Alter Ego #58 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Roy Roy T Thomas homas ’’ X-Traordinary X-Traordinary Comics Comics F Fanzine anzine

YOU’VE SEEN ALL 3 FILMS! NOW READ ABOUT-TM

THE X-MEN MOVIE THAT NEVER WAS!

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In the USA

No. 58 May 2006

PLUS:

AWESOME Art & Artifacts by:

Vol. 3, No. 58 / May 2006

™

Editor

Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout

Christopher Day

Consulting Editor John Morrow

FCA Editor

P.C. Hamerlinck

Contents

Comic Crypt Editor Michael T. Gilbert

Editors Emeritus

Jerry Bails (founder) Ronn Foss, Biljo White, Mike Friedrich

Production Assistant

Eric Nolen-Weathington

Cover Artist

Gil Kane (layout) & Mark Sparacio (painting)

Cover Colorist

Chris Irving tells how The X-Men became the nucleus of Marvel Comics.

“X” Marks the Sprocket . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 The 1980s X-Men movie that might have been—but never was.

“The Kon-Tiki Statue Blowing Its Nose Was Our Favorite Scene!” . . . 16 Gerry Conway & Roy Thomas talk turkey about their 1984 X-Men screenplay.

Bob Brant And The Trouble-Shooters—Plus Lance Brant . . . . . . . . . . 30 A 1953 Timely/Marvel series that had kids & mutants—by Thomas C. Lammers.

Tom Ziuko

And Special Thanks to:

Neal Adams Heidi Amash Bob Andelman Brent Anderson Ger Apeldoorn Sergio Aragonés Terry Austin Bob Bailey Allen & Roz Bellman John Benson Daniel Best Dominic Bongo Jerry K. Boyd Will Brehm Chris Brown Frank Brunner Orlando Busino R. Dewey Cassell Brent Canavan Nick Caputo Vic Carrabotta Don R. & Ivy Carol Christensen Dave Cockrum Gene Colan Carla & Cara Conway Gerry Conway Mike Costa Phil Couto Ray A. Cuthbert Shelton Drum Shane Foley Greg Gatlin Jeff Gelb John Gentil Janet Gilbert Mark Glidden Matt Gore Jennifer Hamerlinck Jack C. Harris Heritage Comics Daniel Herman Christopher Irving Martin Jukovsky

Writer/Editorial: An X-Rated Movie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Children of the Atom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Adele Kurtzman Richard Kyle Thomas C. Lammers Arthur Lortie Mark Luebker Don Mangus Christie Marx Bruce Mason Dave McDonnell Angel Medina Craig Miller Brian K. Morris Frank Motler Will Murray George Olshevsky Gary Owens John G. Pierce Bud Plant Ethan Roberts Steven Rowe Scott Shaw! Robin Snyder Flo Steinberg Bhob Stewart Dann Thomas Leona Thomas Frank Thorne Alex Toth George & Dorothy Tuska Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. Jim Valentino Dr. Michael J. Vassallo Alan Waite Hames Ware Bill Warren Robin Waugh Len Wein Steve Whitaker Ted White Malcolm Whyte Rodrigo M. Zeidan Eddy Zeno

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Mort Leav & Bill Fraccio

Riddle Of The Rabble Rouser. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Will Murray on the eerie relationship between Rabble Rouser and Hate-Monger.

“Jack [Kirby] Says You’re A Good Artist” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 1950s Timely artist Vic Carrabotta tells Jim Amash about drawing for Stan Lee, Charlie Biro, et al.

A Cruise And A Comicon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Another 1950s Timely staffer—Allen Bellman—still keeps busy!

When Is An “Unknown” Not Unknown?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., and Hames Ware on the life and career of artist Ray Willner.

A Silver Anniversary For A Silver-Ager & Spouse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Roy & Dann Thomas celebrate their 25th—with art & photos from a four-color 1981wedding!

Comic Crypt: Russ Manning – The Fan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Michael T. Gilbert & Ray Cuthbert examine the Tarzan/Magnus artist’s pre-pro work.

“Ball’s In Your Court Now—And No Text To Help You” . . . . . . . 67 Incomparable artist Alex Toth on silent sequences in comics.

Tributes to Mort Leav & Bill Fraccio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 The Forgotten ’50s: Will Comics Ever Again Be As Exciting As EC? . 70 Bill Schelly spotlights a 1966 panel with Archie Goodwin, Bhob Stewart, & Ted White.

re: [comments, correspondence, & corrections on our Will Eisner issue:]. . 75 FCA [Fawcett Collectors of America] #117 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 P.C. Hamerlinck presents Marc Swayze & C.C. Beck—plus Captain Marvel & The Human Torch!

About Our Cover: It was a natural choice to utilize the late great Gil Kane’s half-cover of the classic 1975 Giant-Size X-Men as this basis of this issue’s cover. Working from a copy of its oft-reprinted rough (reprinted yet again, above!), artist Mark Sparacio painted a truly stunning cover especially for Alter Ego. Talk about combining beauty and power! [Painting ©2006 Mark Sparacio; rough ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.; X-Men TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Alter EgoTM is published monthly, except Jan., April., Sept., and Nov. by TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: 32 Bluebird Trail, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Single issues: $9 ($11.00 outside the US). Twelve-issue subscriptions:$72 US, $132 Canada, $144 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © Roy Thomas. Alter Ego is a TM of Roy & Dann Thomas. FCA is a TM of P.C. Hamerlinck. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

Title writer/editorial

An “X”-Rated Movie

ep, that’s right. The X-Men screenplay Gerry Conway and I wrote in 1984 for what could’ve become a major Hollywood movie a decade and a half before the 2000 big-budget blockbuster might easily have been rated “X.”

Still, as a snapshot of what it was like, in the mid-1980s, to be working on the screenplay of a potential studio movie at a time after most of the Christopher Reeve Superman films, but before Tim Burton took on Batman—and in an era when Marvel had had zero success in getting any of its properties transmuted to the big screen—we thought you might enjoy listening in on Gerry’s and my recent phone conversation. And reading what Chris Irving has to say about both our X-Men screenplay and the comic book, by way of introduction.

“X” for: extraordinary… exciting… exuberant… excessive… exaggerated… exasperating… exceptional… expressive… explosive… Execrable? We hope not. And, finally… exterminated. ’Cause, like the vast majority of screenplays written—even purchased, as this one was—by motion picture producers, it never got made. As you’ll see in the last of the three X-Men-related pieces in this issue, we two veteran comic book writers/editors found the experience (another “X”!) of writing that script to be all the above adjectives, at one time or another… all over a period of a few months in 1984. Still, we deemed it interesting, even amusing, to look back on it more than two decades later… and hope you enjoy our dissection of the event. Like most things in life, our joint remembrances of writing that script often resemble nothing so much as the classic Japanese film Rashomon, in which several people recall the same events through different eyes, with different minds—and wind up occasionally with wildly varying conclusions.

Even with this issue’s focus on Professor X’s exceptional students, though, we still managed to squeeze in plenty of other material, much of it Marvel-related this time… plus our regular departments and another feature or two. We won’t claim this issue of A/E contains “something for everybody”—but if you have any real interest in the history of the comics field, we kinda suspect you’ll find something in it to your taste. From mutants to Manning to MegaCon to Man Comics, and, yes, marriage—this one’s got a little bit of everything. Read two articles—maybe three—and e-mail us in the morning. Bestest,

COMING IN JUNE

DARK NIGHTS & STEEL!

Batman, Superman, & More In The Golden & Silver Ages! • Mind-blowing new Batman cover painting by award-winning artist ARTHUR SUYDAM! • Interviews Galore! ARTHUR SUYDAM on his early comics career—modern legend NEAL ADAMS on 1960s/70s DC—SHELLY MOLDOFF on Batman, Hawkman, & BOB KANE—major Superman artist AL PLASTINO—& Golden Age illustrator FRAN MATERA (Doll Man, Steve Roper, etc.) talks to JIM AMASH! • When Superman co-creator JERRY SIEGEL wrote The Spider! (No, not that one —or that one, either!) Article by ALBERTO BECATTINI. • “Superman and the Third Reich!” by DWIGHT DECKER—MURRAY BISHOFF on SIEGEL & SHUSTER! • Plus FCA with MARC SWAYZE, JERRY ORDWAY, RUBEN PROCOPIO, et al.— BILL SCHELLY‘s 1966 Benson Con Report—MICHAEL T. GILBERT on RUSS MANNING—& MORE!! Edited by ROY THOMAS ©2006 Arthur Suydam.] Comics; other art elements [Batman TM & ©2006 DC

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The X-Men Movie That Never Was! part one

Children Of The Atom

Or: How THE X-MEN Mutated To Become The Nucleus Of Marvel Comics by Christopher Irving

Lee & Kirby

he X-Men weren’t always a strong part of the core of Marvel Comics. In the 1960s, they started out as weaker electrons, orbiting a nucleus composed of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four.

Led by the bald and wheelchair-bound Professor X, Marvel’s X-Men were brought to life by the legendary team of writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby in The X-Men #1(Sept. 1963). With field leader Scott (Cyclops) Summers, Hank (Beast) McCoy, Bobby (Iceman) Drake, Warren (Angel) Worthington III, and the lovely Jean (Marvel Girl) Grey, The X-Men were mutants—each born with an “extra” power. Working under the cover of Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters headquarters, the group were assembled to deal with potentially dangerous mutants. In their first appearance, with Charles Xavier leading them from afar via telepathy, they fought Magneto, the Master of Magnetism.

The Men Behind The Mutants Images of X-Men co-creators Stan the Man and King Kirby from F.O.O.M. #1 (1973) & #11 (1975)—plus a flashback page from a never-published fill-in issue of The X-Men! The latter, produced circa 1990 by “new X-Men” co-developer Dave Cockrum (penciler), Joe Rubinstein (inker), & Roger Stern (scripter), includes this truncated look at the early days of the mutants’ original mag. Thanks to Dave for providing photocopies of the original art. The cover of F.O.O.M. #1 was, we assume, conjured up by editor/wizard Jim Steranko by doing weird and wonderful things to a photo of Stan Lee, while the one celebrating Jack’s return to Marvel in the mid-’70s is by John Byrne & Joe Sinnott. Byrne, of course, became the fourth artist of major importance to The X-Men, the previous three being Kirby, Neal Adams, and Cockrum. [Art ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Stan and Jack continued to produce X-Men in the “Mighty Marvel Manner,” and the extra-powered teens continued to face off against misunderstood and downright criminal mutants: The Vanisher, The Mimic, The Blob, Unus the Untouchable, and Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (The Toad, Mastermind, Quicksilver, and The Scarlet Witch). Within the first year, readers saw the five students “graduate,” with Cyclops becoming the field leader. Stan and Jack also introduced Cerebro, the device used to track down new mutants, and the Savage Land, where the Tarzan-like Ka-Zar lived amongst dinosaurs and cavemen. The bimonthly X-Men slowly started to come into its own after the second year, with the introduction of Xavier’s step-brother Cain Marko, The Juggernaut, in #12 (July 1965); the layouts by Kirby and finishes by the also-legendary Alex Toth still manage to shine, despite Vincent Colletta’s heavy-handed inking. Kirby stayed on the book through issue #17, by which point he’d also helped Stan introduce the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots, and had ushered in the return of Magneto with help from Werner Roth (using the pseudonym “Jay Gavin”).

How The X-Men Became The Nucleus Of Marvel Comics The X-Men Get Conned Roy Thomas looking anything but “Rascally” at John Benson’s 1966 New York comics convention (see p. 70 for more on the con), and the cover of X-Men #24 (Sept. ’66), on sale around that same time. Art by Werner Roth & Dick Ayers. [Photo ©2006 Jack C. Harris, with thanks to Bill Schelly; art ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc., from Essential Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 1.]

The X-Men was hardly a bad book, but the early issues seemed to lack the inspiration of the other Marvel titles. Whereas XMen featured team members slightly reminiscent of the Fantastic Four personality-wise (Beast and Iceman were very much like Thing and Human Torch, while Jean and Cyclops enjoyed a Sue Storm/Reed Richards type of relationship), they weren’t as extreme—or quite as amusing—as the FF in their interaction. Sure, they were teenagers like Spider-Man, but Spidey’s angle was in his having to do the superhero gig all alone... while The X-Men had Professor X’s guidance. In short, The X-Men utilized tried and true Marvel formulas, rather than inventing one completely its own.

without the benefit of a full origin tale, as four of the five members had already been recruited by the start of X-Men #1, nor was new arrival Jean Grey’s background revealed. With Thomas and Roth’s run, The Beast became less of a lovable goof and more eloquent and witty, Angel became cockier, Iceman a tad more temperamental. And Cyclops’ serious attitude began to weigh more heavily on him. Lee and Kirby’s X-Men may have been written as a group of individual personality types; Thomas wrote them as an ensemble cast of characters. In #42 (March 1968), Professor X “dies” while defeating the subhuman villain Grotesk, leaving the five teenagers on their own. His death marked the beginning of the rumblings of the dark tone that would later become the book’s trademark. Thomas would stay on for one more issue, plotting #44 (May 1968), which was dialogued by Gary Friedrich. The return of Golden Age hero Red Raven was literally a footnote to The X-Men’s larger adventure. Friedrich would write the next four issues, including a crossover with The Avengers (which resolved itself in June 1968’s Avengers #53) and The X-Men’s short-lived split-up.

Arnold Drake & Co. It’s ironic that Arnold Drake would become writer on X-Men with #49 (Oct. 1968): his DC title The Doom Patrol (also about a group of freaks with a handicapped leader) predated The X-Men by three months, and some feel it was riffed for the mutants’ first foray. Headed by wheelchairbound Niles Caulder (“The Chief”), The Doom Patrol were a group of misfits consisting of Robotman, Negative Man, and Elasti-Girl, where The X-Men were led by wheelchairbound Professor X and was a group of mutant misfits. “[Many] DC artists were working for Stan [also]...” Drake wrote in A/E #24. “In short, from the day I dropped my first ‘Doom Patrol’ script on [editor Murray] Boltinoff’s desk, news could have leaked to Marvel about a team of anti-super-heroes led by a scien-

Thomas & Roth Roy “The Boy” Thomas came on as writer with X-Men #20 (May 1966), and would develop The X-Men’s world even further by introducing new supporting characters and revealing the various young mutants’ backgrounds in back-up stories. At Stan’s request, he revealed how Professor X had been crippled. He also brought back The Mimic (from #19) as a team member, and he and artist Werner Roth created the Irish mutant Banshee. Humanity’s anti-mutant sentiment now began to feel more a threat, as The X-Men would occasionally encounter mutant-hating crowds. Still, from #20-33, The X-Men lacked the visual dynamics required to make it stand out like Kirby’s Fantastic Four or Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man. “The art was a reasonably good approximation of the Jack Kirby look, but without the dynamism Jack gave it,” Thomas stated in Alter Ego #24. He also Wheelchairs Of The World Unite! feels that, as a novice writer, his scripting Arnold Drake—the only Silver Ager who ever wrote both didn’t have the polish of Stan Lee’s. In X-Men #38 (Nov. 1967), Thomas and Roth began the “Origins of The X-Men” back-up series, which followed Xavier’s assembling of the team, one member at a time. Unlike the majority of super-hero comics in that era, X-Men had begun

The Doom Patrol and The X-Men—juxtaposed with the Bruno Premiani cover of DC’s Doom Patrol Archives, Vol. 1. That series, we’re happy to say, is up to Vol. 3, and we hope the entire Drake/Premiani run will eventually be completed... though A/E’s editor has never bought into the likelihood that Lee & Kirby were influenced by the DP’s 1963 debut to launch The X-Men. Still, if anybody has any contrary information...! (Art ©2006 DC Comics.]

Children Of The Atom

tific genius in a wheelchair. So the plagiarism issue remains open. But unless someone steps up to say, ‘Yes, one day, I told Stan about that,’ it will never close.” Drake’s first issue introduced Iceman’s girlfriend Lorna Dane, a green-haired mutant with magnetic powers. Under the control of both Mesmero and (apparently) Magneto, Lorna believed she was the latter’s daughter and fought The X-Men throughout the next issue. Legend-in-the-making Jim Steranko penciled X-Men #51-52, with Barry [later Windsor-] Smith doing his first US comics artwork for #53; Smith later gained notice drawing the Conan the Barbarian comic book in the 1970s. Don Heck drew Drake’s final issue as writer (#54), in time to introduce Cyclops’ brother Alex Summers.

Thomas, Adams, et al. Where Thomas started his first run by fleshing out the characters created by Stan and Jack, he would start his second by running with the two created by Drake: Lorna/Polaris and Alex. Thomas’ first issue (#55), probably taking its cue from hints provided by Drake, revealed that Alex was a mutant... leading up to the next groundbreaking issue. Artist Neal Adams signed on with X-Men #56 (May 1969), which this writer considers the turning point of the title. X-Men had started as standard super-hero fare that had evolved into a darker-than-usual super-hero book. While Roth’s and Heck’s artwork was more than adequate to tell the story, it lacked the grounding in realism that made the dark tone believable. As a result, working via the “Marvel method” (with the artists drawing from a plot, and the writer adding dialogue afterwards) possibly hampered the potential of the title. Adams’ trademark photorealistic style not only gave Thomas more to play with as a writer, but made the dangers faced by The X-Men more believable. When Alex Summers powers fully manifest themselves at the end of X-Men #56, readers are finally shown just how scary being a mutant can be, through everything from the dialogue and artistic pacing to the genuine look of fear drawn on Alex’s face. His terror as he is faced with these new powers sets The X-Men against the newest version of The Sentinels, a larger and more efficient version spearheaded by Larry Trask, son of the robots’ creator. By #58, mutants the world over are hunted and captured by the giant androids, and Alex makes his debut as Havok—in one of the great (Adams-designed) costumes of the era. The next issue ends with Cyclops fooling The Sentinels into trying to destroy the sun, the source of all mutation, by flying straight into it. The interspersing of news clips throughout this arc not only helps to move the narration, but also broadcasts the grandness of the Sentinel hunt and anti-mutant fervor, and provides a parallel to the live television broadcast of the original Bolivar Trask back in X-Men #14. The Thomas/Adams team would stay on until #63. The divergence of opinion between writer and artist concerning aspects of their tenure on X-Men has been documented in the pages of Alter Ego and Comic Book Artist magazines. In light of that debate, it is safe to say that each worked off the other’s respective strengths and contributions, to produce what is arguably the best run of the original X-Men team. The Japanese mutant Sunfire debuted in #64, with art by Don Heck (inked by Tom Palmer with an eye toward keeping the Adams look), followed by the return of Professor X in the next issue. Xavier, it turns out, had let the terminally-ill villain Changeling replace him. With the Changeling/Xavier dead, the real Professor X stayed underground, preparing for an alien invasion that had been brewing for some time. It is

The Phoenix Rises—But So Do The X-Men The entire run of Neal Adams-drawn X-Men issues from 1969-70 was reprinted in the 1966 X-Men Visionaries 2: The Neal Adams Collection (though we frankly abhorred the metallic re-coloring and the removal of story titles and credits therein), and they’ll soon be reprinted again (hopefully better) in the 6th volume of the Marvel Masterworks: X-Men series. So we prefer to feature this early-’80s poster by Mr. A. of the “New X-Men.” Sure, it was also in Alter Ego: The Comic Book Artist Collection—but that book’s out of print. The photo of Neal at left, tagline and all, is from the 1975 Mighty Marvel Comic Convention program book. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

disappointing that the build-up and payoff would take place all within one issue (with Denny O’Neil filling in for Thomas to script from a plot by Adams). One more issue would follow. X-Men #66 would feature the young mutants against the Hulk, as written by Thomas and penciled by Sal Buscema. Then, The X-Men went away—sort-of.

Re-Presentations X-Men #67 (Dec. 1970, nine months after #66) re-launched the title as a series of reprints. Without a regular series of new stories, the mutants flitted in and out of other Marvel titles as guest-stars. The Beast earned his own series in Amazing Adventures #11-17 (March 1972March 1973), wherein he foolishly drank a serum that turned him blue and furry (ironically, it was so he could hide his identity as a mutant from the story’s villain), written by Gerry Conway, then Steve Englehart, and drawn by Tom Sutton. The Beast would become the John Lennon of the group, experiencing a successful solo career that resulted in his later becoming a regular member of The Avengers. In the meantime, as editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas worked toward bringing The X-Men back, but with a different twist: that of an international group of mutants. The reasons for this multi-nation assemblage

How The X-Men Became The Nucleus Of Marvel Comics Support Your “X”!

As Chris Irving points out, during his stint as Marvel’s editor-in-chief from 1972-74, Roy Thomas kept finding ways to keep The X-Men in front of readers. In Captain America #173 (May ’74) he was aided and abetted by writer Steve Englehart—and by artist Gil Kane, who penciled this cover; inker uncertain. Gil and Roy would sit in the latter’s office one afternoon every two weeks or so and come up with dozens of covers. The issue (with interior art by Sal Buscema & Vince Colletta) is currently on display in the trade paperback Captain America & The Falcon: Secret Empire. Sal had also penciled the final issue of The X-Men’s first volume. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

was primarily commercial: Marvel Comics had generated a global audience, and combining heroes from different countries would provide appeal on that wide level.

Cockrum, Claremont, & Co. Giant-Size X-Men #1 (May 1975) redefined the team as, in Thomas’ words, “a team of mutant Blackhawks”—the latter, of course, being a multi-national team of aviators published first by Quality, later by DC—although Thomas had resigned as editor-in-chief by the time the new title debuted. New mutant characters Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Thunderbird joined previously-introduced Banshee, Sunfire, and Wolverine to form the Cyclops-led new X-Men grouping. While Banshee and Sunfire had been introduced in the earlier series, Wolverine had debuted in the pages of October 1974’s Incredible Hulk #180, at the request of Thomas as editor. Earlier, artist Dave Cockrum had apparently shown Thomas a design for a proposed Legion of Super-Heroes villain named Wolverine, before Thomas approached writer Len Wein about creating a Canadian mutant with that name to appear in Hulk. Thomas says he has no conscious memory of the Cockrum character and actually briefly considered having him called The Badger rather than The Wolverine. Designed by John Romita and drawn by legendary Hulk artist Herb Trimpe, Wolverine would eventually find himself both an unlikely hero, and a breakout character. Giant-Size X-Men #1 opens with the introduction of Nightcrawler, pursued by angry German villagers armed with pitchforks and torches. Saved at the last minute by Professor X, Nightcrawler is offered the chance to help other mutants while learning to control his powers. Similar sequences introduce the other characters, leading up to Cyclops’ taking the new and untrained team on a mission to save the older members (Marvel Girl, Havok, Polaris, Iceman, and Angel) from Krakoa, the mutant island.

Dave’s Right Here! Dave Cockrum, in a photo which appeared in the June 1973 edition of The Academy of Comic Book Arts Newsletter—and the artist’s re-creation of his cover for 1975’s X-Men #101. Thanks to Flo Steinberg for the photo— and to Dominic Bongo and Heritage Comics for the Cockrum re-do. [Art ©2006 Dave Cockrum; X-Men TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Written by Len Wein and drawn by Dave Cockrum (fresh from his stint drawing Legion of Super-Heroes for DC Comics), the newest X-Men team was abundant in volatile personalities and angst. While the original team had, for the most part, gotten along with each other, the new one was more dysfunctional than the Fantastic Four on a bad day. From loose cannons Wolverine and Thunderbird, to the pretentious Sunfire and the initially grim Nightcrawler, the character conflicts made the climactic battles all the more interesting. Cockrum had come to the table with a sketchbook-full of character designs, some of which he’d once intended for Legion. The demonic Nightcrawler was originally meant to be a Legionnaire, but DC editor Murray Boltinoff had rejected the character as a little too sinister in appearance. A heroine named Black Cat was given a redesign of her facial features and hair, along with the addition of a cape, and was transformed into the African X-Man Storm. Along with designing Colossus and Thunderbird, Cockrum modified Cyclops’ visor, modeling it

Children Of The Atom on the giant robot Gort in the science-fiction film classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Giant-Size X-Men #1 proved to be a one-shot. X-Men #94 (Aug. 1975) was the beginning of the new team’s run on the book... and the return to original material in the title. With the issue plotted by Wein, new writer Chris Claremont signed on as scripter and would become the architect of the book for decades to come. Beginning with the departure of Angel, Iceman, and Marvel Girl, and ending with the death of Thunderbird, the new X-Men quickly proved themselves a different breed of cat than the original team. The tragedy of Thunderbird’s death was a wake-up call for readers, one that cemented X-Men as a book where people died and the villains were not just evil, they were murderous. Unlike most heroic deaths (such as Menthor in THUNDER Agents), Thunderbird’s was not so much noble as suicidal, as he intentionally went up in flames while tearing apart Count Nefaria’s fleeing jet.

7 (patterned after DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes) and earned their stripes in the cosmic realm. The artist would return to Xavier’s School for a second stint as penciler in 1981. “Dave and I laid a good foundation,” Claremont said in A/E #25. “We defined the team as characters, and John and I took it to the next level.... The thing with the book is that it was very primal and we were very free. Nobody was looking over our shoulders, except us, and I think we benefited from that.”

Byrne, Austin— & Claremont

The new art team of penciler John Byrne and inker Terry Austin came on board with X-Men #108 (Dec. 1977), in time to wrap up the Shi’ar storyline. By the following issue, The X-Men started to gel as a familial unit (as opposed to a cast of bickering superheroes), and more attention was gradually given to Wolverine. Claremont and Cockrum had stated that While issue #96 featured Colossus was originally The X-Men fighting a rather intended to be the breakout generic demon, there were star of the new X-Men two defining character (something very apparent in moments: Wolverine finally the earlier issues), while letting his savage side go— Wolverine was scarcely and a glimpse of Storm’s developed beyond being a childhood. The gradual buildbackground character. Byrne, up of each character’s The “Die” Is Cast a Canadian himself, truly backstory was a more First Professor X “died”—then The X-Men “died”! It was getting to be a trend! began defining the character intriguing approach than the The effectively moody John Byrne/Terry Austin cover of The X-Men #114 (Oct. 1978) is with Claremont in #109. Both back-up origin tales done in repro’d from a photocopy of the original art. The story inside, of course, was scripted Claremont and Byrne were the original X-Men series. by Chris Claremont, who spearheaded the Merry Mutant Marching Society’s meander credited as co-authors, or Readers were spoon-fed to greatness post-1975. With thanks to Dominic Bongo and Heritage Comics. See “Raconteurs,” starting with nuggets of background, Heritage’s full-page ad elsewhere in this issue. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.] X-Men #113—and, Wolverine, piecing the full origins unsurprisingly, began to take on a larger role. together with the characters. X-Men would soon become more soap opera-like in that respect, avoiding set story arcs for one very long, He became more than the team’s resident enigmatic bad-boy; he continuously-winding, and organically-evolving narrative. became more a character the others reacted to, than one who reacted to the others. Rather than being a reluctant team member, he was now a The return of the mutant-hunting Sentinels in X-Men #98-100 (Apr.proactive leader with an uncanny fortitude against villains like Magneto Aug. 1976) sparked a landmark event: the apparent death of Jean Grey, and The Petrified Man. Wolverine eventually became a runaway success, and her return as the enigmatic, cosmic powerhouse called The Phoenix. earning his own title even while remaining a lynchpin in all incarnations The boost in her powers would reflect one of the many groundbreaking of the team. trends in The X-Men: the females would be amongst the most powerful characters. Where female super-team members were traditionally created Claremont and Byrne introduced even more characters, such as to be rescued by their male counterparts, those roles were reversed in Canadian super-team Alpha Flight (which Byrne would later produce as X-Men. a solo title), Kitty Pryde (the youngest X-Man, at age 13), and Dazzler (who, story has it, was created to be a vehicle for a Bo Derek super-hero Dave Cockrum stayed on as X-Men artist until #107 (Oct. 1977), film that never materialized). wherein the young mutants fought the alien Shi’ar Imperial Guard

How The X-Men Became The Nucleus Of Marvel Comics

The X-Men would typically have three-issue story arcs that would flow from one to another, with several running story threads. The most noted thread would be the beginnings of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” which would ultimately go down as one of the most memorable longrunning stories in super-hero comics, and would push the limits of mortality in that genre.

“[Claremont] comes in the next day, and says, ‘We’re gonna kill her,’” Shooter stated in A/E #24’s transcription of a 2000 convention panel. “He thought I would never go for this, that there was no way I would ever agree that a major Marvel character could be killed. I said, ‘Okay, done.’ Looking back on it, it’s a huge story. It was really the thing that catapulted The X-Men to Number One.”

Throughout several issues, Jean Grey’s powers increase, while her humanity slowly begins to slip away. As she is psychically manipulated by the villain Mastermind, she comes in touch with her dark side. Where Spider-Man will eternally teach that “with great power there must come great responsibility,” The Dark Phoenix will always be a prime example of “absolute power corrupting absolutely.”

Byrne would stay on X-Men through #143 (March 1981), which included the anti-climactic yet memorable “Days of Future Past” storyline. Arguably more than any other period in the book’s 42-year existence, the era from 1969 to 1981 is still being mined for both the current X-books and film and animation projects. Jean has died yet again (turning her into a walking cliché) and has become The Phoenix in the comics, while the third X-Men film features numerous elements from the Dark Phoenix Saga era, even down to the inclusion of Kitty Pryde and Colossus. (Alas, no Dazzler, but the early ’80s Disco Queen may get her time in the limelight... er, mirrored ball... someday.)

Dark Phoenix & Aftermath Jean’s corruption from Phoenix to Dark Phoenix results in the death of an entire solar system, and leads Jean to commit suicide by means of a very deux ex machina cannon on #137’s battleground on the dark side of the moon. Sacrificing herself to keep her evil side from re-emerging, Jean Grey became one of comicdom’s first martyrs.

Certainly, despite a slow start, The X-Men eventually redefined the super-hero genre. It is now a nucleus of the Marvel atomic universe, and other series revolve around it.

Interestingly enough, the Dark Phoenix Saga was meant to end with Jean’s redemption and return to The X-Men. A disagreement between Marvel’s then editor-in-chief Jim Shooter and the X-Men creative team, however, resulted in Jean’s sacrifice. “Shooter felt, as editor-in-chief, issue 137 [the issue wherein Dark Phoenix destroys a planet] was making a moral statement about crime and punishment that he felt was wrong,” Claremont recalled in A/E #25. “As editor-in-chief, he decided to tell us to fix it. That’s the job! I disagreed vehemently with the decision at the time, but time has proven him right.”

Chris Irving, who has written for The Comics Buyer’s Guide and other publications in the past, also functions as associate editor of Comic Book Artist magazine, and is hard at work on a book about The Blue Beetle for TwoMorrows. He also writes FemForce for AC Comics and lives in Richmond, Virginia, with a black cat and a lot of books. Chris Irving

The X-Men Movie That Never Was! part two

“X” Marks The Sprocket

The 1984 X-Men Movie That Might Have Been by Christopher Irving

Mutants, Mutants Everywhere Screenwriters Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas can be seen in a 1981 photo on p. 16. So here we’ve juxtaposed the opening scene of the 7/20/84 “Revised 1st Draft” of their screenplay for X-Men with a great piece of art by Brent Anderson & Terry Austin. This was the wraparound cover of George Olshevsky’s ambitious 1981 Marvel Comics Index, Vol. 1, No. 9A. [Art ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.; screenplay ©2006 Gerry Conway & Roy Thomas.]

984 would have been an interesting year for an X-Men film. Six years prior, Superman: The Movie had brought an unforeseen legitimacy to the super-hero as a film genre, and had already garnered two sequels by that point. The highly acclaimed Incredible Hulk TV show had gone off the CBS airwaves in 1982, after enjoying a four-season run.

A revised first draft of an X-Men movie, by writers Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas, was done—with Orion Pictures as its projected distributor—with a July 20, 1984, date. That month’s issue of The Uncanny X-Men featured the writing of Chris Claremont with the art of John Romita, Jr. While X-Men had yet to become a household name at that point, it had achieved high sales marks at Marvel, and was at least on the verge of passing up The Amazing Spider-Man as Marvel’s top seller. Gerry and Roy themselves will tell how their screenplay came to be written, in the piece that follows. But first, what about the story itself? That’s what I’m here to convey, after reading what was officially called the “rewrite” of the first draft as opposed to the “second draft”:

The 1984 X-Men Movie That Might Have Been

X-Men (no “The” in the title) opens with a close-up of a large green crystal, pulsing with energy, as it shoots a ray of green light into the sea floor of the Pacific Ocean, causing an eruption of the ocean that results in chunks of sea bottom rising to the surface. Three hundred miles away, in Hawaii, the results of the upheaval are felt in the form of a crushing tidal wave that wipes out an entire beachside resort. A newborn island surfaces and steams in the ocean, observed by technicians surrounding the green crystal matrix chamber, from which Nickelby, a red-eyed albino, emerges. The scene changes to the basement of Kitty Pryde (“14, all knees and elbows and big elfish eyes”) and her equally skinny and awkward friend Bernie, as they wrestle playfully over the remote control. Professor Charles Xavier, a handsome, bald man in his 30s, is being interviewed by Ted Koppel on Nightline about a super-powered race emerging in the world, in a scene slightly reminiscent of Xavier’s televised debate with Bolivar Trask in X-Men #14 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. As Kitty and Bernie fight for the remote, the images on the TV screen alternate between Xavier and an MTV video of Japanese bubble-gum pop singer Yoshi Akia, until static blots out both images. While Bernie fiddles with the remote, a fed-up Kitty kicks the television set... and her foot phases through it. The set clicks back on, to a news report of the earthquake in Hawaii, a report that Xavier sees in the Nightline studio. Closing his eyes, Xavier witnesses mental images of the quake and its afterbirth. Later, at the Pentagon, Xavier and Dr. Danielle Cross (a member of

“Mein Führer—I Can Walk!” Whoops—that’s a different movie! (One that got made!) Above is page 3 of the never-printed circa-1990 Stern/Cockrum/Rubenstein X-Men issue mentioned earlier; the original art of this story was returned to penciler Dave C. only in early 2003. Here, an ambulatory Charles Xavier confronts FBI agent Fred Duncan, from the 1960s “Origins of The X-Men” series—but he’s really only a “mental projection,” with Wolverine, Cyclops, and The Beast guarding his actual corpus in a nearby limo. You can see page 2 of this story in Alter Ego #24—which contains over 50 pages on Marvel’s madcap mutants behind an original Cockrum cover. See p. 27 of this issue for details. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Proteus’ Command Chamber Artist Mark Glidden, who’s drawn stories for Bill Black’s AC Comics and various “maskot” illos for A/E, graciously illustrated several key scenes from Gerry & Roy’s screenplay. (See Mark’s ad on p. 15.) He titled this one as per this paragraph’s heading. Incidentally, one scene cut from this draft depicted the capture of the poor, doomed mutant “Nicholas Nickelby.” Originally, he was a stage magician (cf. David Copperfield, another name from Dickens) who used mutant abilities to work his wonders. Proteus captured him in one of the very first scenes, to provide a power source— while he lived. Hmm… maybe we should’ve christened Proteus’ headquarters “Bleak House”! [Art ©2006 Mark Glidden.]

the President’s Science Council in her early 30s) arrive by helicopter. Cross is trying to convince Xavier to assemble his once-proposed group of highly trained children with “remarkable powers.” He had made that proposal two years ago, and Xavier remains unconvinced that this “telekinetic commando squad” could be prepared to handle this new island menace, especially with time running out. Xavier’s ire is slightly raised when Danielle makes mention of his brother Jack, another government operative. (Incidentally, Xavier is not wheelchair-bound in this screenplay.) Xavier observes Danielle’s fear of the Pacific Basin earthquake, and she double-takes with a “You read my mind.” “I have hidden talents,” Xavier disarmingly quips back.

“X” Marks The Sprocket Arriving in the Pentagon’s Situation Room, Xavier and Danielle meet up with Marcus Stonewell, a corporate tycoon who is “a charming, hearty man in [his] middle 40s, with a ready grin,” and his stunning 21-year-old blonde daughter, Carmilla. Stonewell disagrees with Xavier’s theories, and chides the Professor before going to hobnob with the Joint Chiefs. Danielle reveals the island’s growth rate to Charles: 2,000 square meters an hour. Videography reveals the island’s man-made nature: a particle beam sent from Easter Island started a fault line. A Marine team, led by Xavier’s aforementioned brother Jack, arrives at the island and is promptly blown to bits. As all the monitors in the Situation Room blink out, the map is replaced by an image of a faceted, gem-like globe, the symbol of Proteus. A hologram emerges from the screen, of a 20-foot tall “amorphous entity made up of faces, faces, FACES”—all of which speak in a single Protean voice. The Proteus hologram announces its plan to expand the island into a new continent in ten days: Pangaea, which will overcome the world. While the hologram speaks its demands, Xavier probes Stonewell’s mind and sees an image of The Master Matrix (a larger version of the matrix from the opening) in Stonewell’s factory. Then, with Stonewell looking back at him, Xavier sees an image of a monstrous face, with “an inhuman mouth gaping, teeth dripping mucus and blood.” At the same time, Proteus announces its collective state of “homo superior,” the next stage of evolution. Leaving the Pentagon, Danielle urges Xavier to collect the children he tracked down with government resources years before: “kids with... extra abilities. Extra powers. X-Men,” Xavier notes in a line culled from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men #1. Back at her home, Kitty Pryde unwittingly phases through the kitchen floor and into the basement with her mutant powers. Dazed, she happens to spot an issue of Psychology Today on her coffee table. It is opened to a photo piece on Xavier and his special Westchester County Institute, where he works with special children. We cut to Gold Mountain, Utah, on Day One, where patrolman Scott Summers (“19... handsome, but hardened by something inside him”) rescues a trio of skiers from an avalanche by lifting his red glasses and firing scarlet beams from his eyes. Xavier greets Scott, and we learn that the lonely Summers has chosen the mountains to keep himself from

Circe La Femme With this dramatic drawing, Mark Glidden becomes the first (and possibly last) person ever to visualize Yoshi Akia, a.k.a. Circe, the Japanese mutant (excuse us, “extraordinary person”). Roy wonders if he and Gerry were ever tempted to suggest using the name “Sunfire,” which he had given a character he’d created for the X-Men comic book. [Art ©2006 Mark Glidden.]

11 Two From X-Men 2 James Marsden as Scott Summers/Cyclops and Hugh Jackman as Logan/Wolverine, in scenes from X-Men 2—or did they mostly just call that one X2? Naturally, as this issue of Alter Ego goes to press, we haven’t yet seen the third movie, but trust it’ll be the special-effects extravaganza that the first two were— with a convoluted plot that would do our ol’ buddy Chris Claremont proud! [Photos: Kerry Hayes/TM & ©2003 20th Century-Fox. All rights reserved. X-Men character likenesses TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.]

harming anyone with his mutant abilities. Hesitant to go back to his old mentor, Scott is convinced after he is zapped by Xavier’s mental images of the island and the inhuman dripping mouth. Meanwhile, Stonewell and Carmilla arrive at the Stonewell Factory. While Carmilla greets her date, Harry, Stonewell retreats to his office, and then his inner sanctum (with the entrance hidden behind a portrait). Stonewell seats himself at a table, with holograms of five other members of Proteus: an Arab shiek, British businesswoman, female Russian in a military uniform, South American engineer, and a Japanese executive. As they speak, only one voice (the one from the hologram) is heard. It is revealed that the mutant Nickelby will burn out after activating the Master Matrix that is to be shipped to Easter Island in six days. The Master Matrix is meant to control the chain reaction begun by the First Stage Matrix in the first scene, and to stop the reaction that will create Pangaea before it destroys the Earth. Meanwhile, Carmilla and Harry make out, while they wait, she says, for her father to “have you for dinner.” She sends Harry through the entrance to Stonewell’s sanctum, and he is eaten alive by Stonewell, whose mouth opens shark-like and closes over Harry’s face. Stonewell leaves his Sanctum, energized by his latest victim. Scott and Xavier set out to assemble their team of X-Men, in a fashion much like the opening panels of Giant-Size XMen #1. Starting in Oakville, Canada, Xavier and Scott find 23-year-old bad-boy Logan fighting with a group of Toronto policemen. During the fight, Logan’s eightinch steel claws “Snik!” out from above his knuckles, slicing billy clubs in two (yet not inflicting any bodily harm to any of his opponents). Finally subdued, Logan is taken in by the police. “We’ll come back for him,” Xavier proclaims before sending Scott out to procure Kurt Wagner in Bavaria and Yoshi Akia in Tokyo.

The 1984 X-Men Movie That Might Have Been

Arriving in the Soviet Ukraine, Xavier and a Russian official witness young farmboy Peter Rasputin, a strongly-built youth of 19, pulling a chained tree stump from the ground. Peter’s skin slowly becomes metallic and, with his “Colossus effect” complete, he pulls the entire stump from the ground, to the cheers of the surrounding villagers. The Russian official forces the hesitant Peter to go to the United States with Xavier, as Peter shockingly eyes them both. The scene of Peter getting the better of an old tree stump is very close to John Byrne’s splash page of December 1980’s The Uncanny X-Men #140, although Peter was much more secretive about his power in GiantSize X-Men. In a Tokyo nightclub, Scott makes his way through the “New Wave” scene, to see 17year-old Japanese pop star Yoshi Akia (seen on Kitty’s TV earlier). Scott’s tall frame and awkward manner catch Yoshi’s eye, and they share some sushi. There, the smitten Yoshi reveals her extra power: she can transform objects into different states (revealed by turning a glass of water to granite). Yoshi agrees to join because Scott is “so, so cute.”

He Crawls By Night—Hence The Name (Left:) A previously-unprinted 2004 comicon sketch of Nightcrawler by his original creator, Dave Cockrum. With thanks to Eddy Zeno. [Art ©2006 Dave Cockrum; Nightcrawler TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Above:) Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler in X-Men 2. [Photo: Kerry Hayes/ TM & ©2003 20th Century-Fox. All rights reserved. X-Men character likeness TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.]

humor, until a few issues after his debut). Charmed by Yoshi, Kurt Wagner pledges himself to The X-Men’s cause. The fourth day has Scott and Xavier back in Ontario at the Oakville City Jail, talking with Logan about his release. Goaded by Scott, Logan agrees to join Xavier’s cause, and he is released when Scott blows a hole in the prison wall “in spectacular SLOW MOTION.” The only real look we get of Xavier’s Salem Center in Westchester is when The X-Men load crates of equipment into a truck... to go train in the government’s Manhattan safe house, which is devised to “test some unusual new anti-personnel weapon systems.” The most apparent reason for not showing more than the exterior of the Westchester Center must have been budgetary: the “safe house” is no more than a townhouse, which would presumably be less expensive to film on-location with.

The parallels between Yoshi and Dazzler (who premiered in Feb. 1979’s The Uncanny X-Men #130) are quite apparent, even down to their mutual attraction to Scott. While Dazzler was the failed Disco Queen, Yoshi’s status as bubble-gum/New Wave pop sensation worked for the mid-’80s, and might even hold up today.

As the van loaded with The X-Men and Danielle starts to pull off, Kitty Pryde arrives, pleading with Xavier to help her. Begging her to give him a week, Xavier starts to leave, with the determined Kitty chasing the van... and phasing in through the back, landing amidst The X-Men.

Xavier arrives in the African veldt of Kenya on Day Three, to track down Ororo, a village’s weather goddess. Standing amidst the storm winds, the near-naked 20-year-old approaches Xavier with disdain and, upon the plea for help... regally turns her back to return to her people. Aside from the end result, the scene plays out much like to her first comic book appearance, even down to Storm’s loyalty to her people.

Two days later, Kitty’s friend Bernie follows her to the brownstone safehouse, where he is witness to the film’s version of the Danger Room: a “narrow white corridor between two rows of OPEN CUBICLES, from which strange sounds can be heard.” He sees each of The X-Men using their respective powers against a series of obstacles in their cubicles, until he’s caught in Kitty’s by the other X-Men.

Scott and Yoshi go to Bavaria that day, outside the ruins of a castle stormed by armed villagers straight out of an old Hammer Frankenstein movie. The monster they seek is first seen as he moves across the forest’s brush, his furry hands and claw-like toes moving like a cat’s...his prehensile tail swishing as the rest of the devilish Nightcrawler is revealed. Wagner is played strictly for laughs, as he deals with the attacking villagers by scaring them and hurling fruit at them in a very slapstick manner. The scene is a well-paced, if not wacky, means of displaying all of his super-powers. If not for the comical approach, it would run very closely with his appearance in Giant-Size X-Men #1 (though Kurt did not develop his teleportation ability, or his sense of

Bernie, typical stock boy character for younger male viewers to identify with, is let in on everything with The X-Men. After two days of training, Xavier decrees that The X-Men must move against Proteus that night, and gives all but the young Kitty a costume and code name, with the Japanese Yoshi named Circe, after a figure in Greek mythology. Their mission: infiltrate Stonewell Industries to prevent any further machinations of Proteus. Wolverine speaks the term “mutie” for the first and only time in the script. Nightcrawler, Cyclops, and Circe learn that Stonewell is having the

“X” Marks The Sprocket

army transport The Master Matrix at dawn. As The X-Men stop the army convoy, Storm decides to join in the fight, bringing Stonewell and Carmilla’s helicopter down with her elemental powers. After all the members have a chance to display their powers against the army, the truck with the Master Matrix is hijacked by Nightcrawler. The X-Men celebrate with a cookout at the brownstone. Complete with everything from Scott and Yoshi kissing, to Nightcrawler and Wolverine playing basketball, to Colossus and Shadowcat dancing... it’s a typical “day in the life” scene straight from one of Claremont’s X-Men issues. Logan pulls away from the group, clad in trademark cowboy hat and sheepskin coat (as often outfitted in the comics by original revival artist Dave Cockrum), and observes the Master Matrix in a training cubicle. Despite Xavier’s plea, he leaves the X-Men, having fulfilled his obligation to help by obtaining the Matrix. Things get worse for Xavier as, later in the evening, Danielle reveals to him that the Proteus Island has gotten out of control, causing stress lines to tear the Pacific Basin apart. Stonewell’s security chief, Krueger, gets control of the cab Xavier and Peter are leaving in and takes off with Xavier. In one of the most visually stunning scenes of the film, Peter is dragged down the freeway by the car, his hand shut in the door. Assuming his Colossus form, he batters the car, saving Xavier but nearly dying in the process. Hospitalized with his injuries, Peter is not allowed to return to the U.S.S.R., much to the chagrin of a Soviet official. Xavier and Danielle have an argument over the Professor’s refusal to divulge information about his X-Men, and we see his contempt for the government’s red tape.

In a repeat of the earlier scene with the ill-fated Harry, Logan is led through the entrance to Stonewell’s sanctum... where Stonewell greets him with a smile. Back at the safe house, Xavier decides to enter the Master Matrix in an attempt to control the tectonic chaos caused by the island. Rather than trying to devour Logan, Stonewell convinces him to help him regain the Master Matrix, so that they can stop the island’s downward spiral, as long as “nobody gets hurt.” Two things are revealed: Stonewell is one of the first mutants, and Logan had two siblings growing up. In addition, Stonewell claims that Carmilla has no “special talents.”

Meanwhile, Logan is seduced by Carmilla and introduced to Stonewell. For the first time ever, the origin of Wolverine’s claws is revealed, and it is far different than the one in Barry WindsorSmith’s Weapon X story of the 1990s: “When I was 18,” Logan recalls, “I rammed my car into a freight train. Every damn bone in my body was busted, and bones don’t heal like flesh. I’d have been a basket case, but some bright surgeon figured out I had something... extra. Something that’d keep me alive, no matter what they did to me. They replaced every long bone in my body with Adamantium steel rods, the hardest thing there is.

“The implants in my hand didn’t work out quite right,” he goes on, popping a claw out with a distinctive SNIK! “The claws were a bonus.”

Proteus agents, led by Wolverine and Krueger, raid the X-Men’s safe house headquarters. They gain entrance when Wolverine tears a door open with his claws. Cyclops and Yoshi are ambushed and defeated while fixing coffee in the kitchen (a slightly similar scene would be played out between Wolverine and Iceman in Bryan Singer’s 2003 X-Men sequel, X2). While Xavier suffers in the Master Matrix, Storm and Nightcrawler are attacked and defeated by Kreuger and Wolverine. After Logan leaves the room, Krueger sets a time bomb to go off in five minutes.

Kitty and Bernie arrive in time to see Wolverine riding off in a Proteus truck... right before the townhouse explodes. Using her phasing ability, Kitty saves Storm from underneath a pile of debris, as the

The 1984 X-Men Movie That Might Have Been

In the Proteus control room, Wolverine glances at the clock counting ten minutes until zero hour as Xavier lies strapped to a table, and then storms from the room. Nickelby collapses from the feedback caused by Cyclops’ powerful optic ray, and is placed by Stonewell in the Master Matrix. The force field disabled, The X-Men then face off with Krueger and his Proteus soldiers in a battle with laser rifles and super-powers. With Nickelby too exhausted to control the Master Matrix, which is attuned to his specific psychic pattern, Stonewell reveals his mutant ability when he swallows Nickelby in his expandable jaws. Stonewell takes on the psychic’s power and albino appearance—and his place in the Master Matrix. Carmilla reveals her true nature to Wolverine: she’s a mutant just like her father. The two struggle as she tries to devour the Canadian.

Storm Amid Storm (Left:) Mark Glidden’s slight re-conception of Ororo, based on a reading of the screenplay. [Art ©2006 Mark Glidden; Storm TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Right:) Academy Award winner Halle Berry as Storm, from X-Men 2. [Photo: Kerry Hayes/ TM & ©2003 20th Century-Fox. All rights reserved. X-Men character likeness TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.]

battered trio of Nightcrawler, Cyclops, and Circe hobble from the wreckage. Day Nine starts with Logan accompanying Stonewell’s men and the Master Matrix (still carrying Xavier), on a transport jet bound for Easter Island. The large stone heads on Easter Island are dwarfed by a new gigantic one that emits a tractor beam that pulls the Stonewell transport jet in safely. Danielle Cross and The X-Men get past the guard at Stonewell Industries, and steal their latest jet prototype: a “thought-controlled” Blackbird jet. As Cyclops, Circe, Nightcrawler, and Storm suit up and prepare to leave, Kitty reveals her green costume and code name— Ariel—only to be left behind to sulk in Danielle’s car. Nightcrawler uses his teleportation abilities to defeat the Blackbird’s guards and board the ship, while Yoshi dons the control helmet, which has “myriad wires attached to instruments.” The description fits that of the Cerebro helmet with which The X-Men track mutants in the comics. The sea floor continues to suffer from magma eruptions and shifting plates, as The X-Men speed towards Easter Island in the Blackbird. With the tides affected, treacherous storms conquer the sky. Nickelby strains inside the First Stage Matrix on Easter Island, controlling the large stone idol to fire a destructive green beam at the approaching Blackbird. Storm hurls herself out of the falling jet, and summons a powerful wind beneath the jet, braking its descent enough to save the X-Men inside. Her cape billowing out as she flies amidst the chaos, Storm shouts incantations as she tames the weather the best she can. As Storm works on keeping the weather in check, the other X-Men encounter a force field, with Cyclops blasting it at full intensity.

Professor Xavier frees himself from the clamps holding him in place, and is then zapped by the Master Matrix. The other X-Men (Nightcrawler, Circe, and an unconscious Cyclops) hide behind the everdwindling shelter of a stone idol, as it is cut down by repeated laser fire. Before they know it, the large stone head fires a green beam towards their spot, as Krueger also levels a rifle at the three— —and is crushed by Colossus, whose impact sends shockwaves that are felt in the Proteus command center. A white version of the Blackbird jet arrives (having deposited Colossus) with Danielle, Kitty, and Bernie inside. Wolverine uses the distraction to send the monstrous Carmilla through a window that is placed in the nostril of the giant stone head. Colossus takes a giant beam from the stone head in the chest, but is then nudged aside by Cyclops, who meets the green beam with his optic blast. The two beams struggle, with Cyclops winning, his optic rays pushing all the way through to Stonewell in the Master Matrix. The force of the blast causes the stone head to crack apart, the control room a shambles from the backlash. As The X-Men reconvene, Bernie touches the apparently dead Matrix, and a green spark throws him back. Beams shoot throughout the room and strike Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Xavier. With Stonewell transformed into a half-crystal being more powerful than before, Circe orders Kitty to distract Stonewell with her phasing powers. Diving into the Matrix, Kitty tickles Stonewell, who inadvertently turns the beam off, long enough for Circe to touch the crystal and turn it to ice. Wolverine makes a sudden appearance, striking the ice crystal with his claws, creating an explosion of ice shards. As The X-Men leave the stone head’s ruins, they’re faced with the still out-of-control weather patterns. Xavier psychically guides Cyclops to blast the ocean floor to

“X” Marks The Sprocket

seal the fault line and cause an end to the destruction. One by one, The X-Men each place their hands on Xavier, lending their energy to Cyclops and increasing the power of his optic blast. The sun comes out and the seas and sky calm, as Storm floats down to her team, sunbeams illuminating her from behind. She lends her power to the team, and then Wolverine joins in. The breach on the bottom of the ocean floor is sealed, and the exhausted X-Men triumphantly collapse. The final scene has Danielle and Xavier kissing—Cyclops and Circe doing the same— Colossus and Storm hugging “as friends,” Bernie and Kitty kissing, and Wolverine playfully pulling his offered hand from Nightcrawler. The outsider Wolverine is joyfully embraced by the entire team as the X-Men movie that never was fades out.… Contemporary readers of X-Men comics And A Good Time Was Had By All would naturally read this script and wonder why Charles Xavier and his X-Men in the second film. Patrick Stewart (once Captain Picard, of course) Wolverine doesn’t play a larger role than Cyclops. as Professor X; Famke Janssen as Jean Grey; James Marsden as Cyclops; Halle Berry as Storm… is When this script was written, Wolverine had been there anybody we missed? [Photos: Kerry Hayes/TM & ©2003 20th Century-Fox. All rights reserved. a major player in X-Men since their return to X-Men character likenesses TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.] their own title in 1976, but he had only been awarded a mini-series handled by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller in 1982, two years A few changes are obvious, even to casual readers of the X-Men earlier. While much of the X-Men screenplay hinges on Cyclops, each books: Xavier is not confined to a wheelchair, and the term “mutant” is character still got a fair share of screen time in this script, more than they used only once in the entire script (and then, actually, just as a slang have in the first two of the current crop of movies. term, “mutie,” by Wolverine—which a mainstream audience probably wouldn’t have known was short for “mutant”). The defining racism aspect of the books is also absent. Stonewell and the Proteus organization seem to be loosely based on Moira MacTaggert’s mutant son Proteus, from 1979 (X-Men #125-128)... who has the abilities to warp reality and absorb others’ life forces while possessing their bodies. The large jaws are slightly reminiscent of the Alien-like Brood in earlier Claremont/Byrne issues of X-Men, while Stonewell’s final form is much like the villain Jack O’Diamonds (later The Living Diamond) from Cyclops’ origin in X-Men #41. In the early issues of X-Men, Xavier had been working with government agent Fred Duncan to assemble his X-Men; Danielle Cross serves the twin roles of both government contact and love interest to Xavier. Xavier’s half-brother in the comics, Cain Marko (later the villain Juggernaut), was apparently killed in the Korean War, sending Xavier into a depression and forced solitude. The military ties are present with the ill-fated Jack Xavier, who seems nothing more than a plot device to give Xavier more motive to defeat Proteus. Kitty Pryde first appeared in The Uncanny X-Men #129 (Jan. 1980) and adopted the Ariel persona in later issues, until eventually settling on the codename Shadowcat. Her presence in the film is an obvious attempt to identify with younger viewers, as is Bernie’s, for the male demographic. Kitty’s introduction into the world of The X-Men would also serve as the basis for 1988’s Pryde of The X-Men animated pilot. The 1984 X-Men script was obviously aimed at a younger, family demographic than the movie that emerged years later. If successful, it might have opened the doors for comic genre movies a few years sooner than Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film did. As things worked out, the Fox Kids’ X-Men cartoon of the 1990s helped make X-Men enough of a household name for director Bryan Singer’s X-Men film to be made and released in 2000.

The X-Men Movie That Never Was! part three

“The Kon-Tiki Statue Blowing Its Nose Was Our Favorite Scene!” A Conversation Between GERRY CONWAY and ROY THOMAS About Their 1984 X-Men Screenplay For Orion Pictures

Conducted (Feb. 6, 2006) by Roy Thomas

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

animated Fire and Ice (1982), produced by Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta—and Conan the Destroyer (1983), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Grace Jones, for which we scripted the first five drafts and received “Story by” screen credit—plus royalties which still trickle in, each and every year. During this period, we also wrote six other screenplays (all live-action), for which we were paid, though they were never produced: Snow Fury (a horror/sciencefiction film based on a 1950s novel)… Cage (also for Bakshi; a film in the “Indiana Jones” mode)… Spy vs. Spy (based loosely on the Prohias feature in Mad)… Doc Dynamo (a send-up of World

ow that you’ve read Chris Irving’s overviews of both the X-Men comic book series and of Gerry Conway’s and my screenplay for a proposed movie starring same, it’s time Gerry and I discussed the latter just between the two of us— actually, for the first time since we scribed it, more than two decades ago. When you’ve finished reading this piece, you’ll know about as much as my early-’80s writing partner and I do about the background of that project and script. Between 1981 and 1985, Gerry and I co-wrote eight screenplays for a variety of production companies and studios. Only two of those were filmed in any form: the

Our Colorful Cast of Characters Gerry Conway (left) and Roy Thomas (right) a decade before their X-Men screenplay, in photos from 1973’s F.O.O.M. (Friends Of Ol’ Marvel) magazine #1. At that time, Roy was in the middle of his two-year run as Marvel’s editor-in-chief, and 20-year-old Gerry was writing key titles like Amazing Spider-Man, Thor, Marvel Team-Up, and Fantastic Four. Seen between them is later Marvel & Image artist Jim Valentino’s frontispiece for George Olshevsky’s 1978 X-Men Index. The grouping of mutants employed in the 1984 screenplay is the quintet seen at bottom, plus Cyclops and new creation Yoshi Akia, a.k.a. Circe. [Art ©2006 Jim Valentino; X-Men TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“The Kon-Tiki Statue Blowing Its Nose Was Our Favorite Scene!” War II movie serials; this screenplay was published in 2005 by Black Coat Press—see p. 84)… The Last Warriors (an sf adventure set in the far future)… and X-Men, based on Marvel’s madcap mutants. Gerry, of course, was a writer (and sometimes an editor) in the comics field from the late 1960s through the 1980s, and co-created The Punisher, Steel the Indestructible Man, Power Girl, and Firestorm, among others. As a teenager he authored the sf novels Midnight Dancers and Mindship. He has been a consulting producer on TV’s Hercules and is currently co-executive producer of the series Law & Order: Criminal Intent. He has been nominated for several Emmys and an Edgar Award. —Roy. ROY THOMAS: Do you know how we first got in touch with the people for whom we did the film? Was it [our agent] Dan Ostroff who would’ve lined it up for us? GERRY CONWAY: Yeah, it was Dan. As I recall, it was right after our Conan script went into production. And he got the call, or he was negotiating with or talking to people at Orion, and our names came up. Unfortunately, they didn’t want to pay our rates, so we made a sweetheart deal with them that turned out not to be as much of a sweetheart deal as we’d hoped. [mutual laughter] THOMAS: So even though we were actually working for these two independent producers, you think Dan negotiated with Orion, rather than with them? CONWAY: Yeah. I’m not sure, but I think Orion actually paid the fee. Of course, no one wants to pay any money out of their own pockets. [laughs] So the reason we got less than our usual rate may have been because the [independent] producers were, in fact, paying it out of their own pockets. THOMAS: But at least we got paid... something. [mutual laughter] Do you recall if Michael Hirsh’s company was already called Nelvana by that time? CONWAY: Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was. He had that animation company up in Canada. THOMAS: I had heard of him because he’d co-written a book about Canadian comics, and Nelvana was a Canadian comic book character as well as an authentic folk legend. I only recently remembered the name of the other person involved in our plotting. Or, more accurately, I accidentally ran across the name on the back

Laugh And The World Laughs At You As seen in X-Men features in Alter Ego #24 & #25, Dave Cockrum, original artist of the revived “New X-Men” in 1975, often amused himself by doing humorous mutant-related drawings. Here are two of them—including one of Nightcrawler, a character Dave created. As this interview moves along, you’ll see why Gerry and Roy feel they could’ve used a good laugh while writing their X-Men screenplay. [Art ©2006 Dave Cockrum; Nightcrawler & Wolverine TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

of another card in my Rolodex file: Jane Kagen. So was it at her house that we had the meetings? CONWAY: No, I think it was the partner’s house—the attorney. Remember there were three of them? He had a house in Santa Monica where we met, and I guess she was in Malibu. THOMAS: No, I didn’t recall that. I’d forgotten any third person entirely. [NOTE: Judging by a name on a contract-related deal memo I ran across recently, the attorney’s name was Bob Kaplan. Both he and Jane Kagen—I think—represented a company called Film Development Fund. –Roy.] CONWAY: I remember the attorney had apparently read Syd Fields’ book on screenwriting—and he kept asking us things like, “Where’s your plot point A?” And we’re like, “What?” [mutual laughter] THOMAS: Had we read Fields’ book by this point, do you know? CONWAY: I think we read it after that—because this guy kept talking about it. But we looked back at our scripts and it turns out we actually had been doing it. THOMAS: Yeah, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing for these guys. [laughs] Maybe for us, too. CONWAY: I do recall that Jane was apparently from a wealthy, well-connected L.A. family, and that her father had bought a lot of property up in Palmdale for development. This was, I think, right during the middle of one of the depressions in the housing market. So she was making bitter comments about how Palmdale was her inheritance. [laughs] THOMAS: You know what Hemingway said: “Nobody feels sorry for a girl crying on a yacht.” [mutual laughter] They seemed all right, though, basically. I still have no memory of the attorney. We don’t have photos, so I don’t have any picture in my mind of any of them… and probably vice versa. Do you know what their arrangement with Orion was? CONWAY: I think they’d sold the project to Orion, or had some kind of an option on it. And we were their last chance to get it off the ground, as I recall. THOMAS: Why were we their last chance? CONWAY: Because they had run through all their development money. THOMAS: [laughs] So maybe we weren’t the first people to try

A Conversation Between Gerry Conway And Roy Thomas

Cyclops Sees Double (Left:) The classic X-Men #138 cover by John Byrne & Terry Austin featured Cyclops—marred by that humongous “Shopping Spree” blurb. (Talk about the tail wagging the dog!) (Right:) This image from a John Byrne/George Pérez X-Men Portfolio featured both the mutants and Byrne’s own Canadian creation, Alpha Flight. [Both original-art images ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.; with thanks to Dominic Bongo & Heritage Comics.]

writing that X-Men movie for them? Well, if not the first choice—the last choice, anyway. This was while our first draft of the second Conan movie was still floating around Hollywood, and producers were seeing that script and asking us why Dino [DeLaurentiis] didn’t make the movie based on our script instead of the 18th draft written by Stanley Mann—and we couldn’t answer them, because we very much agreed with them. CONWAY: Even Arnold [Schwarzenegger] asked us that. THOMAS: Right. I remember him saying, “I liked your script da best!” at the party at Dino’s gourmet fast-food restaurant in Beverly Hills. Well, Arnold was a politician, even then. [laughs] CONWAY: He was that. THOMAS: [laughs] I know we finished the X-Men script around the time Orion started having its real financial problems, with which I’m not too familiar. And Orion sank—maybe not without a trace, but it sank soon thereafter. Was that given as the problem, or was it just they didn’t like our script or the approach or something? Do you recall? CONWAY: I think Orion just sort-of faded out. I think they had other things on their mind, and they knew [by that time] they couldn’t finance

a film as expensive as this one would have been. THOMAS: This wasn’t a Woody Allen film like the ones they’d been doing. CONWAY: Yeah, Orion was doing much smaller-budget films. They’d been a big player for a few years, but they were beginning to fade out, and I don’t think they were around much longer. Once again, like with our Adam Link deal with United Artists, it was just bad timing on our part. [NOTE: Remind us to tell you some other time about how we almost wrote a movie about Otto Binder’s robot hero. —Roy.] THOMAS: I hadn’t re-read the full X-Men screenplay in years. For some reason, though, I recall how my Pontiac Firebird broke down once between San Pedro and a meeting up in Santa Monica, so I rented a Cavalier and drove the rest of the way. It was a fairly zippy little car, and I got a speeding ticket on the way home because I didn’t realize I was 15 miles over the speed limit. Dann and I wound up buying a Cavalier as our next car. Funny that I can remember that better than I can recall many aspects of the screenplay itself! For instance, I keep wondering whether Michael and Jane—and now you’ve added the attorney—had some idea already in mind for

“The Kon-Tiki Statue Blowing Its Nose Was Our Favorite Scene!” that particular story before we started. Because there are things in there, when I started looking over it, that don’t read like the approach we’d have come up with ourselves. CONWAY: Right. As I recall, we went through like a couple of drafts of the outline, maybe three, in which we started out with what we wanted to do; and then, as we were developing it, we would get pushed in different directions. THOMAS: And they would tell us what they would let us do. CONWAY: Yeah, pretty much. And I think we got probably more in it than not, but it certainly wasn’t as representative as, say, the first Conan script was of what we would have wanted to do with a script like that. I know we got some stuff in that we were pretty happy about. I’ve always been particularly fond of the Easter Island scenes, and where I guess Wolverine comes out of the nose of one of the giant heads. THOMAS: It was actually the villainess, Carmilla, who came out the nose. But that was my favorite scene, too! [laughs] Which says something about us, I guess, when the Kon-Tiki statue blowing its nose was our favorite scene! Chris Irving, who’s writing a summary of the screenplay for Alter Ego, asked me why the word “mutants” doesn’t appear anywhere in the script. “Mutie” is used once, but it’s almost as if we were avoiding the word “mutant,” and I don’t recall that. It seems rather strange to have used “mutie” and not “mutant.”

CONWAY: Yeah, it is. I don’t recall what the reasoning was—if there was, in fact, any reasoning. It might have been that the producers felt “mutant” had negative connotations, that they didn’t want to associate it with their super-heroes, so that’s possible. But I don’t know how we could have avoided it. [laughs] THOMAS: We kept using terms like “extraordinary powers,” but the word “mutants” is entirely absent. Another thing I can’t imagine was our idea is the notion that Xavier is not wheelchairbound. CONWAY: Yeah, I don’t think that was ours. THOMAS: Maybe they decided a wheelchair was—I don’t know— unglamorous. Bad decision. CONWAY: They hired us for our expertise and then proceeded to ignore it. THOMAS: Dino did the same thing on Conan, as you know. He didn’t want our ideas, and he had none of his own. [laughs] He just wanted to watch soccer, so we had to sit there with him watching TV in his cabaña at the Beverly Hills Hotel till things got dull in the game, and then he would talk to us for a few minutes. Crazy way to make a movie. CONWAY: I remember we had bitter fights with Michael Hirsh because he would take our outlines and give them to his animation story editors to give notes on, and we were like, “What are you doing?” First of all, they weren’t even American animators. [mutual laughter] THOMAS: They were Canadian animators, right? CONWAY: They were the second team, you know? [laughs] It’s like, “What is that about?” And I know, with Michael Hirsh, there was a lot of hostility after the first few meetings. THOMAS: Even if these things start off well, they often go badly later. But it was such a long time ago that I don’t recall all the fights. They’re par for the course, anyway. I remember a sign I drove by for years outside some production company in L.A.: “In love and film, everything is a fight!” I recently sent

You May Think It’s Funny, But It’s Snot Okay, so it’s a crude joke. But Gerry and Roy still love the scene of Carmilla (who was named after Sheridan le Fanu’s female vampire in his 1871 pre-Dracula novella of that name) spewed out through the left nostril of the mammoth new head on Easter Island. At top of page is artist Mark Glidden’s rapturous rendition of same—juxtaposed with the page of the lads’ screenplay on which the scene occurs. [Art ©2006 Mark Glidden; screenplay ©2006 Gerry Conway & Roy Thomas; X-Men TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

A Conversation Between Gerry Conway And Roy Thomas

How’d You Like To Spend Easter On Easter Island? The huge, mysterious stone heads on Easter Island have long been a staple of pulp science-fiction— and comic books. First, above, a pair of DC covers: Gil Kane’s for Strange Adventures #16 (Jan. 1952), and Jack Kirby’s for House of Mystery #85 (April 1959)—scans courtesy of Bob Bailey and Frank Motler, respectively. Thanks to Steve Whitaker, Steven Rowe, and Nick Caputo for confirming that they (and the Grand Comics Data Base) agree that the 1972 art was at least penciled by Kane. Intriguingly, since Kirby didn’t script most of the stories he drew in that era, he also penciled similar tales for Timely/Marvel, beginning only months after his DC one: “I Was Trapped by the Things on Easter Island” in Tales to Astonish #5 (Sept. 1959), seen at right and bottom right, and “Thorr the Unbelievable” in TTA #16 (Feb. 1961), pictured below, wherein the island wasn’t named. The former story was reportedly inked by Chris Rule, the latter by Dick Ayers; thanks to Thomas C. Lammers for some of the above info. Oddly, art from both these stories is repro’d here from a single b&w British reprint comic, L. Miller’s Zombie #8, loaned to us by Daniel Best—of Australia. And Bob Bailey of North Carolina tells us Jack also drew an Easter Island extravaganza in Tales to Astonish #28 (April ’62). It’s a small world, after all! [DC art ©2006 DC Comics; Marvel art ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“The Kon-Tiki Statue Blowing Its Nose Was Our Favorite Scene!” Michael an e-mail about this project for Alter Ego, but he never responded, so I presumed he didn’t want to talk about it, and that’s his right. Along with the two drafts of the screenplay, I ran across a copy of our outline, written in January ’84. It’s very detailed—116 pages long. It starts out with a scrimmage football game between the mutants. CONWAY: You mean, the “extraordinary people.” [mutual chuckling] Yeah, I remember that. THOMAS: Oddly enough, in the treatment Professor X is in a wheelchair—so I guess we were still being allowed to follow our own best instincts at that point. Do you remember anything else about the treatment? CONWAY: Not really. Most of my memories about the project were around the experiences of dealing with the people, and like the time we spent an entire day rewriting a script and then I accidentally pulled the plug on the computer.

say that if there’s anything in the script that is a false note, [Roy laughs] it wasn’t you and I. THOMAS: Maybe we did a few questionable things on our own— but if there’s something in there that seems so really off that you think, “How could anybody who ever wrote The X-Men do this?” it’s probably because it was not the people who wrote the X-Men screenplay that insisted on it being in there. CONWAY: Exactly. THOMAS: We ended up calling the Japanese mutant girl “Circe,” which is kind-of a strange name for a Japanese. But it fit with The XMen. Of course, we had Storm, too. Probably “Proteus” was our name for the group that wanted to rule the world. Do you know why we wouldn’t have gravitated, say, toward Magneto as the movies did a few years ago? CONWAY: Again, it may be related to why the word “mutant” doesn’t appear in the script. Magneto’s big thing was The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, you know. [laughs] And, if I remember rightly in terms of the

THOMAS: Oh, was that on this script? CONWAY: I think on that outline. [mutual laughter] The whole thing just vanished into the ether. From that time on, I’ve had the compulsion to save every three or four minutes. THOMAS: My God, when I think back to working on that old Osborne [PC] around 1982, where you couldn’t even see a complete line of text across the screen. You had to scroll over to read the last few words! I was practically reduced to tears on that one. That was while writing the Conan script. When you had us both get K-Pros, that was a real breakthrough. I’d probably still be using a portable electric typewriter [laughs] if you hadn’t pushed me into working on PCs. I don’t recall much about the process of deciding which X-Men to use. Obviously, the most popular of the “new X-Men” were primarily going to be the group, including Kitty Pryde, who was relatively new then. CONWAY: I know we wanted to put in Colossus, because I think we wanted, as much as possible, to have an international feel to the team. That was, as much as anything else, motivation in picking some of the characters. THOMAS: We left out Marvel Girl, or Jean Grey. She didn’t add that much, and we didn’t want to get into the whole Phoenix thing. CONWAY: Right. Or had Phoenix even been done at that time? THOMAS: I’m not even sure, without checking. This was 1984. The date is on the screenplays, or I wouldn’t have been sure about that. Mostly, we used the new X-Men, including Cyclops. I don’t think we ever really considered using The Angel or The Beast or Iceman. CONWAY: No, I don’t think so. I think the characters we picked were also ones we thought could be done more easily. Colossus would basically have been some kind of make-up and prosthetic. And Kitty appearing and disappearing was pretty easy. THOMAS: Yeah. It must’ve been the producers’ reasoning that led to the Japanese girl who was suddenly shoehorned into the group. CONWAY: Yeah, the international thing. They figured, maybe Japan would be a big market for the film, so let’s put a Japanese person in. THOMAS: But they didn’t want Sunfire, who was already around. CONWAY: I don’t know what the deal was, but [the female Japanese mutant] was certainly in response to that. You know, I think it’s safe to

Sunfire And Save The Matches The last time Roy T. worked on an X-Men comic, he got a chance to script his 1969 co-creation Sunfire—even if the Japanese mutant had been temporarily co-opted by the N’Garai. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original Karl Waller art, with Roy’s balloon placements, from the 2000 weekly limited series X-Men: Black Sun #3. Plot by Chris Claremont. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

A Conversation Between Gerry Conway And Roy Thomas CONWAY: Right, somebody that normal people could identify with. I think the name “Danielle” probably came from you. [laughs] THOMAS: Maybe, though I never think of “Dann” as being close to “Danielle.” Let’s see, we were talking about arguments we had with the producers. I remember we put in a line that was used humorously when Xavier hypnotizes someone: “These are not the droids you want.” That was a quote from Obi-Wan Kenobi when he mesmerized someone in Star Wars. Michael Hirsh kept expressing a fear that George Lucas wouldn’t like our having a line from Star Wars in our movie. [chuckles] The funny thing is that now, more than twenty years later, a lot of people would still recognize that line, I think, if you did it the right way. And certainly in 1984 they would have. I remember Michael wanted a whole mess of changes in the rewrite, and he kept pushing to take out that particular line. I recall telling him finally: “Hey, if you really want us to work hard and get this done on short notice—let us leave the line in.” So they kind-of backed off on it. But it probably would have come out sooner or later, somewhere along the line. CONWAY: Yeah, after they fired us. THOMAS: After they fired us and got Stanley Mann in to do the next five drafts. [mutual laughter] That great scene near the beginning of the script of a surfer willing riding the tidal wave, or tsunami, to his own death—that was yours, wasn’t it? Because you usually started our screenplays… you’d write the first few pages. CONWAY: Yeah, and I think that one probably was a lift from Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. There is a bit in their novel where, after the path of the meteor hits the Earth, I guess in the middle of the ocean, there’s this surfer who ends up surfing—and I always loved this and I always wished that, of all the meteor movies, they had made Lucifer’s Hammer—but this guy is surfing a tsunami wave into the middle of L.A. and ends up smashing into like the Transamerica Building. [laughs] But it’s like the best ride of his life!

Vampires, Mutants, And Ace Artists Dracula, no less—who has a thematic kinship with the vampire-like beings in Gerry and Roy’s 1984 screenplay. (Above:) Storm and the Count from X-Men Annual #6 (1982), with pencils by Bill Sienkiewicz, inks by Bob McLeod, story by Chris Claremont. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Mike Burkey; see his ads on pp. 15 & 82. (Right:) A choice Drac illo done some years back by major X-Men artist Neal Adams for the cover of Gratis—which, in the words of Brett Canavan, who sent us the scan, was a “free Canadian zine.” [X-Men page ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Adams art ©2006 Neal Adams.]

new X-Men, he wasn’t as big a part of it at this point. He had been more of a first generation X-Men villain. THOMAS: I was amazed to see scenes of the villains’ jaws opening up like a shark’s. I had remembered them as more like psychic vampires, but this is really a bit bloodier… even though it was supposed to be a “family” film! CONWAY: Yeah, although we probably started out one way, [Roy chuckles] but I think that they wanted— again, this is the development process, as you know. You start out with the right ideas, and then people have their own. THOMAS: And the same with Danielle, the nonmutant woman, who I guess was there to be Xavier’s love interest.

THOMAS: After Orion opted out, do you recall if they [the producers] were still trying to shop the project around anywhere else, or was it pretty well dead in the water at that point? CONWAY: They probably did try to shop it around, but we were not connected with it by that point. I guess it’s something they’d invested some of their own money in, so they wanted to try to get it back and maybe get somebody else to pick up this script. THOMAS: Do you remember anything else you’d like to add? CONWAY: Well, I remember that we signed on to do one draft, our first draft— THOMAS: And rewrites. CONWAY: No, no, no. I mean, remember, we were getting like half our rate. We got $40,000 for that job, and our regular rate at that point was like $75,000. And we said we’d only do it if all we had to do was a first draft—no outlines, and no rewrites. So we ended up doing three outlines [Roy laughs] and two drafts.

“The Kon-Tiki Statue Blowing Its Nose Was Our Favorite Scene!”

[NOTE: While this interview was being edited, I ran across a deal memo from that period which called for a treatment and first-draft screenplay… so it looks as if that “no-outline” notion died an early death. There’s no mention of a rewrite of the first draft, however. —Roy.] THOMAS: I have copies of an outline, the first draft, and the rewrite, so we did a lot more than we were paid for. But that’s just us. [laughs] It’s like the old joke about the screenwriter who tells a producer: “I’ll write the movie for free… but I want $5000 a meeting.” He’d come out way ahead! CONWAY: Yeah, it’s taught me a lesson: never do anything for love. It always turns out you don’t get the love and then you don’t get the money, either. [mutual laughter] THOMAS: Well, you should know, having written TV for the past two decades. I guess Hollywood hasn’t changed much, then. CONWAY: But my hackles do go up now. [laughs]

Don’t Brood About It Professor X recalls The Brood—an alien (in more ways than one) species that probably influenced Stonewell and Carmilla in the Conway-Thomas screenplay. This panel doesn’t look familiar? That’s because it’s from that previously-mentioned, never-published X-Men inventory issue by Roger Stern (writer), Dave Cockrum (penciler), & Joe Rubinstein (inker). [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

THOMAS: I guess that’s why they do pay decent money to writers, to some extent. It’s back to that girl crying on her yacht. I mean, to you and me—well, okay, so we wrote that script for a “lousy” $40,000. There are people who’d kill to write something for that kind of money. [mutual laughter] Including us, a year earlier. CONWAY: Yeah. THOMAS: But still, by that time, we had a higher rate, so we wanted it. CONWAY: Yeah, we basically took a hit because they assured us they were going to treat us with respect, in effect. And, in fact, they treated us with enormous disrespect. [laughs]

was right. He said anybody who writes for anything but money is a damn fool. [laughs] Who would write a second movie or TV script for the love of it? A first one, yeah, but not a second. CONWAY: Of course, if you’re going to do it for love, you want to get love out of it, you know? But we didn’t get that. THOMAS: No, not on that project. It’s funny, I remember it as not being real pleasant—I just don’t remember the unpleasantness as vividly as you do. We’d had projects that were more fun, where we felt a bit more supported, perhaps, than that one.

THOMAS: Sure! Because, hey—we were writing for half our rate! [mutual laughter] CONWAY: Yeah. They didn’t respect us because we didn’t hold out for our price. [NOTE: The deal memo mentioned earlier promised us substantially more money for an official “second draft” screenplay than we’d gotten for the first—but of course that part never kicked in. —Roy.] THOMAS: It’s vaguely coming back to me now. Some things I remember from those days, and others might as well have happened on the dark side of the Moon. CONWAY: You remember the important stuff. I remember all the things where people pissed me off. [laughs] THOMAS: No, no, I think the stuff about the financial deal and all of it—I think that’s at least as interesting as the other stuff. Dr. Johnson

Logan’s No Angel—Or Maybe He Is You can’t have too many Wolverine pictures in an X-Men article! This take on Logan was drawn by Angel Medina, artist of Megaton, Dreadstar, The Incredible Hulk, Spawn, et al, for the program book of Shelton Drum’s 2000 Heroes Convention in Charlotte, NC. And, by one of those amazing comic book coincidences, A/E’s editor is going to crawl out from under his deadlines long enough to attend that fun comicon on Saturday, July 1, 2006. See ad on p. 8 for info and partial guest list. [Art ©2006 Angel Medina; Wolverine TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

CONWAY: Well, for all the ups and downs, at least it was a pleasant experience in certain ways, just because we were kept involved for a long time. Hey, got time for an anecdote? The current issue of Film Fax magazine has a big article on [artist] William Stout, and you will probably be impressed to know that it was he who suggested, and actually got cast, Grace Jones as Zula in Conan the Destroyer. THOMAS: You’re kidding! Bill actually said that? [mutual laughter] CONWAY: Isn’t that interesting? Apparently, he’s the one who presented that idea to Richard Fleischer! [laughs] THOMAS: Yeah, interesting—except of course he’s totally wrong! When we suggested Grace Jones for the Zula role at that meeting at Dino’s cabaña, Richard Fleischer wasn’t even the director yet! CONWAY: Right! We sold Jane Feinberg on the idea some time before Fleischer was hired. [mutual laughter] THOMAS: I remember our sitting in the cabaña with just Dino DeLaurentiis and Jane Feinberg [of the major film-casting company Fenton & Feinberg], because even though there was no firmly-set director yet—Dino’d already gone through two—they felt they had to

A Conversation Between Gerry Conway And Roy Thomas

The Three Faces Of Zula Actually, there were four, if you count the original male warrior of that name whom Roy thought up for late-1970s issues of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian—but we’re talking Conan the Destroyer here! The central image of rocker Grace Jones as the perfect Zula—Jones was first suggested for the role by Gerry & Roy—is flanked by two related images from Marvel Comics: (Left:) Zula as drawn by John Buscema for the film adaptation in Marvel Super Special #35 (1984); comics script by Michael Fleischer. Gerry and Roy felt that the film’s introduction of Zula, tethered by one leg amid a murderous mob, a scene totally devised by final screenplay-writer Stanley Mann and director Richard Fleischer, was one of the best images in the movie—but that otherwise Dino DeLaurentiis would’ve been smarter to film their version. They still do. (Right:) When Gerry and Roy turned their quite-different first draft screenplay into the 1990 Marvel graphic novel Conan and the Horn of Azoth, they had to change most of the names. Dagoth became Azoth—and Zula became Shumballah. She even died at the end; but it was the same character…and she survived in subsequent Thomas-Conway drafts. Art by Mike Docherty & Tony DeZuniga. [Movie still ©2006 Universal; comics images ©2006 Conan Properties, Inc.]

start casting the movie. And Dino was saying about Zula, the black Amazon we’d written into our screenplay, that he “might go Asian” with her—meaning cast an Asian actress in the part. We were absolutely horrified! You and I were sitting across from each other at the table, and Dino and Jane were facing each other, and you turned to Jane and said, “Well, actually, we were thinking of someone like Grace Jones.” You’d sold me on that idea earlier, by showing me that arty photo of her in a cage, on all fours, looking fierce. So I threw in my 2¢ worth, and Jane Feinberg really sparked to that idea—her eyes lit up—and she said she’d talk to Jones’ agent. Dino got outflanked on that one! That was kind-of ballsy of us, since Dino was the boss… but our blood was up at that point because he was futzing around with our black Amazon! CONWAY: I remember Dino thought—when he thought black at all—something like—do you remember Jayne Kennedy, the light-skinned black lady? She was like a sportscaster or something? THOMAS: Yeah. Before you brought up Grace Jones, I’d been thinking of Pam Grier, who’d been in those blaxploitation movies a decade earlier. This was years before her comeback in that Tarantino movie [Jackie Brown]. Hard to see how Bill could possibly

Ending With A Cliffhanger Another light-hearted look at Nightcrawler by Dave Cockrum, who likes that character best of any of The X-Men. [Art ©2006 Dave Cockrum; Nightcrawler TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

think he had anything to do with Grace Jones playing Zula. Of course, he could’ve come up with the idea on his own, not knowing she was already cast, or at least in the process of being cast. But it still would’ve been some time later. CONWAY: Yeah. Of course, by the time Bill Stout would’ve gotten involved in things, the script had been rewritten many times, but we had more and more focused it toward Grace Jones. So when he read it, he might’ve thought, “Oh, yeah—Grace Jones would be great for this!” [mutual laughter] That’s what we wrote! THOMAS: No offense to Bill, who’s a nice guy and a fine artist, but he was really re-inventing the wheel on that one! [chuckles] Well, anyway, that concludes this interview about our X-Men screenplay! Sometime, when I’ve got a whole issue of Alter Ego to fill, we’ll have to talk about the horrors of writing Conan the Destroyer! [mutual laughter]

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Edited by ROY THOMAS The greatest ’zine of the 1960s is back, ALL-NEW, and focusing on GOLDEN & SILVER AGE comics and creators with ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America, featuring the archives of C.C. BECK and recollections by Fawcett artist MARCUS SWAYZE), Michael T. Gilbert’s MR. MONSTER, & more! 2004 EISNER AWARD NOMINEE for Best Comics-Related Periodical.

SUBSCRIBE TO ALTER EGO! Twelve Issues: $72 Standard US, $108 First Class (Canada: $132, Elsewhere: $144 Surface, $192 Airmail).

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ALTER EGO #2

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Featuring a never-reprinted SPIRIT story by WILL EISNER, the genesis of the SILVER AGE ATOM (with GARDNER FOX, GIL KANE, & JULIE SCHWARTZ), interviews with LARRY LIEBER and Golden Age great JACK BURNLEY, BOB KANIGHER, a new Fawcett Collectors of America section with MARC SWAYZE, C.C. BECK, & lots more! GIL KANE & JACK BURNLEY flip-covers!

Unseen ALEX ROSS and JERRY ORDWAY Shazam! art, 1953 interview with OTTO BINDER, the SUPERMAN/CAPTAIN MARVEL LAWSUIT, GIL KANE on The Golden Age of TIMELY COMICS, FCA with SWAYZE, BECK, & SCHAFFENBERGER, rare art by AYERS, BERG, BURNLEY, DITKO, RICO, SCHOMBURG, MARIE SEVERIN and more! ALEX ROSS & BILL EVERETT covers!

Interviews with KUBERT, SHELLY MOLDOFF, & HARRY LAMPERT, BOB KANIGHER, life & times of GARDNER FOX, ROY THOMAS remembers GIL KANE, a history of Flash Comics, MOEBIUS Silver Surfer sketches, MR. MONSTER, FCA section with SWAYZE, BECK, and SCHAFFENBERGER, and lots more! Dual color covers by JOE KUBERT!

(100-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #5

ALTER EGO #6

ALTER EGO #7

ALTER EGO #8

ALTER EGO #9

Celebrating the JSA, with interviews with MART NODELL, SHELLY MAYER, GEORGE ROUSSOS, BILL BLACK, & GIL KANE, unpublished H.G. PETER Wonder Woman art, GARDNER FOX, an FCA section with MARC SWAYZE, C.C. BECK, WENDELL CROWLEY, and more! Wraparound cover by CARMINE INFANTINO and JERRY ORDWAY!

GENE COLAN interview, 1940s books on comics by STAN LEE & ROBERT KANIGHER, AYERS, SEVERIN, and ROY THOMAS on Sgt. Fury, ROY on All-Star Squadron’s Golden Age roots, FCA section with SWAYZE, BECK, and WILLIAM WOOLFOLK, JOE SIMON interview, a definitive look at MAC RABOY’S work, & more! Covers by COLAN and RABOY!

Companion to ALL-STAR COMPANION book, with a JULIE SCHWARTZ interview, guide to JLA-JSA TEAMUPS, origins of the ALL-STAR SQUADRON, FCA section with MARC SWAYZE, C.C. BECK (on his 1970s DC conflicts), DAVE BERG, BOB ROGERS, more on MAC RABOY from his son, MR. MONSTER, & more! RICH BUCKLER & C.C. BECK covers!

WALLY WOOD biography, DAN ADKINS & BILL PEARSON on Wood, TOR section with 1963 JOE KUBERT interview, ROY THOMAS on creating the ALL-STAR SQUADRON and its 1940s forebears, FCA section with SWAYZE & BECK, MR. MONSTER, JERRY ORDWAY on Shazam!, JERRY DeFUCCIO on the Golden Age, CHIC STONE remembered! ADKINS & KUBERT covers!

JOHN ROMITA interview by ROY THOMAS (with unseen art), Roy’s PROPOSED DREAM PROJECTS that never got published (with a host of great artists), MR. MONSTER on WAYNE BORING’S life after Superman, The Golden Age of Comic Fandom Panel, FCA section with GEORGE TUSKA, C.C. BECK, MARC SWAYZE, BILL MORRISON, & more! ROMITA and GIORDANO covers!

(100-page magazine) $9 US

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ALTER EGO #10

ALTER EGO #11

ALTER EGO #12

ALTER EGO #13

ALTER EGO #14

Who Created the Silver Age Flash? (with KANIGHER, INFANTINO, KUBERT, and SCHWARTZ), DICK AYERS interview (with unseen art), JOHN BROOME remembered, never-seen Golden Age Flash pages, VIN SULLIVAN Magazine Enterprises interview, FCA, interview with FRED GUARDINEER, & MR. MONSTER on WAYNE BORING! INFANTINO & AYERS covers!

Focuses on TIMELY COMICS (interviews and features on SYD SHORES, MICKEY SPILLANE, and VINCE FAGO), and MAGAZINE ENTERPRISES (including JOE CERTA, JOHN BELFI, FRANK BOLLE, BOB POWELL, and FRED MEAGHER), MR. MONSTER on JERRY SIEGEL, DON & MAGGIE THOMPSON interview, FCA with SWAYZE, BECK, and DON NEWTON!

DC and QUALITY COMICS focus! Quality’s GILL FOX interview, never-seen ’40s PAUL REINMAN Green Lantern story, ROY THOMAS talks to LEN WEIN and RICH BUCKLER about ALL-STAR SQUADRON, MR. MONSTER shows what made WALLY WOOD leave MAD, FCA section with BECK & SWAYZE, & ’65 NEWSWEEK ARTICLE on comics! REINMAN & BILL WARD covers!

1974 panel with JOE SIMON, STAN LEE, FRANK ROBBINS, and ROY THOMAS, ROY and JOHN BUSCEMA on Avengers, 1964 STAN LEE interview, tributes to DON HECK, JOHNNY CRAIG, and GRAY MORROW, Timely alums DAVID GANTZ and DANIEL KEYES, & FCA with BECK, SWAYZE, and MIKE MANLEY! Covers by MURPHY ANDERSON and JOE SIMON!

A look at the 1970s JSA revival with CONWAY, LEVITZ, ESTRADA, GIFFEN, MILGROM, & STATON, JERRY ORDWAY on All-Star Squadron, tributes to CRAIG CHASE and DAN DeCARLO, “lost” 1945 issue of All-Star, 1970 interview with LEE ELIAS, MR. MONSTER on GARDNER FOX, FCA with SWAYZE, BECK, & JAY DISBROW! MIKE NASSER & MICHAEL GILBERT covers!

(100-page magazine) $9 US

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ALTER EGO #15

ALTER EGO #16

ALTER EGO #17

ALTER EGO #18

ALTER EGO #19

JOHN BUSCEMA ISSUE! BUSCEMA interview (with UNSEEN ART), reminiscences by SAL BUSCEMA, STAN LEE, INFANTINO, KUBERT, ORDWAY, FLO STEINBERG, & HERB TRIMPE, ROY THOMAS on 35 years with BIG JOHN, FCA tribute to KURT SCHAFFENBERGER, plus C.C. BECK and MARC SWAYZE, & MR. MONSTER revisits WALLY WOOD! BUSCEMA covers!

MARVEL BULLPEN REUNION (BUSCEMA, COLAN, ROMITA, & SEVERIN), memories of the JOHN BUSCEMA SCHOOL, FCA with ALEX ROSS, C.C. BECK, & MARC SWAYZE, tribute to CHAD GROTHKOPF, MR. MONSTER on EC COMICS with art by KURTZMAN, DAVIS, and WOOD, & more! Covers by ALEX ROSS and MARIE SEVERIN & RAMONA FRADON!

Spotlighting LOU FINE (with an overview of his career, and interviews with family members), interview with MURPHY ANDERSON about Fine, ALEX TOTH on Fine, ARNOLD DRAKE interviewed about DEADMAN and DOOM PATROL, MR. MONSTER on the non-EC work of JACK DAVIS & GEORGE EVANS, tributes to DAVE BERG & VINCE FAGO, FCA & more!

STAN GOLDBERG interview, secrets of ’40s Timely, art by KIRBY, DITKO, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, MANEELY, EVERETT, BURGOS, & DeCARLO, spotlight on sci-fi fanzine XERO with the LUPOFFS, OTTO BINDER, DON THOMPSON, ROY THOMAS, BILL SCHELLY, and ROGER EBERT, FCA, & MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD ghosting Flash Gordon! KIRBY & SWAYZE covers!

Spotlight on DICK SPRANG (profile & interview) with unseen art, rare Batman art by BOB KANE, CHARLES PARIS, SHELLY MOLDOFF, MAX ALLAN COLLINS, JIM MOONEY, CARMINE INFANTINO, & ALEX TOTH, JERRY ROBINSON interviewed about Tomahawk and 1940s cover artist FRED RAY, FCA, & MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD’s Flash Gordon, Part 2!

(108-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #20

ALTER EGO #21

ALTER EGO #22

ALTER EGO #23

ALTER EGO #24

Timely/Marvel art by SEKOWSKY, SHORES, EVERETT, & BURGOS, secrets behind THE INVADERS with ROY THOMAS, KIRBY, GIL KANE, & ROBBINS, BOB DESCHAMPS interviewed, 1965 NY Comics Con review, panel with FINGER, BINDER, & FOX, MORT WEISINGER, MR. MONSTER, FCA with SWAYZE, BECK, RABOY, SCHAFFENBERGER, & more! AL MILGROM cover!

The IGER “SHOP” examined, with art by EISNER, FINE, ANDERSON, CRANDALL, BAKER, MESKIN, CARDY, EVANS, BOB KANE, & TUSKA, “SHEENA” section with art by DAVE STEVENS & FRANK BRUNNER, ROY THOMAS on the JSA and All-Star Squadron, more UNSEEN 1946 ALL-STAR ART, MR. MONSTER on GARDNER FOX, FCA, & more! STEVENS & HASEN covers!

BILL EVERETT and JOE KUBERT interview by NEAL ADAMS and GIL KANE in 1970, Timely art by BURGOS, SHORES, NODELL, & SEKOWSKY, RUDY LAPICK, ROY THOMAS on Sub-Mariner, with art by EVERETT, COLAN, ANDRU, BUSCEMAs, SEVERINs, & more, FCA, MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD at EC, ALEX TOTH, & CAPT. MIDNIGHT! EVERETT & BECK covers!

Unseen art from TWO “LOST” 1940s H.G. PETER WONDER WOMAN STORIES (and analysis of the “CHARLES MOULTON” scripts), BOB FUJITANI & JOHN ROSENBERGER interviewed, VICTOR GORELICK discusses Archie & The Mighty Crusaders, with art by MORROW, BUCKLER, and REINMAN, FCA, & MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD! H.G. PETER cover!

X-MEN interviews with STAN LEE, DAVE COCKRUM, CHRIS CLAREMONT, ARNOLD DRAKE, JIM SHOOTER, ROY THOMAS, & LEN WEIN, MORT MESKIN profiled by his sons and ALEX TOTH, rare art by JERRY ROBINSON, FCA with BECK, SWAYZE, & WILLIAM WOOLFOLK, MR. MONSTER, & BILL SCHELLY on Comics Fandom! MESKIN & COCKRUM covers!

(108-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #25

ALTER EGO #26

ALTER EGO #27

ALTER EGO #28

ALTER EGO #29

JACK COLE remembered by ALEX TOTH, interview with brother DICK COLE and his PLAYBOY colleagues, CHRIS CLAREMONT on the X-Men (with more never-seen art by DAVE COCKRUM), ROY THOMAS on All-Star Squadron #1 and its ’40s roots (with art by ORDWAY, BUCKLER, MOLDOFF, & MESKIN), FCA, MR. MONSTER, & more! Cover by TOTH and COLE!

JOE SINNOTT interview, IRWIN DONENFELD interview by EVANIER & SCHWARTZ, art by SHUSTER, INFANTINO, ANDERSON, & SWAN, MARK WAID analyzes the first Kryptonite story, JERRY SIEGEL & HARRY DONENFELD, JERRY IGER Shop update, ALEX TOTH, MR. MONSTER, & FCA with SWAYZE, BECK, & KEN BALD! Covers by SINNOTT and WAYNE BORING!

VIN SULLIVAN interview about the early DC days with art by SHUSTER, MOLDOFF, FLESSEL, GUARDINEER, & BURNLEY, MR. MONSTER’s “Lost” KIRBY HULK covers, 1948 NEW YORK COMIC CON with STAN LEE, SIMON & KIRBY, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, HARVEY KURTZMAN, & ROY THOMAS, ALEX TOTH, FCA, & more! Covers by JACK BURNLEY and JACK KIRBY!

Spotlight on JOE MANEELY, with a career overview, remembrance by his daughter and tons of art, Timely/Atlas/Marvel art by ROMITA, EVERETT, SEVERIN, SHORES, KIRBY, & DITKO, STAN LEE on Maneely, LEE AMES interview, FCA with SWAYZE & STEVE SKEATES, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Covers by JOE MANEELY and DON NEWTON!

FRANK BRUNNER interview, BILL EVERETT’S Venus examined by TRINA ROBBINS, Classics Illustrated “What ifs”, LEE/KIRBY/ DITKO Marvel prototypes, JOE MANEELY’s monsters, BILL FRACCIO interview, ALEX TOTH, MR. MONSTER, JOHN BENSON on EC, The Heap by ERNIE SCHROEDER, and FCA! Covers by FRANK BRUNNER & PETE VON SHOLLY!

(108-page magazine) $9 US

BUNDLE #30-34, 35-39, 40-44, OR 45-49: ONLY $36 PER SET

ALTER EGO #30

ALTER EGO #31

ALTER EGO #32

ALTER EGO #33

ALTER EGO #34

ALEX ROSS on his love for the JLA, ROY THOMAS on the ’60s JLA (with rare art by SEKOWSKY & DILLIN), the super-doers of 1940s-1980s France (with art by STEVE RUDE, STEVE BISSETTE, LADRÖNN, & NEAL ADAMS), KIM AAMODT & WALTER GEIER on writing for SIMON & KIRBY, ALEX TOTH, MR. MONSTER, & FCA! Covers by ALEX ROSS & STEVE RUDE!

DICK AYERS on his 1950s and ’60s work (with tons of Marvel Bullpen art), HARLAN ELLISON’s Marvel Age work examined (with art by BUCKLER, SAL BUSCEMA, & TRIMPE), STAN LEE’S Marvel Prototypes (with art by KIRBY & DITKO), Christmas cards from comics greats, MR. MONSTER, & FCA with SWAYZE & SCHAFFENBERGER! Covers by DICK AYERS & FRED RAY!

Timely artists ALLEN BELLMAN & SAM BURLOCKOFF interviewed, MART NODELL on his Timely years, rare art by BURGOS, EVERETT, & SHORES, MIKE GOLD on the Silver Age (with art by SIMON & KIRBY, SWAN, INFANTINO, KANE, & more), FCA, ALEX TOTH, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom, and more! Covers by DICK GIORDANO & GIL KANE!

Symposium on MIKE SEKOWSKY by MARK EVANIER, SCOTT SHAW!, et al., with art by ANDERSON, INFANTINO, & others, PAT (MRS. MIKE) SEKOWSKY and inker VALERIE BARCLAY interviewed, FCA, 1950s Captain Marvel parody by ANDRU & ESPOSITO, ALEX TOTH, BILL SCHELLY, MR. MONSTER, and more! Covers by FRENZ/SINNOTT & FRENZ/BUSCEMA!

Quality Comics interviews with ALEX KOTZKY, AL GRENET, CHUCK CUIDERA, & DICK ARNOLD (son of BUSY ARNOLD), art by COLE, EISNER, FINE, WARD, DILLIN, & KANE, MICHELLE NOLAN on Blackhawk’s jump to DC, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT on HARVEY KURTZMAN, & ALEX TOTH on REED CRANDALL! Covers by REED CRANDALL & CHARLES NICHOLAS!

(108-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #35

ALTER EGO #36

ALTER EGO #37

ALTER EGO #38

ALTER EGO #39

Covers by JOHN ROMITA & AL JAFFEE! LEE, ROMITA, AYERS, HEATH, & THOMAS on the 1953-55 Timely super-hero revival, with rare art by ROMITA, AYERS, BURGOS, HEATH, EVERETT, LAWRENCE, & POWELL, AL JAFFEE on the 1940s Timely Bullpen (and MAD), FCA, ALEX TOTH on comic art, MR. MONSTER on unpublished 1950s covers, and more!

JOE SIMON on SIMON & KIRBY, CARL BURGOS, & LLOYD JACQUET, JOHN BELL on World War II Canadian heroes, MICHAEL T. GILBERT on Canadian origins of MR. MONSTER, tributes to BOB DESCHAMPS, DON LAWRENCE, & GEORGE WOODBRIDGE, FCA, ALEX TOTH, & ELMER WEXLER interview! Covers by SIMON and GILBERT & RONN SUTTON!

WILL MURRAY on the 1940 Superman “KMetal” story & PHILIP WYLIE’s GLADIATOR (with art by SHUSTER, SWAN, ADAMS, & BORING), FCA with BECK, SWAYZE, & DON NEWTON, SY BARRY interview, art by TOTH, MESKIN, INFANTINO, & ANDERSON, and MICHAEL T. GILBERT interviews AL FELDSTEIN on EC & RAY BRADBURY! Covers by C.C. BECK & WAYNE BORING!

JULIE SCHWARTZ TRIBUTE with HARLAN ELLISON, INFANTINO, ANDERSON, TOTH, KUBERT, GIELLA, GIORDANO, CARDY, LEVITZ, STAN LEE, WOLFMAN, EVANIER, & ROY THOMAS, never-seen interviews with Julie, FCA with BECK, SCHAFFENBERGER, NEWTON, COCKRUM, OKSNER, FRADON, SWAYZE, & JACKSON BOSTWICK! Covers by INFANTINO & IRWIN HASEN!

Full-issue spotlight on JERRY ROBINSON, with an interview on being BOB KANE’s Batman “ghost”, creating the JOKER and ROBIN, & working on VIGILANTE, GREEN HORNET, & ATOMAN, plus never-seen art by Jerry, MESKIN, ROUSSOS, RAY, KIRBY, SPRANG, DITKO, & PARIS! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER on AL FELDSTEIN Part 2, & more! Two JERRY ROBINSON covers!

(108-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #40

ALTER EGO #41

ALTER EGO #42

ALTER EGO #43

ALTER EGO #44

RUSS HEATH and GIL KANE interviews (with tons of unseen art), the JULIE SCHWARTZ Memorial Service with ELLISON, MOORE, GAIMAN, HASEN, O’NEIL, & LEVITZ, art by INFANTINO, ANDERSON, TOTH, NOVICK, DILLIN, SEKOWSKY, KUBERT, GIELLA, ARAGONÉS, FCA, MR. MONSTER & AL FELDSTEIN Part 3, & more! Covers by GIL KANE & RUSS HEATH!

Halloween issue! BERNIE WRIGHTSON on his 1970s FRANKENSTEIN, DICK BRIEFER’S monster, the campy 1960s Frankie, art by KALUTA, BAILY, MANEELY, PLOOG, KUBERT, BRUNNER, BORING, OKSNER, TUSKA, CRANDALL, & SUTTON, FCA #100, EMILIO SQUEGLIO interview, ALEX TOTH, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and more! Covers by WRIGHTSON & MARC SWAYZE!

A celebration of DON HECK, WERNER ROTH, and PAUL REINMAN, rare art by KIRBY, DITKO, & AYERS, Hillman & ZiffDavis remembered by Heap artist ERNIE SCHROEDER, HERB ROGOFF, & WALTER LITTMAN, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, & ALEX TOTH! Covers by FASTNER & LARSON and ERNIE SCHROEDER!

Yuletide art by WOOD, SINNOTT, CARDY, BRUNNER, TOTH, NODELL, and others, interviews with Golden Age artists TOM GILL (Lone Ranger) and MORRIS WEISS, exploring 1960s Mexican comics, FCA with MARC SWAYZE & C.C. BECK, MR. MONSTER, ALEX TOTH, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom, and more! Flip covers by GEORGE TUSKA and DAVE STEVENS!

JSA/All-Star Squadron/Infinity Inc. special! Interviews with JOE KUBERT, IRWIN HASEN, MURPHY ANDERSON, JERRY ORDWAY, 1940s Atom writer ARTHUR ADLER, art by TOTH, SEKOWSKY, HASEN, MACHLAN, OKSNER, & INFANTINO, FCA, & MR. MONSTER’S “I Like Ike!” cartoons by BOB KANE, INFANTINO, OKSNER, and BIRO! Wraparound ORDWAY cover!

(108-page magazine) $9 US

(100-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #45

ALTER EGO #46

ALTER EGO #47

ALTER EGO #48

ALTER EGO #49

Interviews with Sandman artist CREIG FLESSEL and ’40s creator BERT CHRISTMAN, MICHAEL CHABON on researching his Pulitzer-winning novel Kavalier & Clay, art by EISNER, KANE, KIRBY, & AYERS, FCA with MARC SWAYZE & C.C. BECK, OTTO BINDER’s “lost” Jon Jarl story, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom, & ALEX TOTH! CREIG FLESSEL cover!

The VERY BEST of the 1960s-70s ALTER EGO! 1969 BILL EVERETT interview, art by BURGOS, GUSTAVSON, SIMON & KIRBY, and others, 1960s gems by DITKO, E. NELSON BRIDWELL, JERRY BAILS, & ROY THOMAS, LOU GLANZMAN interview, tributes to IRV NOVICK and CHRIS REEVE, MR. MONSTER, FCA, TOTH, & more! Cover by EVERETT and MARIE SEVERIN!

Spotlights MATT BAKER, Golden Age cheesecake artist of PHANTOM LADY! Career overview, interviews with BAKER’s half-brother and nephew, art from AL FELDSTEIN, VINCE COLLETTA, ARTHUR PEDDY, JACK KAMEN & others, FCA, BILL SCHELLY talks to comic-book-seller (& fan) BUD PLANT, MR. MONSTER on missing AL WILLIAMSON art, & ALEX TOTH!

WILL EISNER discusses Eisner & Iger’s Shop and BUSY ARNOLD’s ’40s Quality Comics, art by FINE, CRANDALL, COLE, POWELL, & CARDY, EISNER tributes by STAN LEE, GENE COLAN, & others, interviews with ’40s Quality artist VERN HENKEL and CHUCK MAZOUJIAN, FCA, MR. MONSTER on EISNER’s Wonder Man, ALEX TOTH, and more with BUD PLANT! EISNER cover!

Spotlights CARL BURGOS! Interview with daughter SUE BURGOS, art by BURGOS, BILL EVERETT, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ED ASCHE, & DICK AYERS, unused 1941 Timely cover layouts, the 1957 Atlas Implosion examined, MANNY STALLMAN, FCA, MR. MONSTER and more! New cover by MARK SPARACIO, from an unused 1941 layout by CARL BURGOS!

(100-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #50

ALTER EGO #51

ALTER EGO #52

ALTER EGO #53

ALTER EGO #54

ROY THOMAS covers his 40-YEAR career in comics (AVENGERS, X-MEN, CONAN, ALL-STAR SQUADRON, INFINITY INC.), with ADAMS, BUSCEMA, COLAN, DITKO, GIL KANE, KIRBY, STAN LEE, ORDWAY, PÉREZ, ROMITA, and many others! Also, FCA, & MR. MONSTER on ROY’s letters to GARDNER FOX! Flip-covers by BUSCEMA/ KIRBY/ALCALA and JERRY ORDWAY!

Golden Age Batman artist/BOB KANE ghost LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ interviewed, Batman art by JERRY ROBINSON, DICK SPRANG, SHELDON MOLDOFF, WIN MORTIMER, JIM MOONEY, & others, the Golden & Silver Ages of AUSTRALIAN SUPER-HEROES, Mad artist DAVE BERG interviewed, FCA, MR. MONSTER on WILL EISNER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

JOE GIELLA on the Silver Age at DC, the Golden Age at Marvel, and JULIE SCHWARTZ, with rare art by INFANTINO, GIL KANE, SEKOWSKY, SWAN, DILLIN, MOLDOFF, GIACOIA, SCHAFFENBERGER, and others, JAY SCOTT PIKE on STAN LEE & CHARLES BIRO, MARTIN THALL interview, ALEX TOTH, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more! GIELLA cover!

GIORDANO & THOMAS on STOKER’S DRACULA, never-seen DICK BRIEFER Frankenstein strip, MIKE ESPOSITO on his work with ROSS ANDRU, art by COLAN, WRIGHTSON, MIGNOLA, BRUNNER, BISSETTE, KALUTA, HEATH, MANEELY, EVERETT, DITKO, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, BILL SCHELLY, ALEX TOTH, & MR. MONSTER! Cover by GIORDANO!

MIKE ESPOSITO on DC and Marvel, ROBERT KANIGHER on the creation of Metal Men & Sgt. Rock (with comments by JOE KUBERT & BOB HANEY), art by ANDRU, INFANTINO, KIRBY, SEVERIN, WINDSOR-SMITH, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, TRIMPE, GIL KANE, & others, plus FCA, ALEX TOTH, BILL SCHELLY, MR. MONSTER, & more! ESPOSITO cover!

(100-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #55

ALTER EGO #56

ALTER EGO #57

ALTER EGO #59

ALTER EGO #60

JACK & OTTO BINDER, KEN BALD, VIC DOWD, and BOB BOYAJIAN interviewed, FCA with EMILIO SQUEGLIO, rare art by BECK, WARD, & SCHAFFENBERGER, Christmas Art from CRANDALL, SINNOTT, HEATH, MOONEY, and CARDY, 1943 PinUp Calendar (with ’40s movie stars as superheroines), TOTH, ALEX ROSS cover!

Interviews with Superman creators SIEGEL & SHUSTER, Golden/Silver Age DC production guru JACK ADLER interviewed, NEAL ADAMS & radio/TV iconoclast (and comics fan) HOWARD STERN on Adler and his amazing career, art by CURT SWAN, WAYNE BORING, & AL PLASTINO, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, ALEX TOTH, & more! NEAL ADAMS cover!

Issue-by-issue index of Timely/Atlas superhero stories by MICHELLE NOLAN, art by SIMON & KIRBY, EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, AYERS, HEATH, SEKOWSKY, SHORES, SCHOMBURG, MANEELY, & SEVERIN, GENE COLAN & ALLEN BELLMAN on 1940s Timely super-heroes, FCA, MR. MONSTER, & BILL SCHELLY! Cover by JACK KIRBY & PETE VON SHOLLY!

Special issue on Batman & Superman in the Golden & Silver Ages, ARTHUR SUYDAM interview, NEAL ADAMS on 1960s/70s DC, SHELLY MOLDOFF, AL PLASTINO, Golden Age artist FRAN (Doll Man) MATERA interviewed, the first comic book Thor (not the one you think!, SIEGEL & SHUSTER, FCA, MR. MONSTER, SUYDAM cover, & more!

Celebrates 50 years since SHOWCASE #4! FLASH interviews with SCHWARTZ, KANIGHER, INFANTINO, KUBERT, & BROOME, Golden Age artist TONY DiPRETA, 1966 panel with NORDLING, BINDER, & LARRY IVIE, FCA, MR. MONSTER, never-before-published, fullcolor Flash cover by CARMINE INFANTINO, and more!

(100-page magazine) $9 US

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Timely/Atlas/Marvel Biography Series # 1

Bob Brant And The Trouble-Shooters ––Plus Lance Brant by Thomas C. Lammers

ith this issue, Tom Lammers and Alter Ego launch a new and occasional series of Timely/Atlas/Marvel “biographies” of short-lived features from the 1950s. It seemed appropriate to begin with the above-named series from 1953, which is not only about a bunch of teenagers only slightly younger (at most) than The X-Men—but which even has a “mutant connection.” We’ll let Tom take over from this point, starting with his list of the stories covered in two related series, starting with the coded Timely “job-numbers” listed on their splash panels (as explained by Tom back in issue #49, in his in-depth article on the Timely/Atlas “Implosion” of 1957):

Appearances: C-293 Bob Brant and The Trouble-Shooters: “Behind the False Face!” (9 pp.) Man Comics #26 (May 1953) C-378 Bob Brant and The Trouble-Shooters: [“The Dead Ringer!”] (9 pp.) Man Comics #26 (May 1953) C-379 Lance Brant: “The Tarantula’s Web” (5 pp.) Man Comics #26 (May 1953) C-511 Bob Brant and The Trouble-Shooters: [“Rocket to the Moon!”] (9 pp.) Man Comics #27 (Jun 1953) C-560 Bob Brant and The Trouble-Shooters: [“The Faceless Man!”] (9 pp.) Man Comics #27 (Jun 1953) C-621 Bob Brant and The Trouble-Shooters: “The Crawling Things!” (9 pp.) Man Comics #28 (Sep 1953) C-622 Lance Brant: “Death Is a Spy’s Reward” (5 pp.) Man Comics #27 (Jun 1953) C-796 Bob Brant and The Trouble-Shooters: “Where Mummies Prowl!” (9 pp.) Man Comics #28 (Sep 1953) C-824 Lance Brant: “Toying with Death” (5 pp.) Man Comics #28 (Sep 1953)

Man and Boy This dramatic cover for issue #26 introduced the “Bob Brant” series. He, his buddies, and his family took over the mag for its final three issues. There’s something a bit odd about a comic called Man Comics that stars mainly young boys—but hey, they couldn’t exactly change the name to Boy Comics, could they? Lev Gleason and Charles Biro already had that title all sewed up! All art for this article supplied by Thomas C. Lammers. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Biographical Notes:

[from Story # C-293 except where otherwise noted] Bob Brant is a high school student and “a typical American boy” who lives in New York City [C-560]. He is athletic, handsome, and blond, and is characteristically dressed in a red letter-sweater with a large “B” on the front. He drives a green 1920s-vintage touring car of uncertain reliability, and is a licensed pilot [C-378]. His pet is a semianthropomorphic raccoon named Reuben. Bob’s father is head of the United Nations Security Police. His mother was formerly “The Great Cecile,” a trapeze artist with Jingling Brothers Circus; she had her son on a trapeze before he could walk, and by his teen years he is a skilled aerialist. His mother was killed in a performance accident when Bob was six years old. Bob’s older brother Lance Brant is a troubleshooter for the UN, working for the UN Security Police [C-379], though his father does not seem to be his boss. Instead, he has received orders directly from the U.N. [Security?] Council [C-511]. Later, he receives orders from the Intelligence Department [C-621] and is described as a government agent [C-824] and a special investigator [C-824]. Perhaps this indicates that he left the employ of the United Nations and went to work for some agency of the American government.

Bob Brant And The Trouble-Shooters––Plus Lance Brant

Don’t Be A Wise Guy—Or Maybe You Should! See? Reading horror comics didn’t hurt kids, like Doc Wertham claimed! In the two panels at left from the lead story in Man #27, The Trouble-Shooters read Timely’s horror mags— though Menace and Strange Tales didn’t usually feature stories about a rocket to the moon. The Trouble-Shooters seem at least partly inspired, both in stories and visuals, by the Bob’s teenage friends are known as The Troublesuccess of “The Little Wise Guys” in Gleason/Biro’s Daredevil comic. The latter are depicted Shooters [C-378]; their hangout is a large building labeled at right, in art from an ad for a “Wise Guy Contest” featured in Daredevil #64 (July 1950). “Hanger Thirteen.” Daffy is a slim dark-haired boy who Daffy resembles Scarecrow, and Bomber is the size of Pee Wee. Which is even less surprising favors sweater vests and is not noted for his wit or intellect. when you realize that the artist of all the “Bob Brant” stories was Carl Hubbell, who often Feathers is an intellectual Native American with a large drew for Gleason’s comics. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.] vocabulary, who wears a headband with a single feather. arrive. Carter and the girls are rescued and most of the spy gang is Bomber is a red-haired boy, clearly younger and in a lower grade at captured, although False Face escapes. Bob and his pals slip out school [C-796]. Two female classmates are often around, too, although unnoticed, so that their role is unknown to authorities or the girls. they are not considered members of The Trouble-Shooters. Bob likes pretty redhead Carol Carter, but she won’t give him the time of day. In “The Dead Ringer!” [C-378], Mr. Brant is on a mission for the She thinks he’s “spineless” and a “sissy” [C-560], and criticizes him for UN to Idnshar, a small kingdom in the North African or Arabian desert. not being dashing or adventurous [C-378] like his older brother, on When the old king died, his teenage son ascended the throne as King whom she has a crush. Bess is her slim brunette friend, who wears Ibn-Taub. However, the boy’s mother (who died in childbirth) was an eyeglasses. She likes Bob but realizes he’s out of her league, so is content Englishwoman, and the young king “looks like an English boy.” For this to pursue Daffy, who doesn’t appreciate the attention. reason, his uncle Col. Faroun wants to dethrone him and rule in his stead. Because of their careers, Lance and Once he is on the throne, Faroun plans Mr. Brant are often involved in counterto become partners of the Soviets and to espionage and crimefighting. Bob and aid them in conquering the world. The Trouble-Shooters typically become involved as well, though this fact almost Because it is a school vacation and always is not recognized by Bob’s the government aircraft is large, Mr. brother or father, by the authorities, or Brant invites Bob, The Troubleby Carol and Bess. Shooters, and the girls along on the junket. Touring the local bazaar, the teenagers encounter American Willy Wonder, a salesman for Wonder In “Behind the False Face!” [C-293], Tractors, who was stranded in Idnshar Carol’s father John Carter is asked to when his company went out of business; serve as a proxy for the minister from he is trying to sell a tractor to get Norovia for an important vote at the money for his fare home. The only United Nations. If Norovia sides with person interested in the tractor is young the western democracies in this vote, it King Iba-Taub, who incredibly turns will swing things against the Communist out to be Bob’s exact double! No bloc. To prevent that from happening, sooner has the king placed his burnous the Reds dispatch a vicious spy known as on Bob’s head, to show how much they False Face, “the super crook with a resemble one another, than Col. million ugly faces” [C-621]. Faroun’s men arrive. Mistaking Bob for the king, they abduct him and lock him Coincidentally, Bob is selected by a in “the dungeon that shrinks,” a cell city committee to serve as this year’s where the ceiling and floor move “mayor for the day”; the reins of the city inexorably together. Fortunately, The are placed completely in his hands. Trouble-Shooters arrive in the nick of Knowing this, False Face and his gang time, using Willy’s tractor to free Bob. invade the mayor’s office and force Bob After Faroun’s attack on the palace is to send the police on a wild goose chase. repelled, thanks in part to the TroubleThey then abduct John Carter, as well as Shooters and Willy’s tractor, Faroun Carol and Bess, holding them captive in Enter False Face flees to a private airstrip near the an old Tong mansion in Chinatown. Bob Hubbell’s splash for the first “Trouble-Shooters” Dervish Oasis. Bob and the Troubleand The Trouble-Shooters track them story, introducing the villainous False Face. Shooters manage to get there first, there and fight with them until the police [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Adventures:

Timely/Atlas/Marvel Biography Series # 1

Uncle Joe

Oh, What A Tangled Web… Comics veteran John Forte drew this “Lance Brant” story from Man Comics #26. Of course, nobody bothered to tell him (or, apparently, the writer) that tarantulas don’t spin webs! [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

breaking up the gang; his plans ruined, Faroun attempts to flee in a small airplane. As it takes off, Bob jumps onto a wing strut. When Faroun leans out the door to slash at the teen with his sword, he slips and falls to his death. Once again, the boys’ role in resolving the problem goes unrecognized by Bob’s father. Bob and The Trouble-Shooters don’t appear in “The Tarantula’s Web” [C-379], a solo Lance Brant adventure. In his role as a member of the UN Security Police, Lance is sent to the H-Bomb Project in New Mexico, commanded by soldier-scientist Col. Whitney. Whitney tells Lance that plans for a deadly “H” Ray have been stolen from a secure room that only he and his associate Dr. Hale can access. Searching for clues, Lance discovers unusual silken strands near a small window and odd tracks leading into the desert. Following the tracks leads to a cavern, where Lance finds an odd little hermit. He admits that he stole the plans, because “other men would destroy me if they knew my secret.” With the “H” Ray, he can rule the world and have nothing to fear from anyone. The hermit flees deeper into the caves, with Lance in pursuit. Suddenly, Lance pulls up short. Before him is a ferocious mansized tarantula! Brant shoots the enormous arachnid, which turns and flees deeper into the cavern. When Lance catches up, he finds not the tarantula but the hermit … with bullet holes in the same places that he had shot the tarantula! The hermit shouts, “I told you I was different from other men! I am only half man!” He attempts to kill Lance with the deadly “H” Ray, which he had already built from the stolen plans, but Lance shoots and kills him first. The

The mustachioed Communist leader, of course, is intended to be Joseph Stalin—who died around the time Man Comics #27 came out. Of course, no Red underling would ever have dared scoff at a statement of Stalin’s the way the guy does in the second panel, or he’d have swiftly found himself mining salt in Siberia—if he was lucky! With 1957’s Sputnik, the United States and the Soviet Union would indeed suddenly be perceived as engaged in a “race for the moon.” Before that time, the complacent USA hadn’t realized there was another contestant! [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

reverberations of the gunshots trigger a cave-in that hides all the bizarre evidence. Lance is content to simply report that the plans were recovered and the thief killed. In “Rocket to the Moon!” [C-511], Russians are building a spaceship at a hidden base in the Australian jungle. Once they have flown to the moon and claimed it for Russia, they will set up rocket stations with guided missiles, forcing the western democracies to capitulate. At the request of the UN Council, Lance Brant flies to Australia in his private airplane to investigate. Unbeknownst to him, Bob and The Trouble-Shooters are hidden on board. Landing in Australia, Lance finds the Russians’ launch site, but is captured by them. When savage aborigines attack the group, Lance is locked in a small steel dome with the captured American scientist who helped build the spaceship. The Russians board the rocket, followed by Bob and the gang. After blastoff, they attack and subdue the Commies and land on the moon. Planting a hastily crafted American flag on its surface, they claim the moon for the United States. Upon their return, they manage to release Lance and the American scientist and return home without ever being seen.

“The Faceless Man!” [C-560] opens with the teens someplace we’ve never seen them before: in

Bob Brant And The Trouble-Shooters––Plus Lance Brant

wave of mysterious bank robberies. The police are stumped, because everyone in the bank dies horribly, but without a mark on them. Lance Brant is assigned to the case by the Intelligence Department; his father’s office is also involved. Meanwhile, Bob, The Trouble-Shooters, and the girls are invited to a party for brilliant but mysterious classmate Roger Carstairs by his doting father, who is concerned about his son’s social skills. Mr. Carstairs tells the boys that Roger has “always been a strange boy! And he’s been making some new friends, lately ... older men ... and I don’t like their looks! He needs good wholesome friends.” When Bob gets a look at one of these new pals, he realizes the man is a member of the criminal gang they battled previously [C-293], led by that master of disguise, False Face! Bob and The Trouble-Shooters confront Roger about his poor choice of friends, and the cold-hearted teen boasts that he is indeed behind the bank robberies. He tells the gang, “I am a super being ... a new step up in man’s evolution ... I have powers you petty mortals never dreamed of!” Feathers adds, “Roger is a mutation, a super-being, with intellectual powers far beyond our present day understanding! ... Roger ... has turned his mutant powers toward evil, in a world of people he despises!” Roger’s power? He can create images of big swarming insects in people’s heads. The sensation of being attacked by these horrible creepycrawlies is more than the human mind can handle, and his victims die of sheer fright. Once a bank is cleared of potential witnesses, he sends in False Face and his gang to grab up the money for him. Roger’s father debates killing his obviously evil son, but False Face gets him off the horns of that dilemma by obligingly gunning down the kid before making his escape. Once again, the role of Bob and the Trouble-Shooters remains unknown to Lance and the authorities.

Fly Me To The Moon Little would Neil Armstrong ever realize that he was actually the fifth man on the moon! Bob Brant and The Trouble-Shooters beat him to it. Note that Bob’s face has a Milt Caniff-ish look, and even a George Wunder-ish lower lip, in a day when the shadow of the great adventure comic strip Terry and the Pirates was still one of the biggest influences on comic book artists. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Death Is a Spy’s Reward” [C-622] is another solo Lance Brant adventure. Top secrets are being examined and microfilmed in the very office where Lance works. His boss suspects an agent named Stevens; however, that man is murdered before he can be questioned. Lance departs for a weekend of pheasant hunting with his dog Spot, leaving the agency’s other top man, Elliott, to investigate the espionage and murder. Lance bags a bird, but finds it is a Chinese crested pheasant instead of the more common species; incredibly, a band on its leg contains not conservation information but a roll of microfilm! He follows a similar bird to a field of cultivated Chinese rice in which is a bird trap. When

school. They are in a class taught by Prof. Paul Klein, a German who had been sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis during WWII. Invited to Prof. Klein’s house for tea after school, the group meets his nephew Kurt. While they are there, Bob’s father arrives on business for the UN Security Police. He tells Prof. Klein that many Nazis escaped capture after the war and are working together to once again threaten civilization, under the leadership of the Faceless Man. Mr. Brant believes Prof. Klein is in danger, because the Faceless Man was once heard to say Prof. Klein was the only man alive who had ever seen his face. Prof. Klein protests that he has no idea what that could mean and declines protection. Klein is soon captured by the Faceless Man and his neo-Nazis, and taken to an abandoned subway branch. Bob and The Trouble-Shooters follow, and learn that the neo-Nazis plan to dynamite all the pipes and cables running under the city, bringing it to its knees; in the confusion, they will rise up and seize power. The boys attack the conspirators, rescuing the professor and revealing that the Faceless Man was actually his nephew Kurt. As “The Crawling Things!” [C-621] opens, the city is gripped by a

School Daze “Private instruction”? The headmaster at Roger Carstairs’ new school couldn’t by any chance be named Charles Xavier, could he? From the mutant-related story “The Crawling Things!” in Man Comics #28. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Timely/Atlas/Marvel Biography Series # 1

Bugging The Trouble-Shooters Lance is captured by enemy agents, he learns it’s actually Elliot who is the traitor. Quick action saves his life and leads to Eliot’s death and the capture of his gang of spies.

Okay, so maybe projecting mental images of insects doesn’t quite put young mutant Roger Carstairs in the same league as Magneto—but he probably could’ve held his own against Mastermind or The Toad! And his rationale for his feelings toward humanity could have come from Magneto’s own mouth. From Man #28. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

In “Where Mummies Prowl!” [C-796], Lance Brant is looking for counterfeiters who are producing phony $10 and $20 bills; his father’s department at the UN is likewise interested because counterfeiting “makes bad propaganda.” Meanwhile, Bob and gang head to the National Museum to do some research in the Egyptian Room for a big school exam on hieroglyphics. Upon arriving, they find the museum closed because of mummies seen haunting the halls. Ever curious, they find an unsecured entrance and go on in for a look around. As reported in the newspapers, the museum is indeed haunted; mummies as well as knights in armor chase the boys. However, they soon discover that the counterfeiting ring is using mummy costumes and suits of armor to frighten people away from their base of operations. In a major change in tactics, Bob actually telephones Lance to come and pick up the crooks once they have been captured. This is the last time we see Bob and his friends. In “TOYING WITH DEATH” [C824], Lance Brant once again investigates the unauthorized photography of secret documents—in this case, plans for an atomic pistol at a government experimental factory. He receives a telephone call from Felix Klein, the owner of Klein’s Machine Shop, who reports a suspicious order. He’s been asked to make a part for a toy pistol, but from impractically heavy and expensive material. Klein is murdered while on the phone with Lance, but not before telling

the investigator that his friend George Breslin has gotten a similar order for a different part.

Following up on information provided by Breslin, Lance breaks into the Miracle Toy Company. Most crates he examines contain simple squirt guns. In the last crate he checks, however, he finds far heavier guns that burn a hole through cement! He is discovered by enemy agents Turk and Niklos and their beautiful leader Flora, who are planning to ship the deadly weapons to the Reds in Korea, hidden among the look-alike toys. He learns that it was an employee of the government experimental factory, Dr. Mark Wells, who had photographed the plans and given them to Flora, whom he loved madly. Thanks to Lance, the plot is ruined.

Summary:

Mummy Dearest The cover of Man Comics #28 illustrated not the mutant story, but “Where Mummies Prowl!” Well, it was still the era of horror comics, after all! Artist unknown. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Bob Brant and The TroubleShooters” was certainly a strip with a lot of potential. The kid-gang genre can certainly strike a real chord with young people, if the stories are well-crafted and imaginative and feature engaging characters. Although many of the story plots were predictable (particularly those of the interrelated “Lance Brant” back-up strip), the scripter(s) did show a willingness to plunge into the fantastic. A rocket flight to the moon and an evil mutant bent on world domination are plot devices rife with possibilities; it’s a shame the mummies proved to be a fraud. Unfortunately, the characters never had the opportunity to develop into interesting people the reader could care about, instead remaining simplistic stereotypes.

Riddle Of The Rabble Rouser Or, A Hate-Monger By Any Other Name... by Will Murray

or almost 40 years, I’ve been bothered by the “Human Torch” story that ran in Strange Tales #119 (April 1964), “The Torch Goes Wild!” More specifically, by the bizarre villain Johnny Storm fought in that issue. I refer to the cretin who called himself The Rabble Rouser. A self-styled “undercover Red agent” operating as a Manhattan soapbox agitator, he had an awful lot in common with The HateMonger, whom the Fantastic Four had vanquished just four months before in their own title (“The Hate-Monger!” Fantastic Four #21, Dec.

Two Of A Kind What is the relationship—if any—between The Hate-Monger and The Rabble Rouser? Between the Hate Ray and the Mesmerizer Wand? Read on and see what Will Murray has to say about it! The covers of both FF #21 and Strange Tales #119 are by Jack Kirby & George Roussos ("George Bell"); thanks to Nick Caputo and Steve Whitaker for the ST credits confirmation. Art accompanying this article is repro’d from The Essential Fantastic Four, Vol. 2 and Essential Human Torch, Vol. 1 (and only, since it printed the entire Silver Age “Torch” canon). [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

1963). To begin with, both men specialized in inciting street-corner passions and violence. Now, it was not unusual for Stan Lee to recycle villains. Henry Pym was kidnapped into another dimension as Ant-Man in Tales to Astonish #41... and the same thing happened the minute he became Giant-Man. Tyrannus was just a handsome version of The Mole Man... The Titanium Man, a green Crimson Dynamo. Mr. Doll was The Puppet Master in a voodoo rig. And what was Kang the Conqueror but a futuristic Dr. Doom? Literally. Lee was not above recycling names, either. Bad Dr. Strange, meet Good Dr. Strange. But the correspondences between The Hate-Monger and The Rabble Rouser are a little too close for coincidence. Consider: both packed a mind-control weapon that brought out the worst in people. Nothing new there. The Fantastic Four were subjected to a similar emotion-intensifying ray at the hands of Kurrgo, Master of Planet X, back in FF #8. The Hate-Monger used his pistol-like Hate

Riddle Of The Rabble Rouser

Then there is the rough look of The Rabble Rouser. Although he describes himself as a Red agent, he’s dressed like an Andean peasant. There are passing references to his wanting to be the next Castro and rule some puppet country, but otherwise no explanation for his odd garb is given. For that matter, The Rabble Rouser isn’t even given the obligatory origin! Unlike The Hate-Monger, he doesn’t have an army of thugs, but operates alone. And where does he get the money for his subterranean vehicle? Come to think of it, where do you buy something like that? Note that The Hate-Monger operated out of the South American republic of San Gusto. The Rabble Rouser seems to hail from Greenwich Village. At any rate, that’s where he has his low-rent lab.

Heil Hair! On the final page of FF #21, as seen above, The Hate-Monger turned out to be either a 70-plus-year-old surviving Adolf Hitler—or one of his “many doubles.” Will Murray believes some of the facial hair on The Rabble Rouser (right) may have been hastily added by someone other than artist Dick Ayers—perhaps even Stan Lee himself—because Dick had originally penciled and inked Rab, as per instructions, as a dead ringer for Der Führer. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Ray, The Rabble Rouser employed his Mesmerizer Wand. Different toy, same result. Most striking is the underground tunneler that both men just happened to control. In FF #21, it was described as a Russian rocket engine modified for subterranean travel. In Strange Tales #119, Lee called it “a modified version of a Red prototype sub-surface vehicle built to operate in New York’s vast subway system.” In what appears to be a clearcut flashback sequence, Ayers virtually swipes the Kirby panels from FF #21 showing how it operates. Lee even footnotes the reference twice in two panels, going so far as to have The Rabble Rouser refer to it this way: “The larger original version of my sub-surface craft was first used by another during his Hey, Hatey—Mind If I Borrow battle with The The Car? Fantastic Four.” Why not just mention The HateMonger by name? Maybe because it would’ve called attention to the eerie parallels between the two villains.

Perhaps the strongest element of Will’s argument is the fact that both The HateMonster and The Rabble Rouser use the same “modified version of a Red prototype subsurface vehicle”—which the first of Stan Lee’s two footnotes about it in the later “Torch” story actually says was “First described in Fantastic Four #21”! FF #21 interior art by Kirby & Roussos; ST #119 interior art by Dick Ayers. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

But it’s The Rabble Rouser’s strange hairy features that bother me the most. He sports a bushy “uni-brow” and Fu Manchuish mustache that seems unusually wild. Further, it changes from panel to panel. Now, Dick Ayers inking himself is virtually guaranteed to produce a uniform, consistent look, even in those busy days when he was inking up at storm for Stan Lee. Ayers was a seasoned professional. A rush job wouldn’t cause him to produce facial hair so far off the mark as to look amateurish. I have a theory about the Rabble Rouser, and it’s this: He was really The Hate-Monger come back from the dead. How can that be when The HateMonger, after being gunned down by his Hate-Ray-maddened semistormtroopers, was unmasked as Adolf Hitler—or at the very least a lookalike double—at the climax of his first encounter with the Fab Four? Well, Lee and Kirby were not above resurrecting old villains without a good explanation. The Radioactive Man is shown literally going nuclear at the end of his first

A Hate-Monger By Any Other Name...

Hair Today—Gone Tomorrow As Will notes: in A/E V3#6’s study of the way similarities to the 1942 Warner Bros. film Casablanca were disguised in Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #72 (Nov. 1969), we showcased never-before-printed versions of several panels in which editor Stan Lee had personally drawn beards or moustaches on likenesses of Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, and Claude Rains on the original art. Will feels the “lip spinach” on The Rabble Rouser a few years earlier had the same unpolished look. To compare the Sgt. Fury art we spotlighted in 2000, order that back issue (see p. 26 for details)—but above are a pair of Lee-altered panels from that Sgt. Fury tale that weren’t printed therein, featuring a newly-mustachioed Bogart and the outline of a handlebar moustache added to Greenstreet. Actually, in the finished comic, those two likenesses by Dick Ayers and John Severin were changed in other ways... but they illustrate Will’s point. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

battle with the Mighty Thor. Months later, he’s allied with Baron Zemo and his Masters of Evil against the mighty Avengers, sans explanation. Many another malevolent Marvel madman staged unexplained comebacks in that ad hoc era.

Clues abound. If you look closely through the story, The Rabble Rouser’s facial hair is sketched in by an untrained hand. This was no Ayers or Heck or anyone good fixing up the art. In fact, I will go so far as to venture the opinion that Stan himself did the patching.

Let’s suppose Lee in those non-script days told Dick Ayers to recycle the Hate-Monger for a “Human Torch” story. Suppose Ayers went ahead, working from a verbal plot. Suppose, when Lee got the penciled pages, he realized the Torch was basically refighting an old FF battle, complete with the same shock ending—the hate-mongering bad guy is unmasked in the climax as old Uncle Adolf. It might look too pat. It was one thing for a villain to be unmasked in the last panel as Herr Hitler once. But twice in four months? Readers were bound to complain. And they’d expect a better explanation than a lame one that The Rabble Rouser is really the Hate-Monger back from the dead. Lee needed to explain the whole Hitler paradox. Or get rid of it.

Why do I say that? Simple. Back in Alter Ego V3#6, there’s evidence of Lee doing the same thing. Check out “Play it Again, Stan!” Several unpublished panels from a “Sgt. Fury” story based on the 1942 film Casablanca show Stan’s scribbly attempts to put facial hair on certain characters to mask their resemblance to the film’s cast. The scribbling looks similar—if scribblings can be said to be characteristic.

Apparently, Ayers left Lee little room to explain anything. Perhaps the Comics Code objected. Who knows? But maybe Lee realized that he’d need to entire 13 pages of the story to get out of his continuity plothole. So, while the story was still in the pencil stage, he made some careful script and cosmetic changes, hastily jury-rigging this low-rent edition of The Hate-Monger into someone all Marvelites could live with. Thus, the Rabble Rouser was born. Or reborn. Or whatever.

Now look at the last page of “The Torch Goes Wild!” Clearly, that is the masked face of Adolf Hitler, drawn just like Ayers would depict him in the “Mission: Capture Adolf Hitler” issue of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos later that year, with some obscuring ink applied. Before that, the Rouser possessed broad, Stalinesque features and hair. I suspect that this is a rubber mask that came off on that last page, just as I suspicion that the Rouser’s Andean peasant costume hails from the mythical Republic of San Gusto. Another clue can be found on page 5 of the story, where The Rabble Rouser muses, “With the aid of my Mesmerizer Wand and my persuasive voice, I can confuse the American people.” His persuasive voice was a huge part of the real Hitler’s power over people.

Riddle Of The Rabble Rouser

For Comparison Purposes Only—Your Mileage May Vary Will feels The Rabble Rouser’s face on the final page of the “Torch” story in Strange Tales #119 (above) is “the masked face of Adolf Hitler, drawn just like Ayers would depict him in the ‘Mission: Capture Adolf Hitler’ issue of Sgt. Fury” (#9, Aug. 1964), as seen at right. This Ayers-Roussos story, scripted by Stan Lee, was recently reprinted in Marvel Masterworks: Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos Nos. 1-13. So—what do you think? [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

If these suppositions are correct, this bizarre and inexplicable tale is no longer inexplicable—although it remain bizarre. Note that at the end of “The Torch Goes Wild!” Johnny Storm overcomes The Rabble Rouser with his own Mesmerizer Wand, reducing him to a obedient mental blank, while reflecting that he wasn’t sure how long this condition would last. Well, it lasted forever. Lee never brought him back. The Rabble Rouser was a misfire, if not an embarrassment. I suspect Lee was just happy that he was able to salvage that strange story. I once asked Dick Ayers about my theory. He drew a blank. But then, 40 is a lot of years ago. A decade ago, I saw the splash page to this story for sale at a convention. I didn’t take notes, but my recollection is that it was marked as scheduled for an earlier issue of Strange Tales than #119, and delayed. No doubt so it could be fixed. But I think I’ve solved the Riddle of The Rabble Rouser to my personal satisfaction.

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Will Murray (on right) with Doc Savage artist Joe DeVito.

www.twomorrows.com

“Jack [Kirby] Says You’re A Good Artist” VIC CARRABOTTA Talks About Drawing For Timely/Atlas, Biro, Et Al. Interview Conducted by Jim Amash

Transcribed by Teresa R. Davidson

don’t know whether it was Vic Carrabotta’s unusual name or his drawing style that first attracted my attention when I was a kid. It doesn’t matter, because I liked his crime and horror work for Timely, some of which Marvel reprinted in the early to mid-1970s. I always wondered about Vic, partly because he wasn’t drawing comics when I came of reading age. So when Roy Thomas discovered that Vic now lives in Columbia, South Carolina, within an hour’s drive from him, he passed the contact info along to me. Now, finally, I got to learn about Vic, and so will you. And if this interview isn’t enough, check out Vic’s website at www.quickvics.com. —Jim.

“They Used To Call Me ‘Carburetor’” JA: When and where were you born? CARRABOTTA: I was born in Eastchester, New York, in 1929. June 24. JA: I’m curious about your last name. CARRABOTTA: It’s Italian. Carrabotta. They used to call me “Carburetor” in the Marine Corps. [mutual laughter] JA: What got you interested in drawing? CARRABOTTA: There’s quite a lot of art in my family. When I went to Catholic School, I was only 5 or 6 years old and I was the only Italian kid in the school. The sisters always sat me in the back of the class. When I was in the 2nd grade, the sisters called my parents and said that there must be something wrong with me because I wasn’t learning anything. It turned out that I couldn’t see the board because I needed glasses. While the other kids were learning, I was sitting there with my head a few inches over my desk, drawing. That’s when I learned to draw. I actually drew very well; I had my own technique. I was in my own little world. I used to listen to radio shows like Little Orphan Annie. Drawing was my life. At the age of about 15 or 16, I heard there was a kid around the block, who was a little older than me, who worked for National (DC) Comics. His name was Jerry Grandenetti. I picked up with Jerry and he was very nice. He said, “I’m working with Will Eisner, but when I come home, meet me by the subway and I’ll teach you how to ink.” He was nice enough to teach me how to ink. I could always draw, I always had the ability, but Jerry taught me the technique of comics.

“V” Is For Vic Vic Carrabotta in a recent photo—and one of his recent illos. The latter illustrates his point, made in this interview, that he wishes he’d had a chance to draw super-heroes during his 1950s stint at Timely. Photo & art courtesy of the artist. [Art ©2006 Vic Carrabotta.]

From there, I didn’t take the art seriously because I had other things on my mind. I was also a musician, a guitarist. I ended up in the Marine Corps Dance Band. JA: When were you in the service? CARRABOTTA: 1948–1951. I was supposed to go out of Camp LeJune, but my wife Connie was pregnant at the time. There was no one at home to take care of her, so I applied for a discharge. They said they could keep me here if I wanted and they had wanted to put me on Leatherneck Magazine. I decided to go. So I missed a good opportunity there. I would’ve been stationed in Washington, DC. After the Marine Corps, I didn’t do too much drawing except going to the library and drawing horses, that kind of thing. I went to Music & Art High School and did a lot of drawing there. Joe Kubert went there. I went into construction doing bricklaying with my cousins, a typical Italian thing. I was also going to Cartoonists’ & Illustrators’ School (later renamed the School of Visual Arts), and Jerry Robinson was one of my teachers. I was laid off in the winter months, and my wife at the time suggested I get into the publishing field. She was instrumental in getting me into comics. I never thought I could do comics, even though Jerry Grandenetti had taught me and I had the

“Jack [Kirby] Says You’re A Good Artist”

41 JA: He didn’t criticize you? CARRABOTTA: No, not at all. We worked very large in those days. Most people used a #3 brush; I used a #2 brush. To my eye, it looked fine, but when it’s reduced, you lose the image. Today, I don’t use a brush. When I do storyboards I use Pentels, which I use as a brush. Anyway, Stan kept giving me more work. That’s when I met John Romita.

“You Know, You Sketch Pretty Good…” Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Bullpenner Vic in 1952, while working for Stan Lee at Timely Comics—and the splash from the very first story he did for Timely: “The House on the Hill” (not quite “The House on the Haunted Hill,” as he remembered—he probably had it confused with the movie!). The story appeared in Astonishing #13 (May 1952). Thanks to Chris Brown for the scan. Photo courtesy of the artist. [Art ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

ability. I got myself a little homemade desk and did a couple of samples. Connie and I would go from the Bronx to Manhattan with 20¢ in our pockets—she was pregnant—and we would go to publishing houses. We went to Magazine Management, where Stan Lee was. Nothing happened there. We went all over. We always went together. It was the winter and she was about 7 or 8 months pregnant. We went up to see Jack Kirby. Connie sat down in the lobby and I went to Jack’s cubicle in the back. Jack didn’t see her. Jack looked at my samples and didn’t seem that enthusiastic, because my stuff wasn’t that great in those days. He said, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” Jack was very nice. I was just a kid back then, only 21. As he walked me out, I said, “By the way, this is my wife, Connie.” Connie stands up and Jack does a double-take up and down because she’s pregnant. He says, “Oh... how are you, Connie?” Jack said to me, “Have you seen Stan Lee?” I told him I tried, but I couldn’t get in because he didn’t know who in the hell I was. He said, “Sit here a minute, I need to go back to my office.” He writes a note and seals it, and tells me to go back to Stan with the note. I went back to Magazine Management with my wife on the elevator. Kirk Douglas was also on the elevator. I guess he was filming Detective Story at the time. [mutual laughter] Once in the Timely offices, the secretary addresses me to Stan and here I am meeting Stan for the first time. There’s Stan, casual as all, feet up on the desk, reading this note from Jack. Stan said, “Jack says you’re a good artist.” I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Would you like to see my samples?” He says, “No, that’s OK. Jack says you’re a good artist. I tell you what,” and he throws this script across the desk. He says, “ I want this back in a week.” It was “The House on the Haunted Hill.” God knows where it was published! I used my cousin as a model. I don’t even want to look at it, it was so bad. I didn’t know how thick the line needed to be for reproduction. It was so thin you couldn’t even see it. I was surprised Stan accepted it.

JA: Let’s go back before your days at Timely. What do you remember about Jerry Robinson as your teacher? CARRABOTTA: I had him for 2 or 3 classes. He was quiet, a very nice guy. He basically taught us to draw from the mind. I’ve been doing that ever since I was a kid. I can copy, but just to draw. People don’t do that today. It’s a dead thing. Jerry is a very good illustrator, a great cartoonist. I remember what he looked like, the glasses and so forth. He was a very good teacher. [NOTE: For an extended interview with Jerry Robinson, see Alter Ego #39. —Jim] JA: Did you take any classes from Burne Hogarth? CARRABOTTA: I took a couple, like Dynamic Anatomy or whatever the heck it was. He bawled me

Vic Carrabotta Talks About Drawing For Timely/Atlas, Biro, Et. Al.

“They Crawl By Night!” This stylized, quirky little thriller appeared in Strange Tales #53 (Dec. 1956)—and is repro’d from the black-&-white Australian reprint comic Secrets of the Unknown #190, courtesy of Ger Apeldoorn. Strangely, the indicia in these Oz reprints have no dates, but they seem to have appeared several years after the US editions. Thanks to Greg Gatlin for the issue ID. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Jack [Kirby] Says You’re A Good Artist”

out in front of the class one time. He said, “If you care about it, you’re a great artist, but you’ve got no guts!” That’s Burne. He was probably right. I was very quiet, very timid. JA: There were a couple of students who went there about that time. I want to throw their names out and see if you remember them. One of them was Don Heck. CARRABOTTA: No, I met Don, though, one time. He would come up to get scripts like I did. And another guy: Lee Elias. I remember him. And the letterer, Joe Letterese, was a friend of mine. When I was working construction, I would sketch the guys on their lunch break shootin’ craps. [mutual laughter] The foreman comes up and says, “You know, you sketch pretty good. My uncle works with Famous Studios.” These were the people that did animated cartoons like Little Lulu, Popeye, and Casper the [Friendly] Ghost. When times got slow at the construction—before I went to Stan—I worked for Famous Studios doing animation inking. It was after that I worked up the portfolio and went to see Stan. JA: Who do you remember from your Famous Studios days? CARRABOTTA: I remember Steve Muffatti. He was a fantastic inker and illustrator. We would ink on cels. The second job I had was working with Jimmy Dixon, an African-American artist. We worked in the Will Eisner studio for a time. JA: When you were a student at Visual Arts, do you remember a guy named Steve Ditko? CARRABOTTA: I didn’t know him then, but I met him about 9 years ago. I went up to the Marvel offices to visit Jack Abel. We were talking about the kids and whatnot, and Ditko was sitting there. I didn’t know what in the hell he looked like. Jack introduced me to him. JA: Did you know Jack Abel from your Timely days? CARRABOTTA: Jack did my inking. Back then, I did my own inking. But for some reason, Stan—Stan could be difficult. I had a very “DC” style, very clean. Because I was doing a lot of Astonishing Tales and stuff like that, Stan would say he wanted it dark, a lot of cross-hatching. I was forced to put in a lot of detail, which I did, with the brush and pen. Stan said he liked what I was doing, but he wanted to get Jack to ink my pencils. Jack really smothered it with detail. That was his thing. Jack was a very nice guy. A very sweet guy. I was so brokenhearted when he died. I couldn’t believe it. He died of a stroke about a year after I had last seen him. Another guy I met up there was Bernie Krigstein. He was a very good artist. I also met John Romita and Alex Kotzky. I wasn’t on staff, but I freelanced there. Krigstein had a great modern touch. He and his wife worked together at times. He belonged to a group called the National Cartoonists Society. We’d meet like once a month. After the meetings we would go to the bar and have drinks there. I met Wally Wood, Frank Robbins, and Al Williamson there. I really don’t have a lot of stories to tell from that time, because, at one point, I moved to South Carolina, which is where my wife is from. I told Stan I was moving there and he said, “I’ll send you scripts down there.” I worked for several years for Stan after that, but then Stan all of

Nothing Could Be Finer Than To Be In Carolina Vic with Dann Thomas, long-suffering (see p. 56-59) red-haired wife of A/E’s editor, at a 2005 party at the Thomases’ spread. You could’ve knocked Roy over with one of The Angel’s feathers when he learned he and Dann were only the second and third persons to have worked for Marvel while dwelling in Calhoun Country, SC! As Vic reports, for some time in the 1950s, he lived in his first wife’s home town of Lone Star, a very small town just a few miles from where Roy & Dann now ride herd over dozens of unruly animals. So maybe it’s only fitting that the accompanying Carrabotta-drawn splash is from a tale called “The Man Who Lost Himself!” from Journey into Mystery #25 (June 1955), as reprinted in the Oz b&w Secrets of the Unknown #161, courtesy of Daniel Best. Thanks to Arthur Lortie and Tom Lammers for the issue ID. Photo courtesy of Vic’s daughter Robin Waugh. [Art ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

the sudden stopped sending me work. This was due to the Senate investigation on comics. Everything hit the fan. Timely stopped publishing for a while. Stan told me he couldn’t help me. That’s when I changed careers, and went into printing. I went to Atlanta, did different things, and became a creative director, having everybody else do my comps. It just mushroomed into another career. Later, I went up to visit Stan in New York and he was in a little dinky office and he really didn’t want to see me. This was before “Spider-Man” took off. I got out of comics and sometimes I’ve regretted it, but I had to make a living with six kids and living in South Carolina. I’m still working, commissioned to do other things. I never let go.

“Stan [Lee] Never Saw Me As A Super-Hero Artist” JA: Going back to Timely, let’s see if you remember some of these features: “Two-Gun Kid,” “Outlaw Kid,” “Kid Colt Outlaw,”

Vic Carrabotta Talks About Drawing For Timely/Atlas, Biro, Et. Al.

Vic Stomp! Maybe Vic never got to draw super-heroes in the mid-1950s, when there weren’t too many of ’em whizzing around in comic books—but nowadays he often sketches them when, amid his professional work, he manages to squeeze in time for his favorite pastime: doodling. In fact, he says his South Carolina friends call him ‘The Yankee Doodler.’” [Art ©2006 Vic Carrabotta; the Hulk and Mr. Fantastic TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Batman TM & ©2006 DC Comics.]

“Combat Kelly,” “Apache Kid.” Did you like doing a regular series with a recurring character, or did you like doing 6- or 8-page anthologies better? CARRABOTTA: Stan was funny. He had his favorites. John Romita was one of them. John was imitating Kirby and Milton Caniff. He never really saw me as a super-hero artist, which was unfortunate. At the time I liked doing the Westerns and war comics, particularly the Westerns. I did a story where I modeled the town after Lone Star, South Carolina, which is where I lived. JA: Was Stan the only editor you worked with at Timely? CARRABOTTA: Yes. Rolled-up sleeves and very casual. While I was there I met Joe Maneely. Joe Letterese and I would get together. I remember him coming to our house in the Bronx. He was very softspoken, a very nice guy. JA: Letterese is a funny name for a letterer, isn’t it? [mutual laughter] CARRABOTTA: Probably from someone in the family. You know, my name Carrabotta in Italian means “Lover of Boots.” My grandfather was a boot maker. JA: What do you remember about Joe Maneely? CARRABOTTA: He was very fast. He had a distinct style and Stan really liked him. He was a nice guy. I met John Romita in the lobby. We kept in touch year after year. I last spoke with him a couple of years ago. I remember, when things were slow, he called me and said, “I wish I could do storyboards like you.” I was doing a lot of storyboards in New York. He was very slow and methodical in his work, and I’m “Quick Vic.” [mutual laughter] That slow time was in the ’50s. I was making $32 a page, penciling and inking. I worked there from 1952 to 1957. I had spoken to John about seven years ago and we were talking

“It Happened In Gunsmoke”… We Mean, “Lone Star” Vic sent us this splash from the Western story he drew for Timely whose town he designed to look like Lone Star, SC. He says the names he put on stores (like “E. Wingard”), were real businesses in the small town at that time. It's from Outlaw Kid #11 (May 1956), later reprinted in Ringo Kid #9 (May '71); thanks to Mike Costa and Will Brehm for that info. Note that this story was scripted by Stan Lee. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Jack [Kirby] Says You’re A Good Artist” about royalties. I said, “I never got paid any royalties; I didn’t even know they existed.” He said, “Sure they do, for reprinted material.” I wrote to Marvel before they went bankrupt, and believe it or not they sent me a check, which was pretty good-sized.

“It Wasn’t Very Easy In Those Days”

JA: The Lev Gleason stories you did for Biro sure had a lot of copy in them, didn’t they? CARRABOTTA: They really did! You had to really plan the panels, because it was all copy. Biro never critiqued my pencils. The offices were very small up there. JA: When you sent back the inked art, did you letter it?

JA: After working at Timely, was it easier finding work with other publishers? CARRABOTTA: It wasn’t very easy in those days. You couldn’t tell these people you were working for other people. Particularly Stan Lee. He would get very angry if he knew you were working for other people. It isn’t like it is now. We had to keep it under cover. I showed Charlie Biro some old samples. JA: What do you remember about Charlie Biro [editor at Lev Gleason Publications]? CARRABOTTA: He was a nice guy, and he gave me a lot of pages. In the old days, I always imitated Milton Caniff. Charlie said, “I noticed you try to draw like Milton Caniff. Stop doing that and just draw like you want to draw.” I took his advice and developed my own style, which I still use today. I do different styles in storyboarding, because people request it.

CARRABOTTA: No. I laid out the lettering in pencil, then Joe would finish it. JA: Why did you quit working for Biro? CARRABOTTA: I was getting swamped from Stan. I would get a script a week from him, which was a lot for me then. I wasn’t that fast. I was just learning the field and I was raising kids, that kind of stuff. When I moved down South, I began doing lectures and designing for local papers. I also did some cartooning. I was drifting away from comics because Stan was drifting away from me. I was penciling and inking about a page a day. These were tight, tight pencils. I did fillers for Biro in Daredevil and Crime Does Not Pay. Another company was Youthful, run by a man named Unger. He was really a lawyer, and I would have to go to his law office. He would hand me a script out of a drawer. He also did a lot of historical stuff. I did Atomic Attack and Romance Comics. No telling what those look like!

Pretty Scary, Huh, Kids? Two post-Code mystery-comics splashes by Carrabotta—from Marvel Tales #140 (Nov. 1955) and Strange Tales #47 (June 1956). Thanks to Bruce Mason and Vic himself, respectively, for the copies—and to Arthur Lortie for the latter issue ID. [©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Vic Carrabotta Talks About Drawing For Timely/Atlas, Biro, Et. Al. And You Thought Vic Carrabotta Only Drew Comics Books!? Think Again!

Some of this art may have been done for BBD&O Advertising Agency—others have been done since he moved back to South Carolina. [All art on these two pages ©2006 Vic Carrabotta or the respective copyright holders.]

A character study of a Native American.

Penciled ad storyboards.

Storyboards featuring a guy who looks an awful lot like David Letterman.

A finished drawing done for an ad for South Carolina Electric & Gas Company.

“Jack [Kirby] Says You’re A Good Artist”

[mutual laughter] I really banged those out. He only paid $20 a page. I just did these in my spare time. JA: So you left because you got better-paying work? CARRABOTTA: Yes. I was working for Stan, then I left New York. JA: Do you remember what Unger looked like? CARRABOTTA: I remember he was an older man who wore a suit or

Sketch for a soft drink ad. But we’re not gonna tell you which one, ’cause those things rot your teeth!

jacket all the time. Charlie Biro was always in his shirtsleeves. Stan was always in shirtsleeves and a tie. Unger was the only one I remember with a suit, probably because he was a lawyer. I think he was in his mid-40s. I remember I had some trouble getting paid from him. JA: When all that stuff was going on about the Senate hearings and the Kefeaver committee, were you concerned about your livelihood? CARRABOTTA: Later on, I didn’t feel too good, because that stuff wasn’t really too good for kids, to tell you the truth. I used to have nightmares about the stories. JA: The stories gave you nightmares? CARRABOTTA: Yeah. I guess that’s the artist in me. [mutual laughter] JA: Would you have liked to do super-heroes? CARRABOTTA: Yeah, I would have, to tell you the truth. JA: Did you ever want any of your original art back? CARRABOTTA: No, I never thought about it. I spoke to John Romita and he said he might be able to find some of my pages. Two years later he calls and tells me he found some old stuff that wasn’t burned up in the warehouse.

“I Always Land On My Feet” JA: Tell me about when you worked for BBD&O [a major advertising agency].

Three clever “split-screen” compositions; precise purpose uncertain.

CARRABOTTA: That was a steady job. I worked in Atlanta. It was a branch office for the one in New York. I was a senior art director there. One of my clients was Delta Airlines. I used to give my comps out. While I was there, I got into film. I won a national award for my work. I made fairly good money, but after a while the boss didn’t appreciate me. After I won the award, the guys in New York wanted me up there, but I quit. I felt I

Vic Carrabotta Talks About Drawing For Timely/Atlas, Biro, Et. Al. couldn’t grow anymore. I was offered some freelance work, both creative and storyboarding, with a guy named Jonas Gold, one of my mentors in advertising. In my comic book days I drew cleanly and tightly. With storyboarding I was very loose in my drawing. Jonas would say that not even Bernie Fuchs could do what I do. He said, “With your style, you could be making half a million a year!” And I did. That’s how I got the name “Quick Vic.”

There have been some successful stories in my life. The art field always goes up and down, but I always land on my feet. I’m pretty lucky because I am versatile, and I’m glad I’ve done a lot of things. God, if I had done only comic books…! What happens when the field dies? It’s a terrible thing, but it can happen. That’s why I switched to being an art director and finally to storyboarding.

A Sunken Treasure? Now here’s a splash page from a time when horror comics were horror comics! This non-Timely story appeared in Youthful Magazines’ Chilling Tales #13 (Dec. 1952), which was actually the first issue. Thanks to Bruce Mason for the scan. [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

Just recently I had this opportunity to do paintings that will appear on the Oprah Winfrey show. You never know. By the way, did I tell you about a super-hero I created? It’s another story with Stan. A few years ago I sent him a concept for a black female super-hero, and he said he liked the idea. He said, “Try to get funded with the people in Atlanta, like Coca-Cola. I know some people from there.” But nothing came of it. Now, there are these producers in California, Gross and Weston Productions, who really like my Star Lady concept, and they are currently looking for a writer to write the series pilot.

VIC CARRABOTTA Checklist [NOTE: The following is adapted from information provided by Dr. Jerry Bails from his Who’s Who of 20th-Century American Comic Books website—now available to the general public (see p. 81 for details)! Corrections or additions can be sent via A/E or directly to JerryBails@aol.com. Names of ongoing features that appeared in more than one magazine are not placed in italics unless it is believed the artist’s work on that feature appeared on in that particular title (as in the case below of Combat Kelly). Thanks to Michael J. Vassallo and Thomas C. Lammers for a couple of last-minute additions. Key: (p) = pencils only; (i) = inks only.] Name: Vic Carrabotta [b. 1929] (artist) Education: Music and Art High School (early 1950s); Cartoonists’ & Illustrators’ School (early 1950s) Advertising Credits: BBD&O (years uncertain) COMIC BOOK CREDITS (Mainstream US Publishers): [NOTE: All credits following are for full art, penciling and inking, unless noted otherwise.] Fiction House: horror, war—both 1953 I.W. Publications: Planet Comics—no date; reprint Lev Gleason: crime 1953; Red Fire 1954 Story Comics: horror c. 1952-53

Timely/Marvel & related: Adventures into Weird Worlds 1952; Astonishing 1952-54, 57; Battle 1954-56; Battle Action 1955-56; Battlefront 1956; Battleground 1956; backup features in Kid Colt Outlaw 1953, Apache Kid 1956, and Outlaw Kid 1956; Caught 1956; Combat Kelly 1954; Journey into Mystery 1952-56; Journey into Unknown Worlds 1955-56; Justice Comics 1955-56; Marines in Action 1956; Marines in Battle 1956; Marvel Tales 1954-56; Mystery Tales 1954-56; Mystic 1952-56; Mystical Tales 1956; Police Action 1954; Rugged Action 1954; Spellbound (p/some i) 1953-54, 56; Strange Stories of Suspense 1956; Strange Tales 1952-58; Strange Tales of the Unusual 1956-57; Tales of Justice 1956; Two-Gun Kid 1967; Uncanny Tales 1953, 55-56; War Comics 1955-56; Western Gunfighters 1956; Western Outlaws 1954 Youthful Magazines: Atomic Attack 1953; Chilling Tales 1952; romance 1952

A Cruise And A Comicon

Golden Age Timely Artist ALLEN BELLMAN Doesn’t Let Any Grass Grow Under His Feet! [EDITOR’S NOTE: Allen Bellman, who was interviewed in depth in A/E #32, drew for comic books from 1945-53 and worked for some time in Timely/Marvel’s bullpen. In issue #54 we printed a letter from him re his very first comics convention attendance, at MegaCon in Orlando, Florida, in Feb. 2005. At that time, however, Allen and his wife Roz hadn’t yet sent us any of photos they took there… so this is our chance to make a short feature out of them, accompanied by his comments. As these words are written, the two of them are off to China for a few weeks…! —Roy.]

“Let’s Play Detective” That was the name of a one- or two-page feature Allen often wrote and drew for Timely’s comics in the early 1950s—so here’s a drawing commemorating it that he did some months back for Dewey Cassell, as well as a photo of Allen and Roz Bellman with a framed pic of Stan Lee and a certain wall-crawler!

oz and I just returned from Europe and thought it was time to send you photos of the [Florida] convention. We cruised from Fort Lauderdale to Barcelona, making several ports of call on the way. All we had to do was to roll out of bed and we were at Port Everglades, where the cruise ships leave from.

After checking in and dropping off our carry-ons in our cabin, we went for lunch on the upper deck. I saw this guy who was the spitting image of Ernest Borgnine, and it was he, which I learned the next day. With the ship on the high seas, I went to get a cup of coffee around 6:30 a.m., leaving my wife fast asleep. I was walking around holding the

lukewarm coffee. Someone taps me on the shoulder and asks me if I’m having a good time. I slowly turned around, looked at the man, and sheepishly asked, “Mr. Borgnine??” He answered yes, and we had a short conversation. But we kept running into him and his wife, who hawks cosmetics on Home Shopping TV. Don’t know why he picked on me—unless it was the Three Stooges suspenders I was wearing. He gave lectures in the ship’s theatre on how he started his movie career and went into his personal life. The theatre was standing room only.

MegaCon (Feb. 2005)

[All handwritten comments in this section are by Allen; others added by Ye Editor.]

That’s a copy of Alter Ego #32 propped up in front of Allen. If you haven’t read its interviews with Allen and fellow Timely artists Sam Burlockoff and Marty Nodell, see p. 26-29.

That’s Gene Colan on the right, Allen on the left.

A Cruise And A Comicon

Well, just in case you don’t—the guy standing behind Michael T. and Janet Gilbert is A/E editor Roy Thomas. That’s Allen on the left, and George Tuska on the right, with Mrs. Tuska looking on.

More from amiable Allen in future issues!

When Is An “Unknown” Not Unknown?

A Look At The Life And Career Of Artist RAY WILLNER Part IV in Our Series “THE GREAT UNKNOWNS” by Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., and Hames Ware

Comics, which were given free to every kid who bought a pair of Buster Brown shoes. It was there, alongside and ofttimes collaborating with comic book giant Reed Crandall, that Ray Willner not only held his own, but was often given the plum assignments and lead features, including “Gunga the Jungle Boy,” “Little Fox of the Dakota Sioux,” and the fabulous but unnamed science-fiction strip featuring the Interplanetary Police. He often did two of these strips in a quarterly issue. A look through his wonderful work in these littleknown comics makes it easy to see why Willner deserved and received Two Willner Wonderworks lead artist status. He The cover of Smilin’ Ed’s Buster Brown Comics #17 (no date) and the splash of his super-hero tale in Cat-Man #32 (Aug. 1946), that even signed a few of the Holyoke title’s final issue. Ye Editor was struck by how much, in various panels of his personal copy of BB #17, Willner’s art later stories—so you see resembled that of two Filipino ace artists of later years, Alfredo Alcala and (especially) Nestor Redondo. All art accompanying this why we can’t claim that article was provided by Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. [©2006 the respective copyright holders.] he’s totally unknown. (Willner, again with Crandall, also crafted stories for The Adventures of Robin Hood hen is an “unknown” not unknown? comics given away with the Brown Company’s other line, Robin Hood Shoes.) What if he had a career that was only partially documented? To find an artist with such an alter ego, we need look no So, we can establish the bookends of his career, but it takes a real art further than the work of one of the finest artists ever to draw for comic detective to figure just where he was appearing during the in-between books, and yet one whose name is almost as little known as Orestes period. His other known early credits are mainly for the lowly Holyoke Calpini’s: Ray Willner. line of comics. These include “Captain Aero” in Captain Aero Comics in the early ’40s, several strips in Blue Beetle Comics in the mid-1940s— Ray Willner may not be as “unknown” as some who have appeared in most in conjunction with fellow artist Allen Ulmer—and one installment this column. After all, he signed work in the early Golden Age—such as of “Catman” in a 1946 issue of Catman Comics. He’s even listed in the “Bill Handy” in Worth’s Champion Comics #5 from March 1940 ownership statement as the editor of that title! After than he seems to (which later became Harvey’s Champ Comics), and many of you are disappear. probably familiar with his work in 1952-1956 in comic books that weren’t even sold! Namely, he drew several features in Buster Brown The superb animated artist Orestes Calpini (covered in A/E #47) was

A Look At The Life & Career Of Ray Willner

always our first guess when we encountered the beautiful fine-line children’s fantasy art at both Holyoke and Eastern. Yet, upon closer scrutiny, these features took on almost a “What if Lou Fine had drawn funny animals?” look! We knew this work wasn’t by Fine or Calpini, but what if Ray Willner had drawn such features? What might those have looked like? Although, on the surface, there is little from Willner’s early style to suggest the transformation that seems to have occurred as this marvelous chameleon began to shift genres, we now think we Bill Is Handy know.

Specifically, when we were researching some early Holyoke children’s features that appeared in Blue Beetle Comics, Calpini’s name immediately sprang to mind. Looking at “Aesops Fables,” “The Adventures

When Is An Unknown Not An Unknown

53 signed an “Old Swap Shop” as “Wilmer Muddleshtunk” and a “Bingo” as just Wilmer. He appeared early on, disappeared for a while, and then reappeared just after several signed appearances by Allen Ulmer. It was clear that “Wilmer” was Ray WILlner and Allen UlMER. We suddenly knew where Willner had disappeared to, and began to document an entire segment of his career of which we had been previously unaware.

Just review those wonderful issues of Jingle Jangle. Revel in the well-know strips by George

of Sinbad the Sailor,” and “Ali-Baba” we were quite amazed by the sophistication of the art styles, though to the discerning eye, it was clear that this wasn’t Calpini and that another’s hand was at work! It wasn’t until we saw Blue Beetle #23 (July 1943), with its “Ali-Baba” strip signed “Art by Wilmer Muddleshtunk,” that we began to put the pieces together. We knew this artist! We had also speculated Calpini on work in Jingle Jangle Comics, where this artist appeared regularly on “Bingo,” “Hortense,” “Aunty Spry,” and “The Old Swap Shop,” and where he had also

Double Bingo! Two “Bingo” splashes. Jim V. and Hames tells us that the one on the right is the joint work of Ray Willner and Allen Ulmer—and who are we to argue with ’em? They’re the experts on the “Great Unknowns”! [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

A Look At The Life & Career Of Ray Willner

Where There’s A Willner— There’s Sometimes An Ullmer Four bylined Willner splashes—the latter by “Ullmer & Willner,” for a change—and one (“Dr. Diamond”) credited to “Ullmer” but, according to Jim V., “much more Willner than Ulmer.” The latter’s name was generally spelled “Ulmer”—so maybe r a letterer spelled it wrong—twice? All five tales appeared in Holyoke’s Cat-Man Comics, Vol. 1, #7 (June 1941, labeled #2 on the cover). Dr. Diamond, Jim says, was much “like Dr. Strange, right down to being ‘endowed with strange supernatural powers by a mysterious man’ (though ‘on a far-away island’) and being originally a ‘young American surgeon.’” [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

When Is An Unknown Not An Unknown

Carlson and learn about such unsung greats as Dave Tendlar. But, after Carlson (and some might say on a par with him), the outstanding artists there are Allen Ulmer and Ray Willner, who have never been adequately acknowledged for their lively and elegant efforts. Still, as good as these many Willner features are, it isn’t for any of them that Willner really deserves his ranking as one of the greatest of all the Great Unknowns. Though attempts to locate Ray Willner never produced success, it was wonderful, and surprising, to hear his longtime friend and collaborator Allen Ulmer’s description of “a quiet and studious man who suffered from palsy, yet produced beautiful work once his hands touched the drawing board.”

“Plunk Your Magic Twanger, Froggy!” (Above:) Here, as they used to say on TV/radio’s Hit Parade, is “a Lucky Strike Extra”: definitely not a Ray Willner page, but the splash of the “Smilin’ Ed and His Gang” story from Buster Brown Comics #17… mainly because co-author Hames Ware dropped us an email to say: “I, too, was a fan of the Buster Brown show [Smilin’ Ed’s Buster Brown Gang] and early TV, till poor Smilin’ Ed washed up on that beach. Ed’s voice for Froggy the Gremlin was just great…speaking as one who does funny voices for a living. I always felt Smilin’ Ed was a true great…and not only at voices, but he was a heck of a musician and showman, as well. For three decades Jim V. and I have sought in vain to ID the regular ‘Smilin’ Ed’ artist in the Buster Brown Comics. Voice artist June Foray was married to Hobart Donovon, who wrote all the stories, so I asked him via June, but alas, even he didn’t know. Whoever it was was a perfect fit for the humor of Smilin’ Ed’s group. Maybe when A/E #58 appears, somebody will step forward and ID the cartoonist!” And that is the reason we’ve printed this non-Willner art—that, plus the fact that A/E’s editor was one of the great “Froggy the Gremlin” fans back in the late 1940s! Even Andy Devine couldn’t replace Smilin’ Ed! [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

Monthly! The Original First-Person History!

And, lest the readers think that all the old-time artists have been identified, it should be stated that in all those same Buster Brown Comics, the “Smilin’ Ed” feature was drawn by another talented artist for the entire run. And, unlike his co-worker Ray Willner, he has yet to be ID’d!

Write to: Robin Snyder, 3745 Canterbury Lane #81, Bellingham, WA 98225-1186

A Silver Anniversary For a Silver-Ager & Spouse ROY & DANN THOMAS Celebrate Their 25th—With A Look Back At Some Friends’ Well-Wishing by Ye Alter Ego Editor

Most Photos by Alan Waite

ith a little bit of bloomin’ luck, this piece will be as much a surprise to my lovely wife Dann as it is to this issue’s other readers. To that end, I shamelessly sneaked a handful of photos out of the wedding album she’d so painstakingly assembled, made photocopies of a few pieces of relevant artwork, and kept everything under wraps as much as possible while prepping this issue.

But—did I say “day”? Actually, we were wed at the stroke of sunrise, on a hillside abutting Griffith Observatory, and overlooking Hollywood. Dann had chosen the place, for aesthetic reasons—and I’d concurred, partly because it had been the scene of the famous knife fight between Jamie Stark and Buzz Gunderson in the 1955 James Dean/Nicholas Ray movie Rebel without a Cause, which I’ve seen maybe two dozen times. I acquiesced in her desire to have the nuptials at sun-up, mostly ’cause I figured, hey, at least I’d never have to be up at that ungodly hour again. Little did I know!

For, May 3 of this year marks the 25th anniversary of the day in 1981 when Danette (Peck) Couto and I took the proverbial plunge into matrimony. (She didn’t make her first-name change legal till a year or so later, but I’ll still mostly refer to her as Dann herein. Force of habit.)

Dann and Roy exchanged vows, rings, et al., before the right reverend Jennie-Lynn Falk, minister of the Church of the Divine Light, who’d gotten herself ordained specially for the occasion. In another life, she was Dann’s UCLA roommate. Seen ’twixt her and the hapless (er, happy) couple is matron of honor Carla Conway (holding daughter Cara, Roy & Dann’s godchild); at right is best man Gerry Conway. Somewhere nearby, Christy Marx (soon writer/creator of Sisterhood of Steel) was playing the harp… and quite beautifully, too.

Two invitees who couldn’t quite make it to the wedding because they lived on the East Coast sent muchappreciated greetings. (Center:) A few words from Harvey Kurtzman—and if you have to ask who he is, you’re not really a comics fan so what’re you doing reading this mag, anyway? (Far right:) Though he somehow neglected to sign it, Red Sonja artist Frank Thorne sent slightly more words with his drawing. As to who “Rascal and Sam” are— read on. [Art ©2006 Adele Kurtzman & Frank Thorne, respectively.]

Griffith Observatory. Roy kept expecting the cops to screech up and gun down Sal Mineo! Actually, a Park guard did show, to ask if they had a permit to perform a wedding there. They didn’t, but their friend and photographer Alan Waite convinced him they did—then told them to hurry up the ceremony before he came back! As producer of countless TV commercials, Alan knew how to keep things rolling along.

A Silver Anniversary For A Silver-Ager & Spouse

Loaves and fishes it wasn’t—but, right after the ceremony, Dann and Roy dispensed a few early-morning edibles to the guests from the trunk of their Firebird. Seen at right is Bill Warren, author of Keep Watching the Skies, an exhaustive work on 1950s science-fiction films. (So why isn’t he looking up?) Magazine writer Craig Miller, in tie, is seen just past Bill’s left shoulder—with bearded comic scripter Len Wein behind him—and that’s cartoonist Scott Shaw! of Captain Carrot fame glimpsed past Dann’s head. As he took these pix, Alan Waite kept saying, “Move it! That guard’ll be back any minute!”

A celebratory cartoon by Don R. Christensen, comics writer (of Magnus – Robot Fighter, among many others). He and wife Ivy Carol attended. [Art ©2006 Don R. Christensen; Spider-Man TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

This humongous greeting came from Australian-born artist Peter Ledger, who’d made Roy & Dann’s digs in San Pedro his first stop when he’d come over from Oz a few years before. At the wedding he ran into Christie Marx, whom he had briefly dated earlier…and they wound up getting married. Sadly, Peter is no longer with us, but he was a heckuva guy! [Art ©2006 Estate of Peter Ledger.]

Roy & Dann Thomas Celebrate Their 25th

And now, a few pix from that afternoon’s wedding reception at the Variety Arts Center in downtown L.A. Wish there was room for more, but at left is one of the newlyweds with Gary Owens (at left) and Mike Friedrich. Gary’s voice was familiar to radio fans, and to viewers of Laugh-In, while Mike was a comics writer (Justice League of America, et al.) before he started his Star*Reach agency representing comics creators. Cover art of Groo the Wanderer #1 (March 1985). [©2006 Sergio Aragonés.]

(Right:) Nobody livens up a party like Mad’s Sergio Aragonés—and besides, Groo the Wanderer is (with Howard the Duck) Dann’s favorite comic ever. Quick— grab the tablecloths before Sergio draws something on them! Or, on second thought…!

(Left:) Dann with Roy’s mother, Mrs. Leona Thomas, who’s often been mentioned in these pages. Though comics (along with screenwriting work) paid for all the trimmings that day, she’s probably still wondering if she did the right thing, buying him his first comic book in 1945!

A Silver Anniversary For A Silver-Ager & Spouse

Roy and Dann with their wedding cake—which, alas, had become a bit lopsided, à la the Leaning Tower of Pisa, while stored in their car’s trunk till mid-afternoon on a warm day. The lightning bolt atop it was borrowed from Roy’s 1970s Shazam award for Superior Achievement by an Individual—but the achievement he was proudest of that day was getting Dann to say “yes.”

For another view of the wedding cake, here’s Scott Shaw!’s awesome art for Dann & Roy’s wedding invitations. The dogs are Samantha (a poodle Roy had inherited from Stan Lee and wife Joan a decade earlier) and Rascal, Dann’s lovable resident mutt. Thanks again, Scott! [©2006 Scott Shaw!]

Sorry, no pictures from the honeymoon in France, which Roy & Dann had to delay till fall because of movie assignments. Truth to tell, there isn’t a single photo taken in Paris or the hinterlands that shows the two of them together. But here’s one taken by Dann’s first husband (and the couple’s good friend) Phil Couto at L.A. International Airport, to which he drove them to catch their flight!

Everyone deserves a

COMICS’ GOLDEN AGE LIVES AGAIN!

Golden Age!

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GiVE BACK TO THE CREATORS WHO GAVE YOU YOUR DREAMS.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Introduction By Michael T. Gilbert

hile surfing the web a few months back, I spotted a Russ Manning fanzine drawing posted by noted art collector Ray Cuthbert. I’d been a Manning fan for decades; admiring his sleek, clean art on Tarzan and Magnus, Robot Fighter in the ’60s and ’70s, and his “Brothers of the Spear” series in the ’50s. But this 1948 drawing was the earliest piece I’d ever seen. Intrigued, I contacted Ray, who informed me that Manning had done a number of fan drawings in the late ’40s. He then sent me scans of Russ’ fan art to prove it. Manning’s work was extremely impressive even at that early age. He also sent me Russ’ first-ever published work, which you just saw on the previous page! I asked Ray if I could reprint some of the examples in his collection. He did better than that, offering to write a piece on this little known piece of comic history. We know you’ll enjoy it….

Russ Manning – The Fan by Raymond A. Cuthbert Most of us reading Alter Ego are probably familiar with the wonderful artwork of Russ Manning, noted artist of Tarzan, Magnus: Robot Fighter, and Star Wars, along with “Brothers of the Spear” and numerous comic features for Western Publishing under its various guises as Dell, Gold Key, and Western itself. Fewer people are familiar with Russ Manning’s background as a fan of science-fiction. He wrote a handful of letters to pulp magazines, in 1947 became the 86th member of the National Fantasy Fan Federation (NFFF)—32 of whom were from California—and became an sf fan artist. In June 1948 it was announced that Russ Manning placed 4th in the voting for Best Fan Artist. So for fans of Tarzan art in the comics, in 1947, two particularly noteworthy and interwoven things happened. First, Jesse Marsh began drawing the Dell Tarzan comic book. Secondly, Russ Manning began a brief career as a fan artist. Jesse Marsh is an artist who is out of favor with many of today’s comic art collectors—Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets fame being notable exceptions. But, decades earlier, Russ Manning was also a fan of Marsh’s work. That fact had a huge impact on Manning’s career.

Fan Art

In the fall of 1947 Manning joined the previously mentioned fan organization, the National Fantasy Fan Federation—often referred to as the NFFF (the “N-tripleF” as my Dad, himself a member, often calls it). One of his fellow fans was Jerri Bullock, with whom he produced the first issue of a new fanzine, called The Fan Artisan. In an autobiographical précis, he listed Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, and Ray Bradbury among his favorite authors. Lawrence Sterne Stevens (known simply as “Lawrence” to his many pulp fans, and initially thought to be a natural successor or supplementary artist in the style of Virgil

Russ Manning––The Fan

Finlay), Edd Cartier, and Robert Gibson Jones (all pulp artists) were his favorite artists listed there. Manning indexer Robert R. Barrett noted in his 1993 Russ Manning: A Bibliography that Manning had four letters to the pulps published in 1947 and 1948: Famous Fantastic Mysteries Feb. 1947 (“Laurels to Our Artists”); Oct. 1947 (“Plea for Back Issues”); Feb. 1948 (“’Deepies’ Swell”); and in Fantastic Novels July 1948 (“Thanking Fellow Reader”). Thanks to Bob, I could go straight to Manning’s letters in my copies of the pulps, rather than trying to thumb through all the issues looking for Russ’ comments. Although Manning was extolling the virtues of the prose in the stories, he also was giving careful consideration to the artists, as I shall now outline. In the Feb. 1947 Famous Fantastic Mysteries letter, Russ was ebullient about Lawrence: “Never, never let anyone but Lawrence do your covers!.… Awfully glad to see V. Finlay back in our little mag. For clean, beautiful, utterly symbolic (Left:) Manning’s illustrations, no one can top him. But I don’t intend to interior illustration compare Lawrence and Finlay, for they’re utterly for the Vol. 7, No. 3, different in style and type…. We need Finlay to June 1948 issue of the National Fantasy balance Lawrence’s detailed stick-to-the-story illustraFan Art Section, tions, and Lawrence to balance Finlay’s pen-dreams.” reproduced on mimeograph. [Art ©2006 Estate of Russ Manning.]

The October 1947 Famous Fantastic Mysteries letter from Russ indicated that he had followed the example of a previous fan letter writer who had bought a Finlay cover on FFM—but had done so in regards to a Lawrence cover! In the same letter he was once again lauding Lawrence even more than Finlay: “Lawrence is every bit as good as Finlay, especially on your covers. Lawrence’s skull and figures were much better than Finlay’s…. However, since I admire Finlay very much, allow me to give him five stars on his Star Rover cover (no pun).” In the Feb. 1948 Famous Fantastic Mysteries letter, Russ also praised another artist: “And Hannes Bok! Now I see why your old fans were so anxious to have him back. What a wonderful artist! More, more and more…! …By the way, since we’re on the subject of pics, Finlay’s pencil drawing (if pencil it was) in ‘The City of Wonder,’ page 55, had a wonderfully distinct atmosphere of its own. Better than his pen and inks, I believe.” In the July 1948 Fantastic Novels letter from Russ, he was praising the revival of that pulp title and stated, “Your ‘Ship of Ishtar’ is the first F.N. I’ve seen…. So what do we get? The most beautiful Lawrence cover I have ever seen and the best of the superb Merrittales to back it up.” Manning’s art appeared in a small handful of fanzines, and Russ submitted samples, hoping to work for Western Printing Company (Dell). All that was interrupted. In 1950, Manning, in the National Guard Reserve, was called to active duty in Japan due to the outbreak of the Korean War, or “Police Action,” as it was officially called. Bill Stout, one of Manning’s assistants in the 1970s, credited a great deal of Manning’s design sense from his exposure to Japanese prints while in the Navy. (Left:) Manning’s depiction of a scene from A. Merritt’s novel The Ship of Ishtar, from The Fanscient (Spring 1950), has a strong Virgil Finlay feel. [©2006 Estate of Russ Manning.]

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

(Above:) Finlay’s illustration depicting The City Of Wonder. [©2006 the respective copyright holders.] (Left:) The Virgil Finlay cover that Manning graded “five stars,’ symbolically illustrating a scene from Jack London’s novel The Star Rover. [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

Russ Manning––The Fan

Enter Jesse Marsh Manning was taking a life drawing class together with Jesse Marsh, and that was where he met his wife Dodie. Marsh was actually the first of the two to take her out on a date, but Manning—ever the competitor—was determined that she was going to be his girlfriend. Eventually she became his wife. Despite their friendly rivalries, Manning’s friendship and admiration of Marsh’s work was constant. In one of his few forays into fanzines as a writer (Bill Schelly’s Sense of Wonder #12, 1972) in the article “Model T to T-Bird,” Manning

talks about his collection of comic books drawn by Marsh. He says, “One of this artist’s greatest distinctions—simplicity—keeps his… panel pages from seeming crowded. There is none of the terrible overcrowding of detail prevalent on too many comic book pages.” Manning went on to suggest that “comic book/strip artwork can be divided into two basic divisions: composed and designed…. Hal Foster’s panels are superbly composed, while Chester Gould’s show fine (though perhaps unconscious) design.” When Manning was discharged from the military in 1952, his friend Jesse Marsh helped get him the job he wanted with Dell. Tom McKimson, Dell’s West Coast art director, had turned him down three times in six months prior to this. Manning was actually turned down four times in total. Manning’s first published work was the “Brothers of the Spear” series in Tarzan #39 (Dec. 1952), beginning a 14-year run. He continued drawing this popular back-up feature through Tarzan #156. Following a stint drawing the lead feature for the Dell/Gold Key Tarzan comic book, Manning went on to become, along with Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth, one of the top three critically-acclaimed artists on the Tarzan Sunday page. Manning was personally chosen for the syndicated strip by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., based on his successful comic books adaptations of Burroughs’ stories. Manning came a long way from his fan beginnings, but that was where it all started. And long after he went pro, Russ Manning remained a fan—doing what he loved!

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! (Right:) Manning’s proposed cover illustration for Tarzan and the Land That Time Forgot. William Stout, working as an assistant for Russ, jokingly asked, “Russ, when are you going to give me one of your originals?” Russ casually reached over and gave this marvelous illustration to Stout. The inscription reads: “Bill: Here’s to our next super-epic!!” [Art ©2006 Estate of Russ Manning; Tarzan TM & ©2006 Edgar Rice Burroughs.]

Indeed he did, Ray. Russ Manning passed away in 1981, but he’s far from forgotten. Ray is rounding up more early Manning masterpieces for next issue—wherein we’ll also be printing Manning’s no-holdsbarred comments on his fellow Tarzan cartoonists. Kree-gah! Till next time...

“Ball’s In Your Court Now—And No Text To Help You” ALEX TOTH Tells How Silence Can Be Golden In Comic Art

[NOTE: Artist Alex’s pithy comments below are illustrated this time only by a four-panel wordless sequence—but, just for the heck of it, can readers out there suggest comics stories in which Toth drew longer sequences, even full pages or more, minus text? This one is from Frontline Combat #8 (Sept-Oct. 1952), as reprinted in b&w in Russ Cochran’s hardcover Frontline Combat, Vol. 2. [FC page ©2006 William M. Gaines, Agent; Toth art & comments ©2006 Alex Toth.]

Visit the official Alex Toth website at: www.tothfans.com

Mort Leav

In Memoriam

(1916-2006) An “Impressionable Child” Who Left His Mark by Roy Thomas (culled from a Mort Leav memoir originally edited by Robin Snyder)

ortimer Leav wrote that he was “an impressionable child.” But he got his impressions from the best: Charles Dana Gibson, Joseph Clement Coll, Howard Pyle, and their peers in illustration, and Milton Caniff above all others in comic art (though he also “doffed his cap” to Alex Raymond.)

Mort Leav seems to have particularly liked working for Quality and Orbit. At right is his splash from the lead story in The Westerner #27 (June 1950). Below, reprinted from A/E #19, is a juxtaposition of a 1978 self-portrait of Leav and one of the last two drawings he did—of the super-hero called The Mad Hatter. [Art ©2006 Mort Leav & the respective copyright holders.]

At age 21, he went to work for the Editors Press Service in New York City, drawing pictures to be sent to South American newspapers to accompany news stories, for $78 a month. Being let go when Nazi U-boats began sinking US ships bound for South America, he was soon working for S.M. “Jerry” Iger at a princely $30 per week, beginning with a feature called “ZX-5, Spies in Action,” succeeding an artist named Will Eisner. In the early 1940s, through the Iger Studio, his work appeared in comics from Fiction House, Hillman, MLJ, and Lev Gleason. He drew the first two appearances of The Heap in the “Sky Wolf” feature in Hillman’s Air Fighters Comics, working with writer Harry Stein. Later, he drew for Everett “Busy” Arnold’s Quality Comics and loved that job, though he regretted that Arnold wouldn’t let him do his own inking.

He spent much of World War II in the Army, and said he used money he made moonlighting for comics to pay someone to do his KP (“kitchen patrol”) duty. During this period he also drew cartoons which appeared in the service newspapers. Several of these—classics in their way—were reproduced with his memoirs in Alter Ego #19. Upon leaving military service, he briefly drew “Captain America” stories for Timely. But he soon drifted into the orbit of Orbit, the small company run by Ruth (“Ray”) Hermann. He also worked for a time for Ziff-Davis’ romance comics, and drew some of the odd little Triple Nickel Books for Woody Gelman and Ben Solomon. He left comics in 1954 to become an advertising artist, doing TV storyboards for such companies as Procter & Gamble—including those for Charmin bathroom tissue which utilized the famed “Mr. Whipple.” In 1978, at age 62, he retired from advertising. Afterwards, he taught at Joe Kubert’s cartooning school from 1982-85, and contributed editorial-style cartoons to newspapers, including the New York Times. His final two drawings, by his own account, were two re-stagings of events from the cover of the 1945 comic Mad Hatter #2. These were done for Mad’s associate editor Jerry deFuccio, an ardent collector of comic art, and showed a man still master of his craft. We lost a good man and a talented artist when we lost Mort Leav.

Bill Fraccio

In Memoriam

(1920-2005) “A Big, Gentle Bear Of A Man” by Jim Amash

ill Fraccio always wanted to be an artist, and connected with the art world early on. He studied at the American School of Design, where he met Fred Kida, who steered him into the world of comic books. Bill’s first job was inking friend and fellow classmate Bob Fujitani’s “Iron Ace” for Hillman Publications; he also inked Kida’s “Airboy.” And at one time, he was the brother-in-law of comic artist Tex Blaisdell.

Hillman was Bill’s main account for years, but he also worked for companies such as Fawcett (“Commando Yank”), Lev Gleason (back-up features in Daredevil), EC (The Crypt of Terror, A Moon, a Girl... Romance), Magazine Enterprises (“Sunny Sunshine”), DS Publishing (Exposed, Gangsters Can’t Win, etc.), Funnies, Inc., Youthful Comics (Gunsmoke, Redskin, Famous Western Badmen, Beware, Chilling Tales), and Trojan (Attack!, Crime Mysteries, Crime Smashers). During this period, he met his future partner and lifelong friend Tony Tallarico. Tony, several years younger, inked Bill’s pencils. In the 1950s, Bill began working for Charlton Publications, where over the next decade-plus he and Tony turned out reams of stories for darn near every title the company put out, including Blue Beetle, Romantic Secrets, Marine War Heroes, Son of Vulcan, Surf n’ Wheels, Gunmaster, and Billy the Kid. In addition to penciling, Bill wrote some of the stories. He and Tony also did coloring books, and tales for the

Catholic comic book Treasure Chest. Bylining themselves as “Tony Williamsune,” they did a few stories for Warren Publications. They also were responsible for the art of three of the 1960s’ worst books: Dell’s Dracula, Frankenstein, and Werewolf. Bill had no illusions in regard to the quality of those books, and laughed during our discussion about them. He was much prouder of his and Tallarico’s Great Society Comic Book, which parodied President Lyndon B. Johnson and his administration, though he was not credited for the penciling. Bill spent his post-comic book years doing illustration and advertising art, and teaching (the Connecticut School of Art), and spent his retirement years painting. He was never a fan favorite, but his work sure ended up in a lot of comic book collections. He knew he was not a great comics artist, though he was better than most fans (myself included) gave him credit for being. He did the best he could for the money he was paid, in the time he had to get that work done. That’s all the companies ever asked of him, and he wasn’t the type to rock any boats with friends, co-workers, or editors. He was proud of the fact that he was able to make a career out of art and was just happy to have steady employment. He loved to draw. My original goal in interviewing Bill was to chronicle his comic book career and also to surprise A/E editor Roy Thomas. Bill had illustrated Roy’s first two comic book scripts (Son of Vulcan #50 and Blue Beetle #54), and I’d have loved to see Roy’s jaw drop when I told him I had interviewed Bill! It was a gift of mine to Roy. But the real gift, as it turned out, was given to me in the form of Bill’s friendship. He was almost devoid of ego: a self-effacing, giving, gentle soul who loved the world and everyone in it. He was one of the most understanding and forgiving people I’ve known, with a laugh that filled the hearts of those who knew him. Everything... and I mean everything was funny to Bill. I told him that I could say “brick wall” to him and he’d start laughing. Yes, he laughed at that, but he knew it was true. Every once in a while, during a phone conversation, I’d say “Brick wall,” and Bill laughed every time. I was right!!! He knew that I’m a pipe smoker, and one day I received a surprise package from him. Inside were two pipes he had owned, but never got around to using. He said, “I used to smoke a pipe, but I quit before I got around to smoking them, so I thought you’d enjoy them.” I do, Bill.

Bill Fraccio (top right), in the photo he sent us for his interview in A/E #41, plus his cover for Charlton’s Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #48 (Sept. 1965), inked by Tony Tallarico—and the last page of the bestselling Great Society Comic Book (1966), which lampooned the administration of President LBJ, and which was scripted by D.J. Arneson and drawn by the same Fraccio-Tallarico team, though under the latter’s name. [Son of Vulcan TM & ©2006 DC Comics; Great Society art ©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

His joy of life was not slowed down by bad breaks or by illness, which plagued him at the end. A lifelong resident of Mount Vernon, New York, he was planning to sell his house and move to Connecticut to marry his longtime ladyfriend at the time of his death. I’m sorry I won’t hear that hearty laugh of his again, but I am grateful for all the fun we shared in long, frequent phone calls. Since Tony Tallarico was such a good, longtime friend of Bill’s, I think it appropriate that he has the last word here: “Bill was a big, gentle bear of a man. He was special.”

A Comic Fandom Archive Special Multi-Part Series

The Forgotten ’50s: Will Comics Ever Again Be As Exciting As EC? A 1966 Panel With Ted White, Bhob Stewart, & Archie Goodwin

Part V of “1966: The Year Of (Nearly) THREE New York Comicons!” by Bill Schelly

Panel Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

Introduction

n Alter Ego #53 we initiated a series related to an approximately half-year period between mid-1966 and early 1967 which saw the new phenomenon of no less than three comics convention being held in Manhattan. The first of these, as per features in A/E #53-56, was hosted by John Benson on July 23-24, 1966. Just three weeks later, Dave Kaler would put on a sequel to his own “Academy Con” of 1965—and, in very early 1967, a “mini-con” would be sponsored by Calvin Beck’s magazine Castle of Frankenstein. We here continue the extended coverage of the “Benson Con,” utilizing audio tapes John was able to supply us. Transcriptions of these historic panels are worth printing both for their own sake, because of the people involved—and as a snapshot of “the way it was” almost exactly four decades ago. This time, it’s a three-man symposium on comic books of the 1950s, particularly those of EC (Entertaining Comics), moderated by Ted White and also featuring Bhob Stewart and (then) Creepy & Eerie editor Archie Goodwin. The latter, of course, would later write and edit, alternately for Marvel and DC, until his untimely death in 1998. In one of those puzzling conundrums, comics of the 1950s seemed

farther away to younger comics fans of the early 1960s than they do to collectors of today. In a time before comic book history was written or valuable collections were issued, the only way to find out about earlier times was via the oral recollections of Fans Who Were There. On this panel, three Fans Who Were There gathered to convey their knowledge to the mostly-younger set. They were unified by their mutual regard for EC, and their involvement in the fan activity that had sprung up around its publications—and around the work that EC artists did for other comics and magazines of the era. Panels like this (and articles on EC in the new fanzines) helped make EC’s horror and science-fiction output second only to super-heroes in popularity among those who formed the rank-and-file of 1960s comic fandom. The transcript has been slightly edited for repetition and length, but is essentially as it was seen and heard on July 23, 1966. The panel was introduced by convention organizer John Benson: JOHN BENSON: This panel is called “The Forgotten ’50s,” and consists of three people who are in the professional fields today and who were all very active in fandom during the ’50s. Ted White is a science-fiction novelist, and has just received a

Three To Get Ready… Unfortunately, no known photo exists of the “Forgotten ’50s” panel from the 1966 Benson Con, so we’ll have to make do with this trio of pics from that period. (Left to right): Ted White, moderator, shown here acting as auctioneer, probably at that same comicon. The photo appeared in Larry Ivie’s magazine Monsters and Heroes. Bhob Stewart in New York City, circa 1965. Photo by Martin Jukovsky. Archie Goodwin at the Benson Con, posing for photographer Jack C. Harris, who would later become (like Archie himself) an editor at DC Comics. [Photos ©2006 the respective photographers.]

A 1966 Panel With Ted White, Bhob Stewart, & Archie Goodwin

contract to write a Captain America novel for Bantam Books [The Great American Gold Steal]. Ted is also the assistant editor for Fantasy and Science Fiction. Archie Goodwin is the editor and chief writer for James Warren’s comics Creepy and Eerie. Bhob Stewart is the editor of Castle of Frankenstein magazine and also does most of the editorial material in the magazine. He’s also the movie editor in TV Guide, and writes the little squibs about the latenight movies that appear all over the country. TED WHITE: Thank you, John. This panel is based on the ’50s—let’s say, generally, 1950 to 1960, in the comics field. This is a period during which I think the comics showed more upheaval than at any time since the advent of the super-characters in the late ’30s, early ’40s. It was a very turbulent time. It was a time of some of the comic field’s best moments and certainly some of its worst moments, both before and after the Comics Code, which of course was another aspect of the ’50s. To start the panel off, Bhob Stewart has a prepared statement. BHOB STEWART: I’m going to read this because I do not trust my ability to speak spontaneously and there’s something very important that I would like to say. A decade has passed since the death of EC—only a decade—and that’s why I’d put it into a little niche in the overall levels of the graphic story form. There’s an important reason why this should be done. Consider this fact: isn’t it just possible that the comic book is mankind’s greatest art form? Now, if someone made that statement to me, my first immediate reaction would be “no,” or “It could be done with film.” Anything that can be done in any other art can also be done in film, including comics. But maybe it’s the other way around: “movies on paper, the final dream.” That’s the way Jules Feiffer saw comics when he was younger. The last chapter of his book [The Great Comic Book Heroes]—the grown-up chapter—is frightening, is disappointing, is disillusioning, and is sad, because he’s right. Comics are junk: “It has no one’s respect to lose, no image to endanger, its values are the least middle-class of all the mass media, and that’s why it’s needed so. Comic books were our booze.” Now, if you’ll multiply it, your booze is the same kind of booze that I had during World War II. When I was eight years old, I knew my father was fighting Hitler. I knew because I was fighting Hitler every day myself, with Spy Smasher and Green Lama and Boy Commandos, right? Today I walk by a newsstand and I see Captain America is still fighting that same war. Did anyone tell Captain America about D-Day? Then one day, Captain Marvel said, “Shazam!” and nothing happened. And pretty soon, I stopped reading all comics but one: Little Lulu. [audience laughs] After all, I was growing up, and Little Lulu was the most adult comic that I could find in 1946. I reached puberty, and I had my first love affair. Her name was EC. We went together for four years and then we broke up. She and I do not speak to each other very much any more. EC came out of Bradbury who came out of Lovecraft and Thomas Wolfe and Eisner. EC came out of Eisner, who came out of Fritz Lang and [Orson] Welles. And I thought [he pounds his fist on the table with each word], “Hey, maybe it’s not junk!” And I read a few of them next month and I thought, [pounds fist on the table] “Hey, maybe I’ll write in and join this. Maybe they don’t think it’s junk.” And I was right, they didn’t. Not only did they see it wasn’t junk, they tried to show it to me. Al Feldstein, in one monstrous breath, summed up the entire 30-year history of pulp science-fiction. Harvey Kurtzman pushed the Eisner tradition all the way over to the horizon line.

“Gimme a copy of Little Lulu.” “Little Lulu, I Love You-Lu Just The Same” Bhob Stewart mentions reading only Little Lulu at one point in 1946. By coincidence, in 1964, Roy Thomas had drawn the above cartoon for a spread in Alter Ego (Vol. 1) #7 which was influenced by the Playboy work of Shel Silverstein, which Bill Schelly finds equally appropriate in referring to a time two decades earlier. The newsstand dealer was drawn as one of Silverstein’s self-caricatures. [©2006 Roy Thomas.]

And one man, one artist, came along who saw comics the same way Marshall McLuhan does, simply as a medium, a medium with a troubled and artistically unexploited potentiality, a boundless medium. Not junk! A boundless medium, as exotic as an 8th-century illumination—and his name was Bernard Krigstein. He’s since proved his worth as both a fine artist and a classically influenced illustrator. While he was at EC, he functioned not as most writers, he functioned as an artist. Dig it! Every story was a different challenge, required a different kind of style. It prompted a completely new kind of story breakdown. He said, “I think I was striving to control these effects; that is, building up to dramatic climaxes and then realizing, as far as it was in my power to do so, all the emotional force of the climax. And I think I succeeded pretty well, because in working for something, I really feel as if I’d stumbled upon an important way to tell stories, to break down stories. As things worked out, I was unable to continue it.” And his point: Bernard Krigstein saw how much could be done with a graphic story. Imagery flowing across the page: “Something grabbed her eye and ripped it from the socket!” Some of these stories can be read dozens of times and still offer something new, some minute, fantastic detail that he consciously inserted. Yet for the most part, it was not illustration. One time, it was a picture. Another time it was a slap in the face. And more, you got a jigsaw page mosaic, shimmering, pulsating on the pages, and soon you’re engulfed and there’s a snap like a reel change in the projection booth. Krigstein showed that comics can be an

The Forgotten ’50s

experience, not just a series of illustrations, one after another. And the intellectual climate of the comic book business drove him away. Krigstein’s message was, comics are a garden of crossing paths, pictures and words that influence more than words alone, or pictures without words. And Krigstein’s message should not be forgotten. When Ezra Pound called the artist the “antenna of the race,” he was not referring to Ant-Man. WHITE: I don’t know how we’re going to follow that. [audience laughs] Archie, can you actually tell us a little bit about your own antecedents in the ’50s, whether or not they relate to Creepy and Eerie today? And do you care to say anything about the possibility of making Creepy or Eerie have the closest chance of doing something that Bhob was talking about? ARCHIE GOODWIN: Uh, no. Not really. [audience laughs] No, it’s like Tor Johnson following Richard Burton. [laughter] I think the key thing about the ’50s was that it was a period—at least the early ’50s until 1955—when there was a certain amount of experimentation in comics. I think they pushed the method of creating comics to the furthest limit that it’s ever been pushed, so far. I don’t believe any comics that have

come since then have really gone further in exploring different areas. I think … not just Krigstein, but I think Kurtzman, I think Alex Toth, have experimented a good deal. I think the ’50s were also a time when they tried to free up comics, which we probably shouldn’t dwell on all that much. And I agree with Ted, it was a very fertile, creative period, though it of course had its good and bad. But when it’s all over and done with now, I think we tend to remember it for the good things. WHITE: Some of you who were here earlier will recall my dialogue with the head of the Comics Code Authority. I regret I didn’t have the chance to engage him more formally. I feel the ’50s marked a very significant turning point in the comic books. Up to the early ’50s, the comic books had the sky as a limit, and as Bhob said, and as Archie said, it was a case of experimenting and being able to go almost anywhere with it. But you must understand this about comic books: they were published by rapacious little men. They were published by men who would be publishing girlie mags if they weren’t publishing comic books, and many of them are doing this as well, or have done this as well. They are, all of them, shoe merchants or something similar, with absolutely no concept of artistic ability, integrity, or creativity. But that’s the men with the money. That’s not the men who are producing the comics. And because these men with the money had so little idea of what was involved in the production of comics, they looked at their sales figures, they said, “Ah-ha, you’re selling two million now this month. That means I can sell the following advertising for the following amount and I can mark up the following gross and net.” That’s all they were interested in. An editor who didn’t sell his comic books was an editor who had something to answer for. An editor who did sell his comic books could do anything he wanted, and some did. It was this freedom, this freedom because you were in a field in which the money didn’t care so long as you brought back the investment, which made EC, among others, possible. EC was an unusual example because even the publisher cared there for a time. He doesn’t any more. He got disillusioned rather fast. It doesn’t pay to care if you’re a publisher of comic books. You’re dealing in a very cynical business when you get down underneath it. You’re dealing in a business which is dominated by crooks, which is the distributors. You’re dealing in a business which has always had an unsavory ring to it, unlike its first cousin, the newspaper strip. And even many of your syndicates are run by crooks. [audience chuckles] I say “crooks,” I’m laying myself open to libel to a certain extent, but there’s not one professional in this room who will disagree with me. I’m being honest.

Perfect Stranger… Perfect Story… Perfect Art Artist Bernard Krigstein (seen at right in a 1953 photo)—juxtaposed with his cinematic approach to comic art from the final page of the most celebrated story he ever drew: “Master Race” from EC’s Impact #1 (March-April 1955). He expanded an excellent Al Feldstein script from six pages to eight—and nearly gave the writer/editor a heart attack, as related in Greg Sadowski’s lavishlyillustrated artistic biography B. Krigstein, published by Fantagraphics Books (and hopefully still in print). Art repro’d from the Impact volume published by Russ Cochran in his hardcover black-&-white EC reprint series. [©2006 William M. Gaines, Agent.]

Up to the creation of the Comics Code Authority, you could publish what you could get away with. You saw the worst and you saw the best. You saw Classics Illustrated, you saw Treasure Chest Comics, which was a Catholic publication. It is still being published, but it was an example of the depth and breadth that this field had at that point. We had anything that anyone thought would make money. When Simon & Kirby came up with the idea of romance comics, it was new and they went ahead with it, the Young Love and Young Romance, and made money. Personally, they never turned me on, but I have someone here who had Simon & Kirby artwork. Super-heroes,

A 1966 Panel With Ted White, Bhob Stewart, & Archie Goodwin

totally different atmosphere. We have a Code Authority which tells us we must maintain firm to the lowest common denominator. When I asked [Code administrator Leonard Darvin] why he believed the readers are eight years old, it’s because I have read the Comics Code. The Comics Code is predicated on the basis of an eight-year-old reader. It is my firm conviction that something less, considerably less than 50% of today’s readership of comic books is eight years old. I do not believe that we should aim any product which has any creativity in it to the stupidest among us, or the least informed among us, or merely the most immature among us. And yet the only company in the field today that is doing anything creative and worthwhile—except Creepy and Eerie, which are not considered comics by the Code’s definition, therefore free of it, but not free of it because the Code wanted them to be free of it, but because Jim Warren insisted upon being free of the Code—the only serious, worthwhile work being done today is in the Marvel comics. When I speak of a high artistic, creative quality of EC, I’m not doing so to slight what is being done today by Marvel. I admire people like Jack Kirby and Stan Lee very much. I wouldn’t be writing Captain America for the novelization if I didn’t feel that there was something there to work with—although frankly, I’d rather do Spider-Man, but we didn’t get a contract for that. While I would say that probably Jack Kirby is the best of all the super-hero artists that have ever come out of the field, certainly the most consistent, and I think that Stan Lee has done much to put good, solid, believable characterization into a field which is absolutely fraught with fantasy and disbelief. These people are working in a medium which is essentially much more limited than EC. Artistically, it’s limited. The artists and pushing a deadline every single moment. They never have a chance to sit down and do it the way they would probably like to do it if they had the time. They’re tremendously pressured. I would like to think that if somebody came along and waved a magic wand over them and said, “Hey, fellas. The day now has 48 hours in it and the hour has 120 minutes. Let’s see what you can really do now with the same deadlines,” that they would do a hell of

Sabre Rattling “I think Kurtzman, I think Alex Toth, have experimented a good deal [at EC]” Thus spake Archie Goodwin in 1966… and we couldn’t agree more. Here, the two experiment together, in a page of cinematic Korean War aerial action from “F-86 Sabre Jet!” in Frontline Combat #12 (May-June 1953). Of course, writer/editor Harvey Kurtzman broke down the story in pencil form for his artists, but that still left artist Toth plenty to do—including show the passage of time by the subtle shifting of a cloud—as Sabres tangle with Russian MiGs several miles above the Asian peninsula. Repro’d from the hardcover b&w Frontline Combat, Vol. 3, published by Russ Cochran. [©2006 William M. Gaines, Agent.]

anything—you could do anything at all. In fact, you could even do EC. And EC was the first time a bunch of artists and writers got at all idealistic about what they were doing, with the possible exception of the Will Eisner studio. At EC, you had people who honestly were getting into the idea of turning in their best possible work. This is pretty novel in a business which is mainly concerned with beating deadlines. You had people like Al Williamson, Wally Wood, Bernie Krigstein, many others, men who turned in work where you could stop and you could look at a panel, a single panel, and you could admire it and you could say, “Look at the intricate detail he put into that. Look at that lamp over there in the corner. That’s not a lamp, that’s a little statuette. And look at the modeling he put into that statuette. Why, that must have taken quite a bit of time and nobody would even notice it.” And yet they did this. You had people like Harvey Kurtzman practically going into the sickhouse with the amount of time he spent researching [in] the New York Public Libraries so that the war comics would be accurate in detail as opposed to the incredibly bad war comics that were published before and have been published since. Now, today, we have absolutely nothing like this. Today, we have a

The Forgotten ’50s

Make Mine Marvel…and Warren! “The only company in the field today that is doing anything creative and worthwhile—except [Warren’s] Creepy and Eerie… [is] Marvel comics.” We’ll let others retroactively challenge Ted White’s 1966 statement, should they feel so inclined. We prefer simply to illustrate it—with a page by writer Archie Goodwin and artist Al Williamson from Creepy #1 (1964), and another by writer/editor Stan Lee and co-plotter/artist Steve Ditko from The Amazing Spider-Man #21 (Feb. 1965). [Creepy art ©2006 Harris Publications, Inc.; Spider-Man art ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

a lot more. Perhaps we’d see a Zip-A-Tone, the Craftint effects, and things like that which EC made beautiful use of in the ’50s coming back in. We would probably see a great deal less of the little errors, the things that slip in because Stan hasn’t had time to re-read the previous installment before he writes this one. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking Stan Lee, I’m not knocking Jack Kirby, I’m not knocking anybody at Marvel. But these guys are working in a medium which is limited by two things: the first is the physical, the time. But the second is more important and it’s the Comics Code Authority, because these men have been told, almost at every step in the game, “Watch yourselves.” I don’t know this first-hand, but I was told by someone who talked to Stan a couple of years ago that the whole idea of an ambivalent hero/villain like Sub-Mariner upset the Comics Code Authority very much. Yet this is what gives us the believable characters which we’re encountering for the first time in such an unbelievable medium as super-hero comics. It’s a shame that Marvel’s imitators aren’t doing a good job of imitating. But if we hadn’t had the Comics Code Authority, we might have a great deal more quality. Now let me be specific about EC. The Comics Code Authority was more or less specifically designed to rid the comics industry of a bad

name. This was a bad name which had been given to it by one man, Dr. Frederic Wertham. [boos from the audience] This man is a hypocrite who commercially exploits what he considers to be profitable trends in muckraking. About five years ago, he tried to do the same thing with TV, but of course there’s a great deal more money in TV, and he was totally unsuccessful. We almost had him here for you today. You could have booed him in person. [audience chuckles] This man started consistently attacking comic books in a series of articles in Reader’s Digest, the magazine that at the time had the largest circulation of any magazine in the world. All those little pressure groups, the PTAs, the church groups, the American Legion, the Legion of Decency, and all the rest, could exert pressure on a local level that would be felt by publishers. And one day a man stands before us and says, “Well, maybe we can’t exert pressure, but we can talk to pressure groups,” and that’s pure hypocrisy. What he said is, “We can exert pressure indirectly,” because he’s going to the people that hold the gun. And he knows that all he needs is an excuse. [Panel to be concluded next issue] [See Hamster Press’ ad on the preceding page for the publications available from Bill Schelly.]

oy here—in first-person voice, as per usual—but I’m not a totally happy camper. I’d planned, and even announced in #57’s ad for this issue, that this time we’d double up and feature letters re both #48 & #49, since we’ve kinda fallen behind in the letters-section department. But then there were just so many things I wanted to squeeze into this issue that there was no way more than #48’s special Eisner issue could be dealt with.

One thing we had in happy abundance this time was art spots to introduce this section, from three generous souls who’ve provided same before—including two new drawings of our super-hero “maskot” Alter Ego: Mark Glidden, who did powerful new drawings to illustrate the 1984 Conway-Thomas X-Men screenplay, also sent an illo of Alter Ego—while Shane Foley, who’s done such a great job of adapting previously-printed pro art in the past, took an Iceman figure by Werner Roth and John Tartaglione in X-Men #33 and transformed it into the very same maskot. And, just to top it off, Jerry K. Boyd did a bit of cutting and pasting of Marvel Girl from the splash of 1966’s X-Men #19 (in the original, incidentally, she was reading Stan Lee’s gag publication Monsters Unlimited). So we asked layout man Chris Day to put all three of ’em together, and the above is what resulted. [X-Men TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.; new art ©2006 the respective artists.] Actually, while we received a lot of mail and e-mail comments on issue #48, most of it simply stated how much they enjoyed the issue… and while we love getting that reaction, we tend to try to preserve our LP space (virtually an endangered species!) for missives that supply new information or angles. Thus, we’ll let the many applaudatory comments be represented by this brief note from Orlando Busino, the talented artist who, among many other accomplishments, drew the Archie humor comic Tales Calculated to Drive You Bats in the early 1960s—and who was interviewed about same back in A/E #29:

Roy, The Will Eisner issue was terrific! Done well in every way! Orlando Busino Thanks, Orlando. How does it feel to represent thousands of satisfied Alter Ego readers? Certainly nobody who wrote in suggested that we were wasting space by devoting virtually an entire issue to the creator of The Spirit, who was also an early and skilled practitioner of the graphic novel. Malcolm Whyte sent this information about some Eisner work we missed: Hi, Jerry: Regarding the marvelous Will Eisner tribute in Alter Ego #48, I would like to add the following information to the Will Eisner Checklist regarding Will’s association with the Cartoon Art Museum (CAM) in San Francisco: Founding Advisory Board Member – 1984-2004 Artist for the CAM’s 3rd Collector’s Print – 1988 One man exhibit – “Invisible Lives: The City of Will Eisner”; Jan. 13 to April 18, 1993. Winner of the CAM’s Sparky Award – 2001 Cover artist for CAM’s fundraising publication Spark Generators – 2002 In body and spirit Will was always very active with the Museum, lending his sage advice and vast experience unstintingly. He was a great creative force, a true gentleman, and the Cartoon Art Museum’s guardian angel. Malcolm Whyte Founder, Cartoon Art Museum

[comments, correspondence, & corrections]

We’re always aware that Checklists are works in progress, Malcolm, so thanks for help us make some—progress, that is. Here’s another short but sweet note, this one from Italian comics expert Alberto Becattini— which suggests a change in the credits for a piece of artwork amid the Eisner coverage: Roy— I just got #48, the great Eisner issue. By the way, the “Sheena” splash page whose art is attributed to “early Robert Webb” looks like pure Bob Powell to me! Alberto Becattini Thanks. Hope to straighten out the attribution one way or the other by the time we devote most of an issue to that great artist Bob Powell, which we’re currently working on for some months in the future… but not too many, we hope. (I say “we” there instead of “I” because there are several hardworking souls now bending to that task.) Now for something almost completely different. I’ll make no bones about it: a letter from Richard Kyle is always read immediately and carefully when it arrives, because I consider the 1960s editor/publisher of Graphic Story World (later called Wonderworld) to be one of the best writers around about things comics-related. I was also very aware, even at the time of A/E #48, that the claim often made for or by the late great Will Eisner with regard to inventing either the term or the concept of a “graphic novel” was very much open to dispute, partly because of things I knew Kyle had done. But I preferred to wait and let Richard speak for himself, as he can do most ably—for, though he has a sincere respect for Eisner’s body of work, as he states, he (and I) are always determined to pursue historical truth, wherever it leads us….

Spirited Plaudits For A Spirited Life (Above:) Author Bob Handelman and publisher Dark Horse have gotten together to produce a beautifully illustrated biography of Will Eisner, one of the founding fathers of the comics medium—which covers his contributions to the art form from the late 1930s until his passing in 2005. A press release states correctly: “Underground comics legend R. Crumb and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Art Spiegelman have hailed Eisner’s cinematic approach to comics and his enduring character The Spirit”—and his personal and professional life are covered here in dramatic detail. Perhaps Michael Chabon, author of Wonder Boys and the Pulitzer-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, put it best: “As a publisher, a packager, a talent scout, an impresario, and as an artist and writer, Will Eisner created the world of comics as I knew it.” 376 pages, $14.95 – ISBN: 1-59582-011-6. It can be ordered from PGW info@pgw.com [Art ©2006 Estate of Will Eisner.]

Dear Roy— I see that the May Alter Ego will be an Eisner issue, and I realize the copy is most likely already locked in. However, if Eisner is once again credited with creating the term “graphic novel,” I’d appreciate it if A/E would note in the next available issue that the term was not invented by Eisner, “independently” or otherwise. It seems every time Eisner’s name is mentioned these days, he is credited with creating the term and with writing and drawing the first “graphic

A Graphic Exposition (Left:) This advertising flyer for George Metzger’s graphic novel Beyond Time and Again, sent out by Kyle & Wheary’s Graphic Story Press in 1973, uses the term “graphic novel” no less than twice. Anybody have evidence of an earlier use of that phrase? Too bad Beyond Time and Again isn’t currently available—or is it, and we just don’t know about it? It was a unique and ambitious work. [Art ©2006 George Metzger.]

re:

77 novel, but rather a collection of related short stories. Who would invent “graphic novel” to describe a non-novel? Clearly, Eisner seized upon a term he was already familiar with, even though it was not truly a description of his book.

Eisner & Iger—Together Again For The First Time! By sheer coincidence, Richard Kyle also sent us this headline from the Jan. 12, 2006, “Business” section of the Los Angeles Times. A different Iger and Eisner, of course—but similar headlines gave me a start, too, during the Disney convolutions of some months back. [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

novel.” He didn’t do either. I coined [the term] “graphic novel” in Jerry [Bails]’ CAPA-Alpha. In 1976 Dennis Wheary and I—as Kyle & Wheary—published the first actual graphic novel, so labeled, Beyond Time and Again, by underground comix writer and artist George Metzger. It was a hardcover, cloth-covered book with a full-color jacket, and it received wide distribution and sold well. Eisner’s A Contract with God was not published until two years later, in 1978. Eisner had access to my writing on the subject for several years—he was on Bill Spicer’s comp list for Fantasy Illustrated/Graphic Story Magazine from 1966, and my own Graphic Story World/Wonderworld list commencing in 1971. I know he read both magazines. He provided me with news about upcoming Spirit publications and was a news source for GSW when Lou Fine died. He also offered me the book rights to Hawks of the Seas at about that time. And at the San Diego Comics Convention in 1983 (when I ordered Street Code from Jack Kirby), he commented on a point in one of my Spirit interviews, published some long while before—a review, incidentally, that lies immediately adjacent to my use for the first time of the term “graphic storytelling,” a matter of significance, as it turned out. And he received Beyond Time and Again itself prior to the publication of A Contract with God. (As you see, I’m enclosed some supporting materials. “The Future” [the 1964 piece from Wonderworld] is laughably optimistic.) So, Eisner was familiar with me and my work. There is no reason to believe otherwise. Yet he repeatedly claimed to have coined [the term] “graphic novel” despite the fact that A Contract with God appeared two years after Beyond Time and Again and is not a

After a news story appeared in the Los Angeles Times based on a DC press release crediting Eisner with the invention of the name, I wrote to DC, enclosed a copy of Beyond Time and Again to prove primacy, and asked them to stop publicizing Eisner as creator of the term and as the creator of the first graphic novel. [NOTE: Richard enclosed copies of his letters to DC and of president/publisher Paul Levitz’s response. Richard’s missives mostly paraphrased the points made in this letter. We don’t have permission to reprint Paul’s reply, but while leaving it to historians to sort out exactly what was the first graphic novel, he acknowledged Richard’s earlier use of the term. Whether Will Eisner himself was ever appraised of Richard’s letter by DC is unclear. —Roy.] I thought that was the end of it. I don’t follow the current comic book biz and didn’t check to see what DC’s press releases were saying. However, after Eisner’s death, N.C. Christopher Couch, DC’s editor of the Eisner line [of Spirit reprints], was quoted in the New York Times as saying that “Eisner independently [italics mine] coined the term graphic novel in 1978.” “Independently,” eh? Well… vastly unlikely, but not impossible. However— However, over those years, as you know, I also coined the term “graphic story” to describe the medium as a whole and, as cited above, also invented the (rather lame) term “graphic storytelling” to describe the way graphic stories are told by their writers and artists. Curiously, the title of Eisner’s 1966 book on comic art was— Graphic Storytelling.

’76 Trombones The cover and title page of the 1976 edition of Beyond Time and Again, bylined as “A Graphic Novel by George Metzger.” Portions of the book, as the copyright page noted, had previously appeared in the underground press publications Mobius Strip, the San Jose Red Eye, and the Los Angeles Staff, with copyrights dated 1967, 1969, 1970, 1971, and 1972 by Metzger. [©2006 George Metzer.]

I can accept one “independent” invention. Two “independent” inventions? No. And the fact that there was a second “invention” casts considerable doubt on the likelihood of the first—I’d like to say the likelihood was nonexistent. I didn’t coin [the terms] “graphic novel,” “graphic story,” or “graphic storytelling” to attach my name to them, and I never cared whether I was given credit or not. I simply wanted them used. I thought it would be good for comics—and at least in the case of “graphic novel,” the world seems to agree with me. It is surprising how often I hear the term used in the media.

[comments, correspondence, & corrections]

However, I didn’t and don’t want someone else to claim credit, as Eisner did and his editors continue to do. The truth’s simply the truth. There’s nothing personal in this. Eisner was a great creator, notably of the post-war Spirit stories. I met him just the one time, and our other contacts were by mail. He was always civil. But despite my personal experience, he seemed something of a bully. Over the years, he appeared more than once to take credit that he did not deserve, and to take pleasure in the doing. I suppose his actions could be rationalized by saying that he came out of the comics art shops, where it was okay for the boss to sign his name to employees’ work. After all, they were employees. But Eisner didn’t employ the rest of the world, where it isn’t okay to put your name on someone else’s work, and Eisner surely knew it. Many years ago, after reading a swipe of The Maltese Falcon by a then well-known writer (The House of the Seven Files, by Victor Canning, I think), I wrote a spoof of such stuff. It featured a writer who rewrote the Falcon, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Catcher in the Rye, line by line. Accused of a lack of originality, his reply was that he had been “thematically anticipated.” So, I suppose it could be said that in 1964 I “thematically anticipated” Eisner by coining the term “graphic novel.” However, when I wrote the piece, the writing in the spoof could not find a publisher for his work. Now, the market seems to have changed substantially. Yes, it may seem excessive to pursue what appears to be a relatively unimportant matter. Nevertheless, Eisner thought it was important enough to take credit at someone else’s expense. And that, I believe, is why his petty success should be denied him. But enough about me. Let’s talk about you. I liked the flip book Alter Ego enormously. But I’m finding that I like the “regular” version even better. Richard Kyle 3714 Lewis St. Long Beach, CA 90807-4120

An Act of “Espionage” A page from an episode of the early Eisner series “Espionage – Starring ‘Black Ace’” which appeared in Feature Funnies #13 (Oct. 1938). The splash page was printed in A/E #12, and other pages will be seen in the trade paperback The Alter Ego Collection, Vol. 1, out in June, which reprints A/E V3 #1-2, with more than two dozen pages of new material. Repro’d from photocopies of the original art, with thanks to Ethan Roberts. [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

At this point, Richard, I’ll stand aside and let A/E’s readers digest your letter. However, without denigrating Will or his memory in any way, the primacy of dates would seem to indicate, I think, that he didn’t originate the term “graphic novel”—and that, whatever one may count as the first of the species, with all due respect it was not A Contract with God, outstanding a work as that was. Whether the first graphic novel was Metzger’s Beyond Time and Again, of course, depends upon a precise definition of the term. We’d love to hear from other historical researchers on that point, as always. But I do support your view that, while you hardly want people to add the phrase “term invented by Richard Kyle” every time they use the expression “graphic novel,” it should not be miscredited. Will Eisner’s undisputed talent and remarkable body of work, of course, do not require that he receive any credit not due him— Lord know, there’s plenty that is due him, and the comics field will be forever in his debt!

Since the interview which Jim Amash completed with Will not long before his untimely passing dealt mostly with his work for and with publisher “Busy” Arnold’s Quality Comics Group, Hames Ware, coeditor with Jerry G. Bails of the original 1970s Who’s Who of American Comic Books, had these additional thoughts and tidbits of information, including some about Chuck Mazoujian and Vern Henkel, both of whom were also interviewed in A/E #48:

Dear Roy, Jim, and Jerry [Bails]— Alter Ego #48 is indeed another wonderful issue. (How I wish Eisner hadn’t passed from Earth before Jim A. was able to plumb his recall about the Iger-Eisner connection with T.T. Scott’s Fiction House, as there are very subtle differences in that association from those with with Everett Arnold’s Quality. Maybe someday you could all elucidate from a third source two questions still left unanswered: First, if Eisner was indeed the full partner [of “Busy” Arnold] that he says he was, why would this not have appeared in the ownership statements? The second question involves a similar ownership puzzle. For years I have read that Feature Funnies was actually begun by someone other than Arnold… yet no one ever says who it might’ve been! Even Eisner seems to suggest that someone other than Arnold began Feature…yet [comics collector/researcher] Lee Boyett has a tremendous number of Qualitys from the very earliest years and there is no suggestion that anyone but Arnold and his syndicate partners were ever involved. For instance, you can hardly find an earlier issue ownership statement than

re: Lee’s [copy of] Feature Funnies #4 for 1/38 and listing an ownership statement dating back to 10/37, and this ownership statement states that the owners of Feature and Quality are Arnold and the syndicate heads Frank J. Murphy and Frank J. Markey, and, mentioned in Jim’s interview with Eisner, the Register and Tribune’s Henry Martin. Lee is only missing #1 and #2 [of Feature Funnies], and I saw those long ago at Henry Steele’s and can recall no suggestion of any different publisher or publishing address. It seems strange then that such a rumor persists and is even repeated by Eisner… so, since Feature was such a pivotal and important comic title, I’m hopeful that you ace detectives will see if somehow we can either validate this rumor or quash it once and for all, especially when the Comics Buyer’s Guide continues to make the same error/rumor. One aside: The “T-Man” art on p. 52 is probably Dan Zolne’s later work, with perhaps Henkel on inks, as Lee suggests. I’m grateful that Jim A. always tries to glean new names for us all. This time he managed to garner a name from Vern Henkel that is an artist I’ve never heard of at the Timely shop of 1951, one Al Lockwood… and Jim, alert as ever, thankfully pursues this with Henkel, gleaning the invaluable (for later possible tracking) info that he was a Timely romance artist. My query to Jim Vadeboncoeur and Michael J. Vassallo is… have they ever heard of Lockwood, and do they have any romance art in mind circa 1951 that might put some art examples to this new name? Meanwhile, we all are still looking to find any art examples of H.C. “Doc” Ellison, also on the Timely staff of an earlier era, and whose style should really stand out, as he was a major player at the Fleischer studios… yet said style in comics remains elusive. Also—Chuck Mazoujian signed “CJM” to the cover of Target Comics #3 for 4/40. Both these covers, alas, have been mistakenly

79 attributed to Claire S. Moe, whose middle initial should have ruled her out to researchers crediting these covers. Lee Boyett, who’s spent decades teaching himself these early artists, also believes Mazoujian did the cover of Jungle Comics #4, also April 1940. I can’t say about that one, as it would’ve been via Iger [i.e., Jerry Iger’s comics shop]…but clearly Mazoujian had to have at least briefly been at Jacquet [Funnies, Inc.], because, as Lee points out, Mazoujian also signed the text illos of The Angel in Marvel Mystery Comics #2 (Dec. 1939), and as we know both Novelty and Marvel were using Jacquet artists at that time. By comparing these interior illos that are signed “CJM,” Lee ascertained that Mazoujian (CMJ) had also done the [Angel-featuring] cover of MMC #2. Hames Ware Soon after he received his copy of Hames’ letter, Jim Amash wrote: “[Writer & editor] Leon Lazarus remembered Al Lockwood, too. Lockwood was a humor/teenage artist at Timely, having come from the advertising field. It’s my feeling that Henry Martin [one of the listed early owners of the Feature Funnies company that published a comic book of that name] was involved in Feature Funnies before Arnold bought it. Arnold was close to Martin. Someone (I thought it was artist Morris Weiss, but he insists it wasn’t he) told me that Rube Goldberg was involved in the setup of Feature Funnies, and I believe Goldberg drew a cover early on (#2, I think). Morris did tell me that Frank Markey [another FF listed owner] went to the McNaught Syndicate and, whatever the arrangement was, those are McNaught’s features in the early issues of Feature Funnies. I suspect that Busy Arnold was involved with this company before he took it over. His son Dick seemed to think that Busy was there at the beginning, as per my interview in #34. Eisner told me that the documents pertaining to his ownership of those Quality books and The Spirit still exist. I asked him for copies, and Eisner turned me down. I’m pretty sure he said that Ohio State may have copies.” Of course, as Jim well understands, Will was under no compulsion to provide

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A previously-unpublished tribute to Will Eisner’s Spirit.

[comments, correspondence, & corrections]

When Hawks Sailed The Seas In 2003 Dark Horse Comics reprinted Will Eisner’s early feature “Hawks of the Seas” in a hardcover volume, with a great new cover by Eisner and an introduction by Al Williamson. Everyone interested in comics history should make room in his collection for this early work by “Will Rensie”! [Translation and compilation © 1986, 2003 Denis Kitchen; all other materials TM & ©2003 Dark Horse Comics, Inc.]

him with copies of any documents…nor was Jim attempting to disprove Eisner’s ownership. More on the Eisner content of issue #48, this time from writer Jeff Gelb: Roy— I loved the fact that the new A/E reprinted the one and only “Wonder Man” story from Wonder #1. What a rarity! I’d surely never have seen this otherwise. I hope you will consider doing more genuinely rare comic book story reprints in A/E. But I can certainly see what DC was pissed about. Eisner really did create a Superman clone. The only clever bit was creating a power ring (ironically, pre-DC’s Green Lantern!) as the source of his powers, and offering readers the opportunity to get their own Wonder Man power rings. Now that’s great marketing! Somehow I doubt any of those rings ever left the warehouse, though. Hmm—wonder where they are now! Jeff Gelb As it happens, Jeff, I’m wearing one right now—as I sit here sipping from my ice-cold bottle of Kooba Cola. (Sorry… in-joke, but one you’ll “get” if and when I get the chance to reprint Richard Kyle’s excellent early-’60s article “The Education of Victor Fox.”) Now, a note both personal and informative from Bud Plant, owner (what else?) of Bud Plant Comic Art, who was interviewed in A/E #4748: Roy, From my interview, Part 2, in A/E #48: The “unidentified fans” on page 70 are Ron and Uli (sp?) Van Lewenn, owners of Silver Snail Book

Shop in Toronto. They have since split up, but Ron is still running Silver Snail, one of the best comic book stores in Canada and, at this point, one of the oldest. He was also a close friend of Phil Seuling. Many thanks for running this. It was fun to do, fun to read, and I’ve had a blast passing it around to relatives and friends. Great choice in pictures/illustrations you chose. Personal note: The picture on page 69 of us in the doorway of Comics & Comix is one of my favorites, but also quite sad. The others in the shot are (from left): Jon Campbell (passed away two years ago, partner in C&C for several early years and helped acquire the San Francisco/Tom Reilly collection); Jim Pinkowski (manager of the San Jose store, underground artist/writer of Magic Carpet and other comics, gone on to do Christian-oriented comics); Mike Manyak (together with the buddy next to him, whose name I can’t recall, initiated the first underground comix convention in 1973, which C&C became an integral part in putting on at the UC Berkeley campus; still exhibits at West Coast cons); John Barrett (co-founder of C&C and my lifelong friend, big convention dealer, passed away several years ago—there’s a website devoted to him); kneeling is Bob Beerbohm, who helped found C&C, went on to run his own Bay Area shop, Best of Two worlds, and now does shows and mail order of old comics out of his home state, Nebraska—also advisor on early comics history to Overstreet. Long way of saying that two of the relatively young men are gone (we were all within a couple years of age of one another, and I’m 53). Even Phil Seuling made it to his 50th birthday. We’re so lucky that many of the real oldtimers in comics are still with us, like Russ Heath, Alex Toth, Joe Kubert, Dick Giordano, Carmine Infantino, etc. Greatly enjoyed the Eisner tribute. I felt privileged to have worked

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81 with him (Phil Seuling and I—it was Phil’s idea—co-published The Spirit Coloring Book in 1974 with Will)… and to know him later on. He kindly enough credited me with inspiring him to write Graphic Narrative, after I mentioned to him that there were a zillion books on drawing but not one book on writing comics at the time. Not a man to let a good idea go by…. Bud Plant We appreciate the info you added to go with your two-part interview, Bud. And we’re sure many of our readers will check out Bud Plant Comic Art’s ad on p. 25! Just two fast closing corrections: John Benson, whose 1966 comicon is being scrupulously annotated currently in A/E, asked if I really thought in issue #48 that Jules Feiffer’s praise of Will Eisner in his 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes was “fulsome.” “According to my dictionary,” he added, “‘fulsome’ means ‘disgusting or offensive, especially because excessive or insincere.’” My error, John. I definitely used the wrong word! Feiffer, who greatly admires Eisner, was indeed praising him most sincerely, not fulsomely. And FCA editor P.C. Hamerlinck informed us that the late Ralph Muccie, depicted in #48, was not a “veteran comics pro” as I wrote; he was “simply an old comics fan” who drew a lot of art on his own. I had him momentarily confused with someone else.

“It’s really a very nifty site.” —Dr. Jerry G. Bails.

Till next time, send those snail-mail sentiments and cyberspace slings and arrows to: Roy Thomas 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135

e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com fax: (803) 826-6501

Lots of great coverage of Batman and Superman and their creatives teams in A/E #59, behind that striking Arthur Suydam cover seen on p. 2!

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Submit Something To Alter Ego! Alter Ego is on the lookout for items that can be utilized in upcoming issues: • Convention Sketches and Program Books • Unpublished Artwork • Original Scripts (the older the better!) • Photos • Unpublished Interviews • Little-seen Fanzine Material We’re also interested in articles, article ideas, or any other suggestions... and we pay off in FREE COPIES of A/E. (If you’re already an A/E subscriber, we’ll extend your subscription.) Contact: Roy Thomas, Editor 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135 Fax: (803)826-6501 • E-mail: roydann@ntinet.com

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FCA EDITORS NOTE: From 1941-53, Marcus D. Swayze was a top artist for Fawcett Publications. The very first Mary Marvel character sketches came from Marc’s drawing table, and he illustrated her earliest adventures, including the classic origin story, “Captain Marvel Introduces Mary Marvel (Captain Marvel Adventures No. 18, Dec. ’42); but he was primarily hired by Fawcett Publications to illustrate Captain Marvel stories and covers for Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel Adventures. He also wrote many Captain Marvel scripts, and continued to do so while in the military. After leaving the service in 1944, he made an arrangement with Fawcett to produce art and stories for them on a freelance basis out of his Louisiana home. There he created both art and story for The Phantom Eagle in Wow Comics, in addition to drawing the Flyin’ Jenny newspaper strip for Bell Syndicate (created by his friend and mentor Russell Keaton). After the cancellation of Wow, Swayze produced artwork for Fawcett’s top-selling line of romance comics, including Sweethearts and Life Story. After the company ceased publishing comics, Marc moved over to Charlton Publications, where he ended his comics career in the mid-’50s. Marc’s ongoing professional memoirs have been FCA’s most popular feature since his first column appeared in FCA #54, 1996. Last issue Marc discussed the Jack Binder comics shop; this issue he looks at one of the more unusual romance stories he illustrated for Fawcett. —P.C. Hamerlinck.

Well, Marc Said Fawcett Was “A Clean Publisher”! “Too much exposure?” questions Marc. “A small caption, ‘Bette took a bath,’ would have taken care of it. But would it have been as interesting?” Panel by Swayze from “Girl on the Road.” [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

It has been a source of satisfaction that the company with which most of the career in comics was spent was a clean publisher. Clean ... meaning its success in magazine sales was not due to overly suggestive literature or art. It was surprising when one particular story was brought to mind as having ... well, strayed beyond the realm of good taste. It appeared in Sweethearts #111 ... its title: “Girl on the Road.” Dusty records reveal the script as received September 22, 1951— the art as completed and mailed to the editors a few weeks later—the publication date of the issue as May 1952. Listed as magazine editor was Roy Ald; executive editor Will Lieberson; art editor Al Jetter. Specifics describing “Girl on the Road” as questionable had to do with certain panels not considered typical of Fawcett comic books ... and the probable need of editorial concern and discussion prior to preparation of the art. In the story, main character Bette, bored with the good life, joins an unusual bevy of young women apparently having no place to go or stay ... and preferring it that way. Circumstances eventually lead to her meeting “Pete,” who becomes the number one guy ... and so on. Panels in question begin on page 6 of the story with a bathroom scene where a bit more of Bette’s skin is visible than was perhaps necessary. Following that she is shown rather wildly throwing on her clothing as she makes a hasty exit. If the original script included detailed description of that panel, it is not recalled. It is highly unlikely, however, that there was any mention of bare skin. If blame or criticism of that art is ... or has been ... due, then it should rest on the shoulders of the artist alone.

Road Show Marc asks: “Was there more to the wanderings in this unusual Fawcett story than met the eye? What was it trying to tell us?” The splash panel of “Girl on the Road,” the lead story from Sweethearts #111 (May 1952). Art by Marc Swayze. [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

The professional comic book artist of the Golden Age accepted it as a customary responsibility to keep abreast of his publisher’s policies toward matters that might verge upon indecency. At the same time, however, there was an apprehension of falling behind the crowd ... that is, failing to keep up with what was going on! Tabloids and journals of the day were depicting models and starlets in various attitudes where bare skin was obviously of slight concern. Regarding the possibility ... or necessity of editor

We Didn’t Know... It Was The Golden Age!

A Decidedly Atypical Fawcett Panel

Girls Just Want To Have Fun

intervention before the artwork was prepared ... there was none. If it took place at all it would have been with the author of the story. And it may have been.

casually camping out overnight ... on the ground. It’s all remindful of the “hobo jungles” near our communities during the Great Depression ... all-male, of course.

Or should have! It isn’t difficult to see how the readers’ imagination may have been taxed ... even in a comic book ... what with that gang of female transients ... hopping freight trains ... bumming for food ...

Could there have been, say ... a hint ... between the lines of “Girl on the Road”? “Hobo” ... another word for it is “tramp.” Tramp... !!! It has its own definition! Get it? Was the story telling us about ... prostitution?!! It would explain those “dubious” panels on page 6. And it would clarify Pete’s performance later, where instead of treating us to a romantic “Goodbye, dear ... forever!” he cast Bette aside like an old shoe! Otherwise, a pretty good romance story. If you can find it, read it!

Mark Swayze will return with more memories of the Golden Age in our next issue.

Setting The Record Straight

Historical Inaccuracies Pointed Out By Captain Marvel’s Chief Artist

A Previously Unpublished Essay From The Early 1980s By C.C. Beck Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

n the half-century since the dawn of the Golden Age of Comic Books, many errors have crept into its history. The most serious error regarding Fawcett Publications’ Captain Marvel is calling him a “super-hero,” which he never was. In fact, Captain Marvel was not even the hero of the stories he appeared in; Billy Batson was. Billy was the one who got into trouble in the stories; Captain Marvel was the deus ex machina or supernatural character called in to rescue the hero and put things right. Super-heroes had superhuman powers such as X-ray vision, the ability to stretch their bodies into weird shapes, to set themselves on fire, to breathe underwater, and so on. Captain Marvel had no such powers; he was simply a large, powerful man and was billed as “The World’s

Hero Sandwich “Captain Marvel was not even the hero of the stories he appeared in; Billy Batson was.” C.C. Beck’s cover for Whiz Comics #84 (April 1947), repro’d from what P.C. calls his “rat-chewed copy.” [©2006 DC Comics.]

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet, Man Unlike Captain Marvel, Bulletman flew from the very beginning, “thanks to his miraculous bullet-shaped helmet.” Beck’s cover for Nickel Comics #8 (Aug. 1940), the final issue before the Flying Detective moved over to Master Comics. [©2006 DC Comics.]

Mightiest Mortal.” In the beginning he could not fly (neither could Superman) and had no reason to. Later, at the publisher’s insistence, he and all his family were forced to appear in sequences showing them flying through the air like so many bullets … which may have come about because another of Fawcett’s characters, Bulletman, did fly, thanks to his miraculous bullet-shaped helmet. In time, almost all comic characters of the Golden Age flew, bounced bullets off their chests, tore down mountains, destroyed whole armies single-handed, and did other ridiculously impossible superhuman feats of strength. Captain Marvel was forced to follow suit, and it was his undoing. When the rage for super-heroes died away in the ’50s, Captain Marvel died, too. If he had not been forced to join the mob of super-hero characters put out by other publishers, Fawcett’s Captain Marvel might not have been caught in the Ragnarok of the early ’50s.

Setting The Record Straight authority on the history of comics, about which I know practically nothing … but I do consider myself to be in possession of the facts about the creation and short-lived career of Fawcett’s greatest comic character, Captain Marvel. I wish that those who write about him today would consult me, rather than rely on the writings of others or on their own half-remembered impressions from childhood days spent in reading comic books. As old Jewish grandmothers are fond of saying, “It wouldn’t hurt.” I never had a Jewish grandmother; mine were Pennsylvania Dutch and died before I was old enough to know them. The only Pennsylvania Dutch saying I know is, “We get too soon old and too late smart.”

“Do You Know Captain Marvel Has No Sense of Humor?” “No, But If You’ll Hum Me A Few Bars…” “In the first story in which he appeared, in early 1940, there was no humor whatsoever.” A properly grim World’s Greatest Mortal—when not even Sivana would have dared call him a Big Red Cheese. [©2006 DC Comics.]

A second error which has crept into the history of Captain Marvel is that he introduced humor in comics. This is nonsense; there has always been humor in comics. The super-hero stories didn’t include humor— but they were not comics; they were pulp fiction stories illustrated mostly in realistic style. Other comic books of the time were humorous, and still are today. Humor is out of place in super-hero stories, which are far too solemn and realistic to provoke any laughter on the part of their readers. Captain Marvel was drawn in comic strip style, and many of the secondary characters and the villains were cartoon figures, comical in appearance. What humor there was in the stories was carried by the secondary figures; Captain Marvel himself was never the wisecracking buffoon that later writers have sometimes imagined that he was. In the first story in which he appeared in early 1940 there was no humor whatsoever; it was a perfectly straight adventure tale about a small boy’s being given a magic word which enabled him to turn into a powerful man when danger threatened and evil was to be overcome. The first story was written by William Parker and illustrated by me. Since then I have been given the credit for creating Captain Marvel, which I never did. Captain Marvel was created by his publisher Fawcett Publications; Parker and I wrote and drew to their orders. The character belonged to Fawcett; we writers and artists had little or nothing to say about him. To this day I have no control over the character and want no credit for any of the stories or art or movies and TV shows in which he has appeared. I never had anything to do with the stories, which were (with just one exception) written by others and handed to me or to other artists to be put into pictorial form. To put one more thing straight: I never considered myself to be a cartoonist. I am, and always have been, an illustrator and designer. I have been in the art business for sixty years, only thirteen of which were spent drawing comics at Fawcett. Cartooning, in my view, is just one form of art; there are many others. I don’t consider myself to be an

OUR SPECIAL BRAZILIAN BONUS! Two additional pages from the 1964 Almanaque do O Globo Juvenil, in which the comics of Brazil printed new stories of The Marvel Family for years after Fawcett had cancelled all their titles in 1953. In this unique tale, Cap met Timely/Marvel’s original Human Torch—since he and Cap had been published by the same South American company. This symbolic splash gives a foretaste of what’s to come, and The Cobra unveils his plan. [Captain Marvel TM & ©2006 DC Comics; Human Torch TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Captain Marvel Meets The Human Torch” (Continued)

Thanks to John G. Pierce for unearthing this story, which has been translated from the Portuguese by Mark Luebker. The 1964 art is by Rodriguez Zelis, with modern-day art reconstruction and lettering for this issue by John Gentil. With special thanks to Rodrigo M. Zeidan and Matt Gore. [Captain Marvel TM & ©2006 DC Comics.]

90 “Captain Marvel Meets The Human Torch”

[See more pages of this offbeat Brazilian classic in future issues of A/E & FCA.]

Number 17, Spring 2006 • Hype and hullabaloo from the publisher determined to bring new life to comics fandom • Edited by John Morrow

nerds Unite! RUFF ’n’ ReaDY!

COMIC BOOK NERD is PETE VON SHOLLY’S side-splitting parody of the fan press, including TwoMorrows’ own mags! Experience the magic(?) of such publications as WHIZZER, THE COMICS URINAL, ULTRA EGO, COMICS BUYER’S GUISE, BAGGED ISSUE!, SCRAWL!, COMIC BOOK ARTISTE, COMIC BOOK MEATMARKET, and more, as we unabashedly poke fun at ourselves, our competition, and you, our loyal readers! It’s a first issue, collector’s item, double-bag, slab-worthy, keep behind the counter, speculator’s special sure to rub even the thickest-skinned fanboy the wrong way! If you buy only one magazine this month, we’re probably not going to make any money off you, so go ’way. Otherwise, go to www.twomorrows.com right now a sneak peak, and look for it in June! (64-page FULL-COLOR magazine, $11 US)

collection mentalitY If you’re missing sold-out back issues of our mags, or you just like having them on a bookshelf at your fingertips, check out our latest collections: HOW TO CREATE COMICS FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT (reprinting the WRITE NOW! #8 / DRAW! #9 crossover, $18 US), BEST OF DRAW! VOL. 2 (reprinting DRAW! #3 and 4, $22 US), ALTER EGO COLLECTION VOL. 1 (reprinting AE #1 and 2, $26 US), and COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOL. 5 (reprinting TJKC #20-22, $29 US). All feature bonus new material, and ship in May-June. Go to www.twomorrows.com to order!

Spinning out of the pages of BACK ISSUE! magazine comes our newest ongoing mag, ROUGH STUFF!, celebrating the ART of creating comics! Each issue spotlights NEVER-BEFORE PUBLISHED penciled pages, preliminary sketches, detailed layouts, and even unused inked versions from artists throughout comics history. RS #1 features all the gents from our MODERN MASTERS book line so far: ALAN DAVIS, GEORGE PÉREZ, KEVIN NOWLAN, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍALÓPEZ, ARTHUR ADAMS, JOHN BYRNE, and WALTER SIMONSON, plus a feature on animation and comics genius BRUCE TIMM! Included is commentary on the art, background information to put it all into historical perspective, plus before and after comparisons from some of your favorite series of all time! This new quarterly 100-page magazine is $9 US, and ships June 2006! Or subscribe for $24 for 4 issues in the US!

Simon (son) Sez... ...he’s the subject of MODERN MASTERS VOL. 8: WALTER SIMONSON ($19 US) in July, a careerspanning 128-page book featuring a comprehensive interview of the fan-favorite artist, a bounty of rare and unseen artwork from his early days to now, plus a slam-bang new cover featuring the cast of THOR! By editor ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON & ROGER ASH, this one’s sure to make Walter’s fans happy!

Get Back! (issue #17!)

If you love the way BRUCE TIMM draws lovely ladies (and who doesn’t?), wait’ll you see the batch of cuties he’s lined up for the bonus 8-PAGE COLOR SECTION in July’s BACK ISSUE! #17 ($9 US)! For this “Super Girls of the 1970s and ’80s” theme issue, editor MICHAEL EURY figured, who else does ’em better? BRUCE even did an awesome, moody new TIGRA cover for the issue, so don’t miss it! Subscribe now!

one Down, one to Go.

If you haven’t yet gotten your FREE COPY of our 2006 PREVIEW/CATALOG, go online today to www.twomorrows.com (did we mention that somewhere before?) and order one, and see our full list of back issues and current items in FULL COLOR! (It twern’t cheap to print, folks, so please make use of ’em!) And look for our (also free) CATALOG UPDATE in June, which’ll list the stuff you see here, plus a few more surprises you’ll learn about next issue, including a certain Companion of steel and more apes than you ever wanted to see...

Pros@cons! Thanks to everyone who visited our booth (manned by Gorgeous GEORGE KHOURY; thanks, GK!) at San Francisco’s WONDERCON in February. Come see us at: HEROES CON (Charlotte, NC, June 30-July 2, 2006) COMICON: INTERNATIONAL (San Diego, CA, July 19-23, 2006) BALTIMORE COMICON (Baltimore, MD, September 9-10, 2006) COPYRIGHTS: Justice League, Batgirl TM & ©2006 DC Comics. Thor, Tigra, Silver Surfer, Dr. Doom TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. All others ©2006 their respective owners.

contactS:

John Morrow, publisher, JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR editor, & for subscriptions: twomorrow@aol.com Roy Thomas, ALTER EGO editor: roydann@ntinet.com Michael Eury, BACK ISSUE editor: euryman@msn.com Mike Manley, DRAW! editor: mike@actionplanet.com Danny Fingeroth, WRITE NOW! editor: WriteNowDF@aol.com Read excerpts from back issues and order from our secure online store at:

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THE TWOMORROWS LIBRARY !

INNER

ARD W ER AW

EISN

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

TOP ARTISTS DISCUSS THE DESIGN OF COMICS Top creators discuss all aspects of the DESIGN OF COMICS:

DICK GIORDANO

CHANGING COMICS, ONE DAY AT A TIME MICHAEL EURY’s biography of comics’ most prominent and affable personality!

• Covers his career as illustrator, inker, and • WILL EISNER • SCOTT HAMPTON editor, peppered with DICK’S PERSONAL • MIKE WIERINGO • WALTER SIMONSON REFLECTIONS on his career milestones! • MIKE MIGNOLA • MARK SCHULTZ • DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI • MIKE CARLIN • Lavishly illustrated with RARE AND NEVER SEEN comics, merchandising, and • DICK GIORDANO • BRIAN STELFREEZE advertising art (includes a color section)! • CHRIS MOELLER • MARK CHIARELLO • Extensive index of his published work! If you’re serious about creating effective, • Comments & tributes by NEAL ADAMS, innovative comics, or just enjoying them DENNIS O’NEIL, TERRY AUSTIN, PAUL from the creator’s perspective, this guide is LEVITZ, MARV WOLFMAN, JULIUS must-reading! SCHWARTZ, JIM APARO & others! (208-Page Trade Paperback) $26 US • With a Foreword by NEAL ADAMS and Afterword by PAUL LEVITZ!

STREETWISE

TOP ARTISTS DRAWING STORIES OF THEIR LIVES An unprecedented assembly of talent drawing NEW autobiographical stories: • Barry WINDSOR-SMITH • C.C. BECK • Sergio ARAGONÉS • Walter SIMONSON • Brent ANDERSON • Nick CARDY • Roy THOMAS & John SEVERIN • Paul CHADWICK • Rick VEITCH • Murphy ANDERSON • Joe KUBERT • Evan DORKIN • Sam GLANZMAN • Plus Art SPIEGELMAN, Jack KIRBY, more! Cover by RUDE • Foreword by EISNER (160-Page Trade Paperback) $24 US

A comprehensive history of the NEW TEEN TITANS, with interviews and rare art by MARV WOLFMAN, GEORGE PÉREZ, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, LEN WEIN, & others, a Silver Age section with NEAL ADAMS, NICK CARDY, DICK GIORDANO, & more, plus CHRIS CLAREMONT and WALTER SIMONSON on the X-MEN/ TEEN TITANS crossover, TOM GRUMMETT, PHIL JIMENEZ & TERRY DODSON on their ‘90s Titans work, a new cover by JIMENEZ, & intro by GEOFF JOHNS! Written by GLEN CADIGAN. (224-page trade paperback) $29 US

(200-page trade paperback) $26 US

THE

(176-pg. Paperback) $24 US

BEST OF DRAW! VOL. 1 TITANS COMPANION Compiles material from the first two soldout issues of DRAW!, the “How-To” magazine on comics and cartooning! Tutorials by, and interviews with: DAVE GIBBONS (layout and drawing on the computer), BRET BLEVINS (drawing lovely women, painting from life, and creating figures that “feel”), JERRY ORDWAY (detailing his working methods), KLAUS JANSON and RICARDO VILLAGRAN (inking techniques), GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY (on animation and Samurai Jack), STEVE CONLEY (creating web comics and cartoons), PHIL HESTER and ANDE PARKS (penciling and inking), and more!

ART OF GEORGE TUSKA HERO GETS GIRL!

THE LIFE & ART OF KURT SCHAFFENBERGER MARK VOGER’s biography of the artist of LOIS LANE & CAPTAIN MARVEL! • Covers KURT’S LIFE AND CAREER from the 1940s to his passing in 2002! • Features NEVER-SEEN PHOTOS & ILLUSTRATIONS from his files! • Includes recollections by ANDERSON, EISNER, INFANTINO, KUBERT, ALEX ROSS, MORT WALKER and others! (128-page Trade Paperback) $19 US

BEST OF THE LEGION OUTPOST THE LEGION COMPANION • A history of the Legion of Super-Heroes, with DAVE COCKRUM, MIKE GRELL, JIM STARLIN, JAMES SHERMAN, PAUL LEVITZ, KEITH GIFFEN, STEVE LIGHTLE, MARK WAID, JIM SHOOTER, JIM MOONEY, AL PLASTINO, and more! • Rare and never-seen Legion art by the above, plus GEORGE PÉREZ, NEAL ADAMS, CURT SWAN, and others! • Unused Cockrum character designs and pages from an UNUSED STORY! • New cover by DAVE COCKRUM and JOE RUBINSTEIN, introduction by JIM SHOOTER, and more!

Collects the best material from the hardto-find LEGION OUTPOST fanzine, including rare interviews and articles from creators such as DAVE COCKRUM, CARY BATES, and JIM SHOOTER, plus neverbefore-seen artwork by COCKRUM, MIKE GRELL, JIMMY JANES and others! It also features a previously unpublished interview with KEITH GIFFEN originally intended for the never-published LEGION OUTPOST #11, plus other new material! And it sports a rarely-seen classic 1970s cover by Legion fan favorite artist DAVE COCKRUM! (160-page trade paperback) $22 US

ALL-STAR COMPANION VOL. 1 ROY THOMAS has assembled the most thorough look ever taken at All-Star Comics: • Covers by MURPHY ANDERSON! • Issue-by-issue coverage of ALL—STAR COMICS #1—57, the original JLA—JSA teamups, & the ‘70s ALL—STAR REVIVAL! • Art from an unpublished 1945 JSA story! • Looks at FOUR “LOST” ALL—STAR issues! • Rare art by BURNLEY, DILLIN, KIRBY, INFANTINO, KANE, KUBERT, ORDWAY, ROSS, WOOD and more!!

A comprehensive look at Tuska’s personal and professional life, including early work with Eisner-Iger, crime comics of the 1950s, and his tenure with Marvel and DC Comics, as well as independent publishers. The book includes extensive coverage of his work on IRON MAN, X-MEN, HULK, JUSTICE LEAGUE, TEEN TITANS, BATMAN, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, and many more! A gallery of commission artwork and a thorough index of his work are included, plus original artwork, photos, sketches, previously unpublished art, interviews and anecdotes from his peers and fans, plus George’s own words! (128-page trade paperback) $19 US

(208-page Trade Paperback) $26 US

(224-page Trade Paperback) $29 US

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS COMPANION

COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOL. 3 Reprinting the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #7 and #8 (‘70s Marvel and ‘80s independents), featuring a new MICHAEL T. GILBERT cover, plus interviews with GILBERT, RUDE, GULACY, GERBER, DON SIMPSON, CHAYKIN, SCOTT McCLOUD, BUCKLER, BYRNE, DENIS KITCHEN, plus a NEW SECTION featuring over 30 pages of previouslyEach lists PUBLISHED COMICS WORK in unseen stuff! Edited by JON B. COOKE. detail, plus ILLOS, UNPUBLISHED WORK, and more. Filled with rare and unseen art! (224-page trade paperback) $29 US (68/100 Pages) $8 US EACH

WALLY WOOD & JACK KIRBY CHECKLISTS

The definitive book on WALLACE WOOD’s super-team of the 1960s, featuring interviews with Woody and other creators involved in the T-Agents over the years, plus rare and unseen art, including a rare 28-page story drawn by PAUL GULACY, UNPUBLISHED STORIES by GULACY, PARIS CULLINS, and others, and a JERRY ORDWAY cover. Edited by CBA’s JON B. COOKE. (192-page trade paperback) $29 US

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COMICS ABOVE GROUND SEE HOW YOUR FAVORITE ARTISTS MAKE A LIVING OUTSIDE COMICS

JUSTICE LEAGUE COMPANION VOL. 1

SECRETS IN THE SHADOWS: GENE COLAN

A comprehensive examination of the Silver Age JLA written by MICHAEL EURY (author of the critically acclaimed CAPTAIN ACTION and co-author of THE SUPERHERO BOOK). It traces the JLA’s development, history, imitators, and early fandom through vintage and all-new interviews with the series’ creators, an issue-byissue index of the JLA’s 1960-1972 adventures, classic and never-before-published artwork, and other fun and fascinating features. Contributors include DENNY O’NEIL, MURPHY ANDERSON, JOE GIELLA, MIKE FRIEDRICH, NEAL ADAMS, ALEX ROSS, CARMINE INFANTINO, NICK CARDY, and many, many others. Plus: An exclusive interview with STAN LEE, who answers the question, “Did the JLA really inspire the creation of Marvel’s Fantastic Four?” With an all-new cover by BRUCE TIMM (TV’s Justice League Unlimited)!

The ultimate retrospective on COLAN, with rare drawings, photos, and art from his nearly 60-year career, plus a comprehensive overview of Gene’s glory days at Marvel Comics! MARV WOLFMAN, DON MCGREGOR and other writers share script samples and anecdotes of their Colan collaborations, while TOM PALMER, STEVE LEIALOHA and others show how they approached the daunting task of inking Colan’s famously nuanced penciled pages! Plus there’s a NEW PORTFOLIO of never-before-seen collaborations between Gene and such masters as JOHN BYRNE, MICHAEL KALUTA and GEORGE PÉREZ, and all-new artwork created specifically for this book by Gene! Available in Softcover and Deluxe Hardcover (limited to 1000 copies, with 16 extra black-and-white pages and 8 extra color pages)!

(224-page trade paperback) $29 US

AGAINST THE GRAIN: MAD ARTIST

WALLACE WOOD

The definitive biographical memoir on one of comics’ finest artists, 20 years in the making! Former associate BHOB STEWART traces Wood’s life and career, with contributions from many artists and writers who knew Wood personally, making this a remarkable compendium of art, insights and critical commentary! From childhood drawings & early samples to nearly endless comics pages (many unpublished), this is the most stunning display of Wood art ever assembled! BILL PEARSON, executor of the Wood Estate, contributed rare drawings from Wood’s own files, while art collector ROGER HILL provides a wealth of obscure, previously unpublished Wood drawings and paintings.

(168-page softcover) $26 US (192-page trade hardcover) $49 US

TRUE BRIT

CELEBRATING GREAT COMIC BOOK ARTISTS OF THE UK

COMICS ABOVE GROUND features top comics pros discussing their inspirations and training, and how they apply it in “Mainstream Media,” including Conceptual Illustration, Video Game Development, Children’s Books, Novels, Design, Illustration, Fine Art, Storyboards, Animation, Movies & more! Written by DURWIN TALON (author of the top-selling PANEL DISCUSSIONS), this book features creators sharing their perspectives and their work in comics and their “other professions,” with career overviews, neverbefore-seen art, and interviews! Featuring: • BRUCE TIMM • LOUISE SIMONSON • BERNIE WRIGHTSON • DAVE DORMAN • ADAM HUGHES • GREG RUCKA & MORE! (168-page Trade Paperback) $24 US

COMIC BOOKS & OTHER NECESSITIES OF LIFE WERTHAM WAS RIGHT! SUPERHEROES IN MY PANTS! Each collects MARK EVANIER’S best essays and commentaries, plus new essays and illustrations by SERGIO ARAGONÉS! (200-page Trade Paperbacks) $17 US EACH ALL THREE BOOKS: $34 US

THE DARK AGE Documents the ‘80s and ‘90s era of comics, from THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and WATCHMEN to the “polybagged premium” craze, the DEATH OF SUPERMAN, renegade superheroes SPAWN, PITT, BLOODSHOT, CYBERFORCE, & more! Interviews with TODD McFARLANE, DAVE GIBBONS, JIM LEE, KEVIN SMITH, ALEX ROSS, MIKE MIGNOLA, ERIK LARSEN, J. O’BARR, DAVID LAPHAM, JOE QUESADA, MIKE ALLRED and others, plus a color section! Written by MARK VOGER, with photos by KATHY VOGLESONG. (168-page trade paperback) $24 US

MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON

A new series of trade paperbacks devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each volume contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!

VOL. 1: ALAN DAVIS

VOL. 2: GEORGE PÉREZ (128-Page Trade Paperback) $17 US

(120-Page TPB with COLOR) $19 US

VOL. 4: KEVIN NOWLAN

VOL. 5: GARCÍA-LÓPEZ

VOL. 6: ARTHUR ADAMS

(128-Page Trade Paperback) $17 US

VOL. 3: BRUCE TIMM

A celebration of the rich history of British Comics Artists and their influence on the US with in-depth interviews and art by: • BRIAN BOLLAND • ALAN DAVIS • DAVE GIBBONS • BRYAN HITCH • DAVID LLOYD

• DAVE MCKEAN • KEVIN O’NEILL • BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH and other gents!

(204-page Trade Paperback with COLOR SECTION) $26 US

(336-Page Trade Paperback) $44 US

CALL OR WRITE FOR OUR NEW 2006 FULLCOLOR CATALOG, OR DOWNLOAD IT NOW AT www.twomorrows.com

(120-Page TPB with COLOR) $19 US

(128-Page Trade Paperback) $19 US

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH GEORGE PÉREZ DVD This DVD companion to the Modern Masters book series gives you a personal tour of George Pérez’s studio, and lets you watch step-bystep as the fan-favorite artist illustrates a special issue of Top Cow’s Witchblade! Also, see George as he sketches for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues—including Marv Wolfman and Ron Marz—share their anecdotes and personal insights along the way! (120-minute DVD) $35 US

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOLS. 1-5 These TRADE PAPERBACKS reprint the first 22 sold-out issues of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR! Each volume includes OVER 30 EXTRA pieces of unpublished Kirby art!

The KIRBY COLLECTOR (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life & career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby & his contemporaries, feature articles, & rare & unseen Kirby art. Now in tabloid format, with Kirby’s art at even larger size.

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION (160 pgs.) Kirby’s sixissue “Visual Novel” for Pacific Comics is reproduced from his powerful, uninked pencil art! Includes Kirby’s illustrated movie screenplay, never-seen sketches, pin-ups, and more from his final great comics series! $24 US

VOLUME 2 (160-page Trade Paperback, reprinting #10-12) $22 US

VOLUME 3 (176-page Trade Paperback, reprinting #13-15) $24 US

VOLUME 4 (240-page Trade Paperback, reprinting #16-19) $29 US

NEW! VOLUME 5 (224-page Trade Paperback, reprinting #20-22) $29 US

VOLUME 1 (240-page Trade Paperback, reprinting #1-9) $29 US

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION (52 pgs.) Kirby’s 1975 Graphic Novel in original pencil form. Unseen art, screenplay, more! Proceeds go to preserving the 5000-page Kirby Archives! $9 US

KIRBY UNLEASHED: (60 pgs.) New, completely remastered and updated version of the scarce 1971 portfolio/biography, with 8 extra black-and-white and 8 extra color pages, including Jack’s color GODS posters, plus other art not seen in the 1971 version. $24 US

TJKC #23: (68 pgs.) Interviews with KIRBY, DENNY O’NEIL & TRACY KIRBY, more FF #49 pencils, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, unused 10page SOUL LOVE story, more! $9 US

TJKC #24: (68 pgs.) BATTLES! KIRBY’S original art fight, JIM SHOOTER interview, NEW GODS #6 (“Glory Boat”) pencils, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, more! Kirby/ Mignola cover. $9 US

TJKC #25: (100 pgs.) SIMON & KIRBY! KIRBY, SIMON, & JOHN SEVERIN interviews, CAPTAIN AMERICA pencils, unused BOY EXPLORERS story, history of MAINLINE COMICS, more! $9 US

TJKC #26: (72 pgs.) GODS! COLOR NEW GODS concept drawings, KIRBY & WALTER SIMONSON interviews, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, BIBLE INFLUENCES, THOR, MR. MIRACLE, more! $9 US

TJKC #27: (72 pages) KIRBY INFLUENCE Part One! KIRBY and ALEX ROSS interviews, KIRBY FAMILY Roundtable, all-star lineup of pros discuss Kirby’s influence on them! Kirby / Timm cover. $9 US

TJKC #30: (68 pgs.) ‘80s WORK! Interviews with ALAN MOORE & Kirby Estate’s ROBERT KATZ, HUNGER DOGS, SUPER POWERS, SILVER STAR, ANIMATION work, more! $9 US

TJKC #31: (84 pgs.) TABLOID FORMAT! Wraparound KIRBY/ ADAMS cover, KURT BUSIEK & LADRONN interviews, new MARK EVANIER column, favorite 2-PAGE SPREADS, 2001 Treasury, more! $13 US

TJKC #32: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! KIRBY interview, new MARK EVANIER column, plus Kirby’s Least Known Work: DAYS OF THE MOB #2, THE HORDE, BLACK HOLE, SOUL LOVE, PRISONER, more! $13 US

TJKC #33: (84 pgs.) TABLOID ALL-FANTASTIC FOUR issue! MARK EVANIER column, miniinterviews with everyone who worked on FF after Kirby, STAN LEE interview, 40 pgs. of FF PENCILS, more! $13 US

TJKC #34: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! JOE SIMON & CARMINE INFANTINO interviews, MARK EVANIER column, unknown 1950s concepts, CAPTAIN AMERICA pencils, KIRBY/ TOTH cover, more! $13 US

TJKC #35: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! GREAT ESCAPES with MISTER MIRACLE, comparing KIRBY & HOUDINI, Kirby Tribute Panel with EVANIER, EISNER, BUSCEMA, ROMITA, ROYER, & JOHNNY CARSON! $13 US

TJKC #36: (84 pgs.) TABLOID ALL-THOR issue! MARK EVANIER column, SINNOTT & ROMITA JR. interviews, unseen KIRBY INTV., ART GALLERY, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, more! $13 US

TJKC #37: (84 pgs.) TABLOID HOW TO DRAW THE KIRBY WAY issue! MARK EVANIER column, MIKE ROYER on inking, KIRBY interview, ART GALLERY, analysis of Kirby’s art techniques, more! $13 US

TJKC #38: (84 pgs.) TABLOID KIRBY: STORYTELLER! MARK EVANIER column, JOE SINNOTT on inking, SWIPES, talks with JACK DAVIS, PAUL GULACY, HERNANDEZ BROS., ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

TJKC #39: (84 pgs.) TABLOID FAN FAVORITES! EVANIER column, INHUMANS, HULK, SILVER SURFER, tribute panel with ROMITA, AYERS, LEVITZ, McFARLANE, TRIMPE, ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

TJKC #40: (84 pgs.) TABLOID “WORLD THAT’S COMING!” EVANIER column, KAMANDI, OMAC, tribute panel with CHABON, PINI, GOLDBERG, BUSCEMA, LIEBER, LEE, ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

TJKC #41: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! 1970s MARVEL, including Jack’s last year on FF, EVANIER column, GIORDANO interview, tribute panel with GIBBONS, RUDE, SIMONSON, RYAN, ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

TJKC #42: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! Spotlights Kirby at ‘70s DC Comics, from Jimmy Olsen to Spirit World! Huge Kirby pencil art gallery, covers inked by KEVIN NOWLAN & MURPHY ANDERSON! $13 US

TJKC #43: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! Kirby Award winners STEVE & GARY SHERMAN intv., 1966 KIRBY intv., Kirby pencils vs. Sinnott inks from TALES OF SUSPENSE #93, Kirby cover inked by SINNOTT! $13 US

TJKC #44: (84 pgs.) TABLOID MYTHS & LEGENDS issue! MARK EVANIER column, unseen KIRBY interview, ART GALLERY with DEMON, THOR, ATLAS, Kirby cover inked by MATT WAGNER! $13 US

TJKC #45: (84 pgs.) TABLOID TIME MACHINE! EVANIER column, intv. with son NEAL KIRBY, two complete ‘50s stories, PAST and FUTURE art galleries, Tribute Panel, 3-D KIRBY COVER! $13 US

SUBSCRIBE: 4 tabloid issues: $40 Standard, $56 First Class (Canada: $64, Elsewhere: $68 Surface, $84 Airmail).

T H E U LT I M AT E C O M I C S E X P E R I E N C E !

Edited by MICHAEL EURY, BACK ISSUE celebrates comic books of the 1970s, ’80s, and today through recurring (& rotating) departments. 100 PAGES, $9 US. 6-ISSUE SUBS: $36 Standard, $54 First Class (Canada: $66, Elsewhere: $72 Surface, $96 Airmail).

#2: HUGHES, RUDE, WAGNER, JONES, STEVENS!

#1: PÉREZ, KIRBY, BUSCEMA, INFANTINO, KUBERT! “PRO2PRO” interview between GEORGE PÉREZ and MARV WOLFMAN (with UNSEEN PÉREZ ART), “ROUGH STUFF” featuring JACK KIRBY’s PENCIL ART, “GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD” on the first JLA/AVENGERS, “BEYOND CAPES” on DC and Marvel’s TARZAN (with KUBERT & BUSCEMA ART), “OFF MY CHEST” editorial by INFANTINO, & more!

#3: EVANIER, GIFFEN, MAGUIRE, BOLLAND!

“PRO2PRO” between ADAM HUGHES & MIKE W. BARR (with UNSEEN HUGHES ART) and MATT WAGNER and DIANA SCHUTZ, “ROUGH STUFF” HUGHES PENCIL ART, STEVE RUDE’s unseen SPACE GHOST/ HERCULOIDS team-up, Bruce Jones’ ALIEN WORLDS & TWISTED TALES, an “OFF MY CHEST” editorial by MIKE W. BARR on the DC IMPLOSION, & more!

“PRO2PRO” between KEITH GIFFEN, J.M. DeMATTEIS and KEVIN MAGUIRE on their JLA WORK, “ROUGH STUFF” PENCIL ART by ARAGONÉS, HERNANDEZ BROS., MIGNOLA, BYRNE, KIRBY, HUGHES, two unknown PLASTIC MAN movies, a look at the Joker’s history with O’NEIL, ADAMS, ENGLEHART, ROGERS & BOLLAND, an editorial by MARK EVANIER, & more!

#6: WRIGHTSON, COLAN, THOMAS, GODZILLA!

#7: APARO, BYRNE, LEE, EVANIER, & MORE!

#8: ADAMS, VON EEDEN, & ’70s BLACK HEROES!

#9: RUDE, TRUMAN, GIL KANE & COSMIC HEROES!

TOMB OF DRACULA revealed with GENE COLAN and MARV WOLFMAN, LEN WEIN & BERNIE WRIGHTSON on Swamp Thing’s roots, STEVE BISSETTE and RICK VEITCH on their Swamp work, pencil art by SMITH, BRUNNER, PLOOG, BISSETTE, COLAN, & WRIGHTSON, editorial by ROY THOMAS, GODZILLA comics (with TRIMPE art), CHARLTON horror, PREZ, and more!

SWAN/ANDERSON cover, history of BRAVE AND THE BOLD, JIM APARO interview, tribute to BOB HANEY, FANTASTIC FOUR ROUNDTABLE with STAN LEE, MARK WAID, and others, EVANIER & MEUGNIOT on DNAgents, pencil art by ROSS, TOTH, COCKRUM, HECK, ROBBINS, NEWTON, and BYRNE, DENNY O’NEIL editorial, a tour of METROPOLIS, IL, & more!

DENNY O’NEIL & Justice League Unlimited voice actor PHIL LaMARR discuss GL JOHN STEWART, NEW X-MEN pencil art by NEAL ADAMS, ARTHUR ADAMS, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, ALAN DAVIS, JIM LEE, ADAM HUGHES, STORM’s 30-year history, animated TV’s black heroes (with TOTH art), TONY ISABELLA and TREVOR VON EEDEN on BLACK LIGHTNING, & more!

MIKE BARON and STEVE RUDE on NEXUS past and present, a colossal GIL KANE pencil art gallery, a look at Marvel’s STAR WARS comics, secrets of DC’s unseen CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS SEQUEL, TIM TRUMAN on his GRIMJACK SERIES, MIKE GOLD editorial, THANOS history, TIME WARP revisited, an allnew STEVE RUDE COVER, & more!

#12: GIBBONS, BYRNE, MILLER, FRENZ!

#13: STATON, CARDY, EISNER, ROMITA!

#15: PLOOG, COLAN, WAGNER, KUBERT!

’70s and ’80s character revamps with DAVE GIBBONS, ROY THOMAS & KURT BUSIEK, TOM DeFALCO & RON FRENZ on Spider-Man’s 1980s “black” costume change, DENNY O’NEIL on Superman’s 1970 revamp, JOHN BYRNE’s aborted SHAZAM! series detailed, pencil art gallery with FRANK MILLER, LEE WEEKS, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, CHARLES VESS, and more!

CARDY interview, ENGLEHART and MOENCH on kung-fu comics, “Pro2Pro” with STATON and CUTI on Charlton’s E-Man, pencil art gallery featuring MILLER, KUBERT, GIORDANO, SWAN, GIL KANE, COLAN, COCKRUM, and others, EISNER’s A Contract with God; “The Death of Romance (Comics)” (with art by ROMITA, SR. and TOTH), & more!

#14: GRELL, COCKRUM, GARCÍALÓPEZ, KIRBY! DAVE COCKRUM and MIKE GRELL go “Pro2Pro” on the Legion, pencil art gallery by BUSCEMA, BYRNE, MILLER, STARLIN, McFARLANE, ROMITA JR., SIENKIEWICZ, looks at Hercules Unbound, Hex, Killraven, Kamandi, MARS, Planet of the Apes, art & interviews with GARCÍALÓPEZ, KIRBY, WILLIAMSON, and more! New MIKE GRELL/BOB McLEOD cover!

“Weird Heroes” of the 1970s and ’80s!MIKE PLOOG discusses Ghost Rider, MATT WAGNER revisits The Demon, JOE KUBERT dusts off Ragman, GENE COLAN “Rough Stuff” pencil gallery, GARCÍALÓPEZ recalls Deadman, DC’s unpublished Gorilla Grodd series, PERLIN, CONWAY, & MOENCH on Werewolf by Night, & more! New ARTHUR ADAMS cover!

#4: BYRNE, CLAREMONT, CASEY, SIMONSON!

#5: ROSS, HUGHES, LYNDA CARTER, LOU FERRIGNO!

“PRO2PRO” between JOHN BYRNE and CHRIS CLAREMONT on their X-MEN WORK and WALT SIMONSON and JOE CASEY on Walter’s THOR WORK, WOLVERINE PENCIL ART by BUSCEMA, LEE, COCKRUM, BYRNE, & GIL KANE, LEN WEIN’S TEEN WOLVERINE, PUNISHER’S 30TH & SECRET WARS’ 20TH ANNIVERSARIES (with UNSEEN ZECK ART), & more!

Covers by ALEX ROSS & ADAM HUGHES, Wonder Woman TV series in-depth, LYNDA CARTER INTERVIEW, WONDER WOMAN TV ART GALLERY, Marvel’s TV Hulk, Spider-Man, Captain America, & Dr. Strange, LOU FERRIGNO INTERVIEW, super-hero cartoons you didn’t see, pencil gallery by JERRY ORDWAY, STAR TREK in comics, & JOHN ROMITA SR. editorial on Marvel’s movies!

#10: ADAMS, GRELL, KALUTA, CHAYKIN!

#11: BUSCEMA, JUSKO, BOLLAND, ARAGONÉS!

NEAL ADAMS and DENNY O’NEIL on RA’S AL GHUL’s history (with Adams art), O’Neil and MICHAEL KALUTA on THE SHADOW, MIKE GRELL on JON SABLE FREELANCE, HOWIE CHAYKIN interview, DOC SAVAGE in comics, BATMAN ART GALLERY by SIENKIEWICZ, SIMONSON, PAUL SMITH, BOLLAND, HANNIGAN, MAZZUCCHELLI, and others, and a new cover by ADAMS!

#16: ZECK, ARTHUR ADAMS, GUICE, GOLDEN, KIRBY! “Toy Stories!” Behind the Scenes of Marvel’s G. I. JOE™ and TRANSFORMERS, “Rough Stuff” MIKE ZECK pencil gallery, ARTHUR ADAMS on Gumby, HE-MAN, ROM, MICRONAUTS, SUPER POWERS, SUPER-HERO CARS, art by HAMA, SAL BUSCEMA, GUICE, GOLDEN, KIRBY, TRIMPE, & new ZECK sketch cover!

ROY THOMAS, KURT BUSIEK, and JOE JUSKO on CONAN (with art by JOHN BUSCEMA, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, NEAL ADAMS, JUSKO, & others), SERGIO ARAGONÉS & MARK EVANIER on GROO, DC’s never-published KING ARTHUR, pencil art gallery by KIRBY, PÉREZ, MOEBIUS, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, BOLLAND, & others, and a new BUSCEMA/JUSKO Conan cover!

#17: TIMM, HAMNER, INFANTINO, HUGHES! “Super Girls!” Supergirl retrospective with art by STELFREEZE, HAMNER, & others, Spider-Woman, Flare, Tigra, DC’s unused Double Comics with unseen BARRETTO and INFANTINO art, WOLFMAN and JIMENEZ on Donna Troy, Female comics pros Roundtable, Animated Super Chicks, art by SEKOWSKY, OKSNER, PÉREZ, HUGHES, GIORDANO, plus an 8-page COLOR ART GALLERY and COVER by BRUCE TIMM!

BACK ISSUES

Outside the US, ADD PER ITEM: Magazines & DVDs, $2 ($7 Airmail) Softcover books, $3 ($10 Airmail)

DRAW! (edited by MIKE MANLEY) is the professional “How-To” magazine on comics, cartooning, and animation. Each issue features in-depth interviews & step-by-step demos from top comics pros on all aspects of graphic storytelling. NOTE: Contains nudity for purposes of figure drawing. Intended for Mature Readers.

DRAW #3: (80 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #4: (92 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #5: (88 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #6: (96 pgs.) “How-To” demos & interviews with DICK demos & interviews with ERIK demos/intvs. with BENDIS & demos & interviews with BILL GIORDANO, “Action” by BRET LARSEN, KEVIN NOWLAN, OEMING, MIKE WIERINGO, WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO, BLEVINS, CHRIS BAILEY, DAVE COOPER, “Figure MARK McKENNA, “Hands” by CELIA CALLE, MIKE MANLEY, MIKE MANLEY, new column Composition” by BRET BRET BLEVINS, PAUL “Light & Shadow” by BRET by PAUL RIVOCHE, reviews of BLEVINS, PAUL RIVOCHE, RIVOCHE, color section, BLEVINS, ANDE PARKS, color art supplies, more! $9 US color section, more! $9 US product reviews, more! $9 US section, and more! $9 US

DRAW! #11

WRITE NOW! #11

STEVE RUDE demonstrates his approach to comics & drawing! ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation! Political cartoonist JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits! Plus DRAW!’S regular instructors BRET BLEVINS, ALEBERTO RUIZ and more! Edited by MIKE MANLEY.

BENDIS, WAID, DAVID, DEMATTEIS, DeFALCO, O’NEIL, DIXON, ALONSO and 17 others tell PROFESSIONAL WRITING SECRETS, plus DeFALCO and FRENZ on working together and an all-new SPIDER-GIRL cover by FRENZ and SAL BUSCEMA! Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH.

(96-page mag with color) $9 US

(80-page magazine) $9 US

2005-06 EISNER NOMINEE!

SUBSCRIPTION RATES:

DRAW! OR WRITE NOW! SUBS: 4 issues: $24 Standard, $36 First Class (Canada: $44, Elsewhere: $48 Surface, $64 Airmail).

HOW TO DRAW COMICS, FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT DVD: DRAW’s MIKE MANLEY and WRITE NOW’s DANNY FINGEROTH create a new character created from scratch, and create a story drawn from script to roughs, pencils, inks, and coloring— even lettering! It’s 120 minutes of “howto” tips, tricks, and tools of the pros, plus bonus features! $35 US Bundled with WRITE NOW! #8 & DRAW! #9: $42 US

DRAW #7: (96 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #8: (96 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #9: (96 pgs.) Pt. 2 of DRAW #10: (96 pgs.) “Howdemos & interviews with DAN demos & interviews with crossover with WRITE NOW!, To” demos & interviews with BRERETON, PAUL RIVOCHE, MATT HALEY, ALBERTO RUIZ, showing a comic created from RON GARNEY, GRAHAM ZACH TRENHOLM, MIKE TOM BANCROFT, ROB script to print (with full-color NOLAN, Lettering with TODD MANLEY, “Sketching” by CORLEY, “Drapery” by BRET comic insert), plus BRET KLEIN, step-by-step with BRET BLEVINS, color section, BLEVINS, color section, BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ, ALBERTO RUIZ, BRET product reviews, more! $9 US product reviews, more! $9 US SCOTT KURTZ, & more! $9 US BLEVINS, and more! $9 US

WRITE NOW! (edited by DANNY FINGEROTH), the mag for writers of comics, animation, & sci-fi, puts you in the minds of today’s top writers and editors. Each issue features writing tips from pros on both sides of the desk, interviews, sample scripts, reviews, and more.

WN #1: (88 pgs.) MARK WN #2: (96 pgs.) ERIK WN #3: (80 pgs.) DEODATO BAGLEY cover & interview, LARSEN cover & interview, JR. Hulk cover, intvs. & articles BRIAN BENDIS & STAN LEE STAN BERKOWITZ on the by BRUCE JONES, AXEL interviews, JOE QUESADA on Justice League cartoon, TODD ALONSO, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, what editors really want, TOM ALCOTT on Samurai Jack, LEE KURT BUSIEK, FABIAN DeFALCO, J.M. DeMATTEIS, NORDLING, ANNE D. NICIEZA, STEVEN GRANT, more! $9 US BERNSTEIN, & more! $9 US DENNY O’NEIL, more! $9 US

WN #4: (80 pgs.) Interviews WN #5: (80 pgs.) Interviews WN #6: (80 pgs.) Interviews WN #7: (80 pgs.) Interviews WN #8: (80 pgs.) Pt. 1 of WN #9: (80 pgs.) NEAL WN #10: (80 pgs.) Interviews and lessons with WARREN and lessons by WILL EISNER, and lessons with BENDIS and and lessons by JEPH LOEB & crossover with DRAW!, ADAMS on his writing (with and lessons by Justice League ELLIS, HOWARD CHAYKIN, J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI, OEMING on POWERS, MARK TIM SALE, JIM LEE, CHUCK showing a comic created from lots of Adams art), plus inter- Unlimited’s DWAYNE McDUFFIE, PAUL DINI, FABIAN NICIEZA, BOB SCHRECK, FABIAN WAID on FANTASTIC FOUR, DIXON, JOHN JACKSON script to print, plus interviews views and lessons by GEOFF “Hate’s” PETER BAGGE, comics KURT BUSIEK, TOM DeFALCO, NICIEZA, PAUL DINI, JOEY BOB SCHRECK continues, MILLER, MARK WHEATLEY, and lessons by STUART JOHNS, MICHAEL OEMING, scripter/editor GERRY CONWAY, STEVEN GRANT, DENNY CAVALIERI, DIANA SCHUTZ, DIANA SCHUTZ, SCOTT M. DENNY O’NEIL, YVETTE MOORE, DON McGREGOR, & BATTON LASH, secrets of writer/editor PAUL BENJAMIN, O’NEIL, more! $9 US DENNY O’NEIL, more! $9 US ROSENBERG, more! $9 US KAPLAN, more! $9 US Indy creator secrets! $9 US pitching ideas, & more! $9 US & more! $9 US

COMING SOON FROM TWOMORROWS!

BACK ISSUE #16 (MAY)

ALTER EGO #59 (JUNE)

“Toy Stories!” Marvel’s G. I. JOE™ and TRANSFORMERS, “Rough Stuff” MIKE ZECK pencil gallery, ARTHUR ADAMS on Gumby, HE-MAN, ROM, MICRONAUTS, SUPER POWERS, SUPER-HERO CARS, art by HAMA, SAL BUSCEMA, GUICE, GOLDEN, KIRBY, TRIMPE, & new ZECK sketch cover! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Batman & Superman in the Golden & Silver Ages, ARTHUR SUYDAM interview, NEAL ADAMS on 1960s/70s DC, SHELLY MOLDOFF, AL PLASTINO, Golden Age artist FRAN (Doll Man) MATERA interviewed, the first comic book Thor, SIEGEL & SHUSTER, FCA, MR. MONSTER, SUYDAM cover, & more! Edited by ROY THOMAS.

(100-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO COLLECTION, VOL. 1 (JUNE)

MODERN MASTERS VOL. 7: JOHN BYRNE (APRIL)

WRITE NOW! #12 (NOW!)

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46 (MAY)

(100-page magazine) $9 US

PAUL LEVITZ on comics writing, KIRBY’S FOURTH WORLD focus, STEVE ENGLEHART’s thoughts on including FOREVER PEOPLE, NEW writing for today’s market, survey GODS, and more! Rare interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’S of TOP COMICS EDITORS on regular column, two FOURTH how to submit work to them, WORLD pencil art galleries, a Marvel Editor ANDY SCHMIDT on NEVER-REPRINTED 1950s how to break in, T. CAMPBELL on writing for webcomics, plus a new STORY, new Kirby covers inked GEORGE PÉREZ cover! Edited by by MIKE ROYER & JOHN BYRNE, & more! Edited by JOHN DANNY FINGEROTH. MORROW. (80-page magazine) $9 US LOOK FOR VOL. 8 FEATURING (84-page tabloid) $13 US WALTER SIMONSON IN JULY!

BEST OF DRAW, VOL. 2 (JUNE)

ROUGH STUFF #1 COMIC BOOK NERD (JUNE) #1 (JUNE)

One of the finest draftsmen in comics, spotlighted with a COMPREHENSIVE CAREERSPANNING INTERVIEW, rare and UNSEEN WORK, and extensive GALLERY OF EYE-POPPING ART! (128-page trade paperback) $19 US

Compiles material from issues #3 Spotlights UNPUBLISHED penciled PETE VON SHOLLY’s side-splitting and #4 of DRAW!, including parody of the fan press, including pages, preliminary sketches, Collects the first two issues of such publications as WHIZZER, ALTER EGO, plus 30 pages of NEW tutorials by, and interviews with, detailed layouts, and unused inked ERIK LARSEN (savage penciling), the COMICS URINAL, ULTRA versions from artists throughout MATERIAL! New JLA Jam Cover DICK GIORDANO (inking EGO, COMICS BUYER’S GUISE, comics history. #1 features ALAN by KUBERT, PÉREZ, GIORDANO, techniques), BRET BLEVINS BAGGED ISSUE!, SCRAWL!, DAVIS, GEORGE PÉREZ, KEVIN TUSKA, CARDY, FRADON, & (drawing the figure in action, and NOWLAN, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍACOMIC BOOK ARTISTE, and GIELLA, new sections featuring figure composition), KEVIN more, as we unabashedly poke LÓPEZ, ARTHUR ADAMS, JOHN scarce art by GIL KANE, WILL NOWLAN (penciling and inking), fun at ourselves, our competitors, BYRNE, WALTER SIMONSON, EISNER, CARMINE INFANTINO, MIKE MANLEY (how-to demo on and you, our loyal readers! Go to and BRUCE TIMM! Includes MIKE SEKOWSKY, MURPHY Web Comics), DAVE COOPER www.twomorrows.com for a commentary on the art, backANDERSON, DICK DILLIN, & more! (digital coloring tutorial), and sneak preview in March! ground information, plus before (192-page trade paperback) more! Cover by KEVIN NOWLAN. and after comparisons from some (64-page COLOR $26 US of your favorite series of all time! (156-page trade paperback with one-shot magazine) color section) $22 US $11 US (100-page magazine) SUBSCRIPTIONS: $9 US

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Four issues US: $40 Standard, $56 First Class (Canada: $64, Elsewhere: $68 Surface, $84 Airmail). BACK ISSUE!: Six issues US: $36 Standard, $54 First Class (Canada: $66, Elsewhere: $72 Surface, $96 Airmail). DRAW!, WRITE NOW!, ROUGH STUFF: Four issues US: $24 Standard, $36 First Class (Canada: $44, Elsewhere: $48 Surface, $64 Airmail). ALTER EGO: Twelve issues US: $72 Standard, $108 First Class (Canada: $132, Elsewhere: $144 Surface, $192 Airmail). FOR A SIX-ISSUE ALTER EGO SUBSCRIPTION, JUST CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!

HOW TO CREATE COMICS, FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT TPB (JUNE) REDESIGNED and EXPANDED version of the groundbreaking WRITE NOW! #8 / DRAW! #9 crossover! DANNY FINGEROTH & MIKE MANLEY show step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and roughs to pencils, inks, colors, lettering—it even guides you through printing and distribution, & the finished 8-page color comic is included, so you can see their end result! PLUS: over 30 pages of ALL-NEW material, including “full” and “Marvelstyle” scripts, a critique of their new character and comic from an editor’s point of view, new tips on coloring, new expanded writing lessons, and more! (108-page trade paperback) $18 US