finish line, and a young JBC: Talk about walking across the Golden Gate Bridge… girl had to stop and fix it for him, since he forgot his repair kit.

Pam: You do know a lot about us, Jon! [laughter] One year on [laughter] I know we agree, that ride really changed us both. our West Coast trip to Comic-Con, our good friend John ModDuring the down time on the ride, we talked a lot about life ica, who we had just recently met through TJKC, said, “Come and our future. We had talked about having kids over the to San Francisco, and I’ll show you around.” Well, when John years, but were busy building our business, and frankly, just Modica says he’ll show you around, he means it! We walked enjoying our freedom. But, for some reason, the wide-open and walked and walked. The weather was brisk—freezing to be space, nature, and something bigger than ourselves spoke to exact, in July! For two days, he took us to so many wonderful

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us, and we decided it was time to start a family.

I was about to be 36 and time was running out.

We finished the ride. He never let me forget who the super-fit one was, and who breezed through eight hours of riding a day, for seven straight days.

But that’s okay, because the ride brought clarity and courage to make big life decisions. I quickly became pregnant with Lily and our lives were truly changed forever. She just turned 18—her sister, Hannah Rose, came three years after her. Never underestimate what exercise can do for you!

JBC: Tell about the Star Trek cosplayer on the Comic-Con shuttle bus when you were pregnant.

Pam: Gotta love the Comic-Con shuttle bus!

There’s never a shortage of fun when adults in their favorite character costumes venture onto public transportation. I was seven months pregnant with Lily and we were staying in a hotel pretty far from the convention center. I had to take the shuttle bus to get there. I boarded the bus, as did about 30 more people dressed up for the costume contest day at Comic-Con. There were far more people on the bus than there should have been, and we were crammed in like sardines. When we reached the convention center I got up from my seat with my big protruding belly, and a very large gentleman dressed in a Star Trek suit with a long life-like sword turned around and poked me in the belly! He never apologized or even slowed down. Upon going in the convention center, I was very uncomfortable; something just seemed off. I felt poorly the rest of our stay and when I got home I was found to have a small placental tear that put me on bed rest for the rest of my pregnancy. Lily ended up coming three weeks early and I will always wonder if what happened on the bus that day contributed to the course of events. “On the bright side,” as John would say, her due date was September 11, 2001, a very sad day in our nation’s history, so I have always been thankful her birthday is on a different day.

JBC: Both your daughters have been to San Diego almost every year since birth. What are some of your favorite Comic-Con memories of them being there, or their interactions with comics people?

Pam: I remember when Lily was three, our booth was next door to the Charles Schulz Peanuts Museum booth. Lily got hugs from Snoopy all week and she squealed with delight each day. They asked for our address, and after returning home Lily received a big package in the mail with a box full of Peanuts merchandise and a sweet note from Snoopy. They were such kind and thoughtful people.

I remember John going to the mailbox, and finding a large envelope from Marc Swayze, who

Pam Morrow: The Brightest of Two Morrows

worked for Fawcett Comics in the 1940s, and wrote a regular feature for Alter Ego. He was the co-creator of Mary Marvel, and he sent Lily the sweetest drawing of Mary for her second birthday.

The year after she was born, Murphy Anderson and his wife came by the booth with a teddy bear to give Lily. And Hannah Rose took her first steps in the aisle next to our booth.

Both girls still love going there each summer, but for different reasons. Now it’s to camp out for the Hall H presentations, and they’ve started bringing their friends with us. I got to spend some serious quality time with Hannah Rose, standing in line for several hours to get into The Flash TV show panel a couple of years ago.

JBC: Last question: What is your highest high from your time in publishing?

Pam: There are so many publishing highs, especially when you win awards or are recognized for the long hours and hard work by the heavyweights in the industry. But my favorite moments are when fans talk about the joy our publications bring them.

Readers as well as professionals come by our booth and say they love what we do. Sometimes a reader might be ill, and reading their favorite TwoMorrows publication provides a pleasant distraction, or a particular book or magazine may transport a person back in time and bring them joy. You can’t put a price tag on those things, and if you can contribute to someone’s life in such a way, you can’t go much higher than that.

And if we have contributed in some small way to Jack Kirby getting the credit he deserves, that is certainly a very big high.

Above: Fall 2000, in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the end of a week-long 500-plus mile ride! And they still ride those bikes!

Below: The best things to come from that bike ride was their greatest collaboration: making two more Morrows. Daughters Hannah Rose and Lily are a daily blessing to John and Pam.

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The Kirby Collector : To Honor the King John Morrow

One Morrow’s Early Daze

Jon B. Cooke: Dude, where are you from?

John Morrow: Montgomery, Alabama. I haven’t been back much since I graduated from Auburn University. It was a great school experience, though I can’t say I particularly miss Alabama. My mom Born: 1962 still lives there and my dad did until he died a few Residence: years ago. As time goes by, you don’t go back as Raleigh, often. I have two older brothers, Bob and Paul, in North Carolina Atlanta and a younger sister, Janet, in Birmingham.

Vocation: Publisher, My deep South roots are very strong, which might TwoMorrows Publishing explain why I never heard of The New Gods before Favorite Creator: I saw an ad in The Comics Buyers’ Guide.

Duh! JBC: Is anybody else in your family creative?

Seminal Comic Book: John: My mom is a musician—I guess I got that Kamandi #12 from her. From ninth grade on, I was convinced I John’s lifelong appreciawas going to be a band director. I went to music tion of comic book creator school for two years and realized, “Wow, I can Jack Kirby leads him to make this pitiful amount of money doing someproduce a modest Kirby thing else, and not have the hassles of being fanzine in 1994—and, in a band director.” So I switched majors halfway turn, inadvertently starts a through college, and transferred to Auburn and publishing enterprise. got my art degree. I met my wife Pam—she was recruited right out of college by a large ad agency Right inset: Poster promoting here in North Carolina.

The Jack Kirby Collector, given to Pam graduated a quarter before I did, so I folretailers in 1995, and printed at lowed her here to North Carolina. She helped me the same time as TJKC #6— another financial risk that, early get my foot in the door at the big agency where on, paid off for TwoMorrows. she was working, and I started picking up freelance illustration and design work with them, and our advertising career took off from there. We both hated working for agencies because the pay was horrible and the treatment was usually bad, but it was an amazing learning experience.

Auburn got their first Apple computers the quarter after I graduated, so our school training was all conventional graphic design and advertising skills.

I didn’t know a computer from a telephone back then, and I remember picking up one of my first jobs as a freelance designer for an art director who was out on his own, and had an early Macintosh computer: A Mac SE/30. He said, “You’ve gotta see The Jack Kirby this thing!” It had a tiny black-&-white eight-inch Collector screen, not even grayscale, right? He said, “Look First Issue: 9/7/1994 what this can do!” He showed me how you clicked Editor, The Jack Kirby Collector, Morrow #2

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little dots and you could create perfectly smooth line-art drawings.

Back in those days, we had French curves and Rapidograph pens for doing that by hand. When you tried to draw a precision black line-art logo for somebody, it was painstaking and always frustrating for me. To see what he did on that computer… it was very primitive by today’s standards, but I thought, “This has potential.”

JBC: These were Bézier curves? Vector art?

John: Yes, probably Adobe Illustrator version 1.0.

I could immediately see how this could be a great time-saver. I had no clue it would evolve into what we have today—it’s become our whole lives. Every time I went in there to pick up a job from him, he’d show me a new thing he could do with it, and I remember coming back and talking to Pam about it. Pam hated cutting Rubylith and Amberlith to make color separations. They had grunts at the big agencies who would do that for you, but I had to do it myself as a freelancer. So when I saw this

The World of TwoMorrows

on the computer, I thought, “This has potential to eliminate the need to cut that film.” We used to drop off mechanical boards at the local camera shop to be shot. You’d have to drive over there, leave the artboards, pick them up a day or two later after they had time to shoot them; it was a long process. That was when modems first came into play. What were they, 1200 baud or some incredibly slow thing? I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if one day, I could drop off the art there and they could send it back to me through the telephone like a fax?” I didn’t yet make the connection that one day I’d be sending it both directions, or that I would be able to scan it myself, like I do now.

Computers changed what we do, and now we can’t live without them. But in those pre-computer days, Pam taught me how to hand-kern typeset galleys. You glue it down on a mechanical board and with an X-Acto knife and T-square, you cut a

little trench below and above each line, and then you cut out the whitespace between letters where the typesetter didn’t bump them tight enough, and slide it over in the trench. Spacing the letters more evenly visually makes a better-looking, more professional headline. But that ad agency she worked for took it to the next step. They hand-kerned the tiny body copy when they’d get it back from the typesetter; their mechanical boards had hundreds of X-Acto knife cuts on a single newspaper ad, because they would go through and hand-kern every single letter of the body copy, not just the headline. It was insane, but Pam taught me how to visually look for poorly kerned type. She is a super-detail person. That was eye-opening for me.

1994

I wouldn’t have lasted in their production department, though—I was much more suited for freelance work.

I remember going in for my first freelance job at her agency; I’m right out of school. The art director says, “We need this billboard illustration done; can you do this?” I was doing airbrush at the time and I said, “Sure, no problem.”

It was to be a winter scarf that flowed across the whole billboard, with parts of it hanging off the ends, and it had a Piedmont Airlines logo on the scarf. So I stayed up all night working on this illustration. When I brought it in the next morning, he said, “This is perfect, exactly what we want.” I’m thinking, “Great, I’m gonna get paid!” He saw me sort of just standing there and said, “Okay, send me an invoice and I’ll get it processed.” I said, “Huh? A what? What’s an invoice?”

The guy thankfully took sympathy on me and sat me down, and said, “This is how it works.” They didn’t teach us the practical business end in art school—they just taught us the art end! So he said, “This is what an invoice looks like, and you submit it to me, and you get your money in 30 days.”

“Thirty days?! We have to pay rent next week; what are we going to do for the next 30 days?” But I started getting the hang of it; understanding how it works, reading a lot of books about how the whole advertising industry works for freelancers. So Pam worked full-time for her agency and I worked freelance, and, after two years of that, I was doing most of my freelance work for one small agency that couldn’t afford me anymore. I was doing so much work for them, that it was cheaper for them to hire a full-time person to do what I was doing, but they gave me first dibs on the job. I was stuck: “Well, if

Above: Long before comics, John got hooked on pinball. Here he is, seven years old, with his first machine, at Christmas. Today he owns a commercial one and used his knowledge of the game to write an intro for DC’s In The Days of the Mob collection of Kirby stories.

Below: College graduation from Auburn University led Pam Morrow to a large advertising agency.

1995

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR I lose them, they’re my biggest client… ” so I took the job and stayed there for another year-and-a-half or so, but I really didn’t like working for an agency. It was okay, but freelance was more my thing. So Pam and I built up enough of our own clients with late-night and weekend freelance work, that we were eventually able to quit our jobs and start our own small advertising and graphic design firm.

JBC: Creatively, when you were young, did you draw?

John: Absolutely! I drew all the time. But I was going to be a music major; I was going to be a band director. Drawing was something I would do for fun, and I had no inkling it would end up having any relationship to my career some day.

JBC: What were you drawing when you were a kid?

John: Mostly comic book stuff. That was the pipe dream: be a comic book artist like most comics fans that age dreamed of, right? I had so little clue about what really went on in trying to be a comic book artist. I could draw a super-hero figure, a pin-up figure, but trying to figure out how to tell a story from panel-to-panel and page-to-page and vary the angles and shots to make it interesting? I had no inkling of how to do that.

JBC: It’s amazing how many comic book stories we looked at— the hundreds, maybe thousands of stories—and we didn’t pick up on any of the storytelling; we just took it for granted.

John: We weren’t even aware how they were walking us through the story. “I just like this guy’s work. Oh yeah, this is a fun story to read.” That’s the thing about Kirby: his style was a shorthand thing, never meant to be fine illustration work. The first time I saw a Kirby drawing, I thought, “This guy can’t draw. Where are all the muscles and the fine details?” But when I sat down and actually read my first Kirby comic, I left it going, “Wow, that was a great story!”

With a Neal Adams story, you invariably stop somewhere in it and go, “Look at that! See how he drew that arm?” Or, with Ditko, I got hung up on the way he showed the bottom of the foot, and the weird way he twisted the arms and the wrist. But Kirby kind of flowed because of his storytelling ability; it was smooth and before you knew it, you were done reading one of his stories—and it stuck with you.

So, I drew lots of comic book drawings, and I did sell quite a few. My mom was real supportive of it. There was an annual craft fair at a local park in Montgomery and she said, “Why don’t you set up and sell your drawings?” So I gave it a try. It was something like $10 to rent a booth, and my dad made a backdrop to hang stuff on. I sold $80–100 worth of stuff that weekend,

Above: John’s first super-hero drawing at age 13, following an art lesson from his Aunt Kim. She showed him how to use simple shapes to create the form, and from there he swiped a Jim Mooney Sub-Mariner figure, from Marvel Spotlight #27 [1976]. “My future was definitely not as a comic book artist,” says he.

mostly to parents whose little kids were too young to realize my art wasn’t that great. That was really good money. Of course, I turned right around and spent it on comics…

JBC: How old were you?

John: Around 15. Then I went to Montcon ’77, my first comic con. C.C. Beck was the only guest. It was in downtown Montgomery at the civic center, and I got a table there and set up the same backdrop that I used at the craft festival. I didn’t sell a lot because people there knew how bad I really was, while little kids walking up at a craft show would go, “Wow, super-heroes!”

They put me right next to C.C.’s table. It was just fantastic! He was the nicest guy, and the local paper came and wanted to get his picture in the Sunday edition and he said, “Let’s get my friend John in the picture with me.” So the photo was of C.C. and me in front of my backdrop, with me holding comics I was selling.

JBC: Do you still have that?

John: I do, yeah. Here’s some interesting synchronicity for you.

When they took the picture, it was a color photo. They were just beginning to try to print color in our local paper, and it was the most horribly blurry, out of register print job you’ve ever seen.

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Even so, all my friends at school saw me on the front page of the paper that Sunday.

Here’s the funny part. Paul Hamerlinck knew C.C. Beck, and when Beck died, Paul got possession of all his old files. So Paul is the curator of C.C.’s files.

That’s part of how the whole FCA section in Alter Ego keeps going, because he has C.C.’s archives.

A few years ago, I got a package in the mail from Paul. I opened it up and it’s that picture, with a note that says, “Is this you?” Apparently C.C. asked the photographer for a print of it. So now I’ve got a really nice black-&-white print of C.C. and me, with my long, shaggy hair and my Jack Kirby Captain America #193 T-shirt. It was one of those pivotal moments in life you don’t know is going to play out later… when I was taking that picture that day, I had no clue I’d ever be in comics. You just never know where you’re going to end up in life.

JBC: So, you play the French horn?

John: Yes, and electric bass guitar.

JBC: How old were you when you started in band?

John: Seventh grade, so 12 or 13. My brother Paul played the French horn ahead of me and he only stuck with it in middle school and then quit. We had a French horn sitting around the house and my parents said, “You’re playing the French horn because we’re not going to buy another instrument.”

I stuck with that through college; I was the Band Captain in high school. I got to conduct the band, write arrangements for the jazz band, and learned a lot about music theory in high school. I was the stereotypical band geek. I won the John Phillips Sousa Award, the top award for our school’s music program. I made All-State Band in high school. You go and audition and they pick the best musicians in the state, and then you all go hang out at the University of Alabama for a week, staying in the dorm rooms and playing really difficult music.

JBC: Did you have a mentor or any teacher who was really pivotal in your development?

John: Absolutely­: Mr. Farrell J. Duncombe. He was my high school band director, an African-American man who marched with Dr. King in the Selma March to Montgomery when he was young. He

1997 John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

was very active in the Civil Rights movement and was a huge influence on me. My high school was roughly 50% white and 50% black—a very integrated school. I probably had as many black friends as white friends at school. To be living in Alabama in the ’70s, right after the Civil Rights movement, you would think it would be a horrible, ugly situation— there were still some ugly things, but by that point, the schools were all integrated and it was more or less a non-issue, at least in my age group.

My high school was a little rough. We occasionally had kids who brought guns to school, and lots of fights. But I was in band and kept my nose clean.

Band kids are generally good kids; we all hang together and don’t get in a lot of trouble. It was a lot of fun. I didn’t enjoy high school that much, but I really enjoyed band.

Above: C.C. Beck and John at Montcon ’77, John’s first comiccon. Like Subby on the previous page, his drawings weren’t traced; just swipes done by looking at his favorite comics. Below is a sketch C.C. drew for John that weekend.

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR My band director taught more than just man and had a big influence on me. He’s why music; he taught me about life. The best exI was convinced I would be a band director— ample I can give you: He gave me his car keys he’s a great guy, and I wanted to be like him. one day so I could go get him some lunch. I The Road to Kirby grabbed some band buddies and got in his JBC: When did you discover comics? car and drove off campus to the local fast John: Around 1971. I was nine and my dad, food place to get his lunch. I’m the respectwho smoked a pipe, stopped at a store to able Band Captain who is supposed to be get a can of tobacco, and they had a rack of mature and all. I’m backing the car out of the comics. He said, “Go ahead and pick one restaurant parking lot, and there was a dump out.” I didn’t even know what they were! truck parked next to his car with a big, wide, Among them, I remember seeing what I now heavy duty metal bumper, and all of a sudknow was a Gil Kane cover of Spider-Man den, I hear “Squeeeee-e-e-e” down the side with the Green Goblin [Amazing Spider-Man of my band director’s car. I stopped as fast as I #98]. So what did I pick? A Gold Key issue of could, but it left a huge dent in the side of his Scooby Doo, Where Are You! Scooby was on car and a good four-foot scrape in the paint.

TV, which I guess is why I chose it. I read it I thought, “My life is over.” I had to tell this cover-to-cover three times, then loaned it to guy who I idolized and respected more than the kid down the street. The next day, I found anyone in life, “Hey, about your car…”. it in his backyard, waterlogged, with the cover I got back to school and walked into his missing, and that’s when I learned to never office, and I’m sure I was as white as a ghost. loan out my comics! I don’t really remember I gave him his keys and his lunch, and said, how I got them after that, but the big key “Mr. D., I wrecked your car.” He said, “Shut for me was a trade I made with my buddy up and go back to class.” He thought I was Matt Turner in junior high school. He had a kidding! I said, “No, I’m not kidding.” He big stack he didn’t want, and I had my stack I still didn’t believe me, so we walked out to didn’t want, so we’d trade. the car, and the damage was really ugly. He’s He had this one comic called Kamandi that looking at it and I’m just waiting for the axe showed a guy hanging onto a giant grasshopto fall. He was the greatest guy in the world, per on the cover. I said, “I don’t want that,” but he was tough, and didn’t take crap from and he said, “Well, I don’t want it!” He tossed anyone. If you were talking in class, he would it in my stack, and I couldn’t tell you what else take his conductor’s baton and throw it with was in that batch we traded, but Kamandi got deadly accuracy. He could smack your head pushed to the bottom. When I finally read or your music stand with deadly precision, so Above: A miss and a hit: John passed over everything else in the pile, I pulled it out and you knew he meant business. I’d never been Spidey #98, but hit paydirt with Kamandi #12. said, “I might as well read this ugly thing.” on the receiving end of his wrath before.

When I finished, it was as if clouds had parted and I heard angels He finished looking at the car damage, turned to me, and said, “Okay, just go to class.” I never heard another word about playing trumpets! It was like, “I don’t know what I just read, but, it and he never treated me any differently. That stuck with me in man, that was awesome!” I remember looking at his drawings like some other readers and thinking, “The fingers and knees are all life. I recently looked him up online, not having talked to him in square and all his faces look alike; this guy can’t draw.” But, after years. He was also a Methodist pastor, and now he’s going all over the place preaching at different churches—talking about his I read that story, something just clicked. “I gotta get more of this!

Who is this Jack Kirby guy?” It completely changed me from just days in the Civil Rights movement and his reaction when they blew up the church in downtown Montgomery. He’s a fascinating wanting comics, to wanting specific comics by specific creators.

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JBC: Through the ’70s and ’80s, did you continue to always buy comics, or did you ever grow out of them?

John: I never grew out of comics… well, until I got married. I was crazy about comics. I spent more time digging through the other dealers’ bins looking for stuff at that first convention than I spent at my own table trying to sell my drawings. My buddy Matt and I went to a big convention in Atlanta in 1980. We drove my beat-up 1970 Datsun 510 station wagon there, and had to stop every 60 miles and put more oil in it. On the first stop, I dropped the oil cap on one of the old dry-rotted hoses and it started leaking water. “Oh, crud!” So we grabbed every empty container we could find and filled them with water at a gas station. We’d drive until the temperature gauge got too hot, stop and put water in, drive some more, stop and put water in—because we knew, if I called my dad, he’d say, “That’s it!” It was all we could do to get him to let us drive by ourselves to the convention and back.

We knew he’d come get us and we wouldn’t make it to the con.

Before that, my mom drove us to our first big con, the Atlanta Fantasy Fair. What a guest list they had: Steranko, Marshall Rogers, Howard Chaykin…

Stan Lee was the guest of honor.

JBC: What year?

John: 1978. I finally found the program book online; I wish I still had it. The cover was a fantastic Marshall Rogers updated version of Blackhawk I’d never seen before or since. I don’t know why it never got used. At the time, he was doing all the Detective Comics Batman stuff with Terry Austin.

Seeing him sit there at the table in Atlanta and drawing Batman for people—it would take him 11 seconds to draw Batman, and then he’d spend 45 minutes doing the backgrounds, all the skyscrapers, the tenement buildings, the fire escape, and stuff. He was so meticulously drawing all the architecture, and I stupidly thought, “That’s so backwards. If I were drawing Batman, I wouldn’t be worried about all the buildings.” But he had a background in architecture. It was his thing.

2000 John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

Mike Vosburg was there. He had been doing Starfire, so that was cool. I got my first autograph book; it was a great second convention for me. I thought Steranko was the coolest dude on Earth—walking around in his white jumpsuit. He would gather us fans around and talk about his carnival days, and the stories were riveting and hysterical. We were on the floor laughing! He could tell a story like nobody else.

I remember he ended it by saying, “When you’re older, I’ll tell you about the lady with nine toes.” I never got to hear that story, but maybe some fan out there got to!

Sadly, Matt and I never made it out to the San Diego Con. You don’t drive from Montgomery, Alabama to San Diego when you’re a teenager—you just don’t.

JBC: Not in that car!

John: Every year, we’d try to figure out a way to go to San Diego, but it was always too expensive. We couldn’t fly—I didn’t fly in an airplane until I was in college—so that wasn’t going to happen.

JBC: You were aware of comics fandom?

John: Oh yeah, Comics Buyer’s Guide. The Buyer’s Guide to Comic Fandom, originally.

JBC: How did you first encounter comics fandom?

John: I remember right before Christmas one year, my mom stopped at a bookstore and I was looking around and saw something called the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, with a Don Newton Justice Society cover. It was the fourth edition. “Wow Mom, I want this for Christmas! It shows what my comics are worth… some are worth $2 and I only paid 15¢.” So I got it for Christmas. There was an ad for Alan Light’s The Buyer’s Guide to Comics Fandom and I asked, “Mom, this is the only other thing I want for Christmas; can I get a subscription to this?” So she did it. Getting that in the mail every week was just the best. Did you get it?

JBC: Yes. My brother subscribed and I advertised my fanzine in it.

John: It was so full of stuff. There was the Koch Brothers ad with the headline “We want your

Above: The unused Marshall Rogers redesign for Blackhawk.

Below: John Morrow’s 1970s autograph book includes Rogers, Chaykin, Vosburg, Gil Kane, Steranko, Byrne, Grell, Gulacy, Pérez, Sienkiewicz, Cockrum, Wolfman, Broderick, Claremont, McLeod, Williamson, Eisner, and now Ditko and Kirby!

2001 19

1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR phrased all the news articles from TBG and typed them up and added some drawings, and had my dad Xerox them at his office.

Two weeks later, we had our second meeting, and I did the second and final issue of TCE. It covered how DC had cancelled all those great books we reported on in the first issue, and at that point, only one other guy showed up for the meeting, so we disbanded the club. But that was my first publication.

JBC: So, you were inspired by The Buyer’s Guide?

John: Yeah, absolutely. Krause hadn’t bought it yet, and Don and Maggie Thompson hadn’t taken over from Alan Light.

JBC: Did you see The Comic Reader?

John: I never saw it. I heard it mentioned in The Buyer’s Guide.

I never actually saw a copy of a single real fanzine, I just saw people talk about them in letters and columns in The Buyer’s Guide. To me, The Buyer’s Guide was the only thing out there for the longest time until the whole Direct Market happened. There were short-lived things like Comics Scene or whatever, and all of a sudden a bunch of magazines sprung up out of nowhere, and I money.” That’s where I ordered all my Fourth World back issues. was excited about that. I didn’t know about The Comics Journal They showed up in the mail when I had chicken pox. I was miser- until my college buddy Bill Alger, who was into Will Eisner and Wally Wood and underground stuff, introduced me to it. I was able, just miserable. I heard a knock on the door and answered like, “Wow, they really take this stuff seriously!” In college, I disit, and there was the postman with a big box. He saw the black spots all over me, stepped back, and said, “Whoa, you close the covered Westfield Comics. I was away at school and didn’t have time to go to a comic book shop. Back then, they didn’t have door and I’ll put this down over here, and you can get it when I one in Auburn, Alabama, so we had to drive to LaGrange, Georleave.” It had almost all the Jimmy Olsens in it and Mister Miracles… and that made my horrible chicken pox episode go by so gia to get to the closest one; that was a good 50 minutes away.

So I filled out my subscription form with Westfield Comics and much faster. Sitting down and reading the Fourth World series they sent me my comics every week. That’s really when I started more or less in chronological order was it: I was “Kirby for Life” branching out from mainstream Jack Kirby-type stuff. after that. There was no turning back.

JBC: How far did you branch out?

JBC: Did you have any interest in publications and print?

John: Yeah, well, let’s see: I tried to find this for our book Comic John: Not like you, by any means! You grew up immersed in that Book Implosion because Keith Dallas, the co-author, asked me to stuff. Bill introduced me to a lot of things, including Kurtzman’s work. I had seen the name Will Eisner and had seen the characwrite my memories of 1978’s DC Implosion, where DC brought ter The Spirit, but I had no idea what I was missing until Bill and out all these new books and then cancelled them two months later. At the time, Matt and our mutual friend Ken Hattaway and I did a swap. I loaned him my best Kirby stuff and he loaned me his best Wally Wood and Eisner stuff. We had a great mutuI decided to start a comic book club. I was living with my mom in an apartment complex after my parents divorced, and we got al friendship all throughout art school. He ended up doing a wonderful story in our book Streetwise. He’s a very accomplished permission to use their clubhouse to hold our meeting. We put the word out at our respective schools. I decided I would create commercial illustrator today.

JBC: You didn’t have that “nerd shame” about comics, and a newsletter for the first meeting, and I called it The Comics Explosion. DC had just launched the “DC Explosion” of all those would try to hide it?

John: I didn’t care because I was basically a nerd and I was a new titles, so there was plenty to write about. I wish I still had a band geek. I was never going to hang with the cool kids. The copy. I asked my old friends and they don’t have one. I para-

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2003 The World of TwoMorrows

STEVE SHERMAN ON THE NICEST FOLKS YOU’LL EVER MEET Steve Sherman Born: 1949 Residence: Playa del Rey, California Vocation: Puppeteer, former assistant to Jack Kirby Favorite Creator: Jack Kirby and/or Bob Clampett Seminal Comic Book: The Adventures of the Fly

Shortly after Jack Kirby passed, I received an email from a young fellow by the name of John Morrow. He wanted to know if he could interview me for a new fanzine he was starting called The Jack Kirby Collector. “A little late to the party,” I thought. Fanzines had kind of died out in the ’70s. How wrong I was. Here we are, 25 years later, and John is the Hearst of comicrelated magazines! On top of that, John and his wife Pam are the nicest people you’ll ever meet.

So all the best for another 25!

beautiful girls that I fell in love with were never going to go out with me even if I got the courage up to ask them—which I almost never did, until Pam. College was such a life-changing experience for me. You finally learn who you are in college.

JBC: How far away were you from home?

John: Originally for music school, I was at the University of Southern Mississippi, a good five hours away. When I switched to art school at Auburn, that was just an hour’s drive. By that time, I was in my third year of college and didn’t come home much anyway. It was about being independent and becoming an adult, and being more confident in who you are, and not caring if anyone thinks you’re a dork.

JBC: Did you have a scholarship? How did you get to go to school?

John: I had a nice scholarship for music school, but there was no scholarship for art school.

JBC: Did you have to take out loans?

John: Yes, I had to take out loans and was still paying on those ten years after art school. I had never taken a single art class before I transferred to

Auburn. When things went south in music school, it was like, “What am I going to do?” Mom said, “You’re a great artist,” and I said, “But Mom, I’ve never taken an art class.” She said, “Let’s check it out.” I had to show a portfolio to get into art school; most of my core classes from music school—English, science, history—transferred over, so I had three solid years of concentrated art training at Auburn, which was great. It really was just a fantastic experience.

JBC: Were you involved in high school or in college at all with publications?

John: Sure. I did drawings. You would think all the kids taking art classes would get asked to do the covers of the school’s literary magazine, but somehow I ended up… I always drew the covers for my band concert programs. One had a pretty nice French horn drawing and the valves spelled out “Spring Concert.” I did the band T-shirts. I didn’t take chorus, but that teacher wanted the wall of his choir room painted with something cool. It was known around school that I could draw as well as play music. Even though I never took an art class,

2004 John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

Previous page: Rolf the Gopher, star of the comic strip Gadzooks which John did with roommate Ken Hattaway, for the Auburn University campus paper. This faux cover for a collection of those strips was part of John’s final design project to graduate from Auburn’s art department. He created a fictitious newspaper syndicate, and designed a corporate identity program (logo below), including a sales brochure to market their strips to newspaper buyers. That brochure made its way into John’s freelancing portfolio, and included Jack Kirby’s unused Surf Hunter strip—which scored him work from an art director who turned out to be a Kirby fan!

2005 21

1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR I remember meeting her in art school. It was one of my first experiences with alcohol and I was at an art department Christmas party and she was there. I was tipsy and she was cute, and the beer gave me the courage to ask her, “Hey, do you need a ride back to your apartment?” And she said, “Okay.” It was starting to snow outside and it was really he came to me and said, “Do you want to paint something on cold. I hadn’t thought this through because I’d had a couple of my wall?” I said, “Sure,” thinking that would be a great way to beers at this party. My car was about a mile away, back at my get out of class. And so, I did this airbrush mural, basically one apartment. Somebody had given me a ride there, but I wanted of Kirby’s Boom Tubes with musical notes blasting out at you. I to get to know this cute girl better. So I walked her back to the spent about three months getting out of class for it; I’d go for art building to pick up her final painting for that quarter first. half my class, get a hall pass, and go work on the mural. I ended We’re walking through the freezing cold, carrying this giant up doing the cover for the literary magazine two or three times canvas, supposedly to go to my car. She’s like, “How far away is and contributed a piece to it with Steranko-inspired silhouette your car?” “Oh, it’s right up here.” We kept walking and talking. drawings… what’s that story he did for Nick Fury, something “How much farther?” She could have walked back to her apartabout the moors of the…? ment in about half the time it took to finally get to my car, but I JBC: “Dark Moon Rise, Hell Hound Kill”… did give her a ride back to her apartment. We stayed up talking John: Yeah! I was really taken by his style in that, and the heavy until two in the morning. We met for lunch the next day and silhouettes and the way he’d use solid blacks to define shapes, then both went our separate ways for Christmas break. I had no so I did something sort of stylistic like that. I had lots of art opidea it was going to amount to anything. She told me later that portunities in high school, thankfully. she went home and told one of her friends, “I think I’m going to JBC: Do you remember first seeing your name in print? marry this guy,” or something along those lines. We got back to John: Yeah, it was in that literary magazine, and that was aweschool, and our first real date was on Valentine’s Day. some. The band concert program book was great, but how many JBC: This might be a question for Pam. What did she see in you? people were going to see that? Now, the literary magazine was John: I have no clue. different. The whole school would see that, and we had around JBC: You must have some clue, John.

2000 kids in our school. My signature was on the cover! The day John: That’s not false modesty. I have no idea. I had no reason it came out, everyone saw it. That was a good day! to think she would have any long-term interest in me.

Later, I worked my way through music school drawing T-shirt JBC: If there’s one thing I can say, besides the fact she’s a very designs for a local screen printer. All throughout music school, I attractive person, besides her obvious charms, is her laugh. If I was doing art. That was a good gig; both in music school and art amuse her, she really laughs loudly and heartily. school, I worked drawing designs for T-shirt shops.

John: That may be it; I did make her laugh. There was one incident when she was in the Visuals room in the art building. We Along came Pam… Seniors were in the upper level, a big open alcove with drawJBC: Did you date at all in high school? ing tables. I was up there, walking down the steps to the first John: Not really. Pam was my first really solid, sustained relation- level and she was on the first level walking up and we surprised ship. I only dated a few other times before her. each other in the stairwell. I yelled something like, “Boola boola

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2007 The World of TwoMorrows

boola!” and I don’t know why, but she busted out laughing, really hard. She was on the floor laughing for a couple of minutes, with tears streaming down her face. It was so, so funny to her. I think that sealed the deal for her.

For me, that winter I got the flu and was sick as a dog; I missed my classes for seven days and couldn’t get out of bed. One day, I heard a knock on my apartment door; I staggered over—I hadn’t bathed in probably three days—and Pam was standing there with a bowl of won-ton soup from the local Chinese restaurant, because she knew I hadn’t been out, and probably hadn’t eaten. This was another one of those moments where you hear angels singing: “Ohhhh, you’re going to take care of me the rest of my life. You’re a keeper! I think I love you.” That’s when I knew.

JBC: So you were steady from that point…

John: We had actually been steady from our first date on Valentine’s Day. That was embarrassing. I was too big a dope to think that you might want to have a dinner reservation on that day. I got dressed up, picked her up, and she asked, “Where are we going?” I said, “We’re going to the best restaurant in town!” We get there and, of course: “Do you have a reservation?” Huh? “Reservation? What’s that?” I was such an idiot. So, we ended up having our romantic Valentine’s dinner at the local family steak house, because it was the only place without a drive-through we could get into without a reservation. That’s another instance where she should have run away screaming, but I guess she found it endearing. It is a great relationship and we’re well-suited to each other.

JBC: How long did you two go out before you proposed to her?

John: Our first date was in February 1986, and I proposed on her birthday in June. I was 23 and she was 22. That spring break, we took a trip to Orlando with a bunch of friends from school. That’s where our relationship really blossomed, hanging out there with all our buddies. There was another couple in our circle of friends who you’d think

2008 John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

would never get together in a million years—they became a couple down there, too. They’re still married to this day. It’s funny how things happen.

Then, in May, Pam graduated from Auburn and moved to North Carolina, after being recruited by the big agency up here. I still had a quarter to go, so I flew up in June and proposed to her, then finished my last quarter that summer and graduated from Auburn. She foolishly said yes and we got married the following January, 1987. The rest is history.

2009

Above and below: Catalog for John and Pam’s longtime swingset client, and a billboard design Pam produced while working at a smaller agency before they formed TwoMorrows Advertising. In those pre-digital days, these boards were hand-painted at sign companies, by skilled artists who copied the layouts and illustrations given to them by ad agencies.

Previous page: Some of the many high school illos John produced.

2010 23

1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR day publishing decisions, and still is in our advertising work.

Throughout the 1990s, probably 80–90% of our work was advertising and the remainder was publishing. Around 2004, Pam looked at me one day and said, “You know, we’re getting older. People don’t want 40- and 50-year-old graphic designers.

They want 20-year-old graphic designers. Maybe we’d better focus more on the publishing stuff.” If you look at our output, right around 2004 and ’05, you’ll see we produced more books.

I’d have to look at actual release dates; I think we even added a magazine then. When the Recession hit in 2007–08, almost all of our advertising work dried up. Our clients took their work in-house, paying some flunky to do the most horrible graphic design ever—but they saved money. We lost most of our adverJBC: How would you describe Pam? tising work at that point.

John: She’s very headstrong, and I mean that in a good way— Thanks to Pam’s smart thinking, we had already upped our when she gets an idea, nothing stops her from following it publishing output, and that saved us. Otherwise, I would have had to get a full-time job somewhere, and that would have killed through to the end. She’s very dedicated, devoted, and loyal.

She keeps my moral and ethical compass pointing in the right di- our publishing business, because I wouldn’t have had time for it. rection. She’s been amazing with that for our whole life together. So kudos to Pam for having that foresight. She didn’t predict the She’s the best judge of character of anyone I’ve ever met. I tend Recession—that’s more my forte, keeping tabs on the economy.

But any time I need advice on something, she’s my go-to: “Does to take people at face value—“Aww, they’re okay”—and never this cover work?” “Do you think anyone would buy a book on give it a second thought. I can get taken advantage of that way. this person?” Even though she doesn’t always know who they She picks up on people instantly—at a first meeting, she’s 99% accurate on what a person is like. She’s kept us out of some bad are, she’ll ask me questions like, “Does he have many fans? Is business relationships over the years, thankfully. She’s consistent, he popular?” She’s just very wise that way. Even though she’s and she is obsessive in a good way—she is a perfectionist, and I not a comics’ fan per se—although she knows more about Jack Kirby than she should, just by osmosis and sitting in convention need that, because I’m not one. booths—it’s good that she comes at it from a different perspecPam is the “detail” person and I’m the “big picture” person. tive than me. She’s helped with instances where we could have I’d meet with our advertising clients and get the broad idea of produced a book that would have lost a ton of money. She what they needed, then we’d kick around ideas together, and keeps me smart. I may want to do a book on the history of some she’d fine-tune it all to a microscopic level. I’d take the finished obscure creator, but she reminds me, “Are you going to sell work in and they’d say, “You’re so good at this!” Since I dealt more than 500 copies of it? If you can’t, you can’t do that book.” with the clients, Pam didn’t always get the credit she deserved, She’s very wise counsel for me—and the best mom to our girls. which really bothered me, but that’s the way we worked best.

I’ll never forget what my ad agency boss said when I told him I was quitting my full-time gig there. I said I was going into busi- Designing TwoMorrows Advertising JBC: Did you jump at the chance to open your own boutique? ness with my wife, and he said, “Why would anyone want to be What was the process? in business with their wife?” He was serious—I was really taken John: It really was just a case of freelancing better suiting me aback by that. A few years later, he got divorced, and here I am 30-plus years later, still married, so I guess I made a good choice. right out of college, even though it required staying up a lot of nights getting work done. It was so nice because Pam was workJBC: Do you consult with her on decisions with TwoMorrows ing full-time and I’d go downtown and meet her for lunch every Publishing? How involved is she? day, then do my freelance work. When I was forced to take that John: Before we had kids, she was more involved in day-to-

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full-time agency job, I learned a valuable lesson; it was a great small ad firm, but I had a co-worker who had been there for four or five years ahead of me, who just wasn’t cuttin’ it. She was an okay designer, but she didn’t work hard; she put in no extra effort, ever.

My first year there, I’m killing myself to impress my bosses and show them my best. It came time for annual raises, and everybody got the same percentage raise! I found out from talking to other employees, “Oh yeah, they give everyone the same percentage raises every year.” I did the math and realized I would never make more money than this woman who’s not doing half the work I was, because she had seniority over me. “Wow, I’m killing myself for this and making lousy money; I can kill myself going back to freelance work and at least enjoy it!” Pam was with me on that, because she had moved to a smaller agency and didn’t really like her boss. It took us about six months to build up freelance clients working nights and weekends.

We didn’t have kids at that point and were in our twenties—you can do anything then! So, after about six months, we gave our two-week notices to our bosses, and on our wedding anniversary in January 1991, we hung our shingle out as “TwoMorrows Advertising & Design.”

Those first three years were kind of hand-tomouth regarding income, but that’s what you do to build a business. They say if you make it, what… three years? Some say five… you’ve got a good shot of success, as a rule of thumb. After three years, we said, “This is doing okay, we have a little free time for a change.” That’s when The Jack Kirby Collector came about. “I have down time; what’s a good hobby? Oh yeah, Jack Kirby, why not?”

Jack died in February of 1994 and I’d been out of comics a while. I sold almost my whole comics collection in 1988; that was after Watchmen and Dark Knight came out, and I thought this was as good as comics could get, as far as my own interests. I really loved that stuff, but that was a good stopping place, so I sold my collection to help with the down payment on our first house. I

2014 John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

did keep a little of my Kirby stuff, particularly the Fourth World books, and some of Neal Adams’ work that I was pretty attached to—and now I’ve spent way too much money trying to re-purchase most of those books I sold! Then in 1994, my old buddy Matt faxed me a clipping from USA Today with Kirby’s obituary. I had no clue at that point that he had died. That made me drag out the old Kirby comics I hadn’t sold. “Surely he still has some fans out there, so I’ll do a little newsletter now; I have some time.” We had the Macintosh computers to do it with; it would be something fun to do, a little 16-page newsletter. I’d send it out and if anyone’s interested, keep it going for three or four issues…

JBC: Who came up with the name “TwoMorrows”?

John: That goes back to college. I think we came up with that together. We first used it on our wedding invitation, which we designed together the fall after we got engaged. It was an unconventional wedding invitation. On the back, it said, “Invitation

by TwoMorrow’s Graphics.” We thought that was a cute thing to put on the invitation, despite its misplaced apostrophe.

JBC: [Laughs] So, you’re actually telling me that TwoMorrows’ first publication was your wedding invitation?

2015

Above: Unfolded wedding invite— the first TwoMorrows publication!

Previous page: The Morrows in 1991, at a very chilly photo shoot for a medical supply company client. Such big glasses!

Below: A tale of two logos: The company’s original embossed ad agency icon, and the revamped one for publishing, co-designed

by Jon B. Cooke!

2016 25

1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR ed to show off in that venue. It’s not like some of the advertising work we’ve done, where you’re trying to blow people away à la Chip Kidd, without the benefit of Kirby’s art to help you.

JBC: I think it’s functional and nice to look through those first issues we worked together on. They exude a very pleasant feeling.

John: Yeah, very pleasant. That’s what I was going for. You and Pam are a hundred times better designers than me. I get such a kick out of it when one of your issues comes in—I’m thinking, “Boy, I wish I could design like this,” but it does not come natuJohn: Yes, it was. It was very unconventional, with some concep- rally to me. When Mark Voger, who’s done several books for us, tual photos. You look back at your old design work in school and turns something in—and Scott Saavedra, designing RetroFan, there’s a level of excitement to that work, but it’s not necessarily every time he turns something in, I’m like, “Man-o-man!” It’s this very well done. You’ve learned so much since then. You’re kind crazy foreign object to me that I could never produce myself, of embarrassed to look at it, but you have to admire the energy but I can so admire it and wish I could. That is not false humility; and thought you put into it.

I know my limitations as a designer, although I can certainly hold JBC: I have this mental thing of always thinking that I was not as my own. good as I am now. Even if it’s only a week or three issues ago, I But all modesty aside, I know what’s good and what’s not look at it and go, “I would have done that better now.” I guess good, particularly when it comes to functionality. We’ve occait’s a lack of compassion for oneself. sionally pushed out stuff where I’ve thought, “Ugh, I really wish John: Maybe, but I’ve never viewed myself as a world-class this looked better.” This particular designer didn’t cut it too well, graphic designer, although Pam is one. I never took an art class and I had to spend hours fixing the basic, most fundamental until my third year of college. I understand the principles of stuff, like legibility and text flow. But you have budgets to work graphic design and I think I’m a decent designer. If it comes to with and deadlines, and you can’t micromanage every single advertising design, I’m even better. But I’m no Chip Kidd, and aspect. That’s when it’s nice to work with pros like you where I think that’s to my benefit, especially in the field of advertising.

I know I’ll have no real issues with the design, even if I hit a You get a lot of self-indulgent designers like Chip Kidd—and I page or two where I’ll mull over, “Hmm, does that design work admire his design skills, he is amazing—but I think he and others or not?” It always works at a certain level, even if my particular like him sometimes forget that form follows function; like “Wow, sensibility would be, “Oh, this might work better if we turn it this that’s remarkable. That’s innovative design. But was this effect way…”. I have such respect for you, Voger, and Saavedra, there’s that you used the most effective use of your budget?” Whether no way I’m going to change your layout. There’s no way. I’m not it’s embossing or foil stamping or varnish or die-cutting or that infallible, but I know when something stinks up the place! You kind of thing, to me, the question should always be, “Did it sell don’t stink up the place, ever! the product?” I’ve always been focused on that above a flashy JBC: Golly, thanks! design aesthetic.

John: What a nice compliment.

When I did the first Jack Kirby Collector issue, I didn’t bend JBC: I don’t stink! That’s good. I’ll take it. As memory serves, you over backwards to impress people with my design skills. I wanted guys were always scrambling and working on a swingset manusomething nice and functional that seemed to fit the material. I facturer catalog. stepped back and let Kirby’s art “wow” people, because that’s John: Yes. Somehow, we always tended to have a lot of clients what I think you should do. You don’t want to compete with Kirby involved with wood products. This was a redwood swingset to grab people’s attention—you’ll always lose, so why bother? company and we worked for them for 15 years or so through Just do something functional and let his art carry the day. I think three different owners. Then the third owner, a big Northern that served me well. I guess you could look at an early Kirby Col- outfit, bought them out and had their own marketing team, so lector and make the assessment, “That’s boring design.” Well, we were shown the door. That was a great client for us. We set it’s highly functional, readable, and legible. I didn’t think I need- up big photo shoots with all these swingsets. That was always a

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challenge. Where can you find a big, open, green, lush area—usually in November as it turned out— where we can set up a dozen different swingsets for all-day photo shoots? You had to deal with the weather and child models, and all that.

JBC: Was one of you two a copywriter, or did you work with copywriters?

John: We worked with freelance copywriters, and sometimes the clients had their own in-house people. I would write some of the copy. It wasn’t something I was trained to do, but after a few years in advertising, it’s something you pick up. We didn’t write catalog copy, like product descriptions; they had people to do that, but we wrote creative things and catchy headlines for print ads. We won several Addy Awards for various advertising pieces over the years. The best one was a pop-up direct-mail piece for a swingset sale. You open it up and a swing set pops up. That was the first real big piece we did for them, and we did it on a shoestring budget. They saw a 300% sales increase over any other sale period, and that cemented our relationship with that client. They were like, “Wow, these guys know what they’re doing.” It’s very unusual to keep an advertising client for 15 years. They were very happy with our work and our customer service.

If they hadn’t sold to the new owner, I’m sure we would have kept it going even longer.

JBC: What about Raleigh? Did you take a liking to the city? When did it become home?

John: It became home when Pam got recruited by the big ad agency here. I always thought I’d end up in Tampa. Before dating Pam, I visited there with my future sister-in-law at her family’s place and I really liked it and thought, “That’s where I’d like to be.” All our friends from school were moving to Atlanta, but I didn’t like Atlanta; it was too big. I’m not a big-city kind of guy at all.

Back then, the business climate was so good here in Raleigh; still is. There was so much freelance work to pick up around town. We have the Research Triangle Park near here, which brought in all these big corporations to that giant business campus, with plenty of work to go around. It was

a great time to start our business, and we made it through pretty well. A lot of small design firms that started around the same time as us didn’t last, and the owners ended up taking full-time jobs elsewhere, but we stuck it out on our own.

JBC: You guys purchased a home. Was that the one we visited—Beth, me, and the boys—in 1998?

John: No, that was our second home. The first one was a tiny three-bedroom house on the east side of Raleigh. That’s the one we sold my comic collection for, and entered [and won] a publicity stunt contest for, and we spent the summer eating peanut butter sandwiches to save every penny we could for the down payment. In 1997, we bought this wonderful 1925 house in downtown Raleigh, and part of me still really misses it, because we poured our heart and soul into it. It was pretty run-down when we got it. We got a good deal on it and spent seven or eight years just sweating away, working on the thing, renovating it. I got really good with a chop saw and nail gun. Before that, we had office space… first in a small business incubator, then our first real TwoMorrows office space was about a half-mile away from that 1925 house we ended up buying. We gave up the office space we’d had for several years, and moved all our work into that house—that’s the only way we could afford the

2019 John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

Above: John at the Morrows’ renovated 1920s second home, where TwoMorrows began to flourish.

Previous page: In 1988, this beauty won the Morrows $5,000 in a radio station publicity contest. The pair made it from heavy lumber in the basement of their rented home, but John didn’t measure first and he had to rip out a door frame to get it outside. They set it up at 5 a.m. in front of the radio station, and it got lots of buzz on the busy morning commute.

Below: When appropriate, the partners use special effects with the best of them. All those letters are die-cuts with photos printed underneath.

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR stuff, they weren’t trained; it was basic typesetting. I had a little leg up in terms of producing something; even though TJKC was photocopied, it looked professional, and that gave us a boost early on. Although we were trying to do the best work we could based on our training, it wasn’t like, “Oh, we’re going to build an empire.” We just had to do this right. Seriously, we had no inkling that anything would come of The Jack Kirby Collector, except as something to do for fun until it died out.

Meeting Jack

JBC: You didn’t have a passion for print? I mean, I just had to do a magazine, had to do a fanzine, had to do something in print. I was crazy about print, and comics were a part of it. Had you not done that, could you have done a fanzine or periodical on the French horn or something else in your life?

John: I don’t think so. It was simply because Kirby died and I had gotten to meet him in 1991. That was my goal: I just wanted to shake Jack’s hand and tell him I’ve enjoyed his work. Finally, in 1991, we were doing another direct mail piece for the swingset company, and we hired a freelance illustrator to do the cover. He did amazing cut-paper illustration—I found out he was located in Los Angeles. We’re a small business, self-employed, and everyhouse. That was a really smart move. That’s where we had our thing that can, needs to be made a business expense; you have first child, Lily. Working at home, having a baby there, worked to keep your taxes down. I could justify flying out to meet him out great. Then, we realized after a couple of years, “We are the for the project, and then finally getting to go to San Diego Con. youngest people in this old neighborhood, and there’s nobody So in 1991, for our working vacation, we went there, and had for our daughter to play with.” That’s when we moved to North our meeting with the illustrator for the swingset mailer. We had Raleigh to a more conventional neighborhood, and raised our a day to kill and I finally got to go to Comic-Con and meet Jack kids there with a neighborhood swimming pool and playground. Kirby. Pam had no real interest in going to the convention. She JBC: Did you build the house? wanted to hang out in Old Town San Diego and go to all the John: Yes, in 2004, we built the house here specifically with work shops—that was a fun side trip for her. So while she hung out in in mind. It’s a great location for us, especially with raising kids.

Old Town, I went to Comic-Con. Back then, you could show up, Now that we do less advertising work, it’s way bigger than we buy a ticket and go in, not go online six months beforehand and need, but it’s still a great place for us. hope beyond hope that you might get lucky and score a ticket JBC: You mentioned you had a subscription to CBG; were you for it. You could get an affordable hotel room the same day, involved with the fanzine community? Did you have stuff pubtoo. It wasn’t such a big deal then. So I drove into the parking lished at all, or publish anything else prior to TJKC? deck, went up, paid for my ticket, walked in, and tried to find out John: Not really. That was beyond me. I learned this whole pub- where Jack Kirby was. lishing thing by the seat of my pants. I didn’t have anything to go I’m looking around—even then it was the biggest convention on, except I’d read some issues of Comics Interview, The Comics in the country, but back then the hall was walled off. They didn’t Journal and CBG. But like I mentioned, The Comic Reader, and use the whole convention center. Where the wall was, is roughly the original version of Alter Ego, the mimeograph ’zines from the where our booth is now. When you’re there next summer, stop ’60s, I’d never seen those. I knew they existed and knew there where our booth is and see the three million booths beyond us— was a rich history of fan publications going all the way back to that’s all new since 1991. the ’60s, but I never had the opportunity to see them.

I found out Jack Kirby was going to be at the Genesis West JBC: So the only model you really had was company newsletters? booth. I went over there and talked to a guy who was hanging Was The Jack Kirby Collector an echo of anything? out at the booth, who said, “Yeah, Jack will be back later.” I John: It’s not. It’s an echo of our advertising work, if anything— didn’t know who this guy was; it may’ve been Greg Theakston, not that it’s designed like an annual report, for instance. I didn’t but it definitely wasn’t Mike Thibodeaux. He had a portfolio of look at Comics Interview or CBG or The Comics Journal for art there and I was flipping through it. I remember one specific inspiration at all, except for maybe the enthusiasm that went into piece: It was a Kirby pencil rough on 8½” x 11” typing paper, them, but not the look. That’s probably good—even if you look regular old white paper, for the Forever People #8 cover, the at the first issue of the Kirby Collector, the typography is pretty “Billion Dollar Bates” issue, and it was $50—a really beautiful clean, simple, and readable, whereas in a lot of the earlier fan loose pencil drawing, and you could tell everything going on

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The World of TwoMorrows

in it. But we’d spent nearly every penny we had getting out there, and I didn’t have $50 to buy this thing. I assumed Jack must have submitted it to DC Comics to get the cover idea approved. And I’m still trying to track that piece down today!

Anyway, I hung around and hung around and Kirby never came there. I had to pick up Pam at 4:00 to head back to Los Angeles, and it was about 3:30. “Oh great! My one chance, and I’m going to miss meeting Jack Kirby.” I’m really confident in this memory: They suddenly made an announcement over the PA, which they don’t do now, “Jack Kirby is now appearing at the Genesis West booth.” I remember making a beeline back over to the booth and there was already a big crowd at the table. And that was really Jack Kirby standing there! I was late to pick up Pam and thought, “I’ve gotta get out of here.” I didn’t have time to kill—we had to fly back home the next day. What am I going to do? I’m not the kind of guy to elbow through crowds, but I did it anyway! I elbowed right through to the front of the crowd, and when he finished with the guy he was talking to, Jack turned to me and said, “What’s your name? How are you?” We talked for two or three minutes. He didn’t want to talk about comics—he just wanted to know where I was from and what I did for a living.

It was like talking to any regular guy, but it was an awe-inspiring experience. After we spoke, I heard him mention to someone else, “Come on up to the house. I live on Sapra Street, in Thousand Oaks.”

I made a note of it and went to the Beverly Hills library the next morning and tried to find it in the local phone book. There it was—his address and phone number. I jotted his address down and we drove by his house like some kind of stalker, before heading to LAX to fly home. I sent him a fan letter a couple of months later since I had his address. It was about how great it was meeting him and what an inspiration he was. And I thought that was it for me and comics.

But back to your comment: My inspiration for print—after all that long-winded stuff—was always advertising, but my inspiration for publishing was Kirby when he passed away, and I went back and read my Kirby comics.

It’s not like I always wanted to do a fanzine, but I was moved by re-experiencing what Kirby meant to me, by re-reading these books. After that, I just needed to do a newsletter. I didn’t think in terms of a fanzine, because I hadn’t seen one, but I did know what a newsletter was because we did those for our clients. I sent it out to 125 people to see if anybody was interested. I got names from CBG;

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

when Jack died, all these people wrote in and they printed their addresses. So I sent out my little Xeroxed Kirby newsletter and waited to see what would happen.

JBC: Would you say you had an emotional connection with Jack Kirby that transcended the artwork?

What was that “something” about him…?

John: I’m still trying to analyze it to this day; I can’t quite figure it out, but something about his work just spoke to me. My forte with Kirby, as you know, is the Fourth World stuff. Right after that Kamandi issue that flipped the switch in my brain is when I started tracking down the Fourth World titles. Those are the books that hit me; they’re just entrenched in my brain. From there, I worked backwards and found his Marvel comics. I was amazed at that work too, but it didn’t speak to me the same way the Fourth World stuff did. Maybe that’s because Stan was writing the word balloons—the stories were still amazing, but they didn’t have the same feel. The DC stuff just has a different vibe, and I still prefer that. Even that later Marvel work, which I didn’t really enjoy particularly at the time— Devil Dinosaur, Machine Man, or Black Panther— still, there was some kind of emotional connection; it wasn’t just nostalgia. It wasn’t just, “Oh well, I feel sorry for Jack Kirby. He can’t do the New Gods comics he wants to do anymore, so I guess I have to settle for Devil Dinosaur.” It wasn’t that.

There was something about the stories—there was so much more meat in them, creatively, than all the technically better-crafted, -drawn and -written stories that other creators were doing. When Captain Victory came out, I’m looking at these and thinking, “Man, Jack has really… This is so far removed from the Fourth World stuff in terms of how coherent the stories are or aren’t.” It’s still there, but you have to work a whole lot harder to get

Above: Jack’s backyard in 1995, during John and Pam’s first visit.

Previous page: Jack Kirby at the 1991 San Diego Comic-Con, where John Morrow met his idol and took this photograph.

Below: John’s first three Collected Jack Kirby Collector volumes.

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR Left: At their first Comic-Con exhibiting in 1995, the Morrows had the honor of meeting Jack Kirby’s wife, Roz. And you better believe they accepted her invitation to drive up to Thousand Oaks, Calif., to visit her at home after the con! What a lovely lady and hostess she was…

had to say.

John: Like his comics, you’d be thinking about your encounter with him two or three days later. “Now, what did he mean when he said so and so…?” Same thing with his comics, right? “When he drew that panel, what was he trying to get across there?”

Whereas when Neal Adams draws a panel, you go, “Look at that beautiful work!” It’s all there; you don’t have to analyze it days later because each panel is an artistic masterpiece.

With Jack, it’s a shorthand, it’s a caricature that evokes later thought for me. The whole “father” thing is true—I know it from our experiences and respective instances with our dads. My dad was in my life certainly, but he wasn’t a super-involved dad. He was wrapped up in work, and then my parents got divorced, so I didn’t see him much because I lived with my mom most of the time. Maybe Kirby hit me when I needed a more involved father what he’s saying. At the same time, there’s still so much concep- figure, and that’s kind of the way it worked for me, and maybe tually going on that you know… even the worst Kirby stuff, when for you. Now that we’re older, we analyze this on a much more you read it, you have to think about it afterwards. It’s not like you mature level, but when you’re 15 and reading Kamandi or the go, “Eh, that’s fine,” and throw it in a box and forget about the Fourth World, you don’t want to analyze that. You think, “I don’t stories. I still find myself thinking about them a day or two after know why, but I like this.” It’s not just you and me that liked it.

I’ve read them.

JBC: Right.

Whereas, there’s the Roy Thomas/Neal Adams’ X-Men series, John: He was the man! He has these dedicated fans who are still that is superbly produced… they are so gorgeous… and they devoted to this day because of that work! read really well. But when I read one, I don’t find myself thinking JBC: When Jack passed on, did you mourn? What was the about those stories several days later. I fully appreciate them at impact? the time. I love Roy and I love Neal; that is not meant as a slam John: Yes, absolutely. It was a day of mourning when I got the on them at all. There’s a certain magic Kirby had that speaks to fax. “Oh, Jack Kirby died. Wow.” He wasn’t a fixture in my life me personally, that I don’t find in other people’s work. It’s similar though. After meeting him in 1991, it was, “I’ve fulfilled a life’s to Will Eisner’s work. I love Eisner. He is such an amazing craftsgoal. I can take a deep breath now because I don’t have to worry man and so clever with what he does, but it doesn’t quite tweak about doing this again, because it’s done and it was awesome.” me the same way that a Kirby story does.

It totally exceeded my expectations of what I thought it would JBC: I wonder if with Jack, it’s that his stuff has this feeling of be like to meet Jack Kirby. It was beyond perfect. authenticity. With some of his intense work, I just sensed that After that meeting, I wrote him a fan letter and then I didn’t there was a strong autobiographical element. He was talking really think about him much until that fax came through from my about himself and talking about the way that he looked at the friend Matt. I spent about a day mourning, and then I thought, world. That’s the way it seemed to me. The impact of “Himon” “Why don’t I just read some Kirby comics?” Reading the comics, [Mister Miracle #9] on me was just huge. I tried to analyze my I got over the mourning really quickly. He was physically dead, connection with Kirby. I do think a part of it is it’s not just recogbut his work wasn’t dead; I can pull these books out any time nizing that he’s a genius, but recognizing that there is a father and re-read them. Unlike a lot of comics, his hold up well with dynamic going on. For me, as I’ve written in CBA, it’s as if he was subsequent readings. I still find little things when I read the a father who shared with me, who gave to me. I met him, too.

Fourth World stuff, even though I have them committed to He was very paternal. He was really nice! He was like Eisner and memory. I’m still finding little bits and pieces in there.

Kubert: He looked you in the eye, listened, and treated you with JBC: I needed to do something and I didn’t know what to do. I respect… needed to somehow acknowledge Jack. I was eating lunch in a John: And was genuinely interested in you. The times I talked diner and heard it over the radio. I wasn’t sobbing, but I did cry. with Eisner, you could almost hear the gears turning in his brain, It was a freezing February day and to hear it on the radio was so absorbing your words from his commercial mindset. Jack was so incredibly moving for me. I had to do something. I didn’t quite noncommercial that even if he got creatively inspired by talking know what to do, but I somehow learned the Words and Pictures to you, I can’t imagine him finding a way to literally use the acco- Museum had an exhibit up there in Northampton, Massachulades people were feeding him, in his work. [laughter] setts, and that was the beginning of the journey that led to you: JBC: In his interviews, he would fly off on a tangent about the This desire to do something, and I had to do something creative. oddest stuff, and you wouldn’t know where it came from. He I had done this H.P. Lovecraft fanzine, tried to get this thing would sometimes come up with these non sequiturs that were called Dinosaur Times off the ground. I had done stuff periodijust… and you’re like, “Huh?”, but you enjoyed reading what he cally, but I wanted to do something for Jack, you know? I get a

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The World of TwoMorrows

RICHARD KOLKMAN: A TWOMORROWS OUT OF CONTROL Night becomes day, and 25 years later, TwoMorrows turns 25! Two­Morrows, as a name, was at first cute—then profound. From the beginning, we’ve delved deep into comics history. TwoMorrows’ publications have preserved stories of generations of comics pros and fans—and are still on this mission.

From my point of view sitting in Gerding’s Pharmacy (reading Weird Mystery Tales #2, “Toxl, The World Killer” in 1972) to receiving the first TJKC was a quantum leap in life and in time.

The arrival of TJKC was opportune and I felt that I had more to learn than to offer. Ever since the days of Steranko’s History of Comics [1970] and Comix: A History of Comic Books in America [1971], I often thought I enjoyed reading about comics more than reading them. I fervently collected Jack Kirby’s work from 1972 (and before) until 1994 (and beyond!). I was a devoted disciple of Kirby—the good, the bad, and the great! Everything!

Other than FOOM, I had virtually no fanzine experience, reading or otherwise. I was active in the local Indianapolis convention scene, and dealt back issues and punk rock 45s through catalog ads in The Comics Buyer’s Guide and Goldmine. For years, I was a loyal reader of The Comics Journal. The reporting was fascinating, but often, I felt it was too subjective, and overtly combative (negative). Everything changed on September 5, 1994! (cue music) TwoMorrows morphed from an advertising agency of local acclaim, to what we know and love today. A Richard Kolkman niche existed Caretaker, The Jack for this kind Kirby Checklist of comics Born: 1961 history/trade publicaResidence: tion(s), but Fort Wayne, Indiana we didn’t Favorite Creator: know it— Jack Kirby until we did.

Seminal Comic Book: From the Weird Mystery Tales #2 start, Kirby’s (“Toxl, the World Killer”) legacy was

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

not just celebrated—but invigorated!

As days and nights passed, other comics creators and LEGOs were afforded the same respect. Years passed, and the advantage of evolutionary research, art and ideas being shared in this engaging space became apparent. This stuff adds up—comics history is a coalescing galaxy of information. A perfect example: The question of who inked Fantastic Four #1–2 was around long before the internet. Compounded over time, the answer was finally obtained by winnowing a list of possibilities: Ayers, Brodsky, Everett—even Simek! After Christopher Rule was ruled out, Mark Evanier supplied the answer: George Klein. The point is, time takes time. TwoMorrows captured the words of many Golden and Silver Age creators who are no longer with us. What TwoMorrows means to me, is I have a comics nerd friend of 25 years who let his humble fanzine grow out of control. I used to joke with John that he was walking around the TwoMorrows mansion in his smoking jacket like Hef. But c’mon—now we know it’s true!

John’s mags put so much rare art and artifacts in my hands, I responded by writing about (and researching) Jack

Kirby. I already had the knowledge, but a broader understanding developed over the years by absorbing the writing of scholarly pro-am comics fans.

Compared to our world, TwoMorrows publications radiate a positive vibe.

If I were handed the 272-page Jack Kirby Checklist: Centennial Edition hardcover back in 1995, I would have looked at it in mute shock… with no idea where it had come from.

Continuity is tribulation!

Knowledge is power, and has to be coaxed out of the dusty shadows by the few—and you! Evolutionary research often takes years, but is worth it when done right.

We’re still connected to our past. In February 2018, when John was accepting the final changes to the Jack Kirby Checklist: Centennial Edition by snail mail, I was snowed-in by a blizzard.

When walking to the mailbox, I passed the old, familiar Gerding’s Pharmacy window from my childhood. On the way, my hand traced across the same cold window glass—the same glass that saw me read “Toxl, The World Killer.”

I’m proud to be a small part of TwoMorrows’ first 25 years—in service of the future of comics history.

Above: The 2018 Centennial Jack Kirby Checklist.

Below: The original 1997 Beta version.

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MIKE GARTLAND: If you’re asking me to write anything for ya, you’ve got problems…

[The following was written with tongue in cheek, if not foot in mouth!]

So John Morrow is 25; well I always… what’s that? Oh, it’s his 25th anniversary! Well, anyway, he wishes he was 25!

Better yet, he still acts like he was 25!

Congratulations, kid!

Twenty-five years ago, Jack Kirby passed away and John started a magazine with the permission of Jack’s widow, Roz. I don’t know if John ever dreamed that the simple fanzine that resulted would evolve into what it is today, the cornerstone of the best comics-related and pop culture-based publications ever done!

John began The Jack Kirby Collector (hereafter referred to as TJKC to save on my eyesight and fingers) as a simple black-&-white fold-over fanzine, coming out every couple of months or so; showcasing many pieces of unpublished art. There were also interesting articles about Jack and his life and interesting experiences with fans and co-workers. John was getting positive feedback and encouraged readers and friends to submit pieces for possible publication; that’s when he encountered me, and John started to age….

I was a troublemaker from the start!

My first article dealt with why I thought the monsters in Jack’s pre-hero Marvel stories were deemed “prototypes” because greedy comic book dealers could jack-up their values via a phony connection to the super-hero books! To my surprise, John told me the readers enjoyed the story (the dealers, of course, didn’t).

So I started writing articles covering Jack’s time at Marvel and his contributions; I covered his heroes, his villains, his women, even his inkers, and John was happy with my work—until…

One day, I get a package in the mail from John; it was a bunch of Photostats of one of the “Tales of Asgard”-like back-up stories Jack did concerning the Inhumans. John thought it could be worked into an Inhumans piece. What

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we both later realized, however, was that Jack’s border notes told a story different from what Stan Lee had written into the panels. This became the basis for the “Failure to Communicate” series of articles in TJKC. Now, I already knew, after years of seeing Jack’s original Marvel art, that something was going on with all these border notes. In my opinion, it showed that the stories were conflicted between the two men; needless to say, I covered the series from various angles, during the course of which I developed “Crusading Reporter Syndrome.” John became the longsuffering editor, and fans and readers started to become Kirby-Lee polarized!

Bash Away, Bash Away, Bash Away All…

When I started the “Failure to Communicate” series, I only wanted to point out that Kirby and Lee sometimes interpreted a given situation differently; but after reviewing numerous pages of originals and talking with many of the professionals who worked with both men, it became clear that these inconsistencies were more than infrequent. In fact, there were definite signs that someone was being dealt an injustice. These injustices began to become more prevalent with each article, and some fans began to criticize John for allowing the articles to be biased. This led to a lot of fun between John and me. I, of course, wanted what I felt were the facts to be shown, especially since I could back them up; John, to his credit, convinced me to look at the big picture

and help him to not only keep readers entertained without getting high blood pressure, but to avoid possible litigation. Eventually, we both allowed the series to calm down and fade out.

As far as writing that series, all I can add is that, since the thereafter advent of social media, there are newer, younger researchers and reporters finding out things, and the word is slowly but surely getting out. Remember: It took 80 years for Bill Finger to be acknowledged as the genius behind Batman, and not the gregarious, media-friendly guy who by contract always had his name put on the character, no matter who was ghosting it for him. We can only hope that it takes less time for Jack Kirby to be recognized as the genius behind the ’60s Marvel Universe!

Now that all that stuff’s said (plug), the best thing that ever came out of writing for John was all of the great people I got to know; too many to name, you know who you are! I appreciate the opportunity to thank those who enjoyed my work. I may have more in me, and someday, who knows? But until then, I enjoy my retirement, and John has one less nutjob to stress him out.

My last thanks go out to my pal Pam Morrow! For those who don’t know, as much as John is the brains, she is the heart of Two­ Morrows; because she not only helps it to keep going, she helps him keep going! Thanks guys; love ya both—and, John, here’s the line you never thought you’d see me write: “Johnny, you can edit out whatever you want from this article!”

The World of TwoMorrows

sense that you were doing it for him, as well.

John: Oh, absolutely! It wasn’t for me. The whole mourning thing… as you were saying that, I had a flashback. I forgot one very important thing. I did have a period of mourning. I had a need to share my loss… my sorrow… with like-minded Kirby fans, and I didn’t know any like-minded Kirby fans because I had been out of comics since 1988, and hadn’t been in a comic shop since then. So I thought, “Okay, there must still be comic book shops in Raleigh somewhere.” I went to the one where I sold my collection in 1988 when we were buying our first house, and I remember talking to the owner and saying, “I heard Jack Kirby died.

Is there anything out there about him? Is Comics Buyer’s Guide still around? Surely they’d do something about him.” He said, “We don’t sell CBG.” I began looking around the shelves, and I remember that was the first time I saw Image comics.

“What is this? Image Comics?” I opened one up and thought, “Oh, my God! Is this what comics have become since I’ve been out of it?” It was so far removed from my interest level, so I just put it back and left. But I found a cigar shop/newsstand in Cary, which is next to Raleigh, that sold Comics Buyer’s Guide, so I drove over there and picked up the issue where they announced that Kirby had died. I came back for the next two or three weeks and bought the next issues of CBG that they had on the shelves, and that’s where I saw all the letters. That was very cathartic for me, with all these people writing in about their personal experiences with Kirby. I don’t think I would have done the Kirby Collector if I hadn’t read all those letters. It was like having a wake there, with a bunch of people who were family. Everyone felt the same way, “Yes, this is exactly how I feel… Wow, you got to meet him, too.” Thank goodness that store was selling those, because I don’t know how I would’ve gotten any other kind of communication from other Kirby fans. That’s what led me to re-read my comics later in the spring. That was huge.

computers.” So we got a Mac IIcx and a 19-inch black-&-white monitor—1-bit black-&-white, not grayscale, and certainly not color. We needed that size monitor to do big layouts, and we also got our first laser printer—a whopping QMS 300 dpi model, which cost almost $4000 at the time. We took out a $9000 loan from the bank—we were scared to death they wouldn’t approve it, but they did. We made monthly payments on it for years.

Pam, bless her heart, was trained in handcutting beautiful type on mechanical boards and said, “This typography sucks. It’s horrible, it’s ugly.” Most fonts back then were ugly, and the kerning was terrible. And she was right when she said, “This is going to put typesetters out of business.” I said, “No, no, that’s never going to happen. This is just one more functional tool.” Of course, she was right about that. Five years later, all the typesetters were gone, replaced by service bureaus.

Every time Apple would release a new Macintosh model, they’d come to town and put on a big seminar, and I’d go to see what the latest software was.

I’d hang out at the “Apple-only” computer store here in Raleigh, go in and play with all the new Macs, and they had all the boxed software on the shelves so you could check it out. At one, somebody demonstrated QuarkXpress and I thought, “Hmm, this really is better than PageMaker.” So we were using Quark by the time of Kirby Collector #1.

I think that first issue was done in Quark v3.2.

Starting TJKC JBC: I think this is the place to mention that when JBC: Let’s talk about desktop publishing. Were you you and I were working together, we would make familiar with the PageMaker layout software? so many scans, but were so limited for storage John: [Chuckles] Yeah, we started with PageMaker; space in them olden days, that anything we it was our first go-to application. We had heard scanned in color, we never saved before convertof something called QuarkXPress, but that was a ing to black-&-white! Five, six, seven years of all strange name, and PageMaker was the thing to use these personal artifacts at the time. Apple would come to town and show loaned to us from so off their new Mac computers… they demoed a Mac many creators who are IIcx, which was the first one we bought. I convinced now gone… all the Pam, “This is the way it’s going; we’ll have to learn photos and original art

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

Above: The March 4, 1994, issue of Comics Buyer’s Guide [#1059] was the first of two issues that paid tribute to Jack Kirby upon his passing. It featured letters from other Kirby fans sharing their memories of Jack, and John Morrow built his initial Kirby Collector mailing list from them.

Below: Next time you’re in a restaurant or fast food joint with a grill, look for this logo on the vent hood. It was designed by Pam Morrow back in the late 1980s, and is still in use by CaptiveAire today!

The owner of that company started the small business incubator where TwoMorrows had its first office space in 1991. © CaptiveAire

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR we scanned and all the incredible, priceless items! The color versions were never saved! “Oops!” Whatever we did save was in black-&-white because, of course, we would never be able to afford to have our stuff printed in color! Right, John? [laughter] John: On the first Kirby Collectors, the ones I was photocopy-

ing—you couldn’t photocopy a decent halftone back then anyway, so I didn’t even bother saving grayscales of that art. I’d convert them to a dithered bitmap which worked better for photocopying, because it’s little black squares instead of dots. I wish I still had the original scans of all those things, but a bitmapped

CHARLES HATFIELD: MY GRATITUDE FOR TWOMORROWS To me, John Morrow’s Jack Kirby Collector and Jon B. Cooke’s Comic Book Artist and later Comic Book Creator are the core of TwoMorrows. These magazines are storehouses of history and lore, lovingly gathered, beautifully presented, Charles Hatfield and smartly reflected Contributor, The Jack upon. So Kirby Collector much of my Born: own work as 1965 a writer has Residence: been inLos Angeles, formed, even California enabled, by Vocation: what these English professor, magazines California State University have given Favorite Creator: me; I have Jack Kirby and others a hard time envisioning Seminal Comic: Action Boy (my brother Scott’s comic-book homemade effort) scholarship today without the gift of these mags.

Jon B. Cooke is one of comics fandom’s best, most necessary, oral historians. He puts in the time, sitting patiently with creators and drawing out memorable and revealing historical details. He does the legwork, and the sympathetic work of listening, and, man oh man, the endless work of digging deep. Jon’s mags have included some of the most startling, in-depth and confessional stuff I’ve seen in fanzines or tradezines. This is historiography through conversation—invaluable. To take but one example, his CBA issues devoted to Charlton Comics are more interesting than most Charlton comics themselves, and reveal a messy, even

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shady, but complexly human story. As an interviewer of historic creators, Jon’s only rival is The Comics Journal’s Gary Groth, and both men have heroically filled in the outlines of comics history.

As for The Jack Kirby Collector, I go back 25 years with that mag, to its first issue in 1994—when John Morrow, spurred by the recent sad loss of Jack Kirby himself, launched TJKC as, at first, a spartan, black&-white ’zine. It would grow bigger and more lavish as the years went on, transitioning from newsletter to full-blown art magazine, changing in size and look until it eventually attained its current full-color slickness. I empathized with the way John’s creativity and drive seem to have been unlocked by the process of mourning Kirby’s death, as indeed mine were (my first published piece in a trade magazine was, sigh, a eulogy for Kirby in The Comics Journal).

I appreciated even more the glorious reproductions of Kirby’s pencils and the hard nuggets of history that appeared in TJKC. The Collector, like just about everything from TwoMorrows, has always been a very positive, fannish thing, but it has also dealt with hard things and exposed plenty of necessary, unvarnished truths (one watershed being Jon Cooke’s investigative article on Kirby’s Sky Masters strip and resulting legal battle with Jack Schiff—there’s vital information there).

I’ve been fortunate to publish now

and again in TJKC. Parts of my work there got repurposed and reworked for my book Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby—and I suspect that I would not and could not have written that book without John Morrow’s work.

I have learned so much, about Kirby and about writing, through my association with the Collector. While I think my own sense of Kirby may have diverged a bit from John’s (I hope to sit down and debate Stuf’ Said with him some day!), there’s no question that as a publisher and editor he has been responsible for great things in my own life.

Two things people should remember about John Morrow are his kindness and his diplomatic skill.

To edit The Jack Kirby Collector has got to be a delicate thing: a process of navigating the choppy waters of a factious, divided fandom—a group of readers who probably agree about very little other than their love of Kirby!

John, I believe, has had to handle some sensitive editorial, legal, and political matters in the course of TJKC, and he has done so graciously and wisely. The history of the Collector to date has been an odd mix of pragmatism and idealism, love and grit. Few could have pulled this off—and no one better.

Comics historians and fans owe John, Jon, and TwoMorrows a considerable debt. I know I do.

Above: Charles’ own brilliant book, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, was published in 2011.

The World of TwoMorrows

file only took up 100k, whereas a grayscale file took up 3 megabytes! When you only had a 40-megabyte hard drive, you just couldn’t save them.

JBC: Were you adept at Photoshop?

John: I got adept at it after a while. It scared me to death, the first time I used it. “Man, there are so many functions on this and you can’t find what you are trying to do.” But I got pretty good, pretty quickly. I used Quark, Photoshop, Aldus FreeHand.

To this day, I hate Adobe Illustrator; I still can’t stand it. Aldus FreeHand was always a better program, even as archaic as it was. It worked like my brain thinks. Illustrator is like Photoshop. It thinks like a PC person and I’m a Mac person.

JBC: I’m shaking my head. You are totally wrong; but that’s okay. [laughter] I hated FreeHand.

John: You told me all along, “You gotta use InDesign. You gotta use InDesign.” “I don’t want to use InDesign. That’s an Adobe product.”

JBC: And guess what John uses now, ladies and gentlemen? [laughter] John: I kept Quark as long as I could! I could use it in my sleep. Now I’m almost at that point with InDesign, thanks to you. Yeah, I still miss Quark sometimes, but not the printing hassles. You couldn’t quite get it to print exactly what you wanted every time.

JBC: Getting familiar with Quark and PageMaker, was it in the back of your mind that, “I could use this for a hobby someday maybe?”

John: No, it wasn’t. I just needed some new production tools to get my advertising work done. I didn’t make that connection until I read all those Kirby comics that spring. “Surely all his fans are still out there,” because I’d read the tribute letters in CBG and it would be something fun to do and inspire me. I was really inspired by Kirby at that point, so it was kind of a logical thing. “Hey, I know what I’m doing with print; I could do a little newsletter for fun.” Then, I was feeding dimes into the copy machine at my local Eckerd Drug store to make those first issues. I had no clue I would actually commercially print them some day. Our clients had the money for good printing but we didn’t. I’d get rolls of dimes and feed them into the copier at the drugstore and make my little 16-page Kirby Collectors and do 100 at a time, thinking, “Well, here’s 100; that’ll last me.” And then, next thing you know, I’d be out of copies and I’d think, “Guess I’d better go make another 100.” I think I did six or seven printings of the first issue. The word of mouth was amazing. It wasn’t in comic shops. We didn’t really have the internet; it was just Kirby fans talking to one another: “Hey, did you

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

see this Kirby thing?”

JBC: Was Kinko’s around, or was this prior to that?

John: Kinko’s was around, but it was cheaper to feed dimes at the drugstore. Issue #6 is when it became obvious to me that we needed to print these things because I’m wasting half-a-day every week, standing over a Xerox machine.

So, I found a local, very inexpensive printer that could print the double-sized #6, since I really didn’t have time to feed dimes into a Xerox machine for that.

JBC: You had regularly used FedEx? John: We did for advertising work.

JBC: That was well-established by 1994.

John: Oh, yeah. We’d have to drive out to the airport if we missed the 6:00 pm cut-off for the local FedEx drop box. You’d have to drop it off at the airport depot, because you could drop it off there until 7:30.

JBC: I distinctly recall the craziness of getting everything ready for the 2001 San Diego ComicCon—dialoguing Prime8, frantically finishing the CBA Tower issue, and desperately waiting for Jim Warren’s final approval for The Warren Companion—and the insanity to make it to FedEx before closing, 30 miles away!

So, you sent out copies of The Jack Kirby Collector. How did you come up with the name—or

Above: With Jack’s daughter Lisa Kirby at Comic-Con in 2004, during TwoMorrows’ 10th Anniversary.

Like her mom, Lisa has been totally supportive of John Morrow’s efforts with The Jack Kirby Collector over the years.

Below: Chatting prior to the Kirby tribute panel with grandkids Tracy and Jeremy Kirby at San Diego Comic-Con 2019. Photo by Kendall Whitehouse.

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR was it a no-brainer?

John: I don’t even know how it happened. It just seemed to roll off my tongue. It must have been Stan Lee’s alliteration that subconsciously influenced me!

JBC: [Chuckles] You mailed off 100 or 150 copies?

John: It was 125. Originally, I was planning to mail to 100 names I pulled from CBG, but a fan named Paul Doolittle gave me more names of Kirby fans he knew, so it reached 125. We didn’t have any money back then, we really didn’t. I probably sank $300 into Xeroxing. That’s pretty brave of me to tell my wife, “Hey, I’m going to blow all our money on this thing.” She didn’t balk, and that’s to her credit, or to her chagrin… I don’t know! She was fine with it.

JBC: Did you fold them up or mail them flat?

John: We folded the 11" x 17" copies in half and stapled them into booklets, all by hand. I bought this giant, oversized stapler to do it. Today, I’d take it to Kinko’s and let them staple it, but back then, we had to cut every corner and do it ourselves.

JBC: Did you have to then fold them to mail or did you have 9" x 12" envelopes?

John: We mailed them flat. Pam said I should have respect for the thing and not fold it. Did you ever subscribe to DC and Marvel comics back in the day? They’d send them in ugly brown wrappers and would fold them in half. There’d be a big crease in the comics.

JBC: That I remember. My oldest brother subscribed to Marvel in the 1960s.

John: I never understood why they put a big crease in them.

JBC: Did you include backing boards?

John: No, we weren’t that ritzy! That would’ve been an extra 3¢ each, and we couldn’t swing that!

JBC: [Chuckles] Was it intended to be a one-shot?

John: No. I mean, it was a one-shot in that, “If nobody cares about this thing, then it’s a one-shot.” But I put a subscription price in there. I figured this one is free, and so, “If you’re addicted now….” Let me look. [pauses to look through TJKC #1] Yes, I did! “Back Issues: $2.50 each… a six-issue subscription is $12 in the U.S. and $19.20 outside North America.” Wow! I was really thinking ahead that there might be people interested outside the U.S.! It’s funny, looking back.

JBC: You’re looking at a first printing?

John: I believe so.

JBC: I was wondering if you might have changed that with subsequent editions.

John: It says “first printing” in the collection I’m looking at, so I assume it was taken from the same file. My editorial tells where

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your $2 per-copy subscription goes with 100 subscribers. I actually spell out how much the postage is. It worked out that with 100 copies it cost $200, so $2 per issue. That was exactly what it cost to do it, so I was being straightforward. I was doing 100 at a time. I broke it down for Xeroxing and postage and the cost to run an ad, and envelopes, and it came to exactly $2. What a bargain people were getting! No profit at all!

JBC: Did you run an ad for the first printing in CBG? John: I wrote a letter to CBG, saying I was doing this thing. I’ll have to dig it up, but they printed it. I did take out a couple of little ads in CBG so people would know it existed. We didn’t have the internet back then. I didn’t know about Diamond’s Previews catalog at the time and didn’t even consider comic shops initially. So CBG was the only port of call for running ads. It made sense, right? Ads were $50 or $100.

JBC: The ads paid for themselves?

John: Absolutely, but I really had no clue. I was overwhelmed by the response. The response was almost immediate. I sent out 125 copies and, within a week, I was getting dozens of letters and checks from people saying, “Sure, sign me up!” I guess if somebody sent me something out of the blue and said, “It’s 12 bucks for six issues,” I would have sent them a check—even if I’d only gotten one issue; it would’ve been worth it and it would’ve been okay. The little ads did well. Every time I’d put one out there, I’d get orders in. Pam helped me sort through the mail, but, even at that point, it was all manual. I didn’t have database software or anything to keep track of everybody’s addresses. We had a handwritten list for everyone’s addresses—a very low-rent operation, early on.

JBC: Was TJKC handled through a separate bank account or did it go in the advertising business account?

John: At first into the main advertising account. Around issue #5 or 6, I decided, “Yeah, I need to treat this separately.” I’ve been very good about keeping track of records, expenses, and separate accounts. Since it was not-for-profit, you want to make sure it’s a wash with your expenses at the end of the year or you start paying taxes on it and, if that was the case, I’d lose money.

JBC: What was the thinking behind the not-for-profit? Was that from the very start?

John: Looking at the editorial, I spelled out exactly what it cost.

It seemed like the right thing to do. I didn’t want to lie… First of all, as a fan, I followed Jack’s career and knew that he hadn’t been properly compensated for what he did, so I didn’t want to feel like I was making money off of Jack and he wasn’t profiting from it. I sent a letter to his wife Roz to let her know I wanted to

The World of TwoMorrows

Left: TwoMorrows’ first convention booth layout: six issues of TJKC, lots of matted Kirby art copies, and two handmade stand-ups.

Previous page: “Harry Potter” with wife Pam, at Comic-Con 1996.

Below: John says of his Collected Kirby Collector volumes, “One of these days, I may get around to doing additional editions, but the mag went to tabloid size after these issues. Is the world ready for giant collections?”

do this and get her okay. She okayed it. It seemed like the right thing to do.

JBC: Before you published the first issue, you got an okay? You got a letter back from Roz? John: Yes, I did. I mocked up the first issue in June 1994, and sent her a laser print of it. I said, “Hi, here’s what I’m thinking about doing.” She actually called me back: “This is really nice. I’ll put you in touch with this guy Greg Theakston, who has a lot of Jack’s art over at his place.” It was very nice. She was very supportive of it from the start.

JBC: Wow! Holy smokes! She gave you a huge lead!

John: Yes, but looking back—some schmo from out of the blue? “Yeah, I want to do a magazine about your husband….” They were so kind and trusting! Occasionally their blind trust of people came back to hurt them, I’m sure, but that’s how they were.

JBC: That’s the Kirbys! But you were good. From the beginning, did you send any money to Roz? Was she part of the equation?

John: No, from the very beginning, that breakdown of expenses is very accurate. I’m looking at it here. It says $228 to do 200 of them—that’s what it cost. That doesn’t include time for me to design it.

It was totally off the sweat of my own brow. There wasn’t any compensation at all. Subscription cost covered only the expenses. Later, I started paying Roz a small royalty, but she didn’t ask for it. I just felt I should.

JBC: So, the thinking was you were going to self-produce all the content as far as the text and editorial?

John: No, I did use almost all my own content for the first issue, and some from Kirby fans who’d gotten wind of it, like Paul Doolittle. After that, I made a direct appeal: “Okay, I’ve used the interesting stuff I’ve accumulated over the years; you guys

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

send stuff in.” That’s how I phrased it in the first issue. That was another reason I thought it would go three or four issues and that’ll be it: “Maybe people will send stuff in, but I’ll still have to come up with the rest”—but, boy, was I underestimating Kirby fans! I got so much mail, particularly in the first three years. I was constantly getting photocopies of Kirby sketches and unpublished pieces no one had ever seen… art that was sitting in someone’s collection. It was so much fun to go to the mail every day. There were some weeks I’d receive something five days out of the week.

JBC: It must’ve been sensory overload!

John: It was such a blast! So much fun! To the point that, years later when things started slowing down, it was a bit of a letdown. “Aww, I used to get so much stuff and now I’m only getting one thing a month I’ve never seen before.”

The moment I knew TJKC was a going concern… I’ve told you this story: Here it is, 1994, and we’re doing this publication. This thing seems to be taking off. What’s the logical next step? What should I do? “You should rent a booth at Comic-Con.” Well, okay. Back then, you could call up and say, “I want to rent a booth,” and they’d say, “Okay, we’ll put you down for one.” You show up.

We’d never done a convention appearance before and didn’t know exactly how to do a booth. I made these giant Xerox stand-ups of Orion and Captain America and had to figure out how to get them out there in one piece. I hand-colored them with markers, matted some copies of Kirby art, and that was our display. In summer of 1995, we had just released TJKC #6, so we had six issues to put on our table. We gambled the $700 booth cost and cut every corner we could. Instead of shipping, we took everything on the plane. We packed almost no clothes. We brought every suitcase we could, filled with every copy we could fit of the six issues

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR John: He never got proper credit and proper compensation for all the hard work he did. It wasn’t a thing of, “Well, Stan took it away from him.” I never really felt Stan took it away from him; I just thought Stan got what he deserved, but Jack didn’t get what he deserved. This was my little way of saying, “Let’s not forget Jack.” It stems from that—a sense of injustice of how Jack was treated through the years, but it wasn’t this bleeding heart thing.

It was simply, “I’m going to pay tribute to this guy because he never got properly taken care of while he was alive.”

JBC: How were you able to negotiate this minefield over the years, with very strong feelings one way or the other? There were militant “Pro Jack” and “Pro Stan” factions in fandom.

John: Yes, there are those adamantly on one side or the other.

I’ve been accused of being on only Jack’s side. That’s not a fair representation, but… even the first two or three years, it wasn’t and subscription flyers. We got out there and that’s when I knew. a full-on crusade of “We’ve got to get Jack justice.” That wasn’t the focus of the magazine. Some people might’ve interpreted it Barry Windsor-Smith came walking up wearing his Armani suit that way by the articles we ran, but that wasn’t me directing it. It and alligator shoes—looking like a movie star with several people trailing behind him. It was fascinating to see. I’m like, “Whoa, was people sending me articles about the way they felt. Some people had an axe to grind and I did not run every anti-Stan who is this coming up to the booth?” Then I realized who it piece that we received, so some people quickly got the idea was. He says [in faux British accent], “Are you John? I’m Barry that, “I’m not going to be able to air my grievances about Stan Windsor-Smith and I really, really enjoy your publication a lot. I here.” At the same time, some people wrote such glowing brought something for you.” He had a beautiful photocopy of an unused Fantastic Four #20 cover, which we ended up running pieces about Kirby, but they didn’t really add to the discussion, so I didn’t run those either. Politically speaking, that didn’t really in issue #9. I thought, “If Barry Windsor-Smith cares enough to become a factor until around #20, and that’s largely because we take time out of his day to come to our booth, and flew across weren’t in comic shops for the first two years. We started that the country with this photocopy of an unpublished Kirby piece, with #8. That’s when circulation really increased. More people we are hitting some of the right buttons here. This is not going to last just six issues. This has legs.” And that whole convention, got involved and I got a little more pushback about stuff. Politically, the whole Stan and Jack thing—Mike Gartland wrote his we were swamped with people throwing subscription money at “Failure to Communicate” articles in the Kirby Collector, where us. We took no copies back. They adored us. It was a humbling he really took Stan Lee to task for things. On some of those, I experience to have so many people come up and heap praise on us. I’m not one that seeks to be in the spotlight, so to have all had to temper Mike a little bit. Mike was pretty uncompromising, to his credit. that happen was heartening, but a little surreal.

JBC: John, the way I remember my exposure at that time was—I JBC: Though you recognized that it was about Jack, right?

John: Oh, absolutely. It was always about Jack. That’s the thing. got onto the DC message boards pretty early—must’ve been 1995 and having it out with John Byrne, with him calling me a This guy has so many people who love him. There’s not another single creator that I could’ve done this publication about. There’s “Kirby sycophant.” I had to run downstairs and look up the word.

I didn’t know what it meant. [laughter] Oh, man, did we fight! a lot of great comic book artists and other people like music John: Refresh my memory. What issue did you come on board? celebrities and movie stars, but I don’t know if anything else JBC: The Fantastic Four issue, #9. would’ve taken off like this. It was a perfect storm.

John: Issue #8 was the first one that went through Diamond DisJBC: To be in existence for 25 years! tribution to comic shops, and #9 was about the Fantastic Four. If John: My life wouldn’t be what it is today if I hadn’t taken that you look at #9, it has a lot of very positive stuff to say about Stan. leap of faith to do this little publication and approach it the way JBC: There was a lot of energy out there. One appeal of the I did—nonprofit, just a labor of love. That was a huge key and Kirby Collector at the time was not that it was neutral, but it was everyone responded to it. It couldn’t have worked out better. a celebration. It was more celebratory than critical. Do you know JBC: I wonder, did you know, or could have known, that you what I mean? were walking into a potential political minefield?

John: Absolutely. We were really championing Kirby. We weren’t John: I had no idea. slamming Stan. I would run the occasional article, because that’s JBC: You had no idea?! You said you understand what had hapwhat people would write, but I wasn’t thinking, “Hey, let’s stick pened in the 1980s with Jack, right?

John: Well, no, I was totally naïve about the politics around it. I had it to Stan Lee.” People would send in an article and I’d have to decide, “Is this a legitimate argument? Do I want to run this or my own feelings about how Jack wasn’t treated well, certainly. not?” I’d have to balance out whether that’s what people wanted JBC: What were they?

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The World of TwoMorrows

to write about and read about. So, yeah, I felt I had to run some of it. It wasn’t until Mike Gartland’s series that we started to get a mini-reputation that we were going after Stan Lee—but that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was to level the playing field and to honestly present legitimate concerns about the relationship between Stan and Jack. It wasn’t to “go after” Stan. That mentality started with the Comics Journal interview in 1990, #134, where Gary Groth interviewed Kirby and Jack was so bitter. That was a pretty eyeopening experience for fans, I think. If they didn’t have any understanding of Jack’s issues with Marvel and with Stan, they really got it with that interview.

That whole original art fight in the 1980s—that stuck with fans. “They really treated him poorly.”

I don’t know how to address the whole political thing, except my motivation was never to go after Stan Lee. My motivation was to celebrate Jack, but I think you can’t talk about Kirby without talking about Lee, warts and all, and Stan had a lot of warts in his relationship with Jack. It’s like my new Stuf’ Said book. I’m not sure “neutral” is the right word, but I’m trying to be as fair as possible. From my perspective, I think I’ve done that. I’m sure there will be some Stan Lee supporters out there who’ll go, “Wow! You were so harsh on Stan with this book.” At the same time, there will be a lot of Kirby fans who’ll go, “Wow! Why weren’t you harder on Stan in this book?” I think if I reach that level with both extremes not happy with the presentation, I’m probably doing it right.

JBC: What’s your assessment of the Comics Journal #134 interview?

John: Well, I don’t think Gary Groth had to poke the sleeping bear too much to get that reaction from Jack, but he did provoke him. The Journal, particularly at that time, was very much into, “Let’s stir it up here and make some serious controversy.”

That seemed to be their whole purpose of existing with some of those interviews. It wasn’t just the Kirby interview. They pulled no punches with all their interviews, and Jack had plenty to complain about. Rereading it recently for my Stuf’ Said book, it was like, “Whoa… !” On the one hand, Jack was really fired up, but on the other hand—going through what I’ve read through chronologically for Stuf’ Said from the early ’60s to the late ’70s, he was saying the same things back then, just not with quite the same tone. There’s very little in the Comics Journal interview that, in hindsight, after reading these older interviews, surprises me. But at the time, few had read all those earlier interviews with Jack, so it was a shocking interview. I’m glad

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

Groth did that interview. It’s good it’s out there. I’m glad it’s in the historical record. It’s legitimate.

JBC: You think it’s accurate?

John: I think it’s accurate.

I think Jack’s tone… what’s the word? He was very agitated on the topics, but he had talked about many of the same things more calmly in other interviews. But he was in a different time in life and had just fought that original art battle. That left him understandably bitter, and I think that colored his tone. I don’t think it altered what he said, except in maybe a couple of instances—maybe he went a little overboard, but there’s a grain of truth in everything he said in that interview, from what I’ve discovered.

JBC: How about the pivotal description he gave of him going into Marvel in 1957 and there being no furniture and Stan being of the demeanor that Jack said: crying? Do you think that’s true?

John: I get into that in Stuf’ Said, and we can talk about it here if you want. Here’s what I’ve discovered in looking at both of their interviews—the couple of times that’s brought up to Stan, I haven’t found where he clearly states, “No, that’s total fiction.” The way he words things—and Stan’s always been a shrewd interviewee—he doesn’t come out and say, “No, that didn’t happen.” He says things

Above: Kirby inker and John’s pal Mike Royer in 2001, and a note from Steve Ditko. John says, “It’s one of several I’ve gotten over the years. If you wrote Steve, he always wrote you back!”

Previous page: The hand-drawn card Joe Sinnott sent John in 2017 after he received an Inkpot Award.

Below: If there’s a kinder comics pro than Joe Sinnott, we haven’t found them! Here’s John and Joe’s first meeting at the 1996 Ramapo Con in New York. John said, “Whoever put me in the spot next to Joe at that con, thank you!” We’re looking at you, Allan Rosenberg!

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR late-breaking kirby news!

may not have made the best business decisions, but creatively, taking DC books up to 25¢ and putting those Golden Age reprints in the back, was awesome to me, seeing what Simon & Kirby’s work looked like in the 1940s compared to Jack’s work April 1995 in the 1970s. And then seeing these new stories with the same characters was a blast! To me, that’s the wonderment of Kirby.

Special APRIL NEWS Supplement Now, I think I know just about everything about Jack’s career, but back then, I knew next to nothing.

JBC: The juxtaposition of the classic Guardian and this all-new affect are She-Hulk and Dazzler, which were created by Stan clone counterpart absolutely blew me away. I think it was the Change Affects Nearly The Lee after Jack left Marvel in 1970.”

Stan Lee could not be reached for comment.

Entire Line Of Marvel Comics Goody Rickels issue: “What is this? Are you kidding? They have In a related story, Marvel is making Jack Kirby the posthumous Editor-In-Chief, finally rectifying a situation that has arvel Comics announced this week that they intend to give plagued Marvel for years. “We’ve been receiving bad press a history? Oh, Newsboy Legion; kind of corny. But that clone— Jack Kirby credit for all the Marvel characters he helped about our treatment of Jack for years. We finally decided it was conceive individually and with Editor Stan Lee. time to do something about it,” said the spokesman. wow!—Captain America in the DC Universe! That’s pretty cool.”

In a press release, a company spokesman offered reasons for the change of heart. “Our decision is due in large part to a letter-writing campaign instigated by Dr. Mark Miller of And then finding out it’s in the ’40s…?

Portland, Oregon (see enclosed letter). We’ve been inundated with mail. The flood of letters we received from throughout the John: I was the exact same way when I discovered those Golden U.S. and abroad completely overwhelmed our shipping department. We had to do something or risk delays in getting our Age reprints. “Wow! You mean this character existed 30, 40 books into the comic stores.”

The veritable flood of mail pouring in was apparently a major deciding factor in Marvel’s recent acquisition of Heroes years ago?”

World distribution, and their decision to exclusively distribute their own comics. “This situation showed us how vulnerable JBC: Yeah, it was the past, it was the present, but it was also this we are, relying on the old ways of getting our books out to the public. Another avalanche of mail like this could put us under.” cloning and DNA and all this stuff from the future.

The spokesman said that Kirby’s official co-credit line will begin with the November cover-dated Marvel comics, which should coincide with this year’s San Diego Comic Convention.

John: He took the old thing and completely refreshed it, comThe familiar line “Stan Lee Presents:” will be replaced with “Stan Lee & Jack Kirby Present:” on most Marvel comics, pletely made it its own thing for today, which was what Kirby was including: Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor, X-Men, Silver Surfer, Iron Man, and many others. Practically every book in the Marvel about. He could take any old hackneyed idea and turn it into line will be affected. “About the only characters this doesn’t something amazing that would blow your mind. That’s why I was attracted to Kirby. It was never boring—sometimes odd—but never boring. I try to convey as much of that wonder as I can in the Kirby Collector. Early on, a lot of articles I didn’t run were like, “Jack tends toward hyperbole in anything he says,” or “I’ve basically, “Here’s what Jack means to me. I read that Jimmy Olsen with the Guardian in it and it brought tears to my eyes.” never been a crier.” Maybe Jack did color that scene a little bit That was great for me to read, as a fan, but I had to say, “Is this and there’s something to that—but Stan’s friend Joe Maneely material for a publication like this or not?” Sometimes I would had just died, so Jack may have actually seen Stan crying. I get run it and sometimes not. But when guys like you showed up, all more into that in the Stuf’ Said book. of a sudden we started getting some meat in those articles. You JBC: We’ll leave it at that. Initially, did you envision the Kirby did that Sky Masters piece in #15. I had no idea that had gone Collector to be basically a showcase for his artwork—rare, unon, the lawsuit with Jack Schiff in the ’50s. That really brought seen stuff, unpublished stuff? You come from a graphic design some amazing history to life, and I remember when you turned in background. Was it visual?

John: I pictured it 50/50. I wanted to celebrate the guy’s life and that piece and dug up those legal documents from the New York courts. I was like, “This is going to stun people when it comes career. For the first issue, I took every piece from my collection out.” I mailed that issue to Roz Kirby, and three days later, I got a that I thought people had never seen and used it. Anybody can throw together an article about Jack’s Jimmy Olsen run and show phone call from her. It was one of the worst days of my life. She’s on the phone saying, “Yeah, I just got this issue. This is horrible. I a bunch of panels from Jimmy Olsen. There’s nothing wrong feel like you were digging through my garbage. Why would you with that. I’d enjoy reading it. But to me, take the extra step print this?” I never stopped to think she might object to this… and show an unused Jimmy Olsen cover. If you present that, it and I’d disappointed Kirby’s wife! But they were like any other fleshes out the discussion a lot. That’s what I tried to do. When family, like my own—they didn’t air their dirty laundry in public.

I learned, “Oh my gosh, Jack photocopied his pencils all those years in the 1970s!” so we could see his pencils before they were I guess the whole Sky Masters/Jack Schiff thing had been hinted inked, or altered by an editor or art director up at DC or Marvel, at, but had never been documented like you did in that article.

JBC: How kind you are. You never told me that Roz called you. it was mind-blowing. “What a treasure trove of history this is!”

John: I didn’t call you right after that?

That was my focus. It wasn’t to just do an art publication by any JBC: If you did, I have completely blocked it out. It was my finest means—16, 32, or 64 pages of beautiful Kirby pencils, as nice as that would be. I wanted to discuss them and have people talk piece of investigative journalism.

John: It was! I really thought that was the moment people were about what Jack meant to them and what the stories meant to going to stop taking this sweet, little Jack Kirby publication for them, and learn more about the guy’s life and career. granted and go, “Wow, these guys are working hard to set the I didn’t even know the Newsboy Legion pre-existed before those Jimmy Olsen issues came out. Then Carmine Infantino—he record straight.” It was an amazing piece of journalism. Maybe I FREE

to our U.S. Subscribers

Marvel Gives Kirby Co-Credit!

M

The Jack Kirby Collector, April Fool’s Supplement #1, April 1995. Published once-in-a-lifetime by TwoMorrows Advertising, 502 Saint Mary’s St., Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. John Morrow, Editor. Pamela Morrow, Asst. Editor. Regular issues and back issues: $2.50 each U.S., $2.70 Canada, $3.70 outside N. America.

6-issue subscriptions: $12.00 US, $13.20 Canada, and $19.20 outside North America. This supplement’s print run: 250 copies. This supplement was mailed the week of Mar. 15, 1995. All characters are © their respective companies. All artwork is © Jack Kirby unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © the respective authors.

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The World of TwoMorrows

was trying to hide my shame.

JBC: I think you were being kind not telling me because you knew I would be crushed. We were in constant communication at the time. We had no inkling we were delving too far. We were thinking about history and not family relations so much.

John: Or politics. That’s where it became obvious to me that we’re marching into some political minefields…

JBC: Because Jack doesn’t come off that well in that story. It’s a humiliating story that Jack had to go through. But it’s an important story because it predates the Marvel Age that he started with Stan.

It was one of the main reasons he went to Marvel.

John: Absolutely, if Jack hadn’t gone through that, he never would have ended up at Marvel and Fantastic Four never would have happened.

JBC: I still don’t think people understand the implications of that, to be honest with you.

John: Well, if they read the Stuf’ Said book, they’ll understand. I think a lot of people do, largely because of that article, though. Even in the Kirby Unleashed biography of Jack and any other fanzine biographies, up to that point, there were hints to it, like there was a “dispute with DC.” That was the most I’d ever seen. Once that article was printed, it was like “The cat’s out of the bag.” But to Roz and the Kirby family’s credit, they never held it against me, and were always supportive of the magazine.

JBC: Credit where credit is due: Joe Simon in The Comic Book Makers had given the location of the court and specific dates, so I had my intrepid younger brother Andrew run down to White Plains, make copies of all the transcripts and send them to me. It blew us away.

I think another important aspect of the Kirby Collector was that you included an interview with Kirby in every single issue, right? Hasn’t that been one constant?

John: Anytime I could, I tried to include an interview. I’ve missed a few issues, but it was my intention to have some kind of interview with Jack in every issue. I also wanted to include a photograph of Kirby, not just from the ’80s, but the ’60s or ’70s.

When someone picked up a copy for the first time and said, “What is this?” I wanted there to be actual words by Jack and a photo, so they’d know what he was really like. That was very important to me.

It seems kind of simplistic, but that’s what I wanted to do. Here I am at issue #75, and I still have at least four more full Kirby interviews I’ve never run. Somehow they keep turning up. Stan Lee did about a million interviews—so many interviews that I’ve found for the Stuf’ Said book—but for Jack to

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

have done as many as he did? He sat at home at his drawing board and drew all the time, but he did an awful lot of interviews. He had a distinctive way of talking and a distinctive way of trying to get his point across. There’s a lot of depth in what he said—which sometimes left you scratching your head. It’s kind of a puzzle sometimes…

JBC: To say the least. There may have been depth, but clarity? Maybe not!

John: Well, I discuss that in Stuf’ Said. It’s excerpts from all these interviews. I was able to take out the most concise things and use those.

JBC: It’s always difficult for me to follow his train of thought. He’s never easy to quote. As a writer, I know it’s very difficult to find a usable Kirby quote.

When did you start seeking material that had substance to it, that was really talking history—as opposed to just discussing comics series and what had already been published?

John: That was #6, because the Fourth World was always my favorite Kirby work.

I didn’t know how many issues we’d last, taking a gamble actually printing them and not Xeroxing.

I thought, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this whole ‘Fourth World’ thing. Why did it get cancelled and how was Jack originally going to handle the ending? Was he going to have Darkseid die?

Was he going to have Orion die?

That later Hunger Dogs graphic novel—is that really how he planned to end it?” I couldn’t believe it was. It wasn’t a very satisfying ending to me. I’m glad he finally got to do it, but it didn’t feel quite right. I set out with my

Above: At John’s first con as a publisher (HeroesCon 1995), he had the thrill of hanging out with both Chic Stone (left) and Dick Ayers (right). That’s Nick Cardy, Murphy Anderson, and Julie Schwartz behind Ayers. What a line-up!

Previous page: “The day I nearly killed Roz Kirby!” said John. “I planned to send this 1995 April Fool’s flyer to subscribers, to encourage them to sign Dr. Mark Miller’s petition to get Marvel to credit Jack for his creations. I ran it by Roz first, and the day she got it in the mail, I get a call: ‘John, you almost gave me a heart attack when I saw this!’

She didn’t read my cover letter first, and thought the headline was real!

I subsequently removed the credit gag in the final April Fools flyer—but today, it’s no longer a joke!”

Below: John with Roz and Jeremy, at San Diego Comic-Con, in 1997.

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR own meager journalistic skills, to interview all the people involved. I got nice interviews with Mark Evanier, Steve Sherman, Mike Royer, and tried to track it all down. I crunched all the circulation numbers I could find to see if it really sold all that poorly, and whether that’s why it got cancelled. I determined that, no, they sold pretty well, but didn’t sell as well as Carmine expected, for the money DC was paying Jack. If you compare them to other titles coming out at that time, they certainly weren’t bad sellers, they were just expecting Jack to be a miracle worker. Of course, we found out later, with the distributors selling off the back of their trucks to the comic dealers of the world to sell at conventions and in their secondhand book stores, those numbers didn’t get reported. All those issues sold a lot better than got reported by the distributors, as you later documented in Comic Book Artist.

JBC: How did you interview the guys? In person? On the phone?

John: On the phone. I bought a handy dandy Radio Shack tape recorder and an adapter to plug in to the phone line. It worked fine. It was such a blast. “Wow! I can interview Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman, the two guys who worked with Jack on the Fourth World. This is so exhilarating!” Those were my first interviews. Now I know them and can talk to them anytime I want, but, back then, it was such a fanboy dream come true to get to do this. I took my one page of original Kirby art, from New Gods #9, to Comic-Con and got Mark and Steve to autograph it. I met Mike Royer for lunch and got him to autograph it, and then Roz at her home. If the Kirby Collector had ended there, after issue #6, I would have been a happy puppy, even if it hadn’t gone any longer. From there, the fans took over. Guys like you helped guide the direction, taking it where it was going to go.

JBC: Kirby Collector #6 was the first issue I read. It was, quite simply, a mind-blowing experience. I wonder if you and I connected because we were so similar? The Fourth World was very, very big for me. Also I worked in advertising; I was a graphic designer. I had this insatiable curiosity. These are all things you can say about John Morrow—not to say we were twin brothers from different mothers, but it was pretty close. Though I was the bad boy in the family…

John: We have a lot in common. When you contacted me out of the blue, I remember at that point, America Online was coming to the fore and I had learned what email was and signed up.

That was before Google and readily searching the Web. I think you emailed me.

JBC: I’m pretty sure I’ve got that email. I printed it out. It was, literally, my first day on the internet. I established my AOL account: jonbcooke@aol.com, which I still have, 23 years later.

The first thing I did a search for was “Jack Kirby.” When I found

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Left: Archie Comics legend Stan Goldberg, besides having colored the earliest adventures of many of the mainstay Marvel Comics heroes, was in awe of Jack Kirby. He sent John Morrow this illo after reading Kirby Five-Oh! (TJKC #50).

out there was a Jack Kirby Collector, I was mad. It was issue #6 at that point. “How could I not know this existed?” I was mad! [laughter] So, I immediately ordered three issues and you sent them right off. I emailed you and said, “I must have all the other issues; this is fantastic. Oh my God! I must be a part of this.” I immediately determined I must be in two features in every issue. You were not going to stop me! I forced myself on you, so to speak.

John: You don’t realize that was such a godsend! “I don’t have to do it all myself.

I can keep it going!” We were very busy with our advertising stuff too. Every issue of Kirby Collector, I was working on it until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and then getting up at 6:00 to do regular work. You and I both remember the hours we put in during those days. It was insane. But we loved it! We were young, I didn’t have kids, though you did. I could work those hours.

JBC: I started interviewing for you. I did my own transcribing, which is insane to consider now. I can’t believe how much work we did while having a day job. I would stay up until three in the morning, transcribing. I did every single one in CBA #1.

John: I still have all the old AOL emails from early on; I’m sure most of the timestamps on them are from 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. It wasn’t just you, I was emailing others at the same time and getting responses.

JBC: We’d talk on the phone every day and rack up huge long distance bills we’d have to pay, splitting the charges. I’d have the agency accountant come up to me and say, “What are all these calls to Raleigh?” I’d stammer, “I’ll take care of them.”

John: God bless Richard Howell. Early on, he volunteered to be my proofreader, probably because I had so many typos. I said, “I can’t pay you, but I’ll send you all the issues.” He said that was great. I’d send printouts of each new issue; he’d proof it, and on Sunday nights—Richard is meticulous [Jon chuckles]—we’d spend four hours on the phone going over changes. It was fun and crazy, but reached a point much later on, where there wasn’t physical time to do it, and the long distance bills added up. I said, “Just mark up the pages and send them to me.”

JBC: It was excruciating! Richard was comma-crazy on CBA! John: But that really helped with the professionalism. I developed a style sheet that I sent to you guys—when to put in quotes versus italics, and semicolons to keep it consistent, because I was not an English major in college. After issue #2 or 3, I got called on the mat by people: “You used the wrong form of ‘their’ versus ‘there,’” that kind of stuff. I quickly had to bone up on proper English because I was never a writer. Having guys like Richard around gave it consistency and professionalism.

JBC: Was the Kirby Collector your first experience as an editor?

John: Well, I edited advertising copy when needed, especially

The World of TwoMorrows

RANDOLPH HOPPE: TWOMORROWS, JACK KIRBY, AND ME What, really, was so special about TwoMorrows’ The Jack Kirby Collector in its early days… other than being filled with Jack Kirby goodness, of course? I submit two things: the calm, polite editorial voice and the elegant graphic design.

Comics fanzines, and even pro-zines were certainly available in the mid1990s, but TJKC stood out. Recently, in the past year or so, I’ve found that I can go deep and pull up that sensation I felt when reading a fresh issue from TJKC’s Xerox-at-the-drugstore era. New Kirby art and pleasant articles wrapped in a homey sleekness felt like something new and substantial. TJKC was what I wanted from comics culture that I hadn’t yet experienced. I’d been to conventions and comic shops, but to have a professionally produced, good-looking ’zine that took all of Jack Kirby’s career seriously, in a friendly and well-informed manner was… life changing. What was also special was that TJKC did not exude a sub-cult, nerd, geek, alt, grunge, punk, or b-movie aesthetic. It was—and still is—sincerely pleasant.

At the time, I was involved in the burgeoning cyberspace arena. I customized my own PC, dialed up BBSs, conferencing systems, usenet newsgroups, and other places where people communicated. It was exciting and new. It was this phase of

cyberspace culture that afforded me to fly to San Diego to meet and participate in an interview with Jack Kirby in 1992.

And then, the World Wide Web started growing on top of the internet.

I wanted to learn how to set up a website, but hoped to do something other than publish my own cartoons and art.

I can’t remember exactly when or how I hit on the idea of putting Jack Kirby on the web, but the idea caused me to reach out to Kirby Collector publisher John Morrow on Compuserve and ask him if he wanted a website. His answer, “What’s a website?” is one of my favorites, because it places the event firmly in… 1995? Fortunately, he was game and snail-mailed an envelope containing some diskettes of Kirby bitmap TIFF files and text. We were off and running… and here we are! Today, I’m still helping him with his website.

Back then, my graphic and web design business in Hoboken, New Jersey had a few small nonprofits as clients, like community service agencies and charter schools. Having visited Barcelona, Spain in 2000, with its Fundació Joan Miró and Museu Picasso de Barcelona, and then noticed 2002’s founding of the Charles Schulz Museum & Research Center, I had the idea in 2004 that Jack Kirby’s cultural significance warranted the creation of an educational, literary nonprofit, and

TWOMORROWS.COM WEBSITE HISTORY TJKC #8, Jan. 1996: http://www. mordor.com/thehop/kirby TJKC #12, Oct. 1996: http://www. interactive.net/~thehop/kirby TJKC #14, Feb. 1997: http://www. fantasty.com/kirby TJKC #23, Feb. 1999: http://www. twomorrows.com TJKC #31, Mar. 2001: The TwoMorrows “Secure Online Store” begins at twomorrows.com! suggested it to John. He thought it was a good enough idea to suggest to Lisa Kirby, and the three of us will forever be the 2005 vintage “Founding Trustees” of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center.

John is innately calm, kind, and generous, and has helped the Kirby Museum in so many ways: our page in each issue of TJKC; helping us to start our Digital Archive by allowing us to set up our scanner in the TwoMorrows convention booths; using air miles to give a talk at one of our pop-ups in New York City; the list goes on! Thank you, John and Pam, for your overwhelming efforts in support of Jack Kirby’s legacy.

I treasure our friendship.

Inset left: The first TwoMorrows web homepage, 1996.

Below: John and buddy Rand Hoppe, 2010 San Diego Comic-Con. That’s four-year old Hannah Rose at bottom.

Randolph Hoppe

Webmaster, twomorrows.com Born: 1960

Vocation: Collections Manager, Hoboken Historical Museum Residence: Hoboken, New Jersey Favorite Creator: Jack Kirby Seminal Comic Book: Kamandi #12

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

43

1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR

when we wrote it ourselves. But ad copy isn’t journalism.

JBC: Did you write well in English class and college?

John: No, I wasn’t exceptional.

JBC: I wasn’t saying exceptional, but was it clear? You’re a fine writer.

John: I appreciate that. I did fine in school. I’m literate! I’m certainly no Roy Thomas, Alan Moore, or Stan Lee. JBC: No, you’re not! [laughter] John: I meant that in a complimentary way to all three! [laughter] JBC: Did you take to it?

John: Editing, yes. My brain works very well for editing. Writing is a chore for me. When I have to write my editorial for every issue of the Kirby Collector, I have an idea of what I want to say, but finding the right words to get across my idea clearly and concisely is difficult. Some of my writing is more successful than others. I have to labor to get it well edited and clear—and not like my talking, where I tend to ramble. I have to rein it in. I was reading the Stuf’ Said proof from the printer and thought, “Wow, it’s not too bad!” I’m okay—this isn’t false modesty, I’m just not the greatest writer. Or the worst.

JBC: Who was the first person to jump on board and say, “Hey, I want to help here. I’ll do anything.”

John: Paul Doolittle. I still see his posts on Facebook, even though we don’t correspond like we used to. Early on, he’d send me nice little articles about Kirby and art from his collection. He had the Marvelmania Portfolio, and I didn’t know such a thing existed. I’d have to look through those early issues, but he contributed a lot for the first year. Rich Vitone, who is no longer with us, wrote some great articles on Kirby’s Golden Age work, which I knew little about, other than those reprints in the back of the Fourth World books. Rich had a huge Golden Age collection, and knew that stuff well. Mike Gartland—oh, my gosh!

I love Mikey, but we have butted heads on so many things. Man, we got into it! “Mike, I can’t print that!” He’d say, “But, it’s the truth!” “It may be the truth, but I can’t print that without proof!”

He’s a very strong personality. As editor, I had to rein him in. He put up with me and we came up with some really good pieces in the Kirby Collector—well, he did, and I edited them. But he’s a sweetheart of a guy.

JBC: You put your email address in the magazine, right?

John: Yes. Like you, we still have our old twomorrow@aol.com email address.

JBC: That’s how he got in touch with you?

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John: Yes. We didn’t have a real website back then.

JBC: How would I have ordered it?

John: You sent a check in the mail. There wasn’t anywhere to advertise it online. That wasn’t done in those early days. There weren’t websites. We got our first website because Rand Hoppe offered to make one for us. It’s so funny looking back: “What’s a website?” Rand knew, and set it up. I need to get those emails out because they’re really funny in hindsight. Early on, we didn’t have e-commerce. It was just a floating ad: “Send your check…”

We didn’t have a way to process credit cards. You didn’t order online, you just learned about it on message boards and sent your check to TwoMorrows Advertising. Understand, I had such a shoestring budget on things—back then, the thought of giving MasterCard three percent of each transaction was terrifying!

“We’re going to go broke doing this—we can’t accept credit cards!” That seems silly now, but back then, it was a huge thing.

I remember the first time I met Rand face-to-face. We’d corresponded a little by email, and he offered to pick Pam and me up at the Newark airport and drive us to the Ramapo, New York comic-con, which was held in a high school gymnasium, but hosted a lot of classic creators that lived in New York. So we land, get our luggage, and walk out to the curb to wait for this guy we have never met, and have no idea what he looks like.

Then this station wagon squeals up, a guy jumps out, tosses our suitcase in the car, and tells us, “Hurry, climb in the back!”

Another guy we didn’t know was driving, and I remember Pam whispering to me, “The cops are going to find our dead bodies in a ditch somewhere.” [laughter] We were so trusting of total strangers, just like Jack and Roz were. But Kirby fans are a great group, and Rand and his wife Lisa are dear friends today.

With Kirby Collector, for at least the first 18 issues, we still had our TwoMorrows office space away from home. My ritual was, during the week, we’d do our advertising work, then I’d stay up late at night and work on TJKC, and come home from the office at 2:00 a.m. Then, on Saturday morning, I’d get up early while Pam would stay in bed. I’d hop in the car and drive downtown to

The World of TwoMorrows

our office and sit there from 7:00 in the morning to 7:00 at night. I’d be there my entire Saturday working on The Kirby Collector because that’s where our computers were, just like you. I’d take a break at about 12:30 in the afternoon, always getting a grilled chicken sandwich and French fries from the Char-Grill restaurant, then come back and work another six or seven hours straight, and knock off.

Pam was so patient, and I know Beth was patient, too. We were both doing our stupid comic book stuff. Our wives were going, “Is this the life I signed up for?” You had kids then; I didn’t. Our wives were remarkably patient over the years.

JBC: I’m amazed in retrospect. Just like you, I would pull all-nighters in the office 40 miles away and she would sigh, “Okay, honey.” There was no promise that I’d be making any money. You didn’t pay me any money for The Jack Kirby Collector, right? That was all “labor of love.” You paid half my phone bill and paid for my flight to and from San Diego for Comic-Con; that was it.

People would come to the convention booth like they were going to church or coming into some sacred shrine! They would almost change their demeanor in San Diego; they’d just stop in the aisle, come over and pay homage almost. Even Michael Chabon came over to our table. And I’ll never forget when he said, “I like your writing.” I said, “Oh, screw you! You do not! You’re one of the greatest fiction writers living today, and you like my writing?” He looks at me like, “Huh, well, yeah.”

“Oh, well… shucks.” [laughter] John: That’s not an exaggeration, although it sounds like we’re tooting our own horn here. It’s all because of Kirby. It’s not because John Morrow and Jon B. Cooke are such great talents and deserve to be revered. Our talent is part of why the mags became popular, but it’s all because of Kirby. If Kirby had never existed, TwoMorrows would never have existed, and by extension, CBA would never have existed or succeeded…

JBC: No, you’re absolutely right.

John: It all goes back to Kirby. I don’t know how to stress that enough to people: It’s all about Jack Kirby. Not that we think about Kirby every time we produce a new issue of something, but the love and respect that Kirby garnered by just being who he was and for what we did—we totally fed off of it.

I am unashamed that we have been mooching off Kirby’s goodwill for 25 years now.

JBC: And nowhere was it more evident than San Diego. They treated you so well. It seemed to me that you had such good presence… almost immediately. I wasn’t there for the first year; I was there

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

working the booth between 1997 and 2002.

John: That first year, not that we made money, but we came back from San Diego feeling like the richest people on earth. All of a sudden, we’ve got a million new friends, people we didn’t know existed, just because of that one trip out there and because of this little magazine we’re doing. It was astonishing because people kept coming up to the booth. They were all going…

I call the annual Kirby Tribute Panel there “Kirby Church” now because it’s always on Sunday. You get up Sunday morning and—not to be sacrilegious—but we “worship” Jack Kirby. I say that tongue-in-cheek. Everybody just needed an outlet to express how much they loved Jack Kirby, and we were the fortunate recipients for what they had to give. It timed out perfectly. We came back from that first San Diego, and couldn’t believe the outpouring of love people gave us. We didn’t feel like we deserved it: “We’re just doing a little publication here, people.”

JBC: It was that Jack had been a constant presence every single year at San Diego, and then Jack was gone and this was a way to express appreciation…

After Jack died, I went to the Words and Pictures Museum, a place to pay your respects, and I think that was somewhat the same with TwoMorrows.

John: Nineteen ninety-three was Jack’s last ComicCon, because he died in 1994. Then, in summer 1995, we showed up with our six little issues of the Kirby Collector. I think for some, it was like, “Oh, we missed Jack Kirby last year, but now he’s back!”

JBC: The previous year had been the one to mourn.

John: Yeah. By pure luck, we probably did time it perfectly.

JBC: And they kept coming back and you kept going!

John: That’s the thing, they still do. That fascinates me. Maybe it’s because I approached the first issue as, “This may be the only issue I do; if I do another one, great! But I’m not expecting to go beyond this.” Then, after #4, “Well, I’m gonna take my chances and use what little money I have to get it printed professionally, because a Fourth World issue is the one I really care most about. And I’m going to make this the best understanding of the Fourth World ever done, and I’m going to spend my own money and hopefully not lose my shirt

Above: John and Jon B. Cooke hanging at the booth during the 1998 San Diego Comic-Con. Previous page: John with 2015 Comic-Con booth helpers John and Jake Modica, and the proud papa with both his daughters in whatever year the con required exhibitors to wear both a badge and wristband.

Below: Kirby Collector #58 was a special book-size issue, using Mark Alexander’s treatise “Lee & Kirby: The Wonder Years,” while Kirby Collector Special Edition compiles all the extras from the Collected volumes in one digital edition.

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #5

Orion © DC Comics Inc.

Orion © DC Comics Inc.

weeks, but it constantly reminds me, “Okay, this is why I’m doing this. I’m not doing it to make a buck, although I’ve got to make FULLY AUTHORIZED BY THE KIRBY ESTATE ends meet. I’m doing it because I really love it.”

Learn the secrets of the & more! A six-issue subscription is $12.00 I know you’re doing the same thing. When you turn CBC in to New Gods in our DOUBLE-SIZE postpaid in the US ($13.20 Canada, $19.20 Fourth World theme issue of The Foreign). Back issues of #1-4 are $2.50 me, the first thing you want to know… you get upset if I don’t Jack Kirby Collector, the bi-monthly ’zine each ($2.70 Canada, $3.70 Foreign). for Kirby fans! #5 ships May 1st with Send US funds payable to: immediately review the issue and say… unpublished Kirby art, interviews with TwoMorrows • 502 Saint Mary’s St. JBC: Whaddaya mean, ‘immediately’?

Mike Royer, Mark Evanier, Steve Sherman, Raleigh, NC 27605 • (919)833-8092 John: …”This is the best thing you’ve ever done.” You send me an email, “What did you think? How was it? Did it look good?” paying to print it, and I’ll double the print run. I may never do another issue, but this one’s gonna be great.” The Fourth World JBC: Well, sometimes I wait a couple of days…

John: But you do it! issue was supposed to be #5, but it took so long to put togethJBC: I know… [laughter] er that I snuck in a different #5 at the last minute—I literally John: We’re both the same way. We both need that feedback. produced it over a weekend with no sleep—so I wouldn’t miss JBC: Exactly, I think that’s the heart of that. When I was doing the deadline. When #6 came out, it did so well that, “Okay, I’ll CBA all alone at Top Shelf, I was really all alone. I did six issues do another one.” That’s been my attitude all along with Kirby and, as much as it was fine working with those guys, there was Collector. If I don’t ever do another issue, I’m prepared for that.

It’ll be disappointing, but I’m braced for it, and I’ll put everything no one I was essentially collaborating with. That’s what we have now. What we’ve renewed since 2011, is this thing… this energy I have into the current one. I won’t hold back my best piece of that may be bigger than the both of us. Whatever it is, I’m proud Kirby art on this subject for a later issue, and plan to use it two of you… really proud of you, John. I was so excited to get the years down the road. I’m going to put everything I can into the Stuf’ Said book yesterday because I wanted to see it and to open current issue. it up, and I was very touched that you dedicated it to me.

We are at 75+ issues now. I used to think, “How much more John: I was so excited; I was getting a haircut and saw a call from can we say about Jack Kirby?” I found out there’s plenty more you come in on my cell phone and I had to let it go to voicemail, to say. Sometimes when I’m exhausted working on the thing— and then I thought, “Oh no, something happened. The ghost of you know how that is, Jon—I say, “Oh, man, I just want this to Carmine Infantino called and he’s gonna sue us.” [laughter] Then be done with. I have to be finished with this issue so I can get I checked voicemail and it was you: “Oh, I just got Stuf’ Said and on with another aspect of my life.” Because these things are so I gotta say, man, this is awesome!” Ahh, yes, that’s what I needall-consuming, you want to put everything you can into them. ed. That’s my shot of adrenaline.

Then, I go out to San Diego and that love is still there. Even JBC: You kept me from adding to the book and that was good. though fewer and fewer Kirby fans can get to Comic-Con now, John: We pour our hearts and souls into these things and I don’t the ones that are still there, still come to the booth, they still know if the readers fully understand how much it takes out of us. tell us how much they love Kirby and how much they appreciWe need to hear back from them and each other. “This was the ate what we do. I need that every year to energize me to come best thing you’ve done, ever!” back and do another year of it. I hate the idea that sooner or JBC: I really do have an audience of one. As much as there are later, we’re not going to be able to go because of the expensthings I want to do and we always go back and forth on it… just es. The costs are going up and up and up, and comics fans are fewer and fewer there as the pop culture expands. But The Kirby like the idea I had today. It’s gratifying to have an audience of Collector—I don’t want to ever stop doing it. People used to ask one. I want do work I’m proud of and that makes you happy. I have financial realities; yes, I need to make money from this stuff. me, “How many more issues are you going to do?” They don’t It’s not the same as it used to be. I think the energy is coming ask me anymore. I guess I’ve finally beaten it out of them after 75 issues: “Well, I guess they’re just going to keep on doing it.” more from books now for me, especially when we did Kirby100.

Whoa, that was a lot of energy! The old magic was back and it When I sit down to do one, it consumes my life for three or four was back strong. That was great. We worked on that together.

John: It is. And we’re doing this book right now. You are taking RETAILERS: FOURTH WORLD ENDING REVEALED! Inquire about the bull by the horns and doing the bulk of the heavy lifting on discounts. #6 it, without a doubt. I’m hearing from people that you’re contacting and they’re very enthused about the idea of this book, recapturing some of the early magic. They’re remembering—if they’ve forgotten—what it was like early on discovering us and Learn Jack’s original ending to Royer! #6 is $4.95 ($5.40 Canada, $7.40 first getting involved, writing an article, transcribing an interThe New Gods in the double-size Foreign). A six-issue subscription is $12.00 Fourth World theme issue of The ($13.20 Canada, $19.20 Foreign). Copies view, whatever it was. I looked through Kirby Collector #31, Jack Kirby Collector, the bi-monthly ’zine of #1-5 are $2.50 each ($2.70 Canada, for Kirby fans! #6 ships July 3rd with arti- $3.70 Foreign). Send US funds payable which showed pictures of everyone who was working with us at cles, unpublished art, and interviews with to: TwoMorrows, 502 Saint Mary’s Street, that time. A lot of them have gone by the wayside in terms of Mark Evanier, Steve Sherman and Mike Raleigh, NC 27605. Phone 919 -833-8092. working for us, but they’re still out there. They’re still reading

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The World of TwoMorrows

it, they just don’t—for whatever reason, they got burned out. They’re not actively transcribing for us or writing articles or doing layouts, but I still hear from them from time to time. It’s still gratifying to know we haven’t burnt bridges—we’ve built them.

That’s what we’re still trying to do… and it all goes back to Jack Kirby.

the work… that I pay my bills on time. I think that would make him very happy. When we were kids—because we didn’t have a lot—he always harped on “money, money, money… you don’t waste it!” I’m very frugal to this day because of it.

The Future I’m glad to hear that. For any JBC: It’s been a long trip. It’s 25 years, a significant of our contributors out there milestone for any company. Maybe what we’re do- who ever got a check a few days ing is insanely self-indulgent, but it’s good! I’m glad late—pay attention!—it’s usually I pushed you to do this book. It’s important to me, not my fault. Sometimes I get too. It’s the most creative and productive time in busy and I don’t get the checks my life. Here I am turning into a senior citizen now. out as quickly as I want, but not I’ve never been as energized because we’re not in life as I am now; there’s going to pay you! so much to do! And I’m not Sometimes we going to do everything with get sidetracked…

TwoMorrows and you’re not an editor forgets to going to do everything with tell me who to pay… my kid me, and we’ll be proud of one gets sick… Carmine threatens another. I look at Stuf’ Said to sue us… “The check’s in and I know I so wanted to the mail.” Really! be in that book, but it’s okay, JBC: You know what’s interbecause I know I can make it esting, and I believe this is into other projects of yours. true for you: The very last John: You largely, but also thing I did for CBA, every sinGeorge Khoury, Michael gle time, and it’s true today, Eury… so many of you guys is my editorial. One of the have shown me stuff in comics reasons for it has to do with and pop culture I had no extalking directly to the reader posure to. I’m looking at our and saving the last word for new magazine RetroFan— him or her. I’m very grateful I just sent #4 to the printer—and other than the for Stan Lee, to be honest with you, because the Shazam! TV show, I don’t think there is a single way he communicated with the reader made the thing that’s covered in that issue, that I was perconnection so warm. It was cozy and nice and sonally exposed to as a kid. I didn’t watch Star Trek, I never cared about Harvey Comics, and Ray Harryhausen—these were not on my radar. But I’m fascinated reading about this stuff and fascinated seeing the enthusiasm these guys have for that, because it was a big part of their life.

JBC: One thing I definitely want to get into print: I’ve worked with a number of publishers before, but I never worked with somebody as committed to paying people like you are. You pay your people on time and accurately! Every month I’ve gotten a check from you over the years from the books, and that’s remarkable because there are many almost-crooks and full-blown crooks in this business.

John: Thank you. I take that as the nicest compliment of all. I wish my dad were around to hear that.

That would impress him more than the quality of

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

Top and bottom: In 2008, John produced the 200-copy limited edition Kirby: Deities portfolio, assembling all of Jack’s original New Gods concept drawings; it was an immediate sell-out. And by tracking down the original art, he remastered the fabled Kirby Unleashed portfolio in 2004. Along with Kirby100, Kirby Five-Oh!, Stuf’ Said, and Dingbat Love, these are publications John is most proud of.

Center: An original pencil drawing from Jack Kirby’s 1970s sketchbook, gifted to John by the Kirbys.

Previous page: Original ads that ran in Comics Buyer’s Guide. John’s first missed deadline came, he said, “When I couldn’t properly finish my Fourth World issue for TJKC #5, and pushed it back to #6.

It was worth the delay!”

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THE TANTALIZINGLY TRUE TALE OF TOMMY TWOMORROWS “Hey, you wanna write about Mike Sekowsky?”

Well, how did Jon B. Cooke know that?

Am I getting ahead of myself? I am.

I first met John and Pam Morrow in…1996? If I wasn’t sitting down, I would sit at the realization of how long ago that was. I was attending my first San Diego Con, bringing one $50 bill to last me the four days of the con with a list of comics to look for and panels to see. At that time, there were no huge movie studio booths taking up most of the real estate; in fact, the San Diego Convention Center had only opened up about half of the available floor. This does not mean it was small. Nooooo.

It was huge, bigger than my 50 bucks would allow. I was also there with a tape recorder and a couple of appointments for interviews to conduct for a magazine I was writing for. I talked to Randy Reynaldo of Rob Hanes Adventures, Marie Severn (Marvel Comics legend), Mark Evanier (writer of Groo, co-creator of DNAgents, Crossfire, and of the Garfield & Friends TV series) and a few others brave enough to get near my tape recorder. One of these days I’ll write about how hard it was for me to interview people. I always felt really bad at it.

Oh, and John and Pam. I had a Jack Kirby Collector poster that TwoMorrows had been giving out to subscribers.

And hey! I was a subscriber! I had been since finding a stack of TJKC at a CenterCon in Seattle a few months after it started coming out. Even then, John was a busy guy, always with his head

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down near the mouth of some usually older person against the noise of the room, nodding, and then rearing back to answer questions or to work out details of various mysterious deals. Then he’d go back to nodding along with the words of whoever he was talking to. I got John to sign my poster, but it took an eye-roll (“oh, he’s talking again”) and the intervention of the other Morrow to get his attention: “John”—I wish I could write the way Pam pronounced “John,” as there was a certain amount of affection, exasperation, and Southern charm I can’t even begin to capture—“this gentleman would like you to sign his poster.” And he did and he recognized my name from the subscriber list. We talked about the first annual Kirby tribute panel that was coming up before he was pulled away into another close conversation with another baseball cap-wearing senior citizen. At these cons, I learned to watch for the senior citizens; they were usually the Golden Age comic guys I was looking for.

And I never saw John or Pam again.

The End. Okay, I lie. The next year, I stopped by the booth again, saw John and Pam, bought a few more comics, met Gil Kane (he was tall), and talked to more Golden Age guys. I came away with as many comics as I could on my limited budget and an offhand remark from John. “Hey, we’re starting a new magazine, Comic Book Artist. Would you be interested in doing some writing for it?”

Sure! He took my email and said he’d give it to the editor. Cool.

Back then, I did a column/post/blog on AOL called The Basement, about comics, toys, and whatever I thought of the day before deadline. Some of these could be called “articles” (one got me a postcard from Alex Toth), and most were structured to start somewhere and end somewhere. So, when I got Jon B. Cooke’s email about writing on Mike Sekowsky and the series Bat Lash, I figured, “No problem.” Totally had this.

Only this time I couldn’t spew forth stuff from my own tiny mind, I had to inter-

view people.

Tom Stewart Cool people TwoMorrows like Joe contributor, Giella, Sergio convention staff Aragonés, Born: 1964 Mark Evanier, and others.

Residence: So I did, with Seattle, Washington a mini-tape Vocation: recorder, tiny Comics creator, writer tapes, and an Favorite Creator: attachment Will Eisner to the touchSeminal Comic Book: tone desk Batman DC Treasury phone (old Edition #C-25 [1974] school, baby!

The only way to roll! No, really, it was…), and drymouthed, I worked up the courage to call people. And talk, and ask impertinent questions and learn to shut up and let others talk.

I was actually pretty decent at it. But it never really got any easier.

By my third SD Con, I started working in the booth with John and Pam and Jon (later Eric). In my association with TwoMorrows, this was the most fun.

Growing up as a kid in the ’70s, in Pasco, Washington, there weren’t a lot of comic fans around, at least not ones who outed themselves as fans. At San Diego, working the booth with the crew, I got to meet a lot of fans and, especially, pros. I got to autograph my article on Bat Lash for artist Nick Cardy so he could show it to his unimpressed grandchildren, hang out with Gary Owens, chat with Gene Simmons, save stacks of books for Scott Shaw!, laugh with Len Wein about his bags of stuff he was carrying around (“People keep handing me stuff… I can’t say no!”), say hi to Batton Lash, wave to fellow dealers, and meet and talk to the people who made the books I grew up on. Harlan Ellison left a voice message correcting my grammar on an article I wrote. Harlan Ellison read something I wrote! They all treated me like one of them, when I really wasn’t.

I never felt like such a fan as when working a con. Loved it, loved the

The World of TwoMorrows

friendly. I know why people are so crazily in love with the man. He did make me feel special. Roy was very good at that, too—not to the alliterative extremes where Stan went, but he created individual voices for us. We had personality in the magazines and that really shined through.

John: That’s that connection with the readers. For The Kirby Collector; they connected to Kirby, but they also connected to me on some level, that I’m still a Kirby fan. When they read it, that realize that it’s being produced by a Kirby fan, not some corporate art director/editor somewhere in New York that’s just making a buck by producing this magazine about whoever this cartoonist guy is. I try to step back as much as possible in the publication and not inject myself into it more than I have to, because I want it to be about Jack. That was my only hesitation about doing this anniversary book.

But, at the same time, it’s like going to conventions and talking to people about what they like and what they don’t like about the magazine. That energizes me and I don’t want to stop doing The Kirby Collector, even if I only do it once a year. At least I keep my hand in so I don’t ever lose touch with what I was doing in Kirby Collector #1, and why I was doing it. And you were doing it in CBA #1. We don’t ever let it become “just a job.” That’s the key. That’s why I enjoy my job. It’s not just a job.

JBC: For me, it’s a career… This became something totally different than a job. I just turned 60 and I have no interest in retiring, whatsoever. I only feel the pressure of time, in that I only have so much time left on Earth. I want to do a lot of books… that sometimes puts me on the fence about wanting to continue Comic Book Creator.

I can be somewhat ambivalent about it, but I can get very excited about it at the same time, too.

Not that it’s drudgery; but it does consume a lot of time for financial return that’s less than great. standing and talking for hours, toting boxes (wasn’t crazy about standing under the huge AC blowers), never felt like part of something as much as when I was behind the table. There I was, trying to remember which issue of Alter Ego had that interview with Mickey Spillane (#11, by the way, back issue still available at twomorrows.com), and shooing away the people who were there to read but not buy. This ain’t no library, ya know! The cons are a special version of insanity, and insanity is always

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

CBA was different and far more profitable. It was a different time.

Back then, there was also a magical aspect about it—it was basically free content. Our overhead was limited, besides the production.

We didn’t have much overhead; we weren’t paying ourselves or paying a mortgage with it because we had our own jobs! That’s been a part of the key. I don’t want the readers to think we were being mercenary. The free content was freeing us to do more. We did our own interviews, did our own transcribing, and did our own layouts. All that cost money in the sense that our labor went into it. But otherwise, it’s the writers, artists, and the editors who were giving of their time, sharing by letting me interview them, of going through their archives and sending us stuff— our taking the time to do this stuff, and their taking their time to share this stuff. It’s not so easy to get anymore. Professionals are less interested in being covered.

John: We’ve become more professional in that we pay, even though it’s a small amount—we pay our designers, we pay our transcribers.

JBC: Right. The content isn’t free anymore.

John: We can’t… because you’re 60 and I’m pushing 60. We can’t work a full-time job and then stay up all night and produce these magazines. This has to be our job, and that’s the reality. If people want to continue to see the publications, we have to pay other people in the same boat. We can’t expect them to devote their entire lives to transcribing our interviews—they have to get paid for it, even if it’s

better shared with friends.

Comic Book Artist, that magazine went away, and I wrote for Back Issue magazine, the successor. I took a leave from it and never really came back. I kept working the San Diego cons until around 2013 when it got too prohibitively expensive. But I miss it; every year when the Con rolls around, I feel the pull to the balmy town and flocks of fans. And to see John, Pam, and their girls, Lily and Hannah Rose. And the pros looking exhausted and excited at

Above: “Here I am photobombing Steve Sherman’s selfie with Mark Hamill,” John said, “at the private luncheon following the 2017 Disney Legends ceremony, where Kirby was posthumously inducted.”

Below: The 50th issue of The Jack Kirby Collector was a special tabloid-size book, Kirby Five-Oh!, celebrating Jack’s “50 Best” in several categories. It was later reprinted at standard size.

the same time, listening to the complaints of the dealers who feel more and more pressed and squeezed every year, and the kids who have just discovered that there were other comics before they were born, and have I ever heard of Jack Kirby?

And we’ve come full-circle. Bless you John and Pam, and bless this ramshackle kingdom called TwoMorrows; hard won, fiercely maintained and necessary.

Previous page: Tom Stewart and his amazing collection.

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1994: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR Left: Pam and John were profiled in Raleigh’s upscale lifestyle magazine in 2018. “I took the opportunity to wear the jacket my daughters gave me for Christmas,” John said.

just a little bit. That’s fair, but the magazines make less because we pay more to produce them. That means if they make less, we have to work smarter and not longer hours. It’s challenging, but it’s still going, and it’s going well. We’re not getting rich off it, but we’re not losing our shirts either!

JBC: You have developed a model now, John. It’s an industrial

model. They have 80-page issues, plus covers. No more, no less.

The other thing that was very successful for us was the ability to extrapolate early issues of Comic Book Artist into full-blown books themselves. So we are extending the shelf-life of the content.

John: I think by not being too pragmatic early on, and sometimes taking economic risks because we loved the material so much and believed in our mission, that contributed to the initial adoption of our publications and our longterm success. So, time marches on and we have to get more pragmatic, but I think the love’s still there. I know the enthusiasm is for me on this Stuf’ Said book, as exhausted as I was after doing all that research.

Every issue, The Kirby Collector is the same. I finish an issue and I say, “I don’t want to hear the name ‘Jack Kirby’ again for a little while,” as much as I love Jack Kirby. About a week-and-a-half or two weeks away from it, I start getting my curiosity back about him. By the time the issue is printed and back in my hand, I look at it fresh, thinking, “Wow, did I do this? This is fantastic! If I was a reader and not the publisher and the editor, I’d totally buy this and love it.” I haven’t lost the joy I get when an issue comes back from the printer. As long as I can say that, I think I’ve got a pretty good gig for my career, regardless of whether it makes a lot of money. It’s very satisfying.

JBC: That’s part of the equation.

We’re doing stuff we like to see ourselves. I think that’s the key.

John: It is immensely satisfying in that regard. It really is.

KIRK TILANDER: GRATITUDE FOR ALL AT TWOMORROWS Kirk Tilander Contributor, The Jack Kirby Collector Born: 1965 Residence: Cranston, Rhode Island Vocation: Internet auction specialist Favorite Creator: Jack Kirby Seminal Comic Book: Kamandi #1

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In 1972, firefighters came to my school and gave us copies of a Smokey the Bear comic book. I said to my friends, “I’ve seen these before at the drugstore, but have never bought one.”

So I went there after school and bought Swamp Thing #1 and Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth #1. I was blown away by the double-page spread in Kamandi and became a Kirby fan then.

My favorite issue was #6 with the death of Flower. I also recall picking up The Demon #3, with the Demon looking in on the man in the helicopter.

Years later, I found the Marvel Treasury Editions with Fantastic Four and the Mighty Thor by Kirby.

In 1994, at the Boston Comic-Con, fellow Kirby fan Paul Doolittle told me about The Jack Kirby Collector, which was just released. I contacted John Morrow and submitted

the cover for TJKC #2 as well as the article “Kirby on Display” about the Word and Pictures Museum. I shared what art I had at the time and met John in person at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2001 or ’03. I also met Kirby inker Mike Royer and Last of the Viking Heroes creator Michael Thibodeaux.

I am so grateful for all of you at TwoMorrows who put so much effort into making the comics world a little better for all of us. Thank you!

The World of TwoMorrows

JEAN DEPELLEY ON “JOHN, MY AMERICAN BROTHER!” In February 1996, I stumbled upon The Jack Kirby Collector at my local comic book shop. Remember that I am French and live in Limoges, a small town in the center of the country. The dealer, Thierry, told me this fanzine was exactly for me. After buying and reading it, I had to admit he was right. After all, Thierry’s one of my oldest friends and knows perfectly what I like.

At that time, I was still a student pursuing a PhD in chemistry, struggling to become a professional teacher, and Jean Depelley not rich enough to Contributor, afford expensive back The Jack Kirby issues, even if Jack Collector collaborate on The Jack Kirby Kirby was already my Collector by sending articles King. I vividly rememBorn: 1966 and interviews. I managed to ber the shock I had, Residence: Limoges, have a Press Pass (thanks to two years before, Limousin (France) my old friend, journalist when the news of his Vocation: Science teacher Gérard Jean) and, on January passing hit me. Being Favorite Creator: 25, 1997, we went together raised by his Fantastic Jack Kirby to Angoulême, in Charente, Four as a kid, I had 120 kilometers away from that weird feeling Seminal Comic Book: Limoges… to interview none he was a member of Fantastic Four #44 other than the great Will Eisner my family. So, you himself! The trip was difficult imagine my pleasure as snow had fallen, but we eventually when I discovered TJKC #9, a special made it. Will was just finishing a signing Fantastic Four issue! Naturally, after session at his French publisher’s booth reading the mag in one sitting, I had when we met him. I showed Will the to write to its editor, some guy named magazine and, even though we didn’t John Morrow…. have an appointment, he was okay to Recently, I rediscovered an enveanswer my questions, “For my friend lope containing my correspondence Jack.” Gerard recorded it. The discuswith John (I had no idea these printed sion was supposed to be 15 minutes emails would one day become helpful long but it lasted nearly 40 minutes. to write this essay). My first letter is datWill was so kind and generous despite ed April 18, 1996. In it, after congratuhis French publisher complaining to me! lating John for his magazine, I immediI sent the transcript and tape to John ately subscribed. Rapidly, I ordered the and the interview was immediately pubfirst issues which were still available at lished (in #16, June 1997). That was my the time (though not in their first printfirst collaboration with John Morrow. ings). I had no idea the adventure was Thanks to The Jack Kirby Collecjust beginning! tor, to this day, I have had a freelance The American audience probably journalist pass to the Festival of Anknows about the Festival of Angoulême, goulême, where I could meet and interwhich is one of the largest comic-cons view many creators, such as Moebius, in the world, the largest in France. This Druillet, Andreas, Arnon (who became festival generally takes place yearly on a friend and collaborator), just to name the last weekend of January. Already a a few. writer for movie fanzines, I decided to

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

Apart from my emails to John being frequently published in TJKC’s letter column (where I was constantly asking for the publication of the lost pages of Dingbats of Danger Street #2 and 3), many articles came out. I also contributed to Richard Kolkman’s Jack Kirby Checklist. All this, despite computer incompatibilities between John’s and mine!

In year 1999, both our families shared a difficult experience as hurricanes Floyd and Martin damaged our houses and left us without electricity for a full week.

But year 2000 was much better, even if I failed to find a French publisher for TwoMorrows’ excellent Streetwise book: my collaboration with John became official, with the publication of the long-delayed interview with Jack by the late Annie Baron-Carvais.

Through John, I could get in touch with many wonderful people, including Lisa, Neal, Jeremy, and Jillian Kirby, Mark Evanier, Steve Sherman, Jon B. Cooke, Adam McGovern, Rand Hoppe, Tom Kraft, Mike Royer, Mike Thibodeaux…

In 2006, John decided to directly try the French and Canadian markets. He asked me which book would sell better and if I would be okay to translate it and find a French distributor. I imme-

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diately accepted, opting for George Khoury’s The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, not knowing that John was already negotiating it with a French publisher. John was confident enough to cancel his negotiations and give the book to me. It took me three months to translate and one more for John to lay out. The French version came out in October and sold very well.

In 2007, my friend, artist Reed Man, relaunched Strange, the famous magazine which originally published Marvel Comics—including Jack’s work—in France in the ’70s. The idea was to publish creator-owned series. Guess who he asked to collaborate? I became editor and writer, scripting Megasauria (with Arnon) and ShieldMaster (with Reed Man, Arnon and Jim Simon, from the character developed by Joe and Jim Simon). With the approval of the Kirby Estate, we could finish Jack’s Galaxy Green and publish other rare stuff (including a lost page of Fantastic Four #108 and The Astrals). Indeed, Strange was a little bit like a French Kirby Collector.

All along I was still investigating Jack’s life and career for French documentary films (Marvel 14, Superheroes Vs. Censorship, co-directed with Philippe Roure and, more recently,

Kirby at War, with Marc Azéma) and for an extensive biography (Jack Kirby, the Superhero of Comics, which won the award for the best comics-related book in France in 2015). The discoveries I made were also published in The Jack Kirby Collector (the Davy Crockett, Frontierman strips, the Tiger 21 TV presentation sketch… ).

During these two decades of collaboration with John, I could socialize with him and his family and get to know the man very well.

First, John and I have two daughters who were born one year apart and, many times, we shared our experiences of short sleepless nights and how our wives could get rid of morning sickness!

Then, in 2010, I eventually made it to San Diego, meeting my pen-pal and his family (his wife Pam and daughters Lily and Hannah Rose) for the first time. During Comic-Con, John was kind enough to invite me to the Eisner Awards and we could discuss and strengthen our friendship… up to the point when the Morrows visited Paris in 2013! My family met them in the capital and we had a wonderful weekend visiting the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, the Déesse Comic Book shop (the best in the world, period!), and the Castle of Versaille (where John and I admired

the Gallery of battles’ giant paintings—“definitely large art,” we concluded!). Our young daughters could become friends as well and had lots of fun, despite their speaking different languages.

I could eventually pay my tribute to John by filming him for the documentary Kirby at War, during the 2017 San Diego International Comic-Con, and finally help get him the recognition he fully deserves for keeping the memory of the King alive.

Visiting Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina, every year as a teacher, I could meet John and his family and get to know them very well. John is a close friend, very supportive and helpful, especially during difficult times….

To conclude, I will say that I am very privileged to know John and to be his friend. He once said to me that we meet more frequently than some of his immediate family. Together, we have shared a lot of good memories these past 20 years, and the best description for John a French man can find is that he is a real “Honest Man,” with the 17th century meaning. Nothing less! No wonder he has succeeded so well with his life, his family and his publishing company. He has earned it!

JERRY K. BOYD: TWOMORROWS IS… TOTALLY TERRIFIC! In the early ’90s, I made On one occasion, I saw JERRY K. BOYD time to hit the comic this thin, black-&-white TJKC contributor stores not on “the beaten fanzine in a store near path” from my apartment U.C. Berkeley, just Born: 1958 home. This meant that past Oakland. This Residence: every three–four months oddity was called The Palo Alto, CA or so, depending on life’s Jack Kirby Collector.

Vocation: other demands, I’d drive ‘’Well,’’ I remember School Teacher up to stores in Oakland, mumbling to myself, Favorite Creator: San Francisco, and Santa ‘’it only makes sense for Jack Kirby (of course!)

Cruz, 40 miles away in all someone to do something Seminal Comic Book: directions. like this.’’ In fact, the first Amazing Spider-Man #4 The journey was always three of them were there. worth it; some dealer Hmmm… was this a worthy would have original art at reasonable investment of my money? I decided to prices or something on my want list— get the third issue, intrigued by some also at a reasonable price.

Kirby drawings in and outside of it that

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I’d never seen before.

I bought some other items (that I can’t recall now) and went to my favorite greasy burger joint just off the man-made Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland to have lunch.

And after gulping it all down, I started to read. This new fanzine was on the top of the stack… and I fell in love with it, so much so that I went immediately back and picked up the other two issues.

It was announced that the sixth issue would be devoted to the New Gods tetralogy—“the icing on the cake’’ for the King’s stellar and interstellar career, as I saw it. And I decided to write

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something. I’d never wanted to write for a fanzine before and never thought I would – but this Jack Kirby Collector was something different!!

I really wanted to be part of this!

Editor-publisher-chief writer John Morrow used a snippet of information from the article I submitted, but that was all I needed to get me going! I had decided to stick with this fanzine writing thing, and I know my writing has gotten better over the decades since then! (I haven’t seen that article in its entirety for a lonnnnnng time, but I’m sure it wasn’t very good!) John got the right stuff out of it!

TJKC continued to get much better,

and it never disappointed, ever. Color covers, flip covers, color inserts, and interviews with the greats followed— and so many greats were touched by meeting with the King.

In years to come, Comic Book Artist, Alter Ego, Draw, Rough Stuff, Back Issue, and others added to that terrific TwoMorrows magic, along with Modern Masters, Swampmen, Warren Companion, and other mags and books.

Thanks for 25 years of wonderment and magic, folks. It only figures that Kirby’s life and storytelling legacy would get it all started so well…

Right: The original coloring for the cover of 2011’s Jack Kirby Collector #56. Kirby’s unused character Galaxy Green was about to be featured in Alex Ross and Kurt Busiek’s Kirby: Genesis series, so TwoMorrows obligingly recolored the cover to match the scheme they had planned.

FRANK JOHNSON ON THE INSPIRATION OF TWOMORROWS My discovery that John and Pam Morrow were planning their first issue of The Jack Kirby Collector, in September, 1994, coincided with my first purchase of original Jack Kirby art, a piece featuring The Boy Explorers.

This was before internet search engines and when information was harder to come by, and I had felt isolated in my passion for Jack Kirby. I reached out to John right away, told him I was a huge fan, and offered him my research.

We bonded and I spoke of my intrigue with Jack Kirby’s The Boy Explorers: why was it cancelled? What became of the unpublished stories?

Although The Boy Explorers didn’t last long, it’s one of my favorites; I just fell in love with the idea of those kids helping an old guy, Commodore Sinbad. I even created my own comic in homage, called The Young Explorers.

John has a significant network, is generous with his knowledge, and has a gift for bringing people together.

John connected me to someone who could help, and within a year, John and I co-authored the article “In Search of…

The Boy Explorers,”published in TJKC #7 [Oct. 1995]. I was thrilled!

John Morrow: The Jack Kirby Collector

TwoMorrows later listed his name in the credits of Frank Johnson me as a contributor to Fantastic Four #4.

Contributor, the 1998, 2008, as well as From that point on, The Jack Kirby the Centennial editions of I became laser Collector the Jack Kirby Checklist. I focused on Jack Born: 1949 have owned nearly every Kirby and discovcomic on that list and, for ered he created Residence: many years, had chronicled most of Marvel. I New York State every comic in which Kirby became interested Vocation: artwork appeared. I had in how his mind worked, Motivational speaker sent John my notebook, and who he was as a Favorite Creator: and it was used to fill in person.

Jack Kirby many omissions they were John and Pam’s steadSeminal Comic Book: unaware of. fast 25-year dedication Fantastic Four #4 Over the years, as has provided Kirby I collected more Kirby enthusiasts with a sense artwork, I sent John at least of community, a way to 100 pieces of original art. I would also explore Jack Kirby’s brilliance, be incontact him whenever I saw an obscure spired, and even start our own ventures.

Kirby comic or artwork up for sale. John In fact, another article led me to was always very gracious and grateful Barry Geller, and we are working tofor my offerings, even when he already gether on a Lord of Light project, www. had the information. He is a gentleman, lordoflight.com. I am also producing my and an honest man who values others, own comic called Dreamer, with artwork and always treated me with kindness stylized after Jack Kirby (www.Dreamerand respect.

ComicBook.com).

Born in 1949, in Kingston, New York, So many thanks to John and Pam I started collecting comics at age nine.

Morrow for being a large source of My Jack Kirby “ah-ha” moment hapinspiration on my life’s journey! pened a few years later, when I noticed

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST

“A Kirby Collector for the Other Guys” Jon B. Cooke

Kid Cooke

John Morrow: Mr. Cooke, where were you born?

Jon: Kingston, New York. We lived in Westchester County. At the time, it was the highest per-capita income county in the United States. It’s a suburb of Born: 1959 New York City, the exact town Don Draper from Mad Residence: Men “lived” in, a show which perfectly captured West Kingston, that time and place. We were not as wealthy as our Rhode Island neighbors—we rented—but my siblings and I grew Vocation: Freelance up around high-income, well-off people. graphic designer JM: Isn’t that also where Prof. X’s mansion was?

Favorite Creator: Jon: That was next door. Yeah, but they wouldn’t let Jack Kirby us Cookes in. [laughter] Seminal Comic Book: JM: You weren’t “mutanty” enough.

Jimmy Olsen #133 Jon: I was the fifth of six kids. I have a little brother, The Jack Kirby Collector’s Andrew. Comics were a part of the whole culture in surprise success paves the the ’60s. I remember Batmania. I read Richie Rich, way for a follow-up Gold Key Comics, Lois Lane… I do remember the TwoMorrows magazine— first time I bought a brand-new comic off the stands.

Jon B. Cooke’s awardI have a distinct memory of being nine years old and winning Comic Book Artist. buying Captain America, the one where he’s smashing through the Dec. 8, 1941, New York Times.

Right inset: “If memory serves,” JM: Oh wow! So was that Cap #109? [Jon nods] said Jon B. Cooke, “this placard was created to promote Comic That was your first comic? Really?

Book Artist magazine just before Jon: No, that was the first new one I remember Neal Adams offered to ink an buying with my own money. I’d buy them used, like unpublished penciled Batman Classics Illustrated, in Ossining. My oldest brother piece, the results of which saw print as CBA #1.” The illustration collected Marvels. I thought Marvels were a little was derived from Joe Kubert’s off-putting. The best word that comes to mind was cover art for DC’s Strange Adven- Kirby looked “grotesque.” I’m telling you: the Kurt tures #219 [Aug. 1969].

Schaffenberger/Curt Swan DCs were much more welcoming: slick, neutral… probably neutered.

JM: Safe.

Jon: “Safe”! That’s a perfect word. Marvels were, “Whoa!” Something was going on there. I think I was kind of repulsed—or probably “repelled,” is a better word—by Jack’s drawings. But I remember Jack’s style and I remember Ditko. Stan Lee was a household name at home. Marvel was big—my sister loved Ditko’s Doctor Strange—but my brother would not allow us to look through his comics. I believe he had started with Fantastic Four #1.

JM: [Chuckles] So, they were prized possessions in Comic Book Artist the house.

First Issue: 3/21/1998 Jon: Well, his possessions. Richie would not allow us Editor, Comic Book Artist

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Coming in 1998 from the publisher of The Jack Kirby Collector.

to look at them, so he’d have to be out of the house when I’d sneak up to peek. When I was probably four or five years old, I remember seeing Ant-Man and thinking, “Wow, this guy in the helmet is really cool, and he’s small like me!”

But, as I grew older, with Marvel, I was put off by the “to be continued” at the end of stories. By the time I was turning 10 or 11, I thought, “What a rip-off! They’re forcing me to buy the next issue. I’m going on strike against Marvel.” I remember Tower of Shadows #1, the Steranko story. But I was not a comics fan. I was a reader. It was just a part of life.

You watch dumb afternoon TV, you cook up Creepy Crawlers, and you play with Major Matt Mason toys.

But something happened that changed me.

JM: When did it switch over from you being just a casual reader, to an obsession? Can you point to a

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certain issue, series, or character?

Jon: Yes, I can. I don’t know whether the memory is truthful or not—though I have since persuaded myself to believe it—but we lived in Europe for a year. My mother got divorced and she and her two youngest children—Andy and I—went to live in Ireland, England, and France for about a year.

JM: How old were you?

Jon: It was 1970, so I was eleven and Andy was nine. It was the absolute, most important life-changing event that happened, because though we didn’t go to school, we still received a profound education, one that led me to pursue a creative life. My mom took us to all these historical sites and she would allow us to buy one comic book a day. In a way, we were homesick, so comics helped us feel connected.

In that isolation and being in new places, we quickly became comic book fans. We branched out from American comics and bought British comics, as well.

Plus we made up our own comics.

Before my mom got divorced, she was a suburban housewife raising six children smack dab in the middle of the ’60s. After the break-up, she became a hippie, pretty much. It was very freeing. She was really proud of us for just being creative and would let us seek our own muse. Andy and I would make our own comics and tell each other stories before we went to sleep. We’d act out Star Trek episodes and be scared by The Outer Limits. It was a lot of fun.

JM: Is that why you are closer to Andy today?

Jon: Well, yeah, but we were also the two youngest, so it’s natural we paired off. Andy went to Colorado for a couple of years in the latter ’60s to help with his severe asthma. He came back to this hippie family! [laughter] He was this straight-laced little kid with a suitcase and a buttoned-up shirt: “Who are these people? What am I getting into?” We had a really good time and he was soon converted into a long-haired kid. We were very close and have been very tight ever since. We created our own comics to entertain each other. He created Mighty Boy and I created Atomic Man, basically our own respective riffs on Superboy and Captain America. We even dreamed up our own imaginary publishing company:

1998 Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

Anglo-American Publications, AAP. JM: Were they a team or in separate stories? “The Adventures of Atomic Man and Mighty Boy”?

Jon: No, no. I was an older brother and was going to do things my way. [chuckles] We had very demarcated interests in comics. I was very much a Captain America kid and he was a Spider-Man kid. More importantly, he was into Mister Miracle and I was into New Gods, he was into Kamandi and I was into The Demon. With brothers, everything is competitive; you are constantly trying to out-do the other.

That comic book you asked me about? The one that changed me from reader to fan…? Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #133, the first ’70s DC comic by Jack Kirby. I had seen Challengers of the Unknown just prior to that and remember seeing this “Kirby is Coming” blurb. I really had no idea who or what Kirby was. I wondered, “Is Kirby a thing? Is it a character? Is it a new series coming out?” I remember having no idea. And then, when Jimmy Olsen blared “Kirby is Here!”… boy, was he! I share the exact same reaction as Walter Simonson, although he was obviously older, in having my mind blown by that single comic book. I think he was in college when it happened to him. For me, I was 11 or 12, and my jaw dropped to the ground. “Oh. My. God!

1999

Above: TwoMorrows banner produced in 1998 for the San Diego Comic-Con convention booth, in the first year of Comic Book Artist’s existence, during which Roy Thomas’ legendary fanzine, Alter Ego, was a flip-side mag in CBA. Below: Jon as a seven- or eightyear-old, which puts this pic at around 1966 or ’67. He looks to be reading a DC war comic book.

2000 55

1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST JM: What year were you actually overseas?

Jon: It was 1970–71. By September of ’71, we returned to the States and were back into school. It was the start of the 100-Page Super Spectaculars. I can mark my life by all these dumb comic book things. [chuckles] We were quite poor at this point.

JM: You were at your first Seuling convention early on.

Jon: Right. Jack Kirby was there. I was 13 years old by then and Andy was 11 and we were pretty young. We had seen an ad in one of the Creepy or Eerie magazines. We said, “Wow!” and talked our mother into letting us take the bus without her. My sister lived in New York City and we stayed at her apartment. We would stay up all night at the Seuling cons to watch movie serials until we passed out under the seats on the carpet! It had a huge impact. I can’t describe how wonderful it was because these giants were all around. Jack was there and I shook his hand. By then, I was in awe. He meant so much to me; I can’t even describe it. I There is so much going on!” People peg that as a criticism; I beg had a dysfunctional relationship with my own father, and Jack (in to differ, kind sir! It was like the floodgates had opened and I a way) was a surrogate father, at least creatively. He shared more loved everything that was going on—even as corny as these hipwith me, much more than my own flesh-and-blood father had pies, the “Hairies,” and the Outsiders in the “Wild Area” were. shared. That sounds sad, but it was good. As you know, John, I’m JM: This is the difference between you and me: we’re three or emotional about Kirby. He means a great deal to me. I love him. four years apart in age. You got into underground comix, which I JM: You saw the ad in an Eerie or Creepy. When did you first affix never did. yourself to Warren’s output?

Jon: That took a little bit of time.

Jon: Probably around then, but we always looked through everyJM: So, you weren’t seeing them while they were new? thing on the stands that even remotely looked like a comic book.

Jon: Yes, I was, but I was very young. It’s really amazing to think JM: When did you learn about Warren as a personality? how much happened to my brother and me in a short amount of Jon: It was probably at that 1972 convention. He was a character. time. I did not see Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #133 the exact This is back in the day where all of these incredible luminaries month it was published, but in the following fall when I found were just standing around. You’ve mentioned Jim Steranko being it in a London newsagent stand, three or four months after U.S. in his white jumpsuit. And, yes, there he was, holding court with release. It was—for a lack of a better term—a remaindered copy rabid fans! Andy and I hung around Michael Kaluta and Bernie that had made it to England. I don’t want to really get into it; but Wrightson at their table, and they used Andy as a go-fer to get back then you could get DC back issues from the ’60s en masse. coffee. We used their table as home base! They were really, really We moved from England to Paris and, every day, we went to nice to us, while to fans… they weren’t rude, they certainly weren’t Brentano’s, the English-language bookstore, where there were welcoming typical fans to sit behind the table, but for some reanew comics on the stand. All of a sudden, I’m seeing New Gods #4 after I had just seen New Gods #1 in England. “Wow! What has son, they liked us and let us join them. They were rock stars to us!

The undergrounds came along because our mother was single. happened between these three issues?” I was totally obsessed…

She was dating and made friends with a group of young peoand that was also when Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson were ple in their 20s. This will sound more provocative than it was—it hitting their stride. The time between when we became comic wasn’t a commune, but we hung out at a house where a bunch of fans and went to Phil Seuling’s first convention really wasn’t that unmarried young people lived together. There was a pile of comic long. It was just a year-and-a-half between Jimmy Olsen #133 and books there.

I always made a bee-line for comic books in any form July 4, 1972, our first New York Comic Art Convention. Nowadays, or fashion if they were around. If there were words and pictures, I I just marvel at how quickly it happened. A massive change had went for it, and there were some undergrounds and they knocked taken place. We became huge fans of all comics.

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me out. I thought they were great! I looked at stuff that was completely inappropriate for my age!

JM: Which explains a lot of things today! [laughter] Jon: It does; we don’t need to go into that! [laughter] I saw some of Robert Crumb’s stuff really young and I just thought, “This guy is amazing.” You’d see all these wonderful, wonderful artists.

It was also the age of reprints, too. Especially Jack’s stuff. You’d see his Atlas monster reprints, DC Golden Age comics, and even the Western reprints.

I was nuts for all of it. At every single period, Kirby’s work showed unrestrained enthusiasm. I remember distinctly when the Fourth World was cancelled, where I was and how crestfallen I was. I remember being happy to see The Demon #1. I was saying, “Well, at least Jack’s not giving anything less than 100%.” You could still tell he was bummed. We all were. But he put his all into The Demon, and Kamandi, too. Kirby has always been a constant in my life. I may have stopped reading comics in the early ’80s, but when Captain Victory #1 came out, I called Andy (who was living in New York City at the time) and said, “You have to buy that for me and send them to me,” ’cause Jack was back, baby!

be doing a comic book fanzine anymore, thanks very much! (Though I was never ashamed of reading comics.) I went to college and the first thing I did was become a part of the campus alternative magazine. We’d stay up all night and do paste-up. That was the turning point. I was writing features, drawing editorial cartoons, doing production… “I can really do this,” put something together myself.

It was the tactile nature of it; to do this with your hands, create this thing, and then see it in print, and it’s your creation. I could draw. I was a cartoonist, but to combine Getting into Print that with typesetting…!

JM: At what point did you decide, “I’m going to do Wow! Then the big thing some kind of design/art career”? was to see your name in print. That was an amazing Jon: Well, shortly after we came back to the States moment for me. As John Morrow knows, I’m a real from Europe, I’d seen Locus, the science-fiction egomaniac! [laughter] When I saw my name in print, news ’zine. (It’s a trade magazine for SF pros and se- baby, that was the biggest thrill! rious fans.) I’d seen this thing and it was just a typed- JM: I know. When you get that first taste of a byline up thing that had personality. I wouldn’t call it crude, on something, it’s weird how it feeds our egos, but but I definitely wouldn’t call it slick. I remember it’s not like being in a movie or having your song seeing that and going, “What? Why, this is homeon the radio, I would imagine. It’s a more personal made. I can do this!” So, with my two older brothers thing. I don’t know how to describe it. and younger brother, we created The Omega Comic Jon: It’s intimate and yet public. It’s weird, I never Magazine Review (OCMR), and we did about six or really thought about it. I think it’s validation. Maybe seven issues, just stapled-together newsletters. I that’s a part of it. When I worked with you on The typed them all up and traced art, and they were just Jack Kirby Collector, I really made sure to get two as crude as can be. They were a joy to make. things in every issue. It wasn’t competition with anyJM: How old were you? body else. I just loved this thing so much, I wanted Jon: From 1972 to 1974, so 13 to 15. When I was to give that extra effort. I also wanted to help you 15, suddenly—boink!—there were girls, so I won’t out, but it was definitely an ego thing… seeing my

Above: Jon still calls this, the one-shot CBA Special Edition of Dec. 1999, his favorite single publication to produce, perhaps due to the fact it not only includes his selections for the very best of early 1970s DC Comics, but also because it was comic book-size.

“That’s a neat size to work with,” says Jon. CBA SE was not without controversy as it was initially created only for CBA subscribers, and, being in demand, retailers and their customers balked that it was unavailable in stores. Eventually all was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

Previous page: John and Jon at the TwoMorrows booth, 1998 San Diego Comic-Con.

2002 Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST name in two different places in every issue.

JM: Was the Lovecraft ’zine, Tekeli-li!, your first pro publication?

Jon: It wasn’t really professional, but it was pretty near it. Tekeli-li!

Journal of Terror was my horror fiction ’zine from the early 1990s.

JM: Did we have desktop publishing back then?

Jon: Oh yes, I couldn’t have done it without desktop publishing.

Previously, I worked on a big Compugraphic typesetting machine.

At some point, I focused on a graphic design career. Over the years, I had gone in and out of collecting comics. When I was in college, I would only buy Roy Thomas comics. It’s funny: comics were always something to come back to. During the ’80s, when I was living in Boston, after high school and college, I got into comics pretty big. It became an addiction again. [chuckles] I worked mundane jobs, not really to my potential. I was a manager of a convenience store, and Beth and I were getting married and planning our first child (who just turned 30 yesterday!), and I asked, “Beth, can I just start over? I’d be going down to minimum wage again, but I have to find work in graphic design.” Getting back to that whole “make it with your hands” kind of thing: I wanted to learn on a Mac computer and do this new “desktop publishing” thing I’d heard about and to see my name in print again, so I had to learn how to do it. Right then, part-time, I was doing old-fashioned paste-up and layout for an alternative music weekly, The New Paper, in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a hip, counterculture place to be. I started off there and then got a job with a local used car trader magazine. Apple computers were coming up and my sister had one, and I just knew I had to get my hands on one. I really didn’t care what I was going to do for a job so long as I got some experience on a Mac. Soon I started working at a brandnew type of business, a “service bureau.” Remember them?

JM: Oh, yeah!

Jon: They would develop film and typeset galleys and they were also involved in rudimentary desktop publishing. That’s really where my career in graphic design started. I had finally gotten my hands on a Macintosh computer.

JM: Were you a whiz at PageMaker?

Jon: Oh yes, very quickly. Aldus PageMaker, the first software I used for page layout.

JM: You didn’t start with QuarkXPress? You were on PageMaker like I was?

Jon: I don’t think Quark existed when I started. PageMaker was the big thing, but then you started to hear how good Quark was.

I got very good at page layout, very quickly. Suddenly realizing that H.P. Lovecraft’s 100th birthday was coming up, in 1990, and…

I had to do something. I had no interest in horror literature; it had everything to do with Rhode Island. We moved to the state after we came back from Europe. This state has very, very low selfesteem—probably because we’re so small! [chuckles] I thought, “That’s one thing to be proud of: H.P. Lovecraft.” I know he’s something in the horror field and he had an aura of cool. I went all-out; just went nuts. I did “Lovecraft for Mayor” T-shirts, I did a HPL Centennial Guidebook with a centerspread Gahan Wilson made for me. I had a friend who was a videographer and we made a documentary on HPL together, Favourite Haunts, which eventually won an award. I started a successful fundraising campaign to have a plaque put up in HPL’s honor at Brown University.

But the most fun thing was doing the Centennial Guidebook and encountering Gahan Wilson, the famous Playboy cartoonist. That was my first real brush with a celebrity cartoonist. Yowza!

So, after the guidebook, I caught the publishing bug again and did Tekeli-li! Journal of Terror, which lasted four issues and was very well-received. Harlan Ellison loved it. So did Robert Bloch and Ramsey Campbell. The nicest people in the world are horror fiction people, which I say without equivocation. It has to do with them vicariously excising any evil through their writing! [chuckles] There is a Rhode Island horror fiction convention, Necon, that brings in horror writers from the world over. Les Daniels lived in R.I. and I became friends with Les, who wrote major histories of comic books. He had one foot in horror and the other in comics, and we got along great. My first issue of Tek! focused on him.

I have been very lucky and able to attract a lot of outstanding talent with almost everything I’ve done, and Tek! was no exception. It was a very good ’zine. The first was saddle-stitched with a cardstock, two-color cover. By #4, it was perfect-bound, coated cover, duotone color, good paper stock. It was crazy. I spent so much money on production. Even if I had sold every single copy, there was no way I could have recouped those costs! And I crazily thought, “Oh, I’m a publisher now; I can publish other people’s stuff.” I was completely ill-equipped, both emotionally and practically, for doing anything of the sort. If I owe any money to anybody for Tek! subscriptions—please contact me! [laughter] JM: What was your top circulation at that point?

Jon: Two-hundred fifty, maybe 500. I had the late, great Robert Weinberg out in Chicago buy a lot of them. (He was like the Bud Plant of the horror field.) A lot of people loved it, but I couldn’t keep it going. I don’t have to go into it, but I’m a recovering alcoholic. I was a binge drinker, which meant I didn’t drink all the time, but when I did, chaos likely ensued. My psychological state wasn’t

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2003

2004

in the right place. By sheer force of will, I started working in advertising by that time, and the stress exacerbated things. In one way, I really lucked out professionally because, though I didn’t have a college degree, by sheer tenacity, I was hired as an art director in a mid-level ad agency. I didn’t handle that high-pressure work necessarily well until I was fired and went over to Providence Creative Group, where I was made a creative director, which is when you and I met. I was much better focused working over there under a great boss who had tremendous faith in me. It was a much smaller agency and I became much more dedicated to our growing family. Then I got on the internet for the first time, signed up for my AOL email account (an email address I still use!), I typed “Jack Kirby” into a search engine, and…

JM: You stalked me! [laughter] Jon: And—bingo!—I discovered the existence of The Jack Kirby Collector. You and I hit it off very well and my life was forever changed.

JM: You were a godsend for me at that point because, all of a sudden, I had somebody as enthusiastic as I am who wants to tackle some of this workload. At that point, I thought, “Okay, this thing is going to keep going for a while at least.” I didn’t know how long, but it was nice to have a right-hand person to talk with—“Hey, what do you think about this?” “Oh, I’ll do that!”—You were so eager to tackle anything. “I really need somebody to do a Sky Masters article.” “I’ll go down to the Yonkers Courthouse and find all the legal documents.”

Jon: No, I had a brother I could order to do that!

(Just kidding, Andy!)

JM: Still, the results were what mattered. [laughter] Jon: Shout-out to Andrew D. Cooke: thank you!

JM: Thanks, Andy! I remember when you found all that stuff. That was amazing to me. Not that it existed, but that it was readily accessible for people who knew where to look.

Jon: That was another thing: ever since All the President’s Men, I really wanted to be a journalist. I double-majored in journalism and history in college.

I was a big history buff since being a little kid. Plus I could draw and do layout. So mix those all together

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

and that made me a perfect collaborator with you.

Like you, I could pretty much do it all, soup to nuts.

So, when I was with you, I was able to focus on my favorite subject, comics. Both our temperaments gelled so well…

I need to say this: I remember Pam, your wife, saying—and my wife would also say this—that when they overheard us blabbing on the phone for hours, we sounded like a couple of old hens, all cheerful and chirpy! You and I really hit it off, like brothers. [laughter] JM: It’s the Kirby thing that bonds us. You contacted me out of the blue. “I don’t know who you are, but we have that shared experience of Jack Kirby!” So, why wouldn’t we sound like a couple of old hens?!

Jon: Well, I think we had philosophical similarities, as well. My big thing is discuss the artist, not so much the artifact. I was not a collector of comics for the value or condition (much to my regret at 60 years old… only half-kidding!). Mostly what I picked up for back issues were “reader’s copies.”

JM: Me, too.

Jon: It was a philosophical thing. I really appreciated these people who created the comics and added so much to my life, and I was grateful to these guys.

Gratitude was a big part of it. I had nothing but contempt for the collector mentality, I’ll admit. Too many dealers look only at the monetary value of a thing and I always thought there’s something more to the stuff. What is that saying…? “He knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing”? I guess

2005

This page: Above is the first and fourth (i.e., last) issues of Jon’s Tekeli-li! Journal of Terror, from the early 1990s. Below is CBA’s five Eisners and one Harvey.

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST Left: Jon’s bleeding heart political comics work from his radical college days.

Bottom: Example of Jon’s advertising work during the early TwoMorrows years: a bus wrap.

that’s it. [laughter] But I do count one dealer as among my very best friends, so don’t think I believe that about all of them!

JM: Right there just nailed perfectly why—The Kirby Collector first and then CBA—immediately caught on with people. It’s so obvious from our first issues. For you… and no offense to Gary Carter, but this is not Comic Book Marketplace here; this is Comic Book Artist. You couldn’t care less what a book is worth. There is no mention of value anywhere in CBA. Who wants to waste valuable space on talking about what a comic book is worth, when you can talk about what went into actually making it? I know that’s why the immediate response to it was amazing. People latched onto it; “Wow! This is what a fan magazine is supposed to look like.” It was universally acclaimed. You can go back to CBA #1 today and read it and go, “Wow! This is really, really good.” It’s there and the

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heart and the soul’s there. I know that’s why it did so well. It sold extremely well. I wish we had those numbers today on any of our publications, but it was a different era, right? The whole speculator boom pretty much cleaned out the comics fans. I go back and look at those issues and they are amazing. It didn’t even have a slow burn. You were very cagey; you said, “We have to have Neal Adams on the cover.”

Jon: I was being reactionary when I joined up with TwoMorrows, in a way, because I was very unhappy with how things looked, generally, in the comics-related publication field. I remember some publications that were truly ugly to look at. Except for some periods when the Journal was smartly designed, there was pretty terrible-looking stuff overall. But comics are a graphic medium!

It’s visual! There are some very exciting designers in professional comics, but that did not necessarily transcend outwardly. So it was important for you and me, as designers, to improve the look of the comics press.

Kirby Collector #6 was the first issue I bought, and I immediately noted you followed the axiom, “form follows function.” You were perfect at letting the bombastic Kirby artwork be the showoff aspect while being restrained with your layouts and being perfectly readable. You understood your subject visually and how to showcase it to its best advantage. And, through fits and starts, I strove to do that with CBA, and I think I accomplished that, to some degree in my magazines, as well. With comics, we’re talking about a graphically visual medium, so publications about that medium need to reflect that. It should be pleasant; it should be fun, and that’s what I think we push for most of the work.

JM: We did. And, for visual content, we sought out and formed alliances with art dealers to get access to their unseen stuff. They’ll see something unpublished and priceless in terms of comics history, have it for five minutes and sell to somebody who puts it in a closet, never to be seen again. That was pre-internet; pre– Heritage Auctions having a million scans online. We sought them out; we went the extra mile to get some extra art in there, and the dealers were very helpful. We wanted to jazz people with these publications and I think that was a huge asset. It wasn’t just good historical coverage—we put the extra effort in visually.

Jon: Another hugely important moment for me was when I received a letter commenting on the first or second issue of CBA, which insisted I need to establish context for any given issue.

He wrote, “The first issue was great, but if I didn’t know anything about comics in the ’70s, I’d have almost no idea what the hell you were talking about.” I needed to establish context. That was a very important moment for me. It’s always on my mind.

JM: You were too close to the material and assumed people knew…

Jon: The notion of context went through my mind like electricity! So, today, I am always building on that. I’ll stop and look over whatever

The World of TwoMorrows

the subject is I’m covering, and I’ll ask myself if I’ve properly established context. What if somebody stumbles across what I’ve done? I have no right to assume anything about that reader. The second thing that dawned on me about context (and this took a little longer) was it was of supreme importance for me to find a photograph of whoever I was interviewing or was featured in an issue. It’s a no-brainer, but readers want to put a face to the interview subject. Some people, few had ever seen before. What did Doug Moench look like?

CBA Begins

Jon: How do you recall Comic Book Artist magazine starting?

JM: I remember thinking the next logical step after the Kirby Collector was a Neal Adams Collector or a Wally Wood Collector or a Will Eisner Collector, but it quickly became obvious that, “Could their careers sustain an ongoing, regular publication?” We could do a book on them or a mini-series, but you were immediately, “No, no…”. That’s where the idea came to put Adams on the cover of CBA #1, right?

“Okay, we’ve got Kirby, let’s do Adams.” Who’s the next obvious choice? Is that what happened…?

Jon: I knew that was your idea. You know me: I definitely had my own notion about what I wanted it to be. I wanted to push it closer to what it became.

JM: I remember you and I talking about it at the San Diego Comic-Con. I don’t remember if it was your idea or my idea—it was probably yours. You probably said the words, “Let’s do a Kirby Collector for all the other artists.” But I do remember kicking around ideas for the name and I remember “Back Issue” was a name I came up with for CBA originally, and you didn’t like it, and you came up with “Comic Book Artist,” and I liked it; it’s simple. It says what it is. It’s a household name, like Xerox or Band-Aid. [laughter] That’s perfect.

Jon: I can’t say I remember you coming up with the title “Back Issue,” but I would have immediately said, “No, I don’t want to talk about the artifact; I want to talk about the creator.” I want to talk about the history. That’s what I loved about The Jack Kirby Collector: you weren’t talking about Captain America. You were also doing themes. You were doing Marvel… that’s when we really started cooking. You did a Marvel issue; you did a DC issue. That’s when I went crazy, interviewing four or five people for each of those issues. That started something. I think CBA was an outgrowth of that. Otherwise people would have just been talking about the comics and the characters. I think it’s fine what Back Issue has done, but it is just not my approach.

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

JM: I know I suggested the name “Back Issue,” because later on, when we were starting the new magazine, I wanted to finally use that name; I always really liked it. I wanted to co-opt that name, so anytime somebody talks about a “back issue,” they are saying the name of our magazine. I remember feeling mildly disappointed on the flight home from whatever convention that was: “Aww, it was such a good name…” [laughter] You had a much better idea for a name, so now anytime somebody talks about a “comic book artist,” they’re saying the name of your magazine!

Jon: Do you remember anything about Arlen Schumer coming up with the name?

JM: No, I don’t remember having any contact with Arlen back then. Didn’t he do the logo, though?

Jon: Well, he definitely created the logo. I think it was the second Ramapo (New York) Con I went to, and the idea of CBA really started to gel. I recall sitting on some grass with Arlen and David Spurlock, spit-balling ideas. Arlen says he came up with the name, though I don’t remember, but wouldn’t argue against it too strongly. He might be right.

JM: You never told me, “Arlen has a great name for the mag.” You had the name “CBA,” as far as I remember.

Jon: I think I would have given him credit right off. Arlen did a great job on the logo; there’s no doubt about that. The logo was just perfect.

JM: Well, for posterity: The idea was yours, the name was yours, the

Odds are, you’re a longtime comic book fan who simply refuses to give up on our much-maligned art form. You love good art, great stories, and comics that are FUN. We’ll bet that you’re also dissatisfied with the current state of affairs and seek out the old stuff because frankly, it’s simply better.

Well, get ready to feel good again because there’s a new magazine ready to knock your socks off and give you back that old thrill. It’s called COMIC BOOK ARTIST and it’s published by TwoMorrows, the folks who bring you THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR. Published quarterly, each 68 page issue will feature extensive, comprehensive looks at great comic book artists, writers, editors, and the books they made great! Our first issue will focus on A ReAl Golden AGe: dC ComiCs 1967-74, the era of “Artist as Editor” that began with DICK GIORDANO and crew’s arrival from Charlton and ended with ARCHIE GOODWIN’s departure. Behind a new NEAL ADAMS Batman cover (pencils at left), we’ll feature interviews, art, and features on such greats as JACK KIRBY, JOE KUBERT, NEAL ADAMS, DICK GIORDANO, JOE ORLANDO, ALEX TOTH, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, STEVE DITKO, MIKE SEKOWSKY, STEVE SKEATES, UE ON NICK CARDY, C.C. BECK and many, many more. Our debut 1st ISS APRIL! number will be the most comprehensive look at that remarkable SALE IN listing in Look foragazine" time ever compiled. We’ll also have rare art — such as Neal s the "M ril' Ap Adams’ thumbnails for a forgotten Batman story, unseen Nick n in sectio S or PREVIEW Cardy pages from a controversial Teen Titans tale, unpublished ibe! subscr Alex Toth covers, pencils from Kirby's Fourth World before they were inked, and much more — with spotlights on the underappreciated work of DC war artist SAM J. GLANZMAN (with interview & checklist) and The Shadow’s MIKE KALUTA. This puppy is just chock full!

And our next issue will look at The seCond WAve of mARvel ComiCs: 1970-75, examining the overlooked work of such greats as GIL KANE, BARRY SMITH, MIKE PLOOG, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, ROY THOMAS, BILL EVERETT, FRANK BRUNNER, STEVE ENGLEHART, JOHN & MARIE SEVERIN, and many more!

To show that we’re not stuck in the ’70s, we’ll also have issues on Batman ©1998 1986: The BesT(?) YeAR in ComiCs, WARRen mAGAzines, and ToWeR DC Co mics. Use d with omiCs . So subscribe to COMIC BOOK ARTIST and relive the thrill that C permission . made you love comics in the first place!

FIRST ISSUE SHIPS IN APRIL, 1998. Please send ❏ Sample Issue $5.95 Please send me the next four issues. Enclosed is ❏ $20 in US ❏ $27 (US Funds) Canada & Mexico ❏ $37.00 (US Funds) Outside North America Total Enclosed: $ ___________ (US funds only, please).

TwoMorrows 1812 Park Drive Raleigh, NC 27605 USA

PRICES INCLUDE SHIPPING. Please send check or money order in US funds payable to: TwoMorrows Advertising

Name ____________________________________________________________________________________ Address ___________________________________________________________________________________ City _________________________________________________ State _______ Zip ___________________

Country_____________________________________ Phone _______________________________________ Editorial Offices & Advertising Information: contact Jon B. Cooke, Editor, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892. If you have art or an article idea, please contact Jon, but SEND FUNDS TO N.C. ADDRESS ONLY!

Above: This ad appeared in The Jack Kirby Collector #19, promoting the second magazine from the ever-growing TwoMorrows line.

Below: In the early 2000s, Jon got the bright idea to start yet another publication, this one self-published. Alas, Comic Book Artist Bullpen lasted a mere five issues.

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST execution was yours, the design was yours, most of the writing was yours, most of the interviewing was yours; you even transcribed your own interviews back then.

Jon: You did some! You’d do it in a pinch.

You’d help out.

JM: I do remember lots of late nights. You’d call me up, “I need so and so… Do you have time to do it?” I’d stay up until 3:00 in the morning to do it and you’d stay up all night to finish on your end. We were both just killing it. I remember when you submitted the first issue, I was thinking: “This is such a step above The Jack Kirby Collector, in terms of quality and execution.” And then the Neal Adams cover! For me, as a fan, that’s how I’ve always viewed things when determining whether to publish it… would I, as a fan, buy this?

If so, would it be something I had to buy right away, or would I come back on a second trip to buy it? CBA was far and away, “I would buy this in a heartbeat and tell everybody I know about it.”

That’s why I had confidence in it. Did you?

Jon: No, I did not know that it would have the impact that it did.

It was a real surprise. I recall that we confabbed… we talked a lot. We would bounce ideas off each other and it became a real collaboration. We had become tight with The Jack Kirby Collector.

JM: We had, but I don’t want to take undue credit for CBA. It was a collaboration in that we were both really excited about it, but 90% of the work on it was yours, Jon. Jon: You kept your ego out of it. For publishers, that’s really rare. If I was to bring it to other publishers, they’d say, “Well, let’s change a little of this and a little of that,” and put their thumb on it for no reason. You just kicked back and said, “Okay, let’s have fun.”

JM: That’s because I recognized, as a fan, “Wow, this is awesome.” I’m sure I thought there were little things I would do differently, but it was such a beautiful piece of work. How do you pick apart something that good? I’m just not that hyper-critical of a person. Even if you go back now and look at CBA #1—it’s an overused word, but it’s a masterpiece, especially for its time. There had been good journalism prior to CBA #1, but that package mixed hard-hitting journalism with the love and affection for comics that’s in there. It shows through every fiber of the paper on the pages. I look back at that issue and think, “It’s no wonder we’ve lasted as long as we have, because we’re putting out stuff like this.” It’s not schlock! It’s not just some fanzine—and no disrespect to the fanzines out there—but this is a professional and extremely heartfelt thing. The Kirby Collector… that was the whole point of it. It’s going to be heartfelt, but we’re going to do this professionally. CBA took that a notch higher. It was definitely the prestige publication for TwoMorrows, absolutely.

I don’t know how to compare it to the Kirby Collector, other than to say… mine’s the older brother who led the way, and yours is the younger sibling who went on and did a whole lot more; got a lot more acclaim, and deservedly so.

Jon: You designated me as your main interviewer in The Jack

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Kirby Collector and I think that’s what opened doors for CBA before it was in print. Professionals responded to The Kirby Collector.

All the top guys, including Frank Miller, said, “Sure, you can interview me.”

JM: I will take credit for that. If you had just come out of the blue and started looking around to do a publication on your own without having The Kirby Collector there first to build goodwill and pave the way for it, I don’t know that it would have been nearly as successful. TJKC was a nice foot in the door with all these very generous creators who gave of their time, energy, and talents, because I was doing something associated with Jack Kirby and they had that love for Jack Kirby. It was a natural extension: “You’re the Kirby Collector guys? Sure!” Neal doing that cover… that was pretty amazing. It’s not like Neal doesn’t have other things to do all day long!

Jon: Do you remember how that happened?

JM: I remember there was an old pencil sketch originally for…

Jon: One of the 1970s Peter Pan record albums, I think.

JM: Right. I vaguely remember it, but I don’t recall how you ended up getting Neal to complete it.

Jon: I didn’t! It was mind-blowing! He just offered! (Maybe I did ask, but his volunteering is my memory.) I know I must have called you immediately and said, “Oh. My. God! Neal Adams is doing the cover of my first magazine!” But he was willing to do it, John!

He had little idea who I was, other than I’d interviewed him once for TJKC. I thought that was quite a completely unexpected coup.

My experience interviewing him at that time was really positive, so I no doubt extrapolated that idea. It probably did start with Neal. In one way, it was complete nostalgia. I looked at CBA as, “This could be a one-hit wonder,” so I might as well go with complete sentimentality or nostalgia or something. I should go to my own “Golden Age” of comics. I did it and people responded, even though Alex Toth was upset…

JM: What was Toth upset about?

Jon: That I would dare disparage his Golden Age by calling the early ’70s/late ’60s my Golden Age. What was amazing about that first issue was we learned so much about things we had no idea had happened: “The House that Haunted Batman,” the Teen Titans “Jericho” story, the real origin of Swamp Thing… like, “Huh…?!” We had no idea!

JM: That’s what amazes me. Throughout the ’80s, there was Amazing Heroes, Comics Interview, Comic Buyers Guide, The Comics Journal, and it’s not like there was some lack of fan publications being produced… How did those stories not get told out of all of those issues of those different publications during the ’80s—or did they get told and got buried?

Were you approaching CBA from its first issue as if: “I’m putting it all in here, and I’ll worry about next issue when it’s time to worry about the next issue”?

Jon: Yeah. It’s crazy. You might remember, I interviewed so many

The World of TwoMorrows

people for that first issue… CBA #5 was so easy, even though it was a super-thick issue, because I had already transcribed so many interviews with so many people I had intended to get in #1. Even the Warren issue was actually bursting at the seams. The same thing with the first Marvel issue, CBA #2. I had to make two additional issues out of that material that didn’t make it in the first one, I think.

JM: Yeah, and here comes issue #3: “Let’s have another Neal Adams’ cover, because we both like Neal Adams a whole lot!” I don’t remember how that happened.

Jon: Because I was late with the Warren issue; I couldn’t get it done. Warren had been initially planned for #3. Kris Adams, Neal’s daughter, called me up and said, “Hey, Jon, we’ve got this great unpublished wraparound X-Men cover. Wanna use it?”

JM: I didn’t even consider that, in theory, it wouldn’t be commercial to have the same artist on two of our first three CBA covers. I didn’t think like that back then. “We’ve got another Neal Adams cover!? Are you kidding? He killed it on The X-Men. Got one for issue #4, too, Kris?” [laughter] Then I saw your Nick Cardy cover for #5… that painting! I don’t remember what that painting was intended for initially.

Jon: I think it might have been intended for The Greatest 1960s Stories Ever Told collection.

JM: I have always liked Nick’s stuff… but, even though I loved his covers, he drew his heroes looking kind of flabby. He didn’t really define the muscles. They were soft. Then, I saw that painting!

I still remember that acid yellow burning my eyes: “This is going to be awesome!” The fun I had seeing what you were coming up with each issue even to the point of…

Jon: Getting Gil Kane to do a cover…? Whoa!

These were dreams coming true! Unused Bernie Wrightson at his peak, and an unseen Nick Cardy painting…? Those first five issues were just dynamite and people always talk about that with me. “Yeah, I really liked you in the beginning. Today, not so much.” [laughter] The beginning was very exciting.

The people we interviewed were excited, too. Being there when Jim Warren came out of seclusion…

JM: I remember that New York con at Madison Square Garden. There were more exhibitors than attendees at that freaking show! I couldn’t believe what a poorly attended con it was. I did meet Jim Warren there. What a strong personality he had… what a remarkably commanding presence.

Jon: There came a time when you were really busy with The Kirby Collector and I got busy with CBA, and I was always pushing you to add page count to CBA. You were very, very patient with me, but there

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

came a point where we were about to hit the bookstore market and you pushed back.

JM: Yes, I was very patient with you. Every issue: “I can’t make this fit in 100 pages, John. There’s no way.” “Well, how many do you need?” “I need about 148.” I groaned and you always said, “But it will be really, really good, John! I promise!” And, sure enough, it always was really good. That’s my Steve Jobs mentality: I didn’t know it at the time, but it was: “Just make it good. Don’t worry about how much it costs; just make sure it’s really good quality and people will latch onto it.” And they did.

The Kirby Collector started TwoMorrows and built us a lot of goodwill, but CBA put us on the map. It wasn’t just because you won that first Eisner Award (but that certainly didn’t hurt). It was like when a rock band comes out with a hit song, but are they going to be a one-hit wonder or are they going to do a follow-up? Then they do the follow-up and it cements them as somebody who’s got longevity— that’s what CBA did. Nobody knew the name “Two­ Morrows” yet, but they knew The Kirby Collector.

Then, CBA came along and it was, “Boom! Oh, wow! Okay, this is good stuff. We’re going to stick with these TwoMorrows guys.” That cemented our very loyal Kirby Collector following to go on and try some other stuff. Also, that brought in people who thought, “Oh, Jack Kirby, that’s old stuff. Wait a minute… Neal Adams!? Hold on… Don McGregor?!

Really, Jim Warren?! Okay, I’ll follow that.” It broadened our audience greatly. Then both publications fed off each other’s popularity. I wish I could say that we planned all this out to work so well, but I know neither of us had any grand master plan. We just did

Above: The Warren Companion [2001] was the first expansion of an issue of CBA, this one #4. This is Alex Horley’s wraparound cover art for the Eisner-nominated book.

Above: Few people have been more supportive of Jon’s efforts than the legendary James Warren, who participated mightily in The Warren Companion. This photo was taken during one of Jon’s visits to interview Jim in Pennsylvania.

Previous page: Jim Warren even mentored Jon and Andrew Cooke during production of their fulllength feature film documentary, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City in 2007. Eisner participated in the making of the biographical movie, though he passed away before its completion. Andrew directed and co-produced, and Jon wrote and was one of the film’s producers.

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SAM GAFFORD: MEMORIES OF A COMICS HISTORY JUNKIE I’ve been a comic book fan since the late 1960s, when my older brother, Carl, turned me onto them. Being ten years older than me, he had a massive collection of early Silver Age Marvel and DC and allowed me free rein in his collection. I got hooked very quickly, but soon my interests grew deeper than just the comic in my hand. I became very curious about the history of comics, especially as I learned about the many decades of comics that had existed before the ones I was reading. Learning about them, though, was no easy task.

Sadly, during those bygone days, there wasn’t really anywhere you could go to learn about any of the history of comics or the people who made them.

Back then, comics were still suffering under the Comics Code Authority and thought of as little more than “little kid’s garbage.”

Sam Gafford Even with the burgeoning Transcriber popularity of Born: 1962 Marvel ComDeceased: 2019 ics, they were Residence: like the imWarren, mortal standRhode Island up comedian Rodney Vocation: Accountant Dangerfield in that they Favorite Creator: “don’t get no Jack Kirby (of course!) respect.” That Seminal Comic Books: may be why The Avengers #4 I’ve always sought out the books and magazines about comic history: I remember when you couldn’t learn about it. So, I read everything I could get my hands on. For instance, I read about E.C. Comics years before I was actually able to read one of them.

In the 1980s, my interest in horror writer H.P. Lovecraft took me to Providence, Rhode Island, where I met several others who were also fans of his work. But, of all of them, only one also shared my love of comics and comic book history, and that was Jon B. Cooke. Ironically, I didn’t learn of Jon’s comic interests until he had started to

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leave Lovecraft behind and follow his muse to his true love of comics.

I recall very fondly his fanzine, Tekeli-li! Journal of Terror, which included several comic items as well as Lovecraft, so it was no surprise that we shared our mutual interest.

Some short time later, I had lost track of Jon when I heard that he was looking for writers and others to help him put together several comic book projects. I’ve long desired to write about comics (as well as write comics, but that’s another story), so I contacted Jon and found that what he really needed at that time was help transcribing hours and hours of interviews he’d done with comic book professionals. I had never really done anything like that before but I said, “I’ll give it a go,” and that started a literal avalanche of packages from Jon containing dozens of mini-cassettes filled with interviews.

I probably learned more about the history of comics through transcribing those tapes than I’d ever known before.

It was often slow work with hours spent pushing “play” on the tape recorder, typing quickly, reversing the tape to make sure I got it right, making corrections, and then moving forward— often one sentence at a time—but I got to hear comic book history from the mouths of those who had made it.

These were people whose names I had known for decades, but I had never met. I suffered from near-crippling shyness and non-existent finances, and both had kept me from going to conventions where I could have met and talked with these people myself.

Through Jon, I got the feeling that I was part of a conversation that I could never have myself. I’ve never forgotten that feeling and am proud of the small contribution I made to some of TwoMorrows’ earliest publications.

One of my favorite assignments came when Jon was assembling the material for what became The Warren Companion. Warren black-&-white comic mag-

azines were my passion as a teenager in the ’70s and I thrilled as I listened to stories about how the company began and created such legendary characters and titles as Vampirella, Creepy, and Eerie. (During the early ’70s, I discovered that I actually lived near Bill DuBay, but was too terrified to go talk to him because surely he would have had better things to do than talk to a nervous, tongue-tied teenager.) To this day, The Warren Companion remains one of my favorite books on comic book history!

Eventually, as the world moved away from such things as tape recorders, there was less and less for me to contribute. I never did get to write any articles, but TwoMorrows has continued to be the leading publisher in comic book history and appreciation.

I’m happy that I had the chance to contribute and, Jon, if those tape recorders ever come back into fashion, I stand ready to serve once again!

Above: Sam Gafford, who tragically passed away on July 20, 2019, wrote a graphic novel about H.P. Lovecraft, Some Notes on a Non-Entity, drawn by Jason Eckhardt.

The World of TwoMorrows

what we liked, and hoped people would enjoy it.

Jon: Like now, we enjoyed working together then.

JM: We both had full-time gigs going at the same time. I don’t think people understand I didn’t just decide one day, “Oh, I’ll start a publishing company… and let’s start a Jack Kirby magazine… and, hey, let’s start another one.” This wasn’t our livelihood. You had a full-time job when CBA started. Pam and I did full-time advertising from 1994 all the way until the recession in 2007, when things mostly dried up in advertising. I was working two full-time jobs and you were working two full-time jobs. I have so many old emails time-stamped at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning when we were typing back and forth to each other, because neither one of us could go to bed until we finished the work and met deadlines.

Jon: Believe it or not, for me, all I could do at home in the beginning was transcribe the interviews. I couldn’t do any layout at home. I didn’t have a computer at home and I had to do it all at work, 40 miles away in Providence. I would spend the entire weekend at my office, all-nighters, blaring music, to get this thing done. I’ll never forget how unbelievably exhausted I was after pulling multiple all-nighters for CBA #1. I remember it was springtime.

Coming home in the early daylight hours is still very clear. CBA #1 was such a hit, it paid for our swimming pool. To this day, I still look at it from my studio above the garage and remark, “CBA #1 did that!” It did, because that issue had a second printing.

JM: Before readers think you were installing some big, in-ground heated pool with sauna, it was a modest, nice backyard above-ground pool for you and your kids to float around in. When you told me CBA #1 bought you a pool, I thought, “That’s awesome!”

Jon: Did we pay Roy Thomas anything for Alter Ego when it was in CBA? I don’t think so.

JM: I’d have to look. We paid phone bills because back then we had to pay for long distance calls, and we reimbursed for shipping, but I’m trying to remember: did we pay layout people back then?

Jon: No, you did layout. I did layout.

JM: Did we pay transcribers?

Jon: No, we did our own transcribing at the start.

JM: Right. It was all black-&-white printing, which was just the norm. Publications about comics couldn’t afford color back then. Comics Scene did and it lasted, what, a dozen issues? Not many of them could afford color. We did all black-&-white for the first 15 years at TwoMorrows before we were able to make the jump. Readers didn’t mind.

Jon: The paradigm shifted when we could do color.

In the very beginning, I had very close relationships

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

with art dealers because we were always in search of unpublished material to sustain reader interest.

We were always in search of… frankly, to be honest, unpublished stuff by Neal Adams.

JM: Not just find the art, but find the story behind it, too.

Jon: Right. We would be inquisitive about what was going on.

Neal was very open to answering our questions, though his recollection was sometimes at odds with his collaborators.

Controversy ’n’ Conflict

Jon: What do you recall of controversies with CBA? JM: I recall a very sick feeling in my stomach when you sent me that fax that Carmine Infantino was objecting to the Jericho stuff in CBA #1. That was the very first time I had encountered any kind of major controversy with this stuff. It was all joy and fun until then. Then, “Oh, crap! He’s threatening to sue us?!”

Jon: And that’s the first issue!

JM: Yeah! I never considered that there would ever be a lawsuit over any of this stuff! I was totally naïve to that aspect of things. “So, how do I deal with this? We’re not The Comics Journal. We’re not supposed to get sued. We’re not publishing scandalous stuff.” That was heart-breaking for me. Carmine called Tom Stewart “The Comics Savant.” At least I got a good chuckle out of that. Every year after that, Tom would be at our booth with his name tag, “The Comics Savant.” He really embraced that name.

Jon: Carmine was eventually placated.

JM: It smoothed over. And that experience taught me, “Okay, people get upset and worked up to a fever pitch; and you have to take a deep breath and calm down.” Reasonable people can disagree.

That’s par for the course. As long as you don’t have malicious intent, it generally works out okay.

Jon: It was surprising to learn how emotional people working in the business still were about events of, at that time, 20 to 30 years in the past. How we immediately touched a nerve by unwittingly delving into the politics behind this stuff. I had not even the foggiest idea. It was really, really surprising. There was such intrigue! The Carmine/Kirby controversy is what started it, right? There was something in Comics Buyers Guide with Mark Evanier, right?

JM: Yeah. That was ugly. Carmine wrote a letter to CBG that was insulting to Kirby, and saying basically that Kirby was great creatively, but he just wasn’t very smart. That caused a lot of people to get very angry at Infantino and start writing responses. I did,

Above: Jon was the first nonMorrow to help out at the TwoMorrows booth during San Diego Comic-Con in those early years. Here are Pam and Jon showing off their pearly whites in 1997, Jon’s very first SDCC. Below: The three CBA collections.

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST Left: Neal Adams has his arms around the Brothers Cooke, in 2001, as Andrew and Jon display a banner graced with Neal’s art. Prime8 was the boys’ adventure comic book concept they hoped to bring to success. Below is the actual one-shot comic published by TwoMorrows.

Jon: Julie was one of the inventors of fanzines!

JM: When freaking Julie Schwartz is giving you praise like that… I want to mention Julie, too. He was a big supporter early on of all our endeavors. He would go out of his way to come over to our booth at these conventions just to tell us how great we were doing, to offer us advice or suggestions… I remember he sent me a Galaxy magazine, which I didn’t even know existed, which contained an excerpt from Kirby’s prose novel The Horde. Out of the blue, it shows too. In hindsight, I wish I’d stayed out of it. I up in the mail one day with a note, “I thought don’t suppose Carmine meant to be as insulting you might enjoy this.” That Julie cared enough as it came off in the letter, but it sounded really to think, “Hey, John Morrow might want to see bad and upset a lot of people. Was Mark doing this”—that was the kind of generosity we were his column in CBG at the time? consumed with in those early days. Everybody Jon: Yes, he must have. That must have been in comics is so nice and so generous. I hope where it started. All of a sudden, it exploded. they felt like it was returned to them. I think they JM: I don’t remember if Mark responded in his did, with the love we gave in the magazines and column or not. Then it smoothed over a bit. still do. I think people still feel that way.

That was the early days of The Kirby Collector, Jon: Still, an occasional creator would be upset so maybe Carmine already had a chip on his with us. One very big creator was very, very shoulder about that. Then CBA #1 comes out. upset about comments made by someone who Jon: Carmine thought Tom Stewart was a had worked for him. We didn’t think that discussion of a behindpseudonym for Mark Evanier. the-scenes incident from 20 years prior would be an issue, but…

JM: That’s right. Which I think you and I today can categorically JM: I don’t know if you recall, but I even edited that down before state, “No, Tom Stewart and Mark Evanier are two very different it saw print. So I was really caught by surprise. I thought, “This is people.” [laughter] totally acceptable,” and I was wrong, unfortunately. That ranks up Jon: Tom is a wonderful performer! there with one of my most painful moments in this publishing gig.

JM: As is Mark, in a different way! So that was my first taste of politics, I guess, over the Kirby stuff with Carmine. To Stan’s credit, You know, you make mistakes, you make amends as best you can, and hope people are accepting and forgiving. And you move on. over all of the Lee/Kirby controversy, with Kirby fans arguing with Lee fans about who did what and saying things about each other, Jon: It’s naturally the Rashomon aspect of multiple people remembering the same thing differently. You know, Neal Adams Stan never really felt the need to get mixed up in it—which, he talks about the final chapter of the Kree/Skrull War starting off in a certainly had many opportunities to do once we started publishclassroom scene in the year 2060, an ancient history class discussing all our stuff. He could have written a letter saying, “Hey, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” or tried to defend himself ing the cosmic battle, and then his collaborator says, “Absolutely not so.” The aftermath was rather nerve-wracking for me. I develagainst something someone said that may have slighted him. oped post-traumatic stress, which remains to this day! [laughter] John Romita did an interview where he talked about Stan, which JM: These are your childhood idols! Creators you admire and surprised me because I’d never heard Romita ever say anything respect, and can’t believe you’re getting to associate with them by like that. He wasn’t negative, but he was very pragmatic about doing these silly little fan publications (even though they’re neither Stan. Stan could’ve written in to dispute that. silly or little… they’re professional). Inside, you’re still that 15-yearJon: You have to remember the times, too. It was around the days when Ron Perlman owned Marvel Comics. There was a lot of old kid buying comics every week. “Oh my gosh, I get to hang corporate intrigue going on. Why get in the middle of something? out with these guys whose work I always idolized; this is amazing.”

Then, you end up disappointing one of them and, wow, that’s a Stan didn’t necessarily care about fannish things, but yet he did. bad day. You have to quickly mature and realize, “Okay, this is He wrote me a really nice blurb about him appearing in CBA #2, which we would never have been able to do if Roy wasn’t a part of going to happen.” These idols are just human beings, after all.

Jon: And hopefully learn the right lesson from it. the team. That was fantastic… just killer to get him! Thanks, Roy! JM: In San Diego, we went into the Hyatt for the prime rib buffet. JM: Yes, learn from it. At the end of the day, are you presenting the best you can of the truth? That’s where we are. Sometimes That was our one big meal every year. We walked in and Julius Schwartz called you and me over to where he was sitting. He said, there are two truths to a story, depending on a person’s perspective or depending on what Person A was experiencing up in an “You guys, these are the best fan publications ever done. These office, vs. Person B, who was working from their home. I get that are the best I’ve ever seen.” I knew right then; it wasn’t just Kirby with Lee and Kirby. I’m starting to come around to a little better Collector either. I was not about to assume I was getting all this understanding of why Stan Lee felt he deserves all this credit praise because of Kirby Collector… It was because of CBA.

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The World of TwoMorrows

THE BALLAD OF ‘ACE’ IRVING AND HIS COMIC BOOK SCOOPS Let’s talk full-circle: About 20 years ago, I was an art education student at Virginia Commonwealth University, gearing up for my first published comic creator interview, Walter Simonson, in The Jack Kirby Collector.

It wasn’t my first “sold” piece, mind you (that was my first research on the Fox Comics Blue Beetle in an issue of Comic Book Marketplace), but it was the first time I flipped a front cover open and got to my byline.

But let’s talk about what really pushed and shaped me as a historian and journalist, the reason I’m able to sit here in my office at VCU’s Communication Arts department, and recall those crazy and exciting days as a wet-behind-the-ears, budding writer: Comic Book Artist and its editor, Jon B. Cooke.

I was ambitious, looking to get my name out and learn as much as I could about the history of comics in the process. John Morrow sent me Jonny B.’s way and, before I knew it, I was working on an article on this small old comics company called Charlton for an upcoming issue of CBA. I uncovered more stuff, found more people, and Jon was working from his upstairs office in Rhode Island and coming up with even more to cover.

Before I knew it, Jon excitedly reported that CBA would have not one, but two issues on Charlton.

When you research and write, you’re not always aware of what people outside your work bubble are saying. My understanding is most comics fans who read the TwoMorrows mags wondered, “Why Charlton? Their books were crap!”

My thought has always been that, crap or no, it’s all important to document. I’m proud to say Jon and I were amongst the first to cover that controversial and weird corner of comics history. We were like a musical duo riffing off one another for the massive essays we put together for CBA, and we put out some sweet-sounding albums of obscure tunes no one thought they’d care as much about as they did.

Dell/Gold Key? Done. Tower? Done.

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

Atlas/Seaboard? Stick a fork in it.

The great thing is people noticed.

There was a positive write-up in The Comics Journal but, most importantly, the Eisner Award committee deemed CBA worthy of “Best Comics Related Periodical,” several years in a row.

I write this not wanting to discount any of the work I did for Comics Buyers’ Guide, which was the first comics magazine I ever read, but the work on CBA proved the most exciting and personal journey I ever could’ve taken as both a young man and a historian.

After brilliant cartoonist Gray Morrow died, I rode to his home in the mountains to celebrate his life with his wife, Pocho, and a who’s who of comics legends. I count Pocho one of my dearest friends, and my son Grayson goes by Gray in honor of my pipe-smoking hero.

Joe Gill, former Charlton head writer, became a friend and inspiration. He pointed me to his old pal, Mickey Spillane, who, in turn, inspired even more.

I married far too young and my wife argued with me where she pointed to a few copies of CBA on our coffee table and went, “You love those more than me!” I agreed with her. Needless to say, divorce wasn’t far behind.

Most importantly, in the process, Jon became my friend and mentor.

CBA challenged and pushed me to form opinions and views of my own,

and ways of looking at not just comics history itself, but ways to present comic book history. It carried me through my first book, The Blue Beetle Companion, with an afterword by Jon; or when I struck out on my own, the web-to-print Graphic NYC project I created with my late photographer friend, Seth Kushner; or as I stand in front of a classroom of 125 students twice a week at 8:00 in the morning and discuss the importance of historical and social context when digesting older stories. Other things have happened to me in those 20 years, things that have shaped, tempered, and informed who I am today.

And there was far more involving TwoMorrows—how I worked there for a year and learned things without realizing it, skills and production practices that came back when I started my own small self-publishing company; or how John sent me to more conventions than I had ever been to in one given year.

But, of all the lessons I learned, it’s my time on CBA that most shaped who I am as a historian, journalist, and conveyor of comics lore. While I may be done interviewing creators and pursuing investigative journalism, I am taking that same work ethic and gumption into my recent studies in media and other comics (after 21 years of American comics, I’m starting to dive into Euro and Japanese, much to the pleasure of my students).

And as I’m about to hit SEND to an email to Jon, I’m once Christopher Irving more “Ace” Educator, Author Irving from Born: 1977 about 20 Residence: years ago, Richmond, full of piss Virginia and vinegar, Vocation: University ready to professor take on the world with a Favorite Creators: Will Eisner, Jack Cole, chunk of each Mike Allred, Jack Kirby Eisner under my belt.

Seminal Comic Book: Batman #428

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST Left: Rascally Roy Thomas and Jon B. Cooke at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con.

JM: Chris Day… Jon: No, how quickly we forget! You found me, John Morrow! [laughter] I had just quit my ad agency job and gone freelance, working out of my home. By then, I had the studio built and my own computer/scanner/printer set-up.

JM: Oh, that’s right!

Jon: I designed A/E for four or five issues. I had a great time because I have never had a problem working with Roy. I might roll my eyes at so many changes, but I find that he’s almost always absolutely right about a change. Virtually every decision he asks for, he makes the issue better. So I’ve always gone with it. His changes are never about his ego or any control thing over design.

JM: Every change he requests, makes it better. Absolutely. when Kirby was the more creative of the two. It’s still an evolution, Jon: Absolutely. Look, Roy is no designer. Things get super-dense. though; I’m still trying to comprehend all this. And the Kree/Skrull He always gives way too many images to fit into an article, typically. I don’t know if it is right to sacrifice design in the scheme of War thing—it’s fascinating that there is still a dispute over that. things, but it is definitely more informative (but more readable? I People remember things and then you dig up the facts and find, “Your memory may not be 100% about that.” How do you present dunno). He definitely gives the reader more. Any issue is chock full of stuff. It ain’t always the prettiest presentation, to be sure… that? All you can do is show it as genuinely and honestly as you JM: People buy it for the content; they don’t buy it for the pretty can, and let the readers decide for themselves. page layout. I’ve personally gotten critiques over the years, Flipping Over Alter Ego “Some of your publications don’t look as good as some of the Jon: We’ve still got to talk about Alter Ego. others.” They don’t specify which, but maybe they’re talking JM: A big mistake I made was in mis-remembering you as the one about Alter Ego, which is a fine-looking mag; it’s just not slick. who got Roy to do Alter Ego in CBA. I just always assumed it was We upgraded the look a bit around #70 or so. There were some you that contacted Roy, but Roy said that I contacted him, and I typographical things that, as a designer, I couldn’t stand anymore, just found the old letters and emails that show that. but they’re just minor tweaks here and there. The average person Jon: I found some old faxes, too. After we first met, Roy hinted probably doesn’t notice, but at least I feel better. It’s all personal that he would be interested in us putting together a special Alter preference. Roy puts everything he can into every issue. He just Ego issue of CBA once or twice a year. Then I asked him to be does and that’s what I love. I like working with people like you.

CBA’s contributing editor and suggested we do A/E as a flipside Every single one of you just wants it to be as good as it can be. for every issue. It basically started with Roy’s openly pondering Jon: He’s got a healthy enough ego for sure, but nonetheless, being a part of CBA, if for one issue. At the same time, maybe you it’s always a pleasure to work with Roy. It’s exasperating, it can be were concerned about getting enough content out of me for a thrilling, it can be, “Oh, my God!” But it’s always agreeable. quarterly magazine, and having A/E would account for a chunk of JM: Roy and I have never had a cross word with each other in each issue. For another thing, Roy was enthusiastic about getting 20 years. We’ve had a couple of minor disagreements here and A/E going again, even if just a portion of another mag. And, boy, there. I wouldn’t call them “arguments” about Stan Lee and Jack did Roy have the goods! My God, to have such a beautiful Joe Kirby, but we can disagree with one another about Lee and Kirby, Kubert Hawkman cover for the first issue! And to have the Roy and Roy is an extremely professional person. He’s reasonable and Thomas associated with CBA! We haven’t even talked about him he’s very fair-minded. I can’t ask for a better person to work with yet. I was a massive fan of Roy Thomas in the ’70s and ’80s! Huge! on a regular basis.

JM: Me too. I was in awe! “You’re telling me I don’t get to just Jon: On rare moments, his memory might be faulty, but I’ll take interview Roy Thomas, but I get to work with him regularly?!” his word over almost anyone else’s. Even though our politics are Jon: I quickly found out, “What did I get myself into?!” [laughter] I pretty far apart in certain aspects, we have a genuine affection love Roy to pieces… but boy, he can keep you on the phone! for one another, I think. We all have a genuine friendship, I think.

JM: He’s also a very meticulous editor. I remember he drove our I know he respects me. (Plus I love Dann.) All three of us—you, poor designer insane on the first solo TwoMorrows issue of Alter me, and Roy—were there in the beginning of CBA, a very exciting Ego, and the guy quit halfway through. He said, “I just can’t do time, and he also always gives credit where credit is due. it.” Roy was too demanding. “I just can’t work with him; he’s too JM: He has a healthy creative ego, but he’s not an arrogant egoparticular. Too many nitpicks.” So, I had to finish the design on tist, and that’s what you want. You have to have a healthy creative the first issue. Then I said, “I’ve got to find someone else who can ego to be a good creator. I think Jack Kirby had a healthy creative work with Roy because I don’t have time to do this.” I love Roy, ego; he was proud of his work and he would defend his work, but but I could never design an ongoing magazine with him. he was a humble man in general. That’s kind of how I find Roy. Roy Jon: Do you remember who you found? will stand his ground on comics history, on creative directions on

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The World of TwoMorrows

1996

things; he will also listen to the other person, and consider what they’re saying. He may decide that you’re wrong and he’s right, but everyone is that way. Roy is a great person to work with and I see why he’s respected the way he is in the industry, and why he did as well as he did in the industry. I grew up reading Roy’s stuff. I read The Invaders, even though I hated the art. I hated Frank Robbins, especially inked by Vince Colletta, but I still bought every issue because I loved the characters and I loved what Roy did with them. I wouldn’t trade Roy for anybody.

Jon: The Avengers was my favorite title at a certain time, in high school, when I was buying all the back issues.

Those were fantastic. He had appreciation for comics history, for retro-fitting Golden Age continuity, whatever there was of it, and what he actually created himself. In college, when I was buying very few comics, I always picked up All-Star Squadron—just because I always dug the Golden Age stuff.

I did return to A/E as designer later and did layout around issues #102– 108. It was a fine experience and it was a steady job. I’m glad it’s over.

You know what I mean? It’s work; it’s definitely work. You earn your money doing it. It’s not exactly designing, like I said, so it didn’t leave much room for being creative. And he himself said, “Why do layout for A/E when you could do your own mag, Jon?” JM: It’s more production work and not as creatively rewarding as doing your own magazine. Roy is such a self-contained person when it comes to doing A/E. He lists me as “executive editor” or whatever title, and we consult over, “Hey, I want to do an issue on so-andso”… but it’s not like you and I were with CBA where we hashed things out and wrestled things to the ground. I offer Roy suggestions once in a while on Alter Ego—like he’s about to do a Steve Ditko issue. He probably would have thought to do it, but as soon as I heard Ditko died, I said, “Roy, you’ve got to do a Steve Ditko issue,” and we immediately made that the next

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

2001

Mid-’00s

issue on the schedule. I said, “If you do the Ditko issue, why don’t you get Robin Snyder…” or whatever. We consult on covers. That’s the extent of my input on the magazine. Roy does his own magazine and he’s never missed a deadline in 157 issues since, what, 1999? What does that tell you about the guy?

Jon: I think it says a lot about you: you like Roy better than you like me. [laughter] At least in terms of deadlines!

JM: You’ve missed a couple deadlines, sure… Roy has never missed a deadline and Michael Eury has never missed a deadline. That’s in-keeping with my philosophy about people who are more art-driven versus people who are more literature-driven. The “writers” in the world are better at making their deadlines than the artists. You may argue that it’s a whole lot easier to write a 20-page comic book and get it in on time than it is to draw a 20-page comic book and get it in on time, and that’s a fair argument. You’re a graphic designer.

You think with that end of things (even though you are a very good writer). I view you as more of the artist side than the writer side—not that you don’t do both well. I view Roy as a writer, although he knows what he likes, and will art direct to an extent.

Preserving History

2019

Above: Jon and Beth Cooke and their three sons over the years.

Jon: Except for one notable time when you and I broke up for a time, we never really did, as I recall, argue very much. I don’t recall getting involved in a heated argument with you, except prior to our break-up. What I want to get at here is if you and I had a philosophical difference.

JM: Oh no, never.

Jon: Still, you would say, “In the end, it’s only comics.” And I would say, “Oh, but it’s comics all right!” My inner historian, my inner journalist would rise up.

“Screw people’s feelings, I want to know the truth!” I would have gone to the barricades with some of these situations and you were pragmatic and realistic and patient—and I did learn from you there—but my impulse there was to go, once more, into the breach.

JM: You were Comics Journal and I

69

ARLEN SCHUMER: MY YESTERDAYS WITH TWOMORROWS

I knew I would like Jon B. Cooke the first time I met him, at the 1997 Ramapo, New York, comic convention, because he told me he was a fan of mine, due to the fact I had been instigator behind the special fall 1988 issue of Print magazine that was devoted entirely to comics. (For that renowned graphic arts trade magazine, I designed the cover and wrote one the features within, “The New Superheroes: a Graphic Transformation.”) Jon and I discovered we had so much in common—not only as fellow comics fans and graphic designers, but the fact he also lived in the same state as the Arlen Schumer art school I attended, the Contributor Rhode Island Born: 1958 School of Residence: Design!

Westport, Conn.

Soon after, Vocation: Jon told me Commercial artist about a new & writer comics history Favorite Creator: magazine Neal Adams (1967–78) he wanted to start with Seminal Comic Books: John Morrow Neal Adams’ 1967–69 Deadman run of the nascent TwoMorrows Publishing. It was tentatively titled something like Sequential Art Monthly. I was aghast—not at the validity or viability of the idea of such a magazine,

70

but at its terrible title!

I always felt that phrases like “sequential art” to describe comic art were well-intentioned, but unwieldy in their pseudo-sophistication and high-falutin’ pretensions. I never had a problem with “comic art”—but, as a graphic designer, I felt that it’s all in the way a reader sees those words: if you design them typographically to be read with dignity and respect, they will be.

I even told Jon I’d design his logo for him, to practice what I was preaching.

Thus was born my logo for Jon’s multiple Eisner Award-winning Comic Book Artist magazine!

And thus also began my now-over20-year relationship with Jon and John Morrow, writing and creating many comics history articles and projects published under the TwoMorrows imprint, including its flagship title, The Jack Kirby Collector, Alter Ego, and the second incarnation of Jon’s magazine, Comic Book Creator! In chronological order: Comic Book Artist #3 cover-featured something Jon had urged me to do since we first met: “Neal Adams: The Marvel Years,” a “sequel” to my 1996 interview, “Neal Adams: The DC Years,” that I had conducted for fellow comics history mag Comic Book Marketplace.

I remember Jon and I had a great time going up together to Neal’s Continuity studios in midtown New York City to interview him. (I had worked for Neal back in the ‘80s.)

And, speaking of Neal Adams, for Jon’s Comic Book Artist Special Edition’s “Best of ‘70s DC Comics” theme, I got to interview Neal again, for “The Greatest: Neal Adams and Superman vs. Muhammad Ali”!

The year 1999 turned out to be a busy one for me, because I also got to do something that had been on my mind for years, for TwoMorrows’ Alter Ego special issue commemorating the 60th Anniversary of Batman’s debut in 1939: my article about the Bob Kane/ Bill Finger situation—“The Bat-Man Cover Story”—and the cover as well,

my illustrated/designed interpretation of Kane’s first “Bat-Man” sketch that he showed Finger, before Finger made all the art-direction decisions that would turn “Bat-Man” into the Batman we’ve known and loved ever since. (I later based one of my comics history VisuaLectures on it, “Bill Finger: The Man Who Made Batman, Batman.”)

One day, in the spring of 2004, I received a phone call from an older man named Robert Lawrence, praising me for my recently-published book, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art. Turns out he was the Robert Lawrence of Grantray-Lawrence Productions, the animation studio behind the fondly-remembered 1966 Marvel super-heroes cartoons! It didn’t take long for me to propose an interview with him for TwoMorrows’ Kirby Collector. When time came to go up to his classic New York City Fifth Avenue pre-War apartment for the interview, I brought along friend and fellow TwoMorrows scribe Adam McGovern (whom I had met a few years prior). Adam ended up writing the actual article/interview that got published in 2005, coincidentally and ironically, right after Lawrence passed away. Our article honoring his memorable works ended up being a de facto eulogy.

Adam McGovern and I got to work together again for TwoMorrows in 2008,

The World of TwoMorrows

was Amazing Heroes—if you want to put it in those terms.

Jon: That’s a thoughtful way to put it.

JM: It’s wasn’t like I didn’t want to present the truth.

But you do have to be cognizant of the fact that, okay, Creator A, who is doing this interview—you may want to talk to Creator A about a different thing they worked on five years from now, so let’s be cautious and make sure we’re presenting things properly and giving everyone a fair shake.

Jon: You’re right. I looked at things like, “This is my one shot.” Also, I do want to bring up a point: There’s people like Nick Cardy, Mike Royer—and especially for me, Dick Giordano, who I loved—I very quickly gained affection for them. They became my friends. Nick would send me a Christmas card until the end of his days. I could always talk to Dick very closely and he believed in what we were doing, like you said. A lot of these guys believed in what we were doing. Joe Sinnott—I’ll never forget being with him at Ramapo. That was another aspect: They became family, too. There was something about this.

JM: When you sent me CBA #1 in little sections to proofread, I was like, “Wow, this isn’t what I pictured, but it’s awesome. What else can this guy come up with? I’m gonna look so good being associated with this magazine. Bring it on, Jon B. Cooke!” And I was right.

Jon: You were always encouraging. Always. You when John honored me by asking me to participate in the special 50th issue of The Jack Kirby Collector. I was specifically requested to write what I had been chewing his ear off about for years, a definitive piece on Jack Kirby as graphic designer. It was really through my graphic design education at RISD that I came to appreciate Kirby’s work on that level.

In 2011, I interviewed Hank Weisinger, the son of (in-)famous Superman editor from 1940–70, Mort Weisinger; I was fascinated by the paradoxical fact that, while Weisinger’s Superman is the Baby Boom generation’s beloved Superman, Weisinger himself was just as hated by those who worked for him! I based a VisuaLecture on that interview (and other verbal and visual research) that I presented to both the San Diego and New York comic conventions that year, then pitched it to TwoMorrows’ Alter

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

know me and I do it to this day: anytime I send you a final layout, I’ll always give you a little nudge. I always ask, “What do you think, huh?” Because, of course, I’m a person with low self-esteem with a pathological need for constant affirmation… at all times! (Joking… not!)

Also, that’s why we’re doing this book. It’s emotional; it’s really meaningful to me, this whole Two­Morrows experience. Before I depart to whatever is the next plane of existence, I will know we did good work together and we did it for the love of things worth loving and not for greed.

I think it all has to do with the joy we saw in Nick Cardy’s face and the “Attaboy!” we got from Julie Schwartz and the enthusiasm of working alongside Roy Thomas, Stan [Lee] writing a nice thank-you note to me, and Neal [Adams] just being so generous in his way of, you know… tough or not, he’s a father figure! Giving us newly-inked art to put on the cover…?! Who does that?

The genesis of this is partially Joe Kubert. My older brother Chris and I went up to the Words and Pictures Museum for the Fax from Sarajevo tour. This was in 1997. Joe had an exhibition and was promoting the book up there. I talked to him and completely monopolized his time. “What about Tarzan? What about Firehair? What about Enemy Ace?” He’s answering every question directly to me, looking me in the eye, and giving me these thoughtful answers. All

Ego as a 16-page verbal/visual essay, “Requiem for Weisinger,” utilizing Mort’s (and Hank’s) own words with his Superman artist/muse Curt Swan’s images, and it was published the following year as the cover story of A/E #112.

Late in 2011, in response to yet another court loss by the Jack Kirby estate to Marvel Comics/Disney over creative ownership of the Marvel properties Kirby worked on with writer/editor Stan Lee (whom the court declared sole creator), I wrote and designed a 16-page full-color verbal/visual manifesto, “The Auteur Theory of Comics” (based on the famous 1950s French film critics’ auteur theory of film). It posited the comic book artist as author/auteur of a comic book work, not its writer. It was published in black-&-white in TJKC #59, and I financed a stand-alone color print version to help raise funds for the Jack Kirby Museum.

Above: Jon extrapolated his Tower Comics issue of CBA, #14, into a trade paperback that expanded on the issue and singularly focused on Wally Wood’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and its super-hero incarnations over the decades. Jerry Ordway contributed the cover art for the book, The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents Companion, published in 2005 by TwoMorrows.

I eulogized the great Joe Kubert after his passing with a six-page verbal/visual essay in the memorial issue of Jon’s rebooted comics history mag Comic Book Creator, and my most recent comics history project for TwoMorrows was a verbal/visual essay published in Alter Ego #118 on “The Origin of Jack Kirby’s Black Panther.”

It’s fitting that I close my TwoMorrows retrospective on a Kirby note, because what makes Kirby’s passing 25 years ago not bitter, but bittersweet, is that it was also the birth of John Morrow’s great magazine (and eventual publishing empire) that has done more to keep Kirby’s spirit alive than anything that was ever done to honor him, cumulatively, when he was alive! So here’s to 25 more, John—and beyond!

Previous page: Arlen’s photo-montage regarding the Bob Kane and Bill Finger creation of Batman (used as “flip cover” for CBA #5) and the cover he designed for A/E #112.

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DURWIN TALON: EXPLORING THE ART OF STORYTELLING I looked up at the clock. My hour’s thesis structure just kind of hit me. No almost up. My thesis chair, John Sellers, matter the style, technique or process, followed my gaze and realized he was the ultimate goal was to tell clear stoout of time. “Here are the corrections ries. And design was the glue that kept that we found. Add these changes and the panels, the heartbeat of whatever you’ll be done.” stories they were telling, together.

I shook hands with everyone in the I decided to explore the process of room and then took my leave, having comics, from conception to finish. Editearned my Master’s degree in design ing, writing, art, production… all those from Syracuse University. interviewed went through these steps, My Master’s thesis defense went well. and so I organized I pulled the largest review the book with these group in my graduate class. Durwin Talon steps in mind, one My tome had a simple concept building on Author, Panel premise: How do you another. This way, if Discussions design visual storytelling? one of my students Born: Old enough Grids, panels, acting, drawwas in a certain stage to remember standing ing—there were so many of the process, they could in line for Star Wars components to a comic reference that particular Residence: book page. And then sechapter, and get direct Grand Rapids, Michigan quence, flow, action, page advice from the artist.

Vocation: Associate turns, how the story works I interviewed each artist, College Professor within a book. This is what on the phone, in person, at Favorite Creator: drew the crowd of faculty my school, at conventions, Every creator interviewed to my thesis defense. or in hotel rooms. I strove for Panel Discussions Luckily, I didn’t have to keep the conversations Seminal Comic Book: to go too deep into the informal, but I tried to Detective Comics #402 weeds. Everyone started extrapolate a key concept talking about comics they in the interview. In the had as kids. How much fun they had beginning of the interview process, I reading the adventures of Superman or remember how in awe I was of some collecting the spectacular Spider-Man. of these creators that I had the priviThey were instantly taken back to their lege of speaking with. Some were my childhoods and comparing collections. childhood heroes. Some were among It was remarkable how a 25¢ comic the best thinkers and artistic talents in made such an impact on these academ- comics. And even though I was a cover ics. I just sat back and let them talk, artist for DC Comics, I just didn’t feel allowing the hour to exhaust itself. worthy enough to merit their time and At the time, I wrote this thesis paper insight. The other thing that struck me because I taught comics at the Savanwas how gracious everyone was. They nah College of Art and Design and I wanted to share and they realized that my students kept asking wanted to genuinely help my the same questions, which didn’t focus students and me. on drawing, but rather on storytelling.

I will forever be grateful “How do I move the action across a for their generosity: Mike panel?” or “How do I create focus on Carlin; Randy Stradley; Mike the correct panel?”; “How do I divide Wieringo (who left us far too action on a page?” to “How do I plan a soon); Mark Schultz; Dick graphic novel?”

Giordano; Mike Mignola; And so, I started chatting to and Brian Stelfreeze; Scott Hampthen formally interviewing my friends ton; David Mazzucchelli; Chris Moeller; who were comic book professionals. At Walt Simonson; George Pratt; John Van first, we just talked about the nuts and Fleet; Mark Chiarello; and, finally, Will bolts of comics creation. And then a Eisner, who was my favorite interview-

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ing experience.

Understanding Eisner’s impact to comics (the first graphic novel, inventing the splash page, coining the phrase “sequential art”) meant for an intimidating interview on the future of sequential art. When I got to the end of the interview, I remember thanking him profusely for his time. I also asked if I could contact him at a later date with additional questions. He magnanimously agreed, paused, and then said: “You know, if I was interviewing me, I would ask these questions as well…” He then proceeded to extemporaneously share knowledge that I am blessed to have recorded. (Someday I should release all of these taped interviews online.)

In the end, I had 15 interviews covering every facet of comic book production. And then I successfully turned these interviews into my graduate thesis. And then I had my degree from Syracuse University. This would be the end of the story except that my college mentor mentioned that I should consider turning this into a “real” book so that more illustrators could learn from it. So I searched for a home for this book idea.

Enter Jon B. Cooke. I’ve met him through my school and at various conventions. I also loved the work he did in Comic Book Artist, and I pitched this idea as an ongoing article for his magazine. He turned me down saying, “I see this more as a book. You should talk to John Morrow.”

TwoMorrows publisher John Morrow has been a stalwart educator in comics through his publications, helping countless artists by interviewing countless artists. By extolling the greatest storytellers in the field, John has been able to expand the field of comics history. My resulting book, Panel Discussions, was lucky to find a home at Two­ Morrows. I was lucky to be a small part of John’s 25-year long journey to analyze and share the intricacies of comic book creation.

I look forward to being a part of the next 25 years.

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my questions… that’s why I did the magazine! I had so many questions! “Why so many artists as editors?

What was with all the Gothic comic book covers in 1970–71? Who established the double-page spreads in certain books?” Nobody talks about this stuff! No one discussed DC’s little renaissance in the late ’60s/early ’70s; everybody endlessly talked about Marvel. (Though, don’t get me wrong: Comic Book Marketplace could be outstanding in spots.)

JM: You’re touching on why CBA clicked so quickly.

We all grew up enjoying those books, but they didn’t get the accolades in the fan press of the time. Big, high-profile Kirby and Adams books did; the Wally Wood stuff did for a bit; Steranko’s did. But here you are covering Cardy’s Teen Titans. You’ve got pieces on Mike Sekowsky…

Sam Glanzman…

I felt that CBA #2 was a letdown compared to CBA #1, but that’s for me personally, because I knew most of the stuff in #2, but I didn’t know stuff in #1,

STEVEN E. TICE: MUSINGS OF A LONGTIME CONTRIBUTOR I discovered comics when in middle school, and they quickly became my main hobby. I was more a Marvel than DC fan, however. So when Jim Shooter’s policies led to an exodus of Marvel creators in the early ’80s, I became less enchanted with comics in general and my attention shifted to music. I pretty much dropped out of comics entirely in college, when the requirements for obtaining an English literature degree left little time for extraneous reading.

By the time I was taking grad school classes, I took a renewed look at the comics business, and was surprised at the strides that had been made in the mid-’80s. Inspired, I decided to open a comics and gaming shop of my own.

Calliope Comics opened in February of 1990, and I continue to manage it to the present day. In 1993 I decided to branch into publishing and produced four issues Steven Tice (plus one special) of Transcriber a magazine Born: 1965 called MusResidence: ings during Bellefonte, the height of Pennsylvania the specuVocation: lator boom.

Comic shop Musings owner/manager featured interviews Favorite Creator: Alan Moore with comics professionals, Seminal Comic Book: articles about Fantastic Four #176 comics, and

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

special sections devoted to colorists and letterers, who at the time received little opportunity to present their views.

Unfortunately, when the speculator boom inevitably went bust, I had to cease publishing. Musings #5 was completed, but never saw the light of day because sales dropped 80% between issues. It was a scary time for the comics business.

As was true for many comics shops, Calliope fell on hard times in the latter ’90s. This prompted me to respond when TwoMorrows put out a call for transcribers. I’d been a fan of the TwoMorrows magazines for years, and really appreciated the in-depth examination of the history and creation of comics. My try-out assignment was for Jon B. Cooke’s Comic Book Artist.

Coincidentally, it was an interview with my favorite inker, Terry Austin. Jon was sufficiently impressed with my abilities that I became the default transcriber for Comic Book Artist for many years, while also contributing to many other TwoMorrows publications. Jon even

had me scheduled to guest-edit an issue of Comic Book Artist, which I decided to devote to creators of adult comics, another group of people who rarely received public publicity. The creators I interviewed were quite excited at the prospect of appearing in such a prestigious magazine, but CBA ended up ceasing publication before that issue could see print. The comics industry is full of projects that never make it to completion, or make it to completion but not to publication.

Things continued apace at TwoMorrows, and I contributed to Draw!, Write Now!, The Jack Kirby Collector, and other books and magazines, as well as material outside the comics industry. I also assisted David Hajdu on The TenCent Plague, his book about the anticomics hysteria of the ’50s. I continue to transcribe for TwoMorrows, including some assignments for Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego over the last few years.

I would like to express my thanks to John Morrow for giving me a chance, and for running such a successful, professional company. I’d also like to extend a special thank you to Jon B. Cooke, for whom I’ve done the bulk of my transcription over the years, and to Danny Fingeroth, Mike Manley, and the other outstanding creators with whom I’ve worked. Here’s hoping TwoMorrows continues to examine the history of comics for the foreseeable future!

Inset above: Steven Tice’s 1990s fanzine, Musings.

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST Left: December 18, 2003 edition of the Providence Journal’s lifestyle section, featuring CBA. Next page: Jon’s San Diego Comic-Con badges during his first stint at TwoMorrows.

so it was eye-opening for me. That’s why I liked #4, the Warren issue, so much because I knew zero about Warren… I mean, nothing at all. Reading that, I was just mesmerized, not because I have any affection for that material, but for the story that you crafted in that issue of this company I knew nothing about. It was the same kind of thing I got reading the Steranko History of Comics when Jim wrote about Jack Cole’s life story as a kid, going on his bike ride across the country. I was never a Jack Cole Plastic Man fan, but reading about him painted a vivid story in my mind. I was hooked.

CBA #1 especially, was that way for me; it just worked for me as a story I hadn’t heard before. You told the story of DC Comics in that era—of stuff no one had really covered at any length before. That’s always been my gut on things: If I’d buy it… if I’d read it… if I’d enjoy it, fine. It doesn’t have to be geared toward me specifically, but if I can get into it, then sure, it’s got value and we should publish it. CBA #1 was eye-opening to me, as a fan, not just as your publisher—taking this so much further than anything I’ve ever seen done in The Comics Journal, Comics Interview, Amazing Heroes, or Comics Scene… this is it; this is the meat-&-potatoes of comics’ fandom here. It blew me away! I didn’t mean to interrupt you here…

Jon: Thank you! I have to say… that’s the highest compliment, John. It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does happen, there will always be a letter, “You know, I have no interest in Charlton Comics, but you made it interesting.” I’ve always taken that as the greatest appreciation because that’s my intent.

Me, I look at CBA #1 and go, “Oh my God, what a mess.” I know the enthusiasm was there, but I know it was rushed and I didn’t take time to focus on the layout… I didn’t know what I was doing. I over-planned (and still do). I had conducted so many interviews and thought I could fit much more into the issue than I did. Those first eight or nine issues of CBA featured content initially intended for three or four issues.

I have to say, too, part of CBA’s creation was in response to The Comics Journal. I had picked up TCJ #105, years earlier, the blue

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cover featuring Kirby’s art fight against Marvel, and that completely blew me away. I instantly became fanatical about The Comics Journal. It was real-world. All these other magazines—you were right, John—they were all about value or trying to re-live some previous decade with puerile nostalgia, but TCJ was what is happening now. Groth will probably shrug at this, but I wanted to do Comic Book Artist as if there had been a (not-as-critical) TCJ back in the ’70s, if only their in-depth interview section. Their interviews have always been excellent and captivated me (though I loved the news section, as well). You could learn so much from them and that’s what I wanted to do with these issue-by-issue retrospectives.

When I was putting together a theme issue, I was very focused on only dealing with the subject at hand. And, in the beginning, it was DC in the 1970s. So, when I called up Archie Goodwin, my plan was just to talk about his short-lived impact on DC Comics in the mid-’70s. He was only there for 18 months or so at the most, but he did really wonderful work—Manhunter in Detective Comics, anyone?—and I do this interview with him where we just talk about that material, and, in my mind, my plan is to come back soon and talk to Archie about his Warren Publishing work. But what I didn’t know was that this would be his very last day at DC! He went home and, two weeks later, Archie Goodwin was dead.

That was a massive bolt from the blue for me. “I’ve got to get this stuff done.” It became like a mission. I was stunned. All of a sudden, I felt this overwhelming obligation.

In comparison to all the other copy-edited interviews in CBA #1, you can read how verbatim the Archie Goodwin interview is, because I felt responsible to be painstakingly accurate. Every single “hem” and “haw” and “uh” is in there because I knew these were the last words on record of a hugely important comics creator.

That’s what it became in a lot of ways: a place for creators to give their eyewitness accounts of comics history.

I don’t know… the identity of Comic Book Creator has shifted back, here and there. I get disappointed when people use that old Woody Allen line, “I like your earlier, funnier stuff.” People would say, “I really liked CBA in the first couple of years, man. You were really good,” implying that what I do now is sh*t! I have a little resentment for that, but I do completely understand what they are talking about. It was new. Nobody had done this. I was dedicated to exhaustive oral histories of certain eras. And I also had a massive amount of energy back then. I would transcribe until 3:00 in the morning and then go to work at 8:00 a.m., work until 5:00, come home—with an hour commute each way—and transcribe until 3:00 a.m. again, night after night. Then work on scanning and layout the entire weekend at my workplace.

A book that had come out a year or so before CBA #1 was the second edition of The Comic Book Heroes, by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones. A lot of it was wonderful because it was anecdotal, generally knew its stuff, and was breezily-written. But there were a few glaringly wrong things and some of it seemed unnecessarily mean-spirited. They were making snarky insinuations that John Broome was a total pothead. I said, “Wha–?” I asked around and eventually found out that was not true. I took umbrage; I was annoyed by that—but I loved that there was a book of comics

The World of TwoMorrows

history that was engaging and readable! I wanted to do things like this, but I wanted it to be accurate….

If I can quickly say this: the thing with CBA and the stuff that I’ve done, it’s through the words of the person saying it, an oral history, so what they remember doesn’t necessarily make it true; these are their memories of it. But I’m not going to put in brackets the correct facts of certain things; I rarely do that. You know what I mean? I wasn’t trying to trap anybody into saying anything with any kind of “gotcha” kind of bullsh*t you can see in other interviews. You know what other magazine we’re talking about. [chuckles] I always grapple with what exactly my mission is and I ultimately come down on the side of the interview subject having their say. In essence, I am sharing primary source material for some historian to select excerpts and put it all in context and to point out factual errors. I mean, look at the footnotes in Sean Howe’s Marvel history and see how often he dipped into CBA interviews for the ’70s section of his book. And I’m completely okay with that because I know my role is to create primary source material for future historians (including me!).

JM: That’s the thing: back in the day, you had Amazing Heroes and you had The Comics Journal and they were flip-sides of the same coin. Amazing Heroes didn’t have the hard-hitting approach that TCJ did, and it was a lot more positive (while still informative) than TCJ. You managed to kind of mesh those two together. You got the journalism there, but it was a positive, uplifting, fun experience to read an issue of CBA, even though there were some sad, depressing things in there. Your enthusiasm and positivity show through. That’s why people say they like the early issues better. You were young, naïve— well, maybe not that naïve—naïve compared to now that we are much older. That boyish enthusiasm you had for this material and the way you covered it struck a chord with people. It evoked that same enthusiasm people had when they were reading those comics.

I think that’s why, even today, I hear from people who say, “I don’t buy any new comics, but I buy everything you publish about comics.” That’s the highest compliment to me and that’s because we still evoke in our fan publications that sense of wonder (or whatever you want to call it) we all got as kids, buying these comics off the stands and wanting to know, “Wow! I want to be a comics artist one day. I wonder how this guy does this inking? How do these writers come up with these ideas?” All this stuff when we’re too smart to know better that we’ll never be that comic artist or that comic writer. When

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

you read this as a kid, it’s just this amazing sense of wonder about this stuff. And here comes CBA, covering all that stuff we read as kids and covering it with a sense of wonder. That, to me, is why it’s so successful—and why The Jack Kirby Collector was too, for that matter.

Jon: I did want to make my magazine as enthusiastic as the subject we were covering; in content and in the design. In general, comics strive to be graphically appealing and that’s what drew me into comics to begin with. It’s a visually appealing medium.

And yet, as I said, so many publications about comics looked awful. I think readers, in part, responded to TJKC and CBA because they were pleasantly designed. You and I are professional designers, so we could design these things to make them accessible and enjoyable in content as well as design. Again, it’s philosophical.

Again, you would always admonish me, “Hey, chill, Jon! It’s only comics,” and I’d emphatically reply, “But it’s comics, John!” [laughter] This stuff deserves serious consideration, damn it! I believe comics have the potential to be literature, and sometimes comics are just trashy fun. I’m pretty militant. I wonder if I’m the last TwoMorrows editor who still goes to a comics shop every week and continues to buy them. I still do love comics, today’s as well as yesterday’s; I just love them. I still get fascinated when I see, for instance, Jack Chick comics, and it plagues me to wonder, “What’s the story behind this?” I love European and international comics. “What’s the story behind this? Oh, gee whiz, I’d love to talk to the creator about this.” I immediately fall into that mindset. I am endlessly curious. So I’m lucky: people still want to read what I find out about my stupid obsessions! Thank you, guys!

JM: I’m looking at a copy of CBA #1 and I see the incredible amount of unpublished artwork in here. Would you agree that this was another big draw for CBA? You didn’t just throw two galleys of text on a page and stick a little spot illustration on there, you really put some thought in there about “How can I put the most valued-added material possible in here, visually?”

Jon: That’s exactly the phrase. “Value-added.”

But it wasn’t that conscious. I just wanted to see unpublished stuff. “Wow! This is cool!”

JM: That was always our big thing: “We have to set this publication apart from any other that’s been out there and make sure people are getting what

Above: Jon with his first Eisner Award, in 2000. He would win five.

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST

they want,” and it has to be stuff that I would want as a fan. That’s where you succeeded so well.

Jon: I can remember how much time I took to clean up scans of Gil Kane artwork from David Hamilton’s photocopy collection, for instance. I remember it took hours and hours and hours to touch up this one image that some reader is going to look at for maybe 30 seconds, at most. And I would think about that (because I had a lot of time to think) while I was tediously taking out all the dust specks—but I knew if, as a reader, I were seeing it for the first time, I’d appreciate the effort, if just by being delighted to see it in the best presentation possible. It was so worth it. And it was fun to add some things that the reader might enjoy, but might also be considered superfluous, like a double-page spread of Don McGregor versus Marie Severin, as seen by Marie’s hilarious cartoons drawn in the bullpen. That was a big part of this: we were our own audience, right? What would we like to see? That was the thing with Kirby and Sky Masters. “Boy, I would really like to know more about this. Why don’t I learn the story and share it with everybody?”

JM: Your experience with Jim Warren: How was it? You dealt with him before you did that CBA issue on him (#4).

Jon: I was reminded yesterday, reading Bill Schelly’s biography on Jim, how I first met him. It was at a Big Apple Con. I was still working on CBA #1. Archie Goodwin had just passed away and I asked Jim if he would write a testimonial. He said yes and shared the eulogy he gave at Archie’s memorial, so that bonded us. He’s a real character and you know when he likes you. And he liked me.

Jim is a personality who can be challenging at times, but he’s also extravagant, exceptional, original, and he also can be completely exasperating! [laughter] He’s a true personality. I think he genuinely cares for me like I care for him. He can be frustrating because he disappears for long periods, but I feel quite loyal to him, as I feel very loyal to you. There are certain people in this field—in this world—with whom I feel very loyal to. There you go.

would take my call. It grew from there. Paul Levitz was very helpful and Roy helped out with Stan. Especially after I mailed them an issue, pros realized, “Okay, this guy’s legit. I’ll be a part of that.” It very quickly opened up. I would say the fan pros, like Kurt Busiek I remember treating me with some respect. Not like a peer, but as someone whose work he appreciated. Usually I’m asking people for stuff and that’s not the best aspect of the job, not by a long shot. You’re always asking people for stuff and it gets tiring. I don’t want to be a phony by saying, “I’m giving you space for your own promotion and you should be grateful.” They get enough of that crap. I want them to understand that this is about history and bringing it to light… but, of course, I want to make a dollar from it, too. This is not the easiest job in the world, but there are certainly a lot of worse jobs. It’s a pretty wonderful gig in a lot of ways. But, today, it’s a different world than it was then. Back then, it was word of mouth, “You can give this guy the time of day. He’s gonna be all right.” It was different, right? Easier…

JM: This was the era of Wizard magazine. A lot of the classic creators were being kind of marginalized. If they weren’t working for Image Comics, they weren’t given any coverage in Wizard. And here we come along with this thing. There was a level of appreciation for what you were doing from that crowd, because it kept them from getting so marginalized by the new up-and-comers.

I remember one pro from the ’70s didn’t want to be interviewed because he was concerned that if he were in one of the comics history publications, he might not get work on current stuff. Did you run into anything like that, at all?

Jon: No, my memory is that I ran into real appreciation. Dick Sprang calling me up and being so exuberantly appreciative… and it was only one small article! Nick Cardy was so warm and so appreciative. Joe Sinnott is the same way. He still thanks me for designing his book back 10 years ago.

Many are getting quite old and this becomes a race against the grim reaper. It’s really important for me to try and get them Awards and Rewards some appreciation while they are alive—to try and get them some JM: What issue was out when CBA won its first Eisner Award? spotlight, you know? I wish I’d done much, much more with Joe Jon: I’m kind of mixed up, to be honest with you. I was nominated Orlando, for instance. Not enough people have interviewed Joe, in 1999. I think I won in 2000…? but we were able to do that. I think we were the first for some.

JM: Okay. That was probably around #5, or #6 was probably out.

And, if they hadn’t been, ours were different kinds of interviews.

Issue #7 or #8 was probably out at Comic-Con where you actually We asked different kinds of questions than Comics Buyer’s Guide got the award. That sounds about right. Going into its third year and a lot of others… We asked about their upbringing and what is when it first started getting accolades. So, what do you recall of was it like at home, WWII, and what were they doing that wasn’t that time? The response? You’d go to comic-cons and go to tables always about comics. There were interviews within the busiand did the creators immediately know who you were? Were you ness—within the field—that were very comic-centric. I was much at the point where you had made a name in the pro community? more interested in their entire life: “Where did you come from?”

Jon: Most of my relationships were on the phone. Carmine got “What makes you, you?” I’ve become increasingly cognizant that in touch with Joe Orlando and said, “This guy’s all right,” so Joe if I don’t ask about their inner selves and their personal histories,

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The World of TwoMorrows

what if nobody does and that insight gets lost to the sands of time, y’know? What if a life story is read about by someone with a similar life story, and it can be inspirational and change a person’s life? Would I be where I am if not for Kirby? I beg the question, John! Would I? [laughter] John!

JM: Apparently not. Once we started seeing a couple of favorite creators from our youth had died, we went, “This has gone beyond the labor of love we thought it was. This stuff needs to get on the record because these people are not going to be around forever.” I don’t know when it hit you.

Around CBA #10 or #12, it started to dawn on me that, “This is important stuff we’re doing. It’s not just for you and me to have fun with. It’s going to stand the test of time.” Then, around #8, all of a sudden you decided to do some independent coverage. I didn’t think that work was old enough for our core readers to care about. You pushed it. We did #8, and it sold considerably less than ones that had featured ’70s DC and Marvel stuff. At the time, that one convinced me that ’80s stuff couldn’t yet be considered nostalgia. But you were the first one, I think, that gave serious coverage after the fact to that material. It got coverage when it was coming out. Nexus, when it was first coming out, got some buzz. American Flagg! did when it was first coming out, but as far as people looking back at it, this was the first I was aware that anyone was doing that. You were ahead of your time by about ten years. We do it now with Back Issue, but at the time… I’m trying to recall the cover. We have this great Steve Rude cover of Nexus flying and we’ve got the X-Men in the background. Help me remember: I think we intentionally asked Steve to put the X-Men on there because we were afraid that with Nexus alone, it wouldn’t sell the magazine. Am I right on that?

Jon: You are right. We came up with the concept first. Yeah, we had some trepidations about it, but I was so hot and heavy about it. I so wanted to do it.

JM: Yeah. This is what, May 2000? A lot of books came out in the late ’80s. That stuff was 10 or 12 years old at the time. That was a pretty gutsy move on your part, “Let’s start covering this like it’s valuable history,” which now it definitely is, but back then it really wasn’t. Then, you went back to your Charlton issue and that was a perfect follow-up for independents, coming back to Charlton. The material you came up with about Charlton: their warehouse and the flood and those pictures you dug up—the overhead shot of the building with their printing presses. I still don’t know where you dug up that stuff. I’m looking at the byline of the article and it’s you and Chris Irving. When I first met Chris, I

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

thought, “This guy is young!”

Then he started spouting off all this knowledge and I thought, “Wow! We need more guys in their 20s who know as much as those of us in our 40s!”

Would you say he was an important early contributor?

Jon: Oh, yes, definitely.

What did I nickname Chris?

“Scoop” Irving? Sometimes it was “Punk,” [chuckles] and he would call me, “Chief.” He had a lot of enthusiasm and we had a lot of fun. So did George Khoury. He’s probably ten years younger than me, but we sure clicked right off the bat. I liked him immediately. George and I even went to England to interview Alan Moore together. Both Chris and George are important—to me and to CBA’s history.

JM: Your main crew for the first 12 issues, anyway… when you realized, “I can’t do a hundred-plus-page issue… I can’t do that all by myself”…

Jon: No, I have to say I always wanted to do everything by myself! I’m really twisted like that.

It was people barging in and saying, “Can I help?

Can I help?” [chuckles] I’m all “Oh, well, I guess so.” You know George! You fall in love with George!

He’s a wonderful guy. He first got in touch with me to design a cover for his Kimota! fanzine about Miracleman. I remember the audacity of this really well-mannered, pretty shy guy asking a full-time professional graphic designer, “Would you do the cover for free?” I remember being like, “The nerve of this guy!” His chutzpah really caught my attention and I immediately said yes. “This guy’s got a nerve, but

Above: TwoMorrows’ original three editors pose for a photo at ComicCon International: San Diego, in 2013. From left, that’s Roy Thomas, John Morrow, and Jon B. Cooke.

Previous page: Back in 2010, after CBA and before CBC, Jon launched a daily blog at the Kirby Museum website that examined Jack’s Fourth World characters and concepts, focusing on one specific subject per day. Though the blogger mapped it all out, distilling a year’s worth of Kirby ingenuity, the feature remains unfinished as work as a TwoMorrows designer and plans for CBC got in the way.

Hopefully, one day, Jon will finish the ambitious project for museum curator/webmaster Rand Hoppe.

Below: Also during those “between years,” Jon taught at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, instructing on the history of sequential art and software, and also developing an online course about U.S. comics history.

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST Left: Around 2005, TwoMorrows solicited Jon and George Khoury’s Swampmen, which originally sported this Douglas Klauba cover, but the book was delayed by Jon until 2014.

Bombing the Carpet

JM: When you did what I call your “carpet-bombing” issues, like the first Charlton issue, you were like, “I’m going to make this the most thorough, exhaustive thing that ever looked at Charlton in the history of mankind. No one will ever be able to do a more comprehensive look at Charlton than this!” And you did just that.

The only problem was, all the material couldn’t fit in a single 100page magazine, even a 148-page magazine. We ended up splitting it into two issues. I don’t know if people look back and think it was all planned: “Oh, #9 is the first part of Charlton and #12 is the second part.” No, that wasn’t the plan at all. You were so enthusiastic and compiled so much material, and foolishly thought, “I’ll get all this into one issue somehow.”

Jon: My plans have always been completely untethered to reality.

JM: You’d get instructions to make a 100-page issue and end up with a 300-page book! I was almost “Stan Lee” to your “Jack Kirby” on that. Stan would say, “Jack comes up with enough ideas in one story, for me to use in a whole year’s worth of issues.”

You were that way with these carpet-bombing issues. I was like, “Dude… hold something back—we could do a book!” You’d say, “No, no! I gotta fit this in! We gotta tell the whole story!” I know we’re going to do a Charlton Companion if we ever find the time, and it’s going to reuse a lot of material from the two CBA Charlton issues. I could say, “Let’s do a Charlton book that reprints those,” and you’d say okay. Six weeks later, I’d have something double the length of those two issues with all-new material in there. he’s such a nice guy.” [laughter] (Truth is, George says he offered [laughter] I think that sums up the history of our relationship. We to pay me but I refused.) George’s motives are so pure and earwork well together because you come up with great ideas… nest, it is impossible to say no. He gets despondent readers don’t Jon: Thank you. I just can’t help myself, John. It’s an affliction. sometimes share his enthusiasm or that pros aren’t being respon- JM: …and I find a way to facilitate those ideas. So, I’m very happy sive, but I do try to soothe and remind him his contributions to the with that relationship. Hey, I think ideas are hard and facilitating field are immeasurable… and that expectations are pure poison. is easy. You mentioned difficulties being a self-publisher. I think I did have a blast with George and with Chris, and I’m glad they that’s why we work well together. I think CBA, especially the first put a foot in the door. I still have an awfully hard time delegating 12 issues, is a great example of us working off our strengths and and collaborating, but working with the persistent (and talented) weaknesses. I hate that it ended, ever. I wish we were still doing few has been beneficial to my mags and to me personally.

CBA and we’d be up to #150 by now.

I need to give a shout-out to David Roach, too, who was a Jon: Thank you. Things happen for a reason and our relationship priceless addition to CBA throughout its run. He is a master of mi- is more solid. I’m much calmer and pragmatic than in the old nutia and, especially, the stories of international artists, plus he has days. I’m a little more disciplined… or let’s say much less prone a specific love for much of what I love, so it was a joy to discuss to stress-out. It’s a more comfortable relationship. You’re also future issues with him, albeit via long distance to Wales! I remain more agreeable! You let me do what I want! And I try to be more flabbergasted at his incredible grasp of comics history. His work as reasonable. It’s chaos in a certain way. We plan so many different my co-editor of The Warren Companion is staggering. things and I’ve got significant work outside of TwoMorrows…

Chris Knowles was a great contributor to CBA and his enthuJM: My philosophy is: Okay, 10 years from now, they’re not going siasm was always infectious and appreciated. He contributed to remember we were six months late on something, but they mightily to that “Spirit of Independents” issue and I think he was will remember the book that came out six months late. That’s my the one who first suggested that I do it. He helped out enormous- thing, as long as it doesn’t kill the budget with late fees and stuff ly with those early issues—and on much, much more in my life. like that. If you have to push the deadline to make it a better pubIt’s funny: I look through those issues and I feel, in a certain way, lication, I’m okay with that. That’s why I like working with people mixed. It was kind of all over the place in a certain way. Right after like you: I just turn them loose and let them do great stuff and it’s that, I started covering individuals like Walter Simonson, Alex going to reflect well on me. I love that with all our contributors. I Toth. The focus kind of shifted. I was just following what I wanted do my own little Kirby magazine and write some of the articles for to do. I wasn’t disciplined. it and sometimes I do a whole one. My job is to facilitate talented people like you and give you a place to do your thing, and try to

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The World of TwoMorrows

step back and stay out of your way the best I can.

CBA was one case of that. CBA was all you. Maybe I reined you in here and there…

Jon: Don’t even, John! You can’t say that. We would talk out every single issue thoroughly. There was definitely give-&-take.

JM: We talked, but you did it. That’s the thing. We bounced ideas off one another, but you produced it. You produced stuff I could never produce. I don’t have to take credit for what you did. It’s a great publication and it still holds up… what… 20 years later?

Jon: I wonder what the genesis was of The Warren Companion. In a certain way, I think that was your idea. You said, “Let’s make CBA #4 into a book.”

And, with enormous help from co-editor David Roach, that happened. We made one issue into a book; that was one of your great successes.

JM: I know how that happened.

Jon: Please: How did it happen?

JM: We did, what, three printings of CBA #1, or was it two?

Jon: I remember two. If there were three, great! You owe me money! [laughter] JM: Maybe it was two and then we did CBA Collections, and I know we did three printings of the Adam Hughes issue of CBA. It kept selling and selling.

“Okay, we’ll print some more.” Those would sell and we’d go back and print some more. I know I wasn’t convinced we could sell another big batch of magazines of the Warren issue, but you convinced me that there’s a book in it. It was, “Okay, let’s do it.”

We were already dipping our toe in the book water at that point. Why not, let’s give it a shot. It’s horror; a little outside our thing. For the future, you have to branch out from super-heroes whenever you can to keep yourself viable over the long term.

So, how did the Arthur Adams issue come about?

Jon: I think that was George Khoury’s idea. I’ve always been nuts for Arthur’s work, ever since Longshot, but he was comparatively young compared to the other guys I was covering. Some of it was convenience. Whatever the next issue was from that one, when you look at the continuum… the next one was probably labor intensive. The Adam Hughes issue wasn’t labor intensive, but the Gold Key issue was.

The Hughes issue was a nice, casual, wonderful interview, where he just wanted an X-Box out of the deal. [laughter] I was like, “Wow!” I’ll never forget getting that Wonder Woman cover. I was blown away! A lot of that was the way these things happen.

Then Arthur Adams sends this cover! “Oh my God!” It was so beautiful. He spent so much time on it. It was so lovely and kudos to Tom Ziuko, who did a tremendous amount of great coloring work on my

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

issues, with the incredible colors that he would imbibe these things with.

JM: Then you had a carpet-bombing Gold Key issue, which I remember, even on that one, I was thinking, “Are we pushing these obscure subjects too much?

Does anybody really care about Gold Key?” Those aren’t books that are at the top of anybody’s dearest, fondest memories, I didn’t think. Then you got to Magnus, Robot Fighter and how Russ would do the girl’s skirt you were telling me about…

Jon: Right. The pleating.

JM: Yeah. Then I looked at one, “Oh yeah, this is probably somebody’s favorite!” Not that it was a great-selling issue, but it was a valuable one to have. They didn’t quite respond to the Gold Key issue like the others, but I think that’s the relative level of excitement for Gold Key compared to, say, Adam Hughes. Still, people saw it and appreciated it. They said, “Even if I don’t like Gold Key, I’m going to like this issue.”

Jon: We had the Tower Comics issue, which had Harry Shorten and the whole story behind Tower.

That summer was amazing. I had to get that issue, The Warren Companion, and Prime8 ready for Comic-Con. We had Gene Simmons of KISS come up to our booth and he picked up a copy of the Tower Comics CBA, gave me some serious side-eye, and said, “Did you know Dan Adkins had a lot to do with this cover?” I arrogantly said, “Yeah, and…?”

(We were idiots not to get a picture with him, John.)

Then he looked at me with a half-smile and asked, “Can I keep it?” [laughter] That was like, “Wow!” That was the same con where Glenn Danzig took me to see all that original art he owned. Plus Michael Chabon coming up and giving me props for the magazine was another unforgettable moment, when he called me a good writer! The nerve!

The only time I impressed any of my kids was when Stan Lee called the house and asked for me.

My middle son picked up the phone (he was probably 10 at the time) and recognized Stan’s voice from

Above: One glitch during the CBA vol. 2 years was a debate that ensued—with Jon in the middle—over John Byrne’s cover art intended to accompany his interview in an issue planned for the Top Shelf run.

Originally a commission piece, the editor selected it as he was nuts for the Batman/Captain America crossover book John Byrne wrote and drew in 1997. Alas, the piece wasn’t oriented for magazine-size and various complications arose scuttling the issue. Still, the hugely entertaining and career-spanning talk, conducted at the comic book legend’s Fairfield, Conn., home, did see print as Volume 7 of Eric Nolen-Weathington’s Modern Masters series in 2006.

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST the cartoon shows. [In Stan’s breathless voice] “Hey, true believer!

Is Jon there? This is Stan Lee!” My son came to me with a face that was utterly drained of blood and flabbergasted. He was in total awe. “Wow! Stan Lee called my house to speak to my dad!” [laughter] He would brag to his friends!

Breaking Up and Making Up

Jon: So why did we break up? After CBA #25, I went to Top Shelf.

Do you want to say your side?

JM: Okay. I stuck to my convictions about profanity and nudity, and stuff that involves sexual situations. That’s partially because of my own personal convictions and partially because I had young kids, and we work from home with them here. I stuck to that and it’s been a hard-and-fast thing across the board. You wanted to do more and more things like the Weirdo book, which is going to be fabulous, and win all kinds of awards—but it’s like the Heavy Metal book you’ve always wanted to do, and I was never on board to publish that one. As much as I admire the quality of that work, I don’t want to publish that. Also, I think you felt like you were killing yourself on your magazine and not making enough money.

That’s justified to an extent, but as a publisher, we are also responsible for the success of a magazine; just not as much as you. But you wanted to go off in different directions—that’s my assessment.

Jon: Yeah, I think pretty much that. I always argued that an important distinction was they weren’t real naked breasts, but drawings of naked breasts. You had suddenly become more restrictive, I felt. Also, and I’ll be honest, I know it was my expanding ego. I was winning awards and it went to my head. Maybe you don’t remember conversations about this, but I also wanted to become an official part of the company. I felt that I was an integral part of TwoMorrows’ growth in becoming an award-winning publisher of books and multiple magazines rather than just a one-magazine publisher, which is what you were before I came along. The timing was: I joined the company and it started expanding and I wanted to be a “third” Morrow. [laughter] Apparently, I wanted it to become “ThreeMorrows”… or “TwoMorrows and One Cooke.”

JM: Here’s the thing: You know the amount of money you made off of CBA and I’m glad it got you an above-ground pool from your first issue. But there are a lot of expenses we have as a company that get eaten up on our side of things, so I hope you don’t think we’ve gotten filthy, stinking rich at your expense—you’ve seen how we live. We have a modest income; we’re doing okay.

We cut a lot of corners here. We have to because there’s such a small profit margin. There was no feasible financial way to bring you in and give you a share of the company; it would’ve killed it.

Jon: I think it was somewhat symbolic. There was a political aspect to it. We had a developing relationship and I was maybe forcing the issue. Again, I know it was my ego. I see full well that I had some chutzpah, as they say, thinking it was me that made the success and you definitely took offense to that. We had some disagreements.

JM: With one exception for one of our contributors, I don’t think I’ve ever had a shouting match with anybody. But yes, I saw a change in you at Comic-Con every year, after you got your first Eisner Award, and won your second and third—there was an ego

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factor there. You could go for periods not being responsive, maybe not treating contributors as I would. Not returning calls and whatnot… In that respect, the idea of sharing decision-making on the entire output of TwoMorrows versus just on CBA, scared me, too. But it was never a question of your talent as editor or author, or as a designer. I would have loved to have you as full-time art director for everything we produce, because you do wonderful work. We butted heads a little, although not on the creative direction of CBA—you said you did want to do more “adult” material, but I don’t think we fought over the issues you produced, whether the Harvey, Adam Hughes, or Gold Key issues. From my end, that was a great idea to do each one, and you cranked out beautiful work and I didn’t go in and change everything. I think you wanted to spread your wings further than I was comfortable doing.

Jon: I’ll be honest: I may have been in my 40s by then, but I still had growing up to do. It was a journey. My behavior was skewed for a period. Then I got humbled, I matured, I came back, and I proved that I could be reliable. I guess it took a recession. I proved that I had changed. (Plus I started returning people’s calls!)

JM: I was speaking with someone about the old days. I said, “Yeah, but that’s not even the same guy anymore. Jon Cooke is an entirely different person today.” He mentioned our break-up and felt that you had “done me wrong.” I said, “He’s not even that person now. He bends over backwards to make sure he treats people right every single time.” And that’s how you are, Jon. You found a spiritual center, for lack of another name for it. You have advised me so much on life that doesn’t have anything to do with comic books, and you’ve been a great spiritual guru for me ever since we got back together. You’ve talked me out of my tree several times on personal issues. I don’t know if it’s from any 12-step program, but you’ve helped me. You’re the pragmatic one now!

When I have some stress, “John… it’s just comics.” You’re now the calm, rational one and I’m the nerve-wracked one!

Jon: Well, we’re there for each other, buddy…

JM: Your best line is: “You can’t control how other people react to things; you can only control how you react to things.” That was the best piece of wisdom you ever shared, and it’s my spiritual mantra over the last few years. I’ve turned around and used that piece of extremely good advice. That goes back to the Carmine thing. I cannot control how Carmine responded to that Jericho article in CBA #1, but I can control how I respond to that Jericho article and what Carmine is doing. [laughter] I didn’t have your sage advice back then, because, back then, for both of us it was, “Oh my God… we’re going to get sued! And by Carmine Infantino!”

Jon: I was no sage back then. [laughter] JM: We’ve both matured.

Jon: Again, things happen for a reason. There was the Great Recession, which was remarkably humbling and, at times, downright humiliating for me. But we also had a couple of misses that we thought were going to be successful: Streetwise not being a hit, besides the fact that Sergio Aragonés took an Eisner Award for “Best Short Story”—that was fantastic that we got nominated.

JM: It was a critical success.

Jon: But not enough so that enough people bought it, and for us

The World of TwoMorrows

to make a series out of it—a huge dream of mine.

JM: No, but we eventually sold every copy, Jon. Jon: It was something I was pushing you to do.

Obviously, you are co-editor. That was the first real collaborative thing we did as equals.

JM: I had read Maus. I was blown away by it. I had read all the reviews, but had never read both volumes. I finally sat down and read it. “Wow, this is amazing that you can tell a story like this in comics.”

I had read all of Eisner’s biographical stuff. I’m pretty sure that Streetwise was a name you came up with.

I know it arose from “Street Code,” which is Kirby’s autobiographical story, but conceptually, what a great idea. I’m sure it was your idea. The response to that was awesome, too. These professionals were like, “Sure, I’ll do a piece on that.” I remember having a great conversation on the phone with Murphy Anderson. He was from North Carolina, about an hour-and-a-half from where we are. We talked for almost an hour about his childhood. I remember thinking, “This is going to be a really nice story.” These guys just did beautiful stories. I was really proud of that book—and I’m still really proud of it. That never would have happened if you weren’t the spirit of it. I never, on my own, would have thought to do a book of autobiographical stories and gotten all these guys to do it. I would not have had the impetus to do it.

Jon: Thanks, John. I think that was the big thing, my disappointment we couldn’t do more of them.

Sam Glanzman, Murphy Anderson, and Nick Cardy just loved doing what they did. We were able to get such a caliber of people—seriously, folks: Barry Windsor-Smith!—and it turned on a lot of readers, but not enough of them to buy it, which is unfortunate. My eyes got too big…

There’s something I want to acknowledge in print and to apologize for: I wasn’t grateful enough to you, Pam, and TwoMorrows for publishing Prime8, which was a concept that my brother and I had for a comic-book super-hero adventure series we hoped to sell to Hollywood. Though Chris Knowles, George Freeman, and Al Milgrom did great art for it, and Neal Adams, Walter Simonson, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Sergio Aragonés generously contributed, it just didn’t pan out. You did own a piece of it, which amounted to nothing… Sorry, John.

JM: [Chuckling] Honestly, I expected that going in. It was more like, “You’ve done a lot for us, I think I can do this for you. If it hits, that’s great.” But, as good as it was, I did not expect it to do well. We’re not a publisher of comics. People don’t look to us for that. The few times we tried, like Streetwise, it didn’t sell that well, though I didn’t lose money. I’ve since given up the idea of doing that. When people were

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

doing the Golden Age public domain reprints, I contemplated for a while: “You know, we can do these and make them look a whole lot better than those guys do.” But at the same time, that’s not our forte.

We’ve got to be smart.

I’ve published a couple of things over the years that going in, I knew, “This is not what we should be publishing.” I did it anyway as a favor to somebody—and I’m not talking about Prime8. Looking back, they basically broke even because of our reputation, but they’re not something I should have published. Not that they were bad books, it just wasn’t the right thing for us to do. Other publishers probably could have done them a lot more successfully. I guess Prime8 is a case of that, too. Was it fundamentally flawed, or was it just not a great thing for us to do, collaboratively? I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting anything out of it, so you don’t have to apologize. I went into it with my eyes wide open, knowing the chances of success were very small on it, and fully expecting it not to be a hit.

Jon: You took into account my previous contributions to the company. But you were being nice, kind, and generous by doing that.

I really thought that thing was going to hit and it didn’t. I really think my head was getting too big.

One other thing—so we broke up, and in a certain way it was amicable, but in another way, we had a couple of bumps there. We made a deal, but you were upset, John.

JM: You literally hit me

This page: Emerging from a rough stretch during the recession, Jon had a false start when he promoted a never-realized final issue of CBA Vol. 2, at MOCCA in 2011 (with brother Andy above). But the effort proved fruitful in advancing what would become CBC #10, the Peter Bagge issue, and 2019’s The Book of Weirdo. Below is the placard proclaiming the aborted plan.

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1998: COMIC BOOK ARTIST

with it on my 40th birthday. I remember that.

Jon: Did I? Oy! JM: I thought about the symbolism of that. I told Pam, “I’m turning 40 today and Jon jumps ship.”

Jon: I hit you with the news in December of 2002…

JM: I took offense to it because it looked like you had already cut a deal with Top Shelf and this was more like a backhanded, “This is what I need to stay,” kind of thing, “but I’ve already got another deal, so I’m not going to take it anyway even if you offer it, and I know what I need, you’d never offer anyway.” That’s what that felt like, so I was irritated. Then, your editorial in the new CBA #1; I could tell you were mad at me. I read that editorial and I was piqued at you. That’s how it goes. Friends have disagreements and arguments sometimes. We survived.

Jon: I gotta read that again. I didn’t know it got you that mad. I read your Back Issue #1 editorial and, boy, were you angry with me! [laughter] JM: Through either you or the grapevine, I heard you were upset that I considered Back Issue to be a “replacement” for CBA. That really tweaked you.

Jon: That, I’ll be the first to admit, really did get under my skin.

JM: And that is not how I meant it. I think I put that wording in one of our house ads or something like that; I was not trying to poke you with that. We’ve gotta replace it with something on our schedule; I meant it could replace it in that way.

Jon: It got back to my “artist not the artifact” mantra. If you are going to replace me, go with something that was about the artist, gosh darnit! We weren’t not talking for that long, were we? It was strained, but not hostile…

JM: No, but we sure weren’t calling each other regularly. [laughter] We were irritated with each other; I think that’s fair to say. I don’t remember how we started getting back together. Although the Swampmen book, we solicited that thing six times and it never got produced. When you finally came back to me and said you’d like to do Swampmen, I think that’s when… I thought, “I really would like to get that Swampmen book done. Okay, we can probably work together on Swampmen.” Was that the first thing back,

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or was it The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents Companion?

Jon: I was designing books for you by 2005 or so. The first thing was Comic Book Artist Collection Vol. 3. We started to talk again about possible projects. I contributed to The Kirby Collector. I was pretty steady doing design work for a while. I designed George Khoury’s book on Image Comics and also his True Brit.

JM: Oh, right, because you had always kept close with George and I was also close to him. We slowly realized, “We can still work together. We enjoy working together. We can do something kind of cool together.” It was slow but steady getting back together.

Jon: When I was doing CBA Vol. 2 with Top Shelf, I did very good work, but, to be honest, it was lonely. I had some growing to do and also, I had some family issues to deal with that have taken precedence over the years. It’s to our mutual credit that we were able to maintain communication.

It’s a tremendous amount of fun to work with you. All the great artists who did covers for us… it was like a dream come true. Barry Windsor-Smith taking me out to lunch at Comic-Con and earnestly wanting to know my intentions with CBA, plus sharing great “unknown Conan” artwork. It was total enthusiasm and invigorating to do this kind of stuff. We have been really lucky.

John, you do a wonderful job and you have a temperament that’s truly remarkable, fostering creativity and giving “attaboys!”

I was really proud to bear the TwoMorrows brand. Still am. To be honest, I got five consecutive Eisner Awards—consecutive because they skipped a couple of years. Half were for the work I did with you. I did excellent magazines when I was with Top Shelf, but we also did exemplary work together when I was with Two­Morrows, because of this chemistry that we have together. We might have a “mutual admiration society” going, but also dedicated to each doing his best. I’d never be able to do this without your encouragement and support.

We did the CBA Special Edition and that was so much fun, and that remains my single favorite publication I ever did. I love that I put my mom’s picture in it and I love its comic-book size, and it contained everything I loved about DC… Kirby, Toth, Heath, Adams, Wrightson…

The World of TwoMorrows

JM: Since I was handling the business end, I was getting all the hate mail! [laughter] “Why can’t I buy this?” “No, it’s only a free thing if you subscribe.”

“I wanna buy it. I get mine at my comic-book shop.

You’re an evil Communist that doesn’t support free enterprise! Because I want to support my comic book shop and you won’t sell it.” “It’s a premium for subscribers!” I got more hate mail because of that.

People wanted that thing so badly.

Jon: That was so unexpected for us! That was completely unexpected.

JM: “Sorry, you have to subscribe.”

Jon: We’re doing something “special”; it’s a “special edition.” People are going to love it. It’s going to up our sales! It’s a wise move; it’s a smart move and it turned out to be the dumbest move. Still, that Bruce Timm cover is dreamy…

JM: We had no clue about the hate we were going to get.

Jon: Then you sold it through Diamond.

JM: We did. We finally capitulated and it sold out in stores and then people complained because they didn’t get one. At that point, I had to throw up my hands and go, “I’m sorry, you can’t please everybody.” That was a fun little thing and your enthusiasm on that, also—that Bruce Timm Big Barda cover was so gorgeous.

Jon: I think that’s the most beautiful cover we’ve run.

JM: That’s why everybody wanted it; you couldn’t resist that cover. That’s why everybody was dying to buy a copy of it; that cover just draws you in: “I must have whatever is behind this cover.”

Jon: There have been many unbelievable moments doing CBA. Andy and I having a wonderful gossipy dinner with Dave Stevens in San Diego. Becoming friends with Barry Windsor-Smith, Herb Trimpe, and especially Flo Steinberg, who never stopped thanking me for the “surprise issue” of CBA I did on her. That amazing interview with Michael Gross on the comics of National Lampoon, then meeting him.

Days with Bernie Wrightson at his L.A. studio…

JM: After you left for Top Shelf, we kept in some contact, but not a lot, until you started doing production work for TwoMorrows again. Swampmen didn’t happen for some time, but that led to Comic Book Creator, didn’t it?

Jon: No, not at all. I was doing a “365 Days of Jack Kirby” blog for the Kirby Museum website, so I was really getting into the groove to get stuff done and I would call you when I needed work. It was fortuitous that Chris Day wanted to take a break from Alter Ego. So I did layout on A/E for six or seven issues.

Like Roy said: “Why do layout on somebody else’s magazine when I can do my own?”

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Artist

You and I started discussions on CBC. It was a long, thought-out process, in my memory. The agreement was a little more ironclad, and that was it; everything was pretty much the same, though I decided against reviving the CBA name, as I wanted to turn the page on a new era. Plus we made a deal that CBC be jointly owned.

JM: I think what we saw in the old CBA days— you do an issue on, say, Arthur Adams, and people go nuts for it, and then you follow up with an issue on Gold Key, and people are “meh” about Gold Key. You do CBC now and each issue is a little more varied. With CBA, you focused on mostly one topic. I think that’s a lot of it. People think, “I want to read that Kirby piece, but do I want to read the rest of it?”—Mary Fleener or whoever it is. That’s the difference here.

At the same time, is it practical to do CBA all over again?

Jon: I can’t do it all over again at my age, at least not the carpet-bombing issues. It takes too much energy. (And if I do make the effort, it’ll be for something like The Book of Weirdo.) It’s like Mark Evanier’s comment when he was leafing through the Warren issue: “Why don’t you spread it out over multiple issues? You could do smaller spotlights on the same subject.” I looked at him and said, “What do you mean?”

It’s like the old Spinal Tap quote, when Nigel says, “Well, it goes to eleven!” What a dumb question, I thought! Yet he was absolutely right; Mark was always right. But my feelings were hurt: “I put all this effort into this and want you to enjoy it, but instead it bothers you?” [chuckles] JM: “And you’re telling me I shouldn’t have given you all this extra effort,” right?

[This talk segues directly into the section on Comic Book Creator on page 233]

Above: Jon’s exposure at Two– Morrows has created innumerable opportunities to work with many exceptionally talented people in the field, including veteran underground comix publisher/cartoonist Denis Kitchen (whose CBC #5 featured interview was expanded to become a full-length book, Everything Including the Kitchen Sink: The Definitive Interview with Denis Kitchen).

Previous page: Jon has done freelance assignments for Will Eisner Studios, Inc., including their “Will Eisner Week” posters over the last three years.

Below: If Jon has learned anything in his 23-plus years contributing to the TwoMorrows Publishing Empire, it is due to David Allen’s letter of comment, which appeared in CBA #3, in 1998. While lauding Jon’s efforts at uncovering comics history, the LOC also asked the CBA editor to establish context for a given issue’s theme to help inform the uninformed. To this day, David’s appeal is recalled to remind Jon of the need to formulate context on everything he puts together. This is an excerpt from David’s missive.

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1999: ALTER EGO

The Alter Ego Trip of Rascally Roy Thomas Roy the Boy

Comics. That was the comic that got me started, Jon B. Cooke: Roy, was it comics first as far as pub- as much as anything, but the individual comics, Editor, Alter Ego too, got me interested. My second favorite comic lications/ periodicals go that caught your interest? would have been Flash Comics, because it had The Did you like magazines, in general?

Born: 1940 Roy Thomas: Of course. I was probably four-and-a- Flash, Hawkman, Johnny Thunder, and later The Residence: half or something like that (and I was involved with Atom. Within the next year, I encountered Captain St. Matthews, things other than comics) when my parents—most- Marvel and that crew and the Marvel books and, South Carolina to a lesser extent, most of the super-heroes. I just ly my mother—bought me Little Golden Books. I Vocation: Freelance didn’t have enough dimes. My parents didn’t have remember one called A Day in the Jungle, around Writer/Author/Editor much money and probably shouldn’t have bought that same time, with animals (including a black Favorite Comics Creator: me as many comics as they did, but thank heaven panther, and I loved black panthers) going around Stan Lee they did! looking for somebody in the jungle. There were Seminal Comic Book: JBC: I remember talking to Jerry Bails about this a couple like that which I read over and over until All-Star Comics #25 and I’ve always been fascinated with your obsesI memorized them. My mother also read them to Roy Thomas was a foundme. They helped me learn to read, too. (And thank sion with the Justice Society of America. It was ing member of comics obvious to me as a reader back in the ’70s and heavens they taught me to read upper and lower fandom in the 1960s, and ’80s, especially with your All-Star Squadron and case letters; the comics were only good for the his Alter Ego fanzine was even prior to that. I wonder, and tell me if this is upper case letters.) But, I don’t know what else I a pioneer of its time in read except the Little Golden Books. There weren’t true: Is it that you saw a shared universe with these documenting comics hischaracters, and that was the epiphany so many as many children’s books back in the early ’40s. tory. In 1965, he became people had with Marvel Comics in the ’60s?

JBC: What was the seminal comic book that got Stan Lee’s right-hand man Roy: I specifically remember telling someone— you going? Was it All-Star Comics #4? and a key writer at Marvel and I don’t recall if it was a neighbor or my little Comics, eventually serving Roy: All-Star #4? Hey, how old do you think I am, as editor-in-chief. But, as Jon?! That was 1941! [laughter] No, the first All-Star sister (she would have been only one or two at the retirement from his pro time)—maybe somebody who saw one of the comI would’ve seen could have been #24, but was career beckons, he returns ics, and I remember having to explain, at the age probably #25, the first one I definitely remember. to his first love, and of five or under, that what I liked was that all the JBC: Was that the one that launched you into relaunches Alter Ego at characters were together. That’s a little four-yearfandom?

TwoMorrows in 1999. old’s version of a shared universe. Then The Marvel Roy: It launched me into reading comics as a Family appealed to me, as they were a somewhat kid, but I know that by the time I saw All-Star, I’d shared universe. They had their separate series; already seen a couple of comics with Wonder they got together, even if they were so much alike.

Woman, Green Lantern, and a couple of the other I always wanted that to happen with the Marvel characters. It wasn’t like that was my first comic and right from the start, I saw this comic with seven characters, but I don’t know if I ever saw the two All Winners Squad issues [All Winners Comics #19, characters… but what blew my mind about it was I had seen these characters in separate stories and Fall 1946, and #21 Winter ’46–47], as you’d think I’d remember them, because I was five or six when here they were all together and I didn’t see that they came out. So, yes, it was that shared universe; anywhere else in comics I was buying, and unforthat’s what appealed to me. tunately when I went looking, I didn’t find it again By the time Marvel proper started [in 1961], DC either. They didn’t do that with the Timely Comics, already had a shared universe, as Superman and except for a couple of issues that I may not have Batman had been together for years in World’s even seen. There was The Marvel Family, but they Finest Comics, and Julie Schwartz had been doing were pretty much the same character, just multithat for years. He had Flash and Green Lantern Alter Ego plied.

First Issue: 7/1/1999 cross over by that time already.

There just wasn’t anything quite like All-Star

Roy Thomas

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Fantastic Four #1 came out in August of 1961. By that time, I think there had already been two Flash stories with Green Lantern. That became the shared universe for me, too.

It was really the DC shared universe first and then the Marvel; it’s just that the Marvel passed up the other one. At DC, it became very clear, very quickly, that only the Julie Schwartz universe and that Superman/ Batman thing were together, and the rest of DC comics seemed very compartmentalized. Even the ridiculousness of Superman and Batman being minimized and sometimes appearing minimalized on the Justice League covers was kind of crazy.

Within about a year, Stan was doing it right. He was having the characters in the same universe. This was way beyond even All-Star.

JBC: If you had an issue of All-Flash Comics and an issue of Flash Comics, you’d choose Flash because you were getting a bargain because it had more characters in it?

Roy: Oh, yes. All-Flash would have been further down the list. My favorite character, based mostly on visuals more than stories, though I liked the stories too… was Hawkman, who appeared in Flash Comics, but not in All-Flash or anything else. I liked Green Lantern, too, probably more than the Flash.

But I liked all those characters in varying degrees.

JBC: So, have you thought about it? You came out with four volumes of All-Star Companions… is it sentimental? Is it the stuff has substance?

What is it?

Roy: It’s based on several things, I think. One is partly sentimental. I’m interested in the history of comics, but I’m aware of the fact that All-Star isn’t automatically one of the best comics out there in terms of quality. At times, it had better than average art. After all, in the height of it, when I was reading at five, six, seven years old, it had Carmine Infantino, Joe Kubert, Lee Elias, Irwin Hasen,

1999 Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

2000

Alexander Toth, all working on it.

I could tell that it had better art than many comics I was reading. When I did All-Star Companion, I suppose it was largely out of sentiment. But an old Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide talked about All-Star #3 as being up there with the very top breakthrough titles by bringing in that kind of shared universe in the same way as the Human Torch/Sub-Mariner stories were doing around the same time. I felt it was a title with history and lineage—from All-Star Comics through the Julie Schwartz revival in Earth-Two and through my own work and so forth—and that’s the first 50 years between 1940–90 (from then on, I totally lose interest; I see it having almost no connection anymore to the old comics).

JBC: If you could only pick one comic artist, would it be Joe Kubert?

Roy: It’s always been Joe Kubert because of a combination of his Hawkman from the ’40s, even more than the ’60s—even though I like them both—and then his Tor in 1950, which I think was his best work.

It would probably be Kubert, but when I look at it, I have to realize, too, that right up there with him, even if I didn’t know it always, was Kirby. From the time I was at least about six or

Left: Roy and wife Dann, the night before their wedding in 1981.

Below: Roy holds an original copy of Alter Ego Vol.1, #1, at the “Golden Age of Fanzines” panel at the 2011 Comic-Con International: San Diego. Panel participants included moderator Bill Schelly, Jean Bails, Roy Thomas, Richard Kyle (behind Roy in the photo), Paul Levitz, Pat Lupoff, Richard Lupoff, and Maggie Thompson.

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1999: ALTER EGO Left: From left to right, a powerhouse gathering of talent: Irwin Hasen, Roy, John Romita, Sr., and Stan Lee at the 1995 Chicago Comic-Con.

Weren’t there letters columns in MAD comics?

Roy: I think there were, but they didn’t really inspire fans to get together exactly, although they might have in some cases. They were mostly just comments about the comics. I had never heard of science-fiction fandom until Jerry sent me Xero; although it was called a science-fiction fanzine, it was more than that.

JBC: You know the first fanzine I ever saw—which blew my mind—and it was just the fact of it, was Locus.

Roy: I’ve got some copies of that. Locus was like a newszine.

JBC: The idea you could put out something yourself that looked this primitive in a certain way, it was pretty inspiring.

Roy: Well, Alter-Ego, God knows, was pretty primitive with that so, whenever I saw the names “Simon and Kirby” on anything, spirit duplicator, those first three issues—but Jerry had ambition.

I didn’t know who they were or who did what, but anything that By the fourth issue, he was already into offset printing. “Hey, said “Simon/Kirby” on it was exciting. There would be Stuntman we’ve reached Nirvana now!” and that wonderful Kid Adonis story that was all by Joe Simon in JBC: How did you first encounter Jerry? Was it through the a Kirby vein (with this character called Superior Male, who was letters columns? a take-off on Superman… came from another planet to have a Roy: No, I was sent his address by Gardner Fox. fight with this boxer). I almost never bought Kubert’s war comics, JBC: How did you get in touch with Gardner Fox? even though I loved the art in them, and I didn’t buy Kirby’s roRoy: Julie sent me his address. He must have talked to Gardner. mance comics or Black Magic. But I was always aware of the fact I can’t imagine he would have sent me the address without it. that these two were the very best.

What happened was: I wrote three pretty much identical letters JBC: What was the first fanzine you encountered? Did you see at the same time, as sophisticated as I was at the time—19 or science-fiction fanzines at a young age?

20—to the “editors” of Green Lantern, Flash, and Justice League Roy: No, I encountered them when Jerry Bails was getting of America. One of those got printed in Green Lantern #1, and, started on Alter-Ego, and he sent me the first three issues of of course, they all went to Julie. Right away, I was writing to him Xero from the Lupoffs, which Julie Schwartz had loaned him, about All-Star and wondering if they had copies around they which unfortunately went lost in the mail when I sent them back could sell—God knows I had no money—and he told me that to Julie. [laughter] I felt bad about that for many years, although I Gardner Fox was the guy who wrote quite a few of the All-Star don’t think Julie cared that much.

Comics, like the first 30-something of them. He said, “You might So, Xero influenced me right away and what I was trying to do want to write him,” and gave me his address in Yonkers, so natfor Alter Ego. But it was February 1961, practically the same time urally, within 15 minutes, I wrote him a letter. He wrote back and as when I helped start Alter-Ego. said that six months or a year ago, he sold them to a young guy JBC: Wasn’t there mention of fanzines in the letters columns? from Missouri named Jerry Bails, who was now in Detroit with a

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2002

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ALTER EGO and the heart of COMICS Fandom

I grew up in the “Heart of America.”

That’s what they called my hometown of Kansas City, which is really two cities straddling the MissouriKansas state line. I’m of a generation of kids that were known as “Depression Babies.” I was born at the height of the Great Depression, in 1933. It is interesting to note that the comic book in its “modern” pamphlet format was also a Depression Baby. Comic books and I grew up together. —Jerry Bails When Jerry Bails was interviewed

by Jon B. Cooke in 2005, he began by equating the date of his birth with that of the comic book format itself. Indeed, when Jerry first saw light of day, an orderly somewhere in the hospital might have been reading a copy of Funnies on Parade, A Carnival of Comics, the first true American comic book. Historian Ron Goulart called it “the cornerstone for one of the most lucrative branches of magazine publishing.”

As it turned out, Jerry Gwin Bails was destined to create another cornerstone in publishing. He was 27 years old when he mailed out the first copies of the fanzine Alter-Ego, on March 28, 1961. (Note: The title was hyphenated for its first four issues.) Even though his childhood interest in comics had been superseded by years of collegial and post-graduate schooling, Bails’ love of comics arose again in 1960 when he heard about a quasi-revival of his favorite comic book feature of his youth, the Justice Society of America. In late

Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

August 1960, just as he began his first year as an assistant professor of natural science at Montieth College (part of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan), the first issue of Justice League of America was published. He wrote many letters of comment on the title, often using a pen name. His enthusiasm for the new title knew no bounds.

Imagine how excited he was when he received a letter from a JSA fan in late November. It was, as we all now know, from one Roy William Thomas, Jr., a college student at Southeast Missouri State College, who had obtained Bails’ address from none other than Gardner F. Fox, author of the JLA comic books.

Thomas was looking for back issues of All-Star Comics. Jerry replied that he had no old issues for sale, but accompanied his letter with a large envelope containing dog-eared copies of All-Star #4, 5 and 6. His generosity cemented his friendship with Roy. Soon Jerry recruited Roy to contrib-

ute to a proposed JLA newsletter, which morphed into the more inclusive (and sophisticated-sounding) Alter-Ego, after Bails returned from a visit with Julius Schwartz early in 1961. Roy sent Jerry his pages for the Bestest League of America parody strip, and a proposed new version of The Spectre. The rest of the issue was made up of features written by Bails, including “Merciful Minerva, The Story of Wonder Woman.”

The print run of Alter-Ego #1 was small—probably about 150 copies— but its impact was nothing less than seismic. As each of the first four Bails-Thomas issues were published in 1961 and ’62, more and more comic book fans came out of the woodwork and had their names added to Jerry’s growing mailing list. Soon they were buying not just Alter Ego, but the Bails spin-offs The Comicollector and On the Drawing Board. These three fanzines formed comicdom’s beating heart, and were soon joined by other amateur publications for comic book fans, among them G. B. Love’s The Rocket’s Blast, Parley Holman’s Spotlite, and Steve Gerber’s Headline. Within two years of the publication of Alter-Ego #1, there were over 30 such fanzines.

Having stimulated an outpouring of fan journalism and creativity, Jerry Bails was ready to move on to other projects. Hence, he handed the reins of Alter-Ego and The Comicollector to popular fan-artist Ronn Foss, and On the Drawing Board (by this time

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called The Comic Reader) to writer Glen Johnson. Bails spent much of 1963 working out the details of a fan organization known as the Academy of Comic Book Fans and Collectors, which would (among other things) administer the Alley Awards, the first such awards for comic book professionals and fans.

In 1964, he also created the first comics APA (amateur press alliance) with Capa-Alpha.

Ronn Foss did Alter Ego proud (including dropping the hyphen from its name), but after #6, it became too much for him. Soon Roy Thomas, who had contributed to the Foss issues, became the ama-pubs’ sole editor and publisher. And so, while pursuing a teaching career, Thomas, with the help of top fan-artist Biljo White, kept the “heart of fandom” beating for three superb issues: Alter Ego #7 [Oct. 1964], #8 [Mar. ’65], and #9 [Aug. ’65]. With these three fan-produced issues, Alter Ego Vol.1 reached its potential with fandom’s best-written and researched articles, and the most interesting other features. It was the unquestioned leader of the general interest fanzines.

Who knew what heights it would reach? Fans eagerly awaited more, but it was not to be.

As must be the case, amateur publishing falls by the wayside when more pressing “real world” events intrude. In Roy’s case, these events re-

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volved around his entry to the ranks of professional comic book writers, thanks to Mort Weisinger and Stan Lee. To do this, he had to move to New York, and was too busy and preoccupied to continue the fanzine. There would be no more issues until the “dust settled,” and there was little settling of dust at Marvel in the mid-to-late 1960s.

Despite Roy’s success at Marvel, Alter Ego remained close to his heart.

When #10, its first “pro issue,” was published in 1969, A/E created a mini-sensation by presenting John Benson’s interview with an outspoken Gil Kane. Though #11 didn’t appear until 1978, A/E nevertheless staked out a place in the late 1970s with that single Mike Friedrich-published issue, which was marketed through the decade’s end alongside remaining copies of #10.

It continued the fan-mag’s mission of highlighting comics of the past through Roy’s interview with Bill Everett.

Still, although the publication’s 11

issues covered quite a bit of ground, the truth is that Alter Ego had barely touched the surface of the material that editors Bails, Foss, and Thomas wanted to explore in its pages. I’m sure many felt as I did, that the magazine’s passing was premature. Sure, there were a lot of other magazines with material about comic books, but none had quite been able to do the job as well as the one that started it all.

Happily, Roy’s interest in researching and illuminating the history of comics was only “on hold” in the ensuing years. Thanks to John and Pam Morrow, Jon B. Cooke, a dedicated editorial staff working with Roy on the magazine, and a stalwart readership, Alter Ego returned to continue its mission. Some would say it’s better now than it was in its early days, but it behooves us all to never forget its founder, the brilliant instigator in the “Heart of America” who started it all, almost 60 years ago.

— Bill Schelly

The World of TwoMorrows

college teaching job. Now I had his address, so I had another letter to write—within a week, I went from Julie to Gardner to Jerry Bails. My first letter from Julie, my first letter from Gardner, and to him.

The first letter I got from Jerry was a letter along with three copies of All-Star Comics.

JBC: His doubles?

Roy: Yeah. One of them was complete, #5, cover and all. The other was #4, the very first real adventure, just without a cover, and a page or two missing. The next one was #6 with a couple of pages missing, with Johnny Thunder joining. You know, that was a marvel for me. I had never seen HourMan before. I’d heard of him briefly in some letters pages from Julie. I was familiar with Sandman and Starman, but I didn’t know Sandman had worn this gas mask years before, and things like that. These were real revelations for me. Here’s my favorite comic and someone sent me all these early copies of it. I knew that if I had issues that started with #20-something, I’d missed 20 different adventures.

I wasn’t like Larry Ivie, determined to get them, but if a chance came up, that was a top priority. I was interested in other comics, too, but All-Star was a priority way above anything else.

JBC: So you commenced a correspondence with Jerry? How soon did the idea of Alter-Ego come up?

Roy: Yeah. Well, actually, he sent me those books and they arrived just before my 20th birthday, in November of 1960. By coincidence, soon after that, we exchanged letters every week or so, so we were several letters into this whole thing, and he had a lot more information than I did. We had a lot of ideas, back and forth, discussing things like Jerry’s

idea for The Atom, which he had sent a letter to Julie about back in August. But then, Jerry got this weird thing out of the blue—talk about the way the universe conspires! He got invited to come to New York to give a speech to talk at some school, Adelphi College, wherever the hell it is—just by sheer coincidence. While he’s there, he wants to go by the DC offices and talk to Julie. He talks to Julie and he’s already had this idea for a JLA Newsletter, as he calls it, and I can help him with it—just to promote the idea of the JLA and the return of the super-heroes in general and the JLA in particular.

But, we would have branched out; Jerry wasn’t that totally limited, even though he was a DC guy, even more than I was. But by the time he got back, he already had an idea about the name Alter-Ego and it was going to become a whole magazine. He got that idea from Xero and thought, “I don’t have to do a newsletter; I can do a whole magazine,” even if it’s in a cruder form even than Xero, and he enlisted my help on it.

I had already started drawing, for my own amusement, the first chapter of that Bestest League takeoff. I drew it twice-up without intention of it being published. I still have that stuff; it wasn’t published until years later. He had me draw it smaller for

Below: Roy at home in 2020 with his Eisner Award for Alter Ego, and much earlier, getting a little keyboard assist from a member of his farm’s animal menagerie: their pet toucan, Gonzo the aracari.

Photos by Dann Thomas.

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1999: ALTER EGO Alter-Ego and write an article and everything. Next thing you know, I’m the official (if not really) coeditor of this magazine.

JBC: What was the effect of seeing Xero for the first time? Was it exciting?

Roy: Yeah. First of all, it had articles on comics. The three issues loaned to Jerry by Julie had Captain Marvel by Dick Lupoff, a general article on DC by Ted White, and a Justice Society article by Jim Harmon. They were all well-written, literate, and nostalgic mixed with history.

I see magazines like this one called Reminisce, and they’re all so shallow. I could never get into an article that’s a few hundred words of something I was interested in. It’s got to have a little more meat to it. These guys, even if it was a nostalgic article, even without much access to the comics, just to their memories, especially the article by Lupoff on Captain Marvel—they remembered a lot about it and they were thinking about what was behind the idea and talking about the literary and artistic qualities. It was part history, part nostalgia. So, Jerry and I tapped into that, maybe me a little more consciously. Jerry probably had his own ideas formed; he was kind of a data guy. I liked creative writing and was more interested in turning a good phrase than Jerry was. He was the type who wanted to get the information out there. We weren’t that much alike in our approaches, but we made a fairly good team for those few issues.

JBC: Did Xero have some focus on non-super-hero comics?

Roy: Yeah. What I liked about Xero was as an introduction to the whole world of science-fiction fandom. Although I never got into that, I’d been a science-fiction reader since I was a kid. I was an early member since the mid-’50s of the Science-fiction Book Club, with books coming in every month or so. I loved reading science-

fiction books and going to sciencefiction movies. So, the idea that there was this fandom and sometimes even the pro writers would write letters, that was interesting to me. The letters pages were much more interesting to me than what I’d seen from anything in the comic books… they were about something.

Lupoff had such a great talent for editing that kind of magazine. Maybe it was more of Dick Lupoff’s thing than Pat’s, but she really had a lot of fun, too, because she liked science-fiction and she handled the letters pages very well. So the science-fiction part of it, or just the science-fiction fanzine part of it, at least, was just about as important to me as the comics content.

I tried ordering a few other science-fiction fanzines I saw mentioned in Xero, but I was invariably disappointed because they were just about science-fiction! What I realized very quickly was Xero was really about everything. It really was a popularculture ’zine. It was about fantasy, science-fiction, fanzines, and comics… damn near anything. It had stuff on the old pulp magazines, which I was unaware of. If you could come up with an interesting article about something and relate it to things, they were interested in putting it in there. I think that when I saw real science-fiction magazines, they were just writing articles about particular science-fiction authors; they were interesting, just not as much. Xero was the only one that really garnered my full attention and interest.

Learning From the Best

JBC: I vividly recall my enthusiasm, particularly when you were Marvel’s editor-in-chief, for your informative text pages in the early issues of titles, before they had enough mail for letters

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pages. They were never just filler, always informational, always adding context or background, even if through personal anecdotes.

Roy: It started off with Julie sending out advance copies, Photostats or something, of the first issues. I was one of four to get an advance of the first Hawkman issue of The Brave and the Bold, so Julie could have a letters page in Hawkman’s follow-up B&B. I did the same thing with Conan the Barbarian, when I got Harlan Ellison, August Derleth, Glenn Lord, and a couple others to write letters that I could put in Conan #2. Increasingly, as Stan would allow it, it occurred to me, why not put something in there to give the story behind the story, something that I would have liked to read myself—and that’s what I wrote. Obviously, I had Stan and indirectly, maybe even Martin Goodman, looking over my shoulder, so I couldn’t mention the influence of DC Comics, or certain things, or say things I didn’t like at Marvel or that maybe were a problem. I had to be kind of circumspect in what I said. Within those limitations, I tried to do something that was a little more than just a puff piece. Sometimes it was hype. I tried to do the story behind the story because that’s the kind of thing I wanted to see. My background doing fanzines came into play, I think.

JBC: So, first year [1960], you’re trying to track down issues of All-Star, which got you in touch with Jerry. When did it…

Roy: I was trying to get a hold of All-Stars, I suppose. I had an interest because Gardner said Jerry was a big All-Star fan, too, so we might have something to discuss. It was partly to get the comics and partly because we might have a common interest,

so why not write to him?

JBC: When did the search for history of the comic books through first-person accounts begin? The idea of getting in touch with Gardner to talk about the old days… when did that come into play?

Roy: It sort of sneaked in. With Xero, I think, by the second issue or something… the third issue had that letter from Otto Binder, which was about errors and corrections and additional information about Captain Marvel. So that was fascinating! You had one of the guys who had written a lot of those stories, and he’s adding his knowledge… even if some of his memories were wrong… so forth, here and there. You had him talking about the Mister Mind serial, which I remembered seeing one chapter of when I was a kid. That was fascinating. But the whole idea of the interview evolved slowly because it was so damn hard then. You couldn’t do it by

Previous page: Though Roy unfortunately was unable to attend that year, John Morrow and Bill Schelly celebrated Alter Ego’s Eisner Award win for “Best Comics-Related Periodical” at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con. Below: July 2013, after the end of that year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Left to right: Dann Thomas, Jon B. Cooke, Roy Thomas, Lisa and Rand Hoppe, and John Morrow. Pam Morrow took the snapshot.

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1999: ALTER EGO Left: Roy has his prized toco toucan Cyrano.

that. There was also Don and Maggie Thompson with their stuff about Dell/Western and things of that sort. They were influential too; they really got into it. They were like Jerry; they wanted to get into the hard data and critical analysis and everything. I didn’t always take comics seriously enough to do critical analyses of them; they’re just comics, you know? But, at the same time, I was interested in their history—more for their sociological meaning than say, literary or artistic value.

Jerry Steps Back, Roy Steps Up

JBC: So you became co-editor immediately?

Roy: That was just a term Jerry stuck in the book in the first three issues! He called me a co-editor. I never edited him; he edited me. I never edited anything except my own stuff! I was a writer/ phone because it was too much trouble and too expensive. editor from the beginning, I guess. The same way with the late I think the first real interview in Alter Ego was in one of Ronn Foss’ issues, a tiny Q&A with Joe Kubert, done by postcard, back Hames Ware; Jerry sort of named him co-editor of Who’s Who and forth! I was going to do one with Gardner in what was going of American Comic Books, the original edition. Jerry didn’t really think of him as co-editor, he just liked to give out titles to people to become #10, which never really came out—it was still going to be done by letter and postcard. This was in 1965. There were to make them feel good, and it cost him nothing, right? Except later Hames got upset when somebody didn’t think of him as the a lot of difficulties. I wasn’t equipped and most people weren’t, co-editor. I was a little unhappy when suddenly in the fourth isunless you were going to a convention or going to someone’s house. It was very difficult to do that, but I was very interested in sue, and the first offset issue, and the last one Jerry did, suddenly he didn’t mention me as the co-editor or anything at all. I’m in the beginning learning from Gardner about the background of All-Star Comics or his comics writing in general. Julie would give there and I remember Bill Schelly asking me, “Was there some kind of rift between you?” I said, “No, he just forgot!” If he’d me a few hints here and there about things. I had the interest thought about it, he’d have stuck in I was co-editor, but he wasn’t in history from the beginning, but it slowly congealed. I wasn’t that organized in the credits, so he just forgot to write it that consciously thinking about it.

I have this job as a teacher and I’m trying to figure out how to time. As far as he was concerned, I was just as much co-editor then as I was before (which is really not at all, in terms of name not have a job as a teacher and do something else. So, I wasn’t really thinking about becoming this weird thing… a comics histo- only, really). The first time I ever did any real editing for anything rian. It’s just that I had a great interest in history. I mean, that was other than my stuff in Alter Ego was when I took it over totally in #7. Before that, I did some work, but I didn’t edit anything. After my major in college, really, with English being a minor. I was always interested in history and always interested in comics, so it’s Jerry’s first four issues, the next two are by Ronn Foss. just natural I would put the two together. Not that I was alone in JBC: Did you contribute to Ronn’s version?

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Roy: Yes, and that’s why I’m lucky to have something in every single issue. In one, I just had a picture of the Bestest League that I sent him that he printed. If he hadn’t printed that one page, I would have missed being in that one Alter Ego. [laughter] The other thing I did for Ronn was the comic story co-starring the Bestest League with Grass Green’s Frantic Four. I wrote all that and drew over half of it and then Grass drew the Fantastic Four takeoff on it because he had done of parody of them earlier.

So I had some contribution in every issue, the least being the pin-up in that one issue. It was sheer luck, you know?

JBC: Did Alter Ego go on hiatus?

Roy: Yes, Jerry did his first three issues with just a couple of months or so between them. Then it was a little longer to do the fourth one. He’d kind of had it, you know? He discovered he wasn’t really interested in all the things involved in putting together a magazine; he was more interested in the data collection. So, when Ronn Foss was thinking about starting a magazine, Jerry said, “Why don’t you just take over Alter Ego?” Ronn thought that was nice, and then, of course, when Ronn started it, he was an artist and not at home so much with words. He barely understood how to punctuate…

God forbid how to divide a word at the end of a line! He was very happy with the art side, but discovered that wasn’t going to carry him through for putting together a magazine. He intended it to be bi-monthly, but that never worked out because it was too much damn work!

After two issues, Ronn decided to give it up and he was going to give it to Biljo White, another guy

who was more artist than writer, and I was just going to help Biljo the same way I helped Jerry by contributing, or whatever. He was going to be “Captain Biljo” and I was going to be “Corporal Roy.” He even drew cartoons to that effect, and then he suddenly changed his mind and said, “I can’t handle all this publishing stuff! Gathering articles that aren’t by me…” That wasn’t his kind of thing. He asked, “Why don’t you do it and I’ll help you by doing some artwork?” That’s how I backpedaled, or whatever, my way into doing Alter Ego, not because it was something I eagerly sought.

Jerry never offered it to me when he was going to quit, but I think it’s because he realized it wasn’t necessarily my thing. Ronn didn’t offer it to me; he offered it to Biljo. I was the court of last resort; I was there at the end. By the time I got there, there had been two people who had been the full editor and one guy who was going to be the editor. I became like the third or fourth, depending on how you count it.

Which is kind of funny for something I became identified with, happily so, but I didn’t make up the name, I didn’t do any editing on it until about the third or fourth person.

JBC: Who originated the logo?

Roy: Jerry did a version

Above: TwoMorrows’ rare Xal-Kor, The Human Cat collection by Richard “Grass” Green.

Below: Roy with Shadizar the Wicked, a Scottish highland bull.

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I kept that going because I liked it, until such time as, I guess Sol Brodsky—when he and Stan were going to be my silent partners on #10, Sol got Sam Rosen to redo it. I’m pretty sure it was Sam, rather than Artie Simek, who did the logo that’s been used ever since. I hope he got paid for it. [laughter] It’s certainly been used a lot! It just evolved over a period of time.

It’s inherent in the first issue, you know, it just got improved

by Ronn.

JBC: Were there subscriptions to Alter Ego? Roy: Yes, I had them. I don’t know if Jerry or Ronn did. I don’t think I inherited any unfulfilled subs from Ronn. I had subscriptions for three or four issues. In fact, that was my problem when I left: I still owed some people money. For at least ten years or so, I carried around two or three boxes of those little 3" x 5" cards with all the sub information, because I always intended to either restart the magazine or give people back their money or somehow compensate. In the end, a couple of people wrote and asked for their money back, and I sent it, but I’m afraid my intent would have benefited from a few hundred bucks or so that I didn’t have.

JBC: Was that endemic of the fanzine world? Did you have subscriptions to other fanzines and they just disappeared?

Roy: I don’t remember much about it. I think some of them

did. Some of them, like Xero, didn’t want any payment. Don and Maggie’s Comic Art lost money on every issue as it was.

Therefore, subscriptions would only cause them more trouble. [laughter] I remember sending a couple of quarters taped to a card to Dick Lupoff because Xero was 50¢. He sent it back with a note that said, “Don’t be silly,” because they didn’t want to deal with money, that’s why they were fanzines. It was oddly the comic book people who tried to make money, people like us. [laughter] I had to, because on my teacher’s salary, I couldn’t afford to spend several hundred dollars on an issue to put it out.

If I couldn’t get some kind of money, I wouldn’t have been able to put it out. Maybe some others didn’t have to put their hardearned money into it, but I was just trying to break even. I didn’t need to make money, but I couldn’t afford to lose money.

JBC: Was there a market for A/E? Roy: I think there was a market for it. I think with Alter Ego #7, I had about 1,000 copies, which isn’t bad, when you consider that it’s all word of mouth. Julie gave us a plug or two in his letters pages. We would’ve gotten one or two more plugs from him if I had wanted them. I think there were about 1,000 copies of #7 and then, of course, G. B. Love reprinted it later on, so actually there are several hundred more of that issue. The most we ever got to, the one we advertised with Marvel, #10 with Gil Kane on the cover; that’s the one where Stan and Sol were going to be my partners. Well, Stan backed out and so did Sol, although he still helped me out. There we got up to 4,000 or 5,000. I don’t know anything about the next one, as Mike Friedrich took it over and he basically started from scratch. This was five to seven years later.

JBC: Hmm. So, you started editing with #7?

Roy: Yeah, that’s the first real editing I did.

JBC: What was your logistical, practical experience?

Roy: Well, I had my little electric Smith-Corona. I typed everything out and justified the margins by counting the letters on

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every single line. You had to count the letters out before you could type a line before you could justify margins in those days. Now it seems kind of silly to bother with justifying margins because we don’t bother with it in Alter Ego at all now, but at that time we did. [laughter] The art had to be exactly the size as the kind of page I was pasting up if it came in from Biljo or anybody, because I didn’t have any facilities available to shrink it down or blow it up! It was very crude; just a bunch of paste-ups. I had to paste up every individual column, two columns wide on a page, paste up the artwork, paste up the photographs, and everything, and then turn the layouts over to the printer and pray for the best!

JBC: Who taught you how to do that?

Roy: [Laughter] Damned if I know! Maybe somebody gave me a couple of hints, but I don’t remember having a crash course or reading much about it. Somebody probably mentioned a couple of things and then somebody who had done one or two of them gave me some hints. I don’t have the slightest idea! Somebody must have told me something but I don’t… I didn’t really have anyone around in person. Maybe I’d seen something Jerry had done when I visited in person, but I can’t really say. I just did it.

JBC: You literally used glue?

Roy: Yeah! Glue and scissors. Cut-&-paste was actually to cut and paste, you know? It was a pretty messy process because I’m not the most graceful person in the world with these things. I’m sure there were spills of paste and colorful epithets from time to time. [laughter]

JBC: Did you do it on the kitchen table?

Roy: Right, either by myself, or… I had a roommate one year and would work late at night. I should’ve been grading papers, but I’d do anything to avoid the schoolwork I was actually getting paid for. I guess I did okay, I never got fired or called on the carpet for not grading papers, but I did whatever I could to do the absolute minimum I could get away with. I wasn’t interested in teaching at all. I was only interested in working on the fanzine, going to movies, reading, and dating girls, things like that! I’ll stress the fact that I never once for three seconds forgot about women; that would’ve been a top priority. Sometimes I had one and sometimes I didn’t!

JBC: What was the cover art on your first issue?

Roy: It was Biljo White. He did an assemblage…

I think he kind of traced the pictures… but from different sources to have the three members of the Marvel family fighting Black Adam. I know he traced it because of the telltale thing, which we couldn’t really change: It had the lightning bolt on Captain Marvel backwards because he had traced it the opposite way. He adjusted it, but he didn’t adjust the lightning bolt—which he could’ve easily done. We were crude; in that issue, we didn’t have

This spread: Now and then photos of Roy and Dann—still crazy after all these years… about one another, we mean!

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1999: ALTER EGO any flesh tones because I don’t think any of us… Bill didn’t know how to use dots, red dots, to simulate flesh tone. That came in with the second issue, with #8, not in #7, so there was only that one bit of color—the cover. That was printed in Jackson, Missouri, through Gary Friedrich, who helped line up somebody at The Missouri Cash-Book, the local newspaper, which was owned by the same guy who owned the movie theatre where Gary and I had both worked. I always remember, because the guy who did the actual printing, Leroy Beatty, said to Gary, “It was the best printing job I ever did and it was for a damn comic book!” I thought that was funny. [laughter] JBC: That was a nice job!

Roy: It was a nice job, you’re right. The other two were done by a guy in St. Louis, who did a fairly good job, not quite as good as the guy in Missouri, but good. The only problem was I had to give him the material for that third one, #9, before I left New York for my new job, so I had to trust him and that was a mistake. I think I paid him in advance; it took forever to get out, and I never got anything back, so all those things like the six Mr. Tawny strips by Binder and Beck, various photographs, and all the artwork by Biljo—it all got lost and I could never pry anything out of him. I was lucky to get the books. Issue #9 is not printed nearly as well as #8 or #7. Maybe it’s because we added a few more pages and made it harder to bind, but he did a crappy job on it.

JBC: Let’s say on #7, how many did you print?

Roy: I’m pretty sure it was 1,000; I think it went up a little, but not a lot for those three issues. I didn’t have any great way to publicize it.

JBC: Did you just load up your car in boxes and haul them home? You stored the inventory at home?

Roy: Yes, I had a few boxes down at my parents’ place, in Jackson. Since I was teaching in St. Louis and was home—not every weekend, because I was dating in St. Louis—I went home

every couple of weeks. Some of it was there in my bedroom and some of it was in my car. It wasn’t a huge amount of stuff. I had a few comics around because I had my collection and the DCs and Marvels and so forth were piling up. It was all hauled around and sometimes I’d have several boxes in the car and hoped that the tires would last this time. I couldn’t afford new tires and I remember having to change tires a bunch of times, especially in 1961 and ’62, when I was going home and so forth. I was just staggering along; a poor teacher with no money and no sense trying to get by!

JBC: Did you do the mailings yourself?

Roy: Oh yes, I did them all. I even did some assembly. I think I was doing more than just mailing. I remember I was collating or something, the night of the 1964 Presidential election, which was Johnson versus Goldwater. My roommate and I had spent $25 on a bad secondhand TV set just so we could watch the election results. He couldn’t stand the picture, so he went off someplace, but I had to stay home to assemble Alter Ego. Then the TV and Goldwater expired at the same time. I was working on Alter Ego. JBC: How many in general did you mail out? Was it hundreds?

Roy: It was 1,000!

JBC: You didn’t save any for inventory?

Roy: If I had a thousand, I mailed a thousand. I might have had a couple of dozen left over. I couldn’t afford to print them and save them, thinking I’d make zillions of dollars off of them some day!

If I could’ve done something and just had three or four copies left at the end; that would’ve been ideal for me at the time.

JBC: How much would #7 have been?

Roy: It might’ve been $1 a copy by then, or maybe just 50¢.

JBC: Contributors: did you just use pen pals? Did you make assignments? What was your job as editor?

Roy: Everything was through the mail, of course, and almost never by phone. By then, I was in touch with different people.

With Biljo, I would send letters back and forth and he would

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draw some pictures. I got Richard Kyle to do some pieces for me on the Justice Society because I liked his writing so much in Xero. Paul Gambaccini, who took over the [Academy of Comic-Book Fans and Collectors] stuff and who later became very noted on the BBC radio over in England, did some work.

Glen Johnson, who was then teaching on an Indian reservation in New Mexico, was another contributor. We were all people who were corresponding; we’d been trading comics and things like that. I sort of knew what they could do. Sometimes I’d suggest something they could do and sometimes they’d suggest something. I think I suggested a lot of the topics, probably most of them. I was open to somebody else coming in with something they wanted to do. I went after stuff, like the Mexican comics feature. I got Fred Patten to do some work on that. I think I generated most of the ideas, but I was always open to somebody bringing in something they were interested in. I just didn’t want to count on it. I didn’t want to sit back and wait for something to come in.

JBC: Are you a natural editor?

Roy: I think so. That doesn’t mean I’m necessarily good always, but I’m natural. I’m literate. I miss something once in a while; I’m not the greatest proofreader in the world. I’m a decent proofreader and can be fairly good when I take the time, which of course, we don’t always have the time to do.

Since I can write myself, I’m able to spot at least some of the things that need to be changed with other people’s writing, although I didn’t want to do anymore than I had to. So, I probably am a natural editor—except, in comics, I discovered I didn’t like

the editor-in-chief job at Marvel because it drew me away from doing anything creative. It was just an endless grind, as Marv [Wolfman] and Len [Wein] and Gerry [Conway], and even Archie [Goodwin] all discovered after me. But doing Alter Ego then—and doing it now—is a pleasure. My wife refers to it as “my mistress.” [laughter] JBC: My wife says the same thing! [laughter] Roy: Well, okay. We have that in common. [laughter]

Turning Pro

JBC: What was it like for the first time to see your name in print? Did it give you a jolt?

Roy: Yeah! It must have been the letters page in Green Lantern #1. The first time really would have been in the fanzines. And even though I knew that we were only doing 150 copies, Xero only printed a couple hundred copies, maybe eventually a few hundred, and I had a letter or two and articles and one All-in-Color piece in there… but it was a thrill to see my name in print, or to see something I wrote in print, like the whole article on the Fawcett heroes besides the Marvel Family characters in Xero, or a letter I might have written. Yeah, I liked that. That was one appeal of it; that’s why

Below: Photo of R.T. from the St. Louis Post Dispatch newspaper, May 17, 1965. This is just prior to Roy becoming a professional comics writer and editor—the accompanying article states that 24-year old Roy is an English teacher, the publisher of Alter Ego, and that its current circulation is 1,200 copies per issue.

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I recognized instantly that Marie Severin had seen clear through to the heart of me when she did that cartoon of my “first day in sculpting class.” She had done it back in late 1965; I had just known her for four or five months. Here I am in my first day in

sculpting class and I’ve got this big granite block and what have I managed to carve on the first day? The first six letters of my name! [laughter] R-O-Y-T-H-O- and I’m still chiseling away down at the bottom! I loved that from the day I saw it. Not everybody has that feeling, but I’ve always liked seeing my name in print or seeing my work in print. I don’t care for doing stuff anonymously.

Once in a while I do, but unless the money is real good, I don’t have a desire to do it just for the sake of doing it if there’s no credit attached to it.

JBC: Can you remember the effect of Alter Ego #7 on the readers? Were people excited?

Roy: Yeah, I think they could see that this was an exceptional magazine; one of the best fanzines that had come out. There was certainly more substance in certain ways in issues of Xero, which wasn’t entirely a comics fanzine, or in Comic Art, which was. But certainly in the vein of a comic book oriented around the super-heroes, we had the color and the printing… It was generally literate, mainly because I wrote most of it, some under a couple of different pseudonyms—like Rick Strong, the name of one of my roommates. It was literate and Biljo White did a good job imitating C.C. Beck pictures, and Ronn Foss did one or two drawings, and so forth. It was, all in all, a superior production.

I look at it now and I think, well, it doesn’t show up too well against the stuff being done now, but you can’t compare it that way, you have to compare it to what was being done then. At that time, it was kind of an advance in comics fanzines. But it was a natural thing; it was evolving. The first three issues were spirit duplicator, the fourth one was photo offset and bound at the side, sort of crudely. The next two by Ronn varied in size and were different sizes and too small, and mine came the closest, even though the dimensions were smaller, to a comic book size.

It was a comic book fanzine that looked rather like a slightly smaller comic book. And that was the effect I was looking for.

JBC: You gave it up because you went professional?

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Roy: Right. I had the material for the next issue [#10] pretty well done and I kept looking for years to finish stuff, but I never could.

JBC: What were the contents of the unpublished issue?

Roy: I put them all into a little article in the second Best of Alter Ego volume… and had a cover done

by Sam Grainger instead of Biljo White, a cover to go with a Gardner Fox by-mail interview I was going to do, showing Gardner with several of his creations on the cover, and I was going to print the adaptation of the first part of his Edgar Rice Burroughs imitation novel Warrior of Llarn, which Sam illustrated. It was to have the final part of Fred Patten’s Mexican comics piece. Don Thompson was going to write about imitations of The Flash (or was it Plastic Man?… whatever). We had several different things. Half the contents were complete and after about two or three years, I realized it was never going to happen. Then when Stan, as much as anyone, suggested I bring it back, I guess I mentioned I couldn’t get it done. Stan said, “Why don’t I be your silent partner?” Stan was thinking of it, I’m sure, as a moneymaking side venture, although I think he realized there wasn’t much money to be made in it. Then he got Sol Brodsky in; he was production manager and would do anything Stan told him to do, including jumping out a window.

But then Stan withdrew, which is just as well. And Sol stayed around to give me some help, and then when Sol left to go to Skywald, Verpoorten stayed around to help me. We got that one issue out, the issue with the Gil Kane interview. That was good because John Benson showed up with this inter-

view, or he was looking for a spot to run a Gil Kane interview and then he did it, and that was kind of nice and made waves in the business. Then, the idea of doing another issue after that, by that time… it had been four or five years since I had done #9 and then it kind of got dropped.

I remember Phil Seuling, at one point, wanting to take over the name. I’m glad he didn’t. Obviously Mike Friedrich was going to take it over, and make it like a whole different magazine, more like the Moebius interview he did for the second half.

I gave him the Bill Everett interview I had done, to be the first half, but he was going to take the magazine and go off in a whole different direction.

I doubt I would even have been associated with it then; I didn’t have any interest in following up on it at that time. Mike seems to have forgotten everything he was going to do about it… I can never get any information about what he was intending, what he wanted to do. So it just hung around and when you got Comic Book Artist started, it seemed like time to bring it back.

JBC: Did you feel at the time that the Gil Kane interview in A/E was a game changer?

Roy: Yes, in several ways. First of all, the sheer quality, once again, was upped regarding what the contents of a comics fanzine might be. It was more serious and less fannish than the other issues. As I look back at it now, there isn’t really that much great content in it, except the Gil Kane interview, which is extraordinary, especially for its time, and has held up as one of the most important, in some ways, comics interview that’s come about because

Above: Marie Severin nails Roy’s love of seeing his own name in print in this delightful caricature, drawn in 1965.

Previous page: Gil Kane pencil art from 1973’s Amazing Spider-Man #123. Kane’s interview in Alter Ego #10 (1969 edition) was a landmark event in comics fandom, with its serious journalistic presentation. Roy and Gil shared a close relationship personally and professionally in the ensuing decades.

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1999: ALTER EGO it foreshadowed so much of what’s come afterwards. I look at the issue and it’s mostly filler. Mark Hanerfeld did an article about the Tor comics, but it didn’t cover any new ground. I did a little piece on Steranko that was just a humor thing and there were a couple pages of photographs from a convention, and a couple of other things here and there. But, it’s funny: #10 is mostly John Benson’s great Gil Kane interview and a bunch of nice-looking filler, as far as I’m concerned. [laughter] JBC: That made it a great issue, that’s for sure.

Roy: It was a game changer in certain ways. It certainly upped the ante on what a fanzine could be. By this time, the word “fanzine” doesn’t really fit it any more than it almost didn’t Xero. I kept the word “fanzine” when I started doing it 20 years later mainly because I just liked the term and it still has kind of a fannish feel. I’m not interested in it being just a historical thing, like “Journal of Pictorial Graphic Novels Fiction Enterprises…” or whatever they come out with now—all ultra-serious, and so forth. I read those and I’m usually nodding off by the second or third page… I guess it’s because I’ve never taken comic books that seriously.

I know now with graphic novels and so forth, they can be more and now they earn a Pulitzer Prize and there’s a lot of serious stuff, but for me, I still think graphic novels are just comic books with delusions of grandeur! [laughter] But that’s not bad, because I like comic books. I’m reading a book now by Michael Barrier: Funnybooks. It’s about Dell Comics, concentrating on Carl Barks, John Stanley, and Walt Kelly, and it’s really good, but every few pages, he can’t resist his judgment on how “These are real stories and the other stuff is juvenile fantasy.” They’re all juvenile fantasies! Carl Barks and Kelly were good at these types of fantasies, and they did 20- and 30-page stories and they hold up really well, but really: are guys in red-&-blue tights running around any more or less ridiculous than a talking duck wearing a sailor shirt?

JBC: Did you think about resurrecting Alter Ego after Mike Friedrich’s version?

Roy: No, not at all. At some stage, which may have been before Mike’s thing, I got a call from Phil Seuling, who was of course a friend of mine. He was looking at taking over Alter Ego for his own purposes. I think that was back in the early years and not as late as 1978, which I think is when Mike published his issue. Of course, Phil died a few years later. But other than that, I never really had any thoughts about it. For some magazine I did a column called “The Altered Ego,” that was various memories and things like that, but I never really thought about reviving the magazine itself after that. The only thing I did was come up with the idea in 1986 to use that name for a comic-book character.

Restarting the Magic

JBC: How did you first encounter TwoMorrows?

Roy: I’m not sure if I saw a copy of The Jack Kirby Collector first or saw a copy at a convention when I ran into John Morrow. It seemed like a nice magazine. I thought it was a little weighted toward the “not quite that Kirby did everything,” but the “Kirby did more than I thought he did” school, so I basically liked it, but had reservations about it. It seemed like a good fanzine and John seemed like a nice fellow. We talked once or twice and he says he suggested my doing something sometime. I don’t recall that, but it very well could have been like that.

JBC: Jim Amash interviewed you first for TJKC, just before Comic Book Artist #1 came out. I think that led to you, John, and I being in closer contact.

Roy: What was the interview about?

JBC: It was about Jack. How do you recall Alter Ego, Volume 2, when it was the flipside of CBA? Roy: Well, John has said he suggested our getting together sometime and I don’t have any conscious memory of that, but it’s the same kind of thing I would have done. Just like Neal [Adams] doesn’t remember my suggesting he come by Marvel until he showed up, apparently because of Steranko. He’s forgotten that I invited him some time before that. People say things and somebody else doesn’t have as much of a reason to remember it. I wasn’t really thinking about anything at all, except during the same period I was still getting

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work from Marvel, but not quite as much. Conan was winding down and was in these three-issue series, which I was not doing all of. Some of the other work was kind of drying up, so here I was pushing 60 years old, the age when people like Gardner Fox and others who had a lot to offer had been pushed aside, so it wasn’t like I was going to be writing comic books forever. On the other hand, I wasn’t looking for anything particularly to do.

Then you had sent… I think an ad came out… was it a flyer perhaps? Either a flyer John gave me or that I got in the mail about Comic Book Artist coming out. In that—and I don’t remember the exact quotation—it said what the first issue was going to be and then in the second issue, it was going to be about half-forgotten or neglected people like Gil Kane and myself and others, which I thought was a little weird. Gil was still active, although he passed away a few years later, and I was still working. I remember responding to John Morrow, rather than to you, that I didn’t feel especially forgotten, but if they were going to do something like this, perhaps I should get on and do something regularly or something like that. I made some sort of half-assed suggestion. I think John turned that letter over to you with the idea of doing Comic Book Artist with the flip thing. That’s basically what I remember in the general outline. Is that close?

JBC: I don’t know! [chuckles] Roy: I used to have some faxes, but the trouble is, that stuff fades after a while.

JBC: What I recall, generally speaking, was that I was working at an advertising agency, so I’d use their computers, scanner, and printer to get some of my fan comic stuff done on the side. I remember having long conversations with you via fax transmissions. We really hit it off and you wrote multipage faxes.

Roy: Is this before Comic Book Artist?

JBC: I think right around that time.

Roy: I don’t remember being in touch with you before CBA, but it could have been.

JBC: CBA was in development for about six months, maybe longer.

Roy: That’s right. We could have been in touch for a long time before the magazine came out.

JBC: They were such long faxes, I got nervous that the boss would come over and say, “What is all this stuff?

Who’s using up all our fax paper?” [laughter] Roy: I probably didn’t realize that you were doing that.

JBC: Well, you know… Full disclosure here: you were my favorite writer in the early ’70s and always remained one of my favorites thereafter.

Roy: I appreciate that. I didn’t realize I could’ve caused you trouble. If I had known, I could’ve kept it down. [chuckles] I think I didn’t know that was the situation.

JBC: Are you kidding?! And not get all the information that you shared? [laughs] Roy: I could’ve done it in shorter bits, or something.

JBC: Those were the days. It was a different way of communicating. It was pre-internet for you. I do not remember who first mentioned Alter Ego. I don’t know why I would say a “revival” of Alter Ego. I think it was just part of our communication that went back and forth. It happened. There was the possibility I could have Alter Ego within the pages of CBA, so it was, “Wow! Talk about getting legit!” I had Neal Adams offer to do a cover for me and I had Roy Thomas offer to do a section of the magazine.

Above: Gil Kane’s cover art for 1998’s Alter Ego V.2, #2, featuring many of Kane’s most notable characters—actually drawn just as a gift to Roy in 1970.

Previous page: Roy’s 1986 “Alter Ego” super-hero, originally published in a four-issue limited series

by First Comics. This detail by Ron Harris is from the cover of #1.

2020 Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

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1999: ALTER EGO Left: Roy with Michael T. Gilbert in the 1990s.

couple of lines of dialogue, so I had a black-&-white copy of that page and then it was printed without the dialogue. I thought that would be interesting for people to see, how editors change things… especially as I wasn’t that beholden to Marvel anymore.

It wasn’t like I was badmouthing the editors, but I wasn’t going to worry that much about whether they wanted that shown or not, unless there was a legal issue. Plus, I had my own memories and different things from the old days. Sketches here and there of things that never got made, or rejected pages or rejected this or whatever that I had saved because I hated to throw stuff away Roy: Before that, I hadn’t really thought about doing it because that had never been printed. How hard could it be to come up I didn’t want to get involved with publishing again. I didn’t want with 10 or 15 pages every few months to talk about some of that to get involved collecting dimes and dollars and trying to keep stuff? I wasn’t really thinking in terms of going out and finding up that kind of schedule. I liked the editing part, but the publish- other people to write for it; I was pretty much thinking I’d be ing stuff, the bookkeeping, that’s not my strong point. doing it all myself, originally.

JBC: Was it largesse, or a leap of faith for you to go with these JBC: You naturally fell into having a balance of different stuff: TwoMorrows guys whom you hardly knew?

Stuff from your era of working in comics, plus some Golden Age Roy: Well, there must have been a number of issues of The Jack of Gardner Fox, with letters that Michael Gilbert found. That’s Kirby Collector by then. It seemed at least pretty good, basically interesting that you immediately—I would surmise—fell into the on the same professional level as the stuff we had done on Alter role of editor to find a balance, to have a mix.

Ego, like Mike’s issue. It seemed like it was in that same vein, Roy: Right, I mean, obviously, since the Golden Age stuff had above or below. Of course, I figured, “Why not?” Originally, it always been an interest of mine. I didn’t have a lot of access to was kind of a lark. I certainly wasn’t thinking of it as anything original stuff, but there were things here and there. Things like that was going to make any money… and I still don’t! [laughter] Jerry Bails might have put into a more obscure publication, like I didn’t think about it in terms of money. It wasn’t going to solve the four missing Gardner Fox JSA stories that have been tracked any problems otherwise, but it might give me something to do. down in varying degrees. At one time, I owned about 10 or 15 It was going to be a quarterly magazine and, you said, what, it pages of original art from one of those—trying to figure out had to fill 14 pages or something like that? what the others were and what they were like, and corresponJBC: Right. dence with Gardner. I was making a mix of Golden and Silver Roy: It became a bigger section in most of the issues, but it Age material. The main thing was, from the beginning, I knew started out to be like 14 pages. I thought, “That’s not that hard.” that I wasn’t going to deal with stuff I myself wasn’t interested My idea was I could deal with certain things about my own cain—unless it had to do with my own work or something close to reer and I wouldn’t have to look up much of anything else to fill it. I was going to basically deal with stuff that led up to the time I something like that four times a year, and a lot of it would be art stopped being editor-in-chief [in 1974]. After that, my interest in work. There wouldn’t be too much for me to do and it sounded keeping up with current comics fell off the edge of the world. like fun… and it was!

JBC: How do you recall being in the pages of CBA? Did you JBC: Did you have a pile of material of like, “Hey, maybe some- get any notice from people? Were people happy Alter Ego was day, this stuff can or should see print”? back? Did anyone notice?

Roy: Yeah, I had stuff I had kept over time and always thought Roy: I guess so. Did I publish an address in there? I don’t I might use someday. For example, there’s one thing that’s still remember. I’m sure I got faxes and letters right away, so there never been published. (I’m not sure I even have it anymore.) must have been an address in there.

When I was doing Doctor Strange, there was a scene in there JBC: Oh, yeah. I think that was a very important thing. I think where Rintrah, a guy who looks like a minotaur, who was Doctor you were seeking material right off the bat.

Strange’s apprentice for several years under different people.

Roy: Probably so. I don’t know exactly why I decided… but I (I inherited him; I didn’t make him up.) There’s a scene where thought somebody else might pop up with some pages. Around he becomes Alf from TV that Marvel was doing a comic of, too. the third issue, Michael Gilbert—who, of course, has been They decided there was a problem with the Alf contract, so they around ever since—basically provided the flip cover for that suddenly turned him into Howard the Duck. I had a copy of the issue. The first person who came along was Michael, who I think page with him as Alf. just suggested he had some stuff he could make something out I hadn’t saved much from those years; I’d moved around and of. I had him send some stuff and it worked out, so I had him had enough clutter without keeping a lot of copies of old scripts send some more stuff. I don’t know if he’s in the last two issues and things like that, which weren’t going to have much value of Volume 2, but he was in a couple of them, at least. Then, anyway. But I would save pieces of art. There was a Black Knight when it became a magazine on its own, it became inevitable that series, where I was pissed off at the editor because he took out a Michael would be a part of it.

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The World of TwoMorrows

MICHAEL T. GILBERT ON HIS ALTER EGO ADVENTURE Was it 1965 when I saw my first copy of Alter Ego? Yeah, yeah, I think it was.

I was 14, living in Levittown, New York, and swapping comics with a pal who also had a stack of ’zines for trade. I’d never seen a fanzine before, but I was instantly captivated.

There were two older issues of Alter Ego in the stack, but the one that especially fascinated me featured Captain Marvel’s arch foe, Black Adam, as depicted by fan artist Biljo White. The art was cruder than the pro comics I collected, and over four times the price (at 50¢ a pop), but inside were stories about mysterious Golden Age heroes completely unknown to me.

The book, issue #7 [Fall 1964], included articles on the legendary Justice Society of America, the original Human Torch, and a long piece on Fawcett’s Marvel Family by Roy Thomas. I was hooked! Little did I know that my career would later intersect with Alter Ego‘s editor in ways I couldn’t dream back then.

After a little trading, I picked up that and also issue #5 starring Ronn Foss’ ama-hero, The Eclipse. Foss’ drawing of this intriguing character fascinated me.

Roy went pro at Marvel in 1965, first as a writer, then editor, but continued publishing Alter Ego on the side. His last issue was #10 in 1969, after which he finally hung up his spurs. By then Roy was far too busy helping Stan Lee run Marvel to continue his beloved Alter Ego. Cut to 1978, when Michael T. Gilbert Roy’s friend Columnist, and fellow Alter Ego writer Mike Born: 1951 Friedrich sugResidence: gesting taking Akron, Ohio over the reins of Alter Ego… Vocation: Cartoonist, Comic Book Writer/Artist though he did so only Favorite Creator: for an issue, 1. Will Eisner, 2. Steve Ditko as things Seminal Comic Book: turned out.

Jimmy Olsen #25 Roy agreed,

Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

and Mike’s interviews with cartoonists Bill Everett and Moebius became the issue’s centerpieces. Mike snagged an Everett caricature by Marie Severin for the front cover, with an intricate border illustrated by Everett. A back cover illo by Moebius book-ended the issue.

None of the drawings were colored— which is where I come in.

By the late ’70s, my comic book career was beginning to take off, and I was drawing comics for Mike, who had graduated from writing to publishing comics. These included Star*Reach and a “funny animal” series, Quack! I’d contributed to both, and when Mike needed someone to color the covers for this new issue of Alter Ego, he asked if I was interested.

Was I! Being a part of my beloved Alter Ego, even a very small part, was a dream come true for this fanboy. I

hand-separated the covers, adding spiffy color-holds as a special effect.

And that (I assumed) was that for Alter Ego. Ah, but Fate had other ideas!

Fifteen years later, a fan named John Morrow decided to produce a fanzine devoted to his idol, Jack Kirby. The Jack Kirby Collector started slow, but soon proved to be a perennial hit. It spawned other comic book-oriented magazines, including Comic Book Artist by Jon B. Cooke. While Jon was planning the first issue in 1998, Roy contacted John Morrow, and offered to write some articles under the Alter Ego masthead.

Jon (always the fan!) and John (always the fan!) discussed the possibility of reviving Alter Ego as a mini-magazine within Comic Book Artist. If only they could convince Roy Thomas to restart and edit his old fanzine…

Happily for fandom, Roy agreed to it.

Two decades after its demise, Alter Ego was coming back!

I was living in Eugene, Oregon around that time, home of the Gardner Fox papers. It resided in the University of Oregon’s Special Collections section, minutes from my home. Gardner was a DC mainstay writer for decades, having written some of the earliest stories of Hawkman, The Flash, The Justice Society, and too many other characters to list here. While studying Gardner’s papers, I came across a box of letters sent to Fox by fans beginning in the late ’50s. And among these were several by a young comics enthusiast by the name of Roy Thomas!

Back in the early ’80s, Roy and I had worked together on the sword-&-sorcery series Elric of Melniboné. I sent him copies, thinking “Roy The Boy”

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Below: Michael T. Gilbert’s cover art for Alter Ego V. 2, #4, which was on the flipside of Comic Book Artist #4, before A/E spun off into its own magazine. Gilbert’s “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!” column has been a mainstay of the TwoMorrows A/E series since its beginning.

would get a kick out of seeing letters he wrote when he really was a boy. Roy wrote back thanking me, and inviting me to write a column on the Fox papers for issue one of the upcoming Alter Ego revival.

I happily complied, never thinking that I was writing the first of many columns for the magazine. But one led to another, and with the third installment (in CBA #4), “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt” became a reality. The new A/E proved so popular that John suggested spinning Alter Ego off into a solo title.

Roy happily agreed. I stuck around, never missing an issue, and now find myself having written over 160 “Crypt” columns…and counting! TwoMorrows even published a third Mr. Monster

book collection, in 2001—Volume Zero of Mr. Monster’s Books of Forbidden Knowledge—to my great delight.

And all because John Morrow started doing a tiny black-&-white fanzine devoted to Jack Kirby. By doing so, he gave myself, Jon B. Cooke, Roy Thomas, and many others a continuing forum for their research—and helped preserve

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thousands of pages of comic book history that would otherwise be lost.

Not a bad legacy by any measure.

Happy 25th, John. We love ya’!

Previous page: MTG’s Mr. Monster collection was published by TwoMorrows in 2001. Top left: MTG’s association with A/E stretches back to the 1978 edition published by Mike Friedrich, as Michael produced the color separations for the Moebius back cover illustration.

The World of TwoMorrows

JBC: Initially, I was your layout guy.

Roy: Right. I wasn’t up to doing that. I’d done all the pasting up and laying out for Alter Ego back in the ’60s, for #7–9, and worked with first Sol and then Verpoorten on #10, but I didn’t want to get involved with layouts anymore. I just wanted to be the editor—getting material together—and wanted somebody else to handle the other stuff I didn’t want to do. That’s wasn’t my strong suit, so why would I want to do it?

JBC: I would print out the layouts and send them to you. Then you annotated the layouts, sent them back to me, I did the corrections, and sent the final pages back to you, all through the post or FedEx. Roy: We went back and forth a couple of times…

It was a lot of work, but that’s what you got yourself in for, Jon. [chuckles] JBC: You were a meticulous editor; that’s for sure.

You wanted things very specifically, very contextually. I worked as a layout guy for you on a number of occasions and I remember how painstaking you could be, but, whatever the frustration, I have to say you always made it better. You always made it more informational.

Roy: I tried to, but that doesn’t mean sometimes I couldn’t have been wrong. But that was obviously the attempt and you wanted the same thing, too. I just know sometimes it got to be a bit much because there were so many things. I was always like that.

Already, before this time, in 1997, I did The Best of Alter Ego with Bill Schelly. When I sent a round of corrections to Bill, who did the layouts, he said when he got them, he had to sit down on the couch because he was hyperventilating. [laughter] JBC: I think we all hyperventilated once or twice, Roy. Roy: Don’t feel singled out.

JBC: It would be voluminous… a lot of corrections.

Roy: I remember us going back and forth and phone rates were getting a little cheaper, so we talked on long phone calls going over stuff. I thought that maybe had something to do with the fact that you got together with John and kicked me out of CBA! JBC: [Chuckles] No, you spun out of CBA because of A/E’s potential and because I needed the room.

I’ll just never forget doing some A/E work on Sunday afternoons. You had a lot of Gil Kane imagery in one, on which I did a lot of touch up. I remember a Kree-Skrull War article that we worked on…

Roy: One of the main things I remember about working on Volume 2 is when you came up with a plan for the third issue. You had a Neal Adams in-

Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

terview… was it conducted by Arlen Schumer… ?

JBC: Right, Arlen and I went to interview Neal.

Roy: Yeah, right… The interviewer was saying wonderful, neutral things like, “So, Neal, basically, these are just your stories that Roy was dialoguing, right?”

JBC: That was Arlen! That wasn’t me! [laughter] Roy: I don’t know why Arlen thinks I don’t like him… [chuckles] But, anyway, I remember you came to me and said there was this big interview with Neal and what you wanted to do in the “Alter Ego” part, you’d like me to do my version of the events, whether it was an interview or writing it out, or whatever. Whether Neal guessed this or he got wind of it, evidently a few days later, you contacted me and said that Neal had made it real clear that if his interview was going to be in there, there had to be nothing else—no opposing views in that same issue. Do you remember that?

JBC: Yes, I do. [chuckles] Roy: I was kind of chagrined because I didn’t know how bad the thing with Neal was going to be. But, right away in the same conversation, you said, “That seems fair enough and reasonable enough since Neal is going to do the cover, etc., but you should do yours in the next issue.” Which I did.

JBC: Yeah. I was astounded how reasonable you were on that because there are a lot of egos in this business.

Roy: I figured let Neal have his say, whatever he said, and then I get my say later on. If I couldn’t respond in his interview, then he couldn’t respond in mine. He could do that afterward. Nobody has a particular lock on truth. The fact remains, Neal was certainly worth listening to—not everything he said was bull and he certainly had a right to say it all.

Part of it I liked because he said nice things, and part of it infuriated me. I figured if he read my stuff, it probably did the same thing. I’d like to think I caused him some distress.

JBC: I remember how classy you were. To add insult to injury, I took away your cover because it was a wraparound cover for the Neal Adams issue.

Roy: I was unhappy about that, but you had a Neal Adams cover. What could I do? I had my little interior cover by Moldoff. I didn’t get angry about it; I was just unhappy about it, but I understood.

It wasn’t like it was going to be every issue; it only happened that once.

JBC: So, we got along fine?

Roy: I guess so! I don’t know. I didn’t drive you crazy, I guess.

Above: Roy’s earliest comics writing was for Charlton Comics’ “The Second Trojan War” in Son of Vulcan #50 [Jan. 1966] and “The Eye of Horus” in Blue Beetle #54 [Mar. 1966]. Art by Bill Fraccio and Tony Tallarico.

Below: Bill Schelly’s personal account of the early days of comics fandom was a natural fit for TwoMorrows to publish (in 2001) once Alter Ego was part of its regular schedule.

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1999: ALTER EGO me first; first I saw it was I read it in a magazine somewhere.

JBC: I remember the real coup for me was not only having “Alter Ego,” but in the second issue, we had an interview with Stan Lee that you conducted for my side of the mag. That was like, “How are we ever going to get an interview with Stan?” Violá! Roy Thomas!

Roy: That was kind of weird because I did a couple of little ones later on, but this one was fairly major because I got a few things out of Stan that other people hadn’t thought to ask him. I think it was a nice coup to get me interviewing Stan for the first time ever.

That was a nice, long interview. A lot of good stuff.

JBC: Did you like Comic Book Artist magazine on its own?

Going Solo… With Friends Roy: Sure! Some of the parts were on things I wasn’t so interJBC: How do you recall the “divorce” from CBA? ested in, but I’m a big fan and admirer of the comic book field, Roy: I can’t remember who it was, maybe it was John… maybe so whether or not I like a particular comic book or a particular it was one or both of you. Maybe it was at a convention. I have approach, I’m still glad to see that’s there. One issue, you’d covan idea it came from both of you, together, so it was probably er more stuff I’m interested in and another issue, you’d not, but at a convention, rather than on a phone call—suggesting that that’s true of Alter Ego for somebody else. Some people are only I take Alter Ego and make it a magazine all of its own. On the one hand, it would have been kind of fun to do and then I could interested in the Golden Age stuff and some people are only interested in the Silver Age or whatever. But, I always thought you make a couple of bucks, although it wouldn’t have been the did a great job and you always put a lot of work into it. answer to any economic problem. So I kind of accepted it, but I One of the reasons I wanted to get other people to regularly was a little worried, trying to fill whatever length—80 pages, four contribute to A/E and why I went to Bill and Michael, and even times a year—not that there wouldn’t be enough material, but Paul Hamerlinck very quickly, is because I didn’t want to put in just that it was going to be a lot of work and so forth, so I was a as much work as you did on the magazine! [laughter] I really feel little apprehensive about doing it, you might recall. But… like you had—it seems like—a real labor-intensive way of going JBC: I think there was just a slight lag… or maybe you were in there and figuring out how to thoroughly cover the subject preparing for the first issue. I do want to say: In the meantime, and went in there with both barrels blazing, and I had a little I think it was at the time I had just put the Neal Adams issue to more dilettante approach to it, I suppose. bed, I came down and visited John, and then my family and I JBC: John says I used to call it “carpet bombing.” [chuckles] visited you and Dann. That was fun.

Roy: Right. I remember that. I think you talked me out of a copy Roy: I suppose it is! I just felt like I could never get that involved in it unless I was really sure it was going to make a lot of monof Bernie Wrightson: A Look Back. ey. [chuckles] I wanted to do it, but I wanted to find a way… I JBC: I did not! You offered it to me! [laughter] Roy: No, no. That’s okay. That’s all right, I don’t mind. It’s okay… mean, I was doing enough work anyway, but I didn’t want to be I probably got rid of it because every time I looked at it I just got responsible for every single page of 80 (or whatever) number of pages. It went up and down. Michael was already doing stuff, mad because once Bernie accused me in print of stealing his so I said, “Well, if you want to do six pages”—he was getting a King Kull artwork. pittance for it, but it seemed like he enjoyed it—and Bill Schelly JBC: See, I was helping you out! [laughter] and I had already done The Best of Alter Ego book together and Roy: Which is funny because later, it turned up—somebody found it for him and he ended up selling it—but he never apolo- he was doing his fandom thing, so if it was going to be a sequel to Alter Ego and the old fanzines, why not have sort of a fandom gized for accusing me of stealing it! thing and deal with fanzines from the ’60s through maybe at JBC: Oh, well.

Roy: “It was at the bottom of Roy Thomas’ closet,” I think is the most the early ’70s? Who better to do that than Bill, who liked way he described it. [chuckles] Well, I admired Bernie as an artist, the exposure? We got along well. Then, I’d been getting the but if he had a problem with me, he should have mentioned it to FCA [Fawcett Collectors of America] newsletter for several issues

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The World of TwoMorrows

and started becoming a regular contributor to FCA. I had my own column for about one issue or so in there. It could be a regular thing if I wanted it.

Unbeknownst to me, Paul was apparently running out of steam and feeling like he couldn’t continue it. He had to publish it, you know? He liked gathering all the material, but he didn’t enjoy getting involved in all the publishing either. When I made him that offer, he was very happy to fold FCA into it—without the flip cover—but otherwise not too much unlike how Alter Ego folded into Comic Book Artist that first time around. I’d always stick it at the end and it always had its own cover even though it was an interior cover. Unlike the other things, I felt that FCA had already been a separate magazine, just like Alter Ego had been, and it wasn’t like it was just a department like “Comic Crypt” or “Comic Fandom Archives,” I made it like a magazine within a magazine. And of course, for several years, we had the FCA logo on all the covers.

JBC: Did you have a longer history with FCA that went back to FCA/SOB or any early incarnations?

Roy: Only in the sense of the unpleasant contacts I had with C.C. Beck.

JBC: What was that?

Roy: As you can imagine, I’m a big fan of his work, Captain Marvel and everything. I didn’t like what he did in the ’70s, but the stuff in the ’40s and ’50s was great. I was in contact with Otto Binder and he was a big fan. Even though Fatman the Human Flying Saucer hadn’t been too good, Beck was a big talent. I don’t remember where it was, but in various places here and there he began to attack things. He didn’t care that much for the Marvel approach to doing comics and he really went after Barry Smith about the time of some of the early Conans and right before. Beck and I talked occasionally and exchanged letters, and I found him somebody who felt like his view of what comics should be was exactly right and there wasn’t any other way to do it. It had to be that cartoony style that he liked. It wasn’t just Barry Smith, but Mac Raboy, too, who were “betrayers of the pure comics.” I thought that was nonsense because maybe he didn’t like it and maybe I didn’t like it—I hate manga, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s an illegitimate art form, you know? Then he finally stepped over the line.

Sometime in the ’70s, he wrote me a letter with a weird conspiracy thing he came up with—just to gather attention and to keep things kind of riled up and, I guess, give him something to do, I don’t know. He said we should have this “hammer and tongs” kind of argument, going at it back and forth

Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

at each other in the magazine, like we had sincerely before. It would be about comics and only we would know that we really respected each other.

The idea was to be unpleasant and anything short of name-calling. It’s like we would have a “wink, wink, nod, nod” kind of relationship in it just to garner interest.

I said, “I consider that kind of dishonest. If we’re going to argue, we can argue, but I don’t want to have an agreement to argue.” I don’t think we ever had any contact after that, but I continued to respect his work. I bought one of his Marvel Family paintings, but I found him someone I couldn’t really deal with. We were just on a different plane and I was willing to compromise a little bit, but I saw him as someone who wanted it all one way and was unwilling to see another viewpoint. I figured there was no sense in conversing with him any longer.

JBC: How did you meet Bill Schelly?

Roy: Well, I’m not sure. I think we ran into each other at San Diego conventions and things. I believe one of the first things… we may have had some tiny contact, but mainly he contacted me when he was really getting into high gear or almost finished with his book on comics fandom, in the early ’90s. It was the first big book on fandom.

He asked if I’d want to proofread it and write an introduction to it. I think he talked to me about it once or twice. I said fine and I think I proofread it—even made a few suggestions. After that, I was really pleased with that book and he was going off in his own directions, including reprinting some of the old, early comics I had done. Then, strangely enough, Gary Groth brought us together again.

(That’s a sentence I never figured I’d say.) [chuckles] Gary—or at least somebody in The Comics Journal, and I have a feeling it was Gary—did a

Above: In Jerry Bails’ hotel room at the 1995 Chicago Comic-Con, where numerous pioneers of comics fandom gathered to reminisce about olden days. Shown are (left to right) Jerry, Howard Keltner, Roy, and Bill Schelly. John and Pam Morrow were there, as were Richard “Grass” Green and others.

Previous page and below: Roy and Neal Adams may disagree on their respective level of input on their Avengers work together, but one thing is not in dispute: It will always be seen as a highwater mark in comics. Here’s an Avengers #93 spread, inked by Tom Palmer.

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1999: ALTER EGO review of Bill’s fandom book, The Golden Age of Comic Fandom, and said that this should lead to some other books coming out about individual fanzines and things like that. That, as much as anything, got me thinking, “Well, why not do a book collection about the best of Alter Ego? It’d be weird because you’d be taking stuff that had been coming out from ditto copies and putting it in a better magazine or better book, but if you took stuff from all those issues, we could probably make a book out of it.” So, I approached Bill about it, originally for his Hamster Press, which published the first edition. He liked the idea so we worked together on it and it did quite well. Then, there was a later edition from TwoMorrows and that also sold out. That wasn’t bad for a little publication with a bunch of old articles from the ’60s in it. That’s how Bill and I got together. He was doing all these various books, so when I was doing Alter Ego, I thought it would be good to have him do some things there. It would suit his purposes because he could advertise his books in Alter Ego, so it worked out for him, too.

JBC: Working with Michael T. Gilbert on Elric: was that the first time you were aware of him?

Roy: Yeah. We never had that much close contact, but we exchanged a few letters when we were working together. We didn’t really know each other particularly. We may have run into each other at conventions, but I don’t recall. We didn’t have any kind of close relationship or something. Evidently, he even worked on the Mike Friedrich issue, he tells me. He did some production work.

JBC: Oh, right: the color separations on the back cover.

Roy: That’s kind of funny; he goes back to Volume 1. He did a little work at the end of the first run and then did a thing or two in Volume 2 and then, of course, he became a mainstay and it’s at 160 issues and counting as it is with Paul, and also with Bill, who skipped a few issues, but has been in the great, great majority of them.

JBC: When did you first deal with Jim Amash?

Roy: Well, again, I’m a little vague about it. I think we ran into each other at conventions. He was very interested, obviously, in the Golden Age people and I had been doing some interviews and some other people had been doing them. I didn’t particularly like doing interviews, though I was reasonably happy with the ones I did. I liked the one with Larry Lieber and the one with Stan better, but it wasn’t something I wanted to do.

Once again, I didn’t want to get that involved with doing the writing of the magazine; I wanted to put it together. I didn’t want to go and do the interviewing, as well. Jim came up with a bunch of names and they were all people I was interested in.

I said, “Interview them and if the interviews come out halfway well, we’ll put them in.” After we’d done a few, we would run into each other at conventions, especially since I was going to every single HeroesCon since I moved here to South Carolina.

Since he’s from North Carolina, we would run into each other at conventions. That solidified the relationship. Before long, we were talking enough over the phone, I made him, along with Bill, associate editors. It’s sort of an honorary title the way I was when

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Jerry Bails called me the “co-editor” of the first few issues of Alter Ego. I welcomed suggestions from them and once in a while, I’ll drop them a line asking for their opinion on something. It’s good to deal with, but it’s not as if we confer on a regular basis.

JBC: What are Jim’s strengths as an interviewer?

Roy: Well, just that he was very prepared and very thorough.

Instantly, the interviews he was doing tended to be longer and more detailed than the ones I had been doing or other people had been doing because he would think of more things to ask people and go off onto tangents—not just about the guy’s work, but the other people he knew and so forth. I knew that several different people did interviews, but I liked his approach the best.

It seemed he had people he wanted to do. He did it well and was enthusiastic about it, so I got everything delivered all ready to go. At some stage it had to be typed up by somebody, but other than that, he prepared the work. All I had to do was add the pictures and he often was helpful with that, as well.

JBC: He might know the professional history of Golden Age comics better than just about anyone else in the world.

Roy: He certainly would be way up there because he’s talked to so many people and has gotten so many good things out of them. The other day, somebody was quoting something I didn’t remember I’d seen and at the end he said it was from one of Jim Amash’s interviews out of Alter Ego. [chuckles] There’s so much in these things, you know you can’t remember everything that was said. He’s certainly is one of the most knowledgeable.

JBC: If there’s anything that is in need of collecting, it’s a collection of Jim’s Golden Age interviews.

Roy: I agree. A lot of them are still in print in Alter Ego. He’s going to do different things; he’s thought about doing stuff like that. The interviews—in some ways, I have some vague rights since I wrote the captions and things like that—but the interviews are all his property and he can do that anytime he wants.

He’s never really found the energy or desire to do it. He’s played around with it from time to time and he had other projects he was going to do. I think what happened—so many of these guys died off and he got a little depressed about it. Here’s a guy whose main interest was not the Silver Age—those guys are dying off, too—but in the early days, he was interviewing guys like Vince Fago. Within a few years they’re all starting to die off.

He had certain people like Lou Cameron that he was especially close to. The thing is, all these guys were at least 70 or 80 years old—not all of them, but most of them—when he started talking to them, and he was considerably younger, so what happened was over the next few years, even though he did his last interview several years ago, the chances are that the vast majority of the people he interviewed for Alter Ego over the last 20 years are dead!

I put together the latest issue [#158] with a 2002 San Diego panel that had one writer, Bill Woolfolk, and six or seven artists interviewed by Mark Evanier, and you know now—16 or 17 years later—Evanier is the only one still alive of all the people that were up there with him. Granted, that’s the larger part of two decades, but still you’d think one or two might still be around. That

The World of TwoMorrows

P.C. HAMERLINCK ON FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA The staying power and reverence of the Fawcett books, and the appreciation and fervor from its fans, have contributed to Fawcett Collectors of America’s 45-plus year existence. Roy Thomas and TwoMorrows were instrumental in averting FCA from becoming a faded footnote to fandom.

Over those many years, the publication has undergone varying editorial visions.

Bernie McCarty, a Chicago-area newspaper sportswriter, was a man who wasn’t ashamed to embrace his childhood joys of a bygone era—a time that introduced him to a red-suited hero and a colorful cast who sent his imagination to other worlds, courtesy of one particular comic book publisher.

Thus, McCarty launched a newsletter-styled fanzine entitled Fawcett Collectors of America in March of 1973—its release date unintentionally closely coinciding with DC’s Captain Marvel revival in Shazam! just a couple of months earlier. FCA’s humble beginnings consisted of four pages of want-sell-trade lists for the perusal of comic accumulators. By #2 [June ’73], it had expanded to eight pages.

McCarty naturally assumed, given the unifying, straightforward title of his ’zine, that Fawcett collectors simply

Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

wanted to buy and swap old comics, and perhaps correspond with other like-minded fans—many who were now middle-aged, respectable citizens and responsible parents whom Dr. Wertham was convinced would grow up into criminally insane monsters.

McCarty soon acknowledged that his newly-formed community’s hunger went far beyond the acquisition of yellowing, primordial comic books. The more ambitious and aspiring subscribers began composing articles profiling various Fawcett titles and conducted candid interviews with creators from the past.

The readership could now immerse themselves with knowledge of those who were there at the helm during the Golden Age producing their favorite what constituted good (and bad) comic comics. Names such as C.C. Beck, Otto art. Beck desired to rattle readers into Binder, Manly Wade Wellman, Kurt giving more thought to matters and, in Schaffenberger, Marcus Swayze and turn, elicit strong reactions from them. others soon became, as McCarty once Even with his sturdy convictions, and put it, “real human beings, not mysteriastute opinions to match them, Beck ous gods of my childhood.” was clearly having a little mischievous FCA was only published when fun in the editor’s chair. (Ironically, he McCarty had enough extra had loathed editors, except cash on hand to do so. for Fawcett’s Rod Reed, Will After being given away Lieberson, and Wendell essentially for free, FCA’s Crowley.) circulation quickly climbed I had gotten to know the to over 500 copies an idiosyncratic Beck over the issue. However, after #11, years. Elf-like in appearance, McCarty’s avocation had kind-hearted, encouraging, become too-costly a bursoft-spoken, often chuckden. FCA was doomed. ling—quite unlike his exagC.C. Beck.

And then, suddenly— gerated published persona SHAZAM!—Captain Marvel’s co-creator where many really believed him to be and chief artist, C.C. Beck, who had a contentious, cranky curmudgeon. previously contributed letters of comFCA’s potent new direction with the ment and an essay or two to FCA, came SOB add-on was perhaps predestined to the rescue. Beck took over as editor from early reports in McCarty’s FCA in 1980, renaming the publication FCA/ of Beck’s involvement—and ensuing SOB [Some Opinionated Bastards] #1 complications—with DC Comics. Beck (yet also retained McCarty’s original dissertations such as “The Destruction numbering). FCA/SOB went to a regular of Creativity,” “We Were Considered bi-monthly schedule, and paid subscrip- a Bunch of Idiots,” and “What Really tions were finally solicited.

Killed the Golden Age” became par for Charming, mirthful cartoons by Beck the course. Beck’s openness with his were adorned throughout the publicaopinions was often outrageous to subtion, contrasting sharply with his rudiscribers and contributors alike during mentary viewpoints, dogmatic editorial- his dynamic tenure as editor. Writers izing, and non-sugar-coated treatises on complained that Beck’s “nuts and bolts”

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style of editing was too high-handed and that their articles looked nothing like what they had originally submitted.

But Beck stood his ground, sticking with his old belief: “Have something to say, then say it.”

Beck produced FCA/SOB from his Florida residence, and paid the majority of the ’zine’s costs out of his own pocket. At the time, he was living on Social Security and making some cash on the side by creating paintings for fans. It was one of the very few fanzines edited by a seasoned professional artist, giving it a sleek design—while still retaining the folksiness of a fanzine.

The ‘SOB’ era endured for 19 issues, ending with #30 [May–June 1983]. Beck suffered a minor stroke that impaired his vision and forced him to step down as editor. A year later, Bill and Teresa Harper from South Carolina would take over the ’zine, re-naming it FCA & ME, Too! The couple’s inclusion of “ME” into the title represented Vin Sullivan’s Magazine Enterprises company, as Bill Harper was an expert of one of their comics characters, Straight Arrow. The Harpers’ coverage mostly encompassed Western comics by both ME and Fawcett. Beck watched the proceedings from the sidelines before passing away in 1989. With infrequent issues, the Harpers finished out the decade as the ’zine succumbed to an inert, quiescent state.

As the mid-90s rolled around, with my belief that more Fawcett history

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Age comics professional to write their was out there waiting to be brought to memoirs in a regularly published forum light, I received the blessings of both for that length of time. He had saved McCarty and the Harpers to resuscitate nearly everything over the years, from and rejuvenate the dormant publication. rough sketches to correspondences, Before embarking on my self-pubwhich only enhanced his engaging lishing (self-punishing?) pursuit, other narratives. Marc had originally referred than C.C. Beck’s archive of writings that to himself as “The most forgotten of I was put in charge of by his daughter, I the unknowns, or the most unknown of felt I needed another first-hand account the forgottens.” I hope that is no longer from someone who had been involved the case. with the Marvel Family’s P.C. Hamerlinck I self-published six issues original run. I flew Editor of FCA. I was wavering to New Jersey to whether to continue on pitch a memoirBorn: 1962 with it. My mailing list had writing notion to formed into a fine assemanother one of my Residence: blage of a few hundred artistic heroes, Kurt San Diego comic book professionals Schaffenberger, Vocation: and fans. Two notable who graciously Spin instructor names on the list were Roy declined: “It was Fave Creator: C.C. Beck Thomas and John Morrow. just a job, Paul, Seminal Comic: MAD #8 Roy happened to be one nothing more.” of my favorite comic book I then contacted my secwriters and comic book historians. I was ond choice for a veteran Fawcett artist honored when he became a subscriber, as a regular FCA contributing writer. I and even more so when he hopped on figured it was a long shot. He hadn’t board for my final two self-published been involved in comics since the ’50s issues with his column, “Second-Hand before leaving the industry for good.

Leaks from a First-Class Fawcett.”

Nevertheless, after I had presented the John Morrow and I were ’zine-swapidea to Marc Swayze during that initial ping. I respected the work he was phone conversation, I knew without a doing with The Jack Kirby Collector. We doubt that it was time for this unsung were both around the same age, both hero of the comics to leave the land graphic designers, both producing our of obscurity and enjoy some time in respective publications about things we the spotlight. Swayze’s column, “We Didn’t Know… It Was the Golden Age!” were passionate about.

I made up my mind about continuing became our lead-in and most anticion when Roy invited FCA to become pated feature each issue. It turned out a section in Volume 3 of his legendary that Marc’s memoirs in FCA endured Alter Ego magazine. The TwoMorrows for over a decade-and-a-half, lasting merger would now bring Fawcett/Caplonger than his actual career in comics! tain Marvel history to a wider audience, It was unprecedented for any Golden and better showcase my FCA collaborators—Jen (supportive wife/associate editor/proofreader), Mark Lewis (cover coordinator/artist), John Pierce, Brian Cremins (contributing writers), and subscriber Joe Musich, whose keen insights help to remind me why I do this stuff in the first place.

I hope to work with Roy forever.

And congratulations to John and Pam Morrow for pressing on with 25 years as Fandom’s Finest Publisher.

Left: The late Marcus Swayze in 2013.

The World of TwoMorrows

shows you how old all these people were. Stan was one of the last and he was almost 96… Who’s left?

Al Jaffee from Marvel is still around, Allen Bellman, and I guess Ken Bald, Stan’s old friend, is still alive [Editors note: Ken died the month after this interview was recorded, on Mar. 17, 2019, at 98]—but, there’s almost nobody left who was drawing in the early ’40s—even the late ’40s, when Romita came in. There are so few of them left, especially from the early ’40s. I think Jim got a little depressed and I don’t think he was that interested in going over and interviewing people from the ’60s and ’70s.

JBC: For one thing, Jim is a man out of time in a certain way. I think you touched on the fact that he was good friends with a lot of these aging people.

Roy: This was back when he was inking… One reason we don’t talk as much as we could is that he’s not inking as much now. He loved to get on the phone and talk while he was inking!

So I’m grateful for Jim being the A/E interviewer and being interested in the same time period as I was. Just like I wouldn’t be interested in doing an A/E that dealt with guys from the ’80s—it’s not like I don’t respect those people—it’s just that I wouldn’t personally be interested in doing it. It wouldn’t be something I would especially enjoy. If I did such a mag, it would be a professional thing for money. When I’m working on stuff from the ’40s–’70s, it’s something that is of genuine interest, but my interest drops off after the ’70s, you know?

JBC: Did you ever meet Marc Swayze?

Roy: I never did face-to-face. I talked to him on the phone occasionally. We got along okay, but I didn’t talk with him on the phone as much as with others. He was a very nice gentleman. I think we probably had different viewpoints on things, but he was a real gentleman. It was so nice to see some of those pieces he did… sometimes they were a little repetitious because, after all, he only worked in one small corner. He worked on the Captain Marvel stuff and Phantom Eagle and a couple of stories for Charlton. That was pretty much it. You can’t write forever on that stuff, but he did a pretty good job of coming close! [laughter] He did it very well. He wrote it well and projected such a nice personality. It was a real pleasure.

He came in the package with Paul Hamerlinck, I guess, who had already started working with him when FCA was a separate magazine.

JBC: You’ve met Paul?

Roy: Yeah, at conventions; not that often. We maybe had a meal or two together and have been on panels together. I don’t know if we’ve ever sat down and had a long conversation. Nowadays,

Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

almost everything is by email, very rarely are there phone calls. Once in a while it’s necessary. Even with any of them, Michael or Bill, and so forth, it’s almost always emails. It’s the same with Richard Arndt, who is the main interviewer now.

JBC: How long has your association been with Rich?

Roy: Well, I’m not sure. He started edging in doing things about the latter time Jim started edging out.

A few years ago, he started wanting to do some interviews. Jim was kind of moving away from it. He had a couple of extended interviews that weren’t exactly cover features: He had that Tony Tallarico interview and there was one other before that were spread out over five or six issues. Richard came along and wanted to do them and kind of picked up the slack as Jim was somewhat dropping the reins. Richard was interested in picking them up.

He did a good interview, too, so I figured, “Let’s see how it goes.”

I don’t have Richard in quite as many issues as Jim was, but it’s not that he couldn’t be—he has a bunch of things backed up, and it’s just that other things come up—so he’s in about half, or more than half, of the issues. He does a good job as an interviewer. I think he probably has to do more research on things, where Jim was already doing that. Again, he has the main thing that I think a person needs to do that kind of interview: to do thorough preparation.

JBC: So did you have to sell Dann on you doing the magazine?

Roy: Every day, Jon! Every day! [laughter] JBC: Has it been, at all, a moneymaker for you?

Roy: Well, I make money at it. Dann says, “It must be 30¢ an hour.” [chuckles] It makes money. It might be up at five figures a year. It’s nothing that, if it went away tomorrow, it would make a real difference in my life economically, but I like that connection because I’m interested…

Above: The original, unused cover design for Alter Ego #138, featuring Harlan Ellison.

Below: A lovely painting of Mary Marvel by Marcus Swayze, the co-creator—”visualizer,” if you will— of the girl super-hero. Swayze’s “We Didn’t Know… It Was the Golden Age” column ran for several years in Alter Ego, recounting his experiences working at Fawcett Comics in the 1940s.

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1999: ALTER EGO Left: Roy will forever be known for his stellar writing on Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian, and his barbarian-themed issues of Alter Ego are perennial favorites. Here’s Rafael Kayanan’s luscious cover art for A/E #108.

Roy: If it’s a hobby, it’s taking up way too much time, and if it’s a business, it’s taking up way too much time for not enough money.

JBC: Right on, Roy Thomas! [chuckles] Roy: It’s just that we like what we’re doing; we have a respect for the people and history and think it deserves to be… just before Comic Book Artist came out, in that flyer that made me think about becoming part of it, you expressed the idea that it was a Jack Kirby Collector for “the rest of us”—I think that was the expression—to cover the people that weren’t going to be covered in The Jack Kirby Collector. It was a lot of good people.

JBC: Absolutely. Did you ever imagine that you’d be at… what?

Number 156?

Roy: I’m working on #159 and #157 is out, but no, no, it’s amazing! People ask, “How can you do 150 issues?” They look at this on the shelf or I’ve been giving them all this stuff. “Well, you just do one and a couple of months later, you do another one.

All of a sudden, you realize you’ve done 157 issues!” It’s not like you set out… if you thought about doing 100 or 200 issues, you would have run away from it and not done it. But, you start work and it kind of piles up. Nothing has come along that takes away enough time. I’ve been getting other work.

Right now, luckily, I have enough time to do it, but I’ve got a Conan assignment from Marvel and a Captain America & The Invaders assignment, to do a special of that. Plus about five or six—mostly for Marvel, but some for DC—introductions to books that are fairly long. Some of those for omnibuses are 6,000– One thing I hate, but don’t get angry at, is when I see people 7,000 words long, you know? in CAPA-Alpha say that this is our “hobby.” That’s not a word I’ve JBC: Right. ever used for it. I think of chess as a hobby, a game I like to play. Roy: Okay, those don’t quite pay for themselves, but I get a But I never thought of comics as a “hobby.” I thought of it as book or two. On the one hand, it would be nice to do more an interest or avocation, all kinds of things. “Hobby” seems too comics, but if I went back to doing one or two comics a month… weak a word for it. I just never think of it that way. Dann refers to if something like that happened, I wouldn’t have time to do Alter Alter Ego as my mistress because when I spend time with it, I’m Ego because it is something that will eat up an indefinite number not spending time with her. I think she liked the idea more when of hours. I have to keep it down… I run into this all the time with we were having all the interviews with all the old people before contributors, you probably do, too: They give you an idea and they died off, because you’re giving recognition to people who a couple months later want to know how it’s coming and I say, haven’t had a lot in their life; they haven’t had their say and to be “I haven’t thought about it. I’m three issues ahead of that right recognized for what they did. I think she appreciated that aspect now. I have to get it going, but I can’t be devoting that much of it. Of course, now, it’s still true; people are still dying off. Now time or thought to it.” Your situation may be different. Mine is I the Silver Age people are dying and, for that matter, I’m editing try to keep all those plates spinning, but I have to concentrate obituaries for people I’m not that familiar with. on one issue at a time or I’d go nuts.

But Dann doesn’t mind my doing the magazine. She would JBC: You’ve never missed a deadline? probably feel I spend too much time on it—and you may have Roy: Well, sometimes we’re a little later than usual but not really. the same problem, Jon. There’s a line from the wonderful Audrey Some of that has to with the production people, particularly as Hepburn/Albert Finney movie, Two for the Road: “You have only Dann calls him, “Saint Chris Day” [for photo, see page 115]. You two speeds: 110 and stop!” I think that’s the way people like us and a few other people have also done issues and done them so are. If we do something, we go all in for it. The idea of casually well, but Chris has done so many. doing it and not really caring about it or devoting the time that’s JBC: What’s it like working with him? necessary is not in our character, so you have to be “all in,” one Roy: Well, I can only look at my side. I guess since he went away way or another. My “all in” is a little different kind of thing than for a while and then when we needed somebody, he was happy yours is, but it’s still “all in” in its own way. to come back. He said he’d do it for a year, and he’s been doing JBC: I wonder if that’s the connection you, me, and John share. it for two or three years now, so I guess he doesn’t mind. I think We have respect for it. It’s not a hobby. it’s great. I give him the work and he puts it together intelligently

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The World of TwoMorrows

RICHARD J. ARNDT: MY HISTORY WITH TWOMORROWS My history with TwoMorrows Publishing really starts with my initial encounter with Jon B. Cooke’s Comic Book Artist. In the early spring of 1998, while browsing in my local bookstore, I was startled to see a large-scaled magazine sporting a Neal Adams-drawn Batman.

Startled because, in my rural Nevada town, there was no place to buy comics in 1998. There were no comic stores around at the time and none of the local establishments, including the bookstore, sold comics. To buy comics you either had to drive four hours to Salt Lake City or find, as I did, a mail-order service. I used then—and still use today—Westfield Comics out of Wisconsin.

The bookstore did sell graphic novels, but they were the kind based on fantasy games, something I was (and still am) completely uninterested in. Still, even in rural Nevada, I kept my knowledge fairly current on what was out there and what was coming. My knowledge was gained from various outlets, not the least of which was Westfield’s excellent Upcoming Comics catalog, mailed every month and featuring a pretty extensive listing of the comics coming about three months in my future. The paper catalog has sadly shrunk quite a bit since those days, these days focusing mostly on the output of the big two, but back then it covered just about everybody. I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing anything about this Comic Book Richard J. Arndt Artist thing I A/E & CBC Contributor was looking Born: 1962 at.

I startResidence: ed leafing Elko, Nevada through it Vocation: and realized School that it was Librarian providing a Favorite history of DC Creator: Comics and Alan Moore the long, slow Seminal Comic Book: sea change Fantastic Four #41 it underwent,

Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

beginning in May 1967 (according to Cooke), as it struggled to regain traction and hold on to its leadership position as the bestselling comics publisher, while facing the juggernaut of the increasingly powerful Marvel Comics.

The back of the magazine featured a flip-cover and a mini-magazine version of Alter Ego, a 1960s fanzine that I’d heard a lot about over the years, but had never read. Somewhat to my amazement, Roy Thomas, an original A/E editor and one of my favorite writers in the field, was the editor of this mini-mag.

Needless to say, I loved the magazine! Both sides! The bookstore noted my interest and continued getting the magazine for me, although they told me that I was the only customer who bought it. After #5, they had to drop it, as the distributor was telling them that they had to order more than one copy if they wanted to keep receiving it. Luckily, by that time, Westfield had started including it in their catalog, so it wasn’t a problem to keep getting it— especially since Alter Ego split off into its own magazine and I then had two comic history magazines to buy.

I made a point of buying every issue of CBA and as many issues of A/E as I could. While both magazines made me happy and increased my interest in the comics field, they also made me

somewhat poorer, on a regular basis, as nearly every issue of each magazine had something in them that prompted me to buy old comics—sometimes revisiting old stories and sometimes enjoying new ones. Remember, even if it’s an old story, if you’ve never read it before, it’s a new one!

By the time that CBA moved from TwoMorrows to start anew at Top Shelf, I was also indulging in The Jack Kirby Collector, especially when it had an issue or a cover focused on Kirby’s Fourth World titles. To replace CBA, Two­Morrows started up Back Issue—another, at times, necessary buy!

My entry into actually working for TwoMorrows as a freelancer started, like many things in my life, with me entering not through the front but rather the back door.

Either slightly before or concurrent with that first issue of CBA, the internet had come to rural Nevada and, one day, I stumbled upon the Grand Comics Database, an online index dedicated to listing and providing correct credits to every comic book ever published. Like TwoMorrows, it, too, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. My acquaintance with, and growing dependence on, GCD coincided finally with another event.

In the first half of 2003, I stumbled upon a used bookstore in Salt Lake City.

It was run by a man using the foulest language I’ve ever heard from a store proprietor. He made the language of Marines, longshoreman and waitresses look positively quaint by comparison!

Pretty nice guy, though.

His bookstore was split into three sections—the main floor was the used book section, which had peaked my interest in the first place. The second section was walled off from the main floor, with a doorway covered by old swinging western saloon doors, behind which was a massive supply of vintage Playboys, Penthouses, Hustlers, and various other adult magazines and porn paperbacks. That he was able to offer these last on the main street of

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Salt Lake City, less than a block from the Hall of Justice, in Utah—a state renowned for some of the most restrictive, and often nonsensical, blue laws in the country—was rather impressive.

However, the third section is what really peaked my interest. Behind a locked door at the back of the store, in a small cubbyhole of a room, were stacks of old comics. When I mentioned them at the counter, he let me know that his brother had, in the 1970s and ’80s, run a comic book store from that room. When his brother passed away in the mid-1980s, he’d locked up the room, with the contents, and had only been back in there a few times over the preceding 18 years. Can you feel the tingles I felt in my hands on hearing this?

I asked if I could look at what was in there with an intent of buying and, after giving me the fish-eye for a few seconds, allowed that he could let me do that. All four walls of the little room were shelved, with stacks of old comics, none with protective bags on them or in any kind of order, piled on top of each other. There were comic boxes on the floor, mostly organized into an alphabetical order of sorts. On one lower shelf, on the right hand side of the room, were a stack of old comic magazines, with the top copies covered with a thick layer of dust. When I picked up the top one and blew the dust off, I was amazed. They were Warren file copies of Creepy and Eerie, from 1965–67, most with the Frazetta covers.

Never opened. No creases, bent corners or water damage. The top copies, as I said, had a thick coating of dust on them, but I’m a librarian. I know how to clean dust off a slick magazine cover without damaging what’s underneath.

I immediately set aside for purchase one copy of every separate issue of Creepy and Eerie that I could find.

In addition to the Creepys and Eeries, there were also a handful of copies of Skywald’s Psycho and Nightmare. I had Nightmare #3 as a kid, but had never seen, nor heard of, any other copies. I bought every original issue that I could of those as well.

I had a pretty good knowledge of the

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Warren magazines. I had started collecting them from my local Rexall drug store—the only place that sold black&-white comic magazines, both Warren and, eventually, Marvel’s, in my hometown of Big Rapids, Michigan, starting in 1972. However, my knowledge of the Skywald books, which featured a lot of the same artists and writers that appeared in the Warren and Marvel titles, was sketchy at best.

I consulted the GCD but their records on Skywald at that time were equally sketchy and, in some cases, completely wrong. There was no information on how many titles there had been nor how long the runs were. I wrote to them about the incorrect information but didn’t get any kind of a reply.

I am a lover of lists, so I decided to create my own checklist of the Skywald material, since no one else had. I’d also discovered an online site, www. enjolrasworld.com, that listed (and still does) complete bibliographies of Alan Moore’s and Neil Gaiman’s respective works. I sent my early, incomplete checklist to them and they agreed to post it online. Within a couple of days after posting, a Skywald artist, Maelo Cintron, contacted me about it and asked if I had knowledge of where Al Hewetson, the 1972–75 editor of the Skywald magazines, might be located.

I didn’t, but let him know that if I heard anything I would contact him. A couple of weeks later, Hewetson noticed the still-incomplete online checklist and also contacted me. He was working on a book about his Skywald years and wanted to get into contact with both Cintron and Pablo Marcos. I put Cintron and he together and they began exploring a revival of the “Human Gargoyles” series, which had run as a serial in various Skywald magazines.

This was sadly cut short when Al died in January 2004.

Before that happened, it occurred to me that a little interview with Al might be a nice supplement to the growing checklist. We did one by email in December 2003 and it was added to my checklist. Al provided me with his own, also incomplete checklist, which gave the correct names of the Spanish artists

that he’d given English-sounding names to in the actual titles. He also provided the proposed contents of Science Fiction Odyssey, a 1971-era sciencefiction effort, involving adaptations of current science-fiction stories into graphic form, that then-Skywald editor Sol Brodsky had tried to put together.

It was canceled after being advertised, with the Jeff Jones covers and the interior contents scattered through various Skywald horror titles.

My interview was Al wasn’t very good. I had no idea what to ask, and using email to conduct an interview is not the best way to go. E-mail interviews lack freshness and a sense of ease, sharply restrict the possibility of feedback questions, and lose the “happy accident” of remembering something when you’re being questioned by an actual person. I think I’ve gotten a lot better since that one, though.

By now, I’d had enough information to peak the interest of the GCD and they used my checklists, not only of Skywald but the Warren titles as well, in their listings. Shortly after Al’s death I learned that Jon B. Cooke at the new CBA was doing a piece on Al and Skywald. I sent him my nearly complete checklist and he published it in CBA, Vol. 2, #4 at Top Shelf, along with a brief memory piece I wrote about my short acquaintance with Al. By this time, I had caught the checklist bug and was working up numerous ones on titles and companies that I was interested in. I was also tracking down writers, editors and artists that I could find to interview them and tack on those interviews to my checklists.

I was getting better at interviewing and had graduated to phone interviews. Some of those interviews were published in England, in fanzines such as Spooky and From the Tomb, both magazines that I greatly admired. I would have submitted more to CBA but it vanished after #5 in 2005. I sent a few to Roy Thomas at A/E but didn’t get much of a response until one day I sent him an interview I’d done with Robert Gerstenhaber, a.k.a. Robert Gerson, who, as a teenager in 1970–71, had published a two-issue fanzine called

The World of TwoMorrows

and if he has to make a decision about dropping something, usually it’s a very good one—not that I can’t change something later.

The other thing is, as you can appreciate—we go through two or three drafts of it. It’s not like he sends me something, I proofread it, and send it back and we’re done. We go through two or three drafts because, in order to get it back to him in a day or so when I get this book—it’s 96 interior pages or so—I have to do it quickly, so I always miss some stuff and later find some more things.

It’s always a two- or three-week process of going back and forth, with FedExing two or three hard copies back and forth. Near the end, we do it by email and I run them off. Those I see in color but I don’t run them off, as it would be too expensive to run off anything in color, so I abandoned any idea of running off anything in color, but Dann says he must be either a saint or a masochist to put up with how I work. I don’t know any other way to work, and it was that way at Marvel, too. I would have a reputation for nitpicking and wanting things done in certain ways. At Marvel, people have more broad leeway to do things; I wasn’t looking at every single comma. But, if I’m going to get involved with something, I have to get involved completely or I’ll get frustrated or unhappy.

Who started [the layout on] the first issue? Didn’t Chris Knowles start it?

Reality. Those two issues published a number of unpublished stories by the likes of Len Wein, Michael Kaluta, Frank Brunner, Steve Hickman, and Bruce Jones. All those stories had been originally intended for Warren rival Web of Horror, which had ceased publication earlier, in 1970.

Roy liked the interview and published it in A/E #73 (Oct. 2007), making me an official comics historian. That comics historian label scared the crap out of me the first time someone (Tony Isabella) used it to describe me. Historian, to me, means you’ve got to get it right.

That’s not always easy when you’re dealing with someone’s memories of seventy years or more ago. I actually prefer Studs Terkel’s description of “oral historian”—in my case, one who deals mostly with comic book people.

At first, I sent in various interviews

Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

JBC: Yes. I came in on #2, I think.

Roy: Didn’t John and Pam do one?

[Co-editor John Morrow’s note: I had to step in and finish the layout on Alter Ego #1, when Chris Knowles decided the level of work involved was more than he could deal with. Jon B. Cooke did most of the layout on Alter Ego #2–7 with minor input from me, until Chris Day came on board with #8, and, thankfully, he’s still the designer today, after 19 years!] Pam was thinking about doing it regularly and then she had the kids. John did a couple and you came back and did a handful when Chris Day was away, but I don’t remember if there was anyone else in there.

JBC: I had a local friend of mine do a bunch of preliminary work for it, Janet Sanderson.

Roy: It worked out quite well for my viewpoint.

I wasn’t surprised you didn’t do it for too long because I knew you wanted to do your own magazine. It was something you would do to make a few bucks, but knew you wouldn’t do it for the long haul, I figured. Chris [Day] has another job, too.

I guess he does this nights and weekends. God bless him; I hope he keeps doing it forever. Nothing lasts forever, but I hope this lasts forever!

Above: Superb designer/magazine production whiz Chris Day—or as Dann Thomas calls him, “Saint Chris”—who has worked his creative magic on A/E for innumerable years.

The Future of History

JBC: [Chuckles] So, there’s no end in sight for you?

Roy: Nah, I think back with amusement when we

and Roy either accepted or rejected them. A couple of times he suggested a short article on varying subjects. Then one day he asked me if I’d be interested in writing a long article, not an interview, about the effects the Comics Code had on comics in the 1950s. I’m not a fool. I said yes. However, I was fully aware that this was: A) a test of my abilities—from Roy Thomas, a writer that I mentioned I respected a great deal—a bit unnerving, that; and B) outside of my comfort zone. I’d done a fair number of interviews but nothing really long form in the way of an article.

The Comics Code was a subject that I was aware of but not particularly knowledgeable about.

I got it done and, after a few minor cuts to shorten it, Roy published it in A/E #105, with a beautiful cover by the late Josh Medors, based on art by

Steve Ditko. It wasn’t my first cover feature. That happened with a long Steve Englehart interview that was split between A/E #103 and Back Issue #51.

Since then, I’ve appeared regularly in A/E, BI, and Jon’s Comic Book Creator, providing interviews, articles and, for CBC, a regular column on “Comics in the Library.” I’ve had great fun doing it, meeting so many of my heroes, from both child and adulthood.

I’d like to thank Roy Thomas, Jon B. Cooke, Michael Eury, and John Morrow, as well as all the people I’ve had the honor to interview and all the readers who’ve bothered to take the time to read all that stuff.

It’s an honor to have been acquainted with all of you and to wish the best to TwoMorrows on their 25th anniversary.

I’m looking forward to another 25 years!

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1999: ALTER EGO Left: In 2000, Roy drove from his South Carolina home to TwoMorrows headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, to bring his bound copies of All-Star Comics to be scanned for All-Star Companion, Vol. One, and while there, spent quality time with John and Pam Morrow.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, when you hear how little the money is—it’s like $300 a week writing seven days worth of strips,” I said, “Stan, you have no idea how little money I can live on out here in the country! My place is paid for and I don’t have any bills except for what I run up in a month. I’m sitting out here with my land and my two houses and my vehicles and I don’t need anything else; I’ll just buy books to read! That’s great.” Right away, that was already as much as or more than I was making teaching. Even if that was all I was doing, I could’ve gotten by with that and Social Security, and then all the Marvel movies happened and all of a sudden, the last few years I’m earning more than I was making most of the years I was writing comics full-time.

JBC: Wow! Roy: That’ll go away, too, one of these days. It won’t matter. My were moving toward issue #100: John says a couple of people wife is very frugal; anything that comes in, she socks away. came up to him at conventions and said, “Is Roy going to quit JBC: Good to have those people in our lives! Do you have a with #100?” I wouldn’t have any particular reason to quit at 100. memorable issue, a favorite issue; any specific issue you can pick I don’t see a reason why there should be a milestone. At some out as memorable? stage, I’ll just run out of energy or something else will come up Roy: God. Of course, I worked the hardest on the ones that to make it impossible, and I’ll have to figure something out. I’d dealt with myself because that was just me then. But they were certainly want to turn over the work to someone. I don’t know if the ones I had to put the most work into. If I look over, I think I’d want to turn over the name “Alter Ego,” but I’d want to see of certain people… I always enjoyed doing special issues about all the work I have turned over to somebody else and see some- Stan. Putting together an issue about Joe Kubert was good beone put it in another magazine. But, hey! I’m only 78! I figure it cause Joe was my all-time favorite comic artist. Unfortunately, he will go on for a little longer. The nice thing now is, the nadir of passed away while we were working on that one. I don’t know! It my professional life was 1999 or 2000. That was about the time seems like every third or fourth issue… it’s kind of funny—there the Marvel stuff ran out. Marvel dropped the rights to Conan and will be issues. You know this happens—it goes along and it’s a the other stuff was kind of running out, and I was getting less good issue and you’re happy with it… and you look forward to and less work from Marvel at that point. it… and every few issues, there is one you particularly like.

So, I ended up having two things, one good one… That I was especially happy to do an issue with Norman Maurer, was about the time you had come in; we had just started Alter whom I liked as an artist and knew him and his wife slightly…

Ego—I started Vol. 2 in 1998. In 1999, we launched it as a sepand he was Moe Howard’s son-in-law. I liked doing the Larry Ivie arate magazine and that gave me something to do, but I wasn’t issue, because while I didn’t know him well, he was an interesting going to make enough money, so I might not have been able to character and early fan and he had all this body of work. Sandy continue it. The other thing I did was that one additional year of Plunkett did such a wonderful job of telling his story—a story of teaching that was so God-awful. I hated it and kept trying to get an artist who almost made it, but didn’t quite—and why he was out of it after a few weeks. “This is not for me; I don’t want to do always still important to the field. it.” They talked me into sticking around for the full nine months, I guess if I started looking through every five or six issues, which I did. The nice thing that happened was good ol’ Stan as I’d find something that especially moved me. If I was paging always coming to my rescue. About the start of 2000, around through one of the bound volumes, there’d be certain ones I the same time Alter Ego was getting going and I was teaching, stop and look at a little longer, but I try to see to it that every I contacted Stan about his dot.com and said, “If there’s every issue has something in it. anything I can do, I’d love to work for you again.” I didn’t think JBC: Is there anyone else you want to mention? there was too much chance with stanlee.com because he had Roy: In spite of her ambivalence about it, Dann is pretty supso many people working with him right before the whole thing portive. She’ll help me out with something or other if I’m trying crashed. He said, “You really have to be right here to work on to find something on the internet and she buys me all of these that, but I have something else I could use help with. I’ve got watches with the Alter Ego logo on it. She deserves the mensomebody else doing it now, but he’s not really a writer and it’s tion I give her on every one of the “special thanks” pages, even just a temporary thing. I could use somebody to ghostwrite the though she’d probably be fine if I just retired the number at Spider-Man newspaper strip with me.” I said, “Oh, okay, great, this stage.

I’m in.”

The thing is, I’ve mentioned the main people: Jim and Richard I’d never really enjoyed writing Spider-Man, but it would be Arndt, in particular, as interviewers. You, for getting the whole nice to work with Stan and have that Marvel character. He said, thing started and being very supportive. John’s been a great

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The World of TwoMorrows

publisher to work with and also been very supportive. We’ve only had one or two tiffs at all, and no serious disagreements. It’s been a good relationship. I know that it doesn’t make him a ton of money; Back Issue does better because most of the people they’re reading about are still alive… and the Silver Age and Bronze Age stuff is hotter than stuff from the ’40s. I can’t understand that, but it’s a matter of taste.

Of course, Bill Schelly and Michael T. Gilbert have done wonderful work. It’s amazing; there will be people who will come along, if only to contribute to one issue—like Sandy Plunkett for the Larry Ivie thing—but it’s remarkable. What I try to do is, if I run into somebody with a special interest, I try to encourage them. There will be people who want to write an article about this and that and I’ll encourage them to go for it. I haven’t had many articles come in where the person bit off more than he could chew. There are one or two articles that I won’t mention by name and I delayed using them forever because I’d have to rewrite them so thoroughly that it would be two or three times as much work as a normal issue—and it was when it came!

That’s only happened a small number of times.

Luckily, there are a lot of people who come from the industry who have a lot of talent. There is a lot of talent out there. People able to interview, people able to write, people able to come up with concepts and put it together fairly well. I’ve always been surprised that I have to do so little rewriting. Maybe if I were thinking in terms of a more serious book, I’d have to look a little deeper. For the purposes of Alter Ego and what we’re trying to do, most people do a good job. I don’t look at it and say, “This piece has good information but is a disorganized mess that I’m going to have to rearrange.” I’ve only had that in a small handful of pieces. For the most part, I try not to work with those people anymore because it’s not going to do them—or me—any favors. I’m just happy to be working with so much talent… that’s how Jim Amash found me: “Do you mind if do a lot of interviews?” “Yeah, go for it!”

I also need to mention Shane Foley and Randy Sargent, who were a discovery of Michael T. Gilbert. They produced some alternate Marvel covers, using interior art, which were used as the basis of a flip-cover lead article on an early A/E. Later, if I recall correctly, after I’d run through the Ron Harris drawings of the Alter Ego hero and the Biljo White drawings of Alter and Captain Ego, all as what I called “maskots,” Shane drew an additional one or two, just for a lark… and before long

Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

he was doing one for each issue. I’m gratified that he—and now Randy Sargent coloring most of them—has become a part of Alter Ego’s dysfunctional family. Shane’s even done several covers for A/E. I’m grateful for those guys—and am to all the many people who contribute scans or information to each issue.

JBC: You were nominated for an Eisner Award for “Best Comics-Related Periodical.” You were a bridesmaid any number of times.

Roy: We won once!

JBC: And you won! What was it like?

Roy: I don’t know; I’ve got the award upstairs. If we ever win again, I told John he could have the next one. We won around 2007 or so, around 10 years ago. We’ve been nominated several times. Considering that they don’t sell huge numbers of copies, we don’t have a high profile, there’s so much stuff out there lumped into the same situation—your magazine, my magazine, other people’s magazines, books—a lot of things to have three or four or five nominees. It’s always amazing to me. It’s not that I don’t think we deserve it every year, but I’m quite content with the fact that we’re not going to get nominated every year. [chuckles] JBC: Do you think it’s amazing that TwoMorrows has lasted all this time? That there continues to be a market for these magazines?

Roy: Yes, it is amazing. I don’t mean to denigrate him by saying this, but John stumbled into it because of his own enthusiasm for Kirby, right?

JBC: Right.

Roy: It wasn’t just to do a magazine, but his enthusiasm for Kirby. So he started doing the magazine and it slowly turned into this mini-empire. It’s been really good and he’s managed to keep it together, bringing in new stuff like the LEGO magazine and now RetroFan. It all kinds of fits together. Maybe not the LEGO stuff, but it’s its own separate department. I think it’s great TwoMorrows has

Below: It’s amazing the material Roy manages to find—and the fact that it still exists! Here’s Mart Nodell’s original art to the cover of Marvel Mystery #81 [Mar. 1947].

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‘MASKOT’ MASTER: One Foley at TwoMorrows 1996: Good friend and comics mate Mark Muller (who often appears in the “thanks to” section of Alter Ego) told me there was a new mag out called The Jack Kirby Collector. Unlike Mark (who lives in Brisbane in Australia), I lived miles from any comic shop (five hours north of Brisbane, in Bundaberg) so he said he’d get me one. I didn’t expect anything much. I had Amazing Heroes #100 and some Comics Scenes and Comics Feature issues about Jackstuff. And I had spent big bucks on the wonderful Wyman/Hohlfeld volume of The Art of Jack Kirby that Mark had introduced me to. So what more could there be?

Then TJKC #9 (the first Fantastic Four issue) arrived and my Kirby world exploded! The sheer volume of Kirby pencil copies that existed was stunning!

That the bulk of the original FF “Janus” story could be reconstructed was unbelievable! That there were FF #20 pencils of an unused cover was a revelation!

The background info that was presented was beyond anything I could have hoped for. And Shane Foley to think this Contributor, was just the A/E & TJKC beginning of the mountains Born: 1957 of unseen Kirby Residence: work and pencil Bundaberg, pages and beAustralia hind-the-scenes Vocation: intricacies that Patient Transport continued to (Ambulance) Officer be unearthed! I Favorite Creator: was hooked.

Jack Kirby Mark and I both wrote our Seminal Comic Books: Fantastic Four #63–73 memories of first reading Kirby for TJKC’s ‘International’ issue [#12] and that became my first jottings published by TwoMorrows. (Mark’s too, I think).

The quality of the articles and the research in so many issues was inspiring.

Often, new thoughts were kindled that prompted exploration on my part. Or I was reminded of old thoughts that I

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wanted to follow up. So I began writing down those findings, and discovered (as one always does when committing thoughts to paper) that the putting of those thoughts into a logical form took discipline, and sometimes exposed conclusions or opinions that were weak, or even inspired new ones. It’s a wonderful process. I sent some to TJKC, and John, bless him, began publishing many of them. (It was all snail-mail in the beginning—a different world!) It was nice to know that those themes which interested me were also deemed interesting to the readership. Who would have thought that I’d have, to date, over 20 articles published, and as many letters? All from having wonderful fun, motivated by a wonderful magazine!

TJKC #16 [July ’97] had seen the first mention of a proposed second mag devoted to other great artists. What a great idea! By the next issue of TJKC we knew it was to be known as Comic Book Artist and were treated to the logo! Then in #18 we saw the cover of CBA #1 with those Neal Adams’ Batman pencils and the promise of the second issue looking at Marvel in the ’70s. Now this was really interesting!!

Except for the Kirby books, I’d never been a DC guy, so CBA #1’s promise was only so-so for me. It was #2 that I wanted.

But when #1 arrived, something unexpected happened. I found that it was very interesting! The unseen, behind-the-scenes work, the discussions and memories of the creators, be they writer, editor, artist, letterer or janitor, opened the professional world of so many artists and comic company dealings and related stories that hadn’t interested me before. Kirby—no problem! Always interested in his work. Ditto for Buscema and Romita and Colan and Thomas and Englehart and the like.

But CBA, in conjunction with Alter Ego, brought the world of many other creators and their books to life in a way I had not anticipated. I even got a taste of the Golden Age, which, beyond The Phantom newspaper strip, had never had more than a passing interest for me.

Michael T. Gilbert did my good friend and great colorist Randy Sargent and me a huge favor (and compliment) when he arranged for Roy to use some faux Kirby covers we’d made up (for Hulk, Giant-Man, etc.) as an Alter Ego #27 cover (I just looked it up. August 2003…? Sixteen years ago?).

What a hoot!

Then an unexpected involvement with Alter Ego happened.

Since, back then, the mags were all black-&-white, I was already in touch with Roy regarding sending him copies of Australian b-&-w reprints. Guessing that he seemed to be running a bit short of “maskot” illustrations, I asked him if he wanted me to create some, using adapted versions of figure-work by various Golden and Silver Age artists. I got the nod and drew up a batch of drawings (according to an email I have, I did 12—I hadn’t remembered I did so many first up!) The first one was printed in A/E #42 [November 2004] and one has appeared in virtually every issue since.

Who’d have thought it? Again, simply great fun!

Lots of faux covers for Bob Rozakis’ “Secret History of AA Comics” (many done with Larry Guidry), inking Larry’s

The World of TwoMorrows

lasted so long and I hope it goes on forever. What’s always made me wonder is, at some stage, John would decide—not that the books weren’t making a profit or that he didn’t like doing them—but decides it’s time to do something else with his life. So far, he hasn’t decided that and I hope he doesn’t for a while. [laughter] JBC: Yeah! Me, too! How do you recall the surprise that we had for you for your 75th birthday?

Roy: Oh! I can see it right now. It shouldn’t have caught me off guard so much because there were characters in there, like Alter Ego! I guess it’s just that I knew John was going to do something or other, but I kind of glanced at it and didn’t pay too much attention to those spreads. I thought it had these interesting artists, but it slipped by me because I wasn’t expecting it to be all characters I had created and/or written. That one thing he made that he put altogether that’s… what… eight feet long or something?

JBC: Yeah, pretty long.

Roy: Dann hung that up in my office and I can see it right now. It was quite a surprise and very touching. I sure appreciated you and John for doing that.

I don’t know what to say. I probably didn’t thank you enough for doing it.

JBC: Oh, you did. [chuckles] Roy: It certainly was appreciated and very unexpected. [Editor’s note: See the sidebar about this on pages 240–241] JBC: About your four All-Star Companions: how can you get that many volumes out? What can you share?

Roy: It wasn’t about just one comic; it was a bunch of them and there was All-Star itself, which was my main impetus and carried through all, but there were also all the comics I did. I did what… four, five, six different titles of various types in the ’80s of short run or long run things about that? There was pencils of a version of Roy’s first ever DC submission (for A/E #100), and many other mini-assignments followed.

Two special highlights come to mind.

I was delighted to find a b-&-w reprint of a Western story that John Romita loved, and had no copy of, and being able to send it to him. And I was honored to be asked by Jon B. Cooke to participate in helping create illustrations for the looooong poster TwoMorrows prepared for Roy’s 75th birthday surprise! What a privilege.

Roy Thomas: Alter Ego

even the All-Star Western I could make an article about. There was the whole Julie Schwartz Earth-2 stuff, and there was the Paul Levitz/ Gerry Conway stuff in the ’70s.

To me, All-Star Comics was such an all-consuming interest because I consider it my all-time favorite concept: The super-hero group, and for many years, virtually the only such thing I cared for.

I felt there were endless things you could attach to it to make additional volumes. We were going to do a fifth volume except DC upped the licensing fee so much that we ended up having to put some of those articles in Alter Ego instead, and some of those have never been published. We probably shouldn’t have published Volume 4, because all of a sudden, it cost so much more to put together than the first three. They didn’t spring that on us until we were almost done with the whole fourth book or we probably wouldn’t have done it. But, you know, it was my particular homage, I suppose, the thing above all else that fascinated me about comics. I’m fascinated about a lot of the aspects of comics, but not as much as All-Star Comics.

JBC: Any other thing that comes to mind? You worked on a Johnny Romita book?

Roy: Yeah, but that was just putting together a couple of interviews that Jim and I had already done and adding a new one or so. We did those couple of books and then John republished The Best of Alter Ego and then we did a second volume of that. That was kind of nice; we got

I’m so glad I’ve been aware of TwoMorrows for 23 of its 25 years.

As so many will testify, the wealth of information and knowledge, together with the joy that comes from devouring the published insights into our beloved comic medium, is staggering. A sheer delight! Sure, there are other publications about comics young and old, and many are fine. But TwoMorrows does it so well. And for me, providing a small amount of material for them to publish is just the icing on the cake.

Above and below: Solomon Grundy debuted in All-American Comics #61 [1944], and reappeared in the 33rd issue of Roy’s cherished All-Star Comics, in 1947.

So it should come as no surprise that he’d name his own prize piggie “Solomon Grunty”!

Hard work for John and the team!

Great fun for us! Thank you!

One last memory: I still remember laughing out loud when I read Pam’s intro to Collected TJKC Vol. 2, with her reference to John’s “stinky little books.” Classic!

(Now, if only they could go back to the Buscema family and see if, after all these years, they could finally produce that Big John Buscema book!)

Previous page: Shane’s Alter Ego “maskots.”

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1999: ALTER EGO Left: Roy shares the stage with mentor Stan Lee, at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum, Dec. 2014. Inset below: Roy was grateful to finally use Sam Grainger’s cover art as originally intended for A/E Vol. 1, #10, as cover art for The Best of Alter Ego, Vol. 2 [2013].

to use Sam Grainger’s cover that had been done for #10, but never came out that way. I’ve still got a couple of other projects that John and I have discussed and I want to do. I’ll do them for TwoMorrows if John doesn’t change his mind.

One is I want to turn my master’s thesis, which is now eight or ten years in the past—which was on the comics of the Cold War, up through at least sometime in the ’60s (it faded out, but you could always find echoes)—the first decade or two of the Cold War in comics… I want to take out the academic prose I had to write it in and make a book.

The other thing is to do my own weird version of an autobiography. I don’t know which one I’ll start first. One thing I regret is I wasn’t able to contribute more to the American Comic Book Chronicles series. I was supposed to do the two volumes on the ’40s, but I just felt I was too busy with other things at the time.

I felt I’m not really a “data” person. I can do that, but there are other people who would do it better. They’ve mostly been quite good and I was particularly impressed by Bill Schelly’s book on the ’50s. So I got Kurt Mitchell, who had done a lot of the work for the later versions of the All-Star Companions, including some of the stuff that we couldn’t use, and he seemed to have a good feel for doing that kind of thing. I think he kind of burned out with his health doing the first one, so Bill is coming in and will do the one on the second half of the ’40s. [Editors note: Since this interview took place, Bill Schelly unexpectedly passed away, but not before completing a rough draft of the American Comic Book Chronicles: 1945-49 book, which Kurt Mitchell will now be completing.]

At least I helped find somebody to take it over. I’m sort of identified as working with Kurt, but really it’s Kurt’s book. I gave a little advice here and there; proofread it and whatever. I’m impressed with the books. I try to keep a collection of everything, except the LEGO stuff, which is fine but just not to my taste.

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John comes out with these nice books on different individual artists and so forth, and even the modern guys—the old guys, whatever. I’m pleased to see what he and Eric Nolen-Weathington and the others are doing with that. Every once in a while, I’m tempted to get involved with something like that and I think, “What am I talking about? I can barely keep Alter Ego above water with everything else I’m doing.” It’s better if I just do that and unless there’s anything that has to do with my own interests, like turning my thesis into a book or doing an autobiography, I’d better stick with Alter Ego. JBC: Is that an important part of your legacy?

Roy: I guess so, whether I want it to be or not. I don’t think in terms of “legacy,” because I never intend to die, you know? [laughter] Although, it happens sometimes. As Stan said the last time I saw him, “This trying to live to be 100 isn’t as much fun as I’d hoped it would be.”

I want to keep busy. I like comics. I can get by without them; if I didn’t have Alter Ego, I’ve got so much stuff to read. My God, I buy almost everything that comes out that reprints comic strips— though I’m not completely up on the Disney stuff. I have all the Marvel Masterworks, all the old DC Archives, which are kind of discontinued now. All the stuff Dark Horse does and that Craig Yoe does with IDW and all this stuff. I get to read about one out of every 10 or 20 of them.

I keep sitting here thinking one day Dann’s going to have to dump all this stuff, have a fire sale, or donate to a library. In the meantime, all my life I wanted this personal library of comic books and comic strips, and in the last couple of decades there’s been this explosion of this material—so as long as I can, as long as I have the interest, and as long as I can do it without taking food off the table, I’ll continue to collect everything I possibly can. I figure if I’m lucky, I’ll live long enough to read about 20 percent of it!

JBC: [Chuckles] You’ll always be a fan and a pro, simultaneously?

Roy: A pro depends on someone giving him assignments. I’ll always be someone who’s been a pro. It’s like people who win an Oscar.

Are they no longer actors because they won an Oscar 30 or 40 years ago? They made a mark in the business. In that respect, I’m still a pro.

I’ll always be a fan of comics in general and a certain kind of comic book in particular. I like all kinds of comics, but I like a specific genre of comics—heroic. While that’s changed over the years from what it was the ’40s and then what it became with Stan and now it’s changed again, and isn’t as much to my taste— that’s okay. Everyone’s been predicting the doom of comics, at least since the ’50s, if not sooner, and they still keep plugging along. They seem to fill some need… still.

Next page: Alter Ego’s indispensable “Maskot” cartoonist Shane Foley drew this Alter Egothemed pastiche of the iconic cover of the “Silver Anniversary” Superman Annual #7 [Summer 1963]. Colors by “Colorist Supreme” Tom Ziuko.

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BILL SCHELLY: MY PAST TWOMORROWS—A/E, R.T. & Me It’s hard for me to nail down the moment when my relationship with TwoMorrows began. Was it the day when my first contribution appeared in one of John and Pam’s magazines?

That would be The Jack Kirby Collector #18 [Jan. 1998], where a sketch of Captain America that Kirby had done for me in 1965 was published. It was certainly the first occasion when my name appeared in the magazine. This was several months before Comic Book Artist #1 saw print, with its flip-book Alter Ego section. That section, edited by a certain co-founder of Alter Ego, established my role as associate editor of the new incarnation of the seminal fanzine.

The thing is, there were earlier developments that led to Roy asking me to play a substantial role in the new endeavor. They began at the 1992 San Diego Comic-Con, when I joined a group of frenzied fans following Roy as he made his way through a concourse to his next appearance on a panel. He and I had never met before, but I was in the midst of writing the history of fandom of the 1960s, and wanted to tell him about my project in person.

After shaking some hands and signing some comics, Roy turned to me and allowed me to show him my new publication, called The History of the Amateur Comic Strip. It was a photocopied fanzine that told the history of the amateur comics that had been popular in the 1960s, includBill Schelly ing his “BestAssociate Editor, est League of Alter Ego America” in Born: 1951 Alter Ego, as Deceased: 2019 well as Ronn Residence: Foss’ “The Seattle, Wash.

Eclipse” and other things Vocation: Writer that were Favorite Creators: published Jack Kirby, Harvey during his peKurtzman, John Stanley riod [1964–69] Seminal Comic Book: as full editor Amazing Spider-Man #7 of the ’zine.

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Suddenly Roy’s semi-harried demeanor vanished as he paged through it, and “got” what I was doing. I asked if he would help me on such future projects.

He responded enthusiastically, jotted down his contact info, and, with a quick wave, was on his way.

Thus our Casablanca-like “beginning of a beautiful friendship” took flight.

As I began thinking in terms of writing a history of fandom of the 1960s in general, Roy contributed much more than I originally thought possible (given how busy he was), even to the extent of writing the introduction for the book that I named The Golden Age of Comic Fandom and self-published (through my Hamster Press imprint) in the summer of 1995. He even helped me proof the manuscript!

What cemented my friendship with Roy, on my part, was that I realized he was sincerely interested in my efforts to chronicle the rise of comicdom. Some who I had met earlier, such as Bill DuBay, gave off the attitude that his work in the fanzines was barely worth remembering or discussing. But Roy saw the value of what I was doing, which was a most welcome message of affirmation.

At this juncture, I met John and Pam Morrow, also at the 1995 San Diego Comic-Con. I was sharing a small table in the exhibit hall, where I signed and sold the first copies of The Golden Age

of Comic Fandom. Nearby, another young publisher had copies of his periodical The Jack Kirby Collector, which had been sanctioned by the Kirby estate. Naturally, as I admired his publication (and bought a couple of issues), I fell into conversation with the blond, bespectacled fellow who was its editor and publisher: John Morrow. My first impressions were that he was well-spoken, polite and upbeat. I liked him, and I liked the magazine. Once I got home, I began telling my correspondents and associates about the Kirby Collector.

I had no idea what would follow from that initial meeting.

After the 1995 con, I realized there was another book that I wanted to publish. When I proposed to Roy a Hamster Press book that reprinted the best of Alter Ego, to be co-edited by him and me, he immediately responded in the affirmative—the only caveat being that his work on it would have to be done after his professional writing obligations were fulfilled.

While we were working on this book, the idea of throwing a “fandom reunion” at the Chicago Con in 1997 came up. It began after I attended the San Diego bash for two years in a row, and was looking for a change. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to go to another of the major cons in 1997, and perhaps meet some members of 1960s fandom

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who rarely if ever made it to the California event?

The reunion was a rousing success, but there was an enterprise that I learned about at that Chicago convention that had a far-reaching impact on my life. I was having lunch with Roy and Dann Thomas in our hotel restaurant.

After we’d chatted a moment, I noticed two people who I recognized sitting by themselves at a small table, not far away: John and Pam Morrow. I turned to Roy and said, “That’s John Morrow sitting over there. Do you know him?

Should I invite him and Pam over?”

Roy grinned. “We’ve traded emails, but haven’t met. Sure.”

I caught John’s eye, waved, and beckoned. After a moment’s hesitation, the two Morrows joined us. They began talking about a new magazine they were planning to publish called Comic Book Artist. The earliest print allusion to it was in The Jack Kirby Collector #16, the July 1997 issue, where their editorial stated, “We’re considering publishing a new, TJKC-style ’zine, with each issue devoted to different comics greats. It’d be spearheaded

by TJKC’s new associate editor Jon B. Cooke.” After shaking hands for the first time, Roy and John revealed that Roy might be a contributing editor to Comic Book Artist, perhaps even with a “partitioned” Alter Ego section in the back. This would serve several purposes: a selling point (what with Roy being a well-known comics professional), an added dimension since it would feature Roy’s interest in comics from the ’40s and ’50s, and it would help Cooke fill up his pages with high quality material.

After the reunion, Roy and I worked to put the final touches on our “Best of” Alter Ego book. I won’t say working with Roy on the book was always easy.

Often it was, but there were times when the man’s attention to detail was almost too much for me. But, I told myself, this is a good thing—right? And… it was.

Alter Ego: The Best of the Legendary Comics Fanzine, which was published in the fall of 1997, was an immediate sales success. (Indeed, I didn’t print enough copies, so TwoMorrows eventually did

Bill Schelly: My Past TwoMorrows

another printing to meet the demand.)

In any case, I didn’t hesitate when Roy asked if I would be associate editor of his Alter Ego section in Comic Book Artist, writing something about the history of fandom in most issues. I knew that our rapport would get us past any bumps in the road, so I entered upon this new endeavor with unalloyed enthusiasm.

By the time the first issue came out, in the spring of 1998, what started as a 16-page section had evolved to have its own flip cover and pages. (Hence, the magazine could be displayed on a shelf as either CBA or A/E.) The cover of that issue, which appeared the following spring, was a beautiful Hawkman drawing that I’d asked Joe Kubert to do as a birthday gift for Ronn Foss. It was the only thing I brought to the first issue.

For me, being officially involved with Alter Ego was a dream come true.

The “coming out” party for Comic Book Artist and Alter Ego was at the 1998 Comic-Con International in San Diego. John Morrow designed a huge banner displaying both covers for the TwoMorrows booth. He also gave me space there to sell copies of Alter Ego: The Best of the Legendary Comic Fanzine. It was a convention that I would never forget.

I don’t think any of us dreamed Alter Ego would still be going in 2019—not because there wasn’t a great deal of potential material to fill its pages, but because publishing is so often a turbulent endeavor. Although John and

Pam Morrow inspired confidence by their demeanor and the quality of the magazines they had published in their first few years, we didn’t know they had the staying power, consistency and vision to keep the company alive and growing for the next couple of decades, and beyond. The story of their ongoing success in a tough marketplace, year after year, is downright inspiring! Not only that, but A/E itself has shown a remarkable consistency, being helmed by Roy for 20-plus years, and produced by much the same editorial staff as it had at the start, with high quality sections individually edited by Michael T. Gilbert and P. C. Hamerlinck, as well as my “Comic Fandom Archive” columns. Our other associate editor, Jim Amash, has also been around since the beginning, contributing many of the ground-breaking interviews that filled the pages of the magazine, especially in its first decade.

I owe a great deal to Roy, and to John and Pam Morrow, for Alter Ego has been good to me. So have its thousands of readers, who constantly remind me that the love of comic art and comics history can’t be denied.

Note: Portions of this article appeared in Bill’s memoir Sense of Wonder: My Life in Comic Fandom [North Atlantic Books, 2018]. William Carl Schelly tragically passed away at age 67, on Sept. 12, 2019.

Previous page: Jerry Bails, Bill Schelly, and Roy Thomas.

Above: Bill with best friend Jeff Gelb at the TwoMorrows booth in 1998, just before the magazine went solo.

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2000: ALTER EGO

If You Worked in Comics, You Deserve to be Remembered Jim Amash

Interviewer, Associate Editor of Alter Ego Born: 1960 Residence: Greensboro, North Carolina Vocation: Comic book artist Favorite Creator: Jack Kirby Seminal Comic Book: Too many to choose from!

A major component of TwoMorrows’ version of Alter Ego is its relentless search for the life stories of creators from comics’ past. Few have done more to find and celebrate those unsung heroes than interviewer Jim Amash.

Below: TwoMorrows books Jim has co-authored—just a few of hopefully many more to come!

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The Acme Years

Eric Nolen-Weathington: How did you first hear about TwoMorrows? The Kirby Collector?

Jim Amash: I met John back in ’86, when I was working at Acme Comics [the Greensboro, North Carolina comic book store] and we had Jack Kirby as a guest at our convention. John found out about it a couple of months or so after it happened and was really upset. I remember when he came in, and he was asking about Kirby. He was so sorry he’d missed it. It was killing him, you know? He drove all the way from Raleigh to Greensboro, just to hear about the convention, so I thought, “Well, that guy likes Kirby.” [laughter] ENW: That’s about an hour and 45-minute drive.

Jim: Right! That was the first time I met John, but the first time I heard about The Jack Kirby Collector was from Bob Millikin, who used to work for Acme Comics after I left and became a comic book artist.

He heard that there was a Kirby Collector magazine that was going to come out, and I think I got John’s phone number and called him, and John was surprised that I remembered him. I didn’t remember him by name, but we had talked when he came in the shop, so I remembered him. And because he knew I was a big Kirby fan, he gave me a comp copy, and then gave me comp copies after that! Of course, I was thrilled about it. And I contributed to the magazine some over the years. I contributed some photographs, a few Kirby pencil pieces that nobody had seen. Well, one had been seen in the

Jack Kirby Masterworks, an unused splash of Black Panther. I wrote a couple of small articles and I did interviews with John Severin, Mike Royer, and Joe Sinnott, all about inking Kirby. I may have done one more, but it’s hard to remember after all this time.

ENW: Was that the first time you ever interviewed someone, or had you done interviews at the shows you ran?

Jim: I’d interviewed people at the shows. And then I’d interviewed a few people in the APA [Amateur Press Association ’zine] that I was in. I’d interviewed Alex Toth, too. Alex was the first formal (even if it was kind of informal) interview I ever did. We talked every single night, sometimes more than once, and we talked about interesting stuff, I felt, and he felt that too, otherwise he wouldn’t have talked to me. [laughs] He was not always a patient man, you know. [laughter] Anyway, I wanted to do an interview, and also kind of have a record of our calls, but the problem with that was Alex got really uptight about it, and I wasn’t getting the kind of answers that I had hoped to get. But I did get an interview out of it, and then later I called him and filled in a few things. That was the first interview I conducted that was not done at a convention.

ENW: And when was that?

Jim: That would have been about 1990. I published it in the APA a year or two later, and then Jon Cooke reprinted it in Comic Book Artist.

ENW: And, just for context, at what point did you start working professionally as an inker?

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Jim: Nineteen ninety-two.

ENW: Okay, so you were talking to guys before you even broke in to the industry.

Jim: Well, Acme Comics put on a convention every year, so I got to know a lot of people through the years. You know me: I’m a guy that’s easy to talk with, so I’d go to a couple of other conventions and meet people and talk with them, and before I knew it, I knew people! [laughter] I wasn’t trying to make connections to get into comics by knowing all these people. In fact, none of the people I met at conventions got me into comic books. They helped me, because I would send my work out, and Alex Toth would criticize my work, and very gently—certainly a lot more gently than he criticized other people. I accused him, “Alex, I think you’re kind of soft on me because you like me.” His thundering answer was, “Like hell I am!” [laughter] “I’m not cutting you any slack! I just think you’re better than you think you are. At least you’re doing honest work. You’re not trying to be showy; you’re trying to tell a story.”

There were other people: Gray Morrow, Pat Boyette, Steranko, Dan Barry. I could spend some time on how Dan Barry taught me things about figure drawing and stuff like that. He was very important for me to understand some things: composition. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in fine arts, so I had an easier time breaking into comics because I had an art background, and I was doing fine art before I was doing comic books. And I had a couple of cartoons published in Amazing Heroes way back, sometime in the ’80s.

ENW: I didn’t know that!

Jim: I forgot about that myself. [laughter] Tom Heintjes, a buddy of mine, had gone to work for Fantagraphics and became editor of The Comics Journal. One day he just said, “You ought to submit a couple of cartoons to Amazing Heroes.”

I did and they were accepted. I remember one of them was an editorial about how Marvel had treated Kirby by not wanting to return his artwork, and making him sign that long form. I knew Jack, and I certainly was going to do something about that, and I did what little one man who’s not in the business could do, which is complain. [laughter] I always told my customers about it.

Years before I got into comics, I’d tell people what I believed about the Lee and Kirby creation process, and that Jack was, at the very least, the co-creator, which sometimes Stan would say that, and often he didn’t. And when he gave a deposition in the Kirby Family v. Disney lawsuit, Stan claimed he created everything, which was not true.

Jim Amash: Interviewer Extraordinaire

ENW: No. [laughter] Jim: Anyway, I became, not a frequent contributor, but I contributed some to the Kirby Collector, and I actually got to know John.

Above: A recent HeroesCon (Charlotte, North Carolina) encounter between Roy Thomas and Jim. Photo by Heidi Amash.

Working With Roy

ENW: When did you first encounter Roy Thomas?

Jim: I believe I met Roy in ’93. Somebody was putting on a small show in Charlotte and knew what a Roy Thomas fan I was, and thought it’d be cool to sit us next to each other, which really was great. We had a great time. Immediately started talking—two big talkers at the same time. [laughter] Nobody else got a word in. I got to ask him some questions, informally, of stuff I was interested in, and he asked a little about me, and that’s how Roy and I got to be friends, I mean literally from that moment on!

And then, of course, later Roy started doing Alter Ego on the flip-side of Comic Book Artist, and then A/E became a magazine on its own again after many years of lying dormant. I didn’t contribute to the earliest issues, because there was something about Roy that I didn’t realize. I was talking to Bill Schelly at the San Diego convention about him, and he said, “You’ve got to understand something with Roy: unless Roy knows that you know a lot about something, the best way, if you want to do something for Roy, is to approach Roy.” I’d been waiting for Roy to approach me, but I guess he was so busy, because he was still doing comic books, running the farm, running the magazine—you know, having a real life. [laughter] I’m sure I wasn’t on his radar when it came to the early issues, so I took Bill’s advice and called Roy, who said, “What do you have in mind?” I said, “There are two guys that really need to be interviewed. One is Vince Fago, because he was the main [Timely] editor when Stan Lee was in

Below: 2011’s Alter Ego: Centennial (a.k.a. Alter Ego #100) featured the first extensive interview with Jim about his work documenting comics history.

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2000: ALTER EGO military service during World War II.” He’d been interviewed once, but very inadequately, I felt, and he was hardly mentioned by Marvel’s 50th anniversary book, in ’89, because they wanted to focus on the Marvel Age rather than pre-Marvel Age. And I said, “The other person is Gill Fox,” who had given a great interview to Steranko for his History of Comics. But I felt like there was more that Gill Fox could say. And since these men were in their 80s, I figured you just can’t wait around. Roy says, “Great idea. I was thinking about interviewing Vince myself, but I’ll be happy to let you do it.” So, I interviewed both men. Roy was exceptionally pleased, because he didn’t know what I was going to do. He didn’t give me any guidelines; he just figured I knew what I was doing. Roy’s like that: If he has faith and trust in you, he’ll let you do your own work, because he knows that’s how you get the best work out of somebody, instead of standing over their shoulder all the time.

So when I did that—and I gave Roy a John Belfi interview that I had published in an APA as well—Roy was very pleased and asked if I wanted to become associate editor of the magazine, and I said, “Yes!” ENW: Sucker! [laughter] Jim: Yeah, he didn’t know any better! I claim he was drinking!

I actually don’t know if Roy drinks, but we’re going to claim it anyway! [laughter] ENW: What did being an associate editor entail, for you?

Jim: It meant that I could pitch ideas. It meant that Roy could use me as a sounding board. For many years, I was the first person he would talk to, more often than not. I was more of a sounding board than either Bill or Michael T. Gilbert. I think I was handier, because I was awake all the time. You know I don’t sleep much. And because the interviews I was doing were going to be bigger parts of the magazine by page count. Usually, Mike and Bill’s sections were anywhere from five to ten pages each, depending on what they wanted to do that particular issue, but some of my interviews were going 20–50 pages. Sometimes Roy would call me up and say, “This is what I’m thinking of doing for scheduling for the next six months,” or the next year, or whatever. And he’d go over it with me, and I remember one time, I said, “You’ve got two DC issues in a row. Do you want to do two DC issues in a row?” Roy said, “No, I wouldn’t. I’d like to switch to a different subject for each issue. Okay, I’ll put that one back a month, and then I’ll move this Marvel one in between.”

That was something I appreciated: Roy always appreciated and asked for my input. And he has never, never, never once treated me like a subordinate, but as an equal. It’s my favorite working relationship I’ve ever had with anybody connected with comics. Roy made it very easy to work for him. I stayed as long

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as I did because of Roy, who never questioned why I interviewed this or that person, because he understood what I was trying to do.

There were a few people he did suggest I interview.

Lily Renée may have been his suggestion. But he just let me do what I wanted to do. I wouldn’t even tell him who I was interviewing most of the time. I would do an interview, and when I was done with the transcriptions and all the editing I felt needed to be done, I’d send it to him, and that would be when Roy would find out what I was doing. I usually did not tell him in advance.

When he made me associate editor, he said, “You have carte blanche to do whatever you want.” And I said, “Great!” He said, “Well, who are you going to talk to next?” He was just being curious. I said, “Stan Goldberg!” Of course, Roy knew Stan, worked with Stan, admired Stan—and that was mutual by the way. Stan Goldberg really liked Roy a lot. I had felt that Stan was almost completely ignored in that Marvel 50th Anniversary book, and since Stan was the color designer of the Marvel universe, and it was hardly ever touched upon, I was determined to do something about that, and get him to talk about coloring the heroes and villains. Because he colored all the covers up until, I guess, ’65, or ’66, and he colored some afterwards even. Even when he was working at Archie, he still found time to occasionally color for Marvel in the ’60s through the 1980s. I don’t believe there’s a single Marvel hero or villain before ’66 that wasn’t color designed by Stan Goldberg, and I felt like that deserved a lot of attention.

ENW: Had you started working for Archie Comics by that point?

Jim: Yes, I had actually. I started there in ’96.

ENW: Did you already know Stan then?

Jim: No, I didn’t! [laughter] I called up my editor, Victor Gorelick, and I told him what I had in mind, and I said, “Could I have Stan’s phone number?” And so he gave it to me. I called up Stan and he knew who I was, because he’d seen my work in Archie comics. We had only worked together on a one-pager, that, frankly, I didn’t like the inks I did. Stan didn’t like the inks I did either. [laughter] Stan was kind of picky, but he was such a gentleman, I know he was reluctant to say anything. He didn’t admit that until I told him that was my first job for Archie, and I said, “I wish I had done better.”

I want to spend a little time here on Stan, not just because we were such dear, close friends, and I ended up being one of his main inkers. Bob Smith was his all-time favorite inker, and Stan said I was his second favorite all-time inker, regarding his Archie work. I can’t imagine he liked me more than Bill Everett. [laughter] But that was Millie the Model stuff. Stan had been interviewed, of course, numerous times, but not really about

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the subject that we wanted to talk about. We did talk about Millie the Model, and we did talk about Archie to a small extent, but my main interest, of course, was what people didn’t know about, which I felt was as important to his legacy as anything, which was his coloring for Marvel. He did tell me that Ditko had submitted a color rough of what he thought Spider-Man’s colors should have been, but Stan said, “I didn’t see that until much later.”

I read once that Ditko said that the colorist didn’t really follow quite what he wanted to do, but that’s because Stan Goldberg didn’t see it. Anyway, Stan was so pleased with the interview, that he started talking to people who had never been interviewed and always refused to do interviews, and they let me interview them because of Stan Goldberg.

He would talk to them and butter them up on the subject of allowing an interview with me. He really did all of us a great service, because I interviewed people like Bob Deschamps, who was never interviewed, who never signed his comic book work, and who had great stories of working in the Timely bullpen. The same with Dave Gantz—although Gantz did sign some of his comic work in the beginning, and then later on—and Emilio Squeglio, who was a Fawcett production artist, and Sy Barry.

He had talked to Joe Giella, and I hadn’t gotten around to Joe, because I had enough people on my list. It took me awhile to get to Joe Giella. Joe was kind of waiting, I guess, for me to interview him. Now we had never spoken, okay? And Stan mentioned one time, “Joe wants to know are you going to get around to him?” I said, “I will.” I was trying to get to the oldest people first, people who were in their late 80s or 90s. Since time was of the essence, I felt like I had to do that. On the day I decided to call Joe Giella. I told him who I was, and he said, “What kept you?” [laughter] It was pretty funny! He said it with a smile, of course. In fact, Sal Buscema, a couple years or so later, asked me in front of Roy, “How come you haven’t asked me for

Jim Amash: Interviewer Extraordinaire

an interview?” Roy said—I was getting ready to say the same thing, Roy was just half a second faster—“Because you’re too young!” [laughter] ENW: A lot of those names you threw out—people who don’t read Alter Ego, even though they’re comic book fans, might not know a lot of those guys, like Emilio Squeglio.

Jim: Right. But they’re some of my most important interviews.

ENW: Yeah, we’ve talked about this before. A lot of times, those guys you’ve never heard of will have the best information, because other people might have forgotten the details.

Jim: Right. Eisner was interviewed a million times, and I didn’t interview him until I found something that would be different. I don’t mean any disrespect to the big guns in comics history, but they often knew that they could get jobs somewhere, so there were a lot of things they didn’t have to worry about. But you take a person who was considered to be a “lesser light” for whatever the reason may have been, or at least he was perceived to be that way; what happened in these offices, and the people he met, and the contacts he made, were more important to that person, because they’re trying to scratch out a living. Will Eisner wasn’t one who had to worry about scratching out a living. The little things: the office politics, or the people who worked in those offices, were more important to creators who weren’t considered to be at or near the top, so they retained those kinds of memories better, I think, than some of the bigger people did.

And that made them more important interview subjects.

ENW: At what point did you figure that out though?

Jim: At the very beginning. When I interviewed

Above: Jim formed a close friendship with Jack and Roz Kirby over the years and spent many a night sleeping on the Kirbys’ sofa during trips West for Comic-Con. Photos by Teresa Davidson (left) and Roz Kirby.

Previous page: A candid moment with Jack, Roz, and Julie Schwartz, during the 1986 AcmeCon. John Morrow moved to North Carolina shortly after that event, and missed his chance at meeting Kirby, but Jim regaled the future TwoMorrows publisher with memories of that gathering of blockbuster talent at their first encounter. Photo by Teresa Davidson.

Below: An Amash illo of Jack’s signature villain Darkseid, done at the 2008 HeroesCon for collector Peter Roe.

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2000: ALTER EGO John Belfi back in ’91, I figured that out then. And I actually kind of knew going in with John, because I had read Steranko’s History of Comics, and there were a lot of names of people that a lot of fans hadn’t heard of. Everything I’ve done has been signed.

I don’t like the idea of people who were contributors to an art form essentially having their work buried in an unmarked grave.

It would be nice to know who worked on Captain Marvel besides Beck and Pete Costanza and Schaffenberger—like Ken Bald. We know Ken Bald did because the Jack Binder shop supplied a lot of their work early on. But who wrote and drew “Golden Arrow”?

As far as my interviews are concerned, I treated everybody the same way, meaning I felt Bob Deschamps was as important as Eisner, as important as Kirby, because the information is what is important—the information about their careers, the information about their perceptions of the industry, of the companies, of the people they worked with, of the people they knew. Objectively, it didn’t matter who gave me the information, as long as the information was good. I found the so-called “lesser lights,” which I always put in quotes, generally had information that the bigger names couldn’t supply me, because it wasn’t as important to them.

ENW: We talked about how you prioritized according to age, but were there guys you just couldn’t get to?

Jim: If I had started just a couple of years earlier, maybe I could have interviewed Matt Baker’s oldest brother. I missed out on a number of people. I would have loved to have interviewed Carl Pfeufer, because he took over the Sub-Mariner with that really strange triangular head, and really made him ugly. Pfeufer could draw, and Pfeufer at Fawcett drew Westerns in a totally different style. But he didn’t really want to talk about comics from what I heard. It’s a shame. He was very prolific during that time period, and we have very little information on him. I can’t say two or three; there’s just too many, you know? I would have loved to have interviewed Carl Burgos, but he was so angry at the comic book business, I don’t know that he would have agreed to it, because of what happened with the Human Torch, and how he felt screwed over. Because, you know, he sued.

ENW: And lost. And there’s the story of him burning all his comics in the backyard.

Jim: Right. His daughter, Susan, told me that. I would have liked to have interviewed Paul Taylor. He was a writer at DC Comics in the ’40s and ’50s, and then he went to Australia and went into television. He had a lot to do with getting The Adventures of Superman TV show syndicated in Australia and some other countries. And he lived long enough—he died in 2010—but he had such a common last name, I’d have never found him. There were thousands of people with his name. Missing out on people like him was the sort of thing I hate, especially writers. I wish I had been able to find more writers than I did, because they dealt more hands-on with editors than artists did.

ENW: This may be a misconception on my end, but do you find that writers keep better records of their careers?

Jim: Oh yes. Kim Aamodt and Walter Geier kept copies of all their scripts, but unfortunately both men happened to keep

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them in the attic, and the things were practically disintegrating.

Walter sent me three scripts, and one of them was a script that I don’t think was ever even published. But the things were so brittle that they were almost literally falling apart in my hands. I found that writers remembered characters they worked on maybe a tad bit better than the artists did.

One of the things I felt was important was people like Ed Cronin, who was an important editor in that time period. He was one of the first editors at Quality Comics. When he left, Gill Fox, who he’d hired as assistant editor, became the editor. Cronin went to Hillman Publications, and he had a lot to do with the creation of Airboy, and the Heap, among other characters. He died of cancer in the 1950s, and was obviously just never interviewed.

In my interviews, what I wanted to do, as much as anything else, was reconstruct the people who had died and never been interviewed. So, with everyone who worked at Quality comics very early on, like Tony DiPreta, or Bob Fujitani, or people who worked at Hillman—there’s a long list of them—I’d always ask, “What do you know about Ed Cronin?” Sometimes they’d tell me the same story, sometimes with maybe a slightly different slant, but they would always also remember different things about him. I was trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle by interviewing people about other people to a much greater extent, I think, than most other people had. I figured this: If you read five or six of my interviews in a row, you’ll see certain names mentioned in two, or three, or four of them. You start to get a sense of who that person was, and that way, I can save them from being forgotten. That’s the thing. I didn’t want anybody to be forgotten. If you worked in comics, you deserve to be remembered.

ENW: You also interviewed sons and daughters, grandsons, and nephews.

Jim: Right, whomever I could get, because the story is the most important thing. Whether the stories led to good or to bad, to me, was immaterial. I would treat a story that maybe was on the negative side with as much importance, no more, no less, than the good stuff. It’s the only way you can do objective history. I didn’t make a value judgment. The only value judgment that I ever made in my interviews was: “Is this accurate? Is this true?” When I thought somebody had exaggerated something, I didn’t print it. I didn’t tell them I wasn’t going to print it, either. [laughter] Here’s an example: I have two different stories on how Al McLean was fired from Timely. He was fired because he kept playing chess in the office, and Stan Lee said “Hey, do that on your own time!” But sometimes when they would take a break, he’d get the board out and set it up on a trash can. Stan Lee got tired of that, and fired him. And then later, Al Jaffee told me another story about how he had fired McLean when Al was an editor at Timely. But I figured it out! McLean was fired when he was a bullpenner, and later he was fired as a freelancer. It was the only way the two stories made any sense. When I started asking about the time periods I was able to nail down discrepancies like that. Or sometimes somebody remembered something, but not accurately, and then I would say, “Well I heard this. Are you sure that’s right?” And no one ever got upset with me for asking that

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kind of question.

ENW: You’ve got a pretty good memory for keeping names and dates straight, but what kind of preparation did you do for your interviews? How much research would you do?

Jim: I studiously avoided reading interviews with the people who had given interviews in the past.

With some of those people, I had read those interviews years ago, but I did not want my interview to look like anybody else’s, so I wouldn’t go back and read what somebody had done with another interviewer. I wanted to do my own work. I only had two exceptions to this. The first was Joe Simon. I did read The Comic Book Makers again, and I must have read it four or five times in my life anyway, because I wanted to avoid repetition. There were some things that I felt Joe did not cover in TCBM that he should have. There were some things in TCBM that I felt needed a little more discussion, but if you ever compared the two, you’d see there’s very little of TCBM in my Joe Simon interview. I wanted it to stand on its own, and to cover ground not previously covered, or to go more in depth.

The other was Nick Cardy, because somebody had done a book on Nick Cardy.

ENW: Right, John Coates.

Jim: Roy lent me his copy, because John Coates wrote a pretty good book on Nick Cardy. And it was kind of recent at that time. I did not want to cover the same ground that John Coates did, but I knew in some ways I’d have to, because some things were unavoidable. So I read John Coates’ book to make sure that I did not duplicate it. When I told John Coates that, he thanked me. He said that he had noticed that my interview was different than his book, and he appreciated that.

That’s a big thing with me, as many times as I’ve been plagiarized. I became people’s unpaid research assistant, and there were certain people who took chunks of my interviews, and a couple of them wrote books based on my interviews or articles, and all they did was para-

Jim Amash: Interviewer Extraordinaire

phrase what I had in my interviews, without even asking—often beyond “fair use”— which I didn’t like, and I still don’t like. And there’s at least two books where the “writer” claimed some of my work was really his, sourcing my quotes as being from their own interviews. I would not do that to someone else. I do my own work.

It’s tough when somebody does one of those public domain books, printing all the public domain art, and they get somebody to write the introduction, and basically they just rewrite my stuff and put their name on it, as if it’s their own research work, and they get the money. That’s the bad thing about comic book historians: too many of them don’t follow proper procedure that real historians do, like David McCullough, for instance, Harold Holzer, Walter Isaacson. I always tried to hold myself up to their standards as much as I could, because I wasn’t going to be able to be as good as them, but I was taught to footnote, I was taught to document sources, and I was taught not to copy somebody’s work. And that was one of the reasons

Above: Jim with longtime pal, fellow baseball fan, and inking mentor Joe Sinnott. Photo by Joe’s son Mark Sinnott.

Below: A sample of Jim’s inking talents, this over Alex Saviuk’s pencils for the Spider-Man Sunday newspaper comic strip.

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2000: ALTER EGO I quit doing interviews, because I got tired of being plagiarized.

ENW: And you interviewed a lot of people where you’re the only person who interviewed them.

Jim: Right, a lot of them. And I’m proud of that.

ENW: And like we talked about earlier, the majority of those people you interviewed have passed away now, and they can’t be interviewed again.

Jim: I’m the only source. I’m the only source for much of the information on Toni Blum, who was the daughter of Alex Blum, an early comic artist. She was the first female comic book writer.

Somebody wrote an article on her, and completely mined my interview without really crediting me, and passed it off as their own work. That sort of thing happened more than once. I don’t respect that. And if they had asked me, I would have said okay, but if they were going to use a whole bunch of it, I’d say, “Hey, you need to pay me, and you need to properly document the source.”

I didn’t have to do so much research for my interviews, because I had in my mind early on where people were. Jerry Bails’ Who’s Who was a big help to me. My primary resource for anything was Jerry Bails, who wanted people to use Who’s Who as a resource, in case somebody else wanted to follow in his footsteps. Jerry Bails paid me one of my favorite compliments, he said, “You did things that I never was able to do. As far as I’m concerned, you carried on my mantle.” It’s hard to get better than that, because Jerry Bails was one of the pioneers.

Whenever I had corrections, or additions, or stuff that should be deleted, as long as Jerry was alive I sent him all of the changes that needed to be made in people’s entries, so they could be more accurate, and I made thousands of changes to the Who’s Who of American Comic Books. And I did it because it needed to be done. And Jerry appreciated it. I felt like that was my way to give back to Jerry for all the work he and Hames Ware had done. Hames was the co-editor of the original Who’s Who. Jerry and Hames sent out forms to be filled out by the artists by mail.

And a lot of these men and women were pretty thorough, but sometimes they’d forget something. And some of these people, when I interviewed them decades later, they remembered things that they didn’t remember at the time they filled out the forms, which is one reason for the changes I presented to Jerry. He was always very appreciative of me thinking about Who’s Who and the accuracy of it. But, you know, it needed to be done.

The online Who’s Who does not have Hames’ name on it, which it should. It’s because Hames didn’t want to get into computers and do all that stuff. And Bails said, “Well, it’s got to be done.” So Bails just went and did it without him when Hames wouldn’t do it, and Hames got pouty about it. At any rate, Jerry told me that I was one of his most important contributors ever.

Then he did me a favor. He was asked by DC Comics to write an introduction for an Archive Editions book. By this time, Jerry’s health was failing, and he really didn’t want to do it, and he told the editor, “You should get Jim Amash to do it. He knows an awful lot about comic books, and he knows this particular subject,” which was the Adam Strange Archive, volume one. So the

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editor got in touch with me, and I did eight introductions for the Archive books, all because Jerry Bails recommended me for that first one. Once I did the first one, I got the rest of them on my merit, but it was Jerry’s suggestion to use me that got me to do those. I’ll tell you, I loved writing those introductions. I felt very proud to do those, and it was because of Jerry that I got to.

Jerry was a very kind man, a very brilliant man, and he gave thousands and thousands of hours and years of his life, for free, with the same goal I had, to remember these people. And Hames Ware also. Hames gets forgotten, and Hames should not be forgotten, because he did a lot of work on Who’s Who, again, for no money. He had the reward of making sure people were remembered. That was why they did it, and I did it for the same reason, the same spirit.

But that was the most of the research that I did. And once I knew about Quality comics, I didn’t even have to write questions down, because I knew the companies, I knew who worked in the bullpens, I knew who did what features. I didn’t have to write all that down because I already had it in my head. All I had to do was remember to ask the questions. For the Carmine Infantino book, I doubt I had more than 12 or 15 questions written out, for all the work that’s in that book. I knew Carmine’s career, so I didn’t have to go look at anything. And, as you know, I have a pretty good visual memory for stories I read. I still say that Flash drawing we discussed in the book, when he had to eat those oats, and he was so disgusted, that’s the best disgusted look ever drawn in the history of comics. [laughter] I mean, who could have drawn that better than Carmine!

A few times I was surprised. I was surprised that Sam Burlockoff was the original artist of “Mike Danger.” Two of those stories were printed in Crime Detector #3 and 4, when those were published in the ’50s, because they were never printed originally. Sam did not know how they got to Timor Publications, so there was no mention that the writer happened to be some guy named Mickey Spillane. [laughter] Because Timor had these stories, but they didn’t know who drew them or who inked them, they weren’t signed, but those two “Mike Danger” stories that appeared in Crime Detector were written by Mickey Spillane.

If the publisher had known that, however they got that original art to print it, you know they would have put Spillane’s name on it. Sam told me lots of stories like that. And that was the thing, I knew a fair amount, but I learned from these people, just like anyone who read my interviews regularly.

Friends in the Business

ENW: You became friends with a lot of people you interviewed.

Jim: Yes. It’s a funny thing, Herb Rogoff was not the only one, but he was one of the first ones to pay me one of my favorite compliments. He said, “You’re so casual in how you ask the questions, that I forget I’m being interviewed, and I said things that I’m not sure I should have said!” [laughter] ENW: Sometimes you were told things off the record. Do you have that stuff written down somewhere for the sake of posterity?

Jim: Sometimes people would say, “This is off the record,” after

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they told me something, and I had it on tape. But if somebody tells me, “I want to say something, but it’s off the record,” I always shut the machine off.

They wouldn’t have known whether or not I did, but I did, because I wasn’t going to be dishonest. If they trusted me enough, then I owed it to them to be honest with them. But some of the things don’t matter now.

One person I interviewed, frankly, was a racist, and I had to do some editing, because I didn’t want my name on something like that, and I cut some of that out. And I’m not sorry I did it. People can say, “Well, that’s not being objective.” Well, that’s too bad. There are certain words that I would not use, and it wasn’t even protecting them so much as, you get a story that’s that kind of repugnant, and I just didn’t want to print that. And it’s not me being politically correct, because you know I’m not. But I think it’s a matter of taste, and discretion, and dignity. When we did the Matt Baker book, we had to decide what were we going to do on the subject of Matt Baker’s sexuality. We wrestled with that for a long, long while.

ENW: Oh, yeah, we definitely wanted to get at least a couple of different sources of corroboration.

Jim: Right, and the main thing is, I don’t think either of us really doubted that we had to print it, because it was part of the man’s life story, but at the same time, we didn’t want Matt Baker to be defined by that. I didn’t think that would be right. The art is what mattered. Or, if it’s a writer, the writing is what matters. You’ll notice in a lot of my interviews, there’s only so much personal information that I print, because I usually didn’t ask that many personal questions. Sometimes something about their personal life was relevant to the story at hand, and sometimes not. When their personal life was important to their career, then yeah, you put it in, but I was doing comics biography, not necessarily life biography of the individuals I talked to.

ENW: Do you have any particular standout favorite interviews you did for Alter Ego? Jim: Joe Simon, Jerry Robinson, Stan Goldberg— especially in Stan’s case, I was friends with all three of them until they died. Al Jaffee, certainly. Al has a near photographic memory, and gave me tons of stuff about working at Timely. I’ve interviewed Roy about his career every decade up into the ’90s. My favorite is the first part of the decade when Roy was getting going before the responsibilities of the editor-in-chief, because Roy was able to spend more time with people than he was able to later. I always found Roy’s memory to be very good. But there are just so many interviews that I did, that it’s

Jim Amash: Interviewer Extraordinaire

hard to pick just a few—maybe the longer ones.

Mike Esposito was another favorite interview. That one was so long we had to break it up into two issues, because Mike is a great storyteller. He didn’t tell me everything either!

That’s another thing about Roy: I never had a page count. Not once. Most magazines have a word count limit or a page count limit. I never had any restriction. I told Roy, “I’m going to go wherever information leads me, and whatever information is relevant to the subject of comic book history is what I’ll hand you.” And it didn’t bother him a bit. There were only a couple times he ever cut anything, and one time was for an X-Men issue.

He was publishing a transcript of an X-Men panel in San Diego, and in the Dave Cockrum interview, we had a few paragraphs that covered the same ground as in the panel, and Roy said that he didn’t really want the redundancy. He said, “I can cut it from the panel, but that would seem awkward.

How would you feel if I cut it from the interview?” I said, “You know, you’re right. Once said is enough for the issue, it’s not going to bother me if you cut

Above: One that got away…for now. Jim’s efforts on the Lou Fine spotlight in Alter Ego #17 [Sept.

2002], cover seen below, led to plans for a solo book on the extraordinarily talented Golden Age artist, in conjunction with Modern Masters maven Eric Nolen-Weathington. Originally announced a decade ago, real-life got in the way of the co-authors, but don’t be surprised to see it completed in the near future.

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2000: ALTER EGO

it from my interview.” The point is, you see how thoughtful he was. And I felt that was important, because of his consideration.

One of the few times I got into trouble was with the John Romita interview. I edit heavily. The problem was with John, I couldn’t cut the excess, the immaterial, out of that interview, like I could some others. I called Roy, I said, “Roy, we’ll never be able to publish this in one issue. It’s just not possible. It’s too long!

What do you want to do?” He said, “Well I don’t mind doing two issues.” I said, “Roy, I think this would be three issues!” He said, “Well, that’s probably a little too much if its most of three issues.” Roy gave it some thought and said, “How about if we turn it into a book? How do you feel about that?” I said, “Well, that sounds fine to me!” So we got off the phone, he called John Morrow, John said, “Great idea!” Roy called me back, “John said, ‘I think it’s a great idea!’ What do you think?” I said, “I think it’s a great idea!” And that’s how the books came about!

The interview with Carmine Infantino ended up being a book for that reason, but when I interviewed Carmine, I interviewed him a couple times, in shorter interviews. But we’d talk every day, sometimes two or three times a day, and every so often Carmine would say something that I hadn’t heard out of him before, something that was really cool to learn. One day, we were talking about John Ford Westerns, and how John Ford had influenced him, and I said, “Carmine, how would you feel if you said that again, and I taped it?” He said, “Why do you want to do that?”

I said, “Carmine, you’ve never talked about that in any kind of depth. This was great, and I think it ought to be preserved.”

He said, “Are you going to print it?” And I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, I just want to save it first.” So he said okay.

Of course, the retelling wasn’t quite as good as the first time.

Anyway, sometimes, with his permission, I would record him. I’d say, “Carmine, there’s a couple things I want to ask you.” It was all very informal. So I had hours and hours of tape of Carmine and I talking. A lot of times it was nothing important, nothing to do with comics, and often it was. Eventually, Carmine said, “Why don’t we turn this into an interview?” I said okay, so we did a formal interview. And, of course, we had the same problem that we had with John Romita. We couldn’t fit it all into a magazine, even two issues. So it became a book. And sometimes Carmine would be kind of antsy about it.

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ENW: He went back and forth on whether to actually do it or not.

Jim: Right, he was afraid of offending a certain person, to which I said, “Nonsense! Anybody can publish a book if they want to as long as they have the legal right. Carmine, did you know that more books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any man in the history of the world?” He said no, and I said, “Carmine, if we took your attitude literally, there would be one book on Abraham Lincoln.” Eventually, between that and a couple of other things, Carmine agreed to the book.

Sal was the second book we did together. Same problem with the Sal Buscema interview; it was too long for Alter Ego. I want to say this about the Sal and Carmine books: since they were originally supposed to be done for Alter Ego, I went to Roy each time and explained the trouble. And Roy didn’t want to do any more collaborations. He had enough to do. I wasn’t going to put them in book form without Roy’s consent, since they were originally done for Roy, and he was great about saying, “Don’t worry about it. Go ahead and do it. If you get a chance to turn it into a book and make yourself some money, I’m not going to stand in your way. It’s not going to bother me.”

For many years, I proofread Alter Ego, too. Sometimes I’d be inking comics, and I’d quit working at three or four in the morning, and then work on Alter Ego until six in the morning, go to sleep, wake up about ten o’clock, and do Alter Ego for an hour or two, whether I had to interview somebody, or I had to write something, and then I would go back to inking. That was a grueling schedule for many years.

One Christmas Eve, I had an issue to proofread. So my wife Heidi drove us to my mother’s house, and I proofread in the car, and I proofread until all my brothers and sisters started coming in. And when I got home, I finished proofreading. It was just a lot of work that I had going on between Alter Ego and comics.

Alter Ego never made me a lot of money, but I never did this for the money. Of course, I wanted to get paid, because payment’s there, but this was on account of love. Roy doesn’t make a fortune out of this; Roy does it for love. He understands the importance of this.

I want to say something about Brian K. Morris: I was doing my own transcription, and I edited as I transcribed. After I transcribed, I’d edit again, and Roy would edit, then send it back,

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but Roy kept, I’d say, 99.5% of every syllable I ever handed him. Roy even told me, “You give me the cleanest copy that anybody’s ever given me.” I was very pleased with that. When I couldn’t do the transcribing any more—because at this particular point I was doing about 100 pages a month for Archie, and something had to give—I got my friend Tom Wimbish to do it. He would come over and transcribe while I was working, and I would say, “Stop the tape,” and I would edit as we went. But then that got to be too much, and Tom lost interest, so I turned to Brian K. Morris, because I’d known Brian.

Brian was a great transcriber, a great person, and I knew that I wouldn’t have to worry. Without Brian, the work would have been slowed down on getting some of this stuff in print.

Cover Stories

ENW: You inked a couple of Alter Ego covers, too.

Jim: Roy asked me if I would, so I said okay. The only one I didn’t light box was the one we did for the Julie Schwartz issue. I have a couple of cover stories that are interesting, so let me start with that one. Roy said, “I wish we could get Carmine to draw a cover, but he’d never work for our rates.”

I said, “Well, I’ll give it a try, what have we got to lose?” So I called Carmine, and said, “Carmine, is there any way in the world you’d consider doing a cover for us?” He said, “You can’t afford me.” And I said, “I know that, but I’m asking you anyway!” [laughter] He said, “How much does it pay?” I told him and he said, “That’s a miserable rate!” I said, “I know it’s a miserable rate. I know you’re used to getting more than that.” Carmine was used to getting very good money, deservedly so. He didn’t say anything else, and we’re talking, and he said, “Let me think about it.” Then he said, “I’ll do it. If you want me to do it, I’ll do it for you, I’ll do it for Julie.” And that was why he did it. Then, he asked, “Who’s going to ink it?” And before I knew it, I heard myself say, “I am!” [laughter] I didn’t think about it! It just came out of my mouth, because I’d never inked Carmine. Carmine was always one of my favorite comic book artists with all those marvelous covers, all those years at DC. Carmine knew what he was doing. Carmine knew how to make a good cover sell, good composition. Something to catch your attention, or “irritate the eye,” is the phrase. So I was nervous.

I practiced on vellum until I got to where I felt comfortable, because I decided I was going to ink the original. I figured I’d never have another chance—which wasn’t true by the way, because I inked Carmine a few times after that. But I love

Jim Amash: Interviewer Extraordinaire

the cover. That cover is Carmine’s conception completely. He said, “What do you want?” I said, “Well, something to honor Julie, and since Julie was the one who brought back the Flash, something along those lines.” That’s about all I said to him. He added that strip of heads at the top, which was wonderful. But Carmine didn’t need me to tell him anything else. Another cover Carmine did was for Alter Ego #93. This was Roy’s idea. Roy wanted Gardner Fox and Julie Schwartz on the cover in a variation of “The Flash of Two Worlds” cover.

My favorite cover was for Alter Ego #35, because it was based on my idea, and was drawn by Al Jaffee, whose work everybody loves. I got Al to agree to an interview. Roy said, “What are we going to do about a cover?” I said, “We ought to have Al Jaffee do a cover.” He said, “Yeah, but how are we going to do this? How is that going to work?” I said, “You know, I think it would be funny if we got Al to do an Al Jaffee version of an Alex Schomburg Timely cover.” Mainly, that’s what Al and I talked about was the 1940s. Roy loved the idea, and said, “Well, do you want him to draw it like Schomburg?”

I said, “No, no! It’s the Al Jaffee version we’re looking for.” He said okay, so I called Al, and said, “I had this idea. Would you be interested in doing a cover?”Al said yes. I told Al the pay was not going to be very high, because I know what he got for his stuff for MAD. “You know we can’t match it. We’re not a big publication.” Al didn’t care, because I said, “You’ll get to keep the copyright, and you’ll get to keep the original art.” That was important to Al, so he said, “Okay, what do you want?”

I said, “You remember those great Alex Schomburg covers? I want you to do the Al Jaffee version.” He said, “I can’t draw like Schomburg!” I said, “I don’t want you to draw like Schomburg, I want you to do the Al Jaffee look in an Schomburg-type cover.” Al started laughing, and said, “Oh, that’ll be fun!” [laughter] I didn’t contribute

Above: Jim’s favorite A/E cover, based on his concept and executed with humorous panache by Al Jaffee, MAD’s “fold-in” cartoonist, who channeled his inner Alex Schomburg to produce this Timelythemed piece, published on the “flipside” of #35 [Apr. 2004].

Previous page: At left is Carmine Infantino’s pencils for the wraparound cover of Alter Ego #5 [Summer 2000]. (Final inks were provided by Jerry Ordway.) At right is Carmine’s cover art, a tribute to Julius Schwartz and the legendary editor’s Silver Age heroes, for A/E #38 [July 2004], with inks by Jim. Below: Jim’s remarkable research and interviews with Quality Comics alumni were the foundation for much of Mike Kooiman’s Quality Companion book for TwoMorrows.

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2000: ALTER EGO another thing to the idea but that. Everything you see is pure Jaffee. And it’s hysterical!

ENW: I remember you being really giddy when the cover art came in. [laughter] Jim: I sure was! Hitler behind bars in Captain America’s outfit— that was hysterical! One of the wings giving the finger on the head… [laughter] Only Al Jaffee would think of that! Roy loved it. Al said, “When you get a copy of it, I want you to call me.”

And when I did, he said, “What do you think?” and I just started laughing. [laughter] Most of the time, the cover ideas were Roy’s. The Hillman issue [right] , where I interviewed Rogoff, Wally Littman, and Ernie Schroeder, that cover was my idea. And there were probably a couple of others. But sometimes I made suggestions, and I think a couple times Roy said yes, and a couple times Roy said no.

But the vast majority were Roy’s ideas. How am I going to know better about a selling cover than Roy Thomas? Sometimes Roy had three ideas for a cover, and he’d asked, “Which idea do you like best?” And I think maybe only once did he not go with the one I thought was the best. Most of the time he said, “You know, I think you’re right,” or, “Yeah, I felt that way too, but I wanted to get feedback.” And he did that with Bill Schelly and Michael T. Gilbert, too.

was the only DC Comics editor who ever gave a thorough interview, which made him exceptionally important, considering the time in which George worked, which was the post-World War II era through ’68 as an editor. He was an associate editor for much of that time, but still, he was able to give us the only real looks at the inner workings of DC editorial that we’ve ever had, because Murray Boltinoff never gave much of an interview, and Julie Schwartz didn’t want to talk about a lot of that stuff. But the real thing about George I want to say is how courageous he was in giving the interview, because he was a stroke victim. It was very hard for him to talk, and sometimes there would be long pauses between words, long pauses between sentences. I wasn’t always sure when he’d finished a thought or not. And sometimes he would trip up on a word and start to stutter. It was very difficult for him to do that, and it was a long interview, and it was physically very difficult for him, but he did it, because he saw the need for such an interview to be done. Here’s a man who can’t walk, and much of his body was paralyzed, and yet he still soldiered on to do this interview. Because like I said, a lot of these people are dead, and I said, “George, you’re the last link to these people that I’m ever likely to have.” That was why he was willing to do it. We had to do it. Sometimes we were interrupted by nurses, or sometimes he wasn’t feeling so well. Sometimes he called me and we’d talk for five or ten minutes, so the interview was Borrowed Time done in bits and pieces, depending on his health. But I feel like, ENW: You interviewed people as you found them, and because considering the enormous difficulty George had giving that interyou were playing “beat the clock” in a lot of cases, you built up a view, and the importance of that interview, that one deserves a large stockpile of interviews Roy would have to choose from. special place among my interviews.

Jim: He had a several-year stockpile at one point, yes. And ENW: How’d you get in contact with him? out of that, there were some issues that were totally my idea.

Jim: Arnold Drake. Because George was calling Arnold four, five, Obviously, Jerry Robinson was my idea, because I knew it was seven times a day. And it was bugging Arnold a little. Arnold going to take up a whole issue. I knew my Joe Simon interview said, “You ought to give an interview to Jim Amash.” Arnold was going to be a whole issue. I interviewed some Fawcett peo- was frank with me. He said, “It’s partially so George will give me ple, and said, “Let’s do a Fawcett issue! I’ve got Ken Bald, Bob a break.” [laughter] And George often was calling me five, six, Boyajian, and Victor Dowd. I think that would be nice to have an seven, eight times a day, and sometimes it was inconvenient, but all Fawcett issue, even though there’s the FCA [Fawcett CollecI made the time for George, even when we weren’t recording, tors of America] in every issue.” And when I brought this up, because he really needed somebody to talk to.

Roy, of course, loved the idea. When I came up with an idea for He had lived in Brooklyn, but he was in a nursing facility in an issue, he never said no. I had the idea for the Major Malcolm California, because his brother was out there, and his brother Wheeler-Nicholson issue, but you might remember that, because would come see him once a week. George really was alone, and I called you at San Diego Comic-Con and got you to ask Michael I have to say, some of the treatment he got at that facility did not Uslan to get the Major’s granddaughter’s contact information. make me very happy. They’d take him to the bathroom and leave ENW: Yeah, Michael brought Nicky [Wheeler-Nicholson] to the him on the toilet for an hour or so before they came back around TwoMorrows booth before I even had a chance to find him and to him. If I’d had the ability to go out there, I’d have gone out ask him, and Nicky gave me her card. there and given a piece of my mind to some of those people. I Jim: That is one of my most important interviews, because we felt George was very courageous in giving that interview for all knew so little about the Major, but he started DC Comics. He he had to go through and for spilling some secrets. He didn’t tell was a real pioneer. I was unhappy that issue did not sell like it me everything, but he told me plenty—more than we ever had should have. I was very disappointed. I felt it was one of our before, and more than we’ll ever get again. most important issues, because almost every syllable in those ENW: Anything he said you weren’t able to print? interviews I did was new, because we knew so little about the Jim: No, he never said, “Don’t print this.” He never said that, but Major, and some of the things we thought we knew were incorI know there were a few things that he withheld. rect! It deserved more attention than it got.

ENW: How do you think he felt about his time there at DC? Another important one was the George Kashdan interview. He Jim: He was sanguine about it, I would say. He was proud of it,

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but it didn’t end well, because they did fire him— Carmine, you know. But he was ready to go. He didn’t like the way they had changed. And I have to be honest to say that George was trying to move with the times, and that’s very easily demonstrable, because he was the editor of Teen Titans. I think with a little more work and encouragement, George could have fit into the new wave better than say, Jack Schiff could have. But he didn’t get along with Irwin Donenfeld, and Donenfeld was always taking his artists away from him and putting them on something else. One time, George wanted Joe Kubert to do covers, and Irwin said no. Irwin Donenfeld frankly wasn’t suited for that job, in the opinion of many of the people who worked under him. He drove Schiff out, too. And Carmine had his problems with Donenfeld, even though Donenfeld got Carmine into a management position. Irwin really was not qualified for the job, but he got the job because of who his father was.

But I think George gave me a very frank and honest interview. It was a warts-and-all interview, and he was never trying to settle a score. He was just trying to tell the story. And he gave me the best look at what happened between Jack Schiff and Jack Kirby regarding the Sky Masters strip that I’ve heard from anybody, because he was there. George was a fundamentally good, honest, decent man, and I was glad that I could at least do something so George would be remembered for his contributions. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see the interview in print. That I was sorry about.

But Roy got it published as soon as he was able; it wasn’t anybody’s fault, it just happened.

Some of my favorite interviews are because of their importance, and some are because I like those people so much. Herb Rogoff and I were close friends until he passed, and the same was true with a lot of people. I became friends, probably, with at least 75% of the people I interviewed, and after I interviewed them, I stayed in touch with most of them until they passed.

ENW: Some guys I remember you talking about especially were Lou Cameron and Tom Sawyer.

Jim: Tom Sawyer, a great guy. Lou Cameron, smartest man I ever knew. No question about it.

Photographic memory. He once said he was an atheist, and later he said he was an agnostic. He said, “You never know when you might need an out.” [laughter] But he knew the history of all the world’s religions. He wrote hundreds of paperbacks after his comic book days. He was an idea machine.

Herb Rogoff was a very intelligent, dear, sweet man.

Dave Gantz was one of the more literate of those

Jim Amash: Interviewer Extraordinaire

I interviewed. He was always telling me about books he was reading. Dave had sophistication. He actually kind of poo-pooed comics when he left, because he went into fine art, and he had a newspaper strip, and he didn’t really want to look back on his comic book days.

We have Stan Goldberg to thank for that Dave Gantz interview. And Dave and I quickly became very good friends until he passed. Some of my favorite interviews are because of the fun we had, because, like I said, I often was told they forgot they were being interviewed and they were just talking. I always tried to make it casual. I always tried to make it comfortable. I didn’t want them to feel like they were on the witness stand, like you see some interviewers do.

One of the things I found out, and didn’t think about originally, was the importance these interviews were going to hold to the families of the people I interviewed.

Emilio Squeglio, his family didn’t know much about what he’d done in comics. They were surprised. They were very surprised. There were a lot of people like that. They never talked about it, so their families never really knew what all they did in comic books.

I think I told you what happened with Lou Fine, which is something I wanted to do because I love Lou Fine. That whole issue was my idea, just like the Toth issue when Alex had passed. But, with Lou Fine, I interviewed Murphy Anderson, who had known Lou a little bit and was heavily influenced by him.

And I interviewed his son and daughter and their Aunt Cherry, Lou’s sister-in-law. I’ll never forget, when the issue came out, Elliot, the son, called me and was just very grateful, very appreciative, and really thought we did a fine job, and was very com-

Above: A Joe Sinnott illo done for the love of Jim’s life, Heidi.

The couple (seen below, in Acme Comics owner Mark Austin’s photo) has been married for 30 years.

Below: In 2008, Jim drove from North Carolina to the New York Comic-Con with John Morrow, and spent four days personally connecting with a host of comics greats he’d mostly only spoken to by phone. Here’s Jim with Joe Simon, in a photo by Mark Sinnott.

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2000: ALTER EGO their career mattered, and why their story should be told.

I only had one person ever turn me down, and that was Dan Loprieno, who had worked in the ’50s, with Ziff-Davis, and later worked in animation. But he said, “That was the worst period of my life.” You know, marriage troubles and other stuff. He said, “If I start doing an interview, I’m going to be reliving all the worst trauma of my life, and I really don’t want to do that. I hope you don’t feel like I’m being rude, but I don’t want to relive that part of my life.” He started apologizing. I said, “Look, if I was in your position, and if that’s what it was going to do to me, I wouldn’t give an interview either. Don’t worry about it.” He felt bad about turning me down, but I could understand, so I didn’t take any offense to that, because I had to respect that. I gave everybody respect, because they deserved it. I tried to do interviews that respected comics history. That was always the first goal—save plimentary. It made me feel like a million bucks. whatever history and biography that I could. And I would say, ENW: I caught the “Fine job.” You just can’t help yourself. with a couple of exceptions, I got all of that back.

Jim: That’s a Fine comment to make. [laughter] Well, at least it I won’t mention the person, but there was one person that was Lou Fine, and I didn’t do a Larry Fine job. [laughter] I got to be very good friends with—we would talk occasionalENW: You knucklehead! ly—and he got cancer. He went to the Bethesda Naval Hospital, Jim: That’ll teach you a lesson, you stooge. [laughter] But, Elliot and passed away there after a month or two. After he died, his said that his aunt and sister would be calling. I get off the phone daughter called me to tell me that the last few weeks of his life with him, and ten minutes later, the phone rings. I pick up the he kept saying, “I wish I could talk to Jim. I wish I could see Jim.” phone and said hello, and I had the caller ID, so I knew it was They did not tell me until he was dead. I was always a little unLaurie, the daughter. And she couldn’t say anything; she was happy with that, because I would have gone to see him. There’s crying. She must have cried for five minutes, or at least it seemed a guy on his deathbed thinking of me, that’s how close of friends like it was that long. She couldn’t say anything. So I just sat there we had become, and I found out afterwards. I didn’t say very patiently, and finally, she goes, “Jim!” And she was apologizing much to the daughter, but I have to admit that was a very painful for crying, but she said it meant so much to her and was so emothing to hear.

But on the other hand, I was gratified that he really tionally touched by the care we gave to it, and we gave a lot of thought that much of me. care to that issue. Another one of my favorite issues.

Roy was a big Lou Fine fan, so I’ve always felt like Roy spent a ENW: Well, that’s the thing, a large percentage of the people you interviewed are no longer with us. little more time on that one. Of course, Roy spent a lot of time on all of them. Nothing gets past Roy. But she was so touched by Jim: Most of them are gone. I would say 90% of them are probathe whole thing, she was so in love with it. “You brought my dad- bly gone, maybe higher than that, I don’t know. There’s not many left. It always hurts when one of them dies. Not only do we lose dy back to life for me,” which was great to hear. But, of course, a piece of the history, I lose a friend. And I’ve lost a lot of them.

I couldn’t have done it without her and the others. I got off the I knew it would happen, but for a guy my age, I’ve sure lost an phone with her, and about 10 or 15 minutes later, the phone awful lot of friends, because they were older than me, of course. rang. I picked up and said hello, and I heard a lot of crying, and But I think some of these people were delightful. Ernie Schroit was Aunt Cherry. She was crying and crying, what a dear. She eder had a little pixie in him. He was delightful, he was funny, was such a dear, sweet lady. Cherry said, “Oh, it makes me feel he was warm. I could go on, so many of them were just great like Lou’s still here.” How could you get a better compliment?

Most of the people I interviewed were really good people. There people, really. I’m glad I did it for those reasons. What it brought me was nothing but good feelings and a sense of accomplishwere only a couple of people who were jerky to me.

ENW: There’s that saying, never meet your heroes, but you gen- ment that I did something important for an art form that I care very deeply about. I could have earned more money by doing erally didn’t run into that a lot. more comics work instead, but I felt like this was important.

Jim: No. One person who was jerky to me was not a hero, And it bothered me when some people would say, “Well, I wish and the other one was a person whose work I had liked, but I somebody would interview this person, or that person,” and it wouldn’t put that person up in the pantheon of the people who were my heroes. I just liked that particular person’s work. But no, would come from people who were qualified to do the interview, but they didn’t want to do it, because they knew it would take a for the most part, people went out of their way to be cooperative, and were pleased. But one thing I did hear, and I heard this lot of time, and there was not much money in it for the time they would put in. at least 15 or 20 times, was: “Why do you want to talk to me? I But again, in the long run, everything that I did was worth it so wasn’t that important. I was a nobody. My career didn’t matter.” these people would be remembered. And that was all I wanted And I had to explain to them that they’re not a nobody, and why

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to do, was say, “Let’s not forget them.” And if we didn’t know them in the first place, because they were people who never signed their work, now you know, and that’s important too. Because look, the entire structure of what comics is founded on is not just Kirby, and Eisner, and Toth, and whatever other greats you want to name, because they couldn’t draw and write all the books. Stan Lee, Roy, Gardner Fox, John Broome, they couldn’t write all the books. It’s all the other people who have just as important a part of that foundation of the structure, because they did the work. They did the work.

They fueled the fantasies of children, and teenagers, and adults, because adults read comics in the ’40s and ’50s. A lot of them were afraid to admit it in those time periods, of course, but they read them. You know why comics sold so well in WWII? The army was buying comic books and distributing them to the soldiers. When the war ended, that’s one of the reasons sales fell. The same thing happened again when comics sales picked up greatly during the Korean War. Somewhere there was a Martin Goodman comment that said, “War is good for comics.”

ENW: You mentioned that you didn’t ask many personal questions, but you collected a lot of war stories during your interviews.

Jim: I heard a lot of war stories. I printed a lot of them. I’ve got hours of tapes of people’s time in the military service that I never got to. I was going to do a book, as you know, and I had every intention of doing that book. And then things kept happening. From 2003 to 2010, I was averaging 100 hours of work a week, every week. And how I did Alter Ego, and all those pages, and those books with you, I don’t know. Well, I know how, I didn’t do anything else. You know, sometimes the only time I got up from the drawing board was to eat or go to the bathroom. But I had to do Alter Ego. I really just had to do it. And I’m glad I did it. I’m proud of that work. Maybe of all the things I’ve ever done, that would be one of the things I’m proudest of, because I had total control, I knew what I wanted, I knew what was important to get, if they remembered. Sometimes they didn’t remember things. Sometimes I’d get a call back, “How you doing, Jim? I forgot to tell you, something just popped up in my head.” And then I’d go grab a tape and record it. With Carmine, one time there was something that didn’t quite make sense to me when I was reading it in print. I called Carmine, and said, “I’m not quite understanding what you mean.

I must have understood it at the time you said it, but now looking at it in print, it doesn’t quite make

Jim Amash: Interviewer Extraordinaire

sense.” So I talked to Carmine about it, and in the process of talking to him, I rewrote the paragraph, with his permission of course, so what he was trying to say would be better understood.

I probably spent more time talking Carmine than anybody regarding interviews. I must have 25, 30 hours of tape with him. Carmine was like Alex Toth, not always easy to get along with, but I could pick at Carmine. We were like Abbott and Costello, because he was a great straight man. Sometimes he did it on purpose, and sometimes he didn’t. One time, he was calling me Jimmy—he knew I hated being called Jimmy, so he called me Jimmy—so I started saying, “You know I hate that.” He goes, “Well, you know, it’s just friendly.” Carmine says it’s affection, which was a rare thing to hear out of Carmine, because Carmine had that Italian machismo, where the person didn’t really want to say how they felt about you. But, he did care about me. So I said, “You know, Carmine, I agree with you, so I’m going to start calling you Carmy.” [laughter] He started laughing. The next two weeks I called him Carmy, and every time I did, he just started laughing. We had a lot of fun together. I had a lot of fun with a lot of the people I interviewed.

The important thing is, though: it didn’t matter to me how good a writer or an artist was, all I cared about was the history. And I cared about those people.

Above: “Jimmy” Amash and “Carmy” Infantino share a laugh at the 2009 New York Comic-Con, in another photo by Mark Sinnott.

Previous page: Clowning around at the 1989 AcmeCon, with Joe Kubert, Charles Paris, and Harvey Kurtzman. Photo by Teresa Davidson.

Below: “E.C. for me, see!” Jim has interviewed and formed friendships with nearly every major and minor figure in comics. Here he is with Al Williamson at AcmeCon ’88, and E.C. Comics publisher Bill Gaines at AcmeCon ’90, in photographs by Teresa Davidson.

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2001: COMPANION BOOKS

Glen Cadigan’s Five Years of Yesterday Glen Cadigan Author

Residence: St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador As TwoMorrows branches out from magazines to add more books to its line-up, their “Companion” books and other projects explore fan-favorite series and creators. Glen Cadigan is one of several authors who tirelessly devote their time and efforts to a level of research never before undertaken in comics journalism.

Below: Glen was a fan of this other well known, non-DC teenage super-hero as a kid.

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I don’t go all the way back to the beginning of TwoMorrows, but I was there for five years from 2003–08, and in that time I edited four books (plus wrote one Alter Ego cover story), so my tenure covers years 10 through 15. For the fannish record, here are my memories of that time in my life: TwoMorrows first appeared on my radar when I saw The All-Star Companion at my local comic book store. It was on a shelf with all of the new DC comics, which is where stores should stock such books, but often don’t. It was later joined by issues of Alter Ego (#6 and 7), so this was back in 2000.

Together that was enough to let me know this was the new behind-the-scenes publisher of comic book material. Wizard was still around, but it didn’t cover old comics, and it wasn’t what it used to be, either. So TwoMorrows had picked up the torch and I took note.

The implications of The All-Star Companion were immediately apparent, namely that there should be more books like it that covered the other DC super-groups. The Legion of Super-Heroes was the obvious next choice—at least to me, anyway—so I waited for it to happen. It didn’t, even though I waited a long time. Eventually, a crazy thought entered my brain: why couldn’t I do a book on the Legion of Super-Heroes?

I had a Legion website at the time (called The Legion of Super-Heroes Online Companion), and part of the site involved writing bios of past creators. I enjoyed doing the research and also thought a good way to spruce it up would be to include interviews with those still living. But a millisecond later, another thought entered my mind: “Why go to all that trouble and then give it away for free? Wouldn’t it be better to put them in a book and sell it?”

My first TwoMorrows contact was actually P.C. Hamerlinck, editor of Fawcett Collectors of America. I was looking for a photo of Otto Binder in the 1950s for my Legion site and saw P.C.’s email address on a Yahoo! group where he was promoting The Fawcett Companion, which had just come out. So I shot him an email and we had a pleasant exchange. Much later, when that crazy idea entered

my head, I emailed him back (“Remember me?”) and asked if he thought TwoMorrows might be interested in a book about the Legion.

He said he thought TwoMorrows would be very interested and I should go ahead and contact John Morrow to let him know. I later found out (and John can correct me on this if it isn’t true) that the idea of doing another Companion book on a different DC property was kicked around the TwoMorrows offices, and the Legion was specifically mentioned, but none of the usual TwoMorrows suspects was interested in doing it.

So, when I reached out, John was interested, just like P.C. had said he would be. I remember John telling me that it would have to be different from the site (not just bios and indexes), and I was glad because I really wanted to do interviews. I had already interviewed Jim Mooney via phone—I found him on eBay—and had that in my back pocket in case I was asked to show what I could do. I wasn’t, but John did say that he wanted to wait until he saw Paul Levitz face-to-face at San Diego that year to see what he thought of a Legion book.

I remember waiting months to find out if I’d gotten the green light. When I did get John on the phone again, he said that Paul’s response was, “I’d like to see it.” That was like getting a blessing from the Godfather, so it was full steam ahead!

What people don’t know is that Tom Galloway approached John at the same convention and pitched a Legion book, too. To John’s credit, he stuck with me. I certainly didn’t have Tom’s credentials at the time, but John chose to go home with the one who brought him, and I can’t say that every publisher would have done that.

When The Legion Companion was put to bed, I was speaking with John and he said, “What do you want to do for your next book?” I took that as a sign he liked the first one, so I said, “One about the Teen Titans.” Both the Legion and the Titans were best-sellers at DC at the same time, and they had organized APAs, so I knew in both cases there was a fan base to sustain each volume.

Another thing people don’t know is that John mailed me his Silver Age Teen Titans collection so

The World of TwoMorrows

I could read it as research. This was before digital comics, and that’s a lot of faith to place in both myself and the postal system. Think of all of those Nick Cardy comics that could’ve been lost! One mishap at the Canadian border and they would’ve been gone forever. I know that I wouldn’t mail anyone my childhood comic books, but John mailed me his. I had the rest of the run covered, so he didn’t have to worry about those.

While I was working on The Titans Companion, I had an idea to go back and do another Legion book called The Best of the Legion Outpost. Someone I met through my Legion website, Kevin McConnell, sent me copies of a complete set of the ’zine, and there was a lot of artwork that I didn’t use in The Legion Companion, plus a couple of interviews with Legion editors from the ’70s. I figured with a little bit more work (calling up David Michelinie and Bob Rozakis for an article about the Karate Kid comic), it would make for a good book. And pound for pound, I think it delivered. It was also a way to attach some permanence to the efforts of the first generation of Legion fandom, and to remind modern day fans of what had gone before.

Speaking of those Outpost fans, I knew I wanted introductory material by its original editors, Mike Flynn and Harry Broertjes. I budgeted two pages, but it came out to three. I didn’t want to cut what they’d said, so I cut a one-page history of The Legion Outpost that I’d written instead. But I didn’t want to cut it either, so I put it on the inside front cover. I thought it was genius; talk about getting bang for your buck! I had to explain that to John, but he let it slide.

A similar thing happened with The Titans Companion. I’d asked Geoff Johns for an introduction and he agreed. But when enough time passed with nothing to show for it, I lost faith and designer Bill Walko suggested turning the two budgeted pages into a roll call instead. That was a great idea, so we did that, but I took one last shot at Geoff Johns anyway.

With just one day to go, I sent him a now-ornever email, expecting it to go unanswered. I was wrong—he explained that he’d just returned to L.A. from filming the pilot for the Blade TV show in Vancouver, and he’d do it right away. And he did, which led to a new problem: all the pages were accounted for, and I didn’t want to cut the Roll Call.

It was solid and, besides, Geoff’s intro was only one page long and the Roll Call was twice that.

I decided to move the table of contents to the inside front cover instead and I still remember talking to John on the phone about it. “We’ve never

Glen Cadigan: The Companion Books

put a table of contents on the cover before,” he said, in his way of letting me know what he thought of the decision. But I explained and he looked the other way. And then I did it again on The Titans

Above: Dave Cockrum’s late career cover for the Legion Companion.

Below: Notes from artists Al Plastino and Jim Mooney received while Glen worked on the above book.

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Companion 2, and he let that slide, too.

I still think it was a great idea. Haven’t you ever tried to find the table of contents in a magazine, but couldn’t? It was right there for easy reference. And when I saw Roy Thomas put artwork on the inside front cover of The All-Star Companion Vol. 2, I figured somebody else thought it was a good idea to use up that real estate, too.

Ultimately, the Companion books came to an end. I did three, so I was tied with Michael Eury for second place.

Only Roy Thomas did more (four).

Michael and I were each given one half of a silver medallion, which we still wear to this day.

Here are some random thoughts and memories from my time with TwoMorrows: I’m convinced Jim Starlin was drawing when I interviewed him for The Legion Companion. He just sounded like he was doing something else, that’s all I can tell you.

When I called Jim Shooter, I was ten minutes late because it had snowed the night before and my phone line was dead. I don’t know why, but it came back to life and we did the interview, fingers crossed the whole time.

A similar thing happened when I interviewed Neal Adams.

There was a power outage on my end, and for some reason my phone needed batteries to work. I call that my battery powered

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interview because the tape recorder required batteries, too.

My stress level was very high due to the prospect of equipment failure, but it was worth it when he casually mentioned that Frank Miller was stopping by later and they were going to talk about doing something with Batman. I guess they didn’t do it or I would’ve heard about it.

Twice when I cold-called someone about setting up an interview, they said, “How about now?” The first time was with Dave Cockrum and I wasn’t ready. The second time it was Al Plastino and I was. Dave was actually sitting by the fire during a power outage (what is it with me and blackouts?), which was why he hadn’t replied to my emails. I was always ready to roll after Dave Cockrum.

People told me that Al Plastino was angry at how the industry had treated him, so he wouldn’t do an interview. They were wrong—he wasn’t bitter, and he went on to do interviews with others after I broke the ice. He even started going to shows and doing commissions, so don’t always believe what you hear.

I learned that when you get someone on the phone, ask them everything because you might never hear from them again. So when I interviewed George Pérez about The New Teen Titans, I think I spoke to him for about two hours, and I still had more questions to ask. He told me to call him back the next day, and when I did, the first thing he said was, “Yeah, I can’t talk that long today.” I felt a little bad for cutting into his drawing time, but I knew that the readers of the book were counting on it!

Speaking of the readers, my goal was to always give them something that they couldn’t get anywhere else. That’s why I did interviews and not indexes, and that’s why some disgruntled readers contacted me and asked why The Legion Companion wasn’t more like The All-Star Companion. I heard that more than once.

A trip down memory lane wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the cover artists. Dave Cockrum did the first two of my books and Phil Jimenez did the third. I asked Phil well in advance, so far that he got back to me once and said he didn’t think he still had the time. When I told him when it really had to be in, I think he laughed.

Mike McKone did the cover of my last TwoMorrows book and I interviewed him in person at San Diego the same year I headed out there and helped set up the TwoMorrows booth. I also helped tear it down, and I remember making a mad dash with a dolly filled with boxes of books down the front of the hall to make it to the FedEx office before it closed. Those were the days!

The World of TwoMorrows

BRIEF FORAYS INTO THE MODERN AGE OF COMICS

Above: Planned for summer 2001, Comicology #5 was to feature 35 years of Jack Kirby’s New Gods, Greg Beettam and Stephen Geigen-Miller’s Xeno’s Arrow, a Tom DeFalco interview, Chris Staros and Brett Warnock of Top Shelf Productions, and Tony Harris, whose above art was to be the cover image (though in color).

In 1999, editor Brian Saner Lamken self-published Comicology, a book-format periodical, the first issue being a “Kingdom Come Companion” with an Alex Ross cover. Unfortunately, a cease-and-desist letter from DC Comics ended its brief moment in the sun after only one edition.

In 2000, Lamken revived Comicology at TwoMorrows as a quarterly magazine devoted to contemporary comics. Alas, because of irreconcilable differences, Comicology proved to be a bad fit for the growing TwoMorrows family of magazines, despite its stellar contents (with

career-spanning interviews and extensive unpublished artwork) and smart design, as well as a line-up of top-notch artists providing covers, including Bruce Timm, Michael Allred, and Paul Grist, among others. The final edition, #4—the “All Brian” ish—appeared in June of 2001.

TwoMorrows’ only other attempt at a magazine on modern comics was a print version of Rick Veitch and Steve Conley’s Splash! news website. It never got beyond the discussion phase in 2002, as publisher John Morrow chose to keep the company’s output focused on historical coverage.

2000

2001

And I couldn’t have done what I did without my partners in crime: Chris Day on the Legion books and Bill Walko on the Titans ones. Bill did some of the interviews himself, especially the ones with the people responsible for the Titans cartoon. He also wrote the titles for each interview, and I still expect him to do his own books someday.

Chris Day had an idea to put Saturn Girl’s symbol around the page numbers on The Legion Companion. I liked the visual, but changed it so that every interview had a different symbol that would correspond with the interviewee. So Dave Cockrum had Wildfire, Jim Starlin had Ultra Boy, and Otto Binder had Lightning Lad because his symbol looked the same as Captain Marvel’s. Legion co-creator Al Plastino got the Saturn Girl symbol in the end, with Mort Weisinger, the third Legion co-creator, ending up with Cosmic Boy. I even “invented” a symbol for Devlin O’Ryan (based upon his shirt) and gave it to Tom Bierbaum. It appears on the inside front cover (that again!) with the other Legion symbols as a repeating pattern, an honor that was never officially bestowed upon the character by DC. I also couldn’t have done my books without a legion of art collectors, so thanks to them all!

Steven Weill was the first, and he wandered up to the TwoMorrows table at San Diego the same year The Legion Companion was green lit because Eddy Zeno told him it might be happening—because

Glen Cadigan: The Companion Books

I asked Eddy for a copy of a Curt Swan interview from Cartoonist PROfiles in case it did. It really is a small community and I tell this story to prove it.

Other major art collectors were Miki Annamanthadoo and Michael Lovitz, but all contributors were greatly appreciated.

A confession: if the TwoMorrows editors were a super-hero team circa 2004, we’d all sit around a T-shaped table with John and Pam at the top, Jon, Roy, Bill, P.C., and Michael T. down one side, and George, Michael, Eric, Mark, and myself down the other. Then the table would just get longer as our numbers grew, just like it did with the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Another thought: isn’t it funny that a company that specializes in comic book history has a name that suggests the future? And after 25 years of covering comic book history, TwoMorrows now has its own history, and thus must cover itself. Those are the rules— look ’em up!

Previous page: Mike McKone’s initial layout for the cover of Titans Companion 2 (inset center), and at bottom, Glen amidst a sea of TwoMorrows books (including his own) at the 2006 Comic-Con International: San Diego. Photo by Tom Stewart.

Below: The Best of the Legion Outpost collection [2004].

— Glen Cadigan

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2001: CONTEMPORARY BOOKS

The Fever Dreams of George Khoury George Khoury

Author, Kimota!: The Miracleman Companion, True Brit, Image Comics: The Road to Independence, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, Comic Book Fever Born: 1971 Residence: Princeton, New Jersey Vocation: Freelance Writer/Author/Editor Favorite Creator: Alan Moore Seminal Comic Book: Star Wars #68 Author George Khoury goes to great lengths to help TwoMorrows reach new audiences—even traveling alongside CBA editor Jon B. Cooke to Northhampton, England in 2002 to visit Alan Moore.

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If there’s a Cousin Itt listed in the Official Handbook of the TwoMorrows Universe, that would be moi.

Like Itt, I’ve been sporadic in my guest appearances over the last three decades and I only speak when spoken to because I tend to drag a conversation on much too long and no one wants that.

Outside of a few members of the TwoMorrows family, no one seems to understand my high-pitched gibberish or why I do the things that I do. It hasn’t been easy being this misunderstood, but please know that my aim is true and that every word I put down for TwoMorrows Publishing was done purely for the love of comic books. Because I wear my heart on my sleeve and can’t imagine living in a world without my favorite medium.

My road to TwoMorrows began in 1995, when I was a Marvel intern “Zombie,” during my senior year of college. I had arrived at the “House of Ideas” after having spent two years working in a small financial firm where I had slowly realized that management didn’t see any potential in making me a full-timer, despite bestowing various empty promises. Looking for something fulfilling for myself and my future, I applied for an unpaid editorial internship at Marvel Comics with the high hopes of finding a learning experience and mentorship

there, but got neither from my four-month investment. Feeling disenfranchised, I went back to my dead-end job at the firm, continued searching for solid employment, and even made the costly mistake of taking Master’s of Business Administration classes in the hopes of making me a more attractive job applicant to potential employers. (Spoiler: it didn’t.) When life kicked back, I suddenly felt that I needed an outlet to bring some joy into my life when I needed it most: through writing.

All throughout the early and mid-1990s, I had a subscription to the Comics Buyer’s Guide and it was there where I first saw something about John Morrow and The Jack Kirby Collector. The death of Kirby had affected everyone. I still remember where I was where I first saw this somber news on the front page of USA Today: paying for lunch at the Saint Peter’s College cafeteria. To later read about how such a somber moment inspired someone to celebrate the life of their favorite comic book creator, with a passionate fanzine authorized by the Kirby estate, was right in my wheelhouse.

The World of TwoMorrows

Albeit short, those early Kirby Collector issues were alluring to me and packed a nice punch when I finally saw them on sale at Jim Hanley’s Universe in good ol’ New York City. I only picked up issue #6 because the Kirby/Sinnott Darkseid versus Orion cover appealed to me. My wallet and I were on a low budget, but it wasn’t long before I came back for more of the ’zines.

TJKC #16, with the Frank Miller-inked cover art and feature, was the one that finally convinced me that maybe I, with my contemporary interest, had something to contribute to TwoMorrows. In my head, the hardcore Kirby fanatics were an older bunch who experienced the King in his prime and bought his work when it was brand-new on the newsstand, before I was born or cognizant of the world around me. This issue made everything about Kirby’s world much more relatable to me.

Also, this was the ish where I really took a shine to Jon B. Cooke’s work, whose energetic flair helped to turn this fanzine into a full-fledged magazine.

I made first contact with John Morrow in 1997 through a phone call. By that time, I had already started my so-called freelance writing phase and done a little work for small publications—CBG and Creative Screenwriting—and had just enough confidence to pitch my work around to other publications I enjoyed reading. To my surprise, I remember Mr. Morrow was amiable during my suggestion to interview Warner Brothers animation guru Bruce Timm about his strong Kirby influence. This was a bit of a surreal experience because, until that point, all the editors I’d ever met were generally arrogant wherever I went, and dismissive when it came to cold pitches. Yeah, TJKC didn’t pay for articles but, money or not, I approached my work there with the same degree of devotion because I don’t know any other way to put together an article. For me, you’re either all in or not at all.

Apparently, the Timm interview [TJKC #21] was good enough for John as a year or so later he was receptive to my next offer for a virtual Kirby

panel with a gigantic Who’s Who of 24 all-star comic book creators, as well as a feature interview with Alex Ross that was all included in the same issue [#27]!

From there, I did interviews with Alan Moore [#30], Ladrönn [#31], and most of the brilliant Fantastic Four creators who followed Lee and Kirby on the “World’s Greatest Comics Magazine” [#32]. My last real contribution to TJKC was simply to suggest one of my favorite Kirby pieces for the cover of #34 when the editor/publisher was telling me that he was stumped, and he surprised me by taking my suggestion. Again, John was the first editor I ever dealt with who had an open mind and, more importantly, was willing to listen to my fever dreams, and that meant a lot to me around the close of the last century because it encouraged me to keep on writing, whether it was for TwoMorrows, other publications, or myself.

Around the summer of 1999, my frustrating job-hunting was taking a toll on me, and the notion of pitching articles to publications was beginning to be a hopeless, soul-draining experience. I started to withdraw from freelance work and stopped dealing with editors who didn’t want my work. I didn’t go to any fancy Ivy League schools or have friends in high places, or necessarily have a background or a face that anyone wanted to be around, so my options were limited at best. Instead, I wanted more than ever to do the things that I wanted to do on my own, and started work on Gotcha!, my own fanzine—and the very first thing that I wanted to explore was the story of Miracleman and of the comic book creators behind the character and stories that I always cherished.

Even with its pedigree of having an epic saga written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, two giants in the comics industry even 20 years ago, the Miracleman saga was lost in a legal limbo

Above: George Khoury joined up with TwoMorrows like a house on fire, particularly when he formed a massive virtual panel, bringing together 24 all-star comic book creators who shared their views on the King of Comics. His efforts appeared in Kirby Collector #27, behind a Kirby/Bruce Timm cover.

Below: George’s much-acclaimed Miracleman companion book, Kimota!, started off as a fanzine called Gotcha! Its cover was designed by CBA editor Jon B. Cooke, with art by Mark Buckingham, doing a pastiche of a Captain Marvel ashcan that Fawcett Comics made in 1939 for trademark purposes.

Back in 2000, I had asked John Morrow if he would consider designing the cover of my ’zine, Gotcha!, because I wanted it to look good—he turned me down because he didn’t have time, but suggested that I speak with Jon B. Cooke. I knew and liked Jon’s work from The Jack Kirby Collector and Comic Book Artist, and I looked forward to finally speaking to him. Not only did JBC create a simply irresistible design, he refused my money for the assignment—it was a gesture that I never forgot. Afterward, we finally worked together on Kimota and Image Comics: The Road to Independence. I moved up to the big leagues and wrote for his magazines Comic Book Artist and Comic Book Creator for more years than I have fingers.

— George Khoury

George Khoury: Comic Book Fever Dreams

143

2001: CONTEMPORARY BOOKS Land of Lost Stories: Kimota Special Edition

When Marvel announced they were going to publish Miracleman comics in 2009, TwoMorrows and I thought the time was right to bring Kimota back to life with a new expanded (and final) hardcover edition that would allow me to tell the whole story of the character, now that everything on the legal front seemed to be resolved.

My idea was simple: to make a definitive version of my previous book that would introduce the rich history of the character to all the Marvel zombies and newcomers who weren’t familiar with this super-hero.

It would have provided more context into Miracleman than the variant covers, and all the cheesy vintage 1950s Marvelman reprints that Marvel collected, put together.

After our initial investigation and inquiries indicated that a new Kimota was highly doable, I started re-editing the original material and expanding the manuscript with new interviews, content, and art. Ultimately, I devoted so much freaking time into making this something special… but it was all for nothing. Just when we were about to solicit the new Kimota, behind-the-scenes snags put my efforts into permanent limbo. It just wasn’t meant to be. You’ll never know how much that hurt me. — G.K.

and fading fast into obscurity. Since Eclipse Comics had closed its doors in 1993, the world and most comic book readers had moved on without the character, and Miracleman was trapped in the 25¢ boxes with other long-lost forgotten heroes. For me, Miracleman was the pinnacle of super-hero storytelling. It’s the one super-hero comic book story that fulfilled all the things that these four-color heroes were supposed to do by simply bringing peace on Earth to all in a seemingly perfect Utopian society.

To me, this wasn’t just another comic book character.

With early positive encouragement from artist John Totleben, and then Neil Gaiman himself, I began interviewing everyone associated with Miracleman that I could find on my own. The experience of working on this project felt so liberating, fun, and infectious since everyone I spoke to was mighty proud of their work on this title. I was overjoyed with the quality of the interviews and all

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Inset below: Alex Ross prelim for the planned Kimota! Special Edition. Alas, due to legal entanglements with the character’s rights, TwoMorrows couldn’t proceed on the updated edition.

the outstanding material that I had on-hand, but I still wondered if anyone out there wanted to see a ’zine such as mine.

As I began putting out ads in places like The Comics Journal, Comics Buyer’s Guide, and Comic Book Artist for Gotcha!, I ran into a real-life crisis when my dad suddenly passed away in the summer of 2000. And, since misery loves company, I had to begin the nightmare of making student loan payments on top of it all, and whatever funds I had set aside for my ’zine evaporated.

Interestingly, I was just starting to see a little interest generate from my ads; even Jim Hanley’s Universe had inquired about ordering 100 copies. The buzz was enough of an encouragement during some dark days to get me to finish what I started, but raising the money again to print it was going to take time. I had gotten so desperate to make Gotcha! happen that I even made the silly mistake of asking my older half-sibling for a loan for my project and was denied a cent—I imagine my personal project must have sounded insane to him. In those days before Kickstarter, I didn’t know who else to turn to for help, so I waited, without any hope, for somehow, something to come my way as I started to again save my pennies.

Out of the blue, I got an unexpected phone call from John Morrow, in the fall of 2000, inquiring about the status of my fanzine. The question caught me off-guard as I may have mentioned it to him once or twice in passing and don’t remember John sounding interested, so I just assumed it was something he wasn’t into and didn’t bring it up again. In the call, he wanted to know how far along I was with my work and what kind of material I had assembled for it. After hearing me out and seeing the goods, he offered to turn my little ’zine into a book! And, up until that offer, I felt that books were reserved for people from Big Time Universities with real publishing connections, and not some guy from, of all places, Jersey City.

In a matter of seconds, I, too, suddenly realized that my material really was good enough to turn into a compelling book.

The World of TwoMorrows

Below: To promote the summer 2007 release of his Image Comics history book, George Khoury ran the idea of a Comic-Con reunion panel by Erik Larsen, who felt certain all seven Image founders would never agree to it, due to their acrimonious break-up. George then set out to make it happen, and got six to agree to appear. However, Rob Liefeld had previously declined to be interviewed for George’s book, but Jim Valentino assured George that if he asked Rob to do the panel, Rob would show up. Thus, George managed to get them all together for the first time ever on a panel—an historic achievement. Photo by Greg Preston.

So, of course, I said yes. I was desperate to get this work out there already, and share it with the rest of the world.

The intended (and now expanded) contents of my ’zine now became Kimota! The Miracleman Companion—the “Companion” moniker was added as a result of the success of The All-Star Companion, one of the earliest TwoMorrows books. Thinking this would be my one and only book, everything I could possibly put on the subject now went into this Kimota (which was the magic word Miracleman uttered to become a super-hero). I had developed an even greater appreciation for the Miracleman

Alex Ross

When Marvels came out, I was in a funk where I wasn’t following comics as closely as in the past. I was busy with the real world (school and job) and just completely disenchanted with the quality of the titles that Marvel, DC, and Image were putting out in 1993. One day after work, on a bad-weathered day, I took the standing-room only bus home and caught a rare sight: a young woman reading a comic book. And it was a comic unlike anything I had ever seen: Marvels #2. To say I was intrigued by her impeccable taste and this fascinating-looking painted book was an understatement.

Alas, there were no sparks between us, and I sadly never saw her again. But the following day, I ran like a bat out of hell to a local comic shop to get my own copies of Marvels.

I had seen the early work of Alex Ross on Terminator: The Burning Earth, but Marvels was a cut above everything on the stands back then. With writer Kurt Busiek, Ross had created a poignant narrative, an ode to joy to everything decent and good about Marvel Comics in an era when the quality of the titles had never been more superficial or unreadable. With its vibrant imagery, this book restored a sense of wonder within many jaded souls—and me, because it was rendered by someone who believed in the power and appeal of these characters. His appreciation for those Marvel characters made Marvels into something very real. By the time Kingdom Come came out in 1996, Alex was invisible to no one and I was very much a true believer of his work.

Without the likes of Alex, Alan Moore, and Jeff Smith in the mid-1990s, I could have ended those trips to the spinner rack and quit comics reading forever. Instead, their efforts kept me

George Khoury: Comic Book Fever Dreams

saga over the period that I worked on my ’zine, and now wanted to make a little book that made sure no one ever forgot Miracleman again as a gigantic evergreen in our medium.

Much to my surprise, Kimota’s release in October 2001 was met, for the most part, with an overwhelmingly warm reception, and rekindled some fond memories for the character among fandom. So much praise came my way that it caught me off-guard because I wasn’t used to hearing so many nice words about anything associated with me. When I look back at the book today, all I see are all the little things that I want to change, but I still remember the people coming back for more goodness and gave me the spark to write about comics I enjoyed and interview creators who I respected. With that as my mission statement, Alex was among the first I ever interviewed when I did a feature about him that ran in the Comics Buyer’s Guide in 1998. In him I saw a comic creator who had immense talent and drive, one who continues to push himself. Plus, he’s someone who was influenced by pop culture and many of the same people who impacted me, if not more. At that time, I didn’t know many people who I could share my cultural references with… Heck, to this day, Alex is the only other fan of the band Badfinger that I know.

When I started Kimota, I knew I wanted Alex to write the introduction for my first project because I felt he was the only one who understood the importance of the Miracleman character created by Alan Moore and company back at the close of the last century. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to humbly witness Alex create spectacular covers for books that I had a role in like Age of TV Heroes, G-Force: Animated, and Comic Book Fever. All these covers are now the faces of these efforts and they masterfully embody everything we desired to capture on the pages inside.

I can still remember how awestruck I was when I first read his work. I can still recall visiting his art exhibitions in New York City during the ’90s—and buying an original Kingdom Come page that I couldn’t afford because the work and its words resonated that much with me. Even years before writing a single word on G-Force: Animated and Age of TV Heroes, I can remember daydreaming of seeing him render the Gatchaman characters and the television super-heroes of yesteryear before I even knew he was a big fan of them. Today, I’m just humbled to call this talented individual my friend.

— G.K.

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2001: CONTEMPORARY BOOKS who genuinely enjoyed Kimota and articulated those warm feeling on message boards across comic book sites, and even sent letters and emails telling me so. For what many might label as a “fannish” book, Kimota went to places that I never imagined as it received a nice recommendation from The Guardian and earned an Eisner Award nomination for “Best ComicsRelated Book” in 2002. The entire experience was truly humbling and an enormous boost of confidence for someone without an ounce of it.

Thanks to Kimota and TwoMorrows, I was able to write more books and articles in my pursuit of happiness about my favorite comic book heroes: the comic book writers and artists of the books that inspired me. I wrote for every TwoMorrows magazine that would have me: Comic Book Artist, Comic Book Creator, Rough Stuff, Draw!, The Jack Kirby Collector, and Alter Ego. Along the way, I’ve also had the good fortune to make my dream books with some of the best friends I ever had as collaborators: Eric Nolen-Weathington (on five volumes for the Modern Masters series, and as my designer on Comic Book Fever), Jason Hofius (on Age of TV Heroes and G-Force: Animated), and Jon B. Cooke (my designer on Kimota and Image Comics: The Road to Independence). Without my friends, the readers and Two­ Morrows, I would have stopped a long time ago.

When my last book, Comic Book Fever, received the lowest pre-orders and got the smallest print-run of all my books, I was devastated. It felt disheartening to know so few people wanted the work that I had invested more than four years into putting together. No amount of expense and time was spared into making the experience as authentic as possible because I wanted to revisit the spontaneity of the era that made my generation and me fall in love with this medium, and I hoped to share that powerful

excitement with everyone.

Comic Book Fever was a book that celebrated the pivotal comics era of 1976–86. It’s a love letter to the medium, the era, and its creators, but it’s also a bit more than that because every chapter and sidebar carried a story, and all these stories together paint a larger picture of the entire comics industry. I wanted it to be a bright spot of positivity in our cynical world, because writing about comics can be a frustrating business since too many people take it for granted or seem only interested in reading about the worst aspects of it: greed, gossip, and pessimism.

Yes, initial orders for Fever were soul-crushing, but thanks to word of mouth from our readers, a heavy dose of determination and help from friends and family, and positive reviews, we miraculously sold out the entire print run of the Little Book That Couldn’t. It felt good to see Fever resonate with the people who gave it a chance and read it, but it still hurts knowing it isn’t around for anyone else to discover. When you put these books and articles together, you do so wishing and hoping these publications will be around forever on paper, available to all who want them. On Fever, I used everything I had learned over the years to make it work because I wanted it to stick around. It’s the one book that I wouldn’t mind bringing back to print myself, bigger and better than before, because I can’t stop thinking about it. I guess the feeling and Fever still burns.

I came to comics with nothing more than a fistful of coins.

I read and bought them because I couldn’t afford anything else on my own when I was a child. These funnybooks gave me a taste of freedom. These four-color wonders helped give me a voice, an imagination, and some independence when the world was new.

— George Khoury

Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore

I was a little intimated by this one because all I wanted to do was to make a fun, accessible biographical reference book that packed a punch and provided insight to Moore‘s fans, new and old, now and then (and tomorrow). Extraordinary was two years in the making. It has layers upon layers; it’s insightful and loaded with content. Plus, there were original strips inside by many of the writer’s key collaborators: J.H. Williams III, Brian Bolland, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd, Kevin O’Neill, among many others. It was a celebration of the greatest writer of our medium on the eve of his 50th birthday. I am forever grateful to Alan Moore for giving me the opportunity to make this dream project come true.

— G.K.

Left: Writer Alan Moore interjects himself—and George Khoury— into comics continuity, in a panel from 2004’s Promethea #30.

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The World of TwoMorrows

Caricature by Wendy Dinsmore.

JASON HOFIUS: COLLABORATING WITH George KHOURY I loved to draw from childhood, and later started my professional career as an advertising illustrator. I always figured I’d finish my career doing something along those, uh… lines. However, as my job duties expanded, I got into copywriting and found that I loved the process. Then I discovered I had fun writing about my most avid fan interests, and had the thrill of seeing my first non-job-related article in print. Even more, I enjoyed the detective work that came along with being able to write a well-informed article.

My first project for TwoMorrows— co-written with George Khoury—was G-Force: Animated—The Official Battle of the Planets Guidebook. My most “fannish” interest had led to a job working for Sandy Frank Entertainment, the U.S. rights holder for the Battle of the Planets property. I had already begun writing a book about the series, when George approached Sandy Frank about doing the same. I was impressed with George’s enthusiasm and our thoughts on the book were nearly identical, so we decided to tackle the project together. It was a life-changing decision. If we hadn’t worked Jason Hofius together, I Co-author, Age would have of TV Heroes missed out on meeting Born: 1971 John Morrow Residence: and getting to Sunny California know George, Vocation: Revealing someone I this would compromise now consider my secret identity a dear friend.

Favorite Creator: John took a Arthur Adams chance on the Seminal Comic Book: project since Captain America #222 it was about a television show, which was outside his main comic book-related field of interest. Thankfully the Battle of the Planets book did well and went into a couple of printings.

I later learned that Sandy Frank had purchased so many copies, he ate through his royalty payments and owed

George Khoury: Comic Book Fever Dreams

TwoMorrows money! It was a point of pride for us to see a copy of the book permanently adorning Sandy’s desk from that point on.

Our second project was the hardfought Age of TV Heroes. It was an ambitious subject that investigated live-action TV shows with comic-book origins. Tracking down long-retired production personnel, finding ways past agents and managers for still-working actors, getting people to agree to discuss projects, obtaining photo rights, and more was all difficult, but worth it. It was a great deal of fun to talk with the people we used to watch every week— Lynda Carter, Nicholas Hammond, Adam West—and so many others.

If John hadn’t stuck behind us and believed in Age of TV Heroes as much as he did, it may never have seen the light of day. George and I worked on the book for about seven years and I think it taught us all a lesson in perseverance, patience, and good timing.

It all came together in the end and it was wonderful to be able to share our feelings about the shows that kept us enthralled as youngsters.

Meeting and working with George has been the best thing to come out of my two (so far) major projects at TwoMorrows. Although George and I live on opposite sides of the United States, he’s one of my closest friends,

and I’m grateful for his ear. He’s like the brother I never had. I was seriously ill a few years ago and George was there to call, write letters to keep my spirits up, and share how things were going on the third book we’d started—Comic Book Fever. Since I was facing years of recovery, with my blessing, he completed it without me.

I love writing and I’m grateful for the freedom working with TwoMorrows has provided; a chance to dig deeply into projects and to present them in ways that remain true to their initial pitches.

Here’s to another 25 years and beyond!

(And why did I choose Captain America #222 as my “Seminal Comic Book”? I realize it was hardly a highlight of ol’ Cap’s crime-fighting career. However, I’d been to Washington, D.C., just a couple months earlier and stood at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. One of the things I’d wondered about was how tall the statue would be if it could have stood up. Then that issue showed up in the mail as the first in my subscription.

Wow… this comic had read my mind; of course I needed to see more!)

— Jason Hofius

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2001: DRAW!

The Art of Making Draw! Magazine A Sketchy Start

Mike: Yes, Dave is a musician and my brother Marc has dabbled in everything from music to photograJon B. Cooke: What’s your middle name, Mike?

Editor, Draw! phy. My family is very creative.

Mike Manley: Cole, like Nat King Cole.

JBC: What was the subject of your father’s photogJBC: Where are you from?

Born: 1961 raphy? What made him outstanding?

Mike: I’m from Detroit, Michigan; grew up and Residence: lived there until I was 13. Then I moved to Ann Ar- Mike: He did a lot of landscapes and human interUpper Darby, bor, Michigan. I lived there until I moved to Philly in est. He has boxes of photos of us as kids—whatevPennsylvania the summer of 1984. I’ve been out east since then. er struck his interest, but he’s taken tons and tons Vocation: Comics, of great landscape photos. One award he won was JBC: Did you have creative people in your family? animation, and for a dog looking in a window or a door, waiting for Mike: Yes. Actually, my grandfather was what you newspaper strip artist would now call a “display letterer.” He was a com- his master to return. I remember that as a kid.

Favorite Creator: mercial artist. Back in the day before computers did JBC: The subject of your mom’s paintings?

Jack Kirby Mike: I remember her doing pen-&-inks and I everything, he used to do the hand lettering, like Seminal Comic Book: in the supermarket… big signs. He worked all over remember still-lifes.

The Kirby Jimmy Olsens JBC: What kind of upbringing did you have? Suband had several accounts: car dealerships, superFurthering TwoMorrows’ urban? How would you characterize it? markets. My mom was artistic. She used to draw trend of having its fan Mike: Middle/working class. and paint and my dad is a fantastic photographer. publications produced by There are definitely artistic inclinations in my family. JBC: What did your dad do? professionals, a new line Mike: Initially, he worked for the board of educaJBC: Is your father professional or amateur? of “how-to” publications tion and then for the post office. Originally, he was Mike: Amateur. I think he wanted to be a photostarts taking shape with a mailman and eventually inside as a clerk. journalist at one time, and he still takes a lot of the introduction of Draw!

JBC: Your mom was a housewife? great photos. He has Instagram and Facebook magazine, edited by top Mike: Yeah, she was a housewife and a good mom; comics artist Mike Manley. accounts, and he’s won a lot of awards. she didn’t have a job outside the house until I was JBC: What’s your father’s name? in my mid-teens—pretty much like a lot of people Mike: Pierre. Mom’s first name is Nancy. who grew up in my generation.

JBC: She was being creative when painting?

Inset right: Mike Manley, set up in Mike: Yeah. I must have JBC: That’s when the latchkey generation began.

Artist’s Alley, in 2005, to promote his own Action Planet self-publish- been early teens, when ing imprint, as well as his various I remember she was Draw!-related publications. taking art classes at a local community college for a while. Looking back, there were always a lot of reproductions of art on the wall at home.

There was always art around. They’d take us to the art museums around Detroit.

JBC: You have siblings?

Mike: Yeah, two brothers. My middle brother is Dave and my youngDraw! est brother is Marc.

First Issue: 3/1/2001 JBC: Are they creative?

Mike Manley

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The World of TwoMorrows

Mike: Yeah, in the ’70s and ’80s.

JBC: Did you have newspapers in the house?

Mike: Yes, the Detroit Free Press and, later on, the Ann Arbor News.

JBC: The accompanying comic strips… did they impress you at all?

Mike: Thinking back, yes. Probably more as a kid— Peanuts, Wizard of Id, and B.C.—those are what I remember. I remember looking at Steve Canyon, when Caniff was still doing it. I remember thinking the way he would draw mouths was a little weird, an odd style to me as a kid. Flash Gordon and Steve Roper and Mike Nomad—I remember those as a kid, but I got more into reading the strips probably from Scholastic. They’d have those reprint books in school. You could get these Charlie Brown reprint books. I think I saw that stuff more through there and I was probably into comics and stuff because my dad was into comics. He would tell us about the comics he read as a kid. He read The Spirit. I didn’t know any of that stuff at the time.

He liked Popeye and The Phantom, which is ironic because that’s what I do now! He’s more excited about me doing The Phantom than maybe anything else.

JBC: [Chuckles] What’s the first comic you remember?

Mike: There are probably others I read before this, but there’s one I read that fascinated me. It

2001 Mike Manley: Draw!

2002

was a Superman, and on the cover there’s some guy made out of crystal laying in some kind of sarcophagus. I was trying to find it and eventually I found a copy online. That’s the first comic; I loved Superman as a kid. It was probably my favorite comic book, although I loved Batman, but I liked Superman the most.

JBC: Were you exposed to the TV show at all?

Mike: Yeah, I watched The Adventures of Superman, and like other kids growing up in the ’60s, I watched the Batman TV show. For us, a big thrill was we could go over on Sunday night to my grandparents’ house and watch their color TV. I remember the transformative experience of being able to see your favorite TV show in color! It was so shocking and dramatic! My favorite show was Lost in Space and I remember seeing an episode in color and seeing the robot’s claws were red. “His claws are red? That’s so awesome!” I was so used to seeing everything in black-&-white, so seeing in a whole other dimension was pretty cool. Like everybody, I loved Space Ghost and The Impossibles, and Frankenstein Jr. was one of my favorites.

It’s pretty horrible to watch now and Space Ghost is pretty horrible, too! There were some nice drawings and some terrible drawings. The stories don’t

This page: Above is young Mike (circa 1971, in Detroit) honing his artistic skills, and meeting idol Jack Kirby at the 1983 San Diego Comic-Con. Below is The Phantom

by Mike, a current assignment.

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JBC: Were you a sociable kid?

Mike: I suppose. There are very distinct patterns… times in my childhood. There are the pre-1967 riots and the post 1967 riots.

Detroit post-riots was a very different city. My neighborhood changed a lot. In fact, I just went back at Thanksgiving to visit my parents and drove down to look at our old neighborhood.

Detroit is such a bizarre city. If you didn’t grow up there, it probably wouldn’t be as striking, but the fact that there are places in my old neighborhood that burned in 1967—like supermarkets—it’s like a Harrison Ellenshaw painting from Logan’s Run, where blight and rot has grown over everything. It’s just so bizarre. The downtown has revitalized with all these young, white kids, but you drive two miles from that and the city is in tatters, with houses falling down. It’s a very bizarre city, so my neighborhood was kind of mixed. Mostly everybody worked for the auto companies, but my neighborhood was radically transformed after the “white flight” in 1967. We finally moved to Ann Arbor and I remember one thing about it when we visited, whenever we went, usually on a Sunday, there was a comic book store there. I was always like, “Man, I want to go in that store!”

So, when we finally moved there in 1975, I was able to go into “The Eye of Agamotto,” named after Doctor Strange’s amulet! [chuckles] That’s when the comic bug hit me hard and I decided that’s what I wanted to do for a living.

JBC: Can you give me a brief synopsis of the riot and the cause?

Mike: I don’t know all the causes of the riots. I just know, as a kid, it was very strange because you could look out the front door and in the distance see fire and smoke. Then the Army was on our street! “Holy sh*t! Mom! I want to go outside!” I loved all the World War II shows like Combat and Rat Patrol, so if there’s a tank or troop truck, what kid doesn’t like seeing all the Army stuff? So, I wanted to go outside and Mom’s like, “Well, you can’t go outside.” “Why can’t I go outside?” “Because you can’t go outside!”

JBC: It was a race riot?

Mike: Yeah, basically. I remember seeing people running and carrying stuff. I remember a young guy running with something and troops chasing him. I remember cars going by with crap hanging out the back. It was the same; race riots were

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everywhere in America then. As a kid, you can’t put all that into context. You don’t know the bigger picture of what’s going on in society, but it radically changed the neighborhood because all the kids I played with moved away. All my friends moved away.

The neighborhood went into block-busting and “white flight,” and all that other stuff that went on. It really radically changed the neighborhood that I grew up in. We basically were forced to move because our house was firebombed twice. We had no choice but to move.

JBC: By strangers?

Mike: I think what happened was there were guys outside drinking from a car and they were throwing their beer bottles onto the yard. My dad went out there and said, “You can hang out here, but don’t throw your sh*t in my yard.” After that, they tried to basically burn us out of our house. The second time it happened, the policeman said, “You’ve got a nice family here; I’d advise you to move.” The neighborhood changed radically. It became violent… drugs. All my friends moved away and so I had the pre-riot Detroit, the post-riot Detroit, and the move to Ann Arbor. It was a very different lifestyle there.

JBC: Did you have notions about race that were complicated?

Mike: Yes and no, because my family is mixed-race. We’ve got white, black, and Hispanic. It’s multi-ethnic. That was never an issue, but I think what was apparent to me was people not valuing their property and taking care of their houses the way my neighbors and my parents did, so each wave of people that would come in; they were kind of like termites. They’d bring it down a little more and down a little more. That’s what’s happened to Detroit. Many of the people moved and the people who didn’t move couldn’t afford to move. Meaning, there’s hardly any supermarkets in Detroit. If you want to go to a supermarket, you have to leave Detroit. It’s a great failure of this country that a city like that could fall into such ruin. There are similarities in big industrial cities like Detroit, like Philly. There’s a lot of poverty—like 25% of people live below the poverty line in Philly and somewhere around the same number are also illiterate. Those things go hand-in-hand. Moving to Ann Arbor was a transformative thing because we didn’t have to worry about shoot-outs and guns. There was a lot of violence in my neighborhood.

JBC: How old were you when you moved?

Mike: Thirteen.

JBC: Did you have awareness of the “Detroit Comics Mafia”?

The comics’ creators like Rich Buckler, Al Milgrom, Jim Starlin…?

Mike: That was later on, when we moved and I started going

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to The Eye of Agamotto bookstore. Probably when I was 14 or 15, I went to my first comic book convention and Al Milgrom, Keith Pollard, Terry Austin, Mike Vosberg, Rich Buckler, Jim Starlin… there were a lot of guys from the Detroit area. At one of the first shows was Keith Pollard. Another show… one great show: Terry, Vosberg, Walt Simonson, and Milgrom were all at some little show in Farmington. It’s ironic because Bret Blevin’s uncle Tim used to work at the comic book show and was friends with the guy who owned the comic book store. Bret was probably at that show. We were probably at a couple of shows together. He didn’t grow up in Michigan, but there were a couple of times he came. We might have actually been at the same conventions, but didn’t know each other.

I did meet him later through his uncle, when he was moving from Vegas to New York. We met and were fast friends from that first meeting. The comics world was much smaller then.

Influence Peddling

JBC: When did you start drawing?

Mike: I don’t remember not drawing. I always drew as a kid. My parents still have some drawings… my grandmother—my mom’s mother—worked for Chrysler. She’d bring home extra pens and pencils and mimeograph paper—anything they were going to throw out, she’d bring home. Whenever I’d go to my grandmother’s house, there was always a big box of art supplies for me to pick from. My grandmother was probably my biggest supporter and booster of being an artist. My grandfather was an artist, but as I got older, we had a bit of an ambivalent relationship. My grandfather was a complicated guy, but he did give me the most important art book I ever got. He gave me Andrew Loomis’ Fun with a Pencil when I was probably 11.

I learned so much from that book on how to build and construct figures. That really helped me a lot as a kid to be able to understand how to put things together… how to construct a figure.

My grandfather was a self-made guy, as were many men of that generation. He learned to

2007 Mike Manley: Draw!

become a display letterer by taking the want ads and turning them sideways to practice his lettering.

He’d go get a job lettering a fleet of trucks in the winter when it was bitter cold. He’d have to cut the fingers off the ends of his gloves so he could letter a truck in the dead of night. I still have one of his old display-lettering books, that shows how to make title cards and show cards. Even one of my teachers in high school, that’s what she did. At that

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Above: The first collaboration between longtime friends Mike Manley and Bret Blevins, done in fall 1984.

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time, people wanted hand-done diplomas and hand-done cards.

She made part of her income teaching art classes, something she did on the side.

JBC: Were the comics you were reading mostly adventure?

Mike: Yeah, I’d go to my doctor’s office as a kid and they’d have Richie Rich, Bible comics… comics for babies. I wanted Superman, Batman—super-heroes, and I was really into the space program in the ’60s. They’d wheel the TV into the classroom and we’d watch the Gemini and the Apollo missions and all that stuff.

You probably had that, right?

JBC: I was a complete nut—especially for Apollo 11. I was “over the moon.” That was of supreme importance; actually the biggest thing in my life at a certain age as a kid. Let’s say cartoons: when did you realize human beings made these things?

Mike: When it became apparent to me was probably watching The Wonderful World of Disney. They’d do the segments on the “Nine Old Men” drawing. I loved animation, too. We’d see the segments, and then we’d go to a Gulf gas station, and they’d have a Disney magazine. In the back, they’d show you how to draw Tinkerbell or whatever. And, because of my grandfather, I knew then that there were people who drew. There were men who had an occupation of drawing cartoons and comics. I knew that was something you could do.

JBC: When did you think of it as a job?

Mike: When I was 13.

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JBC: You were frequenting The Eye of Agamotto shop. Did you encounter any professionals?

Mike: Not at the store. They had a little bulletin board outside the store where they’d put up news about a comic book show in Farmington Hills, or the Holiday Inn, or the Rotary Club or Legion hall, which is where most shows were—the old Legion halls. The first one was in Detroit and Dad drove me. I remember meeting Keith Pollard there. He was working on the Fantastic Four at the time. I think I was doing what everybody was doing— drawing my pages. I was pretty serious at 13 with that being what I wanted to do. At 15, I stopped playing sports. I couldn’t play sports, work at my job, and do my art. I had no desire to be an athlete. I wanted to be a cartoonist. I wanted to be an illustrator. By the time I could drive, I was able to drive myself to wherever they were having conventions.

JBC: Did you do homemade comics?

Mike: Yeah, I’d draw pages. Robert Craddock, a friend of mine in school—we did a comic together. He wrote it and I drew it.

You’d be real hot for the first five or six pages and then fall out because you didn’t really have your story together. You’d go and draw the fun bits and then, “Oh, no, I’ve gotta draw this other stuff.” I was always drawing pages.

JBC: Did you make up characters?

Mike: Yeah, some derivative form of something you like. Superman crossed with a cyborg, crossed with Captain Kirk. [chuckles]

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JBC: What was the name of the character?

Mike: One was called “Star Stalkers,” or something. I had a really original idea for a guy called “Miracle-Man,” who was like a Kirby guy who rode these discs. I don’t know if he had anything to do with Mister Miracle, but like most kids, you’re riffing off the art you admire, the same way my brother the musician is riffing off Van Halen or Jimmy Page.

Everybody learns to play Stairway to Heaven…

JBC: Smoke on the Water.

Mike: It’s the same thing. It’s when you go beyond the hobby aspect. I teach a high school illustration class. You get kids who are coming to the class after school and they’re already motivated. A small percentage will go on to art school. One of my assistants, Liang, was one of those students in my class. I’ve known hundreds of artists now, but most get to that point where they’re not really obsessed with it. They like doing it, but they like doing something else and they get to that point where the rubber has to meet the road and it goes beyond the casual or the hobby.

Learning From Teaching

JBC: When you get a student coming in who has that eye of the tiger, can you often tell when they come in that, “Yeah, this guy’s got something,” besides their talent or attitude?

Mike: Yes, it’s the person in the back of the room with the sketchbook with lots of drawings. You have the person who comes in and they have the same anime head they draw over and over. They’re drawing the same thing and then you’ll find a student that’s drawing as a compulsion beyond skateboarding or picking up the guitar for a while. There are a lot of people with an interest in drawing, but it’s the obsessive type that becomes apparent. As an obsessive artist, you notice that type of person right away.

I had this experience more than once: you start teaching a class and have someone very exuberant and going on about how much they want this class. That’s usually the first person who fails. It’s the person that’s quiet because they’re creative and

2014 Mike Manley: Draw!

living in their head—that’s what I came to realize. The person who is a comic book artist is different from a regular artist because you’re pulling from your imagination as opposed to the student painting a landscape or a still life or doing something else, because an illustrator lives inside their head. It’s a different way of expressing yourself. You’re not responding to an outside stimulus; you’re responding to an inside stimulus—your imagination. You are channeling and working with that. When I meet a student who has that, I know that person has a good possibility, if they’re interested, in going forward.

JBC: Were you one of those kids who sat in the back with a sketchbook?

Mike: Yeah, and I used to read MAD magazine and get it taken away. I would draw flip book battles of guys blowing each other up inside my math book.

I’d take the edge of the pages and draw stuff.

JBC: Were you personable as a teenager and socializing with other guys?

Mike: Yeah. People always liked me, but I tended

Above: Bret Blevins’ distinctive style lends as much life to his caricature drawings, as it does to Draw magazine itself.

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2001: DRAW! to have a close group of friends who were creatives. I had no use for high school after the ninth or tenth grades. I knew I had to do it to get out. I never liked school, to be honest. I wanted to get on with doing what I wanted to do as my profession, but I did have close friends like John Knoll. He was one of the two guys who invented Photoshop and he went off to run Industrial Light & Magic. So, I think those creative types seek each other out in a way.

JBC: Did you date at all? Were you sociable with girls?

Mike: Yeah, but I never had a steady girl.

JBC: You were comfortable in the company of girls?

Mike: Sure. I played sports. I used to wrestle and play football, but I had to be honest about practicing five days a week and putting time in my art. I wasn’t a geek or the “starving artist,” or any other artist cliché.

JBC: I can see in retrospect that I could’ve become an artist, which is mostly solitary, but for me—all of a sudden—it was girls.

I wanted to be with girls instead of drawing all the time. Anything happened that was comparable with you?

Mike: I was very dedicated in wanting to achieve my dream, which was to work for Marvel Comics. I would haunt the library, reading The Comics Journal, I would try to find any information about how to do this as a profession. Now it’s everywhere.

There’s a whole industry of how to get into the industry. At that time, none of my teachers in high school were helpful in that way. The only thing I could do was find How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, which my grandmother bought me; and The Illusion of Light, a Disney book my grandmother bought me for Christmas. I would have loved to be able to be somebody’s apprentice or something, if I’d been able to live in New York or some place like that and get in with somebody like Adams or artists like Chaykin, or Buckler, or anybody who had an assistant. My work would have been adequate enough to at least get me in the door, but Michigan was like a wasteland and none of my teachers were any help with that. No high school teachers, no counselors, and not even my parents necessarily because I don’t think people understood the mechanics of the profession. Now, whatever you want to do—make a grilled-cheese sandwich? There’s a guy on the internet showing you what to do. There’s a whole industry on how to make a grilled-cheese sandwich! The only comparison is, if you were a musician, you’d hang out with other musicians.

There was a social network for musicians.

There wasn’t a social network of people wanting to do this, outside of New York or maybe L.A. (where you had the animation

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business). But, coming from the Midwest… I had friends like you and high school friends like John Knoll and Aaron McClelland—they also wanted to do this. There was no clear path.

You’d draw your stuff, go to a convention and walk around, and show people your stuff, and hope that, “Okay, kid. I’m going to give you a shot,” but there was no direct path to be able to do that, you know?

JBC: What’s the age difference between you and your brothers?

Mike: Thirteen between me and Mark and two-and-a-half between me and Dave.

JBC: Was Dave into comics? Was big brother an influence?

Mike: Dave was good at drawing, but not as good as me. Dave could have been a very funny cartoonist. He’s a funny guy and he could have been—we both liked music and art. I think comics is like baking. Part of the process of liking to bake is liking the process of baking. Music is immediate. You sit down and play and you get immediate feedback. I like music and think I’m a frustrated musician. Now I wish I had taken music lessons, although I took piano. I would love to play music. I think they go hand in hand.

JBC: Did you do any fanzine work?

Mike: I did have a couple of drawings printed in The Comics Journal and I was kind of aware of fandom, but not like RBCC, The Rocket’s Blast Comicollector. I never submitted stuff. I didn’t submit anything to The Comics Buyer’s Guide. I just submitted to The Comics Journal.

JBC: How were you in English class? Could you write?

Mike: Yeah. My punctuation and all that stuff could’ve been better. I wanted to move on from it. I could’ve been a better student, but I wasn’t motivated to be better, because I thought “This is a waste of time.”

JBC: Were you college bound?

Mike: Yes and no. I went to one semester of college after high school. I had two different art classes in high school. I had the hippie-dippie art, draw what you feel—and then I had commercial art, which is learning how to do key-lining and pasteup, running the press, doing darkroom stuff, all that. With that experience, I made a little portfolio and I called every artist in the phone book in Ann Arbor until I found this guy named Rock Lamonte. He was an old ex-Marine munitions sergeant who used to work for Chrysler. I guess he liked my “moxie” as they would say in the old days. He hired me when I was 15 and I learned how to run a press, darkroom work, the whole printing process, type-specing—all the stuff you did before desktop publishing,

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including delivering work to the clients. I worked for him for a couple of years and I learned a lot from him.

When I went to Washtenaw Community College, I wanted to learn how to draw the figure better.

I originally wanted to go to art school, but my parents didn’t plan for it. Nobody said, “Okay, Mike. This is where you want to go; this is how you go about applying for it. This is how you apply for financial aid.” There was nothing there for that. It was not something that was planned. Dad said, “Oh, you can go to Washtenaw,” and I was there, but they weren’t teaching me anything—the pasteup, all that commercial process—I had already been doing that stuff. Why am I going to pay somebody to teach me something I already know how to do? Wanting to know how to draw the figure and paint better—they weren’t teaching all that. There was a live model, but the teacher wasn’t coming around and saying, “This is how you put the bones in, proportion, this or that.”

I got frustrated and quit and followed the path of self-learning all the way until I went back to college at 45 to finish my undergrad degree and, in 2013, I started and finished my master’s degree. I came back to it because I was teaching. I started teaching in the early 2000s, not too long after I started Draw!, which led me to teaching because a friend of mine, Charlie Parker, who does a lines and colors blog, was teaching at DCAD, Delaware College of Art and Design, and they were looking for somebody to teach storyboard class, which is what I was doing at the time. I went down and talked to the Dean and the head of the animation department.

I showed them my stuff and the magazine. They hired me and I started teaching. After I started I thought, “I really like teaching,” so I decided at that time because people said, “If you want to teach, you need to finish your degree.”

There are two ways of teaching in America: you can be famous and they don’t care if you don’t have a degree because you attract people to the school, or you have so much experience—I had more experience than anyone at the school as far as animation and comics. But, if you want to go on now, part of the issue, what’s destroying everything is they make everybody get these degrees, but they don’t pay that much. So, you pay $80,000 minimum to get your Master’s, but nobody’s paying you $80,000 to teach! You’re lucky if you get $30,000–40,000. Nobody gets tenure anymore.

I started the magazine and I teach because I remember how I was as a teenager—really desperately wanting to do this job. Really desperate out in

Mike Manley: Draw!

the wilderness. You’re haunting any bookstore, any library, hunting down any process. How do you do this? How do you draw a figure? So the magazine comes out of me, as a teenager, trying to figure out, “How do I achieve my dream, living in Ann Arbor, Michigan?”

I’m going to a couple of shows a year, meeting people—some of whose art you don’t even like! I tell my students, “You go to a show and maybe this guy isn’t your favorite artist.

‘I prefer Neal Adams or John Buscema and I’m meeting Keith Pollard!’ (Nothing against Pollard—I’m just using him as an example—he wasn’t my favorite like Frazetta or Moebius, or something like that.) But this guy’s successful; he’s working in the business. If you’re lucky enough that he gives you five minutes, you write down what he says. You be serious and be thankful.” I remember an incident with him. He was looking at my stuff and he said, “You’re having trouble with your heads. You’re not doing the necks right.” I wrote it down and when I went back home, I wrote on a piece of paper, “Not doing necks right.” I stuck that above my drawing board. That’s the thing… I’m going to lick that. I’m going to learn to draw my heads better.

JBC: Do you look at it where that boy who wanted instruction led you to being an instructor and editor of a how-to magazine? Is it a straight line?

Mike: I think so. The desire to learn as a student, even though I’m a teacher—I still have that desire to improve myself as a student. When I meet a young student coming in, I can clearly put myself back in their place—where they were. Having the desire, saying, “I want to do that.” Everyone has a dream and then there becomes the reality of

Above: Friends for life: Mike with Jamar Nicholas and Bret Blevins.

Below: A Mike Manley commission.

Below: A fourth Best of Draw volume was planned, but was shelved due to low initial pre-orders.

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2001: DRAW! having a dream become real. There are certain paths that make it clearer and sharper and certain paths like mine, which was self-education. So, I did a pretty good job because I was able to get a job and get in the business and continue to improve, but there are always gaps when you do something through teaching yourself. Then, you can go and have great teachers and great facilities and still suck because you’re not very serious and motivated, and that is ninety-eight percent of art students in the world. The reality is, there was an older teacher I met when I started teaching. He was the one who told me about the ninety-eight percent rule. He also told me he had a teacher who told him that most of the students are there to pay for the lights for the actual two people who do make it. [Jon chuckles] It sounds funny or brutal, but it’s really true. I’ve taught hundreds of students and seen hundreds of portfolios in my time—standing behind people in line and at the table, reviewing people. Very few people make it because most people can’t take having the regimen…

JBC: Fortitude, it’s called!

Mike: …and the amount of rejections. Same thing with actors.

How many times can you audition and be told “no” until finally, you get that role and finally everyone wants to hire you and you win an Academy Award! If I could have gone to Art Center… I remember that I had a job at a local ad agency that I quit. I was nineteen and saw an ad in the paper. They had hired an outside firm to vet people for the job. I called every agency in town until I found the outside agency and I went directly to the agency.

And then I got the job while everybody else was standing in line.

I was 19, making $15,000 a year, and had benefits, but they were two-faced people. They would tell you one thing and do another.

I was very unhappy. That’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to do comics. I remember seeing an ad in some magazine. At that time Hanna-Barbera still had a training program, so I remember calling out there and getting some old guy on the phone and he goes, “Oh, kid, you don’t want to work in animation—it’s a f*cking sh*tty business. You should do something else.” I don’t

know if it was Hanna or Barbera. [chuckles] I was really down.

I liked animation and thought it was something I could do. All the people I loved, like Adams or Frazetta, they did everything—comics, fine art, movie posters, concept design— they did everything. Their talent was good enough they could say yes. I wanted to be like those guys—they could do a car, they could do a movie poster for a film, or really awesome comic books. There didn’t seem to be any direct path in my life. I wasn’t rich, so I couldn’t go to the school I wanted. I didn’t even have anybody who could tell me how to do a portfolio, which I’d probably have to do, I’d have to take the time to prepare one. I had the love and support of my parents and grandparents, but they didn’t understand what you had to do to do this. That’s very typical.

If somebody wants to go to medical school—you have to have grades, you have to have money, go to certain schools based on what you want to do—“I want to be a childhood oncologist,” “I want to be a brain surgeon”… there are certain schools that specialize in that. You study with a doctor and then you get recommended to study with another doctor who’s good at that.

There really isn’t that for art school. There certainly isn’t that for cartooning. I remember seeing the ad for the Kubert School, but that was in Dover, New Jersey, “How would I go to Dover, New Jersey? Would I get a job? Would I get an apartment there?”

There was just the idea that nobody was going to deny me my goal. I quit that job at the ad agency and had a huge argument with my dad. At 45, with three kids, a job with a salary is a “bird in the hand, son! What are you talking about?” But, that’s not what I wanted to do. I quit that job, worked, took my samples to Chicago, and that’s where I met Chuck Dixon; he and his wife were doing a book for DC called Robotech and she needed help drawing the robots. That’s funny because I had two sets of samples: I had Batman samples, which nobody seemed to give a crap about, and then I had this funny animal stuff and everybody responded to that and drawing robots and backgrounds and perspective. That’s what landed me helping her, which led to other work directly. I got to go to DC and met Joe Orlando. You take advantage of every opportunity. I was not a fan of Robotech and The Transformers, but I was not going to say, “No way, man.

You bring me the Fantastic Four on a silver platter.”

Beginning to Draw!

JBC: How did Draw! start?

Mike: I was on a chat group and I had the idea that I would like to do like a trade magazine, a step-by-step publication, like what they have for every other business—commercial art, plumbing, car mechanics… everybody seems to have a trade magazine, but there had not been one about comics. There are ones where they interview people, what you do with Comic Book Creator, but I wanted there to be one more about the process, “from A

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to Z”—about how you go about actually drawing in very specific steps. I remember reading How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way and I’d see layouts and they would show you some steps, but there would be steps in-between that were missing.

Like you would see an Alex Simmons The Art of Making Comics rough and then see his finish, but you wouldn’t see anything about how to do a rough: “Oh, I’d put it on a lightbox and tighten it up,” or Neal Adams using his Artograph to “project stuff down,” or Gil Kane, to “blow stuff up.”

There were a lot of steps that I remember when I was younger, I wanted to know how to do this, so that was my impetus.

When I was young, I would try to find any source that I could, but there was no source that was complete, so I wanted to make a magazine that would completely cover the process like you’d see in other magazines about commercial art and design.

I think somebody mentioned that I should run the idea past John Morrow, so I sent him an email, I believe, and we hit it off. He seemed to really like the idea and started the ball rolling.

JBC: So you knew about TwoMorrows?

Mike: Oh, yeah. I had been buying all the other magazines like Comic Book Artist and The Jack Kirby Collector, so I was already familiar with them.

JBC: Did you have a mission besides the how-to aspect? Were there artists you wanted to promote or showcase that may have been more neglected?

Mike: Not necessarily in that regard, although I did—and even more so today—believe everything is connected through drawing. Whether it’s John Singer Sargent, John Buscema, Jack Kirby, Moebius, Dave Cooper, people working in animation… it’s all connected through drawing. That’s the one thing all this figurative art, classical art, have in common. Whether a narrative in painting, film, or comics, it’s all connected through drawing. Each format has its own criteria and its own demands, but it all connects through drawing.

When I look at a drawing in animation by the Nine Old Men [Disney animation veterans], the beautiful work on things like those classic Disney films, and then look at the drawing by John Buscema or Albert Dorne or somebody like Alex Toth—who bridged, because he worked in both mediums—you see that beautiful sense of form and trying to understand things. All drawing is linked in trying to understand three-dimensional form and depicted in a 2-D surface; whether you move it through animation or on a single surface, it’s all connected that way. So, I had always been interested in animation as a kid. I wanted to work

Mike Manley: Draw!

in animation and was very interested in working in animation and comics and illustration—all the people I admired when I was growing up worked in animation—or, I could do a cover, or I could draw a comic book. It didn’t seem like you had to have a specific job where you could only do one thing.

By that time, I was working in animation, working on the Superman and Batman shows and working up Samurai Jack. So that gave me a chance to bring people who worked in animation into the magazine and talk about their processes as well.

More people in comics want to do animation these

Above: An unused cover for Mike’s Monsterman comic.

Previous page: At inset top is the cover of Mike’s Action Planet Comics #1 [1996]. At bottom is Mike sharing some convention time with comics legend Moebius.

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2001: DRAW! days, and a lot of people in animation want to do comics, like Bruce Timm. A lot of people were going back and forth. The animation business was exploding in the late ’90s with all that Lion King money, and Saturday morning cartoons were still going.

This was before Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon took over.

The economics of animation started to change. There was a lot of competition for talent at that time, so it was a real boom time at the end of the ’90s. (There’s a little bit of a boom going on now since Netflix is busy making shows.) But it’s the demographics and the way cable and the internet have changed things. Now you have the web, so you have all these kids doing comics as a format, but they’re doing it through the cellphone. They’re never going to read a Jack Kirby comic, they’re never going to read an Iron Man comic, but they like comics as a form of telling stories, so we have a whole generation coming up using the medium and using the same skillset, telling different types of stories.

The Challenges of Publishing

JBC: So, you were a busy guy! You’re teaching, you’re in animation. When did you start the comic strip?

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Mike: In 2010, I started doing Judge Parker.

JBC: Was it tough to do a magazine on the side?

Mike: It’s always tough because I’m very picky about what I want to put in, I’m very picky about the artists I want to display and the process. You want to put out really good quality information, not like the old Wizard magazine “Tips and Tricks: How to draw shine on armor.” Any monkey can learn that, so I was never interested in that. If you look at the type of artists I feature in the magazine, that I curate in the magazine, I try to put people in that have quality and depth to their work, and the craft. There’s a lot of craft that went down the tubes in the ’90s. There was a lot of popularity and a lot of money to be made, but there was a lot of sh*t that was made and a lot of craft that went down the tubes.

JBC: Did you do all the interviews yourself?

Mike: In the beginning, I did all the interviews myself, and then I started bringing in new people, like Jamar Nicholas; Eric Nolen-Weathington has done a couple. I still do most of the interviews myself. That’s gotten easier, because in the beginning, I was using the tape recorder running through the phone and getting it transcribed, and now it’s a lot easier with digital technology to record over Skype. I had to run around trying to find cassette tapes, which you can’t find anymore. Technology has changed, even printing… we can get the magazines printed in color now in China for nothing comparatively.

JBC: Didn’t you have trouble with Diamond with the first issue?

Mike: That was also at the time the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was defending shops because someone would walk in a comic book shop and see a nipple and have a sh*t-fit. The drawing of the girl on the cover was nude—it wasn’t crude—and we had to draw a bikini on her. The weird thing that’s happened to the industry—“Hey Kids, Comics!”—is that they’re basically bought by middle-aged men and that’s been the demographic for a very, very long time. But people still perceive that a fiveyear-old is going to walk in and see a Richard Corben magazine and be triggered.

That was the only issue we had, which was an easy fix. If there was any nudity—and we’re talking figure drawing like you’d have in any art class, not Penthouse—we’ve had to put a “Mature Readers” sticker on it. I think it’s stupid, but again, the local community smut laws in Philadelphia are not going to be the same as they are in Roanoke, Virginia. And you don’t want somebody who is supporting your magazine to be in trouble because some zealot wants to use this as their whipping boy for their own political aspirations.

JBC: Many of your contributors—who are contributing material not only through interviews, but articles, too—are professionals, and very busy professionals, at that. Was it tough to keep on these guys to get the material?

Mike: No, not really. It’s tough on myself. Everyone is busy and working, but I think that is important. At Art Center, in Pasadena, one of the qualifications for people teaching is if you are teaching, you have to be working in the business—a card designer or in illustration, or some facet of the entertainment industry. That person is actually working in the industry and I think that’s very

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important. One of the things about being able to give accurate information is also based upon the fact that the field is always in flux. The way things are in the comic book business, the first issue of Draw! is very different from the latest issue. So many people are doing digital now. Everything is basically digital delivery.

In the beginning, at 30th Street Station, there was Egbert Delivery Service. I’d pay a guy $50 and he’d run it—along with other stuff—up to Marvel and DC on the train. Nobody does that anymore.

Nobody runs to FedEx. Nobody wants your original art. And I’m teaching, I just started my second week teaching my high school animation class— these kids, some 15–17, some 14—how they interact with the world, what jobs are going to be there for them; how different it is for them at 15 than it was for me. How different it is for them from when I taught students while I was doing Draw! So that whole aspect of the business is changing almost daily. It’s changing rapidly. The medium of comics as a format is still growing, but it’s not going to continue to grow in the comic book store. It’s going to grow online, it’s going to grow on the cellphone.

Again, it’s all being powered by Disney—the most successful entertainment company in history. The fact is, they’ve made billions of dollars on these comic book properties and invest absolutely zero money advertising comic books. You can go to Target and Walmart or any place and see Captain America shields and Iron Man toys, and you will not see them spend one red cent on advertising in publishing.

JBC: Are you happy to be in publishing?

Mike: I still like being in print and in the newspapers. It’s very odd from the standpoint… the readership is very stratified. I have people who have been reading Judge Parker since it started.

I’m doing The Phantom right now. There are people who have literally been reading The Phantom since 1936. There’s nobody reading comic books that long, but there are many long-term readers of the comic strips. They’re a different type of reader. They’re not like the 14-year-olds that are reading all the stuff on Webtoons. Those kids reading on Webtoons are not interested in reading comic strips. Those kids don’t even know who Calvin and Hobbes are now. Again, we’re turning a corner in time where the Baby Boomers’ booms’ booms don’t know the comic strips. In five years, they won’t know Peanuts, they won’t know Charlie Brown, because there’s nothing for them to access.

They see what comes through the phone. I see that with my students. They see what’s current and

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what’s curated through the multimedia companies.

So you don’t see a lot of Charlie Brown stuff. We grew up with it. We grew up with Scholastic, we read the newspapers. They just know what they see and you don’t see that stuff much.

JBC: What were some of your best Draw! experiences?

Mike: One of the nicest things that ever happened to me was last year in Baltimore. I hung out with Tom Palmer, who I’ve known for several years.

He’s not only one of the best guys ever—such a nice person—but he came up to me, unsolicited, and said he loved the magazine, and said I ask the questions that people want answers to. If Tom Palmer reads the magazine and actually gets something out of it, then that’s great! When Joe Kubert or any of the people I admire gave me a compliment on the magazine… on Facebook, when García-López likes one of my strips, I can’t

Above: Many an issue of Draw begins with roughing in a visual idea for the cover—by Mike, publisher John Morrow, or designer Eric Nolen-Weathington. Here’s one for a (sadly) never-realized issue featuring Mike Mignola.

Previous page: A very Manley layout drawing for Monsterman.

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2001: DRAW! get anything better than that!

JBC: How’s it been selling? Does it help your income or is it a hobby?

Mike: I make a little money, but not a lot of money. I don’t get it out as often as I should because I’m very picky about how I want it. I never did it for money. Everybody wants money, but that’s not the main reason. I do it because I feel it’s important for this craft and this industry to have Draw! to show something that discusses, displays, and shows the process. Of course, in the time since I started it to now, comics are everywhere. The whole how-to aspect has blown up. Most of it is crap; most of it shows you how to draw shine on armor. It’s not actually talking about the important parts of the creative process, like the layouts. It’s not really talking about the process… how you have to do figure drawing in comics, as opposed to animation or illustration, so I still have colleges using it as teach text. Most of the art schools carry it. I just got somebody asking to use something from one of our earlier issues, so I know it’s well respected amongst the professionals and that’s what really counts to me. If the professionals enjoy it, then I know the aspiring professionals are going to enjoy it.

The Life of an Artist

JBC: Can you tell me what your typical week is like now; how much do you devote to teaching?

Mike: I teach one day at the school and then I am also teaching both of my assistants. I haven’t taught animation or drawing storyboarding for a couple of years now. I may go back. It depends upon where or when. A few years ago, I did a Free Comic Book Day event. The kids at the school loved me and wanted me to come teach there, so I decided I’d do that. In the third week, they started complaining that I was too tough a teacher. [chuckles] So, I go from beloved magical Santa to Satan! [laughter] I plan to do a Patreon, but I’m also at the point of my life I

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want to do my own stuff. The strips occupy a lot of time, so doing two is crazy, and one doesn’t pay enough, but I want to do my own stuff. I went back to school ten years ago. I want to do more of my own comics, my own paintings, my own drawings, and less work for other people. I’m in that process to figure out how to do that with social media: What works and what doesn’t work. It’s an endless marathon with the strips. I don’t want to crap it out either. 12- or 14-hour days are standard, so if you were to work at that level doing something you hated, you wouldn’t last. I wouldn’t want to sit there doing something I hated. I don’t enjoy Judge Parker the way I did a lot of the comic stuff, or even The Phantom, because it’s not as interesting a script, but it does keep the drawing pencils sharp, continuing having to draw much more realistic things, and that also comes in handy.

Wednesdays, I teach, usually; the weekends are heavy with working on the newspaper strips. I just turned in the Sunday today for Judge Parker, so I finished that about 10:30 last night and my assistant, Liang, colored it and sent it back. I made a few notes and sent that in to the King Features server and I’m spending the afternoon finalizing my Ink Book—I’m self-publishing a book of my pen and ink drawings.

JBC: When did you get into doing syndicated strips?

Mike: In 2010, Eduardo Barreto got sick and passed away.

Graham Nolan had been doing the Phantom Sundays at the time. He said, “Hey, you should contact King,” and then King Features contacted me. I did two weeks as a try-out and they said, “Great.” I started doing Judge Parker. It actually happened at a perfect time because I had done a job for a publisher who bounced a $10,000 check on me.

That put a big hole in my finances, so it came through at a good time. That was probably my worst year. I did an adaptation of Martians, Go Home, and had already sent in my first issue, and I was coloring it. The guy’s check bounced and I had never had that happen before. The strips came through and then I started doing The Phantom for the same reason: because Paul Ryan passed away a few years ago. Since I was already working with King, they asked me if I wanted to do it. There’s a lot of people who could draw the strip for a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month; there are very few people who have the mentality and stamina to do comic strips for decades. Schulz did it. I think Harold LeDoux, who was the second or third guy on Judge Parker—he was the assistant and then he took over—did it for something like 53 years!

To the generation before mine, that was the Gold Standard—Kirby Toth… everybody wanted to do comic strips—that was the big money. Today’s generation doesn’t really care about that, and the humor strips are the most popular. But doing a classic adventure or soap opera strip, that was the mountain back in the day. The comic guys wanted to do comic strips; the comic strip guys wanted to

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do illustration; and the illustrators wanted to be fine artists. Everyone wanted to jump to what they thought was the higher realm.

JBC: There’re not many artists who do two strips.

Mike: I don’t know if there ever was any artist who did two realistic strips. It’s not like drawing Wizard of Id, which is a little simpler. I don’t know anybody who’s actually done that besides me.

JBC: How many hours a week do you spend on this?

Mike: Easily 60 to 90 hours. I am constantly working, Jon. JBC: Is that any way to live, Mike?

Mike: It’s the way I have to live to do what I do now. Even at the end of the day, I worked from 3:00 in the afternoon and finished the Sunday at 10:30 and sent it to Liang to color, and then I sat down and did an Inktober drawing, because I love drawing. Today, I have a gallery to go to, and the gym, and I’ll spend this weekend drawing. I’ll work on the strips the next week—a round of Phantom and Judge Parker, finishing a couple of Inktober drawings, and then working on my book. It’s what I like to do.

JBC: What have you done in animation?

Mike: I’ve done storyboards, background design, and character design.

JBC: Is there anything you can call your own, that has your distinct… any property you’ve developed and can say, “This is mine”?

Mike: Back when I was self-publishing as “Action Planet,” I was doing a character called Monster Man and I created a strip called Girl Patrol; those are my own things. I’ve always been a bit of a chameleon because I like different styles.

One thing I enjoyed doing in animation was working on the Warner Bros. stuff, or Fairly OddParents or Kim Possible or Samurai Jack—they’re all very different stylistically. I’ve always enjoyed that. I loved Jack Kirby and Neal Adams as a kid.

They’re both fairly intense but they’re both at the opposite ends of the spectrum. I very specifically remember having those Jimmy Olsen comics that Kirby did—I must have been ten or eleven years old. Those things were so powerful to me, more than the Superman comics. That’s when I became aware of an artist by their name. I didn’t see a lot of Marvels as a kid. In Detroit, we didn’t get Marvels, we got the DC stuff.

I remember the Kirby Jimmy Olsen comics and the Neal Adams covers on those, and also the Neal Adams covers at that time. I loved that stuff too, but they’re really at opposite ends—Neal was trying to bring that realism and Kirby is anything but

Mike Manley: Draw!

realism. Liking both of those things, I loved all the Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble stuff as a kid… I loved the Hanna-Barbera stuff. Because I loved all this stuff, I like being able to do different types of art. Some people like doing one kind of style, but I like being able to explore different styles and ways of working—sort of like being a character actor!

JBC: Do you do a lot of comic-cons?

Mike: For a while, when I was in school, I didn’t do any. Now I’m doing more. I’m doing the Baltimore show and a week after that, I’m doing the Illux Con in Reading, Pennsylvania, and then nothing until spring. I don’t do a ton of them partially because of my schedule—I especially like doing Baltimore because I like seeing a lot of my friends there—you know, most comic book shows are boring, frankly.

You see people, you talk and do sketches, but I’d rather go paint a nice landscape than sit on a chair that’s really bad for my back at a comic book con.

Above: We’d hoped to make a Draw! feature with John Byrne happen, but haven’t worked it out to date. This 2002 Byrne/Joe Rubinstein commission piece sure would’ve made an amazing cover though!

Previous page: Mike (in the foreground) get a signature from Jack Kirby, at an early 1980s DC Comics convention booth.

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2001: DRAW! I’ve been going to cons since I was fourteen; it’s always basically the same thing. The only thing different for me is some friend or professional that I get to see for ten minutes, or hang out with after the show.

Artistic Fulfillment

JBC: You sound happy. Are you?

Mike: Yeah. I get to do what I’ve wanted to do since I was 13.

Yesterday? I wasn’t excited to draw Judge Parker, it was kind of a boring Sunday and nothing really exciting to play with, so it can get boring. For the most part, I enjoy my craft and I’m really lucky to do that. I know other people my age who are sucking wind—they can’t find the work. I can’t complain.

Nobody’s shooting at me, nobody’s dropping a bomb on me.

I sit in my comfy sweatpants and T-shirt and work most of the day. Nobody’s yelling at me, you know? [Jon chuckles] If I didn’t want to do the strips, I could go figure out something else. Sometimes we all have to back up and have perspective. The one thing that gets me down is the level of professionalism, especially editorially, has suffered the most.

When your editors are no longer your editors, then your history is erased. Your history with that company and personal interaction is erased. I’m very cognizant of that now, much more than even ten years ago. Almost all the people who knew me at King Features are gone. They have completely reshaped the company in the years I’ve been there. My long-time editor, Evelyn, retired.

I’m now the person who knows the most about the strip, even though I’ve been doing it for only ten years.

JBC: You have 18 years with TwoMorrows?

Mike: I do. How about you?

JBC: About 24. I’m doing a lot of research for this book. It’s been a long, strange history.

Mike: It has. I think John has done such a great service to fandom and the industry. I don’t think people will even really realize that for a long time. I’ve always said that comics have never been like Hollywood.

Hollywood celebrates its history.

Hollywood makes an industry of repackaging its history. Comic books have never really done that. It’s not something that celebrates the artists, the writers, and their craft. That’s one of the things I enjoy the most about

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TwoMorrows. There were also some things like The Comics Journal, although they always seemed to be a bitter bee about things to me. There’s a lot of people who created a lot of great entertainment in the 20th century that these corporations now are reaping billions and billions of dollars off of, but have also shaped the imaginations of the entire world. People in Africa wear Batman T-shirts. People in Africa know The Phantom. People in Australia know The Phantom. For people in Europe and Australia, The Phantom is more popular than Batman. You have people who know these characters and stories from the success of the movies. They are able to take the kernel of these ideas and these stories and if they are done right, they are so appealing to people. Comics as an industry, unlike Hollywood, is not good at celebrating that stuff.

JBC: And we both contribute to a company that does.

Mike: Right, right. That’s one thing I like about what John does.

There are so many fascinating reads—maybe not even artists I knew about, like in Roy Thomas’ magazine. I wish Al Williamson was still alive. I’m a few years older now than he was when I met him. There’s things I would ask him now that I didn’t think of when I was 27.

Those guys are slowly going away—not many from that generation left. It’s very interesting to talk to those guys about how things were back in the day. You probably get that from guys like Russ Heath.

JBC: It’s a race! I’m in a race with the reaper. Now it’s getting down to the Baby Boomer artists and creators. I’m in a race to get their stories before they pass away. From the very first issue of CBA, I did the last interview with Archie Goodwin; he passed

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away before it was in print. You can think of it as depressing, but I see it as a mission, and I have to interview people before they’re forever silent.

I’ve got to do the best that I can. I’m really happy that CBA and Jack Kirby Collector inspired a lot of people to do their own, and Alter Ego came out of that, but nonetheless, there’s always somebody whose story needs to be saved. I don’t know who will care to read it, but I do.

Mike: What’s funny is both you and I are now doing podcasts. One of the things about teaching I enjoy is every year I get a new crop of 14- and 15-year-olds. I can see how the world is changing, and changing very rapidly. These kids, they don’t want to read a magazine—they’ll listen to a podcast or see it on YouTube, but they don’t want to sit down and look at a magazine. The idea of reading is like, “Aww, man.” The people in my classes are more disposed to read. They’re artists and they go to some of the nicer high schools and are in the more creative high schools, but still I can see—if you give them a podcast, they’ll listen to it.

This year, all the kids are doing the Inktober drawing challenge, by doing one ink drawing every day for the entire month; so they’re learning how to use pen and ink. I think that’s great because the digital world occupies most of their time, so it’s fun to see them sit there and take something hundreds of years old and take a pen and use it on a piece of paper. I know you’re doing your podcast and I’m doing mine, but that’s the way it’s going. I don’t know if Draw! went away on paper, if I could continue it digitally. Do you ever think about that with your magazine?

JBC: We’re really lucky to have John to continue it.

I’ll stick with John as long as he’ll have me.

I’m glad you’re thinking of other things—I don’t even know how to make a dime off the internet.

There’s gotta be some way. People are hungry for content and we might have to shift into different mediums, that’s all.

Mike: That’s part of… because our lives intersect at this time. If we were born 30 years earlier, we would’ve been on the big boom of the ’60s. We’d be part of the Silver Age—too young to be a part of Walt Disney. If you were born 15 or 20 years later, you’d be a part of this generation. We’re straddling the digital thing—I remember going and buying my first computer. Nobody at Marvel or DC told you to buy it, but you could see you needed to go buy a computer and learn how to use it. Comics were the last adapter of things. I think the medium of comics will last. I don’t know if print comics will last. We are on the cusp. I don’t know how they’re

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printing books at Marvel and DC that only sell 5,000 or 7,000 copies. That doesn’t even make sense to me.

One last thing: That’s the main thing about Draw!

It never paid me a lot directly, but I got a lot because of it. I got more because of it indirectly with connections, just like my self-publishing. I never made money at that, but it allowed me to do Draw!

I also got in touch with Bruce Timm and that led to the animation thing. Sometimes you’ll do something and not directly get something back—“I just created this thing and made a million dollars”— but with art, it goes out there and cooks, and comes back to you in a way you can’t even predict.

Above: Another as-yet unrealized Draw issue idea, this by Frank Cho. Previous page: At top, a 1987 Christmas visit with comics legend and Mike’s close friend Al Williamson, in Honesdale, Pennsylvania.

At bottom, Mike donated the cover art for both of TwoMorrows’ Free Comic Book Day giveaways, in 2007 and 2008.

Below: Clowning around with Bret.

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PETE VON SHOLLY: A JOURNEY TO TWOMORROWLAND

It’s been a while since we put together our “Von Sholly Trilogy,” but I fondly remember the process and am pretty happy with much of what we did—and wish we had done better with other parts! I’ve been asked to write something about working with John Morrow, so here goes…

I first learned about John and his company through a discerning friend who told me about a brand-new publication called The Jack Kirby Collector.

He raved about its high quality and so I looked into it right away, being a long time Kirby fan. I snatched up the first couple of issues, all that were yet available, and agreed it was great stuff. I got in touch with editor/publisher John and sent him all the Kirby stuff I had, some of it unpublished pencils, and became an early, if modest, contributor to the mag. I wanted to see it thrive, and if anybody reading this has any goodies to throw in, please do so.

As TJKC got bigger and better, John’s line also expanded into quite an enterprise. I also was able to meet John in person every summer at the San Diego Comic-Con and sit at his table to chat with him and his team, including his delightful wife and daughters, the TwoMorrows staff (Hi, Eric!), and members of the Kirby Museum. I always made it a point to visit the TwoMorrows booth and always enjoyed it.

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A couple of years later, I had an idea for a project, but had no idea what, if any, publisher might want to take a chance on it. I fondly remembered and relished the truly great original MAD comics and magazines as well as The Nation Lampoon in its prime. That kind of satire was really appealing to me and poked well-deserved fun at its targets, so why should the old monster magazines and the (then) current fan press not be similarly skewered? I asked. And John, bless his heart said, “Let’s see if we can make this work”—or something like that, so I was off and running.

And I have to say it was really quite a bold move for him because what I was proposing was really outside the realm of what he normally published. Despite his concerns, he believed in me enough to take a chance—or he thought that maybe the idea was commercial enough to make us a few bucks, either way. In those days, one could solicit a new book and product through the big distributor Diamond’s Previews magazine, and see how many orders came in. If the interest and orders were there, a publisher would be safe to print the book and if nobody was interested, he could simply not go to press. My first TwoMorrows book, the oddly-named Crazy Hip Groovy Go-Go Way Out Monsters, did well enough with orders, so John went ahead with it. I don’t think it’s that simple these days.

Crazy Hip Groovy Go-Go Way Out Monsters

A monster mag satire seemed a good place to start… A very early influence on me was this black-&-white magazine printed on cheap paper that was hated by parents and teachers everywhere— but loved by us kids. One problem maybe; this landmark publication was brought forth in the late 1950s and early ’60s, so the question initially was: “Are there enough fans of this kind of thing still around and reading fanzines to support such an effort?”

Of course, our subject was the legendary and original monster mag

that had far-reaching influence on our culture. A great many kids grew up to make monster movies and write horror fiction as a result of what they learned in its pages. Of course I’m talking about Famous Monsters of Filmland, published by James Warren and edited by Forest J Ackerman. This was our target and it was all done with love.

FMoF had many wonderful and very important functions and features in the beginning. In its pages we learned about Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, the iconic actors who portrayed Frankenstein, Dracula, and the rest, and the key make-up men who transformed these actors with putty, hair, glue, and rubber appliances in order to bring our favorite monsters to the screen. We also got to know the men who created the fantastic special effects we loved, and gave us rare insight into how they did it. We were even treated to news and interviews about new films “coming to theaters near us soon.” It was all very exciting stuff. Yes, there was really a time when you’d see a movie and your jaw would drop at the visual effects and you’d exclaim, “How did they do that?” Not anymore—the answer now is “with a computer” 99% of the time and nobody is surprised by special effects anymore—but that’s now and this was then!

There was another side of the picture though—apart from all the wonderfulness, there were definitely things about FM Peter Von Sholly and its many Editor, Crazy Hip imitators in Groovy Go-Go the magazine Way Out Monsters (and movie) field that Born: 1950 were worthy Residence: of lampoonSunland, Calif. ing. The Vocation: really cheesy Storyboard Artist, and schlocky Author, Illustrator side of Favorite Creator: certain films Jack Kirby and studios Seminal Comic Book: was pretty New Gods #7 (“The Pact”) glaring.

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Forry’s cornball jokes and self-serving presence was overwhelming and yes, he was important and well-loved, but the man wasn’t a saint, after all. In our TwoMorrows mags, we got to complain about the annoying kid characters so often shoehorned into otherwise great films; the little kid who would stow away and make trouble or just generally be annoying. I suppose the producers thought we kids in the audience would identify with these little brats, but as far I know we all pretty much hated them.

They were usually Italian or Mexican and had names like Juanito or Pepe. At last there was a place we could gripe about them! We interviewed Sinbad’s sidekick, Harufa, now the owner of a 7-11 store, about his Caucasian boss and his shabby treatment by both Sinbad and the cyclops. We made up model kits and 8mm movies you could order, ridiculous but really fun stuff that never existed but could easily have.

And so, in the course of producing two issues of Crazy Hip Groovy Go-go Way Out Monsters, I, with my partner, the great Mike Van Cleave, had a ball aping and spoofing the style of Famous Monsters, doing our own versions of the ads for crazy worthless crap that you might not even get (like the “goods” offered by the notorious Captain Company in FM), the interviews, “filmbooks” and so on. We did a take on Ray Harryhausen, a mutual hero, and hoped it would be taken as not mean-spirited, but we felt you couldn’t do what we were doing without referencing him, Forry and others.

Was everything that we did great?

Certainly not, and I’ll be the first to say it! Could we have done better? I would hope so. But we had a blast in any case.

John Morrow was totally supportive and a joy to work with. Speaking of John: on an early cover mock-up of our monster mash, I had simply plastered the words “crazy,” “hip,” “groovy,” etc., across the top like catch-phrases that square old farts would use to pander to what they thought “the kids” would like, and John said, “Why don’t we just call it Crazy Hip Groovy Go-Go Way Out Monsters?” or CHGGGWOM (chig-wom), which I thought was a better idea than

what I had in mind—and John wasn’t about to put out a magazine called Sh#tload of Monsters anyway, so…

Comic Book Nerd

After we wore the monster mag subject out, we focused on another branch of publishing and another source of childhood fun and inspiration: comic books, and specifically the current fan press that they spawned, the press which did for comics and comics creators what the monster mags did for the kinds of people and movies I mentioned.

At first, Comic Book Nerd was going to be a collection of random articles about comics and fans and so on, but it was John Morrow who shaped the effort into a book-by-book approach and gave the thing the form it has, and I’m glad he did. I think the direction he steered us in was to the greater good of the effort and gave it a proper format and cohesion.

Comic Book Nerd now wanted to cover as many bases and different publications as possible, and since a great deal of them were the product of TwoMorrows themselves, we were in the right place with John. But only because he was a willing participant in the fun and could absolutely take a joke— or a thousand jokes! We lampooned his books as liberally and mercilessly as the rest—and I had John to help! He had all the right fonts and layout tools to make the satires dead-on format-wise, and as I said, he was a good sport about it. He also threw in a lot of good jokes himself along the way and never wanted credit (blame?) for any of them—but he wrote a lot of good stuff that we used. Again, Mike Van Cleave lent his hilarious talent, and much of what you may have laughed at could well have been his.

Mike is one of the funniest people I’ve ever known and he’s been a best friend since 1976—and he grew up loving the same things as I did, so we were totally in sync on these projects.

Comic Book Nerd, by its nature, required tons of fake comic covers, which I loved creating, but it was also an insane amount of work, which I think you can see with even a cursory

glance—but whatever it takes to do a thing as best you can is what it takes, and it’s what you have to do, or don’t even bother.

John sprang for full-color printing, which was more costly and, since he’s… let’s just say “frugal” by nature, that was quite a leap. We tried to cover all the bases: The Jack Kirby Collector, Back Issue, Comic Book Marketplace, Comic Book Artist, The Comics Journal, Wizard, Alter Ego, Write Now, Draw!, and so on… even websites for comics fans. We addressed the new practice of “slabbing” and comics grading and “sniffing” (see CBN!). We were able to lampoon comics that we loved, but comics that were frankly rather insane— like DC’s “War that Time Forgot” series which always had soldiers in World War II stumbling upon some lost land or other that just happened to teem with dinosaurs! I did an imaginary Ditko character and worked up some fake cover images for “The Punctuator”!

His costume was covered with various symbols like colons, exclamation points, etc. Aping Ditko’s style along with other favorites was really fun and challenging and I’ll let you decide if I was successful or not. I really enjoyed attacking Image Comics and that super ugly crowded mess of scowling crabby tiny-headed costumed characters that most of their covers seemed to be overstuffed with.

Ugh. It makes me shudder even now.

Comic Book Nerd was also a place for fun stuff like what if Graham “Ghastly” Ingels, the notorious E.C. horror artist, had tried to do kids’ comics and/ or super-heroes when the horror craze faded, but couldn’t shake his own ghastly style—and didn’t see that as a problem? Or what if The Freak Brothers’ Gilbert Shelton or ZAP’s Robert Crumb had worked for DC or Marvel? Or what if there was a comics convention in Antarctica? We were able to visit almost any genre of comics and cartoonists whose work deserved a loving nod or a venomous puncturing! We even did a little piece on the aforementioned Diamond Previews magazine, which required a lot of work and fake covers.

If what we were examining had a lot of text and a lot of images, we had to

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emulate the look as close as we could.

I felt that the more what we did looked like the original, the more effective the satire would be. One part I really enjoyed was the Ultra Ego editorial which was just one ridiculously long run-on sentence like Roy Thomas gone mad.

Letters pages are always fun and we pumped out a few of those as needed throughout the mag. We tried to spoof the snooty Comics Journal style and the Groth/Ellison feud… knowing that

not everybody was going to get every joke, but hoping, like MST3K (and if you don’t know what that is, you’re not reading this, so who am I talking to?) that maybe there’d be enough jokes to make up for it—and that the right people would indeed get the rest.

In order to make something like Comic Book Nerd, one really had to be a comic book nerd, and I am guilty as charged. I really love the fact that we could do these lampoons in an unre-

stricted and fully supported style at TwoMorrows.

My association with John has been rewarding and profitable and I like him personally, and I’m very happy to see his company thrive. He has high standards and a finger on the pulse of the world of comics lovers. Take a peek at Crazy Hip [etc.] Monsters and Comic Book Nerd, if you haven’t. I hope you find some of the fun there that we had making them.

TOM FIELD: SECRETS BEHIND SECRETS IN THE SHADOWS John Morrow had three words for me when he received comics legend Gene Colan’s initial cover illustration for what would become our 2005 book Secrets in the Shadows: The Art and Life of Gene Colan: “What’s this for?”

You’d have wondered the same. Because the last thing one would expect to see from the guy who drew the adventures of Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Dracula, Howard the Duck… was a portrait of an antique chair spitting out a demon.

But John didn’t know the backstory, which is: Gene loved the book title, which was meant to describe untold bits of his life story, as well as his dynamic “painting with a pencil” art style that delighted fans and panicked inkers.

To Gene, Secrets in the Shadows inspired memories of a 1930s childhood, when he’d stay with his grandparents.

They had an antique chair beside Gene’s bed, and at night, after he’d lay out his clothes on this chair, he’d see them in the shadows, taking life like… well, like the demon in this cover illo.

Great story, creepy drawing… but how does that help sell books? That was John Morrow’s quandary. He asked gently if Gene might be willing to draw a more commercial cover image (“preferably with characters on it”).

And indeed Gene came back with a Daredevil/Captain America/Iron Man cover that blew us away. Meanwhile, the demon chair sparked Gene to draw a series of autobiographical illustrations of key moments in his life. These pieces (seeing Frankenstein at the movies,

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meeting Stan Lee, etc.) were included in the special hardcover edition.

Fourteen years later, looking back on the book, there’s a lot I’d do differently today. But there’s a lot that I still like, too. Writers talking about what it was like to work with Gene. Inkers talking about how it felt to tackle those lush penciled pages. Exclusive conversations between Gene and four of his key partners: Stan Lee, Tom Palmer, Steve Gerber, Adrienne Colan. And yikes, of those five, only Palmer is still with us today.

The lesson is: Time passes so quickly, so we’ve got to record history when we can. The magic of TwoMorrows is: over a quarter-century, John and Pam have given us amazing vehicles through which we can preserve comics fandom, history and the work of visionaries.

I’ve been blessed. I’ve written for The Jack Kirby Collector, Comic Book

Artist, and Tom Field Back Issue, Author, Secrets in had two books the Shadows: published by The Art and Life TwoMorrows, on Gene Colan of Gene Colan Born: 1963 and on high school friend Residence: Lee Weeks.

Exeter, New Hampshire But more, Vocation: Business Exec I’ve been Favorite Creator: educated and Jack Kirby entertained by Seminal Comic Book: the breadth Fantastic Four #72 of the Two­ Morrows library.

Infused with John’s own enthusiasm, these books always remind you why you fell in love with comics to begin with, and I’m grateful to have contributed my small part to the collection.

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CHRIS KNOWLES: THE TWOMORROWS EMPIRE’s FIRST 25 From tiny acorns do mighty redwoods grow.

It was 25 years ago and I was paying by the minute to tool around a little thing called “America Online,” at a rip-roaring 2400 bits per second. It was on the comics board—I think there was only one at the time—that an enterprising young soul from North Carolina was thinking of starting a Jack Kirby fanzine.

Or was it a newsletter, then? I don’t remember, I’m old.

I do remember the heroin-like dopamine rush I got from the early days of the internet, though. Ah, those were the days, Gladys.

Anyhow, this was the acorn, the seed, the spore, the germ upon which an empire of nostalgia was built. The Xeroxed Jack Kirby Collector soon morphed into a slick magazine and it was off to the races from that point on.

I’d written a couple things for TJKC and got to be friendly with John and his lovely wife, Pam. And, in 1997, they put me in touch with a travel-sized dynamo of pure adrenaline and charisma named “Jon B. Cooke,” and we roomed together for the San Diego Con. It was, to say the absolute least, a memorable experience.

Whereas John and Pam Morrow were both the epitome of cool, calm and collected, Jon Cooke was/is like a power-walking cyclone of enthusiasm,

excitement and sheer, unbridled love for the medium. I still remember sitting with him in a scuzzy Holiday Inn in downtown SD (believe me, there were some very sketchy characters milling around that joint at night) and heard the entire game plan for Comic Book Artist rolled out in exacting detail.

It was like surfing a tsunami, watching those twinkly little eyes burn with a certainty that it was time to scuttle all the chromium, shoulder pads, and bandoliers of post-crash ’90s comics and bring it all back to basics. To tear fandom’s eyes away from the grim spectacle of spandex’d horses being whipped into slurry and remind everyone what was once so great about this medium of ours.

The time was right, given that an almost-obscenely-gifted young artist named Alex Ross was doing the very same thing with his apocalyptic jeremiad Kingdom Come. I do believe, to this day, that it was both the quasiBiblical fortitude of Mr. Ross and the burning passion of Mr. Cooke that lifted the super-hero genre from what nearly everyone believed at the time was its casket and helped make super-heroes the de facto secular religion of the post9/11 world.

I know for a fact that all the right people were reading the Kirby Collector and CBA, and were finding the courage and inspiration to hammer the medium in general, and the genre in particular, back into fighting shape.

It was no small thing, mind you.

Remember we’re talking about a time when Marvel Comics was tap-dancing on the precipice of insolvency and stores were being shuttered by the thousands. It wasn’t a question of if comics would follow pulps into the great beyond, but when.

I still remember attending a con in the summer of 2000 that was so poorlyattended the guests outnumbered the fans. We hadn’t seen the first X-Men movie rekindle the home fires yet, and the public’s view of super-hero movies was still being soured by an ignoble

string of Chris Knowles box office Contributor, disasters like Comic Book Artist Batman and Born: 1966 Robin, Tank Residence: Girl, The Basking Ridge, Phantom, New Jersey and Judge Vocation: Dredd.

Superhero Grim licensing artist times, Favorite Creator: indeed.

Jack Kirby John’s Kirby ColSeminal Comic Book: Kamandi #30 lector and Jon’s Comic Book Artist were soon joined by comics god Roy Thomas’ successful relaunch of the august Alter Ego fanzine and it wouldn’t be long before TwoMorrows became the voice of comics fandom.

Don’t forget we’re talking about a time when longstanding institutions like The Comics Buyer’s Guide and The Comics Journal were collapsing and newer outlets like Wizard were fading fast as well.

TwoMorrows filled a giant void in the marketplace, one that otherwise would have gone unfilled.

Twenty-five years later, the Two­ Morrows empire continues to be the sole voice of comics fandom in printed form, more or less. There are all kinds of comics websites now, but most of these are little more than clearinghouses for corporate press releases. After a stint for another publisher, Jon Cooke and his rebranded Comic Book Creator are back where they belong. And with the pending release of a feature film based on Jack Kirby’s Eternals (the bloody Eternals!), interest in the man and his work is cresting again.

So let me extend a hearty congratulations to John, Pam, Jon, Roy and the rest of the tireless and talented Two­Morrows family. You saw a void and filled it, with passion and creativity.

Things might be very, very different today had all of you not done so.

Left: Alex Ross cover art for Andy Mangel’s planned Wonder Woman Companion, which had to be scuttled due to increasing licensing fees from DC Comics.

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2002: WRITE NOW!

The (Not So) Secret Origin of Write Now! Danny Fingeroth

Editor, Write Now! Co-editor, The Stan Lee Universe

“Be totally factual, or else be so vague that you can get away with knowing nothing about your subject.”

—Stan Lee, Write Now! #18, 2008

This article is totally factual. Except where it’s vague.

Residence: By 2002, I’d been working as a professional New York, NY comics writer and editor for 25 years, most of that Vocation: Writer/ time at Marvel Comics, running the company’s Editor/Historian Spider-Man line. I had learned a lot about making Favorite Creators: comics, some of it the hard way—by making lots of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby boneheaded mistakes. I had a lot of thoughts and Seminal Comic Book: ideas and feelings about comics writing, and was Superman #149, “The eager for a way to share them with people.

Death of Superman,” by But how to do it?

Jerry Siegel, Curt Swan, Well, among my career experiences was having and George Klein briefly met John Morrow at a San Diego ComicTo complement its Con, and having written Marvel’s Darkhawk series, magazine on drawing which Mike Manley had drawn for its first 25 issues. comics, TwoMorrows soon (Mike and Tom DeFalco had created the characintroduces a companion ter, but I wrote every issue of the series.) We also publication, again edited worked together on a couple of Darkhawk Annuals, by a working comics pro, and Mike had been an artist on some comics that I writer Danny Fingeroth. had edited, as well. So I knew Mike pretty well.

Cut to 2002. Mike was doing his great Draw! magazine for TwoMorrows. It occurred to me that Inset right: Mike Zeck and Phil maybe there’d be interest on the company’s part in Zimelman’s cover to Write Now! #16, which featured a Silver Surfer my doing something similar, but for comics writing. writers’ roundtable discussion. I contacted John, and it turned out he’d been thinking about doing a writing magazine, too. And from that conversation, Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now! (the official full title) was born.

Now, of course, I didn’t want to draw just on my own experience to do the magazine. That would be good for an article or maybe even a book. I wanted to have multiple voices giving advice and lessons in writing comics. And I knew where to find those voices. After all those years in comics, I knew a lot of people. And those people knew a lot of people.

And many of those people were comics writers, artists, editors, executives and so on. They all had stories to tell and lessons to teach and advice Write Now! to give.

First Issue: 8/1/2002 Besides that, aside from my own experience and

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access to other people’s experience, I was lucky enough to have a great deal of journalistic ignorance.

Why “lucky”?

I’d written or edited a zillion comic books. I’d even worked as writer or editor on some magazines at Marvel, but those were mainly fancy-format comics with some text features. But I’d never really put together, from beginning to end, a magazine that was predominantly articles. So I had a lot to learn.

But, by the same token, I wasn’t burdened by the rules or established modes of thinking of magazine editors.

While this meant that I ended up re-inventing multiple wheels on multiple occasions, it also meant that I could discover new ways of doing things, often by accident. And I had John Morrow himself offering comments from the sidelines, which was essential to the magazine’s development.

The first issue of Write Now! “suffered” from an overabundance of riches. I wanted so much to fill it

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with great interviews and articles that I had enough material for three issues, which I nonetheless decided to stuff into one. Plus, since there was so much cool text material, it was in danger of overwhelming the visual side of the magazine. While it was a writing magazine, it was one about comics (and animation)—media with heavy visual aspects, to say the least. John encouraged me to add more visuals, and I saw he was right.

For that first issue, I had interviews with J.M. DeMatteis and Joe Quesada and Brian Bendis and Tom DeFalco and Mark Bagley and, oh yeah, with Stan Lee. If you bought it, boy, did you get your money’s worth. (And you can still get a digital version at the TwoMorrows website, of course.) These were, for the most part, long, in-depth interviews.

I had a million questions and these folks weren’t shy about giving answers that more than answered them. Each interview could have been—and maybe should have been—its own book!

As the issues went on, I became more adept— WN was an earn-while-you-learn journalism course for me—and the issues became somewhat less dense and breathed more, so the content was easier to read. I added more how-to’s—we called them “Nuts & Bolts”—and tried to include a decent amount of independent-oriented material, as well as content focused on the so-called mainstream.

Looking back at those early interviews, I can see how I allowed some of them to go off on fascinating, but perhaps not completely necessary, digressions. Later interviews were tighter, more focused on passing along lessons about craft and about the professional world, and were perhaps slicker reads, but I think, perhaps, some unpredictable quirkiness was left behind.

At the same time as WN was being produced, I was doing a fair amount of teaching of comics writing at New York University and The New School, among other places, and each endeavor informed the other. Articles from WN became handouts I gave my classes, and topics raised by my students became subjects for WN. An interesting aspect of doing WN was that,

2002

2003

Danny Fingeroth: Write Now!

although it was a print magazine, it would not have been possible without the internet and email. I was living in New York. TwoMorrows HQ was in Raleigh.

My great designers and brilliant editorial staff were also working from their homes. The magazine, though, came together as if we were all in the same office. (I will say, though, that there were times—as is often true in our digital world—where us all being together in the same place to discuss things would have been more efficient that going back and forth with countless emails. But such, apparently, is modern life.)

One of the best things about doing WN was that it enabled me to, especially with the interviews, establish and/or strengthen my relationships with various creators. I could simultaneously be fellow professional and fanboy geek. With people I already knew well, I could probe their answers a little deeper. With people I hardly knew at all, I could now get to know them as more than just credits in a comic.

With the interviews, I felt that, on the one hand, I needed to emphasize craft and career advice in terms of shaping my questions and guiding (or at-

Above: The week Danny spent researching Stan Lee’s archives, at the University of Wyoming, yielded spectacular dividends through his and Roy Thomas’ book, The Stan Lee Universe, giving fans access to Lee’s private documents and correspondence, much of it with lasting historical significance.

Here’s Danny with the book at the 2016 Wizard World Richmond con.

Photo courtesy of and © Danny Epperson.

Below: In the category of little known TwoMorrows tidbits: The “Nuts & Bolts” logo that appeared in issues of Write Now! was originally designed for one of TwoMorrows’ advertising clients’ newsletters back in the 1990s.

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2002: WRITE NOW! Left: John Morrow’s suggestion to do a crossover between Write Now! and Mike Manley’s Draw! magazines grew from the published two issues to become a how-to book and an instructional DVD, as well. Inset below: Among advice from comics pros featured in Write Now!, Stan Lee regularly offered his perspectives. Here, the first page of his “Top Ten Tips for Writers” that appeared in WN #18 and, in somewhat different format (pictured here), in The Stan Lee Universe. [Text © 2011 Stan Lee.]

tempting to guide) the conversations, as opposed to doing more general interviews about the subjects’ lives and careers. But, of course, people’s thoughts and ideas about the art and craft of writing are tied in to their life experiences and backgrounds, as well as to whatever x-factor of creativity and inspiration they bring to the table. So while I suppose I could have more narrowly focused my questions (and/or edited the responses) to only deal with specific elements of craft, I felt it was important to also explore the personal backgrounds and overall points of view of the people I was interviewing, so that their ideas and feelings about craft would have more meaning to readers.

A couple of the most interesting examples of these interviews were, unsurprisingly, the ones I did with Stan Lee and Will Eisner.

While I knew Stan reasonably well, and certainly knew he was never shy about being interviewed, it was still a personal challenge to see if I could come up with any questions he hadn’t answered a million times, or to see if I could get him to come at something from a different angle than he had in the past. The same was true for my interview with Will. That

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one has been reprinted numerous times in a variety of places, so I guess people must have found some value in it. While I’d met Will a few times, and had had some brief discussions with him, the interview gave me a way to explore his creative and thinking processes in depth.

Aside from his interview in WN #1, Stan did several other interviews for the magazine, including one where I asked pros for their most important advice, and also ones where I did roundtable interviews with writers who worked on particular characters, such as the Silver Surfer or Spider-Man. Stan always had insightful (and often funny) observations to add to these kinds of things.

Probably the peak of this was when I made issue #18 a celebration of Stan on his 85th birthday. (Much of that issue was reused—along with material from Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego birthday tribute—when Roy and I collaborated on the TwoMorrows book, The Stan Lee Universe, although we added tons of material from Stan’s University of Wyoming archives to it.) For that, Stan wrote up his “Top Ten Tips for Writers.” He gave some really important pointers for aspiring and already-established wordsmiths in it.

And I knew he, himself, must have felt the points truly significant, because he made a point of telling me he needed to retain the copyright to the piece. (He would have had it anyway, since that was magazine policy, but he really wanted to be able to use it in the future. I was certainly pleased that Write Now! had it first.)

One thing I prided myself on doing with Write Now!— perhaps it goes back to a Tom DeFalco performance review for me, when I worked as a Marvel group editor to his editor-inchief, when he referred to me as an “editorial pitbull”—was to try to get interview subjects to peel back the layers of the onion to how they broke in as pro-

2006 The World of TwoMorrows

fessional writers. Many people would sort of start their career story in the middle. They’d say how a prominent editor or other writer helped them get an important gig. And I’d ask, “But how were you even in a position to be speaking with that influential person in the first place?” And they’d go back further and further until they were able to pinpoint their particular foot in the door. Not that anyone could duplicate their individual journeys, of course, but I figured that a reader could figure out from various individuals’ stories what first step they might take on the trek to being a pro. It was funny, though, that so many master storytellers would skip what—to me—was the key thing that enabled them to go from peering into the window to being inside the room.

Write Now! had a relatively small but highly dedicated readership. Everyone thinks they can write.

If you can’t draw at a professional level, it becomes obvious fairly quickly. But everyone writes something, even if it’s a laundry list, so some people think they don’t need any instruction or advice on how to do it right or better. But there were numerous readers (including some highly accomplished

2007 Danny Fingeroth: Write Now!

professional writers) who wrote in regularly to tell me how appreciative they were of what I was doing with the magazine.

And I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a convention without at least one person coming up and thanking me for WN and telling me how much it meant to their writing career. Hearing that kind of thing always was and is deeply moving, and makes me proud of what WN accomplished.

Also, I’m very proud of the books that WN spawned: We had The Best of Write Now, which was just that. And Mike Manley and I collaborated on How to Create Comics From Script to Print, which grew out of a crossover between Write Now! and Draw! (possibly the first trade magazine crossover of all time!). That was fun to do, and was a book a lot of people found useful. There was even a DVD spin-off Mike and I made called How to Draw Comics From Script to Print, which was, admittedly, more about art than writing, but there is a fair amount of screen time of me giving writing lessons. And, of course, there was the aforementioned Stan Lee Universe, which gave me an excuse to fly to Stan’s Wyoming archives (on a plane nicknamed “the Vomit Comet”) to do research.

So thanks to everyone who worked with me on the magazine, and to everyone who sat for interviews, created articles, and supplied “Nuts & Bolts” materials. Thanks also to WN’s dedicated readership—and to its casual readers, too.

And big thanks to John Morrow, for taking a chance on Write Now! Congratulations to you and Pam (the two Morrows) for making TwoMorrows an incredible resource for great magazines and books about comics history and comics making, and for keeping it going and growing for a quarter of a century! Kudos, folks!

— Danny Fingeroth

Above: The Best of Write Now! trade paperback featured Mark Bagley’s cover to the first issue (Shakespeare and DaVinci collaborating on a comic), a rare example of Mark inking his own work.

Inset left: Tom Ziuko’s unused color variant for Erik Larsen’s cover to Write Now! #2. The published version was colored by Erik, himself.

2009

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2003: POP CULTURE

Monster Mash and More Pop Culture Fun My generation of comic book fans got in through a weird side door—the 1966 TV Batman played by Author, Hero Gets Adam West, and all of the brain-twisting hoopla Girl!, The Dark that went with it, the toys and trading cards and Age, Monster Pop Tart premiums. Everything was Batman in ’66.

Mash, Groovy, You had to be there.

Holly Jolly This got us reading comic books, which were sometimes as crazy as the TV show. I preferred the Born: 1958 1950s Batman stories reprinted in 80-Page Giants Residence: and paperback digests, over the contemporary BatOcean, New Jersey man comic books published at the time. The older Vocation: Newspaper stuff seemed more like the TV show. The artwork Features Writer, was more cartoony, in a good way. A Dick SprangPage Designer drawn Joker still holds a strange fascination.

Favorite Creator: Of course, we little punks wound up Ross Andru falling in love with the comic book as a Seminal Comic Book: medium unto itself.

Metal Men #22 In ’66, I was an eight-year-old South Jersey boy scraping together There’s more to life than comics, and TwoMorrows pennies, nickels, and dimes to buy looks to capitalize on fans’ comic books at two establishments, broader pop culture chiefly: the Woodcrest Drug Store influences, with Mark and the Berlin Farmer’s Market. I read Voger leading the way. everything from Harvey’s kiddie stuff (Little Dot, Hot Stuff, Sad Sack) to DC (Flash, Inset right: Kurt and Dorothy Justice League of America, and my favorite, Metal Schaffenberger, in images which Men) to Marvel (which one friend complained was only saw print in black-&-white “hard to read” because they squeezed in so many during TwoMorrows’ pre-color days. words).

This era, from ’66 to ’69, remains my personal Golden Age. To this day, when I see “go-go checks” on the cover of an old DC book, I figuratively salivate.

I segued into the Warren horror books (Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella) and, during my college daze, the sex- and drug-obsessed underground comics, particularly the work of Robert Crumb. I’d pretty much stopped buying contemporary comics, but I kept an eye on them.

Then something happened in 1989, when I was a married career guy of 31. Tim Burton’s movie, BatHero Gets Girl!: The man, was coming out in June, with Jack Nicholson Life and Art of Kurt playing the Joker in a then-novel casting coup. (For Schaffenberger better or worse, here was the film that ignited the Published: 11/1/2003 renaissance of super-hero movies.)

Mark Voger

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This triggered something in me—a sort-of return to my childhood, when we used to safety-pin towels around our necks as capes, and “played Batman” in adjoining backyards, swinging off of tree branches as we re-enacted fight scenes from the Adam West TV show.

Well, I was no longer swinging from branches, but I began buying up vintage comic books from my youth. Reading those old books was like stepping into a time machine.

The difference this time was that I began identifying, studying and contrasting the styles of the various artists. When I was a child, I loved the

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drew Superman stories for DC in the ’80s.)

Here’s where Two­ Morrows Publishing comes in. Around 2001, Bender got wind that TwoMorrows was planning a (never realized) “split” biography of Schaffenberger and Captain Marvel co-creator C.C. Beck. Bender put me in touch with P.C. Hamerlinck, the Fawcett Companartwork of Kurt Schaffenberger, Curt Swan, Ross ion editor who was at work Andru, Mike Sekowsky, Jack Kirby, John Romita, on the Beck half of the and Fred Rhoads, but I didn’t know their names. I was not a sophisticated eight-year-old; I only knew planned book.

I jumped on board, and what I liked. From ’89 on, I made up for lost time my work on the project and could spot a favorite artist in an instant. eventually morphed into a solo So it seemed like serendipity Schaffenberger book, which I dewhen, in 1989, Kurt Schaffenberger signed and wrote with the approval relocated to the town I then lived and support of the Schaffenberger in, a place called Brick in Ocean family. (The artist died at age 81 in County, New Jersey. The Kurt 2002, just as the book was nearing Schaffenberger—the guy who drew completion.) Hero Gets Girl! The Lois Lane and Captain Marvel.

Life and Art of Kurt Schaffenberger I was on staff as a page designer was published by TwoMorrows in and entertainment writer at the 2003. The title Hero Gets Girl had area’s newspaper of note, The a double-meaning; it not only reAsbury Park Press. Stoked by the ferred to Superman and Lois Lane, imminent release of Burton’s film, but to the real-life romance of Kurt I was writing a sporadic column and Dorothy. about comics. Since I loved, loved, It felt like a noble misloved Schaffenberger’s artwork when I was a child, I interviewed the Germany-born artist at his home in sion, telling the story of one of the medium’s great Brick for The Press.

My late wife, the photographer Kathy Voglesong, artists who, nonetheless, posed Schaffenberger in his back-porch studio. We had never attained the met his wife Dorothy, who was warm, outgoing and status of a Jack Kirby or a Will Eisner. I did my best hilarious. Kurt was funny, too, but in a subtle, understated way. In conversation, Kurt might deliver a to capture Schaffenberger little zinger almost under his breath, while Dorothy as a person—Dorothy lent went for the belly laugh. When Kathy and I packed me family photo albums and scrapbooks—as well up to leave, Dorothy insisted that we get together as a masterful artist with again some day soon. a wholesome, accessible So, thanks to Dorothy, Kurt and I actually got to style who worked for just be friends—as much as a 69-year-old comic book about every publisher then legend and a 31-year-old local newspaper guy could be, anyway. Over the years, I interviewed him in existence.

I had a lot of luck conten times (though only two were lengthy interviews) tacting people who collaband observed his interactions with the public and orated with Schaffenberger old cronies at comic book conventions. At such or admired his work. events, he was often accompanied by my buddy Eisner, Julius Schwartz, Joe Howard Bender, another Ocean County comic Kubert, Murphy Anderson, book artist with a DC Comics pedigree. (Bender

Mark Voger: Monster Mash and More Pop Culture Fun

Inset top: Mark with wife and photographer Kathy Voglesong.

Inset left: The original plan was for a combined biography titled Beck & Schaffenberger: Sons of Thunder, but TwoMorrows soon realized that there was plenty to document about both creators’ history, and thus Hero Gets Girl! emerged.

Paul Hamerlinck still has plans to produce his Beck volume someday.

Above and below: Mark’s pivotal pop culture book Monster Mash, and his overview of 1980s-90s comics, The Dark Age.

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Carmine Infantino, Dave Hunt, Mike Carlin, Alex Ross, Schaffenberger’s adult children, and some of his fellow Pratt Art Institute graduates all chimed in.

I was given access to unpublished original art and Schaffenberger’s personal collection of old Fawcett comic books, which was organized and annotated

by Bender. Schaffenberger’s lifelong friend Ken Bald (illustrator of the Dr. Kildare and Dark Shadows syndicated comic strips) penned a lovely, heartfelt foreword.

On the day Hero Gets Girl was released, I received a call from a Schaffenberger fan in England who thanked me profusely for writing the book, as if I had cured cancer or saved the whales. This gave me a clearer understanding of how deep, and specific, fandom can go. When I once asked John Morrow if he thought there was enough demand for a Schaffenberger biography, John replied matterof-factly that he would want to read such a book.

The idea for my second TwoMorrows book was hatched while promoting Hero Gets Girl.

Kathy and I were flogging the book at comic shops and sprawling conventions such as the Big Apple Con in New York City. We were meeting people like Jim Lee, Erik Larsen, Jim Salicrup, and Danny Fingeroth—pros who helmed high-profile series during the industry boom of the 1990s. This boom, of course, produced hot and cold results.

There were some terrific comic books, absolutely, but also a collectors’ frenzy which yielded a glut of gimmicks such as #1 editions, polybagged premiums, and cover enhancements (holograms, foldouts, gold-foil embossing). Always on the alert for material for my newspaper column, I interviewed these new contacts while Kathy photographed them.

A book idea was coalescing. Besides this new Above: Monster Mash was TwoMorrows’ first foray into non-comics pop culture books, detailing such delights as Ben Cooper Halloween masks.

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material, we compiled a great deal of archived interviews and photos from our days covering the comics beat in “real time” as the ’80s and ’90s unfolded. I bolstered this with sections on influential series (Crisis on Infinite Earths, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen) and trends of the day (celebrity creators, super-hero makeovers, the rise of independent publishers such as Image, Valiant, and Defiant).

I wasn’t 100 percent enamored of the period, so I had a bit of irreverent fun with the subject matter, which I hope imbued the resulting book with some necessary arm’s-length objectivity. The Dark Age: Grim, Great and Gimmicky Post-Modern Comics was published in early 2006, four months after Kathy’s death.

It would be nine years before I pitched another project to John Morrow. In the meantime, I had some grieving to do—ah, the Irish gift for understatement—and another life crisis to deal with.

In 2008, I was laid off from The Press in a chainwide downsizing that stands as the biggest layoff by a media company in history. Luckily, I landed at my old competitor and New Jersey’s largest newspaper, The Star-Ledger, but the industry remained in turmoil with continued buyouts and layoffs. I figured I’d do another book when my professional life became less chaotic, but it eventually dawned on me that in the post-internet newspaper game, chaos itself was the “new normal” (an expression I abhor).

So, why wait? Life was short, and growing shorter. I fleshed out the idea I felt I was born to do, and offered John Morrow first refusal (even though it didn’t precisely line up with TwoMorrows’ largely comics-centric canon). The title functioned as a handy pitch: Monster Mash: The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America, 1957-1972. You know—

The World of TwoMorrows

the era of Aurora monster model kits, Munsters board games, and Frankenstein bubble-bath toys.

John, bless him, told me to go for it, with a bonus: I could do Monster Mash as a full-color book. (Hero Gets Girl and The Dark Age were done in black-&-white with color front and back covers, though The Dark Age had an eight-page color section in the middle.) The designer part of me rejoiced. Full-color throughout? It’s a playground!

John didn’t even tell me that Monster Mash would be a hardback. I found that out when I saw the first solicitation blurbs online. Another reason to rejoice.

I scanned nearly double the amount of images I wound up using in Monster Mash, and dusted off many of my archived interviews: James Warren, Forrest J Ackerman, Bobby “Boris” Pickett, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Al Lewis, John Astin, Jonathan Frid, David Selby, Kathryn Leigh Scott (my pre-

Mark Voger: Monster Mash and More Pop Culture Fun

adolescent crush). TV horror-movie host John Zacherle, who rapped the #6 hit “Dinner With Drac” in 1958, generously contributed a foreword, which he dictated over the phone from his Manhattan apartment. One year after the book’s 2015 release, Zacherle died at age 98.

Monster Mash was selling well, though I didn’t realize it at the time. You see, bringing a book into existence is the finish line for me. But when it comes to selling a book—promoting it and staying on top of the numbers—well, that’s something I struggle with. (I have a philosophical aversion to Facebook, which every author tells me is an invaluable promotional tool.)

So it took a friend who happens to be a novelist, Wallace Stroby (Some Die Nameless), to tell me that Monster Mash was doing better than my two previous books. “Your numbers are great,” Stroby said, sounding something like a physician. He later said, “Your numbers are life-changing.”

Life-changing? That, to me, would mean quitting your day job, lobster for breakfast and clubbing with Nicki Minaj.

Well, my life never changed, but I still recount one moment from the giddy days when Monster Mash was riding high. On July 25, 2015, Monster Mash had an Amazon ranking

Above: It’s all too beautiful in Mark’s book Groovy, another departure from TwoMorrows’ traditional comic book focus.

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2003: POP CULTURE Right: Next up for Mark is his book documenting pop culture of Christmases past, coming in 2020 from TwoMorrows.

of 3,631 for all books. (The lower the number, the better. Any day under 10,000 is a cause for celebration.) On that same day, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown had a ranking of 6,223. (I took note of this because The Da Vinci Code was so annoyingly trendy in its heyday.

Everyone was asking, “Didja read The Da Vinci Code yet?”) So for the rest of my days, I can boast that Monster Mash outsold The Da Vinci Code … on July 25, 2015, anyway.

I pitched several more book ideas to John, and he green-lit my fourth for TwoMorrows, 2017’s Groovy: When Flower Power Bloomed in Pop Culture, a (hopefully) fun look at the psychedelic era of the late 1960s and early ’70s. The twist was that Groovy covered the Banana Splits and H.R. Pufnstuf as well as Woodstock and Altamont. Talk about a playground—designing a book about psychedelia in color was like floating in a giant lava lamp.

You couldn’t overdo it.

As a designer, I got to stretch in ways I never could in newspapers. I’m proud, sinfully proud, of a two-page spread in Groovy for which I did a gigantic scan of my 45-RPM recording of “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James and the Shondells, added a black-&-white close-up of James, and fit the story into the hole of the record. The story itself was round like the hole.

Content-wise, Groovy presented my interviews with members of the Jefferson Airplane, the Guess Who, Vanilla Fudge,

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Peter Fonda, Brian Wilson, David Cassidy, Melanie, Arlo Guthrie, Peter Max, Susan Cowsill—all the grooviest people.

I’d wanted to use (left) campy crooner Tiny Tim (“Tiptoe Through the Tulips”) as my cover boy. Thankfully, John Morrow talked me out of it.

(What was I thinking?) Instead, I used a detail from Stan Goldberg’s cover for Archie Comics’ Madhouse Ma-ad Freak-Out #72 [1970]. She’s a hippie girl dancing in the foreground at a party. She’s not a character with a name, like Betty or Veronica. You could call her an “extra.” I’d almost call her “generic,” except that through Goldberg’s mastery of simplistic communication, she seems to have a personality.

To me, she’s so sunny and beautiful that she encapsulates the whole Flower Power era. At first, I just called her Hippie Girl, but I finally decided she deserves a name. She is now Daisy.

One thing I love about working with John and the gang at TwoMorrows is their passion. They believe in what they are doing. But more importantly, TwoMorrows is doing its bit in the important effort to keep that embattled, old-fashioned medium—print—alive.

Me, I don’t really read on a computer screen. I skim. I believe this is human nature, and there are studies that back me up.

This phenomenon portends sad, scary outcomes for the human race. We are not retaining vital information, people. And the less smart we are, the more the robots win.

Call me a dinosaur, but when I’m holding an ink-onpaper book in my hands on a cold winter’s night, or during a long train ride, or sitting in a beach chair as the seagulls caw, I’m apt to read more thoroughly—and retain what I’ve read.

I know this because I still vividly recall so many things I read as a child more than a half-century ago. Like when Peter Parker first laid eyes on Mary Jane Watson. Or when The Flash quit being The Flash. Or when Lois Lane became supersmart and her brain tripled in size. You know, the important stuff.

— Mark Voger

Top left: Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki were married on Johnny Carson’s show, on Dec. 17, 1969.

Above inset: Cover detail with Curt Swan pencils and Neal Adams inks, Lois Lane #95 [1969].

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ROB SMENTEK: PROOF OF (A WONDERFUL) LIFE Whenever anyone refers to themself as a “geek,” based on their love of the current slate of super-hero films and television, I just have to laugh. I’m sorry, folks, but you aren’t part of a geek subculture if you’re among the millions upon millions who view blockbuster movies based on a Marvel character; you’re a geek if you know who inked that character’s first appearance.

If these folks want to see the real comic geeks in action, they should look no further than the TwoMorrows line of magazines and books. Here, they will find an entire publishing enterprise built upon the history—and accompanying minutia—of the comic book industry.

For 25 years, TwoMorrows has continuously put out fanzines and books featuring meticulously researched articles and studies of the artists, writers, and editors behind the scenes, with care and detail often reserved for scholarly journals.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are the true geeks.

And, I am one of them… and couldn’t be prouder.

I began my association with TwoMorrows in early 2010, after I was let go from a long-held editorial position.

In some ways my newfound “freedom” was advantageous, especially since I’d get to stay home with my not-quitetwo-year-old girl, but on the other hand, the lack of cash flow was an issue.

With my background in writing, editing, and page design, I figured I could pick up some freelance proofreading work to help with expenses—or at the very least, fund my reading habits. One of the first people I reached out to was John Morrow. I introduced myself by flattering him with an appreciation of his publication line, and offered up my skills as an editor—along with the arcane knowledge of comic book trivia I’d amassed over the years (including, for instance, the correct spelling and pronunciation of Sienkiewicz).

As luck would have it, Mr. Morrow contacted me right away, as they were in need of a proofreader for their titles.

Within a matter of days, proofs of Back Issue and Alter Ego were in my inbox and in need of a quick edit. I gotta say, as a lifelong comics fan, it was something of a thrill getting to work with former Comico/DC writer-editor Michael Eury and, of course, the one-and-only Roy Thomas whose credits need no mention.

Before long, more work would come my way, including sporadic issues of BrickJournal and Draw! and booklength projects like the Don Heck biography and the first few volumes of the American Comic Book Chronicles. Later, when Comic Book Artist editor Jon B. Cooke returned to the TwoMorrows fold after an absence, with his new mag Comic Book Creator, that mag became the next regular title to come under the

auspice of my red pen.

I’ve been immensely proud to be part of the TwoMorrows team. Not only does it provide me with a bit of “cred” among the more-sophisticated comics fans, but I’ve also enjoyed the relationships I’ve cultivated through the publisher.

John Morrow’s been a generous and patient publisher, who didn’t kill me when page proofs went to the wrong address in North Carolina. I’ve enjoyed talking Jerry Lewis and the Replacements with Modern Masters’… well… master Eric Nolen-Weathington at numerous New York Comic-Cons. Roy and Michael have remained first-rate editors (duh!) who genuinely seem to trust and value my input. Meanwhile Jon B. Cooke’s become a genuine pal—despite my suspicion Rob Smentek that he might Proofreader/ be trying to Contributor kill me with Born: 1973 his deadline Residence: crunching Haddon Heights, (I keed, New Jersey Jon, I keed).

Vocation: And I’d be Editor/writer remiss withFavorite Creators: out mentioning Back Issue Howard Chaykin, Peter Bagge, Kirby/Sinnott contributor Seminal Comic Book: Karl HeitDC Special #29 mueller Jr., who isn’t just a terrific cartoonist, but also a cool guy.

Though I must confess that superhero fatigue has begun to set in a bit, I still get a certain thrill—or maybe, more accurately, a sense of vindication—to see the mainstream populace embrace the comic book culture that I’ve been a fan of for most of my life. But when this trend inevitably dies out, you can bet that the geeks—the real geeks—will still be found in the pages of the TwoMorrows’ pubs.

Left: Originally pitched by Dave Plunkert in 2011, TwoMorrows’ Don Heck biography finally saw print in 2014 under author John Coates. Neither writer liked John Morrow’s respectfully meant, but ironic title suggestion, Don Heck: The Best Worst Artist In Comics.

Rob Smentek: Proof of (a Wonderful) Life

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The Origin of Euryman and the Birth of Back Issue Who He Is and How He Came to Be

out in the 1970s, studying their text pages and learning about comics history.

I was born on September 28, 1957, in Concord, Editor, Back Issue In the tenth grade, I began cartooning, writing North Carolina. My parents were periodicals readBorn: 1957 and drawing my own gags, and comic books about ers: Dad, a baseball fan, loved my teachers, plus lampoons The Sporting News, and Mom Residence: of DC and Marvel characters.

New Bern, adored movie and celebrity I’m sure I wasn’t the only kid North Carolina magazines. The newsstand was to come up with a “Green a weekly stop for our family, Vocation: Freelance Flashlight,” but since streakwhere I was drawn to the racks Writer/Author/Editor ing—running nude in public— of colorful “funnybooks.”

Favorite Creator: was a fad back then, I might’ve I initially read comics based Dick Giordano been the only one drawing The upon familiar TV characters, Seminal Comic Book: Flash as “The Flesh” (luckily, but once the Adam West-starDetective Comics #350 his super-speed and my limited ring Batman premiered, on As Comic Book Artist ability kept his naughty parts a ABC, on January 12, 1966, moves to a different blur). But it was my homemade when I was barely eight, I was publisher, TwoMorrows super-hero comics that cultivatcaptivated. With Detective and needs a new title to reed a degree of fandom at ConBatman as my gateways, my place its top-seller on the cord High School, since they next discovery was The Brave schedule. Based on having starred my classmates as caped and the Bold, the Batman previously worked with crusaders. One kid with a long pro writer and editor team-up book which would neck who was nicknamed Michael Eury, John ultimately become my all-time Morrow knows he is a “Weasel” became Weaselman, favorite comic title and my perfect fit to edit the new with a stretching neck inspired introduction to many other DC periodical, Back Issue. by Elongated Man swipes.

Another kid notorious characters. Fast-forward to September 1967 and for hurling spitwads became Wonder Wad. the premiere of the Spider-Man and Fantastic Four During my junior year, I started writing fan letters animated cartoons, on ABC, on Saturday mornto Murray Boltinoff, the editor of Brave and Bold.

Right: Mickey Eury, age 8, ings. Those series’ respective comics became my was destined for greatness, welcome mat for reading Marvels.

In January of 1974, I bought the brand-new B&B based on that steely look of #112, a 100-page issue teaming Batman and Mister By the time 1970 rolled around, I was entering determination on his face.

Miracle. In its “B&B Mailbag” was printed my my teens and had “aged out” from the fold. That name, with my appeals for future Batman co-stars. didn’t last long. I was 13 and my baby brother, John, was five when Batman #232 [June 1971] was My first DC “credit”!

I really wanted to work in the comics business, brought into our home. Whether Dad selected it for but since its hub, New York City, might just as soon us or little John pointed to its bright green cover have been another planet for a kid from small-town or I on a whim wanted another Batman fix, I don’t North Carolina, I chose my second love—music recall. This was the now-iconic Denny O’Neil/Neal (I was a trombonist)—as a career path. In the late Adams issue that introduced Ra’s al Ghul. Its blend 1970s, I obtained a bachelor of music education of intrigue and excitement and its photo-realistic degree at East Carolina University.

Neal Adams artwork captivated me. I read the After college, I briefly taught middle and high cover off of it—and after a brief nap, my passion for school band—and hated it. I left my job and wafcomics was reawakened! fled for much of the 1980s, along the way workSoon I was reading many DCs and Marvels—and ing as a record store clerk, cable TV subscription Back Issue soon, some Charltons and Atlas/Seaboards. I also salesman, producer/talent/cameraman at a public First Issue: 11/19/2003 bought the various comics reprint books that came

Michael Eury

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access station, and singing telegram messenger!

At this time, I started to establish a fandom profile by joining APAs like Interlac and the newly minted CarolinAPA. Fantagraphics launched Amazing Heroes magazine around this time. In its earlier years, I had two “Silly Covers” cartoons published, one an issue of Superman with Red Kryptonite turning the Man of Steel into Slim Whitman, the other an issue of Marvel’s Dennis the Menace with Galactus summoning Mr. Wilson as his new herald. I was also writing a lot of letters to comics, mostly DCs, with many making it into print.

In July of 1984, at Monkey Business Singing Telegrams, I met my wife-to-be, Rose. Less than two years later we became a couple, and in April 1986 we headed from Charlotte, North Carolina, toward the mecca of comics production, New York City. We had only $1,700 to our name, a crappy Chevy Chevette that couldn’t make it up a steep hill (heck, it could barely clear a speed-bump), and a U-Haul loaded with long boxes of comics. We couldn’t afford to live in New York, though, and ended up within striking distance, in the Wilmington, Delaware, area, near some college friends of mine who were in grad school at the University of Delaware. I worked part-time in a video store, did a little performing with a comedy troupe, and started to do some freelance writing for local newspapers, while continuing to produce ’zines for APAs. I also produced a newsletter for a local comic shop.

One of my Interlac APA pals—Mark Waid—had recently become the editor of Amazing Heroes, and, in 1986, I submitted to him a review of Joel Eisner’s 20th anniversary book about the Batman TV show. Mark published my article and gave me more assignments. With Amazing Heroes, I wrote numerous preview articles, hero histories, and creator interviews, and began to make industry contacts.

’80s!) that appeared in #28 [July 1985]. Jim liked my sense of humor and offered me the chance to write scripts for “Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham,” which was, by that post-Star Comics period, the back-up in Marvel Tales. I wrote a handful of Spider-Ham stories, including ones introducing the Punfisher (Charlie the Tuna meets the Punisher) and a Spider-Ham/Forbush Man team-up. Big fun!

(I’d love to write Spider-Ham again…) Marvel Tales #205 [Nov. 1987] contained my first Spider-Ham story, a professional milestone. Jim Salicrup was a great encourager, and I’ll always be grateful to him for affording me my first pro credits.

Since I was mostly paid for my Amazing Heroes work with Fantagraphics products (where I discovered the wizardry of E. C. Segar’s Popeye), the Marvel work, for which I signed work-for-hire vouchers, scored me my first freelance paychecks. Rose worked as a medical receptionist and I still kept my freelance video-store job, but money was tight and our big meal out each week was at a local pizza Joining the Ranks of the Pros buffet. I began to venture out to other publishers, Another score was an over-the-transom piece writing a few Underdog and Mighty Mouse: The I did for Marvel’s Jim Salicrup for Marvel Age New Adventures scripts for Spotlight Comics… but magazine, a spoof of coming attractions (such as an they went under and my work went unpublished X-Men/Michael Jackson crossover—hey, it was the (and uncompensated). I also remember pitching

Above: Michael and future wife Rose, up to monkey business in 1985. Coincidentally, that’s an un-inflated Superman mylar balloon on the background wall!

Below: A proud papa to the 2019 Eisner Award for “Best ComicsRelated Periodical/Journalism.”

2004 Michael Eury: Back Issue

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2003: BACK ISSUE It was there that I would edit scripts, have story conferences on the phone with writers, call freelance artists to ask why they were late, make assignments, write letters pages, proofread, and manage the various other tasks associated with editing comic books.

I’d traipse up and down the stairs to Diana’s office as needed.

Diana Schutz scared me at first! She’s brilliant, and politely corrected me when I needed it and steered me along the way. I was quickly promoted from assistant editor to editor at Comico under her tutelage and got to work with a slew of talented creators, including Steve Rude, Bill Willingham, Mike W. Barr, Adam Hughes, Tim Sale, Arthur Adams, Steve Purcell, Joe Staton, Len Wein, Jill Thompson, and Gene Colan. Some of the books I edited were The Elementals, Justice Machine, The Maze Agency, Gumby’s Winter Fun Special, Trollords, Sam and Max Freelance Police, and E-Man Special. Steve Purcell’s scripts for the Gumby and Sam and Dr. Lasorda’s House of Comics Max books made me bust a gut laughing. And I’m proud to have I began working at Comico (pronounced “Ko-mee-ko,” by the been involved with Adam Hughes at the beginning of his career, way, which I discovered when Diana first called me) at the beginas Mike Barr, Diana Schutz, and I selected Adam from among ning of January 1988. Comico was headquartered in a rickety old several potential artists to illustrate Barr’s mystery book, The Maze house, on DeKalb Street, in Norristown, Pennsylvania. On the Agency. Adam’s work was very good to begin with and improved first floor was the physical therapy office of Dennis Lasorda, one by leaps and bounds over just a few issues. He and I were great of Comico’s publishers. The second floor housed—in one-time buds back then, and I wasn’t surprised when Andy Helfer at DC bedrooms and dens—the offices of editor-in-chief Schutz, adminhired him away from us to draw Justice League. istrative director/marketing guru Bob Schreck, co-publisher Phil Those were primitive, pre-computer days, where text pages Lasorda, and art director Rick Taylor, plus a kitchen (with Xerox were typed, then sent to a local typesetter, who returned galleys machine) and another small office that was the workspace for a that were proofed and later pasted onto artboard. few different employees over the years. Up the creaking stairs It was as a Comico editor that I made my first trek to New York (which creepily sounded like something out of The Addams FamCity. Bob Schreck and I drove (in Bob’s car, not my Chevette) ily) was the third floor, where two former bedrooms, now offices, from Norristown to Manhattan to meet with Amnesty Internawere located. Both were empty and I had my choice as my office. tional to discuss Comico’s proposal to create a benefit comic One was partially painted with a Robotech mural, but I chose the for the organization. I remember being wowed by the enormity other one, which must have been a teenage boy’s bedroom with and energy of the city, wishing to be a part of it. The Amnesty its wallpaper of black polka dots on a white background (I joked International deal didn’t pan out, but I got a cool T-shirt from the that it reminded me of when The Brady Bunch’s Greg Brady meeting. moved to the attic to get “his own scene”). But it was my office! to DC’s Bob Greenberger an Uncle Sam Special that dealt with a divided America; despite being weakened by this national rift, Sam rallied to rekindle the American spirit. (Maybe I was 30 years too early for that plot.)

By late 1987, at my wife’s urging to focus on a specific career goal rather than multiple goals, I set my sights on getting a staff position as a comics editor. I inquired to Mike Carlin at DC, but Renee Witterstaetter had just been hired to work with him. I also wrote a letter of inquiry to Comico the Comic Company’s editor-in-chief, Diana Schutz—and Diana called me the day she received the letter. She had just lost her assistant editor to another job and commended me for having no typos or grammatical errors in my query letter. After an interview, I was hired as assistant editor at Comico!

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Early in my second year at Comico, in January 1989, I had a trial by fire, on national television.

The Christian Broadcasting Network’s Straight Talk morning talk show, filmed before a live audience, was doing a feature on the immorality of modern comic books. (A house ad for Comico’s first Gumby one-shot, Gumby’s Summer Fun Special, which predated my time at the company, was criticized as it riffed off of Eddie Murphy’s Gumby portrayal on Saturday Night Live with the ad line, “He’s Gumby, dammit!”) CBN invited each of the major comic publishers to send a rep to appear on the show.

Only two agreed: First Comics, sending publisher Rick Obadiah, and Comico. Bob Schreck was going to attend, but since Bob had long hair and a beard and looked like a rock star or a biker, they instead asked the clean-cut boy from the Bible Belt to represent the company. Wow, did they grill us on that show! It was a one-sided, biased presentation, and no one wanted to hear discussion of how comic books, like other media, were being produced for a variety of ages and how Comico’s material carried mature-readers advisories in their solicitations.

During a commercial break, an elderly gentleman in the audience stood up and condemned me to hell!

Later that year, in the spring of 1989, I believe, Comico, which had fallen into financial difficulties, brokered a deal to have DC Comics distribute its titles. We were told to keep things hush-hush. I got a call from someone in the fan press, as the rumor mill was buzzing, and for some reason the “always be helpful” side of my brain kicked in (as it usually does), shutting down memory of the “hush-hush” mandate, and I provided information of the dis-

tribution deal—which appeared in the press before the companies made their official announcement. D’oh! I got yelled at. (Wouldn’t be the first time.) This was a valuable lesson about confidentiality and impulsiveness.

Too Mayberry for Manhattan

While I was learning a great deal at Comico (and writing a “Video Views” comics-cinema column for Amazing Heroes on the side), working for DC remained my goal and I kept in touch with Mike Carlin there.

In mid-1989, with Tim Burton’s Batman still in movie theaters, I jumped to an associate editor’s job at DC. Rose and I sold my comic-book and album collections to help fund the move and prepare for living in a small apartment, and we moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn.

At DC, I worked under three group editors, Mike Carlin, Denny O’Neil, and Andy Helfer. I assisted them on books, eventually taking over titles like Hawk & Dove, New Gods, and The Huntress, and was able to observe, work with, and learn from all three of them.

Above: Among the APAs (Amateur Press Alliances) Michael contributed to was North Carolina’s own CarolinAPA, created by Tony Wike. In addition to producing ’zines, Michael occasionally drew CarolinaAPA covers, including this zany hybrid of X-Men and The Andy Griffith Show.

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2003: BACK ISSUE My biggest “Gosh, wow!” fanboy moment in this position came as I (along with Rose) accompanied Dick and Pat to Los Angeles, in December 1990, to host DC’s Holiday Party for West Coast freelancers (I had never seen pink and blue spray-painted Christmas trees until that visit… and haven’t seen them since, now that I think of it). The party was a blast, but the activity I’ll never forget was being taken on a V.I.P. tour of the Warner Bros. television and film studios. We first visited the office of Howard Chaykin, who was working on The Flash weekly series at the time, then were led onto other sets, where I strolled along some familiar back-drops. We visited the set of the family drama Life Goes On (yes, I opened their refrigerator to see what was there), and when asked if there was any set I’d like to visit, I naturally said, “The Flash”! There we got to observe the taping of a special-effects scene where John Wesley Shipp, in costume, very patiently hoisted Amanda Pays over his shoulder and ran At this time, I was also assigned a revamp/revival of Who’s Who, which, alongside designer Keith “Kez” Wilson, we re-imag- in place, take after take, for what became a super-speed scene.

That night we had dinner with Gil Kane (yes, he did call me, “My ined in the looseleaf format. As Who’s Who editor I got to work with, albeit briefly, just about every artist in the biz in the late ’80s boy!”), Howard Chaykin, and Dick and Pat. Back in New York, on the job I had hoped that my editorial and early ’90s. Amazing experience. When my officemate—coincidentally, Mark Waid!—left DC, I inherited from him Legion of colleagues would perceive me as someone from the inside of Super-Heroes (which had recently been rebooted into its contro- the department who was their voice “upstairs,” but, truth be versial “Five Years Later” phase), plus mop-up on the final issues told, my promotion disrupted my relationship with some of the editors. I was too immature, too unsure of myself, and too, well, of Secret Origins. nice to toughen up to grow into the potential Dick had seen in In early 1990, my DC career took a detour, as Dick Giordano, me, and, over time, I grew unhappy and asked to return to the the editorial director, offered me the newly created position of editors’ pool. By 1991, I was an editor again, returning to Legion, “assistant to the editorial director.” How could I say no? I got to developing Legion spin-offs, and developing other projects like work closely with Dick and his aide, Pat Bastienne, traveling exAmbush Bug Nothing Special and Eclipso: The Darkness Within. tensively, meeting creators, promoting the company at convenAlso, at this time, an undiagnosed, untreated progressive tions, writing the “Inside DC” house column, and learning about hearing loss was adversely affecting my ability to understand and the executive side of the company. Other than Who’s Who, my titles were reassigned. I learned so much from Dick—particularly, perceive verbal information. As a result, I was speaking and/or acting inappropriately at times, mishearing or not hearing what how to nurture and encourage talent and creative visions—and was being said to or around me. Between this burden and my found in him a fantastic mentor and friend.

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inability to deal with internal politics, I ended up leaving DC in 1992, briefly returning to North Carolina (to my maternal grandparents’ house in New Bern) to lick my wounds.

Looking back, I now realize that, as a Southern boy at heart, I was too Mayberry for Manhattan.

I never fully felt at ease with corporate life, having been reared in the small-town workforce of a slower-paced environment with laid-back staff—not exactly the idle loafing of Floyd’s Barber Shop, but not all that far removed from it either. My failure to go the distance at DC remains a professional regret, as I wasn’t there long enough to ascend to editing any of the A-list books.

The Wild, Wild West

I was depressed and angry at this time, but still remotely connected to the comics business as a freelance writer on Sensational She-Hulk and G’nort in Green Lantern Corps Quarterly. Moving to such a small community was too much of a shock for me, and we quickly relocated to Philadelphia, as we had friends there from my Comico days.

Barbara Kesel, with whom I’d worked when she was co-writing Hawk & Dove under my DC editorship, had since become a Dark Horse Comics editor and recruited me to move from my native East Coast to Portland, Oregon, to be an editor there. The cross-country move was amazing, as Rose’s parents, in their motor home, led the way, with us driving a moving van following, staying in campgrounds for seven nights.

In mid-1993, I joined Dark Horse’s staff, launching new books starring characters from its recently

launched “Comics’ Greatest World” universe (X, Barb Wire, Ghost, The Machine, Catalyst: Agents of Change, Motorhead, etc.) plus a new mini-series starring The Mask. I edited the first issue of John Byrne’s Danger Unlimited series, plus two DC-Dark Horse crossovers: Batman vs. Predator II and Superman vs. Aliens. Before long, I was promoted to group editor, first overseeing the company-owned titles and later, the licensed ones.

Above: From 1982–83, in Concord, North Carolina, Michael wrote, produced, and starred in the cable-access TV show The Movie Magazine, using SNL-type comedy skits to promote upcoming cable programs. Thus Michael played everyone from Han Solo and Mister Rogers to (seen here) Clark Kent.

Previous page: Michael in 1988; that’s a lot of comic boxes to move!

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At Dark Horse, I once again worked with and learned from Diana Schutz, as well as Bob Schreck, plus Mike Richardson, Randy Stradley, and David Scroggy. And, boy, the talent on my books! John Byrne, Doug Mahnke, John Arcudi, Eric Luke, Adam Hughes, Matt Haley, Steven Grant, Paul Gulacy, Doug Moench, Dan Jurgens, Kevin Nowlan, Tim Hamilton, Eddie Campbell, Chris Warner, etc., etc., etc. I also got to do a little writing, most notably Hero Zero #0 (which I co-plotted with my wife), starring a Dark Horse super-hero that was a blend of Ultraman and Shazam!, and its follow-up, Hero Zero vs. Godzilla, which was set at the San Diego Comic-Con. After a few years my diminishing hearing was souring me. I had gotten one hearing aid in my worst ear, but was drowning in self-pity. Also, as a mainstream super-hero guy, I never found

my groove at Dark Horse amid its creator-owned and Hollywood-licensed titles. So, by late 1995, I went freelance again, taking with me a newly launched Dark Horse title to write, Adventures of the Mask, based upon the cartoon show which was based upon the Jim Carrey-starring movie (which was based upon the Dark Horse comic…). This was great fun for the year it was in print. I also reconnected with DC, through its Warner Bros. Worldwide Publishing adjunct, and wrote a lot of short stories for DC’s Looney Tunes comic, starting with “I’ll Take Manhattan,” a Marvin the Martian tale, in Looney Tunes #28 [Apr. 1997]. Over the next few

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years I wrote tales for most of the Looney Tunes franchise’s characters. Several of my stories have stayed in print, via Looney Tunes digests and trade paperback reprints.

Life in the Phantom Zone

By the late 1990s, my freelance writing work was drying up. I began selling off my collection of classic toys, original comic art, and books to pay bills… plus, being depressed by and angry over my imploded comics career, I wanted to divest myself of reminders of it.

I remained in Oregon, 3,000 miles away from my family and roots; was trying to reinvent myself as an animation writer, although my wife did not, wisely, think a move to L.A. to pursue that was a good move at my age; and I was down in the dumps about my hearing loss, which was worsening. I took a part-time job as a communications director for a small corporation, in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and was cordial, smiling, and functional, but lost on the inside (although I will give this job its props for allowing me to hone my skills in working with the public and with municipal government). At times, I found it embarrassing to be a comics expatriate,

since my network of friends consisted of people who were in the business, Portland having become a mecca for comics creators. I became adept at keeping everyone except my wife at arm’s length.

There were the occasional creative gigs: I wrote some income tax-related cartoons (illustrated by Tim Harkins) for the Microsoft Network, developed super-hero personas for several famous sports pros for unrealized animation and product lines for Nike, and shopped around an animated comedy series that had one production house in L.A. interested.

But nothing panned out.

But like the landlocked sailor lured by his ocean mistress to hoist anchor, my mistress— the world of comic books—once again whistled her siren’s call.

Robert Conte, with whom I had worked at Dark Horse, was publishing a few projects under

Previous page: Michael in 1989, in New York with his Captain Action collection. His love of the action figure got publisher John Morrow hooked, and resulted in two editions of Michael’s book.

Below: 1988 at the Chicago Comic-Con, with Adam Hughes.

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his Studio Chikara brand and offered me the chance to write a book about a classic toy he knew I loved. And thus my book, Captain Action: The Original Super-Hero Action Figure, was born. I tracked down people who had worked on the Ideal Toys Captain Action line and interviewed them, from Captain Action’s creator Stan Weston, to my old contact and friend from comics Murphy Anderson, to Jim Shooter and Gil Kane, who worked on DC Comics’ Captain Action spin-off title.

Studio Chikara ultimately couldn’t publish the book, however, which was another blow to me. Luckily, Tom Stewart, with whom I was networking online as a fellow Captain Action fan, suggested I contact John Morrow about TwoMorrows publishing my Captain Action book—and I’m glad I did! John was game, and our long-standing professional and personal relationship began in 2001.

TwoMorrows released Captain Action: The Original Super-Hero Action Figure, in softcover, in 2002. When my comp copies arrived, I was exhilarated—sure, I had many publishing credits in

the past, but with this my byline was on the spine of the book!

That was the comics fan-turned-pro’s equivalent of a community theater actress finally seeing her name in lights on a marquee.

TwoMorrows, TwoMorrows, I Love Ya, TwoMorrows

After Captain Action was done, I pitched to John a bio of my former boss, Dick Giordano, which he accepted. With Rose joining me, I flew from Oregon to Florida, where Dick had retired, and spent a week interviewing Dick for the book. Dick was extremely gracious and allowed me access to his vault of original art—a treasure trove! He also said I could have any art there I wanted. I kept three pieces: for Rose, an unpublished late-’60s DC romance cover (which is framed in my office) and a romance comic splash page, and for me, the title page to a Batman story of Denny O’Neil’s that Dick illustrated for Batman #247 [Feb. 1973]. (In retrospect there were two other pieces I wished I would’ve taken, a Batman cover featuring Cat-Man and a page

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ROBERT GREENBERGER: IN GOOD COMPANY Growing up in the 1970s, fanzines delved into bits and pieces of the comics history, grabbing snatches of interviews with figures now long gone.

But they were out inconsistently, the quality of the writing and editing haphazard. These were soon after followed by the rise of The Comics Journal as the singular source for serious coverage of the field, and just as they decided to become too elite for mainstream comics fare, offered us Amazing Heroes.

Similarly, Hal Schuster provided us with Comics Feature, which gave the world a platform for Carol Kalish pre-Marvel.

When I entered this realm with Comics Scene, I provided a mainstream vehicle to explore comic books, comic strips, and animation.

None of us lasted, but the appetite for interviews, histories, and character profiles only grew. Thankfully, 25 years ago, John Morrow saw that appetite and did what any self-respecting fanboy would do: fill the gap. He knew there were the Jack Kirby fans who couldn’t

get enough about the King or those who loved and respected the legacy of the Golden Age and its number one ’zine, Alter Ego. By adding Comic Book Artist, then Back Issue, and then the line of artistcentric books and biographies, and character companions, he’s succeeded where everyone has failed. He has grown a small, respectable publishing company, releasing works that might appeal to niche interests, but does them for the sheer joy of the content.

We’ve learned things about the underrated greats like Herb Trimpe and Don Heck and so much more.

John should be lauded and celebrated for the American Comic Book Chronicles, the first set of in-depth explorations of comics history. There’s been nothing quite like it and it fills a void in our business.

As a former journalist and editor and fan, I was delighted to be a reader.

Then, as opportunities arose, I began writing for the titles, notably Back

Dick inked over José Luis García-López from the Batman/Hulk crossover, but I didn’t want to seem greedy.)

In 2003, the biography I wrote, Dick Giordano: Changing Comics, One Day at a Time, was published by TwoMorrows. I’m honored to have captured Dick’s myriad contributions to the field between its covers.

John Morrow’s wife, Pam, designed both of my books and John and I developed a strong relationship—and I delivered my materials on time! So one day, in early 2003, I believe, John contacted me about editing a new magazine called Back Issue.

This was during the time when Jon B. Cooke had taken Comic Book Artist magazine to Top Shelf.

John wanted a new comics mag to replace (not

Michael Eury: Back Issue

Robert Greenberger

Issue. Here, Contributor, I could ring Back Issue my years of Born: 1958 professional Residence: experiencFulton, Maryland es to the Vocation: profiles, hisHigh school teacher, tories, and writer, editor, bon vivant interviews.

Favorite Creator: I don’t get Too many to pick just one rich on these Seminal Comic Book: (neither does Superman, issue number John) but do lost to history them out of affection for the content and the pleasure of helping fill in the gaps. It reconnects me to people or titles I haven’t talked to in ages, which makes up for the lack of riches.

The entire TwoMorrows line deserves plaudits, but it all starts with John, and I salute him.

replicate) it on his schedule. After careful consideration I decided to do it—and am glad I did!

John had some departments in mind for the magazine: “Greatest Stories Never Told,” “Pro2Pro” interviews (originally suggested by David “Hambone” Hamilton), “Rough Stuff” pencil art showcases (the brainchild of Ken Steacy), and “Beyond Capes” (non-superhero comics). He provided careful executive guidance but largely let me to develop the tone of the magazine as I saw fit.

(Thanks, John!)

CBA was a tough act to follow, and so I decided to make BI different from CBA in its tone and presentation. The magazines’ titles clearly, for me, delineated how their contents differed: Comic Book Artist was (mostly) about the talent, while Back

Above: The inestimable Mr. Greenberger conducted an extensive interview with Michael Eury in Back Issue #100 about the mag’s history. Here’s page one of their chat.

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The other idea I brought to the table from this developmental period was BI’s thematic structure, believing this would give me an editorial framework, plus keep each issue fresh for our readers as well as ye ed. Sixteen years later, that formula continues to work! We started with “DC vs. Marvel” for #1 [Nov. 2003], and, as I write these words in mid-February 2019, have just put to bed our “Batman Movie 30th Anniversary” issue for #113.

Robert Clark, the magazine’s original designer, was fundamental in establishing the look of Back Issue, from its cover logo to its department logos to its overall graphic layout. Early in the magazine’s run Robert moved on to other things, but his contributions still remain in our DNA. Thank you, Robert!

You’ll Believe a Man Can Fly

A pivotal personal experience happened on October 10, 2004, during my second year of producing Back Issue, with a connection, coincidentally, to the magazine itself.

As you’re probably aware, Christopher Reeve, the handsome, athletic star of four Superman movies, narrowly survived a freak horsebackriding accident in 1995 which left him a quadriplegic, unable to breathe without an oxygen tube. He initially wanted his family to pull the plug, but through their love they convinced him that he was “Still Me” (the title of his autobiography). And thus Reeve became a real-life superman, inspirationally speaking of his personal goal of walking again one day while serving as an advocate and fundraiser to help those with spinal cord injuries.

In September 2004, I reached out to Christopher Reeve through the Christopher Reeve Foundation about an interview for Back Issue, wherein we would discuss his legacy as Superman

and his work for spinal cord injury research.

I was prepared to fly to the East Coast on my own dime and offer to Alex Ross the opportunity to paint a portrait of Reeve as Superman for our cover.

After a few encouraging dialogues, I received a message on Friday, October 8, 2004, that the interview could not happen “at this time.” I was bummed.

But the worst news came two days later, on Sunday, the 10th, as I learned on CNN that Reeve passed away that very day. I was crushed. I had never met him, but Christopher Reeve was my hero—first, for bringing to life my Superman, and second, for his advocacy for people with spinal cord injuries, which he did from his wheelchair for the last nine years of his life.

The day Christopher Reeve died, my life changed. I stopped feeling sorry for myself over my hearing loss. This was no gradual adjustment—it was a transformation, an epiphany. I stopped bellyaching, “Why me?” and asked, “What do I do next?” That latter question pointed me toward a self-help/advocacy/information nonprofit called the Hearing Loss Association of America (hearingloss.org), from which I learned communications and coping skills… and soon became a leader and motivator within the organization. I regard Christopher as an angel who, on his trajectory from this earthly realm, “spoke” to me and pointed me to this path of revitalization.

I look nothing like Lois Lane, but I was saved by Superman!

Life in the Back Issue Bunker

In the years since, through my progressive, adult-onset hearing loss, I have also learned patience, something I lacked earlier in my career, which has also helped me grow as an editor. I no longer lose sleep over deadlines; problems are merely puzzles waiting to be solved.

Okay, it wasn’t always that way. Early on, BI had a narrow production window.

The second issue was dropped on me

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the day before Christmas Eve, and I proofread it on Christmas Day. But, over the years, following the model established at Comico by my first editorial mentor, Diana Schutz, I’ve learned to work ahead of schedule so that problems, when they occur, are easier to fix.

What kind of problems, you ask?

Most of my writers—freelancers, all—deliver their work on time, and turn in professional work that satisfies their assignments’ editorial requirements.

Many of them also contribute scans of original artwork and comic-book panels. Most of these men and women are not professional writers by trade, but are comics enthusiasts who share TwoMorrows’ mission to capture comic-book history and the oral histories of those who created the works—and they give up leisure time to craft these features for you.

But, on a handful of occasions, there have been writers who have dropped the ball, either by turning in their work very late (which creates a trickle-down network of production problems), not delivering in their manuscripts what they promised and were contracted to do, or—and yes, this has happened—literally disappearing while on deadline, not responding to messages (and it’s hard to disappear in the era of social media), prompting an 11th-hour reassignment… which forces the stand-in writer to work under duress. There have been times when comic creators who committed to interviews could not deliver, for a variety of reasons, including health issues, imposing last-minute changes, and apologies. There have been embarrassing mistakes in our articles, going back to #1’s “Koran,” Son of Tarzan, typo. There have also been a couple of mistakes on our covers, specifically #80’s typo of Ganthet’s Tale as “Gathet” and #81’s use of an earlier cover draft which cited the inclusion of material (Giant-Size Marvel) that didn’t appear in the issue.

But at the end of the day, whattaya gonna do?

I dealt with chaos daily when I worked on staff as a comics editor, and often took it too seriously, to the detriment of my health and wellbeing. Today I still take my job seriously, but, over the years, have learned to minimize stress by adopting the mantra,

“This isn’t the hospital emergency room. We’re doing a magazine about old comic books.” And after taking that deep breath and forging ahead with a clear perspective, I’ve discovered that some of those problems that at first seemed so disruptive can be quickly fixed with some creative thinking.

I will admit that the issue that most deeply affects me is negativism. Back Issue’s tone is positive by my direction and (hopefully) example, but contemporary culture has, since we launched in 2003, become hypersensitive and hypercritical. Comic fans have never been ones to keep their opinions quiet, and I expect occasional constructive criticism when we make a goof—or even woes of lament when I experiment with a non-traditional cover (issues #55, 84, 101, and 102) or themes that seem contrary to Bronze Agers’ tastes (#101 and 102). If we’ve reported something wrong, I appreciate the reader remarks that set the record straight. But I embrace those readers who do so civilly. Over the years there have been worst-case scenarios, like the brutal email I received (on my birthday) one year admonishing me for my “incompetence” over an article I wrote to the flare-ups in BI’s Facebook group where hatred is literally heaped upon certain artists and writers—some of whom have been members of that very group and personally reading those hurtful remarks. Fortunately, these are the exceptions to the rule, as most of Back Issue’s readers are loyal, intelligent, considerate, and fun-loving.

And I love ya for it!

From the messages I’ve received and conversa-

Above: Euryman exposes his secret identity in 2011’s Hearing Loss magazine—on the cover even!

Previous page: At top, Michael and Rose at Halloween 1987, and, inset below, the dapper editor in Feb. 2019.

Below: Michael edited the Justice League Companion [2005] for TwoMorrows.

2020 Michael Eury: Back Issue

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tions with readers I’ve had over the years, there’s a misconception that TwoMorrows has a fleet of offices from which Roy Thomas edits Alter Ego, Jon B. Cooke edits Comic Book Creator, John Morrow edits The Jack Kirby Collector, I edit Back Issue, etc. There is a TwoMorrows office, in Raleigh, North Carolina, but that’s largely the domain of our fearless leader. The rest of us produce our publications from our own studios or home offices.

Back Issue has an editorial staff of one: me. I work each day, usually seven days a week, but don’t maintain strict hours, opting instead for “the artist’s life,” coming and going from my duties of editorial management, communications, editing manuscripts, writing, proofreading, etc. However, I don’t sit around staring out the window waiting for the muse to strike—I’m disciplined and get my work done. I’m proud to say I’ve never delivered an issue of BI late.

I work from my home office, which is decorated, as you might expect, with framed comic art and sketches, a framed poster of Superman: The Movie, and Hot Toys action figures of Christopher Reeve as Superman and Adam West as Batman. One of our cats, Miss Edgewood, who guest-edited our “Cat People” issue, #40, often “works” (sleeps) on a comfy blanket in the nice red leather chair in the corner which is supposed to be my proofreading

chair. When we started BI, in 2003, I produced its earlier issues from my home office in our condo in Lake Oswego, Oregon; in September 2007, Rose and I moved back to our native East Coast and bought a home in my hometown of Concord, North Carolina, where we stayed until downsizing, in September 2018, to coastal New Bern, North Carolina, where we now reside.

Although I work from home, I don’t work alone.

I am connected, via the internet, and sometimes by phone, to designer Rich Fowlks, cover designer Michael Kronenberg, cover colorist Glenn Whitmore, proofreader Rob Smentek, and BI Facebook coadministrator and often BI contributor John Trumbull. Each of us contributes to BI as freelancers, working from different cities and states. These guys are top-notch pros and I’m lucky to be partnered with them. If I’m the “backseat driver” of BI, they’re my pit crew making sure we cross the finish line.

My freelance status has afforded me the flexibility to find additional work and volunteer opportunities away from my TwoMorrows duties. From 2008–12, I became a 50-something overachiever. I took on a part-time job as executive director of my county’s historical-preservation nonprofit (where I curated and ran two local museums), wrote books about comics history and regional history, volunteered with several nonprofits and community boards

Karl Heitmueller Cartoonist, Prince Street News Born: 1964 Residence: Newark, New Jersey Vocation: Bartender/ freelance writer/artist Favorite Creator: Alex Toth? Jaime Hernandez?

Swanderson? Denny O’Neil?

Charles Schulz? I’ll let you know…

Seminal Comic Book: Superboy #164

JARROD BUTTERY: CHEMIST BY DAY, WRITER BY NIGHT As a child in Perth, Western Australia, in the 1970s, my two favorite television shows were Doctor Who and Planet of the Apes. I still remember the day my father brought home a Planet of the Apes comic. It contained ad for another title called Fantastic Four. I looked for, and found, FF #5 and was hooked for life.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, these comics were black-&-white Australian reprints of Marvel Comics from the United States. The reprints continued for a couple of years and, when they disappeared from the newsstands, “real” Marvel Comics began to trickle in. My first was The Avengers #159 [May 1977], featuring Graviton.

Two issues later, Ultron invaded Avengers Mansion and “killed” Captain America, Scarlet Witch, the Vision, and the Beast. The denouement in Avengers #162 was a life-altering issue. Ragged and re-read as it is, it was the first comic I asked George Pérez to sign when he visited Australia many years later.

Michael Eury: Back Issue

Back Issue #1 [December 2003] seemed to be aimed straight at fans like myself. As I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Back Issue celebrates my formative years. Editor Michael Eury cannily balances reminiscences with revelations. Every issue mixes “I remember this!” with “I didn’t know that!” By #32, I wanted to join in the fun. BI #42 [August 2010] published my first article, featuring a history of the Two-Gun Kid. I shall forever be indebted to the first creator I ever approached, Mr. Steve Englehart, who graciously answered my questions, thus encouraging me on a near-decade-long association with Back Issue and over 20 published articles.

Editor Michael Eury displays similar enthusiastic curiosity about his subjects, inquiring about our backgrounds. As an industrial chemist, I am required to write scientifically. Writing for Back Issue affords a little more flexibility and freedom, whilst still necessitating thoroughness and accuracy. I’ve never stopped

following Jarrod Buttery Avengers, Contributor, through thick Back Issue and thin. My Born: 1967 wife liked Sandman and Residence: Peter David’s Perth, Australia superb SuVocation: pergirl, whilst Industrial chemist our son is a Favorite Creators: fan of tamer Stan and Jack characters Seminal Comic Book: like Rocket The Avengers #162 Raccoon and Deadpool.

But a favorite comics creator? The Bronze Age is filled with them! Aragonés, Byrne, Claremont, Chaykin, David, Englehart, Michelinie, Miller, Pérez, Simonson, Starlin, Stern, Thomas, Wolfman—and many more. So maybe one has to go back to the Silver Age— or the Marvel Age—because without Stan and Jack, the industry as we know it would never have existed.

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2003: BACK ISSUE of directors, and was a member of the Rotary Club… all while editing Back Issue. Four-plus years of that level of activity and stress led to heart palpitations, followed by the realization that I needed to cut back. I briefly decided at that time to relinquish my editorial duties of BI (as part of my lifelong on-again/off-again relationship with comics) but wisely opted to drop the nonprofit job and stick with BI. Mine has been a career of ups and downs… but, hey, that’s life. Thanks to the opportunity I’ve received from publisher John Morrow, from the superb work presented by my Back Issue creative partners, to the many talented writers who continue to make this magazine a fascinating read, to the creators in the comics community who volunteer their time to dust off old memories for interviews, to the retailers who order our magazine for their stores, to—most importantly—those of you who read the magazine, either loyally each issue or when prompted by a theme, I am the luckiest guy in the world. I have the great priv-

ilege of producing this time capsule that goes behind the scenes of the comic books and comic culture that shaped our childhoods. And I get to do so from the comfort of my home office, fulfilling the life of the creative artist that I was always intended to be.

Back Issue’s sales have remained consistent for years now, which shows me that many of you share my enthusiasm for the material we explore and the way we do so. You have stuck with us and watched us grow from a black-&-white fanzine to a slickly produced full-color periodical. Wow, what a ride it’s been so far! I plan on producing Back Issue for as long as there are readers supportive of it. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of The World of TwoMorrows, and for orbiting around my particular corner of that world.

— Michael Eury

Inset above: This fake cover designed by Rich Fowlks appeared on the editorial page of Back Issue #86, the Marvel Bronze Age reprints issue.

RICH FOWLKS: THANK GOODNESS FOR MY BIG SCANNER It was 1998 and I was working a day job as assistant manager at Pizza Hut, spending my nights feverishly inking samples for Marvel, DC Comics, Dark Horse, anyone who would not shred them on sight. My lovely landlady introduced me to her husband, who then worked at Dark Horse and was writing the book Dick Giordano: Changing Comics, One Day at a Time. His name was Michael Eury. As great fortune would have it, he needed to scan a handful of images, and I had a functional oversized scanner (a rare bit of technology for the era). As our friendship grew, I scanned images for his works and got myself on TwoMorrows comp list. Free books? Every fanboy’s dream!

I got to see Back Issue at its earliest stages as the original art, photocopies, and manuscripts began to adorn Michael’s home office and he set to editing what would become the seminal magazine. I was bursting to help out in any manner possible, and deadline pressures led to me designing a few articles here and there for the publication. The production schedule ultimately led to me taking over the title fully as designer, and I have had the honor of designing over one hundred issues of

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Back Issue with Michael Eury.

I learned quickly to never miss a deadline, pace my workload and turn in the highest quality, tightest layouts I could. Michael is a meticulous editor who is magnificent at recommending layout changes that strengthen the design, increase readability, and make the material better. Every single time I am tempted to grumble about a revision that might take awhile, I always look and see that yes, he’s completely right; this would be a much better arrangement. And I have learned so much from Michael Eury, who I am proud to call my mentor.

Magazine design led to opportunities designing TwoMorrows books, and I have fond memories working on The Justice League Companion; Secrets in the Shadows: Gene Colan; The Krypton Companion; Blue Beetle Companion; Comics Introspective: Peter Bagge; Marvel Comics in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; and Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978.

I had the fortune of designing nine issues of Write Now! for Danny Fingeroth. That magazine was a completely different challenge of presenting material by authors aimed at writers, whereas

I am such a Richard J. Fowlks visual perLayout & Designer son. I spent Born: 1973 a lot of time researching Residence: and finding Vancouver, Wash. imagery Vocation: Graphic (thank you, designer, photo scanner) to retoucher complement Favorite Creators: the articles.

Alex Toth, John Byrne, I think that and Darwyn Cooke I was able Seminal Comic Book: to make Batman Animated the material

by Chip Kidd visually compelling while never overshadowing the text.

Far and away, I have produced the most TwoMorrows material for Back Issue. It is what brought me into the fold, and I will be eternally grateful to Michael Eury and John Morrow.

I started as an eager fanboy (with a scanner) who was just fortunate to be there and work on material I loved. I am honored to be a part of a stable of creators, working with authors and editors on publications that readers connect to, and to work on material that energizes and engages me on a daily basis.

The World of TwoMorrows

2003: MODERN MASTERS

A Masterful Time with Modern Masters Starting out With Comics & Sci-Fi

Jon B. Cooke: Where are you from, Eric?

Eric Nolen-Weathington: I grew up in a small town called Winterville, population about 1200.

JBC: Did you have creative people in your family?

Eric: Sort of. My family is of mostly Irish/English descent, and on my mother’s side, they were tall-tale tellers; great storytellers. My mom played guitar and piano. Some of my immediate family probably had some talent, some writing ability, but never did anything creative professionally. There were a lot of teachers in my family. My mother was a teacher and became a principal in an elementary school.

Two of my aunts were teachers, my grandmother was a teacher, and a bunch of my cousins became teachers. I grew up in more of an educational environment than a creative one.

JBC: What did your dad do?

Eric: He also started out as a teacher. He taught and coached at the middle-school level. He gave that up pretty fast and joined the family business, which was the only grocery store in our small town.

My great-grandfather had started it back in the early 1900s. My grandfather took it over, and then my dad, aunts, and uncle took over when he retired.

Most of them lived on the same street, so I saw lots Below: Eric says, “I’m pretty sure this was Christmas of 1979. I’m in my Superman pajamas, holding a knock-off Star Wars blaster (Space Wars, maybe?), and you can see an unopened Batman utility belt sitting in the background, which I would wear with my Batman Halloween costume from that point on (and not just at Halloween).”

Eric Nolen-Weathington: Modern Masters

of family every day.

Eric NolenJBC: What was the name of the store?

Weathington Eric: It was Weathington’s Clover Farm. Clover Series Editor, Farm was a small chain of independent grocers, on Modern Masters a similar level to Piggly Wiggly or IGA. I’ve come Born: 1970 across the Clover Farm brand here and there up and down the East Coast, usually in small towns.

Residence: JBC: Was the town you lived in a backwater?

Mebane, North Carolina Eric: No, it was about ten miles from Greenville, which was the county seat, and had East Carolina Vocation: TwoMorrows University, so it was a college town. It wasn’t comoffice manager pletely podunk.

Favorite Creator: JBC: Did you have brothers and sisters?

Alex Toth Eric: I have a younger brother. I was the oldest Seminal Comic Book: child in my family and the oldest grandchild on my DC Special #29 mother’s side. That was a weird place, because on (The Untold Origin of my father’s side, I mostly had cousins much older the Justice Society) than me. My father was a surprise baby and far Having proven to be younger than his brothers and sisters. There was a diligent worker who a big gap; my older cousins had all gone off to keeps TwoMorrows’ office college before I was old enough to interact with running smoothly, Eric them on a regular basis. There were two cousins in gets the opportunity to town who were a couple of years younger than me spearhead a new line of books on current artists— who I hung out with. On my mother’s side, I also and he comes through had a gap. My cousins were either much older or with flying colors. much younger. I didn’t really have anyone my age to play with.

JBC: What kind of kid were you? Bookish?

Eric: I started reading when I was four. Being in that gap, I spent a lot of time by myself. The first thing I remember reading, or told I was reading, was Highlights magazine. Then, in kindergarten, I remember getting up in class to read Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In the first grade, I read all The Hardy Boys books.

JBC: You read those in the first grade?

Eric: Yeah. The library had about 20 of those Hardy Boys books, so I read all that they had. I started going to the third-grade reading class when I was in the first grade, once a week. I read comics as a kid too, of course. The first I remember was a Gold Key Tweety and Sylvester comic. And then I had a few DC comics that came trickling in over the years— Justice League and World’s Finest 100-pagers, stuff Modern Masters Volume 1: 4/23/2003 like that. It’s hard to remember which issues I had

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2003: MODERN MASTERS war, humor, a lot of variety of styles… I read it all.

JBC: Were you drawn to the form or to the content? Was it “anything that’s comics” or were you gravitating toward super-heroes?

Eric: If the story was cool and the art looked cool, I didn’t really care what it was. There were some I read more than others, but I read them all over and over. I realized the newer Archies were not as good as the older Archies. Back in those times, they were reprinting a lot of older stuff, so I was seeing a lot of the reprints.

I remember reading the Super Friends Limited Collectors’ Edition with the Alex Toth feature at the back showing how cartoons were made. That grabbed my attention, too. It was kind of funny being so young and knowing who Alex Toth was, I guess.

JBC: Did you get an allowance?

Eric: Yes, and I had to work for it. Once a week, I had to vacuum the house and, every other week, dust the house. I started because the covers quickly became torn up because I read them mowing the grass when I was in the fourth grade. Then my dad over and over. I had two or three different 100-page books, so it bought another house that he was renting out and I mowed that must have been around 1975. 1976 was when I started reading lawn, too. By the time I was in the seventh grade, I was cutting comics more regularly. other people’s yards too, and I had six or seven yards at that JBC: How did you initially encounter them? Were they just around? point. It got up to 15 yards by the time I was in high school.

Eric: My dad brought home the Tweety. I don’t know where he JBC: Did you buy comics with it? got it and I didn’t ask! [laughter] Usually I’d get comics when my Eric: That’s the funny thing: I didn’t really buy comics myself mom would go to the Eckerd’s drugstore and I’d get a comic when I was little. I would occasionally, but more often I’d get my off the spinner rack. There was a comic shop in Greenville, in a parents or grandma to buy me comics because they were cheap. run-down part of town, literally next to the railroad tracks. Three I used my money for Star Wars figures! [laughter] Star Wars came quarters of the store was used books and one quarter dedicated out the week of my seventh birthday. Going to see Star Wars to new and used comics. I think they opened up in 1978 or ’79. with two of my cousins was literally my birthday party. [laughter] My pediatrician was three or four blocks from there and, if we So that really struck me and stayed with me for a long time. I had to pick up medicine, the pharmacy was right next door to stopped buying the figures around 1984 and switched to buying that bookstore and we’d sometimes go in there afterwards. That fantasy and science-fiction novels. Like I said, I didn’t buy that was the first time I saw lots and lots of comics in one place. many comics. After I inherited that big stack, I had the equivalent Also, kindergarten classes lasted half-day and, since my mom of a long box of comics by the time I was seven! I didn’t feel the worked at the school and dad was at his job, I would go to this need to buy comics because I had so many to read. I’d still get lady’s house, Miss Barbara. She had two sons: One was in the a dozen or more a year, especially during the summer because eighth or ninth grade and the other was about to graduate high we’d be at the beach or something with my grandmother. We’d school. They had two big stacks of comics, almost as tall as me go to the grocery store and I’d help her get what we needed, (which, at that time, wasn’t all that tall… even now). They had and she’d let me and my brother each pick one off the spinner a bunch of the Treasury Editions from DC, so I was seeing a lot rack. Between the two of us, we were bringing in a decent numof reprint stuff. I inherited about half of their comics from them ber of comics per year, so I was still getting my fix, but spending a year later after I stopped going to their house. The cool thing my own money on things that were more expensive. In 1983 my about it was, there wasn’t a lot of super-hero stuff. It was a big family’s store got a spinner rack, and I bought a bunch of comics mix of stuff: There were war comics—mostly DC titles—and a during that year. But I think my cousins and I were the only ones lot of Harvey comics, especially Richie Rich and Casper, some who bought them, so after the contract expired they got rid of anthology books, and a lot of Archie comics, so I had a big mix… the comics.

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JBC: Did you have favorite science-fiction authors?

Eric: Yes. Star Wars got me into science-fiction, but I was always a big fan of mythology too, from when I was in elementary school. I read a lot of the Norse mythology before I read Thor, so I was familiar with the names when I was reading Thor comics. Blade Runner came out when I was in fifth grade and I got a hold of the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It was probably a little bit too old for me at the time, but I read it and loved it. Philip K. Dick was an early author for me. I got into Robert Heinlein probably around the seventh grade.

I read goofy stuff too, like Piers Anthony, who I was into for a few years… Robert Asprin, Douglas Adams. I never got into a lot of the classic material, such as Frank Herbert. I read all of Moorcock’s Elric books while I was in high school, but I got super-depressed reading them all back to back, so I went through a period where I was reading lighter, humorous stuff. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the fifth grade. It was still a new thing at that point, relatively speaking.

JBC: You were a nerd?

Eric: I didn’t think of it that way back then. We didn’t have any super-nerdy people in our school back then. I was into sports, too, so it wasn’t like I was just doing nerdy stuff. I was also playing baseball and basketball, though not so much with the school. I had interests outside the geek stuff. I moved through different social groups.

JBC: How was high school?

Eric: It was fine. In the morning, I’d hang out with one group of friends who weren’t in a lot of my classes. Throughout the day, I’d hang out with different friends, and after school, I’d hang out with another group of friends. I wasn’t very close to a lot of people, but I had a lot of different types of friends. Most of my friends lived in Greenville, so it was hard to be social outside of school. Once I could drive, it was a little better, but I was never one for parties and I’ve never been good at small talk, so I didn’t do a lot of the party scene with my friends.

JBC: Were you creative in school?

Eric Nolen-Weathington: Modern Masters

Eric: I was. I started playing guitar when I was 15, when I got a guitar for my birthday. I played bass in the school jazz band my senior year. I drew some and was decent at it, and I think I could have been a decent artist, but never had the temperament to sit at a drawing table for the long periods of time it requires to become truly proficient at it.

Back in fifth grade, one of my best friends and I decided we were going to do a comic book adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back. I had one of the big memento books that came out along with the movie, so I had photo reference. It took me two or three weeks to draw the first couple of pages, and after that it was like, “Okay, I’m done.” [laughter] It looked all right, though kind of wonky because I wasn’t using any tools to get clean lines on the tech stuff. And I didn’t have the patience or the temperament to keep redoing it until it was right.

Music was a little more immediate, so I gravitated toward that. You asked about how I spent my money: the music gear wasn’t cheap. A new distortion pedal, a new set of strings—that’s where all my money went from cutting grass. I wasn’t buying many comics at that point.

We finally got a mall in-between Greenville and Winterville that opened up when I was in ninth or

Above: Eric and wife Donna (and their dog Molly) around the time they got married, back in 1995.

Previous page: Along about 2012, TwoMorrows opted for a double-size booth at Comic-Con, necessitating bringing Eric out West to help man that monster square footage. The experiment failed to bring in the double sales needed for the extra expense, so these days John mans the West Coast booth, while Eric handles East Coast events such as the New York Comic-Con and HeroesCon. Below: During interviews, Eric told Lee Weeks his depiction of the Hulk was probably his all-time favorite. Lee remembered and drew this on the inside front cover of Eric’s personal copy of Modern Masters Vol. 17.

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2003: MODERN MASTERS the best grade in the class. So I knew that after that, I had some ability, but I also knew that it had to be pulled out of me. I usually have to have a bit of that sense of desperation to write. That’s stuck with me even now. It’s hard sometimes to make myself sit down and write.

Outside of music, I guess the most creative thing I did back then was Dungeons & Dragons; coming up with plots for the games. There was no pressure there. No one was going to see what I wrote except my cousins and my brother.

Future Imperfect

tenth grade. It had a Waldenbooks that had a comics spinner rack. I saw Classic X-Men #1 there, and I liked the back-ups in there, drawn by John Bolton, and I really liked the Art Adams covers. That was the one comic I read regularly my last couple of years in high school. I didn’t really get back into comics fully until I got to college.

JBC: Did you get into creative writing?

Eric: Some. It was one of those things where, again, I didn’t have the patience for it. I drove my English teacher, Ms. Rouse—my favorite teacher ever—crazy because I was turning in papers at literally the last minute. “Yeah, I’ll get this to you during my study period.” For our final paper our senior year, she wanted a big essay on “What English Means to Us” and how the classes we had taken over the years had affected us. I started writing that thing three or four different times and would trash it because it was just garbage. It always read like I was trying to write what I thought she wanted—it didn’t feel honest at all. We had a month to write the paper, but now it was the last weekend before it was due, and I was like, “Ugh, I got nothing.”

For my midterm paper, I’d wanted to write something on Robert Heinlein’s work, but Ms. Rouse said, “I think you would like Kurt Vonnegut. Try that instead.” I read a couple of his books and I got hooked. My best friend, Mark Whitehead, had a word processor, so I went to his house, and after staring at a blank sheet of paper for half an hour, I decided to take a cue from Vonnegut and write stream-of-consciousness. I wrote that five-page paper in a half-hour, no re-writes. Ms. Rouse loved it, and I got

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JBC: What were your plans when you went to high school? Were you always college-bound?

Eric: Yes. When I was younger, in third grade, people would ask what I wanted to be when I grew up. Back then, I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau. I had read a couple of his books—one on dolphins I still have—and had seen the PBS specials. I had also gotten into Adventure Comics, back when it featured Aquaman with Jim Aparo doing the artwork. He was always my favorite character, probably because of that, I guess… I had this whole fascination with the ocean. I spent a lot of time at the beach growing up, especially in high school. That’s what I wanted to do for a long time, and then people said, “Oh, you’re good at math. You should go into engineering; you’ll make a lot of money.” So I went to North Carolina State University with its great engineering school, enrolled in computer engineering, and then, after a year-and-a-half, I changed my major to communications. [laughter] JBC: That’s a switch. How far away from home were you?

Eric: About two hours. Close enough that I could go home on the weekend to do laundry. I’d usually just go home for the holidays and school breaks though. Occasionally, if I didn’t have enough quarters to do laundry, I’d go home for the weekend. I didn’t really spend a lot of time traveling back and forth, but I didn’t miss any of the big family events. I could go home for a birthday party.

JBC: Did you enjoy the college experience?

Eric: Yes, I did. I didn’t have the Animal House type of experience; I didn’t do the frat thing. My friends weren’t even in my classes. I started working at a comic shop that was across the street from campus in my junior year. I had previously worked at an arcade, two doors down, filling in for one of my roommates over the summer. While I was there, I became friends with one of the guys at the comic shop. In my junior year, I was able to get a

The World of TwoMorrows

job in the comic shop because one of the guys was graduating, so I took his spot. I worked there the last two years at State and stayed there a couple of years after that until I found a “real” job. [laughter] JBC: So you changed your major from computer engineering to communications?

Eric: I just didn’t have a passion for computer engineering, so I tried to think about what I wanted to do. I remembered Ms. Rouse telling me once that I had a great voice. We’d recite plays out loud and she said, “You should do something with that.”

I was interested in radio and television production, so I switched my focus to that.

JBC: You have a good radio voice?

Eric: When my sinuses aren’t acting up! [laughter] That’s my problem with that. I can do a lot of voices and imitations and things like that, and have decent control of my voice, but I also have a lot of allergies that keep my sinuses clogged, so that’s a no-go. I never could have been an on-air radio personality. I was more interested in video editing and that kind of thing anyway, much more than being a personality.

JBC: Did you work on productions?

Eric: I did a little bit. I had an internship at the community television station there in Raleigh. They would have volunteers run the lights, run the cameras for people’s shows. You know what community television is like, right?

JBC: Cable access?

Eric: Right, cable access. You’d have local, everyday people who wanted to do a show, but it takes several people to pull something like that off. So I might be running the camera for somebody one week, then running the sound board for someone else the next week. My one regular job was covering the City Council meetings and the County Commissioners meetings. For those, I’d either be running the three remote-controlled cameras, or the Chroma key, which puts the titles on the screen.

JBC: What were you hoping to do out of college?

Eric: I wasn’t sure. Having switched majors fairly late in the game, I never figured that out. I just took different types of classes to see what I enjoyed and

Eric Nolen-Weathington: Modern Masters

tried to go from there.

At one point, I considered applying with ESPN (though I never did). I applied for a job with the local NPR affiliate, but didn’t get that and ended up with a job at American Audio-Video, which mostly handled business conventions and equipment rentals.

A lot of the job was just setting up overhead projectors. This was back when the video projectors weighed over a hundred pounds and had huge lenses—it wasn’t quite plug-andplay like it is now.

One night I got to run sound for a fundraiser dinner where Al Gore was the keynote speaker. I didn’t speak to Gore, but I did talk to his secret service protection for a while, which was cool. But, for the most part, the job was pretty lame. I wasn’t doing anything I particularly enjoyed.

That’s how I ended up at TwoMorrows: the AV company was based up in Falls Church, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and, at that point, I was the night manager at their largest location in North Carolina, so I had to deal with clients face-to-face.

We had a limited amount of equipment on-site, so for larger events we’d have to have stuff sent down temporarily from Falls Church. We started getting equipment that was half-broken, and then I’d have to apologize to the client when their event didn’t go smoothly. It got to the point where I was cussing on the way into work, dreading what would go wrong that night. Pro tip: if you are cussing on your way to work, you need to find a new job.

This was 2000, and I was shopping at the local comic book shop I’d worked at in college, which

Previous page: Nick Cardy with Eric’s wife, Donna. Nick adored her—at one of the HeroesCons, he gave her a 10-minute lesson on how to draw eyes. He would always ask about her whenever they talked on the phone. The friendship led to collaborating on Nick Cardy: Behind The Art for TwoMorrows.

Above: The original color scheme for the Chris Sprouse Modern Masters volume, which Chris felt was too busy.

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2003: MODERN MASTERS was about four blocks from where John and Pam Morrow lived at the time, near NCSU campus. John had put up a notice in the shop, looking for someone part-time. Since I worked at night— my shift didn’t start until 3:30—I thought, “I could do that.” I could go in during the morning, work a few hours, go home, change, and then go work my full-time job. I call it my mid-life crisis, because it was literally a week after my 30th birthday when I got the job.

I had met John and been to his house once before. I had ordered from my comic book shop a copy of Comic Book Artist #4, but they didn’t put one aside for me, so I called John and asked if he had copies, because I noticed he was nearby.

“Can I drive by and pick one up?” He said, “Okay, fine.” I went over to his house and paid cash for it, and that’s how I first met him. That was probably about a year before I started working for TwoMorrows.

JBC: Thank you for the purchase, Eric! [laughter] I’m not seeing a precise point when you became a fan of comics. Did you call yourself a “fan” by then or were you a “reader”?

Eric: I always enjoyed comics.

JBC: That’s a “reader.”

Eric: I’ve never been what I call a typical fan. After working in a comic book shop, I describe typical fans as people who buy every single issue of X-Men, no matter who’s drawing it. They are the ones who come in and say, “X-Men sucks. I wish they’d find a new artist.” And when asked, “Why are you buying it then?” they respond, “Because it’s X-Men; I buy them all.” That’s what I call a typical fan. I followed artists mostly and, if I didn’t like a new artist, I’d drop the book in a heartbeat. I think a lot of that goes back to reading such a large variety of comics as a kid, not just X-Men comics. I had tons of books from other genres, and I was always more attracted to the artist than the writer.

When I got to college, that comic shop was right across the street, and I thought, “I need to go in there some time.” I’d gone there once during my orientation and bought the Alan Davis Captain Britain trade paperback, the work he did after Alan Moore left, some with Jamie Delano. That’s when I became a huge Alan Davis fan. I was going to go back in but never really did until I saw a poster for the new Doctor Fate series by J. M. DeMatteis and Shawn McManus. I thought it had the look of that DC Special [#29] I loved as a kid, so I went in, bought it, and I loved that issue. I went back the following month for the next issue, and I saw The Tick while I was in there, the second issue had just come out and I saw a reprint of the first issue on the rack

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with it. So I started buying Doctor Fate and The Tick regularly, and by the end of my freshman year, I was regularly buying 10 or 12 books, and I was pretty much back into comics.

JBC: How far afield did you go of super-heroes? Did you buy Love and Rockets?

Eric: I never got into Love and Rockets. I was buying some indie stuff… The Tick, which is more super-hero satire. I got into the “Bwah-Ha-Ha” stuff… you know, the Keith Giffen/J. M. DeMatteis Justice League run with Batman punching Guy Gardner in the face, which was pretty atypical of the super-hero comics I read as a kid. I was buying super-hero comics, but that Doctor Fate series… I’m not sure I’d technically call that “super-hero” per se, and The Tick wasn’t super-hero, it was satire. “BwahHa-Ha” was kind of super-hero, but it was a humor book. I was buying Detective Comics when Norm Breyfogle was drawing it because his artwork reminded me of Jim Aparo’s, which I liked a lot. That was probably the most mainstream super-hero book I was buying.

The one thing about that store is they had a better variety of independent books than most. I bought Kyle Baker’s The Cowboy Wally Show, based on a recommendation from one of the clerks in the store, and I loved that. You know, once again: a humor book, not super-hero. Fringe [Caliber Press] was another cool little series from the early ’90s. I never got into Love and Rockets. I’d stare at the covers, but never picked it up for whatever reason. I liked Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, V for Vendetta, Moonshadow… things like that. I saw that J. M. DeMatteis connection for Moonshadow. You know, it was a mix of things… I picked up Cerebus…

JBC: Were you drawn at all to the comics press? Did you read The Comics Journal or Comics Interview?

Eric: I liked Amazing Heroes. I had a couple issues of The Comics Journal, but most of the stuff TCJ was covering didn’t really appeal to me. I’ve never been into the navel-gazing kind of comics. Going back to that Super Friends Collectors’ Edition: the “behind-the-scenes” stuff appealed to me, particularly after reading that Alex Toth piece on how cartoons were made. There were some issues of Comics Interview and Comics Scene coming out at that time that I bought. Amazing Heroes I liked most because I enjoyed the interview style more than the articles, for the most part. The interview format always seemed a little more personal to me, so I gravitated to that. Of course, TCJ is known for their interviews, but for the most part the people they interviewed at that point were not pertinent to me—they’d gotten

The World of TwoMorrows

away from anything resembling mainstream comics.

I wasn’t quite ready for that. I got into some of those guys later.

JBC: Did you contribute to any fanzines?

Eric: No, I wasn’t thinking that way. At that point, I had met very few creators. There were some local artists working in the area. We had Richard Case come in for a signing when the first Doom Patrol collection came out [1992]; he was the artist. I met him and got a page of Doom Patrol original art from him. When the first Sin City book came out [1992], Frank Miller came to the store and did a signing. I went to the airport with the owner of the shop to pick him up and we all went to lunch.

Then he did a signing at the store that day. So, I met Frank Miller—I had comic book experiences, but I was not a small-talk kind of guy; I didn’t like doing all the talking, so that kind of thing wasn’t something I thought about until I started working for TwoMorrows.

JBC: Was it exciting to meet Frank Miller?

Eric: Yeah, it was cool. He was on a whirlwind tour.

The thing I remember was that he was pretty nice, but I was low man on the totem pole. We had two shops, one in Chapel Hill and one in Raleigh, where I worked, and the owner and my manager were there. I guess I was somewhere between “just” an employee and “assistant manager.” I did assistant manager type of things, like employee schedules and ordering. I was making $10 an hour, so I deferred to the guys who paid the bills to do the talking. I didn’t talk to Frank; I was more just a fly on the wall. It was cool though. I’d never done a lot of conventions; I hadn’t gone to any up to that point. HeroesCon was driveable, but still fairly far away. The idea of having to try to get off work, drive down there, and spend the money—that was beyond my budget at that point.

JBC: Did the comic book shop work appeal to you?

Was anything about the comics culture drawing you in? What was the name of the shop?

Eric: Foundation’s Edge. It’s still there, named after the Isaac Asimov novel. My manager bought the store while I was there, and there was a point when he was looking for a partner, and he found someone. If I’d had the money, I would have tried to go in with him to buy the shop. I was into it enough to contemplate that because I hadn’t found anything else demanding my attention. So, yes, I was into it, but I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do long-term.

JBC: When did you meet your wife?

Eric: At the comic book shop. Donna’s boyfriend was a customer, so she started coming in with him

Eric Nolen-Weathington: Modern Masters

and then she started buying her own comics. After she broke up with him, we started hanging out, and that was that.

JBC: When did you get married?

Eric: Nineteen ninety-five. I quit the comic shop about three months after we got married and took a “real” job. [laughter] Marriage spurred me on to find something that paid more.

JBC: How many kids do you have? How old?

Eric: We’ve got two. My son just graduated college, he’s 23 and my daughter is 13.

Above: Alan gifted Eric with the cover he drew for the book, along with this cover layout.

Below: Cliff Chiang drew this on the inside front cover of Eric’s personal copy of Modern Masters Vol. 29, along with a very kind note, an homage to one of his childhood favorite comics.

Finding TwoMorrows

JBC: You were obviously familiar with TwoMorrows?

Eric: Yes. I joined the company in 2000. I never bought The Jack Kirby Collector, but Comic Book Artist started coming out and that was something I was interested in. I started buying that. Then Alter Ego split off and I started buying that, too. I was interested in the Golden Age and Silver Age guys and to some extent, Bronze Age guys.

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2003: MODERN MASTERS One book I got when I was a kid, sick in bed for two weeks with bronchitis, was basically a collection of Golden Age covers with artist credits and publication dates, along with a little essay at the beginning, talking about Will Eisner and some other guys.

Man, I loved that book. I still have it. I had a real desire to learn more about that Golden Age and early Silver Age stuff, particularly the Golden Age stuff. It was probably 1981 or ’82 when I got that. I was 10 or 12, somewhere in there.

JBC: Did you have any interest in history, not just comic book history, growing up?

Eric: Yeah, I read a lot of books on history in elementary school, books about the Pony Express, the Old West, sports figures like Johnny Unitas, Franco Harris… I read a lot of biographies from the school library. Miss Batson, my third-grade teacher (she was great), had a contest: whoever read the most books over a particular time span would win a prize. I won four out of the six because I was reading those biographies, just eating them up.

JBC: You had a natural interest in people’s lives, reading biographies?

Eric: I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg. I don’t know if I read those books because I had the interest or had the interest because of those books.

I don’t know where it came from. It could be that’s just what was available to read and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed reading about what made people tick.

JBC: Did you write letters to any comics?

Eric: No. JBC: When was the first time you saw your name in print?

Eric: As a proofreader for TwoMorrows, I guess. I remember in the second week after I started working there, the first story and artwork for Streetwise came in, so I scanned a lot of that artwork. I dropped in gray tints, going

by Paul Chadwick’s guides for his story. That was the first time I saw my name in print. “I did gray tones for Paul Chadwick!” [laughter] I was a fan of Concrete, so getting to work ”with” Paul Chadwick, was pretty cool.

JBC: So you answered that ad. Did you call up John or walk over there?

Eric: I called John and set up an appointment for the interview.

He asked me if I’d be comfortable talking with artists on the phone and I told him about having lunch with Frank Miller and I think that impressed him—I didn’t mention the fact that I didn’t really talk to Frank. [laughter] JBC: Did you get a good vibe at TwoMorrows?

Eric: Part of it was looking for something more fulfilling than corporate audio/video work. I didn’t really know how to transition to the type of AV work I wanted to do. This just came along at a time when I was starting to look around for something else. “I’ll

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give it a shot. I like comics. I like Comic Book Artist, so I know they do quality stuff. Let’s see what happens.” I started out as part-time that summer. When I got there, I started scanning work

by Barry Windsor-Smith, John Severin, Sergio Aragonés, and others. That was pretty cool and really sucked me in.

I was proofreading everything we were putting out at that point, which wasn’t nearly as much as we were putting out a couple of years later, but it was still a workload. The proofreading was okay.

I’d be reading it anyway, so it was cool to get paid to read it.

With Streetwise, with half the creators there, I’d be calling them up to get information for the bios for the back of the book.

I wrote about half of those bios. That was more fulfilling than anything else I’d been doing up to that point. By the end of that summer, John said, “Things are looking good and I think we can expand some more and give you a full-time job if you want it.” I said, “Yeah, I would love that, but I’ll be making a lot less money, so I don’t know if I can do that.”

So, I started looking around for parttime work I could do at night. It was just serendipity, total luck of the draw, that the local Raleigh newspaper, The News & Observer, one of the two big newspapers in the state of North Carolina, was looking for part-time designers for the sports section. I thought that, while I didn’t have a lot of experience in [page layout program] QuarkXPress, I had used Quark a little bit, so maybe I had a chance. It turned out, I did have a chance because not a lot of people were looking for part-time work in that field. I convinced them that I was a quick learner of software and passed a little test. I talked it over with my wife and, between the two jobs, I was making a little more than I had with the AV company, so we thought, “Okay, I can do this.” I was working 60 hours a week, but felt it was worth it just to be satisfied with my life, so that’s where we went. I started working for John during the week and then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, from 5:30 to 1 a.m., depending on deadlines, I was working at the paper. So yes, I was working 60 hours a week, but felt a lot better about my life.

JBC: When did you first work on a Macintosh computer?

Eric: My first day working for TwoMorrows. At NC State, while in computer engineering, I was working on PCs, programming in C+, which was just coming into vogue. I was in the first class at NCSU that did not have to learn Fortran. One of my younger cousins had an Apple IIC when I was in high school, so I had some familiarity. And my high school had one Apple we got in my senior year, but we didn’t get to use it much—we mostly used Tandy PCs. After college I had kind of pieced together my own PC. One of my friends was much better at computers than I was, and he helped me with it. So I had a pretty decent knowl-

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edge of computers, just no real experience on a Mac. And, of course, no design experience.

JBC: Did you pick up design aesthetics? Did it come natural to you; was it by being a proofreader and being around the material?

Eric: Yeah, I think I’ve always had a pretty good eye for things like that. I was drawn to the art side in comics, so I had paid attention to how things were laid out. Reading so many books, I think, even subconsciously, I had picked up on the basics of design and what felt right when I was reading different types of books. I could see different formats; maybe not always constantly thinking about what works, but getting a feel for it. John gave me a few tips to help me along. I didn’t do a lot of design stuff at TwoMorrows the first year or two; I was mostly proofreading and scanning and cleaning up scans. But I was also at the newspaper and learning there. When you have to learn on deadline, you learn pretty quickly! You don’t have a choice. So I was learning from different sides, different perspectives, as well as just going by what I naturally observed. It came pretty quick, even though I didn’t have any formal training, per se. I wouldn’t say I had a natural ability, but I had my own eye for that kind of thing, I guess, and opinions about what would work. If you’re paying attention to what you’re doing, you can see what works and what doesn’t work. That’s what I did, especially after the first Modern Masters book. I said, “Okay, this didn’t work here, so let’s change my approach.”

Making Modern Masters

JBC: Was Modern Masters your first layout job?

Eric: I think so. I would later help John with layouts on The Kirby Collector here and there when there was a tight crunch, but I don’t think I had done any of that yet. I might have done the TwoMorrows News page already, but I think that was a little later too. Modern Masters was definitely the first time I had done layout work on that scale.

JBC: Can you tell us the genesis of Modern Masters?

Eric: I was looking for something more to do; more fulfilling work. In my down time when I wasn’t proofreading, filling orders, or answering emails from customers, I was scanning Kirby pencils. That was part of the reason John wanted me full-time because he wanted this art archived. These Kirby pencils had been photocopied onto thermal paper that was deteriorating rapidly, so he wanted to get it all scanned as quickly as we could. I loved that.

I scanned—there might be an issue missing or a splash page—probably 75% of the pages Kirby drew in the ’70s. It was a cool time. Seeing all of

Eric Nolen-Weathington: Modern Masters

that art at that size…

There are some people through the years I just wish I could read everything they did in pencil—Walter Simonson being another one. There is so much density and texture in his pencils. It’s amazing.

So that was great, but having had a taste of Streetwise and doing more than just scanning and clean-up, I wanted to do something else; something I could have more say in.

Charles Brownstein— now with the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund—had pitched John on doing a magazine that would have been somewhere between Wizard and The Comics Journal. The idea was he and I would team-up to do it, but it fell through. Having come so close kind of spurred me to come up with something else. We had the Golden Age, Silver Age, and Bronze Ages covered, but there were tons of artists we weren’t covering in any way. Also, I’d get frustrated reading interviews with older artists who couldn’t remember a lot of the details of their careers. Even the Silver Age and Bronze Age guys didn’t always remember the details I really wanted to know, so I decided to do long-form interviews with these guys before they forget everything. [laughter] I pitched it to John as a book series—I wanted the series numbered. I wanted volume numbers so readers would think, “I like this book, so I’ll probably like the rest of the series.” I wanted to include artists I thought

Above: If you were at the 2017 New York Comic-Con, or any number of other events over the years, it’s a safe bet you saw Eric, as he was probably manning the TwoMorrows booth. Photo by Mark Voger.

Previous page: Pencils and inks by Paul Chadwick, graytones by Eric, in a detail from 2001’s Streetwise.

Below: Eric’s daughter taking a break from the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con with the Morrow girls.

Left to right: Caper NolenWeathington, Hannah Rose Morrow, and Lily Morrow.

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2003: MODERN MASTERS interview because I had to really work to gain his trust.

In a sense Alan was a big influence on the format of the series.

There is a chapter in the book called “Under the Influence,” which was his idea. He said, “I want to talk about the guys I like.” I said, “How about a whole chapter? We could also show a bunch of their artwork.” We both liked that idea and it seemed to make him more comfortable and excited about doing the book. That became something of a mainstay for the series. I didn’t do it for everybody, but in most of the books, that chapter is in there because of Alan’s initial suggestion.

JBC: How did you pitch it to Alan?

Eric: I told him, “Don’t see this as a be-all, end-all book on your life. This is your life to date, not a memorial. I just want to get your memories on paper before they start to fade.” That was part of the thing, too. We wanted to price it to be accessible. I wanted people to be able to read them. I didn’t want it to be art collectors just picking up the ones about the guys they already liked. I wanted the readers to get to know the artists as people.

“I want them to get to know Alan as a person.” That’s how I pitched it to him. He went with it.

JBC: Was it to be a book or a magazine? Is it a hybrid?

Eric: We wanted to do a hybrid. We were hedging our bets.

That’s also why we were numbering them; we could say it was a magazine that came out sporadically. Also, that was a way we could bring down the price point. We settled on 128 pages and black-&-white, no color. We got to where we’d do a color section, but only as long as the artist had done the coloring.

That was the point: cheap and accessible. I wanted people to read them.

JBC: How were the orders for the first volume?

Eric: Pretty good. We weren’t really sure what to expect and I deserved more robust biographies, but who might not have as big of a following, either because they’re slower or didn’t have a don’t remember what they were at this point. John was happy, long run on a popular book. I thought having a series would help so I was happy. They were good enough where I knew I could go ahead with the second one, that was the important thing. [laughthat. And John agreed. ter] Once the second one came out with George Pérez, people The first volume featured Alan Davis. Back in 2001, George were going back and finding the first one, as well. So, it built up Khoury was working on his Miracleman Companion and wanted for the first few, where I was building a regular readership. to get Alan Davis for the book, but didn’t know how to contact JBC: Was it important for you to do Alan Davis first or was it him. Alan was going to be at HeroesCon that year, which is a happenstance? Was it an accident of the HeroesCon, or did it convention TwoMorrows always attends. Jim Amash snuck me hearken back to when you picked up the trade paperback back into the creator dinner hosted by Shelton Drum (and I probably in the day, or is it both? have to thank Shelton for not kicking me out of the restaurant!).

Eric: Both. A lot of it was he had never really done any kind of Towards the end of the evening, I was able to strike up an acin-depth interviews. I saw a void I thought people would respond quaintance with Alan.

So, when John started asking about people I wanted to cover to. Part of it was happenstance with being able to meet him at the right time, because he didn’t do a lot of U.S. shows. That’s in the series, I said, “How about Alan Davis? I already know him kind of the way it goes throughout the Modern Masters history. a little bit; I have his contact information; and he doesn’t really talk to the press that much. If I can get him, that would be pretty I always prefer to pitch books face-to-face. I don’t like to send an out-of-the blue email or make a phone call. I try to personally great.” He was drawing X-Men at that time. We had a big list of hand them a book to look over and show them, “This is the kind people, but I said, “Let me try him.” Luckily, Alan agreed to do of thing I want to do.” Most of the artists now are familiar with it, but he was really, really hesitant to open up at the start. He the series, but during those early days, it was more important for had been kind of misquoted on interviews with Wizard magame to talk to them face-to-face. That chance meeting with Alan zine, but he was familiar with our stuff because he loves comics history, and he had done the interview in Kimota! for George, so was a big impetus for getting him first.

JBC: For the line-up, did you have a wish list? he decided to give it a shot. I really learned a lot about how to

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The World of TwoMorrows

Eric: Yes, I had a list of about thirty to forty artists.

There were some guys I asked early on that I never was able to do, including Mike Mignola at the top of that list. It was a year or maybe two years in before I got to talk to him face-to-face. He would say yes, but something would always come up, and he’d be too busy. That was fine. I’d be upfront with them: “I know it’s going to take a lot of your time, and you’re not going to get a lot of money out of it. You’ll get some money, but probably not as much as your time is worth. But, please do this anyway. I’ll work around your schedule to make it as convenient for you as possible.” [laughter] I was always worried about that kind of thing; I didn’t want it to become a drag for anyone, you know? I wanted them to enjoy it as much as possible, and for it not to become a burden on them. When I was talking to artists about the project, I would always stress that. Some guys wanted to do the interviews in big marathon sessions, and some preferred to talk for an hour and then do another one in three or four weeks. Whatever worked for them, I tried to accommodate.

JBC: Who else was on that wish list that you never got?

Eric: P. Craig Russell was one of the first guys I talked to, but he’s a self-starter and does that kind of stuff himself. I thought he’d be a long shot anyway. Some guys like Dave Stevens I never had a chance to meet. He passed away before I had a chance to really talk to him. Mignola was really the big one that got away… and there were others, like Paul Smith, who wasn’t interested in doing it. Some guys want their work to speak for itself or they’re not comfortable doing interviews. Some guys may have an art book deal with another outfit. I never got miffed or anything; I completely understood.

Do what you gotta do. I didn’t get upset; just maybe a little disappointed because I wanted to know more about them.

JBC: You had a pretty strict format, and you kept to those aspects. When you got José Luis GarcíaLópez, did it pass through your mind that it would be a good idea to do a larger book, something outside the series? Or were you focused on Modern Masters as your baby?

Eric: José was very soft spoken and almost shy to a point. His was supposed to be the fourth book, but he got busy and Kevin Nowlan was free and was going to be the fifth book, so we switched them around. I had some parameters for who I asked.

For the “modern” part of Modern Masters, I define that as anyone who came into the business after Neal Adams. Because I didn’t necessarily see the

Eric Nolen-Weathington: Modern Masters

Modern Masters books as a be-all, end-all biography/art book kind of thing, but rather a “here’s this section of his life” kind of thing, I never really thought, “I can’t cover somebody in this format because they’re too big.” All the guys I was talking with were still working. This wasn’t going to be their “big, end-of-career, bow out.” I was working under the assumption that down the road, we could do a follow-up book. That was my hope at least. “If they stick around, I’ll come back to some of those guys 15–20 years down the road and tell the rest of their story.”

JBC: Was it a nice bump in your income?

Eric: It was nice, especially once I had three or four books under my belt. It could vary fairly wildly from month to month, but there was a certain floor. It wasn’t a huge amount, but when you’re getting an extra $300 a month with a young family, it makes a difference. The more books I had, the more steady it would become.

Some would fall off and others would pick up the slack because they were newer. I was working 60 hours—neither job paid a lot—plus having to do the Modern Masters

Previous page: After the book came out, Alan Davis said he wanted to draw something for Eric as a thank you for making the book a pleasurable experience.

This showed up in the mail a few weeks later!

Above: Eric and the kids, Caper and Iain, in 2010.

Below: Initially announced around 2005 in collaboration with a different co-author, Eric’s long gestating Jim Aparo book is still in the works.

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2003: MODERN MASTERS on top of that for like 10–12 hours a week, sometimes. There would be some weeks I wasn’t working on a Modern Masters, but I’d be doing stuff at home freelance, like proofreading. If you want to make a living doing what we do, you have to put in a lot of hours. So, having that commission check was nice.

JBC: What was the best-selling Modern Masters?

Eric: Bruce Timm. His appeal expanded beyond comics. There were people who were fans of the cartoons he was doing, and those people weren’t necessarily into comics. There was a popular message board about cartoons I was on from time to time. (I’m a big animation fan.) They did a review of the book and my Amazon sales jumped dramatically.

That was huge. I think we did five printings of that book.

JBC: Wow. Did you stop? Did it saturate?

Eric: That fifth printing had a slower sell-through, obviously. By that point, it was ten years out of date, but it still sold steadily. Doing a sixth printing would have been too much, though, so we didn’t do that.

JBC: People who aren’t into publishing might not realize it, but to reprint it again, the book itself has to pay for production costs. Even though there might be a desire for the book, it’s usually not profitable to reprint.

You were putting out a volume once every six months?

Eric: That was the plan. There were times we put out three a year because things shifted around and you might get lucky with schedules and things like that. There was one year where I did four.

JBC: How did the DVDs come into play?

Eric: There were these two brothers up in Toronto, Canada, who made instructional videos for corporations; that was their gig and they liked the Modern Masters books, because one of them was an artist. They approached John about the possibility of doing a documentary about an artist and John asked, “Do you think we can tie it in with one of the Modern Masters?”

JBC: Were the DVDs successful?

Eric: Not really. I look back on it and wish we could have had more time to work on it. That first one with George Pérez, I wanted to find someone who wasn’t working on something for DC or Marvel; someone with whom I could make an arrangement without having to pay a lot of licensing fees. Production costs were up front, and we had no idea how the DVD would ultimately

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do—or if we could even pull it together correctly. It was a first-time experience for TwoMorrows and for all of us.

George Peréz was working on a Witchblade project, and they had no problem with us including their imagery. I was going to MegaCon in Orlando the next month—George lives about 30 minutes north of there—and was going to be at the show as well. Ron Marz, who was writing the Witchblade story, was going to be there. Everything lined up nicely, so, “Okay, let’s do it.” We didn’t have a lot of time to prepare, so we were kind of figuring it out as we went along. The guys came down from Toronto the day before I got there and filmed him drawing, working on the cover. I was there the next day at George’s house and we shot a little tour of his studio, with me talking to him. It was really on the fly. [laughter] We talked to other creators at the show. Phil Jimenez was there; he’s a big Pérez fan, so that worked out really well. The timing was too perfect to pass up, but I wish we’d had a little more time to really plan out what we were doing. It turned out all right. I’m not embarrassed about it, but I’m not super proud of it either. It could have been much better.

It could have been a lot worse, so all things considered, it was fine.

JBC: Did comic fans want to see the documentaries? How did it sell?

Eric: It sold okay. We had a number of them signed by George, and they sold well up front. It didn’t really have a life after the initial solicitation, but it worked well enough that we tried it again with Michael Golden. We went to his place in Connecticut and hung out with him and Renee Witterstaetter for two days.

There were a lot of headaches with the second one, technical issues. Their hardware crashed and we barely got footage out of it. There were all kinds of problems we weren’t set up to handle, so we decided it wasn’t really worth it to keep it going.

Branching Out

JBC: What else have you done besides Modern Masters?

Eric: Books with Jim Amash, who became one of my best friends. We did books on Sal Buscema, Carmine Infantino, and Matt Baker, all of which were very satisfying. I also did a book with Nick Cardy, which I just loved because I became good friends with him during that process. If you’d have told me when I was a kid that the guy drawing all these DC covers I loved would someday become a friend years later, I would’ve told you that you were crazy! That’s one of my favorite things out of all of

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the TwoMorrows projects. I had become friendly with him leading up to that, but this got us closer and talking more regularly. I wouldn’t give that up for anything.

JBC: Yeah, Nick was a great guy. What was a typical day like at TwoMorrows?

Eric: In the early days, I’d get here around 8:30.

I’d take a half-hour for lunch and would be gone by 5:00, especially on the days I had to work at the newspaper that night. After a while, at the newspaper, I changed my schedule from Friday, Saturday, Sunday, to Thursday, Friday, Saturday, so I could have a day off. That made Friday mornings kind of difficult because I didn’t get home until one in the morning, but it gave me a day off. The thing about working at John’s: if there wasn’t a whole lot going on, I could clock-out and run errands. That is the cool thing about working for a small company like this. Everything falls on you when it’s busy, but when things are under control, you can flex your schedule a little bit, and do things you need to do without applying for time off. It worked out pretty well.

JBC: When did conventions come in?

Eric: Right away! I started working there in May and one month later, in June, was working the booth at HeroesCon, and I’ve worked Heroes every year since! I haven’t missed one since 2000. At that point, I didn’t do San Diego right away. I didn’t start to go there until 2003 or so. I was only doing that one show, HeroesCon, the first few years. The most conventions I ever worked in one year was six shows, including some of the LEGO shows, which we started doing after we launched BrickJournal.

That doesn’t sound like a lot. I’m sure a lot of comic pros go, “Six shows a year! I wish I could only do six shows a year!” [laughter] But, for me, having to do all that on top of my other jobs; it could be a drag sometimes, depending on the show. Some shows, it didn’t matter because I got to hang with people I knew and catch up with friends I’d made over the years through TwoMorrows, like Mike Manley. He’s a super guy. When we started working on Draw! magazine, we did the Wizard World Philly show. Even though the show sucked—Wizard shows were never good for us—I got to hang out with Mike and his Philly friends. I met Darwyn Cooke through Mike. I met a lot of guys through Mike being such a nice guy and bringing me along to his after-show dinners.

JBC: About four years ago, you and I went out to dinner at New York Comic-Con and I had a very good time. It was very enjoyable.

Eric: Yeah, getting away from the crowds…

Eric Nolen-Weathington: Modern Masters

JBC: And really getting to know one another.

Eric: Exactly. I’ve worked and become friends with a lot of great people over the years. George Khoury is one of the best friends a guy could ask for. He’s worked with me on a few Modern Masters books, and I worked with him on his Comic Book Fever book, which required a lot of time and effort, but was worth every minute. Then there’s Mike Manley, Jamar Nicholas, and Jerry Ordway, who I work with on Draw! I love hanging out with those guys when we happen to be at the same show. And of course, I’ve become friends with a lot of the artists I’ve done books with— Alan, José, Kevin Nowlan, Mark Schultz to name a few—and several I’ve just gotten to know by going to so many conventions over the years.

Being at the shows is almost always interesting, because you never know who’s going to show up at the booth. Marv Wolfman always comes to the booth if he’s at a show we’re at. Mark Waid always comes to the booth. I remember one year at San Diego, Mark Evanier walked up to the booth with Gary Owens! I was too young to have watched Laugh-In, but I knew Gary Owens from Space Ghost reruns. Talking to Gary Owens for twenty minutes was a thrill. Paul Levitz always comes up to the booth, Michael Uslan, Dan DiDio—people who I would never have had a chance to meet otherwise, much less become friendly with. I don’t mind having to work a show!

JBC: I remember 2005, at San Diego Comic-Con, Gene Simmons came up to the booth!

Eric: Yeah! He let my wife have her picture taken with him! [laughter] He was, “Eh, okay.” But he was cool about it. I was never a huge KISS fan, but…

JBC: But it’s Gene Simmons! [laughter]

Previous page: Screen captures from the first Modern Masters DVD, on George Pérez. Both it and the Michael Golden DVD were moderate successes for TwoMorrows.

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2003: MODERN MASTERS Left: Eric’s wife Donna with Gene Simmons, at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con. Simmons shared that he subscribed to Roy Thomas’ original 1960s fanzine version of Alter Ego.

place, it just happens. Do you remember the Recession?

Eric: Yeah, sales slowed quite a bit. We took a hit, mostly in the magazine subscriptions. A lot of people started dropping print subscriptions altogether or getting digital subscriptions to save money. That was a tough time and tough for me, too, because I was relying solely on TwoMorrows at that point and a lot of my projects were stalling because I couldn’t get people to commit to them. It was not a time I’m very fond off.

JBC: But TwoMorrows survived.

Eric: Yes, we have a faithful core audience and we had enough loyal customers to keep us going, and then it started coming back after a couple of years. The thing for us was trying to find… we have an older audience for the most part, so you’re always trying to find that next generation of readers. The Comics JourEric: Yeah, it was very cool of him not to blow us off! nal has that problem, I think. Your audience isn’t going to sit still JBC: Working in the office, you were manning the phones, right? forever, so you have to find new ways to get people in. We’re Did you become friends with some of the people who would be expanding what we do, with RetroFan, BrickJournal… Those calling in? things made a big difference as far as reaching different areas Eric: Yeah, I also did a lot of data entry over the years, so when of pop-culture people. It’s the same thing with my Bruce Timm people would place orders, you’d get to know the name, so book. If you can reach outside the comics community—and I’d get to know people. Now most people order online. Back that’s a tough sell, because what we can publish relies heavily then, we had a lot of phone orders and mail-in orders. It was on what Diamond can sell to comics retailers. Otherwise you’re more personal than it is now, but I think I got to know more of really taking a gamble on that printing cost. If the stores aren’t the customers through the conventions, either at San Diego or supporting it, can you really sell? You can sell stuff through AmaHeroesCon, who were buying that year’s zon, but will people really find you there worth of books. But there are people and give you the time of day? There’s so who call and talk for twenty minutes, so much competition out there; it’s tough to I let them as long as I’m not swamped. keep going on some things.

There were several people like that; you For me, with the Modern Master may not become friends, per se, but books—you go on Tumblr and Instagram, friendly—good acquaintances that want every artist has a Tumblr page. You can to talk for a few minutes. watch videos, watch them draw online, JBC: Were there any projects you wanted so why does anyone need a book? Some to do outside Modern Masters that did of the stuff I do in the books, and the not see fruition? things I’m most interested in showing, Eric: No, I’ve been pretty lucky. I’m still can now be found for free. What’s the working on the Jim Aparo book. That’s point of buying a book? So you have to been the monkey on my back for over adjust and find something that has that a decade! But everything else I’ve perception of value that people will want wanted to do, I’ve been able to do, to pay for. It’s tough. for the most part.

JBC: You surprised you’ve been at Two­ JBC: So, you hopefully have one more Morrows almost 20 years?

Modern Masters coming?

Eric: Yeah? No? Yes and no! [laughter] Eric: I want to finally get that darn In some ways, yes, it’s been a long time, Darwyn Cooke volume out. We’re playbut it’s gone by in a flash. But, no, I’m a ing it by ear with that right now. We’ve been talking about guy who likes to feel comfortable. When I get comfortable, I’m reformatting the series and doing more going forward in a not looking to change things. [laughter] I’ve enjoyed my time different format. I’ve got a couple of ideas for books I’ve been here and doing what I do, for the most part. Even though there working on that John is interested in. After I finish the current are some limitations, I’m able to get by and find fulfillment in the book, I’ve got another book or two in me before I get back to work. I’ve worked with and become friends with a lot of great Modern Masters. Jim Amash and I are talking about doing people over the years, and… I haven’t been chased out yet! another book or two, including a Lou Fine book. There’s no [laughter] pattern to it really. Whatever happens to hit at the right time!

JBC: Boy, do I know that! [laughter] However it all falls into Above: Plans are in the works to complete the Darwyn Cooke volume; stay tuned!

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TOM ZIUKO SHARES HOW HE BECAME COLORIST SUPREME Back in the prehistoric, pre-digital, pre-internet era, comic book fans got news and information by reading smoke signals in the air above distant mountain tops. Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad, but if you wanted to know what was going on in the comics world, you had to make an effort to stay on top of things, whether you were a working professional or just a fan. One way of doing so was by reading Comics Buyer’s Guide (CBG), a weekly newspaper to which I subscribed. In 1994, by which time I had already been a colorist at DC Comics for well over a decade, I read a CBG news article announcing that a gentleman from North Carolina was going to be publishing a fanzine/magazine dedicated to the life and art of Jack Kirby. Again, this being pre-internet, there was no website to find further information about this upcoming publication. So I did what every caveman of the time did when searching for nuts and berries: I called up Information on the telephone and got the phone number for this fellow in North Carolina, one Mr. John Morrow.

I called and told him that I saw the news about the new mag, and explained that Kirby was the basis for not only my love of the comic book medium, but that in many ways Kirby was almost a father figure to me, through the values he instilled in me via his storytelling over the course of a lifetime spent reading his work. I asked John if he already had a colorist for the covers and offered to color them for free in order to be a part of this publication, and as a way to show my appreciation for the King. John replied that the book was going to be printed entirely in black-&-white, as they couldn’t afford color covers. But he did assure me that if they ever were able to go color, I’d be the first they would turn to for the job.

Well, I think the first six or seven issues ran in b-&-w; and then they had built enough of a subscription base that they were able to afford color covers.

And so, for the next few years, I provided colors for The Jack Kirby Collec-

Eric Nolen-Weathington: Modern Masters

tor, hand-painting them with Dr. Martin’s dyes on stats of Kirby’s art inked by various professionals. John would FedEx a copy of the inked artwork to my home studio/apartment in New York City; I would then take these stats down to a print shop in the Village and

have“graylines“ printed to color. These consisted of artwork being printed in a light gray-tone on matte stat paper, with a duplicate of the art printed in solid black on a clear acetate sheet, to provide black line art.

Once completed, the coloring would be FedExed to North Carolina, where John would scan and have them printed as the cover. We followed this process for about the next five years or so, until around 1999. I was still working entirely on paper with dyes and had yet to make the switch over to computers.

At that point, John thought it would be more cost-effective to just help me acquire a computer and have the coloring done digitally, eliminating the middle man, and save on shipping the artwork back and forth and then having it printed up, as well as shortening the turn-around time involved.

And so John (and his silent partner, his wife, Pam—other half of the “Two” in TwoMorrows Publishing—lest we forget her contributions) bought a refurbished computer and monitor, and had

it shipped to Tom Ziuko me, along Colorist, CBC with my first Contributor Photoshop Born: 1955 program.

This incredResidence: ible gesture Niagara Falls, enabled me New York to make the Vocation: Colorist transition into Favorite Creators: the world of Jack Kirby digital coloring, for which Seminal Comic Book: I am eternally Amazing Spider-Man #29 grateful.

Over the course of the next 20 years or so I became the officially unofficial house colorist for TwoMorrows’ publications; coloring covers for their many magazines (including Alter Ego, Comic Book Artist, Back Issue, Draw, etc.); as well as their Modern Masters series, Companion editions, and both hardcover and softcover books.

Along the way, John gave some Kirby Collector old-style Marvel nicknames— like Jack “King” Kirby and “Joltin’” Joe Sinnott—and thus I was anointed “Colorist Supreme,” a name I rather like and I humbly wear with pride (if, in fact, it’s possible to be humble with the word “supreme” in your name). Working with John and Pam over the last quarter century has given me the incredible opportunity to work with artists I would never otherwise have crossed paths with; from the incredible array of Golden Age artists that Roy Thomas features in Alter Ego, to modern masters like Will Eisner, Jim Steranko, Wally Wood, Barry Windsor-Smith, John and Sal Buscema, R. Crumb, Walter Simonson—I could go on and on with this list. Instead, let me just take this opportunity to thank John and Pam and everyone involved over the last quarter century at TwoMorrows Publishing… I am incredibly honored and grateful to consider myself part of the TwoMorrows family.

And so here’s to the next 25 years…

Kirby sez: “Don’t ask—just ENJOY IT!” Above: One of Tom’s final hand-painted color jobs before going digital—for Jack Kirby Collector #15.

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2006: ROUGH STUFF

Bob McLeod Gets Into the Rough Stuff Bob McLeod

Editor, Rough Stuff

Born: 1951 Residence: Emmaus, Pennsylvania Vocation: Comic Book Artist Favorite Creator: Mort Drucker Seminal Comic Book: MAD magazine In 2006, another accomplished comics pro, inker Bob McLeod, dips his toe into magazine editing with TwoMorrows’ Rough Stuff, an expansion of the same-name popular feature in Back Issue.

Inset right: Besides his lengthy career as a comics inker, Bob’s best known for having co-created the New Mutants, an X-Men related strip that debuted in 1982.

Rough Stuff

First Issue: 7/1/2006

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I think I was born with a pencil in my hand. I’ve known since I was about four years old, when I copied a cartoon figure of Buffalo Bee off of a Wheat Honeys cereal box one morning at breakfast, that I wanted to be some sort of cartoonist when I grew up; not an “artist”, a cartoonist. I was known as the school artist in elementary school, and designed holiday decorations and drawings for the classroom door a few times. I often copied the comic strips in the newspaper, and I would buy Superman comics and my sister would buy Archie comics, and then we’d trade. I also read all the Harvey line of comics.

By the time I was in junior high, I grew bored with Superman, but I was totally in love with MAD magazine, and Mort Drucker’s art in particular. I would write and draw little one- or two-page comics featuring myself as the main character and include a lot of direct swipes from Mort Drucker. I just always took it for granted that I would be a professional cartoonist of some sort when I grew up, but I wasn’t really into comic books all that much. I missed the whole Marvel Comics scene when they exploded into being in the ’60s. I didn’t read Spider-Man or The Fantastic Four. I was reading MAD magazine.

My parents were not artists and didn’t know what to do with my talent.

My mother sent all my childhood drawings to Walt Disney, who, of course, we never heard back from. Living in Tampa, Florida, I knew nothing about the great art schools up north, and I never had any art instruction until college. Because my sister was enrolled at Auburn University, I also went there, attending

for four quarters, but I quit because my teachers actively discouraged me from doing cartooning. I then went to the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale for a year, but also quit there because they weren’t teaching me anything about cartooning. At age 19, I wrote, penciled, lettered, and inked 36 strips over the summer as a sample for a humorous newspaper comic strip. It was about a private eye named Tom Nosey. It was politely rejected by the syndicates, but it was a valuable learning experience. It was the first time I inked with a brush, although it was a cheap one that wasn’t much good. I had started reading Heavy Metal and the Warren magazines, Vampirella, Creepy, and Eerie, and I sent a 10-page comic job I wrote and drew to Warren, which was also rejected.

Finally, at age 24, having decided I had wasted enough time as a grocery store stock boy, I sold my car to finance a trip to New York City to start my art career. My plan was to work in advertising and eventually do animation for Disney, but having no luck at finding any work at the ad agencies, my backup plan was to work in comic books. However, I was rejected by both Marvel and DC. Joe Orlando, then the art director at DC Comics, even told me I needed to go back to school and learn how to draw! But rather than getting discouraged, I was simply confused. I knew I could draw, so I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t like my art.

In retrospect, I realize that as with most amateurs, I wasn’t looking objectively at my art. I was focusing on what I did well, and ignoring what I didn’t do

The World of TwoMorrows

well. I had no intention of going back to school, so I just started studying the comics and doing new samples. I would take a page from a published comic that I thought was badly drawn and re-draw it, in my mind making it better, though all of those early samples of mine were pretty awful. But I was studying comic art almost every waking hour.

Finally, when I was down to my last $10 and about to ask my parents for bus money back home, I met Neal Adams, who mercifully called the production manager at Marvel, John Verpoorten, and got me a job in their production department on his recommendation.

I figure I started at the rock bottom. Part of my job there was actually taping the page numbers onto the original art. I was taught the basics of comic book lettering by the staff letterers, Danny Crespi and Morrie Kuramoto, and spent my days doing lettering corrections. I worked my way up to making art corrections, and my desk was right next to long-time inker Mike Esposito. He told me I could learn how to ink faster than I could learn penciling, so I started inking backgrounds for him, Al Milgrom and Klaus Janson.

Working in production turned out to be a great opportunity because I met all of the editors and could show them my samples, so I was soon able to get one to give me a tryout. For my first published job, I penciled and inked a satire of Westworld for Marvel’s Crazy magazine, which I continued to do work in over the next decade, taking over the “Teen Hulk” strip from Marie Severin and doing some more movie satires. But none of the other artists I was meeting cared much about humor comics, and it was obvious I needed to do the more “realistic” color comics if I wanted a successful career.

I started getting some inking jobs, and it turned out I had an aptitude for inking, so, before long, my inking career took off. My dramatic penciling took another five years of study to catch up to the level of my inking, while I learned more about anatomy, figure posing, and visual storytelling.

But I was always penciling as well as inking, and I

2006

2007

Bob McLeod: Rough Stuff

eventually lettered and colored a few jobs as well.

I primarily studied Neal Adams and John Buscema, who I considered the best artists in the business. But I also sought out work by the artists they had learned from: Stan Drake, Wally Wood, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and so many others. I studied everyone, with the notable exceptions of the Marvel stalwarts Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and John Romita. Their work just wasn’t what I was looking to emulate. I studied everything: clothing folds, lighting, staging, inking hair and water, and all of the other various things involved in making comic art. I used comic books and comic strips as my textbooks, and I slowly figured out how to be a comic artist.

So talent was just the starting point. Some luck was involved, in being in the right place at the right time, and meeting the right people; networking to make connections to get work. In addition to Marvel and DC, I worked for Pacific Comics, Valiant, Gold Key, Dark Horse, First Comics, and Techno.

Over the last 40 years, I’ve been fortunate to have penciled or inked most all of the major characters for Marvel and DC. I worked on The X-Men, Spider-Man, G.I. Joe, Star Wars, The Hulk, Conan, and many other titles at Marvel. I penciled Superman, and inked on Batman, Wonder Woman, The New Titans, and others at DC Comics.

I’m probably best known for co-creating and drawing The New Mutants, which I originated with writer Chris Claremont. Unfortunately, The New Mutants was some of my most rushed work, so it’s

Above: Bob McLeod at one of his many convention appearances, this one in 2011.

Photo by Luigi Novi.

Below: Bob’s signature characters debuted in their own graphic novel, which he had to ink while on his honeymoon to meet its deadline.

Now that’s dedication!

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2006: ROUGH STUFF not my best, but it created a lot of very devoted fans. I left The New Mutants after the first eight issues, because I was too rushed by the deadlines and wasn’t happy with the way the art looked, and wanted to move on. In retrospect, that was probably a bad decision, because had I stayed, I would have made a lot of money in royalties, and been indelibly linked to what went on to be a great series. But, then again, I probably wouldn’t have worked on all those other great titles I did, so maybe it worked out okay after all.

I started doing commissions for fans in 2000, and the comic convention circuit was growing, so I started attending more comic-cons. By 2005 or so, my comic book career was slowing down, and I had more time on my hands to try other things. I had always wanted to do a children’s book, but had never had the time, so I wrote and illustrated Superhero ABC, a humorous alphabet book, which was published by HarperCollins and received starred reviews.

Rather than use copyrighted Marvel or DC characters, in which case they would have tried to tell me how to do it if they allowed me to do it at all, I created my own silly heroes and used a lot of alliteration to teach kids the alphabet. It’s still in print after all these years, and it brought my art to the wider world outside of comic books. For about six months I had a job designing T-shirt art for a company owned by Ecko. I did art for a gaming company, and illustrations for books and magazines.

Also around that time, there was a regular feature in the early issues of TwoMorrows’ Back Issue magazine that I really enjoyed called “Rough Stuff,” which basically just showed the pencil art of comic book pages before they were inked. Of course, as a pro inker I had seen hundreds of pages of pencil art by the best artists in the business, but it was always interesting to see more.

I read that they were looking for more images to run in it, and I just happened to have made photocopies of almost every job of my career, initially in case the original art got lost or damaged in the mail, but I soon decided I just liked having a record of the pencils and inks before they were colored, and often before they were lettered. I’ve inked a great variety of pencilers, so it was just what TwoMorrows was looking for and they were glad to get

it. I sent them three FedEx boxes full of my photocopies, and then, I’m not sure why, because I had never done any published writing, I also submitted an article I wrote for them about inking “rough” pencilers, and they printed it (in Back Issue #14)!

Evidently my article got a huge response from their readers, and they were apparently already considering making “Rough Stuff” into its own magazine because of its popularity, so they asked me if I would want to edit it.

Well, I was, of course, very flattered, but I was also a bit reluctant at first, because it sounded like a lot of work for not much money, and I hadn’t had any experience editing anything, and had never really had any interest in editing. I told John Morrow as much, but for whatever reason he seemed to think I’d be good at it. Or maybe there just wasn’t anyone else handy at the time! Who knows? Well, John knows, I guess. Anyway, after thinking it over for a while, I decided it would be an interesting challenge and maybe it would be fun, not to mention steady work, so I decided to give it a try. I really didn’t know what I was getting into, and how much of my time it would take up. I’ve always been a bit overconfident in my abilities, so it never really occurred to me that I might be horrible at it.

The basic idea we had for the magazine was to simply show readers the creative process involved in creating a page of comic art, by showing all the various preliminary stages the public would not otherwise see, along with comments from the artists themselves so the reader could get a real sense of what the artists were trying to do, and how well (or badly) they managed it. For the pros whose art we featured, it was free publicity. We also paid them for their trouble of sending me samples of their art. I generally refrained from commenting on their art, except to praise it where I saw fit. And the artists were free to make whatever comments about it they wanted.

I also featured an in-depth interview with a top pro artist in each issue, usually (but not always) conducted by me. I would just try to ask them whatever I thought the readers would want to know, and they were often very revealing. Most of them were done by email, with them responding to questions I sent them.

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But I would send follow-up questions after I got their answers, and then edit it all so that it sounded like we were having a conversation rather than just an email correspondence. And I included the “Rough Critique” feature I had started in Back Issue, where I tried to help amateur artists get their art up to a more professional level by offering a constructive critique of a sample page every issue, which would hopefully be sent in by the readers. I had given a few private lessons over the years, and I asked the artists for permission to use their art

and my critiques in the new magazine. Luckily, they agreed. So I used those for the first few “Rough Critiques.”

It was a lot of fun doing Rough Stuff. It turned out I had a lot to say and a lot of art to show. Even though I had tons of examples of my own art I could have used, and would have of course liked to show, I tried to be primarily just the editor, and not make the magazine about me. I tried to stay mostly in the background and showcase other artists. I only used my own art when I was short of other

Previous page: Had Rough Stuff continued, plans were on tap to feature rough sketches and pencil work by a host of other top names in comics, including John Buscema, one of Bob’s favorite artists.

MICHAEL KRONENBERG: TEAMING WITH TWOMORROWS In 2006, the year my book on Paul Gulacy was published, Comic Book Marketplace magazine, which I had been designing, was canceled. I was also working on the EC Archives, and was a big fan and subscriber to all of TwoMorrows’ publications.

I grew up in the 1970s, a passionate fan of the Bronze Age Batman. After reading Michael Eury’s TwoMorrows’ Companion books, I decided to contact publisher John Morrow and propose doing a similar Batman book. John was kind enough to respond and team me up with Mr. Eury, who was already working on such a volume. It was a perfect match—Michael covered Batman in the 1960s and I covered the character in the 1970s. Working on The Batcave

Bob McLeod: Rough Stuff

Companion was a wonderful experience, as I got to relive and research all aspects of the Batman comics I read so passionately as a kid. I also got to interview and get contributions from creators I admired: Neal Adams, Denny O’Neil, Steve Englehart, Terry Austin, Len Wein, Mike Grell, and more. My only sad regret is that less than a week before our scheduled interview, one of my favorite artists, Marshall Rogers, suddenly died of a heart attack. Thankfully, Terry Austin and Steve Englehart stepped in with beautiful and very personal remembrances about Marshall for the book. No doubt The Batcave Companion was a true labor of love and one of my proudest accomplishments.

Michael and I would team-up again in 2009 on the hardcover, full-color version of his book about the action figure Captain Action.

During the summer of 2007, I moved from the Washington, D.C. area to North Carolina. John and I became neighbors of a sort and I finally got the chance to meet him in person.

While working on The Batcave Companion, John offered me the opportunity to work with artist Bob McLeod on a new TwoMorrows magazine called Rough Stuff. What fun it was designing that magazine for Bob! I also learned so much from his wonderful commentaries and critiques in each issue.

In 2007, thanks to our successful work on The Batcave Companion, John

and Michael Michael asked me Kronenberg if I’d like to Cover designer, be the cover Back Issue designer for Michael’s Born: 1963 wonderful Residence: magazine Chapel Hill, Back Issue.

North Carolina As a big Vocation: fan of Back Graphic Designer Issue, I enFavorite Creators: thusiastically Jim Steranko, accepted Neal Adams and I’ve Seminal Comic Book: proudly deBatman #232 signed every cover of the magazine since. I’ve also written several articles for BI over the course of that time, including a recent fun and illuminating interview with my friend and Batman [1989] screenwriter Sam Hamm.

Since I started working with John Morrow, I’ve become a freelance designer for Marvel Comics, the graphic designer for Eddie Muller’s (Turner Classic Movies host) Film Noir Foundation, designed DVD/Blu-ray movie packaging for several companies, started my own boxing magazine, and so much more. But it all started 13 years ago with me contacting John and him giving me the opportunity to work for TwoMorrows.

Thank you, John!

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DEWEY CASSELL ON JOHN MORROW’s LEAP OF FAITH I have always wanted to be a writer. I started writing short stories when I was in middle school, about the same time I started reading comics. But it wasn’t until I got back into comics in the mid1990s, when my kids first started to read, that I really paid attention to who was writing and drawing them. Then I started going to conventions where I met the writers and artists behind my favorite heroes and I was inspired to somehow pay tribute to them, to honor and preserve their legacy.

So, in late 2003, my good friend Aaron Sultan and I approached publisher John Morrow with a 14-page proposal to write a book about a favorite artist of ours, George Tuska. I had never met John before, but I was familiar with TwoMorrows publications like Comic Book Artist and Alter Ego—and their goal of honoring and preserving the legacy of comics—and I knew that John lived nearby, in Raleigh.

John was extremely approachable and encouraging and gave us the go-ahead to start work on the book.

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Looking back on it now, I realize that it was quite a leap of faith. John didn’t know either of us from Adam, but he believed in our sincerity and trusted us enough to run with the idea.

That was four books and over 40 magazine articles ago.

It is an unequivocal pleasure to work with John Morrow. He has the great appreciation of a fan coupled with a keen business sense of what will be successful in the market. He is a family man who treats the people who work for him like family. He surrounds himself with exceptional editors like Michael Eury, Jon B. Cooke, and Roy Thomas, all of whom I have had the pleasure of working with. John is the consummate professional, but at the same time easygoing and humble in spite of the tremendous impact that he and his company have had on the comics industry. He could undoubtedly have made more money doing something else, but instead he is dedicated to making a difference.

And, thanks to John, I have met

some absolutely amazing comic writers and artists over the years. I’ve interviewed Will Eisner and Yvonne Craig, eaten in a diner with Flo Steinberg, and traded Christmas cards with Stan Lee. I currently have three new books in the works, including a collection of Marie Severin’s cartoons and biographies of Irv Novick and Marshall Rogers. And none of that would have been possible were it not for John Morrow and that leap of faith.

The tagDewey Cassell line on the Contributor, TwoMorrows Back Issue website says Born: 1962 “The Future Residence: of Comics Cary, North Carolina History.”

Vocation: Well, in Communications Quality the hands Assurance of John Favorite Creator: Morrow, George Tuska the future is looking Seminal Comic Books: bright in“The Legion of SuperHeroes” series deed. And I am honored to be a part of that family.

Congratulations on your 25th anniversary, John, and best wishes for many more successful years to come!

Left: Dewey recently branched out from authoring biographies of Marvel Bullpenners with his 2018 bio of Mike Grell, which was nominated for a Will Eisner Comics Industry Award for “Best Comics-Related Book.”

The World of TwoMorrows

people’s material, or if they were late sending it to me. But that was just because I needed content for the magazine. I did write some articles, mainly because there was no one else to write them, and I did most of the interviews, mainly because there was no one else around to do them. I had a wonderful time and thought it was a great magazine, so I’m sorry it didn’t become more successful.

Because sales started going down, John Morrow contacted me to say it was going to be cancelled after ten issues, but I asked him to extend it to 12 issues, because I had so much unused material, and he reluctantly agreed. I really don’t think the poor sales were a result of anything to do with the quality of the magazine.

I think it was timing, the limited distribution, and the market during that period. I never heard any criticism that people didn’t like it. All I ever heard were compliments on it from the readers, many of whom I later learned were professional Marvel and DC artists. I was paid a decent amount for editing the magazine, but I think I spent far more time on it than the pay warranted, being the perfectionist that I am. I would also like to give credit to Michael Kronenberg for his efforts as designer on Rough Stuff. He was a big help.

I was sorry to see Rough Stuff end, but I also felt I’d done what I set out to do and was ready to move on. It had become more and more difficult to get artists to send copies to me. The artists I wanted to feature were just too busy drawing comics.

And I myself was doing less art because editing the

Bob McLeod: Rough Stuff

magazine took up so much of my time.

Being editor of Rough Stuff was an interesting experience to have had and I’m very glad I did it.

But than again, I’ve always wanted to learn how to do a bit of everything. I didn’t want to just be an inker or penciler. I learned lettering, I learned about color, and I do some painting. As for writing, even though I never wrote any published comics, I did write my newspaper strip samples, my Superhero ABC book, articles for Rough Stuff, and I even wrote a Red Sonja job that Marvel bought but never published.

I’ve just always been far more interested in art than in writing. I currently no longer look for work in the comic book business, but I still do occasional variant covers for Marvel and commissions for fans, along with the occasional freelance job and personal projects. I also usually sketch at one or two comic conventions per month.

Happy 25th anniversary to everybody at TwoMorrows Publishing!

Above: The full Bob McLeod color image that was cropped for the cover of 2008’s Alter Ego #82, and eventually used in the MLJ Companion from TwoMorrows.

Below: One of Bob’s critiques of a newcomer’s work from Rough Stuff magazine.

— Bob McLeod

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PETER NORMANTON: HE CAME IN FROM THE TOMB The expression “mighty oaks from small acorns grow” sits quite nicely with the accomplishments ascribed to the team at TwoMorrows.

It’s one quarter of a century since the tentative first appearance of The Jack Kirby Collector, and in that quartercentury things have gone through an unusually remarkable change.

Living across the pond, in England, TwoMorrows has been an invaluable lifeline for me, throwing light on so many of the comics I grew up with, and those that came long, long before. I wasn’t lucky enough to be around for those early days of The Kirby Collector—it had already reached its ninth issue when I took the plunge.

It’s safe to say I was not disappointed.

Far from it. The crowning moment was the interview with Joe Sinnott, an inker I had come to recognize as one of the greats, but I knew him equally as well as an artist on the horror comics of the early 1950’s. A few years later, thanks to his son Mark, I too would get to interview Joe. The appearance of the award-winning Comic Book Artist took many fans by surprise. It can have only been months, but in this short time this magazine set itself apart from its peers, going head over heals in its desire to celebrate over 50 years of talent in a series of

in-depth articles, each presented with page upon page of layouts destined to inspire a generation of comics-related magazines.

Those on the outside may have seen CBA as a risky undertaking as it set forth, but it has shown itself to be one worth taking, for those 50 years of talent have increased to take on board 70 years of genius, and it looks as if this will continue to grow well into the future. With two successful titles to his credit, John had revealed an uncanny instinct for picking up on a project with

true potenPeter Normanton tial, then Editor providing a worthy Born: 1961 editor the Residence: means to do Rochdale, England something Vocation: very speRetired government cial. When finance officer the idea of Favorite Creator: resurrecting Stan Lee Alter Ego Seminal Comic Book: after a hiatus Nightmare #17 of over two decades was ventured, this time with Roy Thomas at the helm, it was soon obvious Two­ Morrows had yet another success on their hands. Alter Ego’s revival came as a flip book in the pages of CBA. Cautious this approach may have appeared, but it was a shrewd way of safeguarding the return of this well remembered fan publication from the heyday of the comic book fanzine. Almost 20 years later, Alter Ego is still with us and as strong as ever.

I was astounded when John, courtesy of Roy Thomas, showed an interest in my amateur horror comics fan publication, From the Tomb. While From the Tomb had enjoyed success under John Anderson’s Soaring Penguin imprint as a fan publication, it was another thing altogether to turn it into a book published by a professional outfit. This was when I learned just how incredibly patient a man he is, and, believe me, I must have pushed that patience all the way. John remained calm, driving me on to new heights. The result was The Best of From the Tomb, which was followed five years later by It Crept From the Tomb, both of which I am immensely proud. Proud I may be, but I know I couldn’t have done it without the encouragement of John Morrow.

So, a big thank you, John, and here’s to the next 25 years.

Left: The delightfully ghoulish work of The Gurch adorned the covers of our two “Best of” From the Tomb collections.

Inset top: Cover from the original From the Tomb fanzine.

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2008: BRICKJOURNAL

Joe Meno on Building His BrickJournal Joe Meno

Joe Meno: BrickJournal started as an online magazine, but my friendship with John came a bit before, when we both volunteered and worked for political campaigns. At the time (the early ’90s), I was between jobs in graphic design and did freelance work. I met with John and showed my portfolio. I didn’t get a job then, but I later got work elsewhere and became an art director.

About a decade later, I started BrickJournal as an online magazine, where it got the attention of the LEGO® Group. During the initial issues, I met John to get a design review by him of the then-new publication.

His reply was that the magazine looked good, and, as it so happens, he would consider publishing the magazine if I ever wanted to go to print media. The LEGO Group was interested in seeing it go to print too, and through a wonderful bit of timing, one year later, BrickJournal was launched as a print publication in 2008.

Initially set as a quarterly, the mag soon became a bi-monthly, where it has been up to the present day. It’s been over a decade and 50 issues since BrickJournal’s print adventure began and, with that, dozens of LEGO builders have been showcased.

The mission of BrickJournal hasn’t changed in all of this time—to inform and inspire LEGO builders, young and old.

John has been a quiet guiding force all this time, nudging the magazine to where it needed to be, but never interfering with its mission. I think that’s because his passion for Jack Kirby is much like mine with LEGO, that things have gone so long and so well, and I am thankful for that! I’m proud to be a part of the TwoMorrows portfolio, and happy to say: Happy 25th Anniversary!

John Morrow: When I first announced that TwoMorrows would be publishing a magazine for LEGO enthusiasts, it raised the eyebrows of more than a few of our comics-centric readers. What do those ubiquitous plastic bricks have to do with comics, after all? As it turns out, more than many people would’ve thought!

Joe Meno: BrickJournal

Editor, BrickJournal Born: 1965 Residence: Springfield, Virginia

Vocation: BrickJournal editor, graphic designer As TwoMorrows seeks more ways to cover broader pop culture, when the opportunity for a LEGO® magazine comes along, things just click!

Despite originating in Denmark, LEGO is probably as much a part of American pop culture as comic books. Nearly everyone who grew up reading comics likely got their hands on some LEGO bricks during childhood. But the idea of publishing a magazine about them never occurred to me ’til the fateful day, in 2007, when old friend Joe Meno called up out of the blue. I had no idea, at that point, that there was a sub-culture of adult builders out there, making spectacular creations out of what I’d always considered “just a toy.” I was in for a rude awakening… and a very speedy education!

Before that fateful call, we had hit it off while working together as volunteers on a political campaign in the late 1980s, but had lost touch in the last few years. Joe told me he’d been doing a digital-only LEGO magazine for over a year, and was wanting to move from free digital issues to paid print ones. So it was fun to see how our mutual backgrounds in graphic design had taken us in similar directions—me with a Jack Kirby magazine, and Joe with one focused on his LEGO hobby.

Joe wanted to know what was involved in self-publishing, so I took him out to lunch at my favorite Italian restaurant and let him pick my brain for a couple of hours about the realities of the publishing game. I concluded that meal with the offer that, if it ended up being more than he was ready to tackle himself, to let me know, and I’d investi-

Above: Brit LEGO builder Adam Cadwell constructed the ultimate TwoMorrows/BrickJournal mashup: a LEGO® Jack Kirby figure!

BrickJournal

First Issue: 2/28/2008

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2008: BRICKJOURNAL gate whether it made sense for TwoMorrows to take it on.

Within a few weeks, Joe said that, indeed, he was more interested in producing a LEGO magazine than publishing and distributing it. So I did some research, and learned there was actually quite a bit of overlap between comics and LEGO fans.

That bolstered my confidence that we could make a go of it, and Joe’s connections with the LEGO Group in the U.S. and Denmark meant we would have their support as well. We struck a deal, and launched BrickJournal as a print magazine in 2008.

LEGO was instrumental in the periodical’s early success, by initially distributing it through their LEGO store chain, which gave BrickJournal wider exposure than a comics publication would get through comic shops. But just as important were the grown-up LEGO builders (AFOLs, or “Adult Fans of LEGO”), who have taken the hobby to amazing new levels. By traveling and manning a booth at myriad LEGO fan conventions around the country, I quickly learned their lingo and got to meet some of the nicest, most dedicated people this side of Comic-Con. In fact, nowadays I see a lot of them at both LEGO events and at Comic-Con International: San Diego, as LEGO has become an integral part of the pop culture scene—and many of the top builders display creations based on comics, anime, and sci-fi.

My association with Joe even lead to our own BrickMagic LEGO Festival, which we’ve put on four times so far. It’s given me a greater appreciation for the hard work those AFOLs put

in. They take time off from their day jobs or use vacation days, to lug thousands of pounds of LEGO bricks across the country, just to build and display their creations for the enjoyment of the public. It usually takes a full two days of set-up at events like BrickMagic. And then, on Sunday night, they have to tear it down and schlep it all back home again, ’til their next event. But you’ve never seen camaraderie like you’ll experience with those builders; the sound of a giant tower of LEGO bricks tumbling to the floor during set-up brings the whole room scrambling over to help reassemble what that poor builder watched shatter on the ground, even if it takes them all night. That’s the key to the crossover between LEGO and comics: the two groups love their hobby, and the best give selflessly to help their fellow fans.

Still, the most critical element of BrickJournal’s success is Joe Meno himself. He has that same joy and enthusiasm over his obsession that I have for Jack Kirby—and, for that matter, that our other editors have for their particular interests. I’m not a LEGO builder, but when I proofread each new issue that Joe produces, I’m struck by how we’re cut from the same cloth as fellow fanatics, even if we focus on different labors of love. His enjoyment of LEGO is just as strong as mine of comics, and I get inspired reading about the builders’ latest creations, and the thinking and dedication that goes into each one. But it’s Joe’s own devotion that pulls the magazine together, issue after issue, and makes it such a fun read for even non-LEGO guys like me.

2008

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2013

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2019 Joe Meno: BrickJournal

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2009: MARVEL COMICS IN THE…

Through the Decades at the House of Ideas It was Amazing Spider-Man #14 that did it. That was the first Marvel comic I ever bought and I Author, Marvel Comics was hooked for life. By the time I reached high in the ’60s, the’70s, school, I was still crazy about Marvel and began and the ’80s thinking about turning that enthusiasm into a book of some kind. Sure, like probably every other fan, Born: 1955 I’d thought about being a comic book artist, but Residence: soon realized that I had no talent in that direction.

Lowell, I began collecting whatever I could that might be Massachusetts used later as research notes for my projected book: Vocation: clippings from newspapers, magazines (that usually Freelance Writer began with “Bang! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Favorite Creator: Kids Anymore!”) and an occasional book (which Jack Kirby often didn’t include more than an isolated chapter Seminal Comic Book: or two covering Marvel).

Amazing Spider-Man #14 Aside from what I could glean from Marvel’s Bullpen pages, my knowledge of the contemporary The core mission of TwoMorrows will always be to comics scene was extremely limited. Adding to my cover comics history, and isolation was the fact that I didn’t know anyone else many fine authors help who was interested in comics, let alone who shared do that in the company’s my level of enthusiasm. The dam finally broke second decade. Pierre’s when I saw an ad for Steranko’s History of Comics. insightful commentary I mailed away for it and my mind fairly explodon the key Marvel issues ed upon reading it! Sensory overload, fer shur! I from the 1960s–1980s couldn’t wait for the volumes that would cover the offers critical insights into Marvel Age of Comics. Alas! None were forthcomthe workings of the major creators of each era. ing. In the meantime though, Steranko had begun Comicscene, which I subscribed to, and immediNext page: The original unused ately I was plunged deeper into the world of comcover for Marvel Comics in the 1960s ics and genre film than ever before. In

by Mike Manley and Tom Palmer. particular, I found the pages detailing the contents of upcoming comics… amazing!

Then it happened.

A friend of a friend mentioned to me a record store that opened in the neighborhood, which also sold comics. It took a while, but one day having nothing better to do, I walked over to check it out. There, I was amazed to find new comics for sale… two weeks before I’d expected them to show up at the newsstand where I usually picked up the latest releases! I’d discovered the Direct Marvel Comics Market and very soon after that, The in the 1960s Comics Journal with its incredible, inPublished: 8/1/2009 depth interviews with my favorite comics

Pierre Comtois

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creators. Now I was learning about all the inside mechanics of comics as well as their history, knowledge I stored in my head against the day when I finally wrote that book about Marvel Comics— which is where TwoMorrows came in. (Thought I’d never get there, huh?)

My first issue of The Jack Kirby Collector was #3, and believe you me, it was a revelation! Jack Kirby had always been my number one favorite comics artist, one for whose stuff I’d been searching for years. When I finished collecting everything he did for Marvel’s super-heroes, I backtracked to his Atlas Westerns (even issues where all he did was the cover), and when I exhausted those, I did the unthinkable… I backtracked to DC and began collecting his Challengers of the Unknown and “Green Arrow” back-ups in World’s Finest. So, when I idly picked up that first copy of TJKC and saw uninked, original pencil art of his Marvel work, my mind was duly boggled! Seeing those penciled pages from Captain America gave a whole new level of appreciation for Kirby. I was a reader for life after that and, as TwoMorrows cranked out new titles and mags over the years, I was on board for… well, to be honest, the Silver Age material mostly: Alter Ego, Back Issue, and relevant Comic Book Artist/Creator.

By then, the Marvel book I’d always had it in mind to write was a reality. No need to go through its origins here (its earliest permutation was as

The World of TwoMorrows

an article in Comic Book Marketplace #81, if you must know) or list the publishers that had accepted it before going out of business (one planned to publish it as a giant, coffee table-sized book). Suffice it to say, that I finally got around to doing what I should have done in the first place, submit it TwoMorrows. Right off, John Morrow expressed interest in the book, and formally signed me on as a member of the TwoMorrows family.

Subsequent production of the book was a writer’s dream. In fact, Marvel Comics in the 1960s was my first published book. Many others would follow from a variety of publishers, but none would provide as satisfying an experience as that of TwoMorrows.

From the get-go, John helped me prepare the groundwork. It was his suggestion that we divide the book into two (Marvel in the 1960s and Marvel in the 1970s) and to write more entries to fill them out.

The entry format I ended up using, by the way, wasn’t what I’d intended when I first envisioned the book back in high school. Then I was thinking of a straight narrative history. The entry format began as a “ten of a kind” article I submitted to Amazing Heroes (one duly rejected) and reached its final form in that Comic Book Marketplace piece. That format took hold and what emerged was what I consider a unique approach to the subject—one that, as a fan, fulfilled what I always wanted to see: an in-depth book about Marvel Comics that examined it issue-by-issue, telling what was good and what wasn’t. I didn’t get to every single issue, but I did give it the old college try!

It was also John’s idea to use silhouette figures on the covers, each outline representational of the comics decade being covered. But it was an idea borne out of necessity, as Marvel rejected John’s original idea for the cover: An illustration by Mike Manley and Tom Palmer featuring pseudo-Marvel props. So we had to fall back on my initial suggestion: a collage of photos representing key events of the years covered in each volume. John agreed with the added suggestion that we use the silhouettes overlaid in the foreground.

Next, miracle worker Richard Fowlks was assigned to handle the interior layouts. No one could have been easier to work with than Rich (sorry, John!), who came up with a number of good ideas for the books that I eagerly approved, as well as finding ways to make my own sometimes offbeat ideas work. He did what I still consider to be a most complex job quickly and efficiently with newly

Pierre Comtois: The Marvel Comics Books

finished pages popping into my inbox every other day. I still have no idea how he managed that!

Marketing and advertising came next and John was on top of that, never stinting on the effort and expense and, as sales piled up, kept me informed with complete spreadsheets at every step. With that kind of muscle behind me, Marvel Comics in the 1960s: An Issue by Issue Field Guide to a Pop-Culture Phenomenon appeared in 2009 and soon after that, Marvel Comics in the 1970s, in ’11.

Not even a printer’s warehouse fire in 2014 that destroyed copies of Marvel Comics in the 1970s slowed John down much. In fact, when I told him many readers were writing me asking if a 1980s volume was in the works, he encouraged me to get to work on it. That finally appeared, in 2014—which begs the question (in my mind at least): Why John or TwoMorrows never got any awards or recognition for the work and presentation of all three of my books? The answer is beyond me; so John, consider this essay of thanks as that award… in spades!

— Pierre Comtois

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BRIAN K. MORRIS: AN EAR TO THE GRINDSTONE Many years ago, I received an opportunity to work on a prominent comics publication as a transcriptionist and writer. The way had been prepared; all I had to do was say “yes.”

However, that publisher wasn’t Two­ Morrows. It was for Comics Interview.

A buddy of mine who worked on the magazine during my comic shop managing days talked me up to David Anthony Kraft, the publisher/editor. I was about to send DAK my letter of intent when the fan press buzzed with the news that CI was going under.

Well, crap!

So, years passed. During that time, I moved from comic book retail into office work. However, I didn’t leave my love of comics behind. After attending one of the final Chicago Comic-Cons, I picked up a new magazine about Jack Kirby from this TwoMorrows outfit. I kinda enjoyed it and put it on my pull list as soon as I got home.

After a while, John Morrow announced he was expanding the Two­ Morrows line and needed transcribers.

Ah-hah! Upon reading that, I decided I wasn’t going to pass up this opportunity again. I sent John an email, explaining how I’d worked in a couple of comic shops, used to be a letterhack in my misspent youth, wrote advertising, was currently a playwright, and wanted to give this transcribing a shot.

I also revealed that I could type 120 words a minute and the only creatures with better hearing than mine walked on four paws. I believe I skipped over any mention that I’d never done this before and possessed only the barest idea how this worked. I figured I’d pick it up as I went along.

To my surprise and delight, John welcomed me to the Two­Morrows family and assigned me to some poor fellow named Jon B. Cooke who needed a helping hand. A few emails later, Jon and I began working together.

Despite a steep learning curve on my part, Jon patiently (some days more than others, but never without reason) stuck with me. Soon, my name started

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appearing in Comic Book Artist and called Back Issue. He had an interview kept popping up for a couple of years with Marv Wolfman and George Perez until some more transcribers were about their days with The Teen Titans brought on to take some of the tranthat needed to be made editable. Forscription burden from me. tunately, my supervisor at the day job Then one day, I came home from was on vacation and I could sneak in work and my dear wife, Cookie, told work on the transcript during business me, “Someone named Roy Thomas hours, thus finishing it in record time. asked to speak to you. Something Back Issue soon became my new about transcripts.” regular gig and I enjoyed working with My jaw dropped. I was as much a Michael. However, every time I sent him fan of Roy Thomas and Alter Ego as a completed transcript, he asked if I’d anyone, if not more. With trembling ever considered writing articles. Up to fingers, I dialed Roy’s that point, no, I hadn’t. number and immediBut now, I wondered what I Brian K. Morris ately, he was on the could contribute.

Transcriber, Back line. I gritted my teeth I’d just finished tranIssue contributor and tried to sound as scribing an interview Born: 1956 professional as I could,

by Dan Johnson for BI internally wrestling #5. In replying to the Residence: my inner fanboy into two of us, Michael exLafayette, Indiana submission. Roy and pressed a wish that he Vocation: I discussed what we had something, even Publisher/author needed from each othjust a sidebar article, repreFavorite Creators: er and now I was on the senting the Alan Moore era.

Jack Kirby and Alter Ego team too.

Well, it just so happened that Roy Thomas Towards the end I possessed an old VHS tape Seminal Comic Book: of the conversation, from DC Comics about Saga A 1950s issue of I came clean. “Roy, of the Swamp Thing with their Superman you’ve been a big then-new writer, Alan Moore. influence on my writing I pitched a review of the tape and editing. Heck, you’ve written some and Michael said the job was mine if I of my favorite comic book stories of all could bring it in at 500 words. time. However, I’m trying to sound as So, I spent a Sunday afternoon professional as I can. So please considwatching the tape again and again er yourself gushed over.” before taking pictures of the images Long pause, then Roy replied, on the screen. I turned in the piece, “That’s all I get?” making sure it came in at 499 words.

Yep, I knew I’d enjoy this gig.

Then for the next three years, I not only Soon, I found myself working also transcribed where needed, but wrote with Bill Schelly, an old buddy from articles for BI and one on “The Losers” CAPA-Alpha, and then with Jim Amash, for The Jack Kirby Collector. By this who became a close friend and probatime, I’d contributed to every Twobly the one person for whom I’ve done Morrows magazine except Write Now!, the most transcripts. I was privileged Rough Stuff, and BrickJournal. to hear the voices of many of comics’ My transcription work grew so much, pioneers such as Joe Simon, Don Rico, I had to turn people away. It sure beat and George Kashdan. no one knowing who you were. I wound In time, I did a few transcripts for up collaborating with other writers who Mike Manley at Draw! magazine just became friends like R.C. Harvey, Bob before Michael Eury contacted me Greenberger, and Andy Mangels, as about a last-second transcript for this well as working with them on maganew magazine he was putting together zines outside of the TwoMorrows family,

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such as The Comics Journal and The Advocate, as well as some of the interviews on The Masters of the Universe DVD box sets. Through Dan Johnson, I placed some articles in Hogan’s Alley and I gave Bill Schelly a transcribing assist in his excellent biographies of Otto Binder, Joe Kubert, and Harvey Kurtzman.

In addition, I interviewed people whom I admired greatly, such as Trevor Von Eeden, Paul Kupperberg, Stephen DeStefano, Bob Rozakis, Gerry Conway, Steve Skeates, Marv Wolfman, Timothy Truman, Will Murray, Denny O’Neil, Mike Gold, Peter David, and Ty Templeton, among others. I had a hand in books about Murphy Anderson, John Romita, Sr., Sal Buscema, Herb Trimpe, Batman, The Justice League of America, and one of my most enjoyable interviews, a round-robin discussion between the late Curt Swan’s inkers in The Krypton Companion.

As if that wasn’t enough, I received a sweet note from Jenette Kahn, thanking me for my work on her interview, and a handshake from Carmine Infantino for transcribing his lengthy discussion with Jim Amash. And I finally got to meet Trevor Von Eeden in person in 2018, at a convention in Southern Illinois.

He was my first real interview for Back Issue, and it’s a favorite piece (and his too, he continually told me). I’m pleased to say we stayed connected over the years, much to my delight.

Heck, I even reconnected with David

Brian K. Morris: An Ear to the Grindstone

Anthony Kraft, who remembered my non-application to Comics Interview.

Things were going well for this side-gig as I worked nine-to-five during the day.

Then a whole bunch of things happened … in early 2012, I lost my office job. It seemed the publicly-traded company I worked for didn’t make as high a profit as expected. So, to look better for the stockholders, 26 people in Illinois were dropped from the employment roster. I happened to be one of them. However, I received a generous severance package and a membership with a re-employment agency. Through them, I learned about self-publishing.

I turned to writing prose and my first book was published through Kindle Worlds, a division of Amazon. Bloodshot: The Coldest Warrior (based on the Valiant Comics character) premiered as the site’s #2 Hot Book of the Month and was a pretty solid seller until Amazon cancelled the program earlier this year.

This led to other books of my own creation, such as Santastein, a parody of the Mary Shelley novel, and Vulcana: Rebirth of the Champion, among others. As I type this, I’m writing the sequel to the latter.

Around that time, I noticed my hearing range had diminished dramatically.

Some words became harder to discern in the audio files as certain sound frequencies no longer registered clearly, thus slowing me down as I tried to discern the conversations. So, rather than make TwoMorrows and my other clients wait on me, I decided to bow out of transcribing. I trained Sean Dulaney to take my place and the last transcript I did was the Roy Thomas interview in Alter Ego #136.

Meanwhile, I published more works under my new publishing business, Freelance Words, which became Rising Tide Publications in 2016. And because of the contacts I’d made not only at TwoMorrows, but in my new field of choice, I found myself in demand as a short story writer, convention guest, and public speaker. My side job became my main vocation and it’s been amazing, even after a major relocation from my native Illinois to central Indiana.

My time spent with TwoMorrows

meant I could call upon some of my pro-level friends for permission to exploit their good names. My 2016 novel, The Original Skyman Battles the Master of Steam, featured a foreword by Roy Thomas, whose compliments touched me greatly. Ty Templeton was gracious enough to draw one of the variant covers for my first comic book release, The Ghostly Tales of Spencer Spook. And along the way, I’ve discovered again and again the truth of the adage “The bigger they are, the nicer they are.”

(Also, it wasn’t too bad for the ego to walk into my local comic shop and have the man behind the counter ask me if I was the same Brian K. Morris who worked for TwoMorrows!)

While I’m quasi-retired from transcribing, I still do some retyping of old articles for Roy Thomas as well as pitch the occasional article or two. I intend to never close the door on the company, and the people, who have been so good to me for a decade-and-a-half.

I’ll always be grateful to John Morrow and everyone associated with TwoMorrows. For 15 years, I got to hear the sections of the interview that never made it to the printed page. I also got to count some of the coolest bunch of professionals and comics aficionados as colleagues and, best of all, my friends.

Top: Brian’s earliest writing work, from Back Issue #6.

Above: Brian with Roy Thomas, for whom he’s done numerous transcriptions. A tip of the fez to all our hard working transcribers; we wouldn’t be here without you!

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THE PICTURE-PERFECT WORK OF KENDALL WHITEHOUSE Much of the magic of comics lies in the worlds they create. The vibrant New York City as rendered by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, the dark alleys of Batman’s Gotham City, and the sunlit fields of Superman’s Smallville, the soaring megalopolis of Russ Manning’s North Am, all are fully-formed worlds to be explored within comics and graphic novels.

As rich as these worlds are, they’re merely the final product of an oftentortuous series of events that went into their creation. They are the visible surface of a deeper world beneath.

TwoMorrows’ publications are guides to that seldom seen realm.

Stories begin as ideas in the minds of their creators. Preliminary sketches give visual form to those ideas. Discussions between writers, artists, and editors further shape narratives. Sometimes stories are completed but, for various reasons, are never printed.

This is the world revealed by TwoMorrows Publishing. Magazines such as The Jack Kirby Collector, Alter Ego, Back Issue, and Comic Book Creator tell the stories behind the stories of the comics. It’s an intricate world of successes and failures, of big ideas and minute details.

By revealing this history, TwoMorrows documents both the craftsmanship and the human drama behind the comics.

We can see the artistry of their creation, savor the hidden meaning of details we may have glossed over, and see how the stories reflect the life experiences of their creators.

The tragic death of Jerry Siegel’s father when he was a boy sheds light on Superman’s drive to protect the innocent. The Thing’s squabbles with the Yancy Street gang take on additional resonance when we know about Jack Kirby’s youth. The rigid moral convictions of Steve Ditko’s The Question and Mr. A (along with Alan Moore’s Rorschach) are seen more clearly in the light of Ditko’s Objectivist philosophy.

Literary critics may claim the author’s intent has no relevance to the analysis

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of an artistic work—and, indeed, any Woman stories of the mid-1940s and creative work must stand never received a published on its own without requircredit. For two-and-a-half ing external knowledge decades, TwoMorrows Kendall to appreciate. Yet, for has led the charge to Whitehouse both fans and scholars, balance the ledger of Photographer, there is much to gain history.

Comic Book from understanding the And, yes, there’s also Creator origin of creative works. a bit of nostalgia in The backdrop of comic Born: 1953 older comics, suffused books is more than with the joy of reliving Residence: Doylesville, Pennsylvania biographical, of course. the tales that thrilled us when They also arise out of we were young. The perVocation: the social and political sonal and historical context Journalist/Photographer character of their times. provided by TwoMorrows’ Favorite Creators: Works like TwoMorrows’ publications lets fans revisit Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and seminal American Comic Steve Ditko these works with a deeper Book Chronicles provide understanding of their origins Seminal Comic Books: a sweeping history of and artistic relevance.

Ditko/Lee’s Amazing the medium set against As for myself (about which Spider-Man the historical and cultural my editor insists I say a few landscape. words), I’m elated to have The flourishing of super-heroes been able to contribute to Comic Book during the Second World War, the rise Creator and other TwoMorrows’ publiof new genres in the post-war era, the cations in some small way, primarily by hostile response of the public and the supplying photos of the men and womgovernment to comics in the miden who work in the medium we love.

1950s, the shift in distribution from With so many of the seminal comics newsstands to comics shops begincreators no longer with us, I’m thrilled ning in the 1970s, the modern era of to have had the opportunity to capture cross-media productions controlled by many of the artists, writers, and editors large corporate conglomerates—all at comic-cons and various public aphave echoes in the stories told in the pearances, and to have a platform like comics produced during these periods.

TwoMorrows Publishing to make them In viewing comics through the lens of available to a larger audience. history, TwoMorrows’ publications often One final note: TwoMorrows has the reveal long-hidden narratives. The com- best distribution model in publishing, ics industry has an unfortunate record offering printed copies at a reasonable of creators who worked anonymously, price or unlocked, DRM-free digital from “ghost” artists whose work was editions at half-price. If you opt for published under the name of someone the printed copy, the digital version is else to writers who never received cred- included (and instantly available online) it for the stories they authored. at no additional charge. One hopes this TwoMorrows’ books and magazines is the future of print/digital publishing. delve into this largely ignored history The biographical, sociological, and to bring to light the achievements of historical underpinnings of comics can these creators. be complex and obscure, but they let To highlight but one example, a the reader enter the fascinating world recent issue of Alter Ego included an behind the stories in comic books and in-depth interview and career retrographic novels. For a quarter century, spective of 94-year-old Joye Murchison TwoMorrows Publishing has been the Kelly, who wrote many of the Wonder gateway into that universe.

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2012: AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES

Creating Chronicles with Keith Dallas I don’t think I ever told John Morrow that my first experience with TwoMorrows Publishing wasn’t an issue of The Kirby Collector or Comic Book Artist or Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego or even Michael Eury’s Back Issue. It was The Legion Companion. In 2003 my lifelong appreciation of comic books had led me to writing news articles and reviews for SilverBulletComicBooks.com (later renamed Comics­ Bulletin.com). As such, I was always on the lookout for new comic-related books to spotlight, and Glen Cadigan’s comprehensive history of my secondfavorite DC property perfectly fit the bill. Over the long term, my purchase of The Legion Companion altered the course of my writing career. In the short term, though, it was a book I couldn’t put down. As if the interviews with such fabled Legion creators as Paul Levitz, Keith Giffen, Dave Cockrum, Mike Grell, and Jim Shooter weren’t engrossing in and of themselves, the volume was also a visual feast: page after page after page of Legion-related artwork, including dozens of never-before-seen private commissions. Long before I finished reading The

Keith Dallas: American Comic Book Chronicles

Legion Companion, I came to a near-fanatical Keith Dallas determination: I was going to produce a similar volSeries editor, The ume about my favorite DC property: the super-hero American Comic I had adored since childhood, The Flash. For the Book Chronicles record, I have no “favorite Flash.” It doesn’t matter to me if the hero running across the page is Jay or Born: 1969 Barry or Wally or Bart or even that John Fox guy. I Residence: just love the concept of “the Fastest Man Alive.”

Sound Beach, (Truth be told, the reason why I love the concept so New York much is because running was the one athletic acVocation: College tivity I excelled at when I was an awkwardly skinny Professor kid. The Flash reassured me that “strength” wasn’t Favorite Creators: just measured in the size of one’s muscles.) So if Keith Giffen, Carmine there was a book that I was meant to write, The Infantino, John Byrne, Flash Companion was it, but my problem in 2003 and Alan Moore was that I didn’t really have the résumé to convince Seminal Comic Book: John Morrow (or any publisher for that matter) to Watchmen #1 trust me with a book-length project. At the same Publisher John Morrow time, I knew I would be forever kicking myself if I had long wanted to prodidn’t at least throw my hat into the ring. So I spent duce a complete overview the next three years continuing to write, refining of comics history. So, when my Flash Companion pitch, and crossing my fingers Keith Dallas pitches a that John Morrow didn’t tap someone else to write 1980s history book to him, the book in the meantime. it seems like the person Finally, in 2006, I felt it was time. I hadn’t seen to tackle such a herculean any TwoMorrows press release promoting the task had been found. impending publication of a Flash Companion, but I knew I couldn’t risk waiting any longer. By way of introduction, I emailed John a detailed Flash Companion outline. As expected, John wanted to know how many other books I had authored. I admitted that this would be my first, but to prove to him my ability to handle the project, I directed him to all the articles I had written and all the interviews I had conducted up to this point. If they weren’t enough to convince John that I was his man, then it just wasn’t meant to be. A week later, John responded.

He was impressed enough with my work that he gave me the green light to get started. (Interestingly enough, I soon learned that Michael Eury already had designs on producing a Flash Companion for TwoMorrows but he was too busy handling other tasks at the time, so he graciously relinquished the The American Comic project to me.)

Book Chronicles First Volume: 11/1/2012 Nothing quite beats the elation one gets when

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a publisher accepts a pitch. What quickly followed my elation, however, was the dread realization that I now had a lot of work to do—too much for me to accomplish by myself in one year, the deadline that John had set for me. So I reached out for help.

I started with writers I had worked with at SilverBulletComicBooks.com: Jim Beard, Jim Kingman, Christopher Power, and Jason Sacks. Chris Irving then gave me permission to reprint his interview with Harry Lampert. Andy Mangels provided me with a CD-ROM library of Flash materials and research. My pal Bill Walko volunteered to design the book, and to my great delight one of my best friends, Don Kramer, took a break from penciling Detective Comics to draw the Flash Companion cover (colored by the extraordinary Moose Baumann).

My roster of contributors was being filled out, and as I began attaching writers to specific assignments, Jim Beard asked me, “Have you contacted John Wells?” John and I had never met or interacted online, but I certainly knew of him. Put more accurately, I knew of John’s reputation as one of the foremost experts on DC Comics. As it turned out, this wasn’t true. John isn’t just an expert on DC Comics. He’s an expert on all comic book subject matters. (Don’t ask him, though; he’s too humble to admit the truth.) In his uniquely polite way, John responded to my request for help by agreeing to pitch in as best he could, given his burdensome workload. “As best he could” ended up being a half dozen articles, a series of interviews with Mark Waid, and a bunch of wonderfully tongue-in-cheek Rogues profiles.

By the time production on the Flash Companion wrapped up, I

Above: Keith in 1979 with his Nana. Love that Curt Swan-drawn Superman shirt!

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was forever grateful for John’s involvement. Besides his individual contributions, his fact-checking and feedback of everything within the volume proved invaluable. Not long after John began to help me, I vowed to include him in any future TwoMorrows project I could convince John Morrow to publish, and not just because John Wells is tremendously knowledgeable. He is also one of the kindest, most accommodating, friendliest, most genuine people on the face of the Earth. He’s the kind of person who restores your faith in the human race. In short, he became my very good friend, and the only time I feel bad being John’s friend is when I realize that I’ll never come close to doing for him what he does for me. I’ll always be in his debt.

I didn’t have to wait long to fulfill my vow to John Wells. Soon after The Flash Companion was published in 2008, John Morrow called me to congratulate me on a job well done. The book was selling very well, so he wanted to know what I wanted to do next. After we batted around a few ideas, John let me know that TwoMorrows’ Companion line was winding down because the licensing fees were too prohibitive. So I proposed a book that documented the comic book industry during the decade in which I grew up: the 1980s. I didn’t want to focus just on “the Big Two” (i.e. DC and Marvel) but also on all those groundbreaking independent publishers that catered to the budding Direct Market: Capital, Comico, Eclipse, Dark Horse, First, Pacific, etc.

I envisioned a book that unfolded chronologically (i.e. year-byyear), so readers could experience how the decade progressed as it happened. They could then see which trends came and went, which creators rose to superstardom, and ultimately, how the whole industry transitioned from the newsstand to the specialty comic shops.

John Morrow loved the idea, but he didn’t want to publish a single volume on the 1980s; he wanted to release a series of volumes that covered the entirety of comic book history, from the 1930s to the present day. I told him that I only had the time to write the 1980s volume but I knew who to contact to write the volumes covering the other decades, and I would gladly serve as the series’ editor-in-chief, responsible for managing the other authors and making sure all the volumes were aligned in approach and style. Thus was born the American Comic Book Chronicles series, and little did I realize in late 2008 that this series would consume my life for the next eleven years (and counting). It’s fair to say that neither John Morrow nor I really knew what we were getting ourselves into when we came up with this idea. As every ACBC author has learned (the hard way, unfortunately), each volume requires a lot of work, far more work than anyone

The World of TwoMorrows

KURT MITCHELL: IT’S ALL TWOMORROWS’ FAULT! Back in 1994, working as a methodologies analyst for the Washington State Employment Security Department, I had put my days as a comic book fan behind me. I was a grown-up now. I even wore a suit and tie. I’d given up on comics eight years earlier, unhappy with the darker direction Marvel and DC had taken their super-hero universes. I’d even gone as far as selling off a big chunk of my collection, and what remained sat boxed up in the back of a closet, protected but ignored. Then two co-workers bought a comic book store and invited me to pick something from their inventory as their gift to me. I chose Jerry Ordway’s Power of Shazam graphic novel, took it home, devoured it, and, just like that, I was hooked again.

Over the next four years, I bought all kinds of goodies (Sandman Mystery Theatre, Starman, Ostrander and Mandrake’s Spectre and Martian Manhunter, Busiek and Pérez’s Avengers, and the DC animated titles, to name a few) but as much as I enjoyed them, something had changed, not about the comics, but about me. The passion I’d once felt had cooled. I just didn’t care the way I used to. I wanted something more.

And then one day someone gave me a copy of The Jack Kirby Collector. I was impressed. Here was a “fanzine” as polished and professional as any mainstream magazine, one that celebrated the past without wallowing in nostalgia, respectful without being reverential, critical without being caustic. I meant to keep buying TJKC, but life got in the way. I moved to Burbank for a short time and, while there, I picked up a new magazine from this TwoMorrows outfit called Comic Book Artist. This time I made a point of tracking down each new issue, which I read from cover to cover. When Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego spun off into its own mag, I started buying that too. Both titles jump-started my long-dormant interest in the history of comics, an interest that had begun with the two-volume Steranko History of Comics and continued through The World Encyclopedia of Comics, Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes,

Keith Dallas: American Comic Book Chronicles

and random issues of The Comics Journal, Dave Kraft’s Comics Interview, and similar fanzines before I’d reached burn-out. Now, for the first time since I walked away from comic books in ‘86, something clicked.

Flash-forward to 2006 and that year’s Emerald City Comic-Con in Seattle.

I was thoroughly enmeshed in comic book fandom by this point, a regular presence at Jonah Weiland’s Comic Book Resources (before it converted to its current all-clickbait/all-the-time format), I’d attended several ComicCon Internationals, I’d had letters printed in both CBA and TJKC, and I’d even pitched a pet project of mine, a ridiculously detailed history of DC’s Earth-Two, to John Morrow and Jon B. Cooke. They hadn’t been interested, but I’d kept working on it anyway. Now here I was, standing in line to meet Roy Thomas and have him autograph a few treasured comics while my friend Rob Allen good-naturedly nagged me to mention my Earth-Two project to Roy. I did, somewhat reluctantly, and, to my great surprise, Roy expressed enough interest to have me send him a copy of my work-in-progress.

A few weeks later, I got an email from Roy, impressed by what I’d done, enough so to ask me to help with his All-Star Companion book series. It went well and he credited me as a “special contributor.” There was talk of TwoMorrows following the All-Star series with a stand-alone Earth-Two Companion, one depending heavily on my work.

When that fell through, Roy decided to run what we had in a couple of issues of A/E. In an editorial, he referred to me as “comic book historian Kurt Mitchell.”

That was it. That was the moment when I finally realized I’d found my calling. Because if Roy freakin’ Thomas says I’m a comic book historian then, by God, I must be a comic book historian!

I continued to contribute to A/E over the next few years, writing about the first ten years of The Avengers and about the Golden and Silver Age histories of The Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman. That last assignment

led to Roy Kurt Mitchell suggesting I Author, collaborate American Comic on the 1940s Book Chronicles volumes of Born: 1958 The American Residence: Comic Book Tacoma, Washington Chronicles, a Vocation: series I had Freelance writer been admiring from afar.

Favorite Creator: And when Walt Kelly his other Seminal Comic Book: commitments Amazing Spider-Man forced Roy off Annual #1 the project, he recommended that I fly solo and John Morrow agreed.

That vote of confidence changed my life. For the next three years, I immersed myself in the Golden Age of Comics, expanding my knowledge of the era and gaining a new appreciation of such geniuses of the medium as Will Eisner, Walt Kelly, Jack Kirby, Charles Biro, and George Carlson. I have never worked harder in my life (and, believe me, sometimes it was a slog) and although health issues ultimately dictated that I step down from authoring the second 1940s volume, I am still immensely proud of what I accomplished.

And I am proud and honored to be a part of the TwoMorrows family. In the last 25 years, John and Pam Morrow have turned their little kitchen-table operation into a major player in the burgeoning field of comic book history.

Their line of magazines and books— and, boy, do they publish great mags and books—are monuments to the Morrows’ dedication to quality, accuracy, illumination, and entertainment.

Every person who loves the medium of comic books and the men and women who create them owes an unpayable debt to John and Pam. It is a wonderful legacy they are leaving to future generations, a legacy that will hopefully continue to flourish in the years ahead.

Congratulation on 25 years as the best damn publishers in the field.

I can’t wait to see what you two come up with next!

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could have anticipated, because the challenge of the project is twofold. First, each volume has to be comprehensive. It’s impossible for a 280-page book to be “exhaustive” in its coverage of the comic book industry (for any decade), but each volume must have a broad scope. That means considerable research, not only of the primary sources (the comic books themselves) but of secondary sources as well (i.e. creator interviews and informative articles from such magazines as Alter Ego and Back Issue). The second challenge is taking all of this material and shaping it into something that reads like a history novel. I must confess that I cringe every time I see a reviewer or blogger describe American Comic Book Chronicles as an “encyclopedia.” I don’t know the last time these people actually looked at an encyclopedia, but ACBC doesn’t resemble anything like it. A more appropriate descriptor for the series is “narrative.” American Comic Book Chronicles narrates the history of comic books one decade at a time, and, as everyone associated with the series can tell you, narrating a story in an entertaining way can be just as arduous as making sure the information within the story is accurate and correct.

When I look back at the original ACBC schedule that John Morrow and I had laid out, I can’t help but wince (or chuckle in an uncomfortably nervous way). As confirmed by the final page of the first printing of the 1960-1964 volume (for those of you lucky enough to have it), all the volumes were supposed to be released by the end of 2014. Newsflash: it didn’t work out that way. This was partly because, again, we underestimated the amount of work each volume necessitated, but we also found ourselves constantly shuffling our line-up of authors. Besides me being attached to the 1980s volume, we originally had Roy Thomas handling the 1940s, Bill Schelly assigned to the 1950s, John Wells helming the 1960s, Jim Beard the 1970s, and Tim Callahan the 1990s. Before long, though, I needed help finishing the 1980s volume. Once again, I called out for help, and this time, I was aided by not only Jim Beard and Jason Sacks, but also Dave Dykema and Paul Brian McCoy. Soon after the publication of the 1980s volume, Jim had to bow out of writing the 1970s book, leaving me, Jason, and Dave to complete it.

Once we did, Jason and I then had to tackle the 1990s volume

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which had been vacated by an apologetic Tim. Roy Thomas also proved too busy to compose the 1940s volumes so he tapped Kurt F. Mitchell to take his place. Kurt submitted brilliant work… but then politely asked off the second 1940s volume which forced me and John Morrow to approach Bill Schelly, whose work on the 1950s volume earned him a Harvey Award nomination. Much to our relief, Bill agreed to write the 1945-1949 volume. Sadly, Bill passed away just after finishing his rough draft of the book, but Kurt is jumping back on board to complete it.

Add to the stress of these line-up changes the daily tasks associated with this series, which include triple-checking facts, resolving discrepancies and differences in creator testimonies (i.e. figuring out who to believe in a “he said, he said” conflict), polishing prose, and amassing the hundreds of images to be used in each volume. I recently told John Morrow that I was a very healthy man before I started working on American Comic Book Chronicles, but over the course of the last eleven years, I had two knee surgeries, have been hospitalized for kidney stones and pulmonary embolism, and according to my latest physical, I can give anyone a run for their money in a high blood pressure contest.

I’ve lost countless hours of sleep fretting over this series, but if John Morrow asked me tomorrow to do it all over again, I would do so without a moment’s hesitation. In the end, American Comic Book Chronicles is worth all the labor, all the stress, and all the headaches because it represents a unique (and special) collaboration. Every volume is the product of the considerable efforts of several people. The achievement of ACBC involves not just the authors themselves, but also people like Bill Walko and David Paul Greenawalt, who beautifully designed each volume.

It involves various comic book creators and executives who graciously allowed us to document their insight and experiences.

And it involves the work of other comic book historians, like Jon B. Cooke, John Jackson Miller, and Mike Tiefenbacher, among many others, whose important research informed our project. In many ways, American Comic Book Chronicles is an acknowledgment, a celebration, and an attempt to continue the comic book history scholarship that came before it. A perusal of ACBC’s Works Cited sections shows the multitude of texts, interviews, and articles that were consulted for each volume.

Because of all the people who have been involved with American Comic Book Chronicles, I am very proud of what we accomplished. The person I involved the most, the person I kept leaning on year after year, and volume after volume, was John Wells. In addition to producing both 1960s volumes, John also helped me fact-check every volume, provided many of the images appearing in the books, and at my behest even wrote sections for volumes that he technically wasn’t authoring. (See what I mean about always being in his debt?) As we worked on ACBC, I kept trying to think of a different TwoMorrows project John and I could collaborate on. I finally thought of one in 2014 as I wrote the 1978 chapter for ACBC. As I composed the section on the DC Explosion/Implosion, I realized I was only scratching the surface of one of the most infamous events in comic book history.

The World of TwoMorrows

Even though I had accessed so much information, ACBC space restrictions didn’t allow me to explore the event in depth. When I saw that some of my research included articles John Wells had previously written, the proverbial light bulb went off in my head. A book that comprehensively explored the DC Explosion/Implosion (its origins, its unfolding, and its impact) would be right in our wheelhouse.

John agreed, but he refused to commit to the project, solely because he was inundated with work.

I’ve heard that line before, and little did John know that over the years I’ve sharpened my ability to rope him into projects that he didn’t have the time to get involved in. I didn’t revisit the idea until late 2017 when I reminded John of the impending fortieth anniversary of the DC Explosion/Implosion. If we were going to pitch a book about the event to John Morrow, it was then or never, and I made clear that I could only do the book if he co-authored it.

Never underestimate the power of a guilt trip because soon thereafter, John and I officially pitched Comic Book Implosion to John Morrow.

If I remember correctly, our esteemed publisher accepted our pitch not just because of its subject matter, but also because of our unique format for the book. I wanted to take a break from the kind of narrative presented in American Comic Book Chronicles, so we told John Morrow that Comic Book Implosion would instead present a plethora of oral testimonies from the comic book executives,

editors, writers, artists, journalists, and even fans who experienced the DC Explosion/Implosion as it happened, threaded together in chronological order.

Supplemented with lists and descriptive entries, the book would be deliberately scant of editorial commentary in order to allow readers to come to their own conclusions about the event.

As John Wells and I put the book together, I felt like my TwoMorrows career had come full circle. I was once again producing a DC Comics-centric book, similar in focus (but not in format) to The Flash Companion. (Heck, if we could have gotten away with it, I would have proposed a title of The DC Implosion Companion.)

Every book has its own set of challenges and obstacles to overcome, and Comic Book Implosion was no different. Besides compiling scores of testimonies from fanzines and interviews, we also spent a lot of time figuring out how to make our “oral narrative” both coherent and entertaining.

Once you finish a book, you never know how your readers are going to react to it, but much to our relief, the majority of reviews and feedback was positive. The appreciation we received, though, still didn’t prepare us for the announcement that Comic Book Implosion was nominated for a 2019 Eisner Award for “Best Comic-Related Book.” I’ve long felt that John Wells deserved greater accolades for his knowledge and accomplishments, so for that reason, I consider it a distinct honor to share the Eisner Award nomination with him.

I also consider it a distinct honor to have contributed to TwoMorrows Publishing. I am awed by how over the course of 25 years, John Morrow parlayed his modest Jack Kirby magazine into the most distinguished line of comic book history publications ever produced. John’s vision and acumen have allowed TwoMorrows to persevere in a turbulent marketplace, and I cannot thank him enough for taking a chance in 2006 and trusting me with a book-length project when he had every right to turn me down. Here’s to John and TwoMorrows’ next 25 years!

Keith Dallas: American Comic Book Chronicles

Previous page: Keith alongside David Greenawalt, and inset is Bill Walko. They’ve designed the ACBC volumes, and it’s been an honor to work with so many talented designers like them for the last quarter century.

Inset left: Keith and John Wells’ 2018 book, Comic Book Implosion, received an Eisner Award nomination for “Best Comics-Related Book.” Above is Keith and his wife, Shannon, at the Eisner Award ceremony.

Below: Longtime fans will recognize that the inspiration for that book’s cover was a DC Comics house ad from the 1970s.

— Keith Dallas

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JASON SACKS: AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLER 1998 was a crazy year in my life.

With two young children in the house and my wife pregnant with our third, I was striving hard to get a job in the then-burgeoning computer software industry. Life was frantic, intense, and always focused on the next hour and day. Aside from all-too-rare visits with friends, I had little time to indulge in my hobbies and nostalgia.

That’s probably why Comic Book Artist #1 hit me so hard when I discovered it, after a friend casually mentioned that I might be interested in this unique magazine about ’70s DC Comics. I was already aware of The Jack Kirby Collector and owned a few scattered issues of that mag, but frankly I never loved Kirby quite as much as many of my comics-loving friends did.

As a very late Baby Boomer, I became aware of Kirby during the King’s down period—my friends and I called him “Jack the Hack”—and I could never forgive him for pushing Don McGregor off “Black Panther.” So I didn’t follow TwoMorrows closely.

But CBA? That was something different. It spotlighted the comics I cared about and the creators I remembered.

I drooled over every word in the first few issues, read and reread the Warren issue for its endlessly interesting anecdotes about the bizarre Jim Warren, and gloried in the pure, unadulterated nostalgia those magazines brought me.

It’s easy to forget today, with people (including myself) writing books and for mags like Back Issue, but at that time, older comics Jason Sacks seemed Author passé in an Born: 1966 era always pointing to Residence: the future.

Seattle area, There was Washington precious Vocation: Software little material program manager available Favorite Creator: about comics Don McGregor from “my” Seminal Comic Book: era and I had Omega the Unknown #1 an almost

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physical urge to dig into that work.

It was a revelation to find those mags, especially since CBA helped me through a crazy era of my life and helped me get more involved in comics once again.

Two­Morrows’ “Companion” series. I responded and was given two sections to write: one was on the Ross Andru/ Mike Esposito run on The Flash; the other was on Robert Kanigher’s work on the series. Both were fun historical articles which sparked in me a deeper interest exploring obscure corners of comic book history.

In fact, I enjoyed my participation so much on the project that I recruited my friend Mike Decker to write the section about John Broome, which he still feels is one of the highlights of his fan career.

It was the fulfillment of the first phase of my dream to have myself credited as writer on an actual book, and I have John and Keith to thank for that.

The Flash Companion After CBA restored my deep love for comics, I went back into reading and collecting comics as a hobby. I also reconnected with some old friends from my days writing for fanzines in the ’70s and ’80s. Among them was Clifford Meth, an endlessly enthusiastic crusader for stuff he was passionate about. (I still remember the heated debate about a story Meth wrote for the old fanzine No-Sex, which chronicled the detailed torture of Adolf Hitler.) Meth never got American Comic Book Chronicles: out of comics. In fact, he was kind of a The 1980s Big Name Fan during an era when that The TwoMorrows’ Companion line mattered, and he involved himself with ended soon after the publication of The important causes. One was to get MarFlash Companion. However, ace editor vel to pay royalties to Dave Cockrum, Dallas quickly kicked off an ambitious, co-creator of several of the new X-Men, almost unprecedented project: The who was suffering a slow and painful American Comic Book Chronicles, a decline in a dilapidated series of volumes that docVA hospital. Cliff, a true uments comic book history mitzvah, was able to get decade by decade. Keith Dave and his wife, Paty, was writing the volume on a reasonable stipend the tumultuous 1980s and from Marvel. got pretty far with that effort.

Mitzvahs are important After a few years, though, to an orthodox Jew and Keith realized how much he kind of accidentally work was really involved in performed a great one such an undertaking. In July for me. Cliff introduced 2011, shortly after the San me to Keith Dallas, Diego Comic-Con, Keith Meth’s editor at Silversent an email to me, Jim Above: Clifford Meth also BulletComicBooks.com, Beard, Paul Brian McCoy, spearheaded a benefit book for and there I began reand John Wells, asking if we comics creator William Messnerembracing my love of might help to get The AmerLoebs, which TwoMorrows published gratis in 2005. comics. Meth was proican Comic Book Chronicles: ducing weekly columns The 1980s over the finish centered on comic book history, and line. When I received Keith’s email, I while I was a mere reviewer, I had great jumped—I mean I literally jumped—for fun doing it. My relationship with Keith joy at the chance to work on this book. got me involved in a project which I quickly assembled my collection of sparked a different interest. fanzines like Amazing Heroes and The In November 2006, Keith put out Comics Journal to put together my take a feeler for writers for a book titled on 1985–86, the two chapters Keith The Flash Companion, as part of assigned me. These years include such

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fantastic stories as Crisis on Infinite Earths, Marvel’s chaotic New Universe launch (a topic I’ve revisited several times since), and the “holy trinity” of ’86: Watchmen, Maus, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Rather than rely on creator retrospectives, I instead dug deep into vintage source materials and contemporaneous news items, an approach I’ve followed throughout my work for TwoMorrows. I became fascinated by DC’s uncertainty over whether fans would embrace Watchmen, or that distributors under-ordered Dark Knight after the relative failure of Frank Miller’s Ronin.

Most of all, I came to appreciate the mostly hands-off approach Keith took, and the completely hands-off approach John Morrow took, to my chapters. I was given the space to explore ideas of interest to me and come to my own conclusions. I’ve always appreciated that from both of them. I’ve also always appreciated how professional John is about paying his authors. This was the first project I did for John for which I was paid and I am so glad my experience with John is different from what my comic-creating peers complain about from other publishers. John always pays on time and is crystal clear about profit and loss. It makes me trust him as a person—something I always feel when I see him in person as well.

ACBC: The 1970s My involvement with the ACBC ’70s book is similar to how I became attached to the ’80s book: after Jim Beard departed the 1970s book, Keith approached me and Dave Dykema and asked if we’d like to join him on the project. Boy, would I! Working on the ’80s book was one of the coolest professional experiences of my life. I was thrilled to get a chance to write about the complicated years of 1985 and ’86, so when Keith asked me to write about the ’70s, I leapt at the opportunity.

Keith and I created a new outline and reshaped the book in a way that suited his ACBC approach to providing a “biography of the comics industry during the decade.” As I wrote each chapter, I made tons of new discoveries. I think

Jason Sacks: American Comic Book Chronicler

my favorite thing to read was Dr. Fredric Wertham’s 1973 monograph, The World of Fanzines, an odd attempt by the grizzled psychologist to make up for the pain he caused with his noxious tome Seduction of the Innocent. I had fun reading his bizarrely tangled syntax and his semi-incoherent assertions about the freedom that fanzines give creative people, all couched as an attempt to earn back some trust from those who hated him. The 1970s volume was a job but it was never a slog, in part because of Keith’s good humor and focus on the deadline.

For me, this book will always be wrapped up in the win by my beloved Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLVIII. My family was living in an extended stay hotel as renovations were being made to our house. My wife would stare at my stacks of reference material, surreptitiously grabbed from our house, piled on the small kitchen table at the hotel. I’m not sure how she let me get away with this, but that small space actually helped me focus better on the book. (By the way, our new kitchen looks great!)

Out of all the TwoMorrows projects I’ve been a part of, the ’70s book might have been the most pleasant. Certain chapters of the book fell into place incredibly easily. I remember writing most of the 1979 chapter—a chapter of both despair and a chance for redemption—over a weekend and being satisfied with the results. One of the most interesting aspects of writing this book has been the different personalities with whom I got to work. Roy Thomas is a prince among men, a thoughtful and completely honest historian with an excellent memory which is always backed up by the facts. Obviously, for the ’70s book, we had to rely a lot on Roy. After all, he was the key reason Marvel acquired rights to Conan and Star Wars, perhaps the two most important comics Marvel published during that decade. Roy had every reason to pump up his ego and place himself at the center of these important stories.

But instead, just the opposite happened. Roy’s stories about Conan were clear and self-effacing, betraying still a

bit of surprise that everything somehow turned out so well. In every email and message, Roy was detailed, thoughtful and readable—a treat as a collaborator.

ACBC: The 1970s took about two years to come together—not too bad considering the amount of research and writing required for it. I wish I could say my next book came together as quickly.

ACBC: The 1990s I enjoyed working on the ACBC ’70s book so much that I asked Keith and John Morrow at the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con if I could write ACBC: The 1990s. I figured the ’90s volume couldn’t be much tougher to write than the ’70s one, right? How naïve that initial assessment proved to be. ACBC: The 1990s was a chore, a slog, a struggle at times—and maybe the most fun project I’ve ever worked on.

With the ‘90s book, I performed lots of blue sky research, connected a whole lot of historical dots, delivered my own outline, and determined the events which would flow through the decade.

I found a good amount of primary material to use: interviews with relevant creators all over the internet, and most of the important comics available at low prices at comic conventions. There were lots of magazines covering the industry during that time, a well-established fan base, and scores of people I could reach out to. Since I didn’t read too many comics during that decade, I thought I could take the subject on with fresh and unjaundiced eyes.

Oh, I was so wrong. Yes, there was a ton of material for the ’90s book, but there was almost too much, and a lot of it was contradictory. I kept running into conflicting stories about why Jim Shooter was fired from Valiant and why the Image rebels left Marvel and why so many new comics companies sprung up during that time. I struggled with finding clarity on details about the Ultraverse creators’ summit and Marvel’s bankruptcy. And though I read literally every issue of Wizard, The Comics Journal, Comics Retailer, and every other magazine from the era I could find, I was always trapped under a deep and nagging doubt that something was

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missing, that I was going to get some crucial fact wrong and not live down for the rest of my life. But what is a writer and historian to do when faced with these obstacles? Just keep writing, keep researching, and keep sharing chapters with my esteemed editor and with colleagues inside and outside the industry. By the time we wrapped the book, I’d written something like 180,000 words, scanned 3,000 images, and lost many nights and weekends thinking about things like Avengers: The Crossing, the Amalgam era of comics, and David Lapham’s amazing Stray Bullets. There was some pleasure and very little pain. Maybe I went a little bit native as I read dozens of Rob Liefeld comics, but dammit, we don’t need to see every character’s feet! From begin-

ning to end, the book took four years to put together.

I received my first print copy of ACBC: The 1990s just days before Christmas 2018, and it was the best Christmas gift I could have hoped for.

Just like he did with the ’70s book, David Greenawalt did a brilliant job with page design and layout. Every time I show off this book, the first thing people notice is how clean and slick the book appears. Their next remark is typically something like, “I forgot how much I loved that comic!” The best compliments I get from readers is when they tell me they now have a long list of comics to look for in the back issue bin.

And just as he was with all my previous projects, my editor, Keith Dallas, was a dream to work with. Keith is

an interesting editor because he has his obsessions, and most of them are focused on making sure we get the book right. I don’t know how many confusing passages he revised or how many instances of repeated words he removed for me. The number is probably incalculable, which means Keith has infinite patience. But I also value Keith’s expert insistence that we make these books read like novels, with plot threads flowing throughout each year.

Keith gave valuable guidance which made these books far better than they otherwise would have been. I’m not going to write ACBC: The 2000s, but after this fantastic experience I am going to pitch more books to John—and hope I get to work with people of the same caliber as Keith and David.

JOHN TRUMBULL: I ONLY WANTED BI TO COVER NEMESIS! Really, I just wanted to get “Nemesis” reprinted.

I’d been a fan of TwoMorrows ever since I picked up a copy of The Jack Kirby Collector #9 at my local comics shop in 1995, but honestly, it never occurred to me to write for them. I was happy just reading TJKC, Alter Ego, Comic Book Artist, Back Issue, and learning some cool bits of comic book trivia here and there.

But I really thought that Back Issue should cover Cary Burkett and Dan Spiegle’s old Brave and the Bold backup series, “Nemesis.” The series was about Tom Tresser, a gadgeteer and master of disguise taking down the criminal Council who’d murdered his mentor and framed his brother, and I’d loved it ever since I first read it in B&B #175. And, hey, maybe if Back Issue did a feature on it, DC Comics would finally reprint the whole series in trade!

I cold-pitched the idea to BI editor Michael Eury via Facebook messenger, in October 2011. I had good timing, because my idea just so happened to fit Michael’s planned theme for BI #64, “Back-Up Series of the Bronze Age.” Michael took a chance and gave a complete stranger the assignment for

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a short article on the “Dark Herald of Justice.” I don’t think he even asked me for a writing sample, the sucker.

I did my best to convey what made Nemesis so cool in 3,000 words or less.

Michael liked it, and he didn’t change much. He even ran a mock cover I did for an imaginary Nemesis #1 to illustrate the article. And I got hooked on

investigating John Trumbull and writing Writer, Back Issue about comBorn: 1972 ics history.

I’ve Residence: written 26 Parsippany, NJ articles for Vocation: Pharmacy BI since shipping associate then, totalFavorite Creators: ing 149,067 Gun to my head? words. I John Byrne became Seminal Comic Books: an adminBatman #303 and Justice istrator on League of America #195 BI’s Facebook page, interviewed dozens of comics pros I’d loved for years (even becoming friends with a few), and moderated panels at cons. I wrote a third of Back Issue #99’s coverage on Batman: The Animated Series, which I’m currently expanding into my first book. And none of it would’ve happened without Michael Eury and John Morrow. Thanks, guys… …but I still haven’t gotten that Nemesis trade, dammit.

Inset above: No, you’re not missing this issue in your collection, as, for kicks, John Trumbull set up this mock cover for a faux Nemesis #1. A man can dream, right?

The World of TwoMorrows

JOHN WELLS: AN EXPLOSION OF COMICS ENTHUSIASM This is not the sort of thing I should admit in a TwoMorrows publication, but I’ve never been a big Jack Kirby fan. I don’t dislike his work, mind you, and can’t deny his extraordinary achievements and skill, but there were many comics creators that I connected to more. Growing up in the ’70s, I glimpsed bodies in caskets, dismembered women in boxes, headless men with mouths on their stomachs, and the never-ending line of hysterical faces and concluded that this Kirby guy was the foremost horror artist in comics. I was well, and truly, creeped out. A few years later, I started flipping through back issues at the new comics shop in Ottumwa, Iowa, and couldn’t help but roll my eyes when I looked at those early 1970s copies of Jimmy Olsen and Forever People. Don Rickles? Super-hippies?

Boy, was this guy out of touch.

My opinions were tempered once I moved into adulthood. I was—and am—a huge DC Comics fan, but I’d expanded my buying habits to include Marvel at the end of the ’70s with books like Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. For one Christmas, I received a pile of Marvel’s Greatest Comics reprinting Lee and Kirby’s last years on FF and I finally got to see Jack in his prime, gracefully embellished by Joe Sinnott. I may not have been sold on the newer stuff, but I finally got a sense of what all the fuss was about.

The years passed and my DC collecting and research accelerated, leading to occasional historical articles in fanzines like Amazing Heroes, It’s A Fanzine, and especially The Comics Buyer’s Guide.

One of my more ambitious pieces for CBG had been a 1997 series called “Lost DC,” wherein I discussed stories from the ’40s through the ’70s that had never been published or were diverted to other books. The grand finale covered 1978’s DC “Implosion.”

Gearing up for the series, I was particularly alert to reports of “lost” DC stories, so I perked up when a 1995 edition of CBG mentioned a fanzine called The Jack Kirby Collector #6 teased info on Kirby’s original ending for New

Gods. I wasted little time in ordering a copy, liked what I found, and sent a check to John Morrow for a subscription.

I’ll admit that my original motivation was a desire to find more unpublished Kirby DC material. John certainly delivered, but TJKC also went a long way toward expanding my appreciation and understanding of Jack.

TJKC’s role in restoring the luster to Jack’s reputation is enough to certify TwoMorrows’ significance in and of itself, but John didn’t stop there. His additions of Jon B. Cooke’s Comic Book Artist, Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego, and Michael Eury’s Back Issue have made an incredible impact on the preservation of comic book history. Their importance can’t be understated.

By the 21st Century, my reputation as DC historian was growing. Now on the internet, I’d gained a bit of notoriety that had led to DC editor Robert Greenberger reaching out to me for input and collaboration. Meanwhile, I was writing a quarterly ‘zine called Destination Cool! and was passing along issues to Roy Thomas. Roy was taken with a piece I’d written about a variety of dollsized 1959 DC heroes who predated Ray Palmer and asked to publish “Sort of the Atom” in A/E #40. My association with TwoMorrows had begun!

It extended to Back Issue in 2006 when Michael Eury asked to use two more of my CAPA-Alpha articles. My coverage of DC’s unrealized Supergirl/ Superboy comic book (DC Double Comics) appeared in BI #17, and an abridged version of a longer Martian Manhunter history was used in BI #18.

A plethora of articles written exclusively for BI have followed in the years since.

On December 8, 2006, I received a fateful email from a gentleman named Keith Dallas. He was putting together the Flash Companion for TwoMorrows and my DC Message Board pal Jim Beard suggested me as a contributor.

Based on “JSA Jim’s” passion for the Justice Society of America, Keith assumed that I was mostly a Golden Age fan and offered me profiles of Gardner Fox and E.E. Hibbard as assignments.

John Wells: An Explosion of Comics Enthusiasm

He didn’t John Wells know me Co-Author, American very well. I Comic Book Chronicles, wasted no various volumes time in clarBorn: 1964 ifying that my knowlResidence: edge of all Batavia, Iowa things DC Vocation: Walmart spanned the Dept. Manager 1930s to the Favorite Creator: 21st Century.

Dick Moores I should Seminal Comic Book: note at this Shazam! #13 point that there are many things that my distant acquaintances don’t know about me: I don’t drive, don’t like long-distance travel, or large crowds; or social events; or making conversation.

I must build up my nerve to send an email or make a phone call. When Keith learned of my long friendship with Mark Waid (who first cold-called me in 1986 to compliment me on a CBG feature), it seemed reasonable to him that I should do a phone interview with the popular Flash writer for the Companion.

Reasonable for a normal person maybe, but not me. Instantly, my mind raced with all the things that could go wrong, up to and including the tape failing to record. The fact I still went ahead with the assignment is a credit to Mark and to Keith’s persistence. It wouldn’t be the last time.

Likewise, Roy Thomas also stepped forward to push me out of my comfort zone when he approached me in 2007 about writing a history of sword-&-sorcery in comics prior to his celebrated 1970s run on Conan the Barbarian. This was far outside my area of DC Comics expertise and, more practically, I simply didn’t have the materials to write such as article. Roy understood but offered to send me said materials from his personal collection if I changed my mind.

My resistance weakening, I mulled things over. This was Roy Thomas asking me to write an article for him and I was incredibly flattered. When he asked again in 2008, I said yes. Published in

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Alter Ego #80, “Sword and Sorcery in the Comics—Part 1” is an article that I’m still very proud of.

Meanwhile, back in my DC wheelhouse, my article-writing for Back Issue was flourishing. Michael Eury honored me by seeking my input on a variety of DC-related book projects and occasionally specifically requested that I consider covering a subject for BI. The most auspicious message in my 2009 emailbox came from Keith Dallas.

It seemed the Flash Companion had sold very well and John Morrow was amenable to getting the gang together for another project. Calling it American Comic Book Chronicles, Keith intended it to be no less than a narrative history of the U.S. comics industry from 1940 to 1999! Keith was to cover the ’80s and Jim Beard called dibs on the ’70s. They both agreed that I ought to write the ’60s volume. I said no… and quickly!

Perhaps more than my cohorts, I immediately envisioned the scale of what they were undertaking and it scared the socks off of me. Done properly, a history of American comic books required a massive amount of research, reference materials, and time… so much time.

Like the sword-&-sorcery article for Roy, this also ventured outside my comfortable DC boundaries and added another layer of stress.

So I hit up friends like Bob Greenberger and Mark Waid in hopes that someone would offer an unassailable argument against taking on the project.

Instead, I got a message from my friend Mike Tiefenbacher who essentially said this: “How many times does someone offer to publish a hardcover book with your name on it? Say yes!” So I did.

Mike—whose personal Golden Age was the 1960s—eagerly offered to be my back-up in the project and was there through the whole process with abundant info, suggestions, and corrections. For my part, I vowed that this was not going to be the usual DC/ Marvel super-hero-centric survey of that decade. For my sake as much as for the narrative, I wanted to keep engaged by learning things I hadn’t previously known and covering new ground.

Before I did anything else, I compiled a very long list of every event that hap-

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pened in the industry during the ’60s.

As I began each chapter, I poured all the pieces for each year into my Word file and began to assemble them like a jigsaw puzzle that made perfect sense when complete. Part of the fun was figuring out how to weave disparate details into a narrative and there were only a handful of “pieces” left when done.

In the process, I became a better writer, due in no small part to Keith.

The challenge of doing a narrative history with so many wildly different elements was finding a way to naturally segue from one subject to another. I got reasonably good at this as I moved forward, enough so that Keith became enamored of my transitions and started calling me out if I tried to make a cold break. He believed I could do better, and he made me believe it, too.

Early in ACBC’s existence, John Morrow made a crucial decision that helped me immeasurably. Given the significance of the ’40s and the ’60s, he concluded that each decade deserved two volumes. It was a smart move that ensured I was able to fit in everything.

Even with extra space, I still pushed my luck on the ’65-’69 volume (published in 2014), winding up about 50 pages longer than expected. By this point, Keith and I had earned John’s trust, so the book went forward without any cuts.

Back in 2012, John had been getting antsy about the progress of American Comic Book Chronicles. I was a little more than half done with ’60–64 but not really stressing since Keith’s stillin-progress ’80s volume was meant to introduce the series. I had plenty of time. When Keith sent an email that John really wanted the project to kick off before the end of the year, I did something I almost never do. I spoke up: “Um… I could have my manuscript done by this spring.” I wasn’t at all sure that anyone would go for it. ACBC was Keith’s brainchild and I didn’t want to cut in front of him. Suffice it to say that both gentlemen liked my suggestion just fine and ACBC ’60–’64 (beautifully designed by David Greenawalt) kicked off the series late in 2012.

Now fully invested, I eagerly awaited each new chapter of the other ACBC books and—with Keith’s blessing—

offered suggestions and corrections throughout. I also tended to offer unsolicited chunks of text, sometimes sending multi-paragraph blocks on a topic that hadn’t been discussed in the manuscript. I’m amazed that Keith and the other contributors didn’t kill me.

Indeed, Keith even came back to ask me about collaborating on another project: The Oral History of the DC Implosion. On the one hand, I loved the idea. As previously noted, it was a subject I was long fascinated with. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine DC letting TwoMorrows publish a book on the subject. Ah, but Keith had that covered. We’d discuss the infamous 1978 DC cutback in the larger context of the struggling ’70s comics industry and extend our coverage to other publishers.

I said yes and John signed off on the project. One tends to forget that our esteemed publisher is more than just a Kirby fan. In the course of our work, we discovered that teenage John had avidly anticipated the DC Explosion himself and even published his first fanzine— a two-page newsletter—in support of it. How can you not love someone like that?

Anticipation for 2018’s Comic Book Implosion was gratifyingly high, and Keith and I were cautiously optimistic that we had a hit on our hands.

Still, both of us were surprised at the number of unsolicited testimonials that began popping up online as the book was released.

And I certainly never imagined that we’d be nominated for an Eisner Award… but there it is. So, thanks, Keith, for continually pushing me into projects that I loved but would never have taken on of my own volition.

And thanks to John for making this extraordinary body of comic book research possible. In recent years, I’ve thought a lot about how much history would have been lost if The Jack Kirby Collector and its offspring had never existed. Tens of thousands of pages of comic book coverage, countless interviews with creators no longer with us… the loss would have been incalculable.

Thank you, John, for ensuring this wasn’t lost forever… and for letting me play a small part in helping preserve it.

The World of TwoMorrows

2013: COMIC BOOK CREATOR

CBA (Sort of) Returns: Comic Book Creator [We join John Morrow and Jon B. Cooke in mid-conversation, continuing from the Comic Book Artist interview on page 83.]

It might make you more money. It might make us more money, but it wouldn’t be a satisfying experience for us or the reader, so I don’t think we’re going back to that.

John Morrow: We built—largely through CBA— Jon: No! There’s also a new discipline. our own competition. People saw CBA and said, We have to stick to a regular page-count, “We can do our own magazine.” How many mags no deviation. cropped up between the time we started CBA JM: If we were black-&-white printing now, and now that are not around any more? Wizard’s gone—it wasn’t direct competition—CBG, Comics we could make exceptions occasionally.

Diamond wouldn’t care as long as the price Now, Comics Journal… well, the Journal’s essenwas the same. They don’t care if you give tially gone. People are a little bit jaded and more them twice as many pages. They only care used to getting the info, and also getting used to if you change the cover price or give them seeing unpublished art at Heritage Auctions—you fewer pages than you solicited. didn’t have that when CBA started. Comic Book Creator is every bit as good as CBA, and the color Jon: We can’t go to black-&-white. I don’t think the readers would stand for it. is a great addition, but people have easier access to this kind of stuff now, so it’s a little harder to sell. JM: I don’t either. It’s such a better experience in color. Comics are a colorful medium… After Jon B. Cooke: I think there’s also an audience attrition. There’s also this strange dearth of interest, coming off your great Kirby issue, CBC #1, you did though we retain a certain type of fan who likes this the Joe Kubert issue, your tribute to Joe [CBC #2].

People really responded to the heartfelt nature of history stuff, the material that stretches back. Two­ Morrows now has a quarter-century of our own his- that. They saw it as your love letter to Joe. It may not have been the most commercial choice for a tory. I think that kind of fan base is loyal but pretty small. There’s also a newer generation who expects second issue… everything for free—the “Napster effect” that hurt Jon: [Laughter] Especially making it a giant trade paperback. That was weird! us all, ultimately. With TwoMorrows, our base is JM: It was weird, but it needed to be done and we “we break even.” You’re the one who set up the don’t mind doing weird stuff here. We don’t have model and you don’t seem to expect super-sales.

You certainly welcome stellar returns, but slow and some corporate overlord that says, “You can’t do that.” You come up with a crazy idea, and I’m like, steady wins the race.

“Can I make this work financially?”

JM: It does, but at the same time, the elephant in So, the one thing that puzzles some readers with the room is we are getting older and I have to put two daughters through school, so it would be nice CBC is you’re not showing a bunch of super-heroes to have the old sales numbers we used to have for on the cover. Explain your thinking about that.

Jon: Well, I have an interest in featuring artists proCBA #1, and needing two and three printings to moting their own creator-owned stuff, if they have help make ends meet. That would be really nice. it. Did you think I had some philosophical motive?

It’s been 25 years and the recession was a tough JM: Well, we talked about it. You didn’t want to be time for us—late 2007–09. You saw it when you beholden to Marvel and DC because it is a differcame back, Jon. “Wow, these are the numbers ent world now. You wanted people to feature their now compared to 1998, 2000?” We have to set own work. We went into CBC knowing this wasn’t our expectations realistically. the most commercial work. I can’t think of a single The other thing is, when we made the shift thing over all these years that we went into for a to full-color, that set us up. It’s hard to go back.

There’s probably a business model where we could commercial reason; that’s always been a factor, because you’ve gotta make ends meet, but can you take CBC and do it in black-&-white, with a lower think of a single project you’ve done where “We’ve cover price. Would that make you more money?

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Creator

A measured return by Jon B. Cooke to TwoMorrows meant it was inevitable he’d do what he does best: a new ground-breaking magazine about comics.

Above: Renowned illustrator Drew Friedman produced this caricature of Jon B. Cooke for the CBC editor’s business card and promotion during the “Year of Weirdo” events as he toured in 2019 to support The Book of Weirdo, the cover of which Drew… ummm… drew!

Comic Book Creator First Issue: 5/6/2013

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2013: COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Above: Alex Ross’ pencil rough for the cover of Comic Book Creator #1, including a really cool—albeit unused—concept for the CBC logo.

Next page: Cooke and Morrow ham it up after Jon receives the Inkpot Award during his “Spotlight” panel at the 2019 Comic-Con International: San Diego. Photo by Kendall Whitehouse.

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got to make a boatload of money!” was the reason we’re doing it?

Jon: I knew that the Adam Hughes issue of CBA was going to do well, but it was the excitement of loving his art. He was an equal fanboy in his own way and wanted to be a part of it, and gave us such a delightful cover.

JM: Right. And we certainly didn’t mind that the issue sold great!

Jon: No, but that wasn’t the intent, as you say. It

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was because he deserved it!

JM: Same thing with CBC. Jon: I’m not the most commercial-minded fellow…

I want to make a really good reader experience.

I want the reader to have no doubt that we gave it our all, in whatever it is. If I’m entrusted by a columnist, if he gives me that material, I’m going to do the best I can do to make him look good.

If there’s one thing I’m very gratified about, my columnists have said, “Just do your typical job and I’m happy with that.” It’s an “attaboy” that I really want. Again, I never thought about things commercially. It’s instinctual; I love it all. There aren’t many people like me out there who love it all, but I do! I am as enthusiastic about Mary Fleener’s work as I am Alex Ross’. That’s just how I am.

JM: I am so glad we got Swampmen out, making it part of CBC. That’s a clever little twist I came up with for Kirby Five-Oh! and Alter Ego: Centennial.

When we want to do some special thing like that, we make it a regular issue of the magazine, but we also consider it a book, as well. We’re getting two possible distribution avenues. That is a commercial consideration that we take on. We’ve got a built-in audience for it. The subscribers get it, so you’ve sold that many copies up front, so that is a commercial consideration, Jon. We could have done Swampmen as just a book, but it really fit the venue of CBC, so considering it the sixth issue, I thought it was a great fit.

Jon: I have always wanted to do a regular summer annual, and it’s the closest we got, which is okay by me. We did have that fantastic Frank Cho cover.

The unfinished Swampmen was a sore point for a period when I just bagged out delivering it in the ’00s, but I was able to score some redemption by getting it done and it’s a good issue. And you’re right: it’s not an issue, it’s a book, and it’s about to sell out.

There are ideas I have about ’70s comics… when I saw the American Comic Book Chronicles, I had a burrowed frow… or a furrowed brow [chuckles]; this is a subject area I wanted to go into, and I will, in my own way. “Keep ye eyes peeled,” as I say.

2015 2014 The World of TwoMorrows

JM: I view the Chronicles books as sort of a roadmap. You can take any one of these chapters and find 20 or 30 ideas for standalone books. I don’t view them in any way circumventing doing books on those specific topics.

Jon: Oh no, me neither. I want to focus on some sub-genres, so I can go to my grave saying, “Well, I did it!” Does the world really need a KungFu book? Probably not, but I can do a helluva good one, you bet!

JM: Did they need a book on swamp monsters? Apparently they did!

Jon: Well, yes, because of the work of Alan Moore! [chuckles] Transcendent…

JM: There was a lot of great talent that did kung-fu books, too.

And barbarian books.

Jon: Not at that level.

JM: Now, a Harvey book… that’s one I wanted to do, but it didn’t happen. Your Harvey issue of CBA did okay, but there are some things that aren’t commercial enough in today’s marketplace, and as much as we want to do them, we can’t.

Jon: Yeah. As much as I want to do…

JM: Your Wrightson issue, CBC #7, right? I seriously expected way better sales on that than we got, and I think you did too. It’s a great issue and there’s no reason it shouldn’t have sold better, other than attrition, or just, “Oh, I can look up Bernie Wrightson stuff online anytime I want.”

Jon: But it sold out! And I think that’s a testament to that. It was a very good interview. I spent three days with Bernie and we just ran the tape recorder the entire period of time. Remember, a big chunk of that went into Swampmen—a big chunk. So, we were able to get two projects out of that one trip. There’s life yet, my

people, for a new presentation because that issue is sold out. I have to say, just to bring it up—there was a path of redemption with a number of interviews I had done. I went out to California and interviewed Howard Chaykin, Bernie, Sergio Aragonés… I went to Len Wein’s house (which later burned down) to do a chunk of Swampmen.

If I can explain the gap that took place: the issues were raising my three boys and the Recession, where I had to scramble to get regular work. I didn’t really have time to work on comics stuff, but I was also depressed. So, yes, I was discouraged—personally, I had to find my own way back—and I did! I got “right-sized,” put my ego where it belonged, and offered my services to an old buddy. And it was Kirby that brought me back!

JM: It’s always Kirby, right? Everything ties back in.

Jon: I periodically will whine to my publisher that, “I don’t know if I want to do it anymore.” And then, you say, “Well, come up with some covers for the next few issues and some for down the line because we can’t give up yet; we have subscribers.” So, I get recharged. I have a P. Craig Russell issue coming up, and I’m excited about that. There’s life in them old bones yet. Here’s news for you all: the Barry Windsor-Smith issue is coming!

JM: That’s what I don’t think readers understand about a magazine like CBC or a book like Kirby100. Every single time we do one of these things, it’s a total risk, because there’s a very low profit margin, and it can end up losing TwoMorrows money.

I’ve seen people scratching their heads, thinking, “How in the world do they break even on these things, much less make a profit?” It’s a tricky, precarious balance, as you guys—as contributors—learn. A lot of it comes down to being willing to put in a

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2017 Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Creator

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2013: COMIC BOOK CREATOR boatload of hours and never sit down and figure out, “Okay, if I actually figure out how many hours I spent on the Kirby100 book and then compare it to what I made per hour, it’s like Third World wages!” [chuckles] It is, so you can’t ever do that calculation or you’ll get really, really depressed.

You gotta first and foremost love this stuff and want to see it produced. Okay, if I can facilitate that so you can at least get something out of this deal and we can too, it all works out. I think other people have gone into this thinking, “Oh, this is publishing—I can make a whole lot of money.” Maybe it’s true for genres other than comics history. We have a very realistic idea of what a “hit” is at TwoMorrows, and you just have to gauge your expectations appropriately. If you do, and you’re in it for the right reasons, it all works out. That’s what CBC’s been.

When you turn in a beautiful issue, like that Mark Schultz issue, this is what it’s all about. This is gorgeous; this is one I, as a reader, am going to the store to buy. I’ll sit down and read it cover-to-cover because it’s too much fun. You still do great work; you always do great work, Jon, and you’ll keep doing great work as long as you’re physically and financially capable of it.

Jon: Thank you very much. It opens up doors. On its own, one can’t make a living from it. But we also do books and different projects, this and that, and we mix it up, but just to do a magazine would be tough to eek out a living, and one’s gotta keep financial expectations low and just really enjoy the work that you’re doing, or else you’ll be doomed. That’s why 90 to 95% of people who get into this business don’t last! They don’t have the enthusiasm for it and they think they’re going to make steady money. You just don’t know! As long as you can combine it with either some practical work or have so many different irons in the fire… right now, in my life, I have so many irons in the fire!

JM: You said something else, something very important—you said the word “enthusiasm.” So many people do an issue and say, “Wow, that was great!” “Wait a minute, I have to do another one?” They burn themselves out too soon. You’ve maintained your enthusiasm for comics from the moment we hooked up with The Jack Kirby Collector all through CBA; by the 25th issue of CBA, you never lost your enthusiasm. You had a fire in your belly over at Top Shelf when you did those issues, and coming back to do CBC, you still have that fire. That’s the thing; you’re one of those rare people who can maintain your enthusiasm over two decades—to keep cranking out great stuff that you care about and the readers care about. So many publications in the past have bright spots and then they just coast along. I don’t see that

with CBC. Every issue is remarkable in its own way.

Jon: Yeah, and you know the grind can get to you… it certainly can get to me. But never for long. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a pile of CBCs I hadn’t looked through since getting printed copies, issues I had avoided looking at because some of it made me cringe because I could have done better. But this time, I sat there and had that paternal type of pride coming over me. “You know, that’s not so bad!” It’s funny, I’ve emotionalized this stuff in the past. “Oh God, I’m really stressed about Carmine Infantino threatening to sue me!” I used to let it eat at me. But now I’m old and think, “So what?” Now it’s all about creating the best experience for the reader that I can.

JM: Do you look at old issues? If you pulled out CBC #3 right now, would you remember working on everything in that one?

Jon: I’d say most of it, yes. It depends. Everything is kind of different. I do get into a routine. Say I’m working on Michael Aushenker’s material, or that of pretty much all my contributors: I make sure they see a PDF of their section before it goes to press, out of respect, and also because they might find something terribly wrong. Also, it’s not a job; it’s a career. It’s funny. It’s a different thing. It’s extremely creative. Even though I’m not creating anything per se, I’m dealing with creative things. In a sense, I’m being creative. It’s like what you do. You have to come up with themes for these books and you have to make it work.

JM: Honestly, the theme thing is a kick in the pants to get it moving, rather than, “Oh, I have to do another Kirby Collector—I have to throw a bunch of Kirby stuff together.” That theme gives me a starting point. What’s that story about Mort Meskin, that he had horrible artist’s block and couldn’t start a page? Jack Kirby would walk over and draw a bunch of nonsensical lines on the page, just to get him started. They weren’t even anything, but that little kickstart was all Mort needed to sit down and draw his beautiful, beautiful pages. It’s the same kind of thing with the theme for me. But, when I finish an issue, I’m so glad it’s over, that I go on a two-week break and don’t want to hear the words “Jack Kirby.” When I pull out an issue from a year or two ago, maybe it’s my addled brain or age, but I’m like, “Wow! Did I do this?” Yeah, I vaguely remember it, but it’s like someone else did it for me and I’m looking at it fresh like a reader, which is really exciting! The same thing happens when you send me an issue of CBC. Okay, I knew you were going to do an issue on Mark Schultz and I knew so-and-so was also going to be in it, and I figured you’d have Kendall Whitehouse photos, but I didn’t know which photos there would be and no idea what the interview’s about

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The World of TwoMorrows

for the person that’s covered. Seeing an issue of CBC all put together, I’m a kid at a comic store, “Woo! Here’s my ten dollars! Let me buy that thing.” That’s what’s so fun about working with all you guys—seeing the final product when it comes in. Realistically, I have regular—but minimal—input about what you include in an issue.

Jon: I have to argue that. There’s one thing I want to say before we’re done. I have the exact opposite of that: When I finish an issue, nowadays I’m so revved up! Often, I will jump on the next one and also start planning my next batch of issues. You and I do debate over the subjects in upcoming issues of CBC and it’s a nice process. “Don’t go too far, Jon.” But, weird as this sounds, after 20-plus years, I’m finally in a real groove in this process. I just hope I can find the energy to go bi-monthly…

JM: I have “spiritual input,” if you want to put it that way. I do have involvement in that regard. But there’s a difference between you and me being at a convention and saying, “Okay, we need to do a Kirby Collector, but for all the other artists.” That’s great; that’s my input there—then you create this beautiful, finished product that I’m blown away by. It’s so far beyond what my limited imagination thought it would be…That’s the beauty of working with somebody like you. Whatever I think you’re going to deliver, you always deliver more. I’m not trying to suck up here and deliver faint praise. You have never ceased to surprise me with what you deliver and I don’t think you’ve ever delivered a product I was disappointed in: “Oh, I was expecting so much more.” It’s always the exact opposite.

Jon: Okay, let’s just stop here! Thanks, John!

Above: As the subject is a bit out of the TwoMorrows wheelhouse, in 2019, Jon B. Cooke had Last Gasp publish his 12-years-in-the-making history devoted to R. Crumb’s legendary humor comics anthology.

RONN SUTTON: SELF-PORTRAIT OF CBC ’s PORTRAIT MAKER When I started reading comic books, they cost 10¢ apiece (later 12¢), and you bought them from a variety store.

You read them and then you were done. There was nothing more to know.

Rarely were any names credited to the work. In an age before comic book shops, specialty publications, conventions, message boards, or the internet, your best bet was to meet another kid who liked comics, although he probably knew no more than you, but at least you could share enthusiasm together over various titles and issues. You could scour the letters page for hints about how favorite comics were made and who made them.

Eventually, infrequent fanzines began to appear.

These were slim amateur fan magazines, printed in hard-to-read ditto or mimeographed, that could only be acquired through the mail after sending loose coins

Jon B. Cooke: Comic Book Creator

all across North America. I happen to know because I published a half-dozen mimeo and ditto issues of Whirlwind back in 1968 myself. But it was the beginning of a community that would love comics, examine them, write about them, and share information and visuals.

By the ’90s, there were numerous comics publications, some good and some not so good, with many of the latter focusing on monthly updated price guides and chasing after the ever elusive “hot new artist” du jour. But standing out for the past 25 years, TwoMorrows has given us an array of publications documenting past and current creators, exploring a previously unseen wealth of Jack Kirby artwork, and taught us the basics of writing and drawing comics (straight from the field’s top professionals).

Alter Ego deserves special mention for unceasingly

uncovering Ronn Sutton a comics CBC Illustrator history of Born: 1952 creators, Residence: books and Ottawa, Ontario publishers that most Vocation: Full-time artist of us had never even Favorite Creators: heard of Albert Giolitti, Al before. But Williamson, Gray Morrow, Alex Raymond there it is, all laid out with Seminal Comic Book: biographies, Flash Gordon #1 photos, reminisces, interviews and art reproductions in a publication just jam-packed with historical information. Roy Thomas is doing future generations a favor by capturing elusive information before it’s gone forever.

I’ve been privileged to contribute to a number of TwoMorrows magazines and books, most of it my own artwork, but occasionally historical photographs or previously unseen art by Wrightson, Wood, and others. I hope to see many more books and issues in the future, and I’ll continue to help out.

Left: Ronn’s 1960s fanzine, Whirlwind.

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MICHAEL AUSHENKER: MY TWOMORROWS ADVENTURE

For this writer, it all began with a panel at Comic-Con 13 summers ago.

Hard to believe, but that much time has passed since the seeds of my TwoMorrows adventures were planted in San Diego back in the summer of 2006.

Following a panel devoted to the outfit, which featured publisher John Morrow and Back Issue magazine editor Michael Eury, both Michael Aushenker visiting from North CaroliCBC Assoc. Editor na, I struck up Born: 1969 a convo with Residence: the Euryman.

Los Angeles, It sparked Calif. my debut Vocation: article for the Writer and Cartoonist publisher, in Favorite Creators: the January E.C. Segar, Jack Kirby, 2007 edition Hergé of BI, which Seminal Comic Book: explored the Marvel Double funky fun of Feature #10 Marvel’s shortlived ’70s real-life Canadian super-hero saga, The Human Fly, a Frank Robbins/Lee Eliasdrawn gem scribed by Bill Mantlo.

Since then, I’ve written five yearsworth of BI pieces, gamely analyzing such myriad topics as the Son of Satan [#21]; Captain America and the Falcon [#22]; Dr. Fate [#24]; Deathlok the Demolisher [#25]; Mr. T in comics [#26]; Steve Gerber’s ’70s work at Marvel [#31]; ROM: Spaceknight [#32]; the Legion of Monsters, Dr. Thirteen, and Jewish folk-legend The Golem in comics [#36]; the Unknown Soldier and Combat Kelly & The Deadly Dozen [#37] and David Chelsea in Love [#39]; Steve Ditko’s Atlas work [#40]; Dick Ayers’ supernatural cowboy series, Ghost Rider [#42]; Spectacular Spider-Man [#44]; and Steve Englehart’s West Coast Avengers [#56]. Phew!

During this same period, I’ve interviewed some amazing women—Janice Chiang [#51] and Carol Serling, widow of Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling [#55]. Continuing down my Robbins rabbit hole, I also covered another failed Mantlo/Robbins-licensed Marvel

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title, The Man from Atlantis.

Writing for Back Issue was simultaneously an adventure, entertaining, and edifying. I enjoyed my most candid interview with former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter and visited my comic book artist buddy Mike Vosburg at his Tujunga, California home for the history of Marvel’s 1980s licensed book, Team America. I was the first journalist to analyze Deathlok in print with creator Rich Buckler and I learned that artist Herb Trimpe not only thought his co-creation, Damian “Son of Satan” Hellstrom, was stupid, but as a lapsed Catholic, found drawing the feature off-putting. For my Unknown Soldier article, I gabbed with Joe Kubert and located long-lost Filipino artist Gerry Talaoc living in Alaska. Notably, I cemented my long-held belief (contrary to the negators and haters) that Stan Lee was not a mere exploiter of his artists, as Gene Colan and John Romita, Sr. described to me how they collaborated with Lee and what a brilliant writer and idea man he was.

My Human Fly article led to me becoming the editor and lead writer on a 2013 revival of the character in comics for his new owners. Plus, I had befriended Tony DeZuniga and his wife during their brief residence in Los Angeles and I was able to spin the home-cooked Filipino meal that I shared with them, courtesy of Tina DeZuniga, into a Back Issue photo essay.

Thanks to Eury’s generosity as an editor, I came up with snappy, punny headers for my stories, such as (for Son of Satan) “A Trident True Hero.” Yet, by 2012, I pretty much thought my TwoMorrows tenure as a contributor was over…

But that’s when I got a call from one Jon B. Cooke, an editor and journalist I had admired for

his work on TwoMorrows’ erstwhile magazine Comic Book Artist. My work for Back Issue had caught Cooke’s eye, and, to my delight and surprise, he brought me in on his new venture, Comic Book Creator, as the pub’s associate editor.

Right out of the box in CBC #1, my Robbins obsession continued, as I contributed an examination—featuring commentary from Robbins’ pal Stan Goldberg, Romita, Sr., and Robbins’ widow—of the cartoonist’s five final years in the bohemian Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende. My followup articles included a three-part careercovering conversation with the late artist Buckler and chats with new-generation comics creators Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Bechko, Joshua Dysart, and Mort Todd (discussing his exploits working with Ditko). Most significantly, I became the first and last journalist to interview the late, beyond-great painted cover artist Earl Norem.

In-between, I’ve occasionally contributed articles to the flagship periodical The Jack Kirby Collector—a shout-out to fellow writer Jerry Boyd for that work! John, Michael, and Jon continue to roll on publishing and editing at TwoMorrows, and, thanks to Jon’s lackadaisical publication pace, I still have a few upcoming pieces pending in CBC. Ultimately, it’s been an honor to work with/for Eury, Cooke, and Morrow. They have not only upgraded the fanzine into luxurious glossy magazines productionwise, they have legitimized the form editorially and elevated comics journalism to Eisner Awardwinning levels.

I’m proud to contribute to these mags, and happy to report, as of this writing, the TwoMorrows adventure continues….

Left: Michael’s Human Fly article from Back Issue #20.

The World of TwoMorrows

TwoMorrows Tune-In Podcast Episode List* # *

7

Danny Fingeroth on Write Now!

Apr. 4, 2008

#

8

Keith Dallas on The Flash Companion

May 1, 2008

#

9

Nick Cardy and Eric Nolen-Weathington on Nick Cardy: Behind the Art

June 2, 2008

#

10

Eric Nolen-Weathington on Modern Masters

July 2, 2008

nn

Special Pre-2008 Comic-Con International: San Diego Show

Jul 22, 2008

#

11

Bob McLeod on Rough Stuff

Aug. 4, 2008

#

12

Michael Eury on Back Issue

Sept. 2, 2008

nn

Gary Owens Special

Oct. 1, 2008

13

Doug Zawisza on The Hawkman Companion

Oct. 10, 2008

#

14

Eric Nolen-Weathington on Modern Masters 19: Mike Ploog

Nov. 3, 2008

15

George Khoury on The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore

Dec. 4, 2008

#

16

TwoMorrows January 2009 releases/ The Comic Book Podcast Companion

Jan. 6, 2009

#

17

Danny Fingeroth on Write Now!

Feb. 2, 2009

18

Steven Alan Payne on Grailpages/Eric Houston on The Comic Book Podcast Companion

Mar. 1, 2009

#

#

#

#

19

Michael Eury and Michael Kronenberg on The Batcave Companion

Apr. 1, 2009

#

20

Michael Eury on Captain Action/ Pierre Comtois on Marvel Comics in the ’60s

May 1, 2009

#

21

Jason Hofius and George Khoury on Age of TV Heroes

June 2, 2009

#

22

Jim Amash and Eric Nolen-Weathington on Sal Buscema: Comics Fast and Furious Artist

July 21, 2009

#

23

John Morrow, TwoMorrows publisher

Aug. 15, 2009

#

24

TwoMorrows September 2009 releases

Sept. 14, 2009

#

25

Mike Manley on Draw!

Oct. 2, 2009

#

26

2010 TwoMorrows Spring Catalog

Mar. 2, 2010

#

27

George Khoury on Kimota! The Miracleman Companion

Apr. 2, 2010

#

28

Jim Amash and Eric Nolen-Weathington on Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur

May 4, 2010

#

29

Bobby Bryant on The Thin Black Line: Perspectives on Vince Colletta

June 7, 2010

30

Danny Fingeroth on Stan Lee Universe/ 2010 Comic-Con International: San Diego

July 21, 2010

#

* Christopher Irving launched the original “TwoMorrows Tune-In” podcast in 2006, and Chris Marshall took over with #6, featuring March 2008 releases and a Michael Eury interview. Episodes #1–6 are lost. The show is no longer on iTunes, but episodes can be found at https://twomorrows.com/blog/category/tune-in/

CHRIS MARSHALL TUNEs In to TwoMorrows As an amateur comic book historian, TwoMorrows Publishing has been my go-to source for all things Golden and Silver Age. The comprehensive articles in Alter Ego and Back Issue are my favorites. So much so that, in 2008, I approached John to see if he would be interested in me hosting a podcast. This was just two years after I launched my own podcast, Collected Comics Library (which is still going strong). John was interested in restarting one Chris Irving had begun in 2006, so over the next two-and-a-half years, I produced 25 TwoMorrows Tune-In podcast episodes.

I interviewed creators, artists and writers and helped promote a slew of TwoMorrows books and magazines.

My most memorable interviews were with Nick Cardy, Danny Fingeroth, Gary Owens, and Roy Thomas. (Most Tune-In podcasts are still available for download, by the way.)

Chris Marshall: TwoMorrows Tune-In Podcast

In 2009, I was featured in Eric Houston’s Comic Book Podcast Companion.

Eric interviewed several pioneering podcasters and it is considered to be one of the first books on podcasting.

John must have liked what I was doing because he asked if I would hit the con circuit and be a representative for TwoMorrows. I jumped at the chance and first hosted a small local Detroit show where our booth was between Jeffery Brown and Jeff Smith—awesome company. Jeff even told me that anyone who buys a copy can get it signed for free. Needless to say, all copies sold out immediately.

Later on that year, I loaded up the Jeep and went to C2E2, in Chicago. The organizers of the show were so happy to see that TwoMorrows was there that they upgraded the booth location to a high-traffic corner. Sales were spectacular and, to my surprise, people recog-

Logo designed

by Robert Clark.

nized my voice from Chris Marshall the Tune-In Podcast host show. Both Born: 1971 were a huge Residence: success and Bloomfield Hills, I’m glad that Michigan I could make Vocation: John happy SEO supervisor and proud.

Favorite Creator: Along the Steve Ditko way I landed Seminal Comic Book: a coveted Daredevil #183 spot in Back Issue magazine with editor Michael Eury. This was a great honor, and it’s nothing short of damn cool to see your name next to your idols in the magazine credits. I truly thank John for taking a chance on a guy with just a love for the medium. I congratulate John and Pam for 25 years and many, many more to come.

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TWOMORROWS CELEBRATES ROY’S 75 YEARS ON EARTH-A In November 2015, Roy Thomas, legendary comic book writer and Marvel Comics editor-in-chief after Stan “The Man” Lee passed him the baton during their ’70s heyday—and a brother editor at TwoMorrows, to boot!—was going to turn 75 years old. So, the previous spring, John Morrow and Jon B. Cooke got cracking to plan a celebration of their old chum’s milestone. And what better than to give the Rascally One a surprise present?

John and Jon enlisted the talents of nearly 100 comic book artists, each depicting a character associated with Roy all running in the direction of a closeddoor birthday party, outside of which there were actual TwoMorrows editors (and co-publisher Pam Morrow!) posing as if pleading to get into the soirée.

The plan was to have this huge tableau with hundreds of characters featured in five spreads, each printed in separate TwoMorrows mags (with an added LEGO-based spread included in BrickJournal). The first was to appear in Alter Ego #136, and the surprise fifth spread reveal (featuring R.T.’s beloved All-Star heroes hooting ’n’ hollering at Roy’s beloved King of Rock ’n’ Roll, all with a salutation by his beloved mentor, Stan Lee) was to appear in A/E #137.

And, somehow, some way, it all came off without a hitch and, somehow, some way, Roy was even caught by surprise!

The enormity of the ambitious project hit the septuagenarian when John

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mailed him a huge seven-foot-long reproduction combining all the spreads, which arrived on his actual birthday.

(Rand Hoppe donated the giant print.)

In a thank-you email to John and Jon, Roy admitted, “I was really floored. I still haven’t quite got over it… especially as it has sunk in on me just now much work was involved in getting all those art pieces, plus several photos, together. Many dozens of drawings— and, even if several people contributed more than one, that was a huge amount of requesting and coordination to get those drawings coming in.”

Roy continued, “It was the magazine equivalent of a surprise party… and I was as completely caught off guard as any birthday boy (or girl) whose friend or spouse ever guided him to an ‘intimate little gathering’ that turned out to be a mammoth birthday party. The part at the end, I guess, was the equivalent

of everybody jumping out and yelling, ‘Surprise!’

“So thank you for this totally unexpected and gracious act on both your parts. I won’t forget it. Dann was almost as touched as I was.

“But be warned—you’re not going to be able to surprise me like this on my 100th birthday! So don’t even try!”

The participation of so many diverse artists—which actually even included the work of decidedly non-cartoonists John and Jon!—is testament to Roy’s impact on the form and to how many friends he’s made in his now over halfcentury in comics. What a time it was!

— Jon B. Cooke

This spread: Roy and wife Dann unroll the surprise birthday gift. Next page features the names of all 97 participants. Extra-special MVPs are set in bold-faced text.

Parts of the image appeared in Alter Ego #136, Back Issue #85, Comic Book Creator #10, Jack Kirby Collector #66, Draw #31, BrickJournal #37, and Alter Ego #137.

The World of TwoMorrows

Daniel Acuña Bill Alger Brent Anderson Sergio Aragonés Michael Aushenker Mark Badger Allen Bellman Gregory Benton Bill Black Dan Brereton Rich Buckler, Sr. Bob Burden Jared K. Burks Zander Cannon

Keith Carter Paul Chadwick Ernie Cólon Jon B. Cooke Jim Craig Chris Day Stephen DeStefano Michael Eury Shane Foley Ramona Fradon Cliff Galbraith Rick Geary Michael T. Gilbert Tom Grindberg

Paul Gulacy C. Michael Hall P.C. Hamerlinck Ed Hannigan Ron Harris Dean Haspiel Fred Hembeck Phillip Hester Rick Hoberg Ashley Holt Greg Hyland Rafael Kayanan Todd Klein Peter Kuper

TwoMorrows Celebrates the 75th Birthday of Roy Thomas

Batton Lash Alex Nino Bob Layton Graham Nolan Stan Lee Eric NolenSteve Leialoha Weathington Joseph Michael Linsner Kevin Nowlan John Lucas Mitch O’Connell Mike Manley Jerry Ordway Lou Manna Dan Parent Russ Maheras Rick Parker Luke McDonnell Don Perlin Will Meugniot Wendy Pini John Morrow Jay Piscopo Pam Morrow Keith Pollard Michael Netzer Carl Potts

Scott Quick Ron Randall Randy Reynaldo David Roach John Romita Sr. Joe Rubinstein Steve Rude Randy Sargent Bill Schelly Arlen Schumer Tom Scioli Eric Shanower Scott Shaw!

Bill Sienkiewicz

Donald Simpson Jim Starlin Joe Staton Ronn Sutton Mort Todd John Trumbull José Villarrubia Mike Vosburg Alan Weiss John Workman Thomas Yeates Craig Yoe Chip Zdarsky Tom Ziuko

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2018: RETROFAN

RetroFan: The Crazy, Cool Stuff We Grew Up With In June of 2018, TwoMorrows released the first issue of a new quarterly magazine edited by yours truly, RetroFan. Its tagline, “The Crazy, Cool Stuff We Grew Up With,” defines its subject matter, but to fine-tune that into a more specific demographic, our primary focus is pop culture of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

RetroFan is sort of the Back Issue magazine of content other than Bronze Age comic books. But it’s far from an alternate flavor of BI. While ye ed’s voice and nostalgic sensibilities may provide RetroFan’s pulse, it’s the contributors and their vast and eclectic interests and areas of expertise that make each issue a groovy grab-bag of everything from a Jaclyn Smith interview to a Jonny Quest flashback to a history of Captain Action (just some of the content in #7, the nearest Above: Publisher John Morrow had a ball for two years, scooping issue to date). up back issues of some of the You ask, “How did RetroFan originate?” worst 1960s comics ever, to loan to RetroFan almost started back in 2012. Back then Michael Eury for Hero-A-Go-Go! I—humble editor of both Back Issue and the mag in question—was juggling multiple jobs, including the executive direction of a nonprofit organization whose demands were becoming more than I could manage with my existing editorial work of Back Issue and writing books. I was weighing options, and one of them was to leave the nonprofit position (which I did). That would free up some time to start up a second publication, a “Retro Magazine,” with TwoMorrows. Yet when I finally slowed down my pace I realized the time wasn’t right for me to launch a new, ongoing magazine.

But I was ready to take on something new, and pitched it to John Morrow: writing a biography of RetroFan Len Wein and Marv Wolfman. That didn’t materiFirst Issue: 6/13/2018 In 2018, a full-blown pop culture magazine was in the offing, and Michael Eury was ready to tackle it.

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alize, but it started a dialogue with John in which we brainstormed Mythmakers, a series of softcover books to be written and edited by me that would be the writer/editor/executive equivalent of Eric Nolen-Weathington’s Modern Masters artist spotlights. I lined up the first eight subjects: Len Wein, Roy Thomas, Paul Levitz, Mark Waid, Marv Wolfman, Karen Berger, Mike Richardson, and Kurt Busiek. Each consented and I was preparing my interview questions for Len. Then came a snag when Len hesitated, as he was considering writing his autobiography. There was also my concern about market saturation from TwoMorrows, since Jon B. Cooke’s Comic Book Creator was launching. In May 2013, John Morrow and I agreed to pull the plug on the Mythmakers project.

There was an additional reason for Mythmakers’ cancellation: My mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, on Mar. 15, 2013, and her caregiving became a family responsibility for the next four years, until her passing on Mar. 15, 2017 (four years to the day from her diagnosis). Watching Mom wither away was difficult, but it was a blessing to be able to provide loving care for the woman who had given so much of herself to me.

During the last year of Mom’s life, I was involved with the research and production of my most recent TwoMorrows book, Hero-A-Go-Go: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, and Culture of the Swinging Sixites. I didn’t realize it at the time, but surrounding myself with warm memories from my comics-crazed childhood with Hero-A-Go-Go provided solace, taking me back to an era when my mother and father (Dad passed in 2004) were young, happy, and vital. Hero-A-Go-Go also allowed me to build an excellent relationship with its designer, Scott Saavedra.

After Mom’s passing, when my life was returning to normal, I was ready to put a new project back on the table. So John and I dusted off the old “Retro Magazine” concept.

One of the toughest challenges we had was settling on a title. “Retro” websites, conventions, T-shirt companies, video game magazines, you name it, had locked in “Retro Magazine” and other similar names.

Then one day John suggested to me, with a

The World of TwoMorrows

GRATITUDE OF THE RETRO-MAN: DAN JOHNSON As a kid that grew up reading comics in the late 1970s and the 1980s, I can truly say that Back Issue is the kind of magazine that appeals to me as a fan. As a writer and historian who is a regular contributor to the magazine, I can say that writing for this publication is a dream job. I get to talk about the comic books I loved as a boy and I get paid to do so! How much better could a gig be?

Also, since joining Back Issue with #2, I have had the honor of interviewing a number of my boyhood idols including legends in the industry, like Gene Colan, Steve Gerber, Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams, Joe Kubert, Dan Spiegle, and Dave Stevens, to name just a few.

Getting to know these artists and writers, the individuals who helped shaped my imagination as a boy, on a personal level has been a true delight, and to have some of them regard me as a peer is a thrill beyond words.

Being a part of this magazine has offered me moments of enjoyment I will treasure forever. Because of Back Issue, I got to speak to Stan Lee, even if it was

by email, for the “Spider-Man Wedding Round Table.” Because of Back Issue, I had the opportunity to ask John Romita what the inside scoop was regarding Ditko leaving Spider-Man. Because of Back Issue, I had the honor of telling Carmine Infantino how much the Scarlet Speedster meant to me and thanked him for his part in bringing my favorite super-hero to life. Because of Back Issue, I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to discuss Watchmen with Dave Gibbons and learned how he and Alan Moore wanted to follow the maxi-series up with a Captain Marvel adventure that was intended to be fun and lighthearted.

Most importantly, because of Back Issue, I had the chance to help set the record straight regarding Marie Severin’s co-creation of Spider-Woman, a bit of information that would have been lost to time had I not had the opportunity to interview her for a history of the character.

But the best part about Back Issue is the guiding force behind it: Michael Eury. Michael gave me one of my first

“You’re not going to like this” disclaimer, the name “RetroFan.” I loved it! And it nailed the tone of the magazine.

RetroFan explores the histories of “the cool, crazy stuff we grew up with” (that tagline was mine, I’m proud to say) through well-researched, professionally written, and smartly designed articles. But at its heart is fandom—a passion for a TV show, or doll, or junk food, or singing group that made our childhoods special.

Much of the content is provided by regular columnists who have a reader following and keen knowledge about their subjects, starting with Martin Pasko, no stranger to DC Comics fans and

2018 Michael Eury: RetroFan

2019

big breaks Dan Johnson when he Writer, Back brought me Issue, RetroFan on board Born: 1970 Back Issue.

For that, I Residence: will always Greensboro, be grateful North Carolina to him. In Vocation: the time we Freelance writer have worked Favorite Creators: together, I Stan Lee and Steve Ditko have gotten Seminal Comic Book: to know The Flash #262 him and his lovely wife Rose, and hanging with them at comic book conventions in our native North Carolina is always a joy.

So, my thanks to Michael for starting Back Issue in the first place (along with RetroFan, which I am also proud to be a part of) and for asking me to be a part of the TwoMorrows legacy. Michael, you have been my editor, my mentor, my friend, and most importantly, my brother.

Thank you for everything.

genre-TV viewers. Marty was actually part of this magazine before it was even created. A few years back at a comic-con, he mentioned to John Morrow his interest in writing about super-hero cinema and related pop culture. John never forgot and I invited Marty to the mag.

John and I talked about a number of other possibilities for columnists, and cartoonist/comics historian Scott Shaw! and Hollywood-hero expert Andy Mangels were both on our lists. John was interested in Pete Von Sholly as a monster-column contributor. When I reached out to Pete, he was unavailable… but recommended Ernest Farino.

And I’m glad he did. Ernie has an impressive

Above: Initial cover idea for the Mythmakers book series.

Don’t steal that name; it’s now TM TwoMorrows, and will get used!

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2018: RETROFAN Left: Michael Eury being interviewed in 2018 for Comic Culture, a broadcast produced by students at the University of North Carolina, at Pembroke. Inset center: The incomparable Scott Saavedra, layout guru of RetroFan.

background in Hollywood visual effects—and like the other columnists started as a fan, most notably of monster and sci-fi cinema. We brought in Hero-A-Go-Go’s Scott Saavedra as designer, and off we went… until things started to go wrong.

Our first issue cover, spotlighting our premiere issue’s celebrity subject, Lou Ferrigno, went through several permutations. Licensor fees were too pricey for us to depict the TV Hulk and Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolf Man, and we were denied use of Filmation’s Star Trek on the cover. Then, as the deadlines for #2’s manuscripts were rapidly approaching, personal matters led to the unexpected departure of two of my columnists, Martin Pasko and Ernest Farino, and their material had to be reassigned late in the game.

Wondering if I, like the tomb raiders from Jonny Quest, had unleashed the Curse of Anubis, minus the shambling mummy, I asked my wife, “Rose, is this magazine cursed?” She assured me that these were growing pains that I’d get under control.

And I did. I was sorry to lose Marty and Ernie, but that gave me the chance to allow our designer to become a columnist— Scott Saavedra is a really fun guy, as readers of his old Comic Book Heaven series know. Then I recruited pulp master Will Murray as a columnist. With Mangels and Shaw!, that was still a formidable line-up of columnists.

Soon, both Marty and Ernie were able to return to the magazine—hooray!—and #1 and 2 encouraged a flood of queries from freelance writers wanting to contribute. Weird, that in a short window of time, ye ed went from needing contributors to

having more than I can manage for any single issue! But believe me, that’s no complaint… what editor wouldn’t want an army of talented writers? The downside is, with only 80 pages in a quarterly magazine, occasionally our regular contributors will rotate off for an issue,* but their dedication to the magazine and unique perspectives are crucial, and so long as they want to be RetroFan writers, this will be a home for them. Same with the guest writers, although practicing the “Patience is a virtue” dictum is crucial since I now have a backlog of material to keep us going for a long time to come—and new ideas are pitched regularly.

RetroFan is being distributed to comic shops and sold through the company website, as you’d expect of any TwoMorrows publication. But it’s also available at Barnes & Noble and we’re working to get it onto other newsstands. This is a risky venture, but a valuable one in an effort to attract a broader commercial audience than currently exists within TwoMorrowsWorld. I’ve received lots of mail from people who stumbled across RetroFan at B&N… and have connected with a few of my new guest contributors there, too.

As with Back Issue, I’m dedicated to RetroFan and am behind it for the long haul, even while other publishers may be shying away from print. These days, every time I read the paper or watch the news I’m bombarded by bleakness… retreating to 80 pages of the crazy, cool stuff we grew up with isn’t such a bad place to visit!

— Michael Eury

* As of this writing, RetroFan has increased frequency to bi-monthly status—six times a year!

Above: Rose Rummel-Eury, reporting for duty as Lady Action at one of Michael’s many personal appearances. She’s even helped man the TwoMorrows booth at pop culture events!

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The World of TwoMorrows

KIRBY100: TWOMORROWS TRAVELS BACK TO ITS ROOTS My conversations with publisher John Morrow are so frequent and they include so many different subjects that it’s hard to ascertain who exactly comes up with what idea when we’re brainstorming. These sessions, always by phone, are collaborative, but I invariably come away convinced that it is my (ahem) genius that is catalyst for any number of projects—an ego thing, no doubt. And I remain adamant that I’m probably right.

Yet, in the long run, whether I get top billing on our joint projects just doesn’t matter. Because TwoMorrows is the facilitator of making true so many dreams, pride is overwhelmed by gratitude.

The idea of doing something to honor the memory of Jack Kirby on the occasion of his 100th birthday, August 28, 2017, had been nagging at me since the beginning of the decade.

In 2015 or so, old pal and conventioneer Cliff Galbraith and I were planning to put on a centennial event—a “King Con,” if you will—and we got some top names interested in helping, including my pal Morrow. But, alas, the idea faded, probably because of complicated logistics and being all so very busy.

But the calendar pages kept turning and, a year or so before the celebratory day, either John or I broached the subject about what we could do. A concept soon gelled to solicit testimonials from 100 different artists about their favorite Jack Kirby work. Here’s a pertinent excerpt about just that from our World of TwoMorrows interview: Jon B. Cooke: Let’s talk about the Kirby100 book.

John Morrow: Talk about a recharge for you, more so than for me, I think!

You were so…

Jon: Where did the idea come from?

Do you remember you having the idea or me having the idea? Was it my idea?

John: That’s a good question; I honestly don’t recall. I know I wanted to do something for Jack’s Centennial. If that’s as much as I came up with… We were kicking around a bunch of ideas.

Jon: I was very intent on doing a con-

Kirby100: TwoMorrows Travels Back to Its Roots

vention—getting people together—I had been involved with the 1990 H.P. Lovecraft Centennial and I wanted to do the same thing for Kirby.

John: That’s right! We had a great meeting out at Comic-Con where Paul Levitz, Mark Evanier, Karen Green, Rob Salkowitz, Charles Hatfield were there… all those people were sitting around the table in that conference room…

Jon: Cliff Galbraith was there in spirit.

We were all willing to do it.

John: We all left that meeting energized to do something! Then, for basically everybody that was interested in doing it, real life interfered.

Jon: Could not do it alone, for whatever reason. There were certainly no hard

feelings about it. I definitely have a memory that we had to do something.

I knew the calendar was against us, but we were on a mission. We have to do it. I had to do something for Jack; you had to do something for Jack. That’s our spiritual connection—in a way, besides caring for each other and each other’s families—is Kirby! So, it doesn’t matter, because we got together and we did this really fun book that people responded to and the contributors… we got the most eclectic group—come on, the founding member of PUNK magazine! Alex Ross sending us, without any solicitation, that masterful frontispiece—remember that?

John: Yes! “This has got to go in!”

Jon: Yeah! That was great fun. For me, my greatest reward in the field came from that book. That success isn’t something you can put in a bottle. I had no idea how people were going to respond to those kinds of things, but they did. And Kirby’s 100th birthday only happens once…

The result was Kirby100, a 224-page book (with a limited 240-page hardcover edition, including a full timeline of Kirby’s life and work), which featured an astonishing array of contributors, almost to a person wildly enthusiastic about Jack Kirby’s artistry. And it was a perfect vehicle for John and I on which to collaborate, working on the subject that had first brought us together more than two decades prior. (It was also the most successful single effort we worked on as a team, which was immeasurably appreciated by our respective spouses!)

Streetwise: Autobiographical Stories

by Comic Book Professionals was an earlier joint effort—albeit considerably less successful monetarily—and it was disappointing we couldn’t do a sequel (as I was hoping for a series), but the critical acclaim we received in the form of an Eisner nomination and the fact that the Sergio Aragonés tale therein won the 2001 Eisner Award for “Best Short Story”… man, that was awesome!

— Jon B. Cooke

245

TwoMorrows Bibliography: 1994–2019 Sept. 5, 1994

The Jack Kirby Collector #1

Edited by John Morrow

July 1, 1997

The Collected Jack Kirby Collector Vol. 1

Edited by John Morrow

Mar. 1, 1998

Comic Book Artist #1

Edited by Jon B. Cooke

May 1, 1998

Jack Kirby Checklist

Compiled by Richard Kolkman

July 1, 1998

The Collected Jack Kirby Collector Vol. 2

Edited by John Morrow

July 1, 1999

The Collected Jack Kirby Collector Vol. 3

Edited by John Morrow

July 1, 1999

Alter Ego Vol. 3 #1

Edited by Roy Thomas

Dec. 1, 1999

Comic Book Artist Special Edition #1

Edited by Jon B. Cooke

Mar. 1, 2000

Comicology #1

Edited by Brian Saner Lamken

June 1, 2000

Comic Book Artist Collection Vol. 1

Edited by Jon B. Cooke

July 1, 2000

Streetwise: Autobiographical Stories by Comic Book Professionals

Edited by Jon B. Cooke & John Morrow

Mar. 1, 2001

Draw! #1

Edited by Mike Manley

Mar. 1, 2001

Alter Ego: The CBA Collection

Roy Thomas

June 1, 2001

Comicology #4 (last issue)

Edited by Brian Saner Lamken

July 1, 2001

Prime8: Creation

by Jon B. Cooke, Andrew D. Cooke, Chris Knowles, George Freeman, & Al Milgrom

July 1, 2001

The Warren Companion (TPB & HC)

Edited by David A. Roach & Jon B. Cooke

July 3, 2001

Mr. Monster: His Books of Forbidden Knowledge, Vol. Zero

by Michael T. Gilbert

Sept. 1, 2001

Kimota! The Miracleman Companion

by George Khoury

Nov. 1, 2001

Sense of Wonder: A Life in Comic Fandom

by Bill Schelly

Dec. 1, 2001

The All-Star Companion Vol. 1

Edited by Roy Thomas

May 1, 2002

Xal-Kor the Human Cat

by Grass Green

May 1, 2002

Comic Book Artist Collection Vol. 2

Edited by Jon B. Cooke

June 18, 2002

Comic Books & Other Necessities of Life: A Collection Of POV Columns

by Mark Evanier

July 1, 2002

Panel Discussions: Design in Sequential Art Storytelling

by Durwin S. Talon

Aug. 1, 2002

Write Now #1

Edited by Danny Fingeroth

Sept. 1, 2002

I Have To Live With This Guy!

by Blake Bell

Dec. 9, 2002

G-Force: Animated

by Jason Hofius & George Khoury

Dec. 23, 2002

Captain Action: The Original Super-Hero Action Figure

by Michael Eury

Apr. 1, 2003

Comic Book Artist #25 (last issue of Vol.1)

Edited by Jon B. Cooke

Apr. 23, 2003

Modern Masters Vol. 1: Alan Davis

Edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington

June 1, 2003

Captain Victory: Graphite Edition

by Jack Kirby, edited by John Morrow

June 18, 2003

Wertham Was Right!: Another Collection of POV Columns

by Mark Evanier

July 1, 2003

The Life and Art of Murphy Anderson

by Murphy Anderson & R.C. Harvey

July 30, 2003

The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore

by George Khoury, etc.

Sept. 1, 2003

Against the Grain: MAD Artist Wallace Wood (TPB + HC)

Edited by Bhob Stewart

Oct. 1, 2003

The Legion Companion

by Glen Cadigan

Oct. 14, 2003

Dick Giordano: Changing Comics One Day At A Time

by Michael Eury

Nov. 1, 2003

Hero Gets Girl! The Life and Art of Kurt Schaffenberger

by Mark Voger

Nov. 1, 2003

Back Issue #1

Edited by Michael Eury

Nov. 4, 2003

Wallace Wood Checklist

by Bhob Stewart & Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.

Feb. 4, 2004

The Fawcett Companion: The Best of Fawcett Collectors of America

by P.C. Hamerlinck

246

The World of TwoMorrows

Apr. 6, 2004

Kirby Unleashed (remastered) portfolio

by Jack Kirby, remastered by John Morrow

June 22, 2004

Comics Above Ground: How Sequential Art Affects Mainstream Media

by Durwin S. Talon

June 22, 2004

Superheroes In My Pants!: Another Collection Of POV Columns

by Mark Evanier

July 1, 2004

True Brit: Celebrating the Comic Book Artists of England

Edited by George Khoury

July 20, 2004

The Collected Jack Kirby Collector Vol. 4

Edited by John Morrow

Oct. 19, 2004

How To Draw Comics, From Script To Print (DVD)

Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley, producers

Nov. 23, 2004

The Best of the Legion Outpost

Edited by Glen Cadigan

Dec. 1, 2004

The Best of Draw Vol. 1

Edited by Mike Manley

Feb. 21, 2005

The Art of George Tuska

by Dewey Cassell w/ Aaron Sultan & Mike Gartland

Apr. 4, 2005

Comic Book Artist Collection Vol. 3

Edited by Jon B. Cooke

July 1, 2005

Alter Ego #50

Edited by Roy Thomas

July 4, 2005

The Justice League Companion

by Michael Eury

July 4, 2005

Secrets in the Shadows: The Art & Life of Gene Colan (TPB & HC)

by Tom Field

July 13, 2005

Heroes & Villains: The William Messner-Loebs Benefit Sketchbook

Edited by Clifford Meth

Aug. 23, 2005

Modern Masters: In The Studio With George Perez (DVD)

Directed by Jeremy McCracken

Sept. 19, 2005

The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents Companion

Edited by Jon B. Cooke

Dec. 1, 2005

The Titans Companion

by Glen Cadigan

Jan. 16, 2006

The Dark Age: Grim, Great & Gimmicky Post-Modern Comics

by Mark Voger

Mar. 3, 2006

Silver Star: Graphite Edition

by Jack Kirby, edited by John Morrow

Apr. 24, 2006

The Collected Jack Kirby Collector Vol. 5

Edited by John Morrow

June 1, 2006

The Alter Ego Collection Vol. 1

Edited by Roy Thomas

June 21, 2006

How To Create Comics, From Script To Print

Edited by Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley

July 1, 2006

Rough Stuff #1

Edited by Bob McLeod

Aug. 8, 2006

The Krypton Companion

Edited by Michael Eury

Aug. 14, 2006

The Best of Draw Vol. 2

Edited by Mike Manley

Oct. 1, 2006

Les Travaux Extraordinaires D’Alan Moore

by George Khoury, translated by Jean Depelley

Nov. 1, 2006

The All-Star Companion Vol. 2

Edited by Roy Thomas

Mar. 2, 2007

The Blue Beetle Companion

by Christopher Irving

Apr. 1, 2007

Comics Gone Ape: The Missing Link to Primates in Comics

by Michael Eury

Apr. 1, 2007

Brush Strokes With Greatness: The Life & Art of Joe Sinnott

by Tim Lasiuta

May 1, 2007

Working Methods: Comic Creators Detail Their Storytelling and Artistic Processes

by John Lowe

May 5, 2007

Comics 101: How-to & History Lessons from the Pros!

(Free Comic Book Day release)

by Danny Fingeroth, Mike Manley, and other TwoMorrows authors and editors

June 18, 2007

Image Comics: The Road to Independence

by George Khoury

July 25, 2007

Modern Masters: In The Studio With Michael Golden (DVD)

Directed by Shane McCracken

July 30, 2007

Comics Introspective: Peter Bagge

by Christopher Irving

July 30, 2007

John Romita and All That Jazz (TPB & HC)

by Roy Thomas & Jim Amash

Nov. 1, 2007

The Silver Age Sci-Fi Companion

by Mike W. Barr

Nov. 12, 2007

Mego 8" Superheroes: World’s Greatest Toys!

by Benjamin Holcomb

Jan. 5, 2008

The All-Star Companion Vol. 3

Edited by Roy Thomas

Jan. 8, 2008

Alter Ego #75

Edited by Roy Thomas

Feb. 28, 2008

BrickJournal #1

Edited by Joe Meno

Mar. 3, 2008

Alter Ego: Best of the Legendary Comics Fanzine

Edited by Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly

Apr. 1, 2008

Kirby: Deities Limited Edition Portfolio

by Jack Kirby, produced by John Morrow

TwoMorrows Bibliography

247

Apr. 1, 2008

The Best of Draw Vol. 3

Edited by Mike Manley

Apr. 21, 2008

The Best of Write Now

Edited by Danny Fingeroth

Apr. 28, 2008

Kirby Five-Oh!, a.k.a. The Jack Kirby Collector #50 (TPB & HC)

Edited by John Morrow

May 3, 2008

Comics Go Hollywood (Free Comic Book Day release)

by Mike Manley, Roy Thomas, & others

June 18, 2008

Titans Companion Vol. 2

by Glen Cadigan

July 28, 2008

The Flash Companion

by Keith Dallas

Aug. 1, 2008

Jack Kirby Checklist: Gold Edition

Compiled by Richard Kolkman

Sept. 1, 2008

Nick Cardy: Behind the Art

by Nick Cardy and Eric Nolen-Weathington

Sept. 6, 2008

BrickJournal Compendium 1

Edited by Joe Meno

Sept. 29, 2008

The Collected Jack Kirby Collector Vol. 6

Edited by John Morrow

Nov. 12, 2008

The Hawkman Companion

by Doug Zawisza

Dec. 1, 2008

The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore: Indispensable Edition

by George Khoury

Feb. 1, 2009

Write Now #20 (last issue)

Edited by Danny Fingeroth

Feb. 1, 2009

The Collected Jack Kirby Collector Vol. 7

Edited by John Morrow

Feb. 12, 2009

BrickJournal Compendium 2

Edited by Joe Meno

Apr. 20, 2009

Rough Stuff #12 (last issue)

Edited by Bob McLeod

Apr. 27, 2009

The Batcave Companion

by Michael Eury & Michael Kronenberg

Apr. 27, 2009

Grailpages: Original Comic Book Art and the Collectors

by Steven Alan Payne

June 1, 2009

The All-Star Companion Vol. 4

Edited by Roy Thomas

June 22, 2009

The Comic Book Podcast Companion

by Eric Houston

July 16, 2009

BrickJournal Compendium 3

Edited by Joe Meno

Aug. 1, 2009

Marvel Comics in the 1960s

by Pierre Comtois

Aug. 10, 2009

Captain Action: The Original Super-Hero Action Figure (HC 2nd Edition)

by Michael Eury

Feb. 1, 2010

Sal Buscema: Comics’ Fast & Furious Artist (TPB & HC)

by Jim Amash with Eric Nolen-Weathington

Mar. 1, 2010

Age of TV Heroes

by Jason Hofius & George Khoury

June 30, 2010

Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur (TPB & HC)

by Jim Amash with Eric Nolen-Weathington

July 8, 2010

BrickJournal Compendium 4

Edited by Joe Meno

July 26, 2010

The Thin Black Line: Perspectives on Vince Colletta, Comics’ Most Controversial Inker

by Robert L. Bryant, Jr.

Mar. 1, 2011

Alter Ego #100, a.k.a. Alter Ego: Centennial

Edited by Roy Thomas

July 17, 2011

Minifigure Customization: Populate Your World!

by Jared K. Burks

Aug. 1, 2011

Back Issue #50

Edited by Michael Eury

Sept. 1, 2011

Stan Lee Universe: Interviews with and Momentos From "The Man" Who Changed Comics and Pop Culture (HC & TPB)

by Roy Thomas & Danny Fingeroth

Sept. 13, 2011

Marvel Comics in the 1970s

by Pierre Comtois

Nov. 1, 2011

The Quality Companion: A Celebration of the Forgotten Publisher of Plastic Man

by Mike Kooiman and Jim Amash

Dec. 1, 2011

Lee & Kirby: The Wonder Years, a.k.a. The Jack Kirby Collector #58

by Mark Alexander, edited by John Morrow

Feb. 16, 2012

You Can Build It Book One

Edited by Joe Meno

July 8, 2012

Marie Severin: The Mirthful Mistress of Comics

by Dewey Cassell with Aaron Sultan

Aug. 30, 2012

You Can Build It Book Two

Edited by Joe Meno

Oct. 1, 2012

Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation

by Lou Scheimer & Andy Mangels

Oct. 22, 2012

The Best of From the Tomb

Edited by Peter Normanton

Nov. 1, 2012

American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960–64

by John Wells, edited by Keith Dallas

Nov. 13, 2012

Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour

by Jim Amash & Eric Nolen-Weathington

248

The World of TwoMorrows

Mar. 1, 2013

American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1980s

by Keith Dallas

Mar. 28, 2013

Plugged In: Comics Professionals Working in the Video Game Industry

by Keith Veronese

May 1, 2013

Dan Spiegle: A Life in Comic Art

by John Coates with Dan Spiegle

May 6, 2013

Comic Book Creator #1

Edited by Jon B. Cooke

May 29, 2013

The Best of Alter Ego Vol. Two

Edited by Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly

July 1, 2013

The Star*Reach Companion: The Complete History of the Influential 1970s Independent Comic

by Richard Arndt

July 1, 2013

Joe Kubert: Creator & Mentor, a.k.a. Comic Book Creator #2

Edited by Jon B. Cooke

Aug. 14, 2013

American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1950s

by Bill Schelly, edited by Keith Dallas

Dec. 9, 2013

Minifigure Customization 2: Why Live in the Box?

by Jared K. Burks

Mar. 1, 2014

American Comic Book Chronicles: 1965–69

by John Wells, edited by Keith Dallas

July 1, 2014

American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1970s

by Jason Sacks & Keith Dallas, edited by K. Dallas

Aug. 1, 2014

Back Issue #75

Edited by Michael Eury

Aug. 13, 2014

Don Heck: A Work of Art

by John Coates

Dec. 1, 2014

Marvel Comics in the 1980s

by Pierre Comtois

Dec. 14, 2014

Swampmen: Muck-Monsters of the Comics and Their Makers a.k.a. Comic Book Creator #6

Edited by Jon B. Cooke & George Khoury

Apr. 28, 2015

Will Eisner: A Spirited Life (Deluxe Edition)

by Bob Andelman

June 26, 2015

Monster Mash: The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America, 1957–72

by Mark Voger

July 1, 2015

The Incredible Herb Trimpe

by Dewey Cassell & Aaron Sultan

Apr. 21, 2016

Al Plastino: Last Superman Standing

by Eddy Zeno

Aug. 1, 2016

The MLJ Companion: The Complete History of the Archie Comics’ Super-Heroes

by Rik Offenberger, Paul Castiglia, & Jon B. Cooke

Aug. 9, 2016

Comic Book Fever: A Celebration of Comics 1976–1986

by George Khoury

Apr. 18, 2017

Hero-A-Go-Go: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, & Culture of the Swinging Sixties

by Michael Eury

July 1, 2017

Reed Crandall: Illustrator of the Comics

by Roger Hill

Aug. 17, 2017

Kirby Five-Oh! Standard Size Edition

Edited by John Morrow

Aug. 17, 2017

Kirby100: 100 Top Creators Celebrate Jack Kirby’s Greatest Work (TPB & HC)

Edited by Jon B. Cooke & John Morrow

Aug. 31, 2017

Back Issue #100

Edited by Michael Eury

Nov. 14, 2017

Groovy: When Flower Power Bloomed in Pop Culture

by Mark Voger

Dec. 7, 2017

Alter Ego #150

Edited by Roy Thomas

Jan. 3, 2018

It Crept From the Tomb

Edited by Peter Normanton

Mar. 28, 2018

BrickJournal #50

Edited by Joe Meno

Apr. 17, 2018

Jack Kirby Checklist: Centennial Edition

Compiled by Richard Kolkman

June 13, 2018

RetroFan #1

Edited by Michael Eury

July 13, 2018

Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978

by Keith Dallas & John Wells

Aug. 15, 2018

Mike Grell: Life is Drawing Without an Eraser (TPB & HC)

by Dewey Cassell with Jeff Messer

Dec. 5, 2018

American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1990s

by Keith Dallas & Jason Sacks

Jan. 3, 2019

Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said!, a.k.a. The Jack Kirby Collector #75

by John Morrow

June 19, 2019

American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-44

by Kurt F. Mitchell with Roy Thomas, edited by Keith Dallas

Aug. 7, 2019

Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! Expanded Second Edition (TPB & HC)

by John Morrow

Oct. 16, 2019

Mac Raboy: Master of the Comics

by Roger Hill

Dec. 18, 2019

Jack Kirby’s Dingbat Love

by Jack Kirby, edited by John Morrow

TwoMorrows Bibliography

249

KICKSTARTER SPONSORS The following individuals made this book possible, through their generous pledges during our 2019 Kickstarter campaign: TwoMorrows TROOPERS Frank Campbell Factr Melvin D. Shelton Phillip M. Stewart Mike Thompson Craig Yoe TwoMorrows MAINSTAYS Steve Andreski Brad Brooks Will Burgdorf Michael A. Burstein W. Stephen Combs Tomus “Danger” Cone Carl Conrad Ray Cornwall Glenn Crouch Al Decena Leland Dugger Mike Fitz Dom Galliano Robert Greenberger Martin Hand Larry F. Houston HyperToast Richard Ing Trevor Kimball Jim Kosmicki Christopher Kutz Mike Lee Keith Mello Jake Modica Julio Molina-Muscara Jeff Newelt Robert Nunez Mike Pascale Artist-Writer Jon Fitzgerald Henry Pheloung Greg Plonowski James Sarver Allen Smith Jason Snyder Mark Vega Matt Wayne Lex Wilson David Young TwoMorrows MAJORDOMOS Tony Adams Hassan Alamdari Jim Allan Gregg Anderson Dylan Andrews Gary Arkell Blake Arledge Richard J. Arndt Frank Balkin Gordon Bartik beanmancomics.com Lance DOC Boucher Peter J. Bracchi III James Cassara Ian D. Casselberry Stuart Chadwick Cam Chesney Grandpa Chet Chris & Reggie’s Cosmic Treadmill David Cilley Brian Cronin Lumpy Dahlk

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Zach Davis Nik Dirga Gary Dunaier Jack Fetterman Steven Finkelstein Tom Floyd Jim Gaudet Geek Brunch Podcast Richard J. Gersh, M.D. Darren Goodhart Ed Gosney (creator of Cool Comics In My Collection) Tom Green Cleveland Gregory Jeffrey Grill Michael Grossman Chris Hansen Justin Harman Billy Hogan Andy Ice Joe Jackson John Joshua Gregory Jurls Gene Kannenberg, Jr. Mark Katzoff Ellen Jane Keenan Paul Kienzle Walt Kneeland Chris Kohler Ali T. Kokmen Steven Kretzer Ryan Lowe Russ Maheras James R. Marshall Al Masciocchi Radley Masinelli Marty McKee Steve Meyer Ken Meyer Jr. Tobi L. Miley Colin Mitchell John Modica Mark Muller Talus Good Night Matt Phillips Gene Popa Nicholas Prom Richard Pryor Bruce A. Ritzen Paul Salvi Guido A. Sanchez David Schwartz Bob Simko Shannon Slayton Doug Smith Paul ‘Smooth Head’ Spence Thomas A. Stillabower Tim Stroup Douglas Toole Jack Trammel John Trumbull Roger Vestal Mark Waid Mike White Kendall Whitehouse Daniel Wieser Jay Willson Gary Winkelman James A. Wu TwoMorrows TITANS Jason Abbott Jack Abramowitz David H. Adler Chad Anderson

John Austin Mike Bannon James Barron John J. Biagioni Aunt Gail A. Boyd Tom Brevoort Fabrizio Buonanno Nate Butler Jarrod Buttery David Campbell Tom Campbell Da vid Campiti/Glass House Graphics Dewey Cassell Samuel Cocar Jerry Colvin Jim Craviotto Randall Cyrenne G.S. Davis Dr. Killmuffin Jeff Ellis Matthew Ficara Eddie Fitch Stacy Fluegge Forgerelli Joe Frank Tim Fuller Jason Guth GwenBob Tom Hamilton Allan Harvey Gregory Hecht Martin M. Hernandez Jr. Rob Holly Tony Isabella Harley Jebens David Jeffery Jesse Knepper George A. Lane III Mark R. Largent Dave Lathrop Dave Lemieux Richard Lemon Michael Maginot James McArdle David Alexander McDonald Gary Fred McIntyre Jeff Metzner Kamron Mohtashemi Robert A. Monroe, Jr. Don Murphy Joe Musich Anthony Naimoli Thomas J. ODonnell Darrick Patrick Richard Pineros Alan Pinion Rob Plass Simon Powell R.J.H. Robert Rettinger Banks S. Robinson Jimmy Rohrich Sc ott Mitchell Rosenberg and Platinum Studios Scott Rowland Philip Rutledge Gary Sassaman Raymond Schaff Jr. Don Schultz Tod Seisser Jim Shegas Rick Shurgin Karl Andre Skare Douglas D. Smith

Robert Sprenger Tom Stewart John Tinkess Jeff Troutman Mark Verheiden Dennis R. Viau, Jr. John A. Walsh Alan Watson John Philip Weber Sean Whelan Trevor Owen Williams Jay Williams Andrew J Wilson Randy Wood Paul Yeates TwoMorrows MONARCHS Bradley Allen Martin Bartolomeo Philip Berkheimer Jr. Travis Boles Captain Phil Peter H. Deschenes DW Ferranti Stephan Friedt Gary Goddard Jon Hart Jimmie M. Harvey Rodney Haydon Joe Heffernan Scotty C Jackson Sean Kleefeld Kevin Lafferty Mike Marshall Jim McCaffery Dr. Mark N. Miller Jason B. Miner Billy Moore Pedro Ortiz Lex Passaris & Lulu Leszczynski Darren Price Charles P. Rhoads Don B Rhoden Jason Sacks Tom L. Shearer Dr. Scott Smith William Wentworth-Sheilds Jeff Wooten Tim Yablonsky TwoMorrows MANIACS Anonymous Dennis Barry Michael Christopher Collier Steven Coates Committed Comics Scott Davis Ash Doyle Tom Field Ted Haycraft Mauricio Heilbron MD Mike Hensel Scott Holthouser Denis Huot Edward Ide Joel Thomas Kelly Gary T Kirwin III Matthew E. Kuhn Matthew McCallum Rob Rooney Kevin Shaw A Singapore Kirby Fan Brian Smith (Spiderbite) Larry Wilson

The World of TwoMorrows

AFTERWORD

Paul Levitz: The Deep Dive of TwoMorrows

Paul Levitz: Afterword

would share a desire to dive deeply into their subject matter, and to present their findings in an enticing visual package (and so, back to the Infinity Cover?).

What is perhaps most unusual is the tenacity and breadth of their efforts. Other fanzine publishers have stayed part of the comics world by transforming their venture into a comics publisher (as Fantastic Fanzine grew into Fantagraphics), or continuing to edit one as a hobby alongside their creative work in comics (Alter Ego), or even abandoning the fanzines to move into the professional side of the field (ahem). But TwoMorrows is noteworthy for continually professionalizing and expanding their work without ever losing their fannish passion. They have grown their circle by providing needed infrastructure to pioneers of comics fandom and new voices, added magazines that speak to niches that go beyond traditional comics fandom, and publishing a bookcase worth of books celebrating the lives of creators who often labored most of their careers in anonymity. And when you talk to them, the greatest joy in their voices is when they turn to the conversations they’ve had, the people they’ve been able to become friends with, and the sheer fun of sharing their passions.

Twenty-five years of magazines, 20 years of books. A deep dive indeed, and one that invited so many of us to plunge along with them into the magic of imagination and creativity. Thanks to TwoMorrows, unrecognized geniuses of the comics have been documented and given the moment in the spotlight that they deserved.

It’s been a pleasure to travel along with them on this journey as a historian, a very occasional contributor, and most of all, as one of their readers.

And now, it’s a pleasure to have this opportunity to close out their silver anniversary party in book form.

If TwoMorrows is indeed “The Future of Comics History,” as their slogan proclaims, let us hope that future has many more anniversaries for us to celebrate together!

— Paul Levitz

Photo from the 2019 Comic-Con International: San Diego by Kendall Whitehouse.

One of the most inviting tropes used in comics is the “Infinity Cover”—the classic covers in which a comic character reads their own comic whose cover shows them reading their own comic, ad infinitum.

The visual dates back to at least 1941, where it shows up on Batman #8, courtesy of artists Fred Ray and Jerry Robinson (though the hand of editor Whit Ellsworth could very well have been behind the joke). The joy in contemplation of comics is something every reader could relate to, and the visual trick sends us spiraling deeper and deeper into the imagined world. And isn’t that exactly what TwoMorrows Publishing has been about since its beginning?

Comic fans delight in the unknown (“Who was the Good Duck Artist?”), the ambiguous (“Who would win their fight, The Thing or The Hulk?”), and the obscure (“See the first Infinity Cover, above”). It’s a deeper level of participating in the comics we love, making our own stories (fan-fiction anyone?), relentlessly assembling information (indexing and interviewing galore), or debating the ultimately unknowable (Stan or Jack?). For most of us, it’s a passing phase in our lives, adolescent years spent assembling data on a favorite title or creator as we collected their work. For the preinternet generation, it was often lonely work, until we discovered others with the same obsessions.

Ultimately, for most of us, the dynamics of daily life and work overwhelm our ability to spend time at this hobby, and we surrender.

And then there’s the TwoMorrows team.

The venture began tenuously, as most fanzines did. The first issue of The Jack Kirby Collector had a modest print run of 125 copies in 1994, a tribute to the recently deceased “King,” whose career sales had certainly exceeded half-a-billion copies in the United States alone. The affection for Kirby’s work that permeated the magazine was palpable, and infectious. Like most ’zines, it connected with people one at a time, reaching out by word of mouth, the occasional review, and, when a few dollars could be devoted to “marketing,” by an ad in a larger circulation ’zine. Issue by issue, more Kirby fans signed on.

Over time, The Jack Kirby Collector attracted the attention of fellow travelers with their own interests in the many faceted world of comics, who

As a teen in 1971, Paul Levitz took over The Comic Reader, making it one of the most successful fan publications of its era. In the 1970s he became a DC Comics editor and writer, and served as its publisher into the 2000s. Two­ Morrows was fortunate to have a fellow fanzine fanatic in the top position there during its formative years, as Paul was continually supportive of our efforts.

Below: To infinity and beyond!

The Adam Hughes issue of Comic Book Artist (#21), with its infinity cover, kept selling on, and on, and on through three printings. And, yessir, it’s still available infinitely as a digital edition.

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POSTSCRIPT

My Yesterdays Today… and TwoMorrows

Right inset: For a laugh, publisher John Morrow (left) and Comic Book Artist editor Jon B. Cooke strike fightin’ poses during the 1998 San Diego Comic-Con, the first year CBA was exhibited.

Below: While still editing Comic Book Creator, in 2015 Jon teamed up with friend Rob Yeremian to produce ACE: All Comics Evaluated, a sort-of inclusive Wizard/Comics Buyer’s Guide hybrid, one that, despite its three monthly issues, just didn’t catch on. Here’s Mike Allred’s unpublished ACE #4 cover.

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I can’t say precisely whether I would have found my way into this niche world of comic book history if not for my chance encounter with TwoMorrows back in 1995. I probably would have. Comics are, after all, my first love when it comes to fannish things and, as a teenager, I had produced a short-lived fanzine with my three brothers (Omegazine/ The Omega Comics Magazine Review). But I can say for certain it was stupendous luck to discover John and Pam’s new outfit on a fateful fall day when I was quite literally surfing the internet for the first time ever. It was then I discovered the existence of The Jack Kirby Collector.

After Jack’s passing the previous year, I had been in a search for purpose regarding my passion for Kirby’s comics. As you may have read in these pages, the genius cartoonist has been of significant importance in life since my early teen years, and I had of late been writing him letters (which I hadn’t had the nerve to actually mail). So, when news of the King’s passing came to me, from over the radio while at a diner during lunch hour, I was devastated and at a loss how to properly express my grief and share how much Jack meant to me.

In the spring of 1994, Kevin Eastman’s Words & Pictures Museum hosted a memorial exhibition —“King of Comics… A Tribute to Jack Kirby”— where I made a pilgrimage. But I still yearned for something less passive and more creative, something I found when, likely late afternoon on Tuesday, Nov. 28, 1995, I typed “Jack Kirby” into an America Online search engine—this was before Google even existed, youngsters—and violá, up pops The Jack Kirby Collector and I’m immediately on the TwoMorrows website, such as it was.

I’m betting that’s the exact date because I know two things about myself: A) I’m a pack-rat who saves anything that has even the remotest hint of

historical value—I filed away my first letter to John Morrow, along with a photocopy of the dated check I sent, ordering TJKC #1, 3, and 6—and B) delaying instant gratification is contrary to my nature, so I’m 99.9 9/10th percent sure I ordered those copies immediately. Along with the check, I included a note to John, “Wow! Cool website. I’ve found what I was looking for: a bona fide Kirbyzine!!!”

For me, the arrival of those back issues was nothing less than a life-changing event. I was simply floored by every aspect of TJKC (particularly #6, the “Fourth World issue,” which still gives a thrill when I open it up), whether its enthusiasm for the subject, the friendly and accessible editorial voice, quality of layout and design, and all balanced with a sense of fun alongside a probing curiosity. Put simply, it was smart. In an early fan letter to John, I wrote, “I can’t tell you how good I feel that The Jack Kirby Collector is as a magazine. Dead on…

It’s so good—a real joy to look at, read, and just bask in the glow [of]… I’ve found my home.”

And almost 25 years later, John’s outfit remains my home. Even before having an issue in my hands, I figuratively started moving in at Two­Morrows! By the time that November week was out, I offered to John my writing talent and tenacious drive to use as needed. I reported for duty. By the weekend, we were working out questions for a John Byrne interview I was to conduct and I soon agreed to write an “Inhumans” article for TJKC #9.

By January, John was prodding me for the aforementioned article (these nudges would become routine), and, by spring, I was hard at work on my first major feature, a look at Jack’s career in animation during the late ’70s. Fall 1996’s #12 included the first of many TJKC interviews I conducted. The 15th issue contained probably my best TJKC piece, “The Story Behind Sky Masters,” which Charles Hatfield has called a “journalistic coup.” I received the title of associate editor in #16, an ish which opened with my “Kirby’s Mean Streets” look at the artist’s hard-scrabble childhood. I became John’s go-to inquisitor of record, particularly when he did the respective DC and Marvel issues, and I suspect therein lay the roots of Comic Book Artist.

Somewhere in there, probably in summer 1997, while we were tending the TwoMorrows booth at

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San Diego Comic-Con, John and I were finalizing an idea we had been discussing for months about expanding the TwoMorrows line, with me editing something akin to “a Kirby Collector for the other guys.” A month or so beforehand, at the Ramapo Comic-Con, Arlen Schumer was involved in coming up with the mag’s name (and the historian/illustrator subsequently created the original CBA logo).

Initially, my concept for the mag was to stick close to the TJKC format (in terms of featuring unpublished art and artifacts) and focus on a specific artist every issue. In fact, the first CBA was intended to showcase Joe Kubert, as I had, with my older brother Chris, attended the opening of Joe’s Fax from Sarajevo exhibit at Words & Pictures and we took the Great One to lunch, where he regaled us with many behind-the-scenes anecdotes of his early days as DC Comics editor while nibbling on plain toast and sipping his tea. Plus he confided that he possessed—choke!—unpublished Tarzan artwork!* Within 48 hours, I sent Joe a letter and asked if he’d be the subject of that mag, which initially had a different title. “For lack of a better name,” I wrote, “let’s call my proposal The Comics Advocate, a ’zine that will feature a significant portion of each issue as tribute to a great comics artist/writer.

It will also include a look at other (sometimes contemporary, sometimes neglected) creators, and investigate this crazy business in a number of ways.”

(In my files, I found a rough of an awful moniker I was contemplating as far back as 1996: The Joe Kubert Enthusiast. John recalls the pair of us contemplating magazines devoted individually to Neal Adams, Will Eisner, Steve Ditko, and others.)

I can find no evidence of Joe’s specific reply (maybe it was by phone), but my memory is that regarding the notion of a mag devoted exclusively to himself, Joe demurred. Like Adams and Eisner, I’m still convinced his long and fruitful career certainly warrants a magazine series. But soon, over the summer and into fall, it was decided the mag would be called Comic Book Artist and Arlen Schumer drew the logo, which reflected the illustrator’s obsession with DC Comics iconography.

I decided to entertain my own DC obsession by devoting CBA’s first issue to what I called my own Golden Age, DC’s “Daring and Different” comics of the late ’60s/early ’70s, a still underexamined era of “the artist as editor.” My point is that I was initially determined to focus on publisher output of certain time periods as remembered by participants, thus CBA was ’zine of oral histories, one very well received by readers. To this day, I encounter folk who wistfully sigh about the good ol’ early days of CBA. Before CBA’s 25th issue, John and I had decided to part ways, disagreeing on a few issues, and I

went over to another publisher, Top Shelf, where I produced some award-winning mags. But leaving the TwoMorrows fold brought on a sense of loneliness and I genuinely missed the daily confabs with my good buddy. During those “years in exile,” we never stayed out of touch, as John and I reunited for various projects, and I also toiled as a book designer for him now and again. Soon, the magic was back and, since launching Comic Book Creator in 2013, the two of us have been brainstorming new projects like a house on fire.

And, of course, while I might be the first, John has been collaborating with a cadre of talented people since the early days, many of whom have contributed mightily to the field of comics scholarship. (One of the indisputable greatest of scholars, Bill Schelly, died while we were putting this retrospective together—a tragedy of enormous proportions, as he had been producing his very best work.)

John may protest me saying so, but this ridiculously big, dense 256-page book, a celebration of TwoMorrows’ 25th anniversary, was entirely my idea, whether the naming of the book or the cover art concept (great job, Tom!), or compiling contents through casual interviews, or soliciting sidebars from past and present participants. I insisted we do this book because I recognize that, one: all of us involved with TwoMorrows have worked hard over the last quarter-century and most of us remain dedicated to John and Pam’s company. And two: somehow, some way, TwoMorrows means something.

What that meaning is, how the last 25 years of TwoMorrows fits into the scheme of things, remains a mystery to me. I don’t know if an overall analysis of the publisher’s impact on the comics field is something I can even grasp, nor if this book can help make sense of. But I do know that John Morrow, through his support, kindness, and friendship, has imbibed deep and resonant meaning into my own life and into the lives of others, and I try to manifest my gratitude into producing work he can enjoy, and hopefully by which we can both make a buck!

Cheers, John and Pam! Here’s to us and here’s to many, many more tomorrows!

Above: As evidenced by this quick tissue sketch, Jon B. Cooke initially envisioned a publication devoted to the great Joe Kubert.

Above: Flyer promoting the first issue of Comic Book Artist magazine, 1998.

Below: The original logo mocked up as a cover layout as faxed to CBA by designer Arlen Schumer (inspired, of course, by the Action Comics logo often attributed to Ira Schnapp) and the commercial artist/historian’s final artwork.

— Jon B. Cooke

* Intrepid historian that Jon is, he can put a date to this meeting with Joe Kubert at Words & Pictures: Saturday, Feb. 8, 1997.

Jon B. Cooke: Postscript

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EPILOGUE

Above and Right: Two Morrows having a little fun, and John accepting Back Issue’s Eisner Award at the 2019 Comic-Con International.

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As I reflect back on 25 years in this crazy biz, I see Jack Kirby’s influence throughout it all. So it’s no surprise that I spent much of year 25 working on solo projects centered around the King of Comics.

After devoting roughly six months of 2018 to research for my book Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said, it officially shipped on Jan. 3, 2019—and proceeded to sell out within the first three months of its release. We’ve never had a book do that so quickly, and it was a really nice pat on the back for me personally, because I slaved away on it like no project I’d ever tackled before. On the literal 25th Anniversary to the day of launching Jack Kirby Collector #1, I proudly started shipping copies of the expanded second edition of Stuf’ Said.

But the additional month I spent updating that book wasn’t my only Kirby Konnection of 2019.

I’ve been a fan of the Dingbats of Danger Street since first encountering them as a teenager in DC Comics’ 1st Issue Special #6 in 1975. After so many years researching Kirby’s work, knowing there were still two complete Dingbats issues that remained unpublished has haunted me. As a Kirby fan, that material simply must get out there! So I worked it out with DC Comics to finally get those, and Jack’s other remaining unpublished DC work, into print in yet another 2019 book I’m extremely proud of.

As I type this in December, copies of Jack Kirby’s Dingbat Love just arrived here at TwoMorrows HQ. It’s a great, and highly fitting, way to wrap up our Silver Anniversary year.

But the fun never stops at TwoMorrows, especially when it comes to Jack Kirby. The week before Thanksgiving, I sent Jack Kirby Collector #78 to press—that 25th anniversary issue will be back here too late to actually be in readers’ hands during calendar year 2019, but such is life as a publisher. I

spend most of my time getting our other authors’ and editors’ books and magazines to press on time, leaving scarcely any for my own magazine.

But still, every few months, I clear the decks, shut off the phones and email, and spend a few weeks re-immersing myself in the work of the guy who got me where I am today in the comics business.

Whether or not they fully realize it, all our authors, editors, designers, colorists, transcribers, and proofreaders wouldn’t be where they are today— namely, involved with such well-loved publications—if it weren’t for Jack Kirby also. I’m fully away our longevity is largely due to him.

And talk about longevity: Jack and Roz Kirby were married for over 50 years! Anyone who’s been in a marriage longer than their first romantic year knows what a remarkable achievement that is. I’ve been blessed with a wife and life partner who’s stuck with me through some

Photo by Kendall Whitehouse.

Next page, top: The youngest Morrow señoritas, then and now— how time flies…

It All Comes Back to Jack… and Family

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unforgettable years (and a couple we’d probably prefer to forget). She’s given me two daughters who almost daily confirm that the decision that resulted from our storied bicycle ride across North Carolina was the wisest choice we ever made together.

But my family is so much bigger than just Pam and Lily and Hannah Rose. I can’t list the names of everyone who’s ever contributed to a TwoMorrows publication, as I’m sure I’d leave someone out and cause hurt feelings. While this book is our attempt

John Morrow: Epilogue

to spotlight some of the most prominent ones, that doesn’t mean the ones that aren’t mentioned weren’t just as critical to our success—and that’s especially true of our readers. If Kirby’s fans hadn’t responded enthusiastically to that 16-page hand-Xeroxed newsletter I mailed for free back on September 5, 1994, there’d be no TwoMorrows today. The same is true of you, reading this now.

You see, you’re a big part of the TwoMorrows family—a quirky, sometimes dysfunctional group of dingbats, perhaps, but our common bonds keep bringing us back together, year after year, issue after issue, book after book. That love of the comics, characters, and creators we grew up with, has formed lasting friendships and relationships among fandom, and I’m proud to have been able to help foster them through our publications.

So my sombrero’s off to everyone who’s been a part of our journey all these years. I’m looking forward to several more decades documenting the history of comics, LEGO®, and pop culture—and of whatever fun new thing I discover, that has similarly sparked the imagination in other TwoMorrows family members I’m yet to meet.

And to Jon B. Cooke: thank you for making me do this book, and for so many years of friendship.

— John Morrow

Above: Jack and Rosalind Kirby, the couple who set an example for us all, in a 1980s photo by Joe Frank. Their May 23, 1942 wedding photo is below.

Below: Outtake photos from our own wedding invitation photo shoot in 1986. If we’d only known back then what awaited… we wouldn’t have changed a thing.

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All characters TM & © their respective owners.

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THE MLJ COMPANION

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COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION

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

ER EISN RD AWAINEE! NOM

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IT CREPT FROM THE TOMB

EXPANDED SECOND EDITION—16 EXTRA PAGES! Looks back at the creators of the Marvel Universe’s own words, in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and television interviews, to paint a picture of JACK KIRBY and STAN LEE’s complicated relationship! Includes recollections from STEVE DITKO, ROY THOMAS, WALLACE WOOD, JOHN ROMITA SR., and other Marvel Bullpenners!

ED AND EXP COND SE ION! IT ED

HERO-A-GO-GO!

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JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE

The final complete, unpublished Jack Kirby stories in existence, presented here for the first time, in cooperation with DC Comics! Two unused 1970s DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET tales, plus TRUE-LIFE DIVORCE and SOUL LOVE magazines!

(176-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 (Digital Edition) $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-091-5

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Pop History.

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

BONUS SECTION

TwoMorrows Mem ry Album

CORRESPONDENCE October 14

, 1991

Jack Kirb y 2590 Sapr a Thousand Oaks,

CA 9136 2 Dear Jack , Don’t let the formali head exist ty of the let s largely because of terhead fool you; this is de your influ finitely a ence in m I’m 28 ye fan y life, an ars old, an d I wanted letter. My first, d have be bama, an in fa to let you d discover en know abou ct. This lettered your wo reading your book purchase of books t it, so he s rk sin by ce arou accid re goes. at the Seve was a plea n-11 store ent when I mistak nd 1972-’73. I gr sa enly purc ew up in . I’m not of your ba nt surprise; pleasa hased an Montgom sure what nt enough ck issues iss ery, Alabooks I wa ue of Kam as I could. dealer, an to make it d waited s an a I in di in my sent off fo re to heavily for them weekly r all of th gular purchase, an at the tim to arrive. e Fourth e, but Ka I was in th World bo d soon after to se mandi ar oks I coul e d afford fro ch for as many school. I seventh grade at th liv m a mail is order were itchi ed in an apartmen time, and I came down with ng like cr t with my azy, and Mom, an wasn’t lo I wa d she had Chicken Pox, and ok to work. was forced showed up ing forward to the s the most misera So th ble re to stay ho at me from the packag my door with a st of that week. Bu I’d ever been. Th ere I was all alo ne HUGE pa at first da e to me. t a wonder ckage of y was tortu , and these things He set it them up!) ful thing comics. down on happened re, and I (He saw our front re th ally e ne my Chick xt day. Th step, and en made me e mailman The rest wait until Pox, and wouldn of that we ’t even ha he was go ek was a miserable nd ne lot more before I co I pleasant uld pick and all th was, and made m becaus e in e co Coke bottl ncepts that I had to a permanent Ja e of those books.

They help ck Kirby to get the es, and do fan. I wa ed get my re finally go in s so blow t the whol g whatever I coul st of those books! n away by mind off of how e thing (e d all the ch ven the no to raise enough m I worked like craz aracters y mowin oney for n-Kirby iss But it wa g lawns, th sn’t enou e ues of ‘L colle gh. It ne ois Lane’). rest of the Fourth to. I just ver ended.

World se cting had to kn ries. And I wa ow chance to I complete how it would end. nted to see the fin your epic. al battle be And I spen tw t the next In the mea several ye een Orion & Dark ntime, I stu seid at Ar ars hoping about you maghetdied your that you’ I d be give work, an n the d tried to ordered Sp could find, and lea im rn iri everything t World, In The Da ed about Venus HB itate your art style. you drew ys Of Th pe I read ev ncils, #3 e . This he ery intervi inking lped me de Mob, and a coup le of portf brushes, and 3 ply ew and article velop my I divided olio bristol bo my time art talent, ard. I between and I finall s you did. And I to college co continued mics and at the Un y branched stu to buy iv T-shirt sh -out into ops, usin ersity of Southern dying music. I alw my own g the draw style.

M ered a ca ays knew ing abilitie ississippi to get reer in ar I wo uld be a m my degree t. s I develo us ic . I helped ped by stu pay my wa teacher, and I went dying yo After 2-1/ ur work.

2 Still, I ne y by working at life. And years of music scho ver serious it ol, I decid ly consid ability. So dawned on me th ed tea ching at if I enrolled in the Au t-shirt shops woul music wasn’t what burn Univ d hire me, I wanted ersity art to th en do m fo aybe I co departmen uld make r the rest of my t, and got a liv a degree in Graphi ing from my art c Design.

I also met

This page: Clockwise from top left is a 1991 fan letter from John Morrow to Jack Kirby, following their meeting the previous summer; Jon B. Cooke’s first missive to his future publisher; four days later, John comments that Jon is already “hard at work” on The Jack Kirby Collector; Jim Warren’s inscription on JBC’s copy of CBA #4; Jan. 1998 fax from Roy Thomas, expressing happiness that Alter Ego will be a part of CBA; and Roy’s 1997 (misdated 1998) letter to John upon hearing of new fanzine CBA. Next page: Communiques from comic book luminaries to TwoMorrows, including letters from (clockwise, top left) Joe Kubert (agreeing to his CBA #1 interview), Carmine Infantino (who initially threatened litigation over CBA #1 and even had his attorney send an intimidating letter, though all was soon enough made right); Stan Lee (commenting on CBA #2); postcard from Flo Steinberg (applauding CBA #4); Julius Schwartz (who subsequently raved about the mag); Joe Sinnott lauding the Wonder Years book; and Alex Toth (who established a friendship with its editor while becoming a regular CBA contributor). In the center is an effusive 2018 missive from Steve Ditko about his admiration for Alter Ego. The Spider-Man co-creator would die three months later.

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THOSE WE’VE LOST Photo by Seth Kushner

Ernie Colón

Jay Lynch Roz Kirby

Jack Kirby

Harlan Ellison

Gil Kane

Joe Kubert

D. Bruce Berry Al Williamson

Flo Steinberg

Dick Giordano

Julius Schwartz

Kurt Schaffenberger

Murphy Anderson

Marie Severin

Al Plastino

Joe Simon Dick Ayers

Nick Cardy Herb Trimpe

Howard Post

Joe Orlando

Dave Stevens

Chic Stone

Will Eisner John Buscema

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Gary Sherman Michael Gross

Grass Green

Len Wein

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Dan Adkins Photo by Seth Kushner

Gary Friedrich

Arnold Drake

Stan Goldberg

Sam Glanzman

Carmine Infantino George Evans

Rich Buckler

Gene Colan

Irwin Hasen

Frank Springer

Photo by Greg Preston

Archie Goodwin

Alex Toth

Stan & Joan Lee

Steve Gerber

Jerry Bails

Mike Wieringo

Jim Mooney George Roussos Batton Lash

Bernie Wrightson

Warren Kremer

Marc Swayze

Photo by Kendall Whitehouse

Russ Heath Jerry Robinson

George Tuska

Shel Dorf

Darwyn Cooke

Gray Morrow

Steve Ditko

Dan Spiegle

Howard Cruse

Next three spreads: Set up chronologically, thumbnail repros of every single TwoMorrows publication from over the last 25-plus years, with a few digital-only efforts. Total is 726, with many more to come in the future!

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OH, THE PLACES WE’VE GONE

Above: We Morrows have incorporated a lot of beautiful excursions in 25 years of heading West each summer for Comic-Con! The Grand Canyon (2010), Yellowstone (plus the Grand Tetons and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 2011), Yosemite and its redwood forest (2012), Maui (2014), Joshua Tree (2015), Bryce and Zion Canyons (2017), and Idyllwild California (2018—their mayor is a Golden Retreiver!).

Right: In 2013, we even journeyed to Europe, where Kirby Collector contributor and longtime penpal Jean Depelley and his family served as our Parisian tour guides.

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Above: With so many West Coast amusement parks, the Morrow family have been regular visitors to LEGOLand, Universal Studios, Knotts Berry Farm, and of course, Disneyland (thanks, Craig Smith!). In 2013, BrickJournal editor Joe Meno let me tag along on his private tour of the Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, where they were putting the final touches on the film Frozen. I got to see the orchestral recording session for the soundtrack—a major thrill for me with my music background.

Left: Vegas, baby! Thanks to some sage advice from Mark Evanier, we had a blast there in 2017, taking in performances by magicians Penn and Teller, and Mac King, and managing not to lose too much at the slot machines.

Top: 2017 was a very good year!

After the Disney Legends ceremony, I met Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Bob Iger, and other celebs. Just a few days later, I was Special Guest at Comic-Con during Kirby’s centennial celebration, and honored with the Inkpot Award for “Achievement in Comic Arts” (inset right).

Left: At the 2019 World of Two­ Morrows panel at Comic-Con, I got to reflect on the past 25 years with (first row, left to right) Paul Hamerlinck, some guy named Cooke (who dat?) , Dewey Cassell, (second row, center) Keith Dallas, and Mike Manley (right). With friends like these, it’s no wonder we’ve stuck around so long!

Photo by Kendall Whitehouse.

Above: Back Issue editor Michael Eury couldn’t attend in 2019, but his mag won the Eisner Award for “Best Comics-Related Publication” that year. (inset left) Thanks to comics and Jack Kirby, I was able to share these great experiences with my family.

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ODDBALL ODDITY

Rarely-seen Comic Book Artist Curio: CBA Bullpen Publisher’s note: Though Jon B. Cooke and I parted ways for a time, he kept me apprised of what he was working on, particularly the CBA Bullpen, his personal pet project. It was in many ways the closest he ever came (for me, at least) to duplicating the excitement of the original CBA #1. I loved seeing these and feeling the love put into them—they gave me the thrill I got from his early CBA issues, Paul Hamerlinck’s original FCA newletters before it became part of Alter Ego, and my own early TJKC issues.

It was sometime around the 2003 American League Championship Series, during which New England home team Boston Red Sox were locked in a life-and-death struggle with mortal enemy the New York Yankees for the ALC crown, when, caught up in pennant fever, I thought up the notion of Comic Book Artist Bullpen. The idea was to create a home business utilizing the mountain of comics history material I accumulated over six years of CBA, and maybe make Casa Cooke a dime or two in the process. The family and I were nuts for the Beantown baseball team during those glorious

years, and so I decided to start a new publication using Stan Lee’s nickname for his Marvel Comics club of contributors and melding it with baseball (from where the term was derived). CBA Bullpen was a black&-white, irregularly published ’zine that lasted for three regular and two double-sized issues, and the effort was attractive, entertaining, and worthy, but the profit margin was nearly non-existent, as the number of subscribers remained pretty slim.

There’s been talk over the years of TwoMorrows publishing a collection or CBC integrating the material into its pages. I’m rooting for the former, as this was a fun home team effort, and the MVPs who contributed certainly deserve it. — Jon B. Cooke

Following pages: A special Kirby Collector supplement from 1995, sent only to subscribers. See page 40 for a full description, and thanks to Richard Kolkman for his help with it!

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late-breaking kirby news!

Rare Kirby Books Discovered

by Richard Kolkman

ln the course of compiling the updated Kirby Checklist, I’ve uncovered four previously unknown books featuring Kirby art. All were published between the late 1960s to early ’70s, but various problems kept them from reaching the newsstands.

These books are so rare, you won’t find them in Overstreet’s Price Guide. But they’re not ashcans or reprints; these are full, complete books with new Kirby stories.

Each had extremely low distribution, and in some cases only file copies of each exists, stored in Marvel’s and DC’s vaults.

DC and Marvel have released several file copies of Infinity Man #1 and Captain America And Hulk #1, which will be up for bid at the Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses this year. When the time comes, we’ll have a full report of what these extremely rare collectibles sold for. We’ll feature some of the previously unseen art from these books in our next issue of TJKC.

Infinity Man #1 (July 1972)

Remember how Infinity Man disappeared from Forever People #4, only to turn up again in #11? While many thought Jack had simply forgotten about the character, he actually was saving him for his own comic, which would have been the fifth book in his Fourth World series. #1 was published at the tail end of DC’s 52-page 25¢ books, but was pulled from circulation when the decision was made to drop all their books to 20¢. Some of the material from this issue was recycled and later used in Forever People #11.

“The Bat and the DNA Project” 24 pgs.

Script, pencils: Jack Kirby Inks: Mike Royer Faces: Murphy Anderson

BACK-UP FEATURE: “The Krypton Equation” 2 pgs.

Script, pencils: Jack Kirby Inks: Vince Colletta STORY SYNOPSIS: Superman’s electronic file at the Evil Factory goes berserk, halting all machinery and disrupting all electrical activity. Eventually, Mokkari enters the “Healer Code” and normal business resumes.

EXTRA!

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ping the atomic reaction, and then fades out again.

STORY SYNOPSIS: After spending months in limbo (a result of being zapped by Darkseid in Forever People #3), Infinity Man temporarily materializes in the DNA Project.

He’s confused by his surroundings, and begins destroying everything in sight looking for Darkseid. Jimmy Olsen is there, and in his search for help stumbles across a Batman clone being held in a life preserving solution. After being released by Jimmy, the Batman clone delivers the first blow to Infinity Man. Into this standoff scene stumbles the Golden Guardian and Goody Rickels, who proceeds to taunt and goad Infinity Man into action. They undergo a heated battle, and the resulting chaos endangers the Project’s power core. Darkseid witnesses this scene and comments on the futility of Infinity Man’s search.

After everyone escapes, Infinity Man comes to his senses. He flies into the power core and succeeds in stop-

Capt. America & Hulk #1 (April 1968) Like Iron Man and Sub-Mariner #1, this book was a one-shot used to bridge the gap between when Cap left Tales of Suspense for his own mag, and Hulk left Tales to Astonish. Jack provided the cover and Captain America

story (inks by Giacoia), while Herb Trimpe did the art for the Hulk story. A scheduling mix-up had this issue shipping AFTER Captain America #100 and Incredible Hulk #102. Since this would have ruined the continuity of the continued stories in the new solo books, at the last minute Marvel pulled it from circulation to avoid confusing readers.

“The Mighty Will Inherit the Moon” 10 pgs.

Co-plot, script: Stan Lee Co-plot, pencils: Jack Kirby Inks: Frank Giacoia STORY SYNOPSIS: The Hulk lays is a suspended state in the Leader’s lair on the moon. A highly dangerous Cosmic-Powered Hulk android discarded by the Mad Thinker is found and activated by the

Leader. Through S.H.I.E.L.D.’s powerful telescopes, Captain America witnesses this and travels to the Moon’s surface in a S.H.I.E.L.D. Lunar Transport Missile. Armed with some oxygen pressure capsules from Reed Richards, Cap tracks down the Leader, but does not reach him. Cap engages in a fierce battle with the Cosmic-Powered Hulk. The ensuing carnage awakens the real Hulk, who maddened with being restrained, proceeds to destroy the Leader’s entire installation. The Watcher, witnessing all of this, appears before Cap and vows not to get

involved.

He then hands Cap a Trans Dimensional Gateway Pod. Cap uses this to transport the battling Hulks into the void of airless space. On the way back to Earth, Cap retrieves the real Hulk and turns him over to the care of S.H.I.E.L.D. The Cap story ends with a fear-crazed Leader entombed beneath the rubble of his laboratory, muttering revenge and beginning work on a Cosmic-Powered Sentry android (later seen in Fantastic Four #100). The Trimpe Hulk story picks up where Cap turns the Hulk over to S.H.I.E.L.D.

Doctor Doom #1 (September 1969)

This was an ill-fated attempt to give Doom his own comic. When Marvel announced this project in 1969, no villain had received his own solo comic before.

Responding to negative publicity from parent’s groups, Marvel destroyed the entire print run. Apparently they forgot Jack had his file copy, which many think is the only copy in existence. Despite its less-than-mint condition, it is complete. This was one of Jack’s final stories before he left Marvel, and the politics surrounding it are said to be a major part of why he left Marvel for DC. Marvel later made Doom a co-feature in Astonishing Tales (in an attempt to pacify parents, they gave Doom second billing to Ka-Zar).

“Doomsman!” 20 pgs.

Script, pencils: Jack Kirby Inks: Wally Wood

STORY SYNOPSIS: After a brief reflection out his castle window, Dr. Doom repairs to his laboratory to confront his newest creation, The Doomsman. To bring him to life, Doom must hook his mind up to that of The Doomsman. After mental transferral to the Id Machine, Doom and Doomsman do battle, until, upon awakening, they find their minds have been switched. Doom (as Doomsman) flees to a missile plane and rockets off into the skies. The Doomsman (as Doom) pursues and shoots down his creator over the hidden land. Happening upon the wreckage is Ka-zar and Zabu. The story is supposed to be continued, but a second issue never came out, so it ended there.

colds. In the meantime, Spider-Man is waging an incredible 10-page battle with the Sentry in an effort to escape the ship. Spider-Man is almost out of the ship, when he is dealt an incapacitating mind blow by the Kree Supreme Intelligence, who decides that Spider-Man is a just soul who is merely caught up in circumstances beyond his understanding. Mercifully, the Kree Supreme Intelligence gently transports Spider-Man down onto the street. Upon regaining consciousness, Spider-Man limps his way home, trying to remember the last few hours.

(Note: Although this story pre-dates the first appearance of Captain Mar-Vell, he is mentioned in this story as a “Kree warrior on his way to Earth.”)

Amazing Spider-Man Annual #4

(Nov. 1967) Many people think Jack never did a very good version of SpiderMan, and apparently someone at Marvel felt the same way. The book was pulled from circulation, since Jack’s Spidey didn’t match the established John Romita look of the character.

“A Web To The Stars” 20 pgs.

Co-plot, script: Stan Lee Co-plot, pencils: Jack Kirby Inks: Bill Everett STORY SYNOPSIS: Spider-Man is swinging around the city and is intercepted by the Sentry and brought aboard his spaceship. The Sentry questions Spider-Man about Ronan the Accuser’s defeat. The story cuts quickly to Aunt Mae commenting to herself about Peter’s susceptibility to

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A Message From The Editor

pril fool (a little early!). Yes, this Special News Supplement is one big joke. A fib. A little white lie (okay, maybe a big white lie). When subscriber Richard Kolkman sent me these great fake Kirby covers for books that never existed, for a few seconds I thought they were real! And for a few seconds, I felt that rush I get when I’m flipping through a box of comics at a convention and find a Kirby comic I’m missing from my collection. It was such a great feeling that I wanted to share it with TJKC subscribers. I hope you enjoyed our little trip through Kirby comics that “might have been”, and that you don’t get too mad at me for pulling your leg. And even though all the comics mentioned here are fakes, feel free to share this April Fool’s joke with a fellow Kirby fan on April 1.

Now let’s just hope none of these comics show up in next year’s Overstreet Price Guide!

John Morrow, Editor Design/Layout: D. Hambone, Machine Wolf Graphics, Ltd.

In 1994, amidst the boom-&-bust of comic book speculators, The Jack Kirby Collector #1 was published for true fans of the medium.

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