Comic Book Artist #13 Preview

COLAN • WOLFMAN • FRIEDRICH • TRIMPE • MARCOS • PERLIN • THOMAS • HEATH

No.13 May 2001

$6.95

Tom b Marv of Dra cu el C hara la TM cters Art , Inc ©20 .

01 G and e Tom n Palm e Cola n er.

In The U.S.

THE MARVEL HORRORSHOW!

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Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher

TWOMORROWS JOHN & PAM MORROW Associate Editors CHRIS KNOWLES DAVID A. ROACH Contributing Editors ROY THOMAS JOHN MORROW

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DEPARTMENTS: THE FRONT PAGE: LAST MINUTE BITS ON THE COMMUNITY OF COMIC BOOK ARTISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS What, no Eisner Award category for the TwoMorrows mags??? At least the Harvey Awards remembers! ..........1 EDITOR’S RANT: THE SINISTER SEVENTIES The revamping of the Comics Code and subsequent deluge of terror comics from Marvel ..................................4 COCHRAN’S CORNER: RETURN OF THE “USED TO” MAN J.R. Cochran, newspaperman and lover of comics, debuts his CBA column by talking with Alan Kupperberg ....5 CBA COMMUNIQUES: LETTERS FROM OUR READERS Scads of Toth commentary and corrections plus responses to our second (and final) Charlton issue....................6 THE BACK PAGE: PRIMETIME FOR THE BROTHERS COOKE Where Ye Ed discusses his younger brother’s 40th birthday and their shared dream ........................................110

Proofreader ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON Cover Art GENE COLAN, pencils TOM PALMER, inks Cover Color TOM ZIUKO Production JON B. COOKE GREAT SWAMP GRAPHICS COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. Jon B. Cooke, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 USA • 401-783-1669 • Fax: 401-783-1287. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT the editorial office. Single issues: $9 postpaid ($11 Canada, $12 elsewhere). Six-issue subscriptions: $36 US, $66 Canada, $72 elsewhere. All characters © their respective owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © their respective authors. ©2001 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Cover acknowledgement: Tomb of Dracula ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS SAM GAFFORD Logo Designer/Title Originator ARLEN SCHUMER Mascot WOODY

by J.D. King Issue Theme Song EXCITABLE BOY Warren Zevon Visit CBA on our Website at: www.twomorrows.com /comicbookartist/

THE MARVEL HORRORSHOW FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE: @!!?* Our Man Fred makes amends with “The Man Who Lived Twice,” Brother Voodoo! ........................................13 SPOTLIGHT ON MARVEL: SHADOWS AND THE DARKNESS David A. Roach examines the short-lived but memorable horror anthology books from the House of Ideas ....14 ROY THOMAS INTERVIEW: SON OF STAN’S YEARS OF HORROR Marvel’s Editor-In-Chief on the Great Horror Revival at Marvel Comics during the Swingin’ Seventies! ..........18 MARV WOLFMAN INTERVIEW: WOLFMAN BY DAY The celebrated scribe of Tomb of Dracula on the title’s longevity and finding his own voice ............................30 GENE COLAN INTERVIEW: THE COLAN MYSTIQUE Tom Field talks to the extraordinary artist on his experience working for Marvel in the ’70s ............................48 TOM PALMER SIDEBAR: GIVING FORM TO SHADOWS The premier Gene Colan inker on the joy of delineating The Dean’s miraculous pencils ..................................55 HERB TRIMPE INTERVIEW: THE INCREDIBLE HERB A fun chat with the Hulk artist on the glory years of the Marvel bullpen and life in the ’70s............................58 RUSS HEATH PORTFOLIO: SON OF SATAN #8 Wow! Didja ever see the artist’s unbelievable job on this obscure mid-’70s Marvel comic? In glorious b-&-w! ......69 GARY FRIEDRICH INTERVIEW: GROOVY GARY AND THE MARVEL YEARS A surprisingly frank and bittersweet talk with longtime Marvel scribe on his bullpen experiences ....................74 DON PERLIN INTERVIEW: PERLIN’S WISDOM The Werewolf by Night artist on his comics career—stretching back to the late ’40s and up to today ..............88 TONY ISABELLA INTERVIEW: TONY’S TERRORS (AND TIGRA, TOO!) Jon B. Knutson quizzes the writer/editor on his first professional comics job and the Marvel horror line ........96 PABLO MARCOS INTERVIEW: PABLO’S AMAZING JOURNEY From his Peruvian upbringing to current work, the superb artist discusses his life (plus great art!) ..................104

Contributors Gene Colan • Tom Palmer Marv Wolfman • Roy Thomas Herb Trimpe • Gary Friedrich Russ Heath • Tony Isabella Don Perlin • Pablo Marcos Marie Severin • Frank Springer Flo Steinberg • Steve Sherman Albert Moy • Tom Horvitz David A. Roach • Tom Field Tom Ziuko • Jon B. Knutson Fred Hembeck • Brian K. Morris Anonymous • John R. Cochran Alan Kupperberg • Alex Toth Cat Yronwode • Sam Gafford John R. Borkowski • J.D. King Greg Huneryager • F. San Millan Warren Sattler • Roger Stern Allan Rosenberg • Jerry K. Boyd Bill Morrison • Bongo Entertainment David “Hambone” Hamilton Steve Morger • Bob Layton/CPL Steve Cohen • Rob Pollak Andy Ihnatko • Russ Maheras Gisella Marcos • Myriam Marcos John Yon • Richard Howell Chris Gage

Opposite page top: Courtesy of an anonymous contributor, this Mike Ploog art depicts four of Marvel’s greatest horror characters from the 1970s: Dracula, Werewolf by Night, the Monster of Frankenstein, and Man-Thing. All characters ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Opposite bottom and this page: Selected panels from Russ Heath’s glorious Son of Satan #8 artwork. Starting on page 69, we have a four-page portfolio from this superb job, sans word balloons! Courtesy of the artist. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. All letters of comment, articles and artwork, please mail to: Jon B. Cooke, Editor, Comic Book Artist, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 • Phone: (401) 783-1669 Fax: (401) 783-1287 • E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com

Dedicated to

Barbara Knutson Get well quick, girl!

And to my baby bro

Andrew D. Cooke on the occasion of his 40th birthday!

Happy-happy joy-joy!

N E X T May 2001

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Spotlight: Marvel

Shadows & the Darkness The horror… the horror: It all started in Towers and Chambers EDITOR'S NOTE: Though he wrote it as an on-topic installment of his “Marginalia” column, we think David A. Roach’s wonderful survey of Marvel’s color comics horror anthology titles is a perfect context piece to kick-start our ’70s celebration. Our esteemed coeditor of the forthcoming Warren Companion is concerned little mention is made of Marvel’s continuing horror series stars, so bear in mind we’ll be covering Dracula, Frankenstein, Werewolf, etc. more comprehensively later in this ish.

Above: Courtesy of penciler Marie Severin, here’s an exquisite Severin/Bill Everett cover to the controversial Tower of Shadows #4, featuring Jack Kirby’s muchchanged story “The Monster.” To find out more about this tale, check out The Jack Kirby Collector #13, also found in The Collected Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 3. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. 14

by David A. Roach 1968 was a truly momentous year for both Marvel and DC. Marvel had finally emerged from the shackles of its oppressive distribution arrangement with main rival DC Comics and the Marvel line began to expand and dominate the marketplace. DC was in the early stages of Carmine Infantino’s revolutionary leadership with old favorites like The Atom, Hawkman, and Doom Patrol being cancelled, and a new group of artist/editors—Joe Orlando, Joe Kubert, Dick Giordano, and Mike Sekowsky taking over from the company’s elder statesmen. However, few observers at the time would have imagined that the year’s most significant development would be Orlando’s revamping of the moribund House of Mystery comic, replacing “Dial H For Hero”’s Robby Reed with an EC-inspired horror title.

The first few Orlando House of Mysterys mix reprints with passable new strips, but soon the likes of Neal Adams, Alex Toth, Bernie Wrightson, Carl Wessler, and Jack Oleck transform the title into a massive seller. Barely more that a year later, DC could boast of five regular horror books: Murray Boltinoff’s revitalized Unexpected, Dick Giordano’s House of Secrets and Witching Hour, and Orlando’s Phantom Stranger and House of Mystery. Inevitably someone at Marvel noticed all this activity and, just as eight years earlier when The Justice League of America prompted them to reenter the super-hero field, so too in 1969 did the House of Ideas decide to launch their own mystery comics. Tower of Shadows premiered in September 1969 and was followed in October by another bi-monthly title, Chamber of Darkness. Marvel had finally entered the modern age of horror.

Tower of Shadows #1 boasts contributions from some of Marvel’s heaviest hitters: Stan Lee, John Buscema. John Romita, and Don Heck as well as EC veteran Johnny Craig, but the best of the issue’s three stories is “At the Stroke of Midnight” by the Great Maverick himself, James Steranko. The story itself hardly breaks new ground—a cantankerous couple murder the husband’s uncle to inherit his fortune and then meet a horrible fate in his festering mansion— but the manner of its telling is truly breathtaking and something very special. Steranko had already made a name for himself as a trailblazing innovator and here he tried every trick in the book—Krigsteinesque multi-paneled pages, color holds, vertiginous angles, black-&white panels, chiaroscuro, and some of the best draftsmanship of his career. The second issue features a typically beautiful Neal Adams

strip, “One Hungers,” while the first few issues of Chamber of Darkness are also home to the best of the Marvel regulars, but even at this early stage, there are signs that Marvel was not quite sure what do do with these comics.

Initially each book features the by now standard cadaverous narrator—The Old Digger in TOS and Headstone P. Gravely in COD, dead ringers respectively for House of Mystery’s Cain and Warren’s Uncle Creepy—but they are soon edged out by the innovation of having each strip’s creators narrate the story, presumably on the basis that the likes of Tom Sutton and Sal Buscema are scarier than any mere literary concoction. More significantly, the established stars are replaced with a mixture of young, occasionally raw, talent and some of comics’ more temperamental veterans. While the likes of Len Wein, Allyn Brodsky, and Steve Skeates are all given early scripting opportunities, there are also rare chances for artists to write their own material, a situation seized upon by Wally Wood. His four stories in TOS #5-8 are all terrific fun, allowing him to wallow in his favorite Tolkien-meets-Prince Valiant subject matter. None of them are intellectually challenging but, boy, are they pretty! TOS #5’s “Flight into Fear” is probably the pick of the bunch.

Over in Chamber of Darkness, the increasingly unhappy Jack Kirby is given a pair of rare scripting opportunities though at least one, “The Monster” in #4, was altered considerably before publication. Neither strip is exactly revolutionary but at least John Verpoorten’s bold inking is pleasingly true to Kirby’s pencils.

Verpoorten appears in six issues of the horror comics, just edging out neophyte penciler Barry Smith as the lines’ most prolific contributor.

Smith’s five stories come just before his emergence into stardom with Conan and his Kirby fixation is still very much to the fore. His work in the ’60s is characterized by all manner of visual tricks in the Steranko mold, and some rather indifferent, if energetic figure work. Smith is always at the mercy of his inkers and while Dan Adkins does a beautiful job on TOS #5’s “Demon That Devoured Hollywood,” Vince Colletta positively murders the Brit’s art two issues later. Smith’s most attractive, and by far his most important, strip is the collaboration with Roy Thomas in COD #4, “The Sword and the Sorcerers,” inked by the artist himself. It’s story of a pulp writer confronted—and killed—by his barbarian creation, Starr the Slayer, is cleverly told and attractively rendered but its true importance is as a dry run for Conan the Barbarian. Starr is Conan in all but name, right down to his horned helmet and his appearance here unwittingly foreshadows the course of Marvel’s success for the next decade. Where they would try a succession of horror books and fail, the barbarian comics would meet with immense acclaim and inspire a mini-industry of imitators.

We will hear about barbarians again before this story is all told.

One of DC’s rising stars—and horror stalwart—Bernie Wrightson makes a late appearance in Marvel’s horror books, contributing four great covers to TOS and COD combined and a decent strip to COD #7. His cover to the ninth issue of Tower of Shadows is a particular treat for students of fashion featuring as it does a selfportrait of Wrightson sporting a very fetching pair of checkered shorts and Indian-style moccasins. Nice! The next issue stars another Wrightson contribution but it is not a horror strip and the comic is no longer called Tower of Shadows. Significantly it is an example of the lack of confidence and direction which would plague Marvel throughout its horror line. As early as TOS #6, reprints are beginning to appear and by the final issue of COD, barely six months later, the new Material shrank to a derisory six pages.

With its tenth issue, Tower of Shadows is renamed Creatures on COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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the Loose and Chamber of Darkness becomes Monsters on the Prowl. Bernie Wrightson’s strip in the first Creature is no horror tale, but was instead the first comics adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s legendary King Kull. Despite Wrightson’s art being poorly printed, the resulting fan acclaim soon led to a Kull title. Meanwhile, seemingly unnoticed, Monsters and Creatures continue to run new strips, albeit behind the Kirby and Ditko reprints. All told, nine new horror stories are printed over the course of the ensuing year and a half, strips that are almost certainly inventory tales from TOS and COD. Amongst many nice surprises is a typically beautiful Ralph Reese chiller, an unlikely collaboration between Jack (First Kingdom) Katz and Barry Smith and one of Reed Crandall’s final art jobs.

A Stan Lee/Manfred Sommer monsterfest in Monsters on the Prowl #12 is decidedly out of left field since Sommer was a Spanish artist of some renown not recognized for his horror work. Unfortunately the strip is not up to his usual high standard, unlike probably the most interesting of the inventory stories. Len Wein’s “Underground Gambit” in Creatures #11 is a hidden gem revolving around superstar underground cartoonist Roger Krass, famed for his counterculture strip, Peter of the People. But Krass has a secret: He’s really a “square” who loathes his hippy admirers. “Gibbering fools—they wouldn’t recognize real art if it came up and bit them on the leg!” One day Krass is discovered by suave talent scout Herbert T. Brimstone (hmmm) who promises the artist a lucrative contract if he will only sign up to Brimstone’s new syndicate. Which he does, of course! His hippy friends are appalled at his sudden transformation into a suit-wearing, short-haired young executive—”I don’t believe it! Roger’s sold out to the Establishment!”

Unfortunately—and don’t say you didn’t see it coming!—Brimstone turns out to be the devil and Krass finds out just what it is like to be a true “underground” artist.

The moral of the story appears to be don’t sell out to The Man or you will end up in Hell, a sentiment we can all relate to, right, kids?

Herb Trimpe’s art is perfect throughout, from Krass’s Crumbesque comic strip to his bouffant wig and peace sign medallion. No one draws hippies quite like Herb. Sadly, once the inventory material runs out (with a final rogue strip by Rich Buckler cropping up in Where Monsters Dwell #15) Monsters on the Prowl becomes an all-reprint book (not before running another Kull strip, though this time as a preview of the newly-revived Kull book). For its part, Creatures on the Loose #16 stars another sword-&-sorcery strip, the underrated Roy Thomas/Gil Kane “Gullivar Jones” feature. This runs for a few more issues before being replaced by a further barbarian, Lin Carter’s “Thongor of Lost Lemuria.”

Creatures on the Loose bucks the trend though. While Marvel seemingly lacks the will to compete head-to-head with DC’s anthology books, they are happy to flood the market with reprints. From Where Monsters Dwell to Tomb of Darkness, the publisher brings out ten fully reprint titles which plunders their ’50s mystery archives and the early-’60s Kirby and Ditko monster strips. Unperturbed by this, DC’s horror line grows and grows, with new titles Ghosts and Weird War Tales soon joined by Swamp Thing, Weird Mystery Tales, Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion, and Secrets of Sinister House. Horror sold and at DC seemingly anything could be given the mystery makeover, from weird Westerns and weird adventure to Gothic romance and even weird humor (the immortal Plop!).

In 1972, Marvel finally hits paydirt. Marvel Spotlight, a horror version of DC’s Showcase, brings us “Werewolf by Night,” “Ghost Rider,” and “The Son of Satan” while Tomb of Dracula, “Man-Thing” (taking over the previously all-reprint Fear book) and The Monster of Frankenstein all find an enthusiastic audience. These strips are essentially variations on Marvel’s patented “super-heroes with problems” approach (“monsters with issues,” if you will) which makes the monsters the stars and introduces strong continuity, ensuring reader loyalty. Still, the continuing presence of DC’s books must have been a constant challenge which Marvel, and Editor-In-Chief Roy Thomas in particular, simply can’t ignore, so between October 1972 and May ’73, four new anthology books hit the racks.

Realizing that the old titles had sometimes lacked direction, Thomas decides to build a new line around adaptations of classic horror and science-fiction stories. The first issue of the revived Journey Into Mystery sets the pattern of things to come with a powerful Roy Thomas/Gil Kane adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Dig Me No Grave,” backed-up with contributions from Ralph Reese, Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, and Steve Skeates.

Next month’s premiere, Chamber of Chills #1, is perhaps not quite so impressive although subsequent issues make up for that with some lovely Frank Brunner strips. One month later, yet another new book is released: Supernatural Thrillers, which is to feature book-length adaptations of varying quality. The first issue’s retelling of Ted Sturgeon’s “It!” by Thomas, Marie Severin, and Frank Giacoia is certainly strong but diluted somewhat by its similarity to Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, The Heap, et al. The last of the four books to appear is clearly a labor of love for Thomas: Worlds Unknown, which adapts classic s-f stories and is something of a dry run for the more highly regarded Unknown May 2001

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Steranko: Master Storyteller A personal look at Marvel’s greatest horror story, “At the Stroke of Midnight” Even my first glance at Jim Steranko’s “At the Stroke of Midnight” from Tower of Shadows #1 told me there was something more going on here than casual comic book fare. This horror tale, which is rather tame by the EC Comics standards of explicit gore, is a chilling nightmare; a Gothic noir tale of terror filled with dread, draped in paranoia thick enough to make H.P. Lovecraft proud.

Consisting of 90 panels in only a seven-page tale, this graphic tour de force broke new ground upon its publication in 1969, shredding comic book conventions and proving Steranko was as much a student of film as sequential art, building on the visual techniques of the world’s greatest cinematographers. It is, simply put, breathtaking in execution.

Even today, it resonates with mood and atmospherics rarely matched in our field. It’s a simple story of retribution from beyond the grave and, if you’ve never seen it, find a copy right away; it needs to be experienced to be fully understood and appreciated.

As Steranko’s “My Heart Broke in Hollywood” (in Our Love Story #5) is the finest Marvel love story ever produced, so too is this Tower of Shadows story the best weird story to be published by the House of Ideas—perhaps the greatest horror tale printed by any publisher, rivaled only by Bernie Krigstein’s “Master Race” for innovative technique.

(Interestingly, the romance and Tower stories were the last two Steranko produced for Marvel in this period, a sad testament to how out of touch the company— and perhaps the entire industry—was in advancing the art form. Not to take anything away from Steranko’s superb super-hero comics of the period, but this is the work I’ll remember most when another 30 years has passed.)

According to the 1998 Vanguard Productions book Steranko: Graphic Prince of Darkness, the story was originally titled “The Lurking Fear at Shadow House”, but the name was changed by Marvel’s editor. Steranko also submitted an extraordinarily bold and innovative cover for that first issue (printed on the gatefold cover of the Vanguard book), but it was rejected by Stan Lee. (I urge readers to seek out Steranko’s original cover and comments on “Shadow House”; write to: Vanguard Productions, 59-A Philhower Road, Lebanon, NJ 08833.)

For me personally, this story (and to a lesser extent Steranko’s impressive work on Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #3) served as a limitless well of inspiration for my early attempts at a future in art. The year I discovered both books (1979), my high school literary magazine was littered with my swipes of Steranko’s work, feebly aping his moody lighting technique. Despite the crude rendering, “my” illos got rave reviews; I guess even my lack of skill couldn’t hide the brilliance of the source material. If not for the encouragement I got from that experience, I may never have ventured into an advertising/graphic design career, and in turn might never have started publishing comics magazines. I guess you could say Steranko’s work—particularly “At the Stroke of Midnight”—is at least indirectly responsible for the magazine you’re holding. As I learned in high school, a strong foundation is important, and I started with the best. -John Morrow, publisher Above inset: Courtesy of Albert Moy, the splash page of Steranko’s masterpiece, “At the Stroke of Midnight,” from Tower of Shadows #1. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. 15

CBA Interview

Son of Stan: Roy’s Years of Horror Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief discusses the ’70s macabre mags

EDITOR'S NOTE: While an in-depth discussion on the Marvel black-&-white horror line was completed during this interview, because of space considerations we’ve had to excise all of that discussion. CBA hopes to include Roy’s insightful comments on that aspect of Marvel’s history in a planned future issue devoted to the non-Warren b-&-w mags. Our apologies to R.T.

Below: Roy Thomas, Marvel’s #2 editorial guy, in mid-sentence during a Creem magazine photo shoot. Dig that belt! Photo by Raeanne Rubinstein. ©1973 Creem Magazine.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris As a consulting editor for CBA, our next interview subject is heavily relied upon by us for deep background on many aspects of 1970s comics. It should go without saying to comics fans of Marvel’s “Second Wave,” that Roy Thomas served as Stan Lee’s immediate successor as the company’s Editor-In-Chief for a short, but eminently memorable tenure, helming the celebrated horror revival, never mind initiating the barbarian frenzy of that decade. It was Ye Ed’s pleasure to interview the talented writer/editor by telephone on March 8, 2001. Roy copyedited the final transcript.

CBA: Marvel had traditionally been a catch-up company in that they would follow an innovative leader, whether it was the crime or romance genre, whatever genre that was currently successful...

Roy: Even Fantastic Four was follow-the-leader.

CBA: I guess it was, but it became an anomaly unto itself.

Roy: It wasn’t intended that way, that’s not what Martin Goodman had in mind! [laughs] It was follow-the-leader, another super-hero book. It was only Stan and Jack Kirby together who made it something more.

CBA: And then Marvel conquered the comics universe in the ’60s. They were finally leading the pack!

Roy: By the late ’60s, early ’70s, yeah… I think it was in ’72 that Marvel finally passed DC in total sales, but they were gaining all the way through. In that two weeks I spent at DC in ’65, they were having meetings about the heat from Marvel, and I was startled, because I hadn’t realized how much they felt the competition from Marvel, which of course they’d see Marvel’s sales figures since they distributed Marvel.

CBA: What was the concept behind the Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness books?

Roy: DC was having some luck with House of Mystery and House of Secrets. After all, Marvel at one time had basically had a lock on the horror market… not in terms of quality, but in terms of quantity. [laughs] They had tremendous sales during the early ’50s, so it was a natural to try to get back into the genre again. The only problem was that, after the first issue or two, with our being too busy to pay a lot of attention to them, they didn’t have the focus Joe Orlando could give to the DC books by concentrating on a handful of titles. Stan would concentrate on the books for the first issue or two, but then they were supposed to run themselves. He wasn’t going to be in on every plot conference, and I had too many things to do to go over every little story, so we just tried to hire a bunch of people to do good stories. But they didn’t ever have any unity. Carmine Infantino says that Joe Orlando was the “secret weapon” in DC’s mystery comics, and maybe to some extent that’s true. Even though we had Archie Goodwin working there part of the time, we really didn’t have anybody that really concentrated on that editorially. Archie was a freelance writer, and I was concerned with other things, and couldn’t do all of it, nor could Stan.

CBA: You started off incredibly, right out of the gate, with Tower of Shadows, having a superb story by Steranko. How was that

assigned to him? Did he come up with the story?

Roy: I don’t recall, but I would imagine that Stan went to Steranko as somebody who could do that kind of thing. Maybe Steranko had talked to him about it, I really don’t know. Didn’t Steranko do a cover, but we weren’t able to use it, it wasn’t clear enough for Goodman?

CBA: Yeah, right. It was an amazing cover.

Roy: But it was a problem, because sometimes you had two or three different people running the company. Stan and Goodman were increasingly on different wavelengths as the time came near the end of their relationship.

CBA: With Stan focusing on those first two issues of Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness, he was getting the best artists in the industry to contribute, right? Steranko, Neal Adams, Wally Wood all did stories, even a young Barry Smith.

Roy: And Vinnie Colletta inked Barry’s stories! Barry had all these weird faces in trees in one story, and Vinnie just went, “It’s a tree!” and inked it like that! [laughter] That wasn’t one of our better pairings.

CBA: Who determined the stories have the actual writers and artists introduce the stories?

Roy: Probably Stan. I think he wanted to give the book some personality, so he said, “Well, we’ll have the writers do some, and the artists do some.” Of course, the writer ended up writing the artist’s words, but I don’t think there were any artists who wanted to bother with the writing. I would write Barry, and if he wanted to change something, that would’ve been fine. Those introductions were a nice touch which evaporated after a few issues. Stan wanted to start off with these host characters… like the “Gravedigger” that Steranko came up with. That seemed like it was copying not just DC, but EC and everything else that had gone before, so Stan was looking for something different. I think that’s why he came up with the idea of having the artists and writers introduce the stories. It was kind of cute for the little length of time it lasted—not very long, I think.

CBA: The titles obviously became reprint books...

Roy: From the very beginning I don’t think sales were that great, and I don’t believe there was the commitment to stick around and do it, because they were so much trouble compared to the super-hero books, having three different sets of writers and artists every issue, as opposed to one. We weren’t really geared for it, because we didn’t have a big editorial staff, like DC. Stan and I were editing everything, and the writers were editing what they did, and we had a few assistant editors that didn’t really have any authority… that was about it.

We didn’t have the right kind of a set-up at the time to make a hit of those books. I think the black-&-whites did a little better later, simply because people like Marv and others could come in and be editors, concentrating on a handful of books.

CBA: So Chamber and Tower were pretty much children of neglect?

Roy: I think so.

CBA: Who was Mimi Gold?

Roy: Mimi Gold was a young woman who worked at Marvel—I don’t remember how she got a job—but she came in, worked as a general assistant around the place. The thing I remember most about her, besides that she was a fun person, was that she took it upon herself to spend a lot of time working on getting Barry Smith back into the States after he was forcibly deported. The two of them went together for a while. In fact, I remember when my wife Jeanie and I went to Britain in the summer of 1970, we spent a lot of time with COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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the two of them, because she had gone over ahead. They were together for a little while after Barry came back, but then they went their separate ways.

CBA: Who was Allyn Brodsky?

Roy: I forget how I met him, but I remember I had him come to my apartment once. He’d written a letter, and he was—no relation to Sol—a nice personable young man in his twenties who was knowledgeable about horror. Although I’d seen the name before, he’s the person who really turned me on to H.P. Lovecraft. He became an assistant editor. A lot of the writers had a left-leaning feel to their writing, but Allyn was more conservative, and that made for a little balance. He turned out not to be the greatest proofreader in the world, but he did some writing for the company for a while. I saw him for the last time at Christy Marx’s house, maybe 15 years ago. I wish I knew where he was now! He’s the guy who ended up doing most of the rewriting on the “Casablanca” story [in Sgt. Fury #72, as related in Roy’s article “Play It Again, Stan!” in Alter Ego V.3, #6] and I’d like to talk to him about it and see what he can remember that the rest of us have forgotten, because he spent a whole weekend with that monster! Allyn Brodsky, where are you?!? [laughter] He was out in the L.A. area, last I heard.

CBA: Was there talk in the office about liberalizing the Code?

Roy: Oh, yes, Stan was always wanting to do that, because he felt increasingly constrained by the Code. The drug thing was part of it, I think that’s what brought some of it to a head, but I think it was always constraining. Not that Stan wanted to go wild and return to the horror days of the ’50s—he practically had nightmares about being kept off PXs in those days!—but combine the Wertham scare May 2001

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with that American News debacle in ’57, and it was a bad decade. He just wanted to liberalize the Code so we could make our own choices, as opposed to having somebody tell us, “You can’t say this, you can’t do that.”

CBA: Did you sit in on any of those Code meetings?

Roy: No, they were closed meetings. Stan had to go, though he didn’t like to, just like Carmine didn’t. I had dinner once or twice once in a while with Len Darvin, the head of the Code, with whom I was quite friendly. I remember when I was married in ’68, he took my bride Jeanie and me out to dinner. We didn’t always agree on the censorship stuff, but he was a nice guy. He’d been a lawyer and then drifted into being the head of the Code when Mrs. Guy Percy Trulock quit.

CBA: When did Len become head of the Code?

Roy: I think it was late ’65, early ’66, a few months after I got there. Mrs. Trulock was offered a subscription to any issue of Marvel she wanted when she left, and she chose Thor, because she liked the language. [laughter] There had been that judge in the ’50s, then there was Mrs. Trulock, and then Darvin for many years.

Len and I would fight on the phone, but I didn’t deal with him too often. I remember having a few weird conversations about changes in Conan, but it was usually pretty civilized. I think I respected him more than some of the other old-line people did, and I think he sensed that I didn’t have the ingrown hostility toward him. You’d think, being younger, maybe I would have, but I didn’t. I was brought up with respect for my elders, and I didn’t automatically think that, just because he was working for the Code, he had to be an idiot.

CBA: Were you champing at the bit for liberalization of the Code?

Above: The whole blamed Marvel bullpen pose for a Rolling Stone camera in 1971, the same year horror returned to the comics house. Can you name all the inmates? Give it a go and we’ll give you a Yo-Prize if you’re correct! Photo by D.E. Leach. ©1971 Straight Arrow Publications.

Left inset: Our Man Stan, chief architect of the horror revival at Marvel. This pic is from an unidentified British fanzine which featured a Stan Lee interview in the ’70s. Courtesy of Jerry K. Boyd. ©2001 the respective copyright holder.

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CBA Interview

Wolfman by Day Marv on Tomb of Dracula and the Marvel b-&-w mags EDITOR'S NOTE: Marv Wolfman and Ye Ed agreed that the pending litigation between the writer and Marvel Comics over the ownership of the Wolfman-created character Blade (featured in a recent Wesley Snipes film) would not be a topic for this interview. CBA suggests those interested to follow The Comics Journal’s news editor Michael “Scoop” Dean’s fine reporting on the case in that mag.

Opposite page: This Gene Colanpenciled and Tom Palmer-inked Dracula image appeared in an issue of FOOM. Courtesy of Tom Palmer. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Recent studio portrait of Marv Wolfman. Courtesy of Marv.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Marv Wolfman has been—especially since his astounding 60+ issue run on Tomb of Dracula—considered one of the best writers in the comics field. Marv has also had acclaimed tenures on The New Teen Titans, Superman, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and numerous other titles.

This interview was conducted via phone during two sessions—on the 19th and 26th of January, 2001. The writer copyedited the transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Last time we’d left off—in your CBA #5 interview—you’d taken on a teacher’s position after leaving DC? Marv Wolfman: Yes and no. I was doing some writing for DC, but that was sporadic and freelance. Meanwhile, I had been studying art as a major, and education as a minor to become a teacher, so I was teaching while writing for Skywald, and just one or two things for DC, but not really a lot.

CBA: What did you do at Skywald?

Marv: Lots of horror stories.

CBA: Who were you dealing with?

Marv: Sol Brodsky, the “Sky” of Skywald.

CBA: What did you think of the books, generally?

Marv: Not as good as the Warren books. The paper was cheaper, the books were a lot cheaper. However, I wrote the type of stories I wanted, and when I wasn’t doing the standard stories, I did a fairly strong demon-type series with Rich Buckler about gods and devils.

CBA: Rich mentioned that to me.

It was quite an ambitious….

Marv: It would’ve been even bigger if we had continued. Also I did a pretty dreadful thing with Ernie Colón called “The Love Witch,” and many other stories as well.

CBA: Did you work fullscript at the time, or was it “Marvelstyle”?

Marv: It was all fullscript.

CBA: With Rich, did you coplot these things?

Marv: No. I believe I submitted the script to Sol and Rich was assigned, but it’s possible Rich and I came in together. I don’t have the memory of that.

CBA: I read a quote in Les Daniels’ history of Marvel that you don’t like horror. Is that so?

Marv: No, I liked horror, I published a horror fanzine called Stories of Suspense. What I was not a big fan of was horror movies. I have a very graphic mind, and they actually terrified me. It took a long time, many years, before I could see a horror film.

CBA: You mean even the Universal pictures?

Marv: Oh, no, I’m not talking silly monster films, I’m talking about more intense horror films.

CBA: The ones that were coming to the fore in the ’60s.

Marv: Yeah. By the way, what did Rich say about the angels and demons story? I don’t remember the situation much at all. I assumed I wrote it full-script, because I was writing everything full script. Did he remember otherwise?

CBA: No, he remembered it as being ambitious and said he was disappointed that you guys didn’t finally resolve the story.

Marv: I was a big fan of… [laughs] it sounds pretentious, but of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and wanted to do a comic version—not of that story, but of the type of material or storyline that it dealt with, only in my own way. A dream project of mine would be to do a comic book version of Paradise Lost.

CBA: Are you saying that you’d like to return to it some day?

Marv: Very much, I just don’t think anyone would be interested. [laughter] CBA: Have to be a labor of love!

Marv: Exactly. For me and the artist.

CBA: Did you seek out Skywald specifically as a market? Why not Warren, for instance?

Marv: I think Sol Brodsky may have asked me to work for them, because I had done some of the mystery books at Marvel, Tower of Shadows, Chamber of Darkness….

CBA: Doug Moench told me after only having a few stories published by Warren, Sol called him up and asked if he wanted to come over and be an assistant editor at Skywald, move from Chicago to New York on virtue of just a couple of stories. Doug was slightly taken aback by that, was startled, to be asked to write Hell-Rider, of all things.

Marv: That would’ve been the way Sol operated.

CBA: You were an editor at Warren for about six months?

Marv: Warren thinks I was there shorter, I believe I was there slightly longer. I think I was there not quite a year, but eight months or so. The only reason my memory is such that I remember Roy asking me to come to Marvel twice. I had turned him down once after I had been at Warren for several months, because I was happy at Warren, and then he asked me several months later to come again to Marvel, and at this point, I was ready to, or interested, and it took about a month or two after that to actually get there. So, I think I was there about eight months.

CBA: What was your experience at Warren? How would you characterize it?

Marv: Pretty good. I liked Jim, always have. He let me alone, I was just about to do some interesting stuff with the books, and when I left, they never got done, although I had set them up to try to break the formula, which was five or six unrelated horror stories, unrelated.

I was going to be doing, and had commissioned, for instance, an allvampire issue, and an all-werewolf issue, telling the stories of the vampire from the very first vampire to the very last one. That’s the one I was originally going to put Blade into.

CBA: Not only themes, but concepts?

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May 2001

Marv: And all the authors I contacted—I’m sure Doug was one of them—had a time period that they were going to do a story in, and most of the stories were done before I left, or as I left, but they were never published in order. My feeling was that I knew Marvel was coming into the field, and Marvel’s strength was series, and I felt that the anthology, although very strong, did not compel you to return issue to issue. I was trying to come up with concepts that would make you want to read the entire book and make you look forward to something a little bit different. The books had already been around for ten years or so, so you try to do different things, and that was one of them. [At this point, the talk veers off to an in-depth discussion of Marv’s eight-month or so stint as an editor for Warren Publications, which will appear in the upcoming TwoMorrows’ book, The Warren Companion.]

CBA: Marvel was offering you better money than what Warren was giving you?

Marv: Oh, tremendously.

CBA: Who called you?

Marv: Roy. I had known Roy for years, through the fan circles and also professionally. He’s the one who brought me into Tower of Shadows, Captain Marvel, and whatever else I did at Marvel, Kid Colt Outlaw, or some book like that. Roy had asked me because they needed somebody, and I turned it down, and then a couple of months later, he asked again at the Rutland Halloween Parade, that’s why I know exactly when this happened. After Halloween, we’d all taken a large bus back from Rutland to New York—we had taken the bus up, as well—and Roy asked me on the way back, so it had to be November 2 when he asked me. I said I’d think about it, thought about it for a week or a little bit more than that, called him back, but Roy was going through some personal situations, and we didn’t even connect for another week or two after that. Once we worked out the details, I gave a month’s notice to Jim. CBA: Was this just before they came into the black-&-white horror line?

Marv: Before. I knew I was coming in to essentially be the editor of them. Although I was listed as assistant editor, I knew I’d be the editor in name very quickly after that.

CBA: So that was part of the deal going over. Was Jim cognizant of the fact that you were going over to work on the black-&-whites?

Marv: Yeah.

CBA: Did Jim give you a strong reaction?

Marv: He was not pleased with that, but financially, I couldn’t afford to stay. I had to move to New York, as I was living on Long Island, from where I’d been a teacher. It was a two-hour commute each way, so I had to move into the city. It was suddenly much more expensive to move. It was okay to commute at the salary Jim was paying me for three days a week. But suddenly, that three-days-a-week salary could not pay for everything I needed, and he couldn’t increase it financially for five days a week, so I really had to go over to Marvel. Otherwise, I enjoyed working up there, and there was a lot of freedom.

CBA: Did you have favorite contributors you were working with at Warren?

Marv: Well, the best ones I took with me to Marvel. In some ways, Doug Moench was a favorite. You could call Doug, and he’d do a story on almost anything, and it will come in instantly. He was fast, he was good. Marty Pasko, I believe did some. I really don’t remember too many more.

CBA: Did you bring Don McGregor over?

Marv: I believe Roy brought him over.

CBA: All of a sudden, Marvel decided that they’re going to go into Jim Warren’s playground with the black-&-white horror books.

Marv: Well, I think you have to go back a little bit to remember that they had done Savage Tales #1 a couple of years before that. Marvel wanted to get into the b-&-w field, and I think that’s because Jim proved it was successful. But Marvel primarily did it on their terms, which was for the most part lead series, characters. The books didn’t have unrelated mystery stories. Warren was far closer to EC, but Marvel always put characters into their horror books.

CBA: Roy tells the anecdote that one morning, Stan walked in and said, “We’re going to do two black-&-white horror books,” and the next morning he said, “We’re going to do three,” and then four, and Roy was suddenly dumped with this enormous load of books to do, and he obviously hired you to come in….

Marv: …and dumped it on me! [laughter] CBA: Was that daunting? What was your first day at work like?

Marv: Well, I started before the books got started, so my first day of work was proofreading color comics. There was a lot of work before everything started moving, and it started fairly slowly. So, I don’t have a memory of the day the horror books started, I just remember slowly moving over to them. Dracula Lives! and Tales of the Zombie, Monsters Unleashed and Vampire Tales all started at once, and the requirement was that there be a certain number of original pages, a certain number of reprints, and some text pages. Within a few months after that, then the books started to have all original material, and we introduced other books as well: Deadly Hands of Kung Fu and all the others. That’s when things started going insane. At one point, I noticed I was handling the entire line by myself—except for Conan, of course, which Roy handled—and counted the number of original pages in each issue, because I wasn’t paying a lot of attention as I was working so hard, and discovered that I was producing, by myself as an editor, more pages than the entire color line! [laughMay 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Above: The splash page to Ye Ed’s favorite Marvel b-&-w story. By Marv Wolfman and Neal Adams from Dracula Lives! #2. Why hasn’t this story ever been reprinted?

Below: Bob Foster’s hilarious “History of Moosekind” feature ran in a zillion issues of Crazy.

Appropriately, here’s Bob’s version of “The Moose of Darkness.” ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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ter] All original pages! We were having 50-some-odd pages an issue, and at that point the comics had 17. So, I realized that was why I was tired all the time. We managed to bring in an assistant at that point. But for several months, I was producing the line by myself, including Crazy magazine, which was 52 pages of all-new material where I was not allowed to use any Marvel staffers. That had to be done outside of Marvel. I could use some of the artists and some of the writers, but nobody on staff. It had to have its own department, it had to be completely separate from everything else. I don’t know why.

CBA: No idea why?

Marv: I had no idea why I couldn’t use anybody else. It was a different production department, done outside Marvel completely. It took a while before they let me use any artists outside of Marie Severin, who drew comedy so wonderfully. That’s why if you look, virtually all the artists in Crazy were people you may never have heard of, or from other fields. I realized at some point—and I’m not quite sure how—that editorial cartoonists, who are brilliant artists, have nothing to do three-quarters of the day, until the editorial decision is made as to what they need to draw for the next day’s paper.

Then, suddenly, it’s a flurry of action, so these people are usually sitting around for a long, long time. I actually had Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists doing stories for me, because it was extra money for them, and they got to draw—which they loved—and they had plenty of time to do it. Among them were Dick Wright and Vance

Rodewalt.

CBA: You know, the book felt kind of Marvel, but it wasn’t kind of Marvel. Didn’t you introduce that moose character?

Marv: Myron? I’d found Bob Foster through a small comic he did called Myron Moose. [laughter] I fell in love with it, and called him.

He was shocked that anyone had ever seen the thing. I asked him if he’d do more moose stuff for us, and I think I came up with the idea of “History of Moosekind.” [laughter] I could be wrong, but I think I did. He was going to put Myron in it, but I said, “No, don’t put Myron in, I want an original.” So, Bob did that incredible job, and brought in a lot of Disney artists as well with him.

CBA: That series really was a history that was developed, issue after issue, and it was densely-packed, just hilarious satire!

Marv: It was incredible satire, and the reason it worked was that Bob used real history as the basis, and altered it into this moose thing. Bob was one of those artists and writers who… I don’t quite know why, but I just look at his stuff and break out laughing, [laughter] it was just so ludicrous and funny and satiric and smart that it was surprising. I had never seen anything like that. I desperately wanted to do a comedy magazine that was different from Cracked, which is what Stan wanted. He didn’t want Mad, because as he said, we couldn’t afford to do Mad; he wanted Cracked. I kept saying, “You know, you don’t have to pay a lot for cleverness, you just have to find the right talent.” Where I could, I found the people who could do it.

CBA: Was it difficult to maintain the schedule of doing all these books?

Marv: Crazy was the hardest, because that one I did by myself. We also had a very low budget, so I had to keep figuring out ways to save money. One of the ways was, I had my ex-wife take a photo of an old radio—one photo—and I would write three or four pages using this radio, each page was self-contained, six panels on the page, nothing changed, just that same radio, and you’d have to read the copy… it was a radio show! [laughter] And it would be continued three or four times per issue, every issue. Because as editor, I didn’t pay myself, and we only paid once for the photo. I managed to get four pages free, which I could then use to pay the artists and writers on the rest of the book a little bit more, to slowly get the rates up to the Marvel level.

CBA: Marvel was in the same building as National Lampoon. Did you ever encounter freelancers working for them, and were able to get them to work for you?

Marv: No. The strange thing was, one of the pieces I wrote, and in fact won a Shazam! award for, was originally intended for the Lampoon.

CBA: What was that?

Marv: That was “Kaspar the Dead Baby.” [laughter] Before the Lampoon started, I submitted an idea called “The Dead Baby, the Witch and the Very Fat Duck.” They were interested in it. I was gonna come back but never did. The rest is history, [laughter] and that story got done in Crazy.

CBA: Did you ever go downstairs to visit the National Lampoon offices?

Marv: Just that one time.

CBA: I think it was Marie who told me it was amazing how much fun it was at Marvel, and then you go over to the National Lampoon, and it would be so quiet, so reserved… [laughs] Marv: Marie, of course, worked at that building longer than I had.

Within a few months of my coming to Marvel, we shifted buildings, so I just never did visit National Lampoon much.

CBA: You were able to do a lot of fumetti, which was also popular in Lampoon.

Marv: That was also to keep the prices down. I love fumettis. I did them again at Disney Adventures magazine. I love them from the days of Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! magazine that I had read as a kid, and wanted to do them in Crazy. We did a number of them, originals such as the one you keep printing Dick Giordano’s photo from, [laughter] which is one of my favorites.

CBA: Did you take the pictures?

Marv: No, my ex-wife did. We then got a deal with Art Buchwald, and we adapted some of his columns into photo stories, and we also worked with Jean Shepherd.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

CBA Interview

The Colan Mystique His name is Eugene, and the talk is about Tomb of Dracula Conducted by Tom Field Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson This interview, conducted in Gene Colan’s Vermont home on February 18, 2001, focuses strictly on the artist’s career at Marvel in the 1970s. Gene’s wife, Adrienne, makes some very welcome comments throughout our talk. For more on Colan’s early years and his beginnings at Marvel in the 1960s, please refer to the highly informative and entertaining interview conducted by Roy Thomas in Alter Ego #6. —Tom Field

Below: The Dean with his beloved canines, basking in the rays at his Vermont home. Ye ed has the pleasure of doing a drive-by at Gene’s abode this past February.

Thanks for the hospitality, Mr. Colan! Courtesy of the artist.

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Comic Book Artist: About the time 1970 hits, you’re drawing Daredevil, Captain America, maybe the occasional Sub-Mariner and some of the mystery/romance stories in the anthologies. You’ve been at Marvel for nearly five years, and your career is going along smoothly. Then all of a sudden Jack Kirby leaves Marvel and goes to DC. What do you remember about that time? Was there a bit of a shake-up?

Gene Colan: No, I wasn’t aware of it. I was in my own world.

[All I thought about was] what am I going to do, and how am I going to do it.

CBA: Now, you had a good working relationship with Stan Lee. But even before Jack left, Stan started to pull back from scripting.

Suddenly, you weren’t working with Stan exclusively; you were working with Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and other writers. How did your working relationships change?

Gene: I tried to give the writers whatever they had written down. If there was something I wasn’t sure of, I’d give them a call, try to get them to tell me what they were looking for, and I would try very hard to give them what they had written on the page. I much preferred to work with Stan, because he left everything up to me! When I worked with Stan, he’d give me a sentence or two, and he’d say, “Now, turn that into an 18page story.” So I had to break it down. I never wrote it out. John Romita would, very meticulously, I think, do little thumbnail sketches, and try to get the thing to pace right. I

would do it all in my head, and sometimes I’d get into trouble that way.

CBA: Now, when you started working with fuller plots, did that affect your enjoyment of the material you were working on?

Gene: The [newer] writers wanted a lot of control, I thought.

They tried to tell the artist—depending on the writer, some of them were a little more controlling than others—how to go about setting up a scene, what the composition would be. I resented it. I’m the artist, he’s the writer! “You write the story. I’ll do the work—I’ll do the visuals—but stop telling me what to do!”

CBA: Did you express yourself to them, or suffer in silence?

Gene: Usually suffered in silence.

CBA: So, let’s talk about Tomb of Dracula. How did you hear that Marvel was going to do this project?

Gene: I must’ve heard about it from one of the editors up there at the time, or Stan himself, and I know I had a talk with Stan about it.

I said, “Stan, I’d literally beg for this.” He asked, “Why?” And I said, “Because I know it’s something I’d love to do.”

CBA: What was it that appealed to you?

Gene: The atmospheric backgrounds that would be necessary to render the evil, the scariness of it all….

CBA: At that point, you didn’t know who was going to write it?

Gene: I had no idea who was going to write it, but Stan had the control, and I wanted to be the artist on the project. They had other monster books at the time—they were giving tests to several of them—and I asked Stan [for Dracula], and he said, “Okay, fine,” and I let it go. I figured he said all right, so I can get it—all right! But then he changed his mind without me knowing it, and who was going to get it but Bill Everett? I called Stan up and said, “Stan, that’s not what you told me!” He said, “Well, Bill had it long before I told you that you could do it, and I promised it to him.” I knew he was double-talking me—I just knew it—so I sat down right away, and I worked out a whole page of Dracula’s character study, and all different poses in a montage. I wish I had that page today.

Adrienne Colan: I hate to be a buttinsky, but… what happened was, Gene was devastated, but took it as, “That’s it,” because Stan was so final about it. But this was around the time the first Godfather movie came out, and there was this big story going around the industry how Marlon Brando saw himself as the Godfather, but the studios didn’t. And Brando being Brando, you wouldn’t think he’d go in and put himself through auditioning, but they said he stuffed cotton in his cheeks and came in [to the studio] as the Godfather, and he got the part, in spite of the fact that the industry didn’t see him in that role at all. So, I suggested to Gene to do a montage, because I knew Gene had this vision [of Dracula], and he was like loaded for bear! He didn’t want to! He thought, “Why should I? I’m not getting paid!” I said, “Listen, it’s good enough for Brando! What th’?…”

Gene: That’s how it happened. I sent [the tryout] to Stan, and the next day he called and said, “You got it!” That was it!

CBA: At that point, did you know if you were going to be drawing a comic book, or was it thought it might be a black-&-white magazine?

Gene: It was a comic book—one of the monster books they were adding to the list.

CBA: Now, you told me earlier how traumatized you were as a kid by seeing the original Frankenstein movie. That inspired your lifelong fascination with horror. Why not go after Marvel’s Frankenstein comic book instead?

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May 2001

Gene: It wasn’t offered! They never mentioned it. Just Dracula.

CBA: Would you have been interested?

Gene: Oh, sure! I would’ve done that, too.

CBA: Would you have been more interested than in Tomb of Dracula?

Gene: No, I think Dracula had the edge. First of all, I had a particular actor in mind [for Dracula] that had never played the part, and that was Jack Palance. I figured, “Oh, if there’s anyone who can play that role, it would’ve been him!”

CBA: What did you see Jack Palance in that made you think that?

Gene: Well, I had seen him do Jekyll and Hyde for television, and right there and then I knew that Jack Palance would do the perfect Dracula. He had that cadaverous look, a serpentine look on his face…. And he did play that role, eventually, on television. So, I took him on as a character, and [when drawing Dracula] I’d sit before the television screen with the Polaroid camera, and whenever there’d be a still image of him on the screen, I’d photograph it in different positions, so I could use him. That’s how [the Palance look] came about.

Dracula never turned out really looking like him—somewhat like him.

Maybe I didn’t catch the actual essence of him in the beginning… but I think as the years went by—and that’s when you really begin to develop a character; you get much, much better at it—it began to evolve into Jack Palance.

CBA: Now, to take on Tomb of Dracula you had to give up Daredevil, the book with which you were most associated. Was that a tough choice for you?

Gene: No, I had been doing that for a very long time, and I was running out of ideas. The idea was to choreograph his acrobatics, and it was getting too much the same all the time.

CBA: Was there any fear that you were giving up the security of a super-hero for the risk of a horror title?

May 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

Gene: No, I didn’t care about that. Actually, I learned later that all the other horror books they were turning out failed. The only one that did hang on, and stayed on, that they wanted to stay on, was the Dracula series. And once I knew that, that it was a hot item, and that I was doing something right, that was reward enough to continue with it.

CBA: So, the assignment is yours. Do you recall how the first story came to you? Did the writer, Gerry Conway, give you a long plot or script?

Gene: I remember talking about [the story]. It was just a written script, like I’d been doing, and I followed it.

CBA: Do you have any memories about how you approached that first story?

Gene: Well, I inked the first one. After that, I just don’t remember.

Just so many adventures came along.

CBA: Why did you ink that one issue? At that point, you hadn’t really inked any of your work at Marvel.

Gene: No, but I wanted to try it out. I thought, “Who knows, maybe I’ll stay with it, maybe I won’t.” But it was too much pressure to get the work out, and I’m slow.

CBA: You’re never really comfortable inking, are you?

Gene: No. It took me a while to get into it. It was bad enough to just get it down right in pencil, let alone then go on and ink it.

CBA: Now, when you first created Dracula, he had a goatee. You kept it for two issues, and then it was gone. What happened?

Gene: I must’ve forgotten about it.

CBA: You forgot it for 68 issues?!

Gene: Yeah, must’ve been! I just left the little mustache; that’s it. I didn’t like the goatee. It was something I didn’t think he looked good in. Too typical.

CBA: How about the inkers on Dracula? You did that first one

Above: CBA contributor Greg Huneryager writes: “It was small size, on one [board]. It corresponds exactly to a spread—I believe in Tomb of Dracula #29— with the same placement of balloons so I just assumed it was a misplaced piece and Palmer inked using xeroxes. Its size is due to Marvel's short-lived policy of having the artists do a two-page spread on [one board] and only pay them for that one page [though it was enlarged to a double-page spread for printing] but when I showed it to Marv Wolfman last year in San Diego, he said this spread exists in pencil form because Palmer hated how the art looked when printed the same size so he would lightbox and blow up these spreads to their standard size. Another oblique mystery solved!” Thanks, Greg!

Art ©2001 Gene Colan. Tomb of Dracula ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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CBA Interview

The Incredible Herb Trimpe (rhymes with “blimpie”) on his Marvel bullpen days Inset background image: Son of Satan and Phantom Eagle notwithstanding, most informed readers know that Herb Trimpe’s trademark character is good ol’ Greenskin. Detail of back cover Trimpe illustration from The Rampaging Hulk Marvel Treasury Edition. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: From left to right, it’s Amelia Trimpe and her parents, Linda Fite and Herb, in a recent photo. Courtesy of Herb Trimpe.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Herb Trimpe, along with Flo Steinberg and Marie Severin, is easily one of my favorite people in comics. Because, like those two delightful women who shared time with Herb in the ’60s Marvel Bullpen, he is simply a very real person. No pretense, checked ego, self-defacing about his own work, and—overall—a solid grasp on the realities of the comics industry. This interview—revealing a perhaps too-opinionated interviewer—was conducted by telephone on January 28, 2001, and was copy-edited by Herb.

Comic Book Artist: I was looking through a comic book index and came across reference to Alex and Mike Trimpe. Are they related?

Herb: Alex is my son, Mike is my brother.

CBA: Your brother helped you with an “Ant-Man” strip in Marvel Feature?

Herb: Yes, he inked it. He inked a couple of books for me, actually.

CBA: That Marvel Feature was a nice job!

Herb: He was a good inker! I know! He actually tried to get work a few years ago, but I think I had already left comics, and he was having a tough time down in Charlottesville, Virginia. He’s a graphic artist, and was having a helluva time getting work. He tried comics again, but they weren’t interested at all, but he is a pretty solid inker!

CBA: Yeah! That’s one of my favorite jobs that you did.

Herb: I loved that “Ant-Man” stuff. I like the whole idea of it. I could draw that now, I think.

CBA: It was a beautiful homage to Kirby’s Marvel work, I thought, from the splash page with his hand outstretched....

Herb: Yep, I remember that, yep.

CBA: I’m just surprised it was your brother! That was a real nice job, it’s just too bad they didn’t hire him more!

Herb: My son Alec did some really good layouts for me on RoboCop and Fantastic Four Unlimited.

CBA: What does he do now?

Herb: He works for a temp agency in Kingston, New York, and he’s a musician. He writes all his stuff, and him and my daughter have a band called Badger. They’re looking for a bass player right now to try to flesh things out. My daughter Sarah plays violin, and he’s working on the keyboards and MPC2000, though he plays just about anything: Guitar, keyboard, he was all-state trombone in high school.

They’re trying, they’re going for it. [laughter] They have a

different sound, it’s not exactly mainstream. (Check it out: www.mp3.com/badger) CBA: Your career, at least your personality....

Herb: Checkered career!

CBA: Checkered career, is bookended by two major articles that appeared in major magazines. First there was the Rolling Stone article that featured your Hulk drawing as a cover in 1972. And, just last year, the New York Times Education supplement had a memoir by you on leaving comics and starting a new career as educator at age 60. Do you know what became of one-time Marvel secretary Robin Green who wrote the Rolling Stone article?

Herb: I guess I do... do you?

CBA: Yeah.

Herb: You do! In fact, it’s really, really, weird... that’s an amazing story! I’ve a friend, Alan, I hung around with—he actually graduated in my brother’s class in high school, but I met him via aviation, we both had airplanes—and we got to talking one day, just about a year ago, and somehow, the name Robin Green came up. He, through another friend, became acquainted with her, and I said, “I know Robin Green!” and we went through the whole thing. He said she worked for Marvel, and I said, “Yeah, I know her quite well.” But I didn’t know she was involved in The Sopranos TV show and other television stuff. I had no idea because we don’t have cable any more.

[For the record, Robin Green, who succeeded Flo Steinberg as Marvel’s secretary in the late ’60s, wrote a revealing article for Rolling Stone on the Bullpen (which showcased Herb Trimpe, among others), and is now a producer and writer for the award-winning HBO TV series, The Sopranos.—JBC] CBA: So you haven’t seen The Sopranos?

Herb: No, I haven’t seen it.

CBA: I don’t get HBO, but they just came out with the first season on video, and I saw the episodes she wrote, and they are some of the best television I’ve ever seen in my life! Just extraordinary writing.

Herb: I’m just amazed, and then I saw a picture of her in Newsweek or something, it was a group shot of the whole cast and the writers and all that, she was standing in the back row. I wrote her a note—I got her address from my friend Alan up there—and she wrote back and said they’re in New York on occasion, and we ought to come down and get together sometime. Yeah, it was very, very interesting, the whole thing. [laughs] CBA: So she was a secretary at Marvel Comics?

Herb: Yeah, like Stan’s gal Friday. She was a bullpen assistant, and she replaced Flo. She didn’t work there that long, maybe six months to a year, maybe not even that. We got along very well. She was really great. Tall, skinny... I don’t know how she looks now.

CBA: Where are you from, originally?

Herb: Peekskill, New York.

CBA: I lived there for a time, when I was 11.

Herb: You’re kidding! No kidding! My mother still lives there.

CBA: Furnace Brook Drive.

Herb: Yeah, I know where that is, exactly. I used to have romantic interludes up that way. I remember it as a sixth grader.

CBA: That’s where I smoked my first cigarette. [laughter] Were you interested in comic books as a kid?

Herb: Yes, especially comic strips. Comic strips were the thing. I didn’t buy too many comic books. I had a couple of cousins and I would go to their houses, one of whom lived near the junior high school in Peekskill. I used to eat lunch there, and my cousin and I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Above: Bob Layton & Co.’s fanzine Contemporary Pictorial Literature occasionally featured special centerfold guest stars. Here’s Herb Trimpe’s submission. Courtesy of Bob & CPL/Gang Productions.

Below: One of Herb’s favorite stories was the Harlan Ellisonplotted and Roy Thomas-scripted story featuring Jarella in The Incredible Hulk #140. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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ing the stat camera?

Herb: No, he was doing drawing and paste-ups, setting the books up. Sol Brodsky hired me. He’s the one I took my work to. John said, “Give Sol a call and come on in, bring your stuff.” I said, “I don’t have any stuff, the last stuff I did was in art school!” So Sol said, “Bring it in, just bring it in,” so I did.

I had some pretty good inking, so they gave me some Western stuff to do, Kid Colt or something else.

CBA: Immediately?

Herb: Yeah, pretty much.

CBA: Was Dick Ayers or Werner Roth the penciler you inked?

Herb: Yeah, Werner Roth was one. I think I did some Dick Ayers. I mostly did Werner Roth. He was a really beautiful penciler, I thought. It was clean stuff, and easy to ink, you know?

CBA: Did you ever meet him?

Herb: No, I never did. I don’t think I did. I think Joe Maneely had just died a year or two earlier when I went in there, and he was still one of the talked about guys in the office, in terms of his great facility with the comic book medium.

CBA: Actually, Joe died in 1958, and they were still talking about him in 1966? Wow! Herb: Yeah, he was like Marie Severin, because they did the same kind of stuff, sort of that EC look, real adventure, highly researched, accurate stuff? The Black Knight stuff is great! Marie said his pencils were almost non-existent, they were like rough, lightly-done layouts, with no features on the faces... it was just like ovals and sticks and stuff, and he inked from that. He drew when he inked. That’s when he did the work, in the inking!

CBA: What was Sol Brodsky like?

Herb: I liked Sol. Sol was okay. He was the last of a breed, I can tell you. Like from the publishing world, you know what I mean? He knew comics, but he could’ve worked in any publishing position that needed to put books together and get them to a printer on time. He was a cando kind of guy. He knew when something was screwed up, and he would say so, you know what I mean? He’d say, “This needs to be fixed.” He represented the kind of quality in publications that you just don’t see anymore, except maybe in The New York Times, where they really care if something’s spelled right or not.

I tell you, Jon, that bullpen in those years?

That was the best job in the world. I mean, it was tremendous, I’m not kidding you. It was just so much fun.

CBA: What made it so?

Herb: It was the people. It was the Marvel Comics universe realizing itself during those years, you know?

And egos were not in play, they really weren’t. There were people

who had really been around the block a couple of times, you know, and they weren’t fools. They really weren’t vying for some sort of “top dog” position in terms of creativity. It was just a fun thing, and it was varied. There were some great people in there: Marie, John.

Oh, it was just very fun. It was small, there weren’t that many people. Tony Mortellero, who was one of the production people, was just a lot of fun. Now, in those days, John Romita was working there every day, too. He didn’t work freelance at home, he was in the bullpen. He was drawing Spider-Man, but he was in the bullpen, in the same way I began drawing The Hulk working in the bullpen. The first couple of books I did right on staff until one day, I complained to Stan about concentration, and he said, “Well, why don’t you just go home and work?” So I did. I just started to take days off, go home, come in a day or so a week and hang around and work there. It was just total freedom! [laughs] It was just unbelievable. And we knew it!

It wasn’t one of those deals where you look back in 20 years, and say, “Gee, wasn’t that great?” We knew it was great at the time.

CBA: One of my favorite anecdotes about the Marvel bullpen in 1968 was Barry Windsor-Smith telling me that he remembers chills going up and down his spine when, spontaneously, the whole bullpen would start singing “Hey Jude.”

Herb: Oh, my God, I remember that!

CBA: Yeah, he just remembers standing there, and everyone just joining in.

Herb: I couldn’t wait to get to work, you know what I mean?

Unlike now at the high school. [laughter] I pray for snow days now.

CBA: You can argue that ten years later at Marvel, there was a lot of jockeying for position, with Stan pretty much out the door in California, Roy had resigned, not wanting to deal with it anymore, and there was a rotating, revolving door for editors and stuff like that. But back in the late ’60s, do you think it was recognition that this was Stan’s ballgame, Stan built this company to what it was?

Herb: I think there’s no doubt. But Jack Kirby also. Jack was “it,” you know what I mean?

CBA: Did you see him a lot?

Herb: He came in occasionally, yeah, I met him. I met him on a number of occasions. He came in on a couple of occasions and he’d work, do some things that needed changes, and chomp on his cigar, and we’d watch him! One time he penciled a cover, I don’t know if it was for Thor or Fantastic Four or what it was, but he just knocked this thing out in about an hour, and we were all in the bullpen, and we’d get up and watch him and talk, and it was great.

CBA: Did you revere him at the time?

Herb: Yeah! Oh, Kirby... you know, when I went there—and I’m sure when everybody else went there—that was Stan’s basic role model, he recognized that everybody drew differently, but in terms of the storytelling, “Look at Jack, take a look at this, this is what I want.” That was basically it. Everybody was judged by the standard of Jack Kirby, I think.

CBA: Would it would be off the mark to say you would seem to be heavily influenced by Jack?

Herb: I was. I wanted to draw like Jack Davis. If I’m left to my own devices, I tend to draw kind of cartoony, like that kind of thing, a lot of wrinkles. Jack Davis was my idol up to the point where I started working at Marvel. But that really went out the window when I began to draw there, it was just not a thing they wanted to see. [laughs] So, I had to do all this kind of bogus re-inventing. It was not... I didn’t really care one way or the other, I didn’t have a real style anyway.

CBA: Were you specifically instructed to draw like Jack?

Herb: No, not in so many words.

CBA: But you were instructed to follow the storytelling techniques?

Herb: If you want to know how to tell a story, look at Jack’s work.

So, you look at Jack’s work—which you do anyway, it’s all great— and you know, there are stories with his original artwork that everyone’s dazzled over. And you wanted to do it! It was cool, so everybody wanted to draw cool! Well, I did. You can see it everywhere.

Buscema, he had his own style, but you can see from panel to panel, it’s the Jack influence in the layouts and the storytelling, it’s really self-evident, I think.

CBA: So the first work you did was in Westerns, do you remember COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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Son of Satan Portfolio

by Russ Heath Though most avid Heath collectors know full well that Russ contributed mightily to Marvel in its earlier 1950s incarnation as Atlas Comics—on innumerable Western, war, and horror tales—it may come as a surprise to afficionados that the artist spent some quality time at 575 Madison Avenue in the 1970s. Dracula Lives #13 includes a lush and gorgeously rendered portfolio of vampire portraits; KaZar #12 contains a full-length tale; and Savage Tales #10 and 11 both are graced with the Heath touch.

But his ’70s tour de force at Marvel was Russ’s Son of Satan #8 job, “…Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son,” as written by Bill Mantlo. Sans word balloons and captions, here are six pages of that superb—if forgotten—story.

Courtesy of the artist. Son of Satan ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. May 2001

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©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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CBA Interview

Groovy Gary & the Marvel Years Friedrich on the highs & lows working at the House of Ideas Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris Below: Perhaps writer Gary Friedrich’s high point at Marvel was his collaboration with artist Mike Ploog on their adaptation of Mary Shelley’s famous novel for The Monster of Frankenstein comic book. Courtesy of anonymous, here’s a Ploog pencil page from #6. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Gary Friedrich‘s writing credit appeared in hundreds of Marvel comics from the mid-’60s to late-’70s, from Sgt. Fury to Captain Britain, but very little is known about the man, who perhaps most notably scribed an exquisite adaptation of Frankenstein in the company’s glory days of horror. But, with the help of Roy Thomas, we tracked Gary down who graciously gave us a startlingly honest and informative interview via telephone on January 25, 2001. The subject also copyedited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you from, Gary?

Gary Friedrich: I’m originally from Jackson, Missouri, same as Roy Thomas.

CBA: And what year were you born?

Gary: 1943.

CBA: Did you meet Roy at a young age?

Gary: I met Roy when I went to work at a movie theater in Jackson when I was in seventh grade. I was 13 or something like that. Roy is about four years older than me.

CBA: You met him at the movie theater?

Gary: Yeah, he was already working there when I started. We popped corn, drew soda, ushered and that kind of stuff.

CBA: Did you guys enjoy movies together?

Gary: Oh, yeah. Roy and I had a number of things in common, primarily movies and popular music. Then he got me turned on to comics again. I had read them when I was a kid but slacked off for four or five years. The super-hero revival at DC was just getting underway and Roy got me back into the comics.

CBA: As a young kid, were you an avid comic reader?

Gary: Yeah, I loved comics. Anything and everything. You name it, I loved it. I liked all the super-hero stuff: Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel, in particular. I liked the funny stuff too. I really loved The Fox and the Crow.

CBA: Were you disappointed when Captain Marvel was cancelled?

Gary: To tell you the truth, I don’t remember. Probably around that time, I was beginning to stop reading the comics and so I didn’t really notice that much. There was to be a period there of a few years where I didn’t read any comics.

CBA: Did you miss the ECs when they were coming out?

Gary: Not entirely. But I didn’t really get to read a lot of ECs until after they’d stopped publishing and I got to New York and began reading some issues Roy was picking up. Len Brown had a lot of them and I read those with him.

CBA: Were you exposed to Mad comics at all?

Gary: Yeah, absolutely. I loved them.

CBA: Roy got you back into comics?

Gary: Yeah. There was a drugstore up the street from the theater and he’d take a break, go up to the drug store, pick up some comics and bring them back. He’d read one and pass it on to me. Roy was kind of my idol, you know. He was four years older and anything he did was good for me. So he was going to read comics? Well, I read comics, too. But I quickly found that I really enjoyed them again.

CBA: Do you recall when Roy started Alter-Ego with Jerry Bails?

Gary: Oh, sure. I was involved in doing some legwork on a few of the early issues Roy did in Jackson, running stuff to the printer and stuff like that. I recruited the second Joy Holiday—Pauline Copeman—for him. [Joy Holiday was a costumed mascot for the fanzine The Comicollector.] Pauline was a friend of mine when Roy and Linda had broken up and he needed a new girl to portray Joy Holiday so I talked Pauline into doing it for him.

CBA: Did you start getting interested in writing, too?

Gary: I was interested in writing. Of course, I was still in high school when this was going on. When Roy started Alter-Ego, he was in college and I was nearing the end of high school, and then Roy pretty much turned me on to writing and I was writing a lot of stuff in high school. I edited the school newspaper and got in trouble for writing a pro-comic book editorial when I was a senior. We had this old maid English teacher who was just outrageously straight-laced COMIC BOOK ARTIST 12

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and conservative and Roy had been her prize pupil. When she stirred up all this trouble about this editorial, I went to her and we were having a rather heated discussion. At some point, I pulled a copy of a Justice League of America Roy had a letter in and I asked her if she remembered Roy Thomas. And she said, “Well, certainly. He was one of my best students,” yadda-yadda-yadda. Then I flipped open the letter with his name on it and her face—! [laughs] It shut her up for a little bit.

CBA: [laughs] Did Roy have a good reputation in high school?

Gary: Oh, very much so. Much more so than me. I was kind of a hell raiser, but Roy had a nice, well-earned reputation.

CBA: Did you have an interest in drawing at all?

Gary: No. No artistic ability whatsoever.

CBA: Did Roy became a school teacher while you were still in high school?

Gary: Yes. He taught in Sullivan, Missouri, up near St. Louis for a year or two and then he taught in Arnold where, strangely enough, I live now, for a couple of years before he came to New York.

CBA: Did Roy have aspirations to become a comics writer?

Gary: Yeah, very much so. He was so wrapped up in the comics, it became difficult to get him to talk about anything else. [laughs] I’d get aggravated with him from time to time. I’d try to turn on the radio and listen to some music and he’s gonna turn it off and start off on talking about the next Green Lantern! [laughs] He had the bug a lot worse than I did.

CBA: [laughs] So were you equally into Elvis and ’50s rock ’n’ roll as he was?

Gary: Oh, absolutely, especially Elvis. We also liked Swing music a lot, were both huge Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald fans and we became Bobby Darin fans when Bobby’s Swing stuff came out.

CBA: You were also an avid record collector?

Gary: Absolutely.

CBA: Did you start getting contact with comics fans throughout the country?

Gary: No, I never really bought into the fandom thing. I wasn’t nearly as interested as Roy. I enjoyed reading the comics and that was about as far as it went. I was glad to help Roy out if there were any little things I could do and in terms of running errands, that’s the most I ever did with Alter Ego. I was always happy to do that as a friend but I wasn’t really interested.

CBA: So the thrill of seeing your name in print—kind of an egotistical thing—never necessarily bit you?

Gary: Well, I had the same thing with doing the school newspaper.

I liked seeing my name in print. You bet. [laughs] Still do.

CBA: [laughs] Do you remember when Roy got the call from DC Comics?

Gary: Yeah. I guess that he was still in Arnold or maybe wrapping up what would be his last year of teaching up there at the time. He got the call and there was no question about him going. I, of course, hated to see him leave.

CBA: Did you consider, at the time, that, “Hey, if he establishes himself in New York, maybe that’s my chance”?

Gary: You know, I don’t think I really did, but within a few months, that changed. At that time I was the youngest newspaper editor in the state of Missouri. Just through circumstance, I’d gotten a job in early ’64 as a reporter for the local newspaper in Jackson. As circumstances warranted, the editor quit and went back to Kansas City, the owner was in an accident and there was nobody there to run the damn paper. [laughs] And I’m there, 21 years old and don’t know squat but I wound up running this newspaper for about a year.

The previous summer, Roy and a girlfriend had gone to Mexico and he’d written a series of stories for my newspaper about their trip to Mexico. [laughs] He and another friend of ours from Jackson got in trouble with the school board for some politically-slanted letters they had written to my newspaper about the 1964 Presidential Election. I got into a kind of mudslinging act with the son of a local merchant. The merchant apparently called the school board in Arnold and he sent some clippings along. Roy and Bud got called in and told to cease and desist the political letter writing campaign. [laughs] Roy and I had a lot of fun.

CBA: [laughs] I never saw Roy as a rabble-rouser, exactly.

Gary: Well, he wasn’t much. Just in this particular case, this kid May 2001

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was such a despicable little ass and Roy and Bud just couldn’t resist ripping him to shreds.

CBA: [laughs] Was the kid a supporter of Barry Goldwater?

Gary: Absolutely. [laughs] It was fun while it lasted.

CBA: Did you go to college for Journalism?

Gary: No. CBA: Did you go to college?

Gary: No. I got out of high school and worked in a music store in Cape Girardeau for about three years.

CBA: You garnered enough clippings from your high school newspaper, to make an impression on the editor?

Gary: Well, I got tired of the music store and went looking for a job.

This new guy from Kansas City had bought out the two weekly papers in Jackson and turned them into a single twice-weekly newspaper with the idea that he’d eventually turn it into a daily. I just stopped by there on the off-chance that he’d need some help, and I was just in the right place at the right time. The editor was a young man from Kansas City named Tom Stites who’s gone on to quite a career working for all the major newspapers in the country. He taught me enough to be able to run that newspaper when he left. I got my education from him.

CBA: Was it a good experience?

Gary: Oh, it was wonderful, yeah.

CBA: Did you enjoy it?

Gary: Yeah, for the most part. There were bad things. Number one, I was working about 80 hours a week for $50, [laughs] and that wasn’t good. I finally got a raise to about $75, I think, but basically, I wrote, edited, and laid out the entire newspaper. I was the whole editorial staff without any help. It was driving me crazy.

CBA: Did you even compose the type?

Gary: Well, in those days, we were still hot type. We still had Linotype machines.

CBA: You didn’t have to operate that, did you?

Gary: No, no. [laughs] I never even

Above: Courtesy of Roy Thomas, the splash page to The Sentinels' first adventure (in Charlton’s Thunderbolt #54), drawn by Sam Grainger and written by Gary Friedrich. ©2001 the respective copyright holder. Left: Just about the only photo we could find of Gary, this from Psycho #12.

Courtesy of Pablo Marcos.

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CBA Interview

Perlin’s Wisdom Don Perlin on his fifty years as a comic book artist Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris Who knew that Don Perlin’s career reached back to the late-’40s when he arrived like a bolt from the blue at Marvel in the early 1970s? Well, the artist’s work in comics stretches a ways back and we’re delighted to include this interview with Don in this special Marvel horror issue. Don was interviewed by phone on January 18, 2001, and he copyedited the final transcript.

Right inset: When Don Perlin worked with old Marvel cohort Jim Shooter at Valiant Comics in recent years, this classy portrait was produced. 1994 photo by Phil Marino. ©2001 the photographer.

Below: This werewolf drawing by Don was inked by Joe Rubinstein. ©2001 Perlin & Rubinstein.

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Comic Book Artist: Where and when were you born, Don? Don Perlin: Hoo-hoo! [laughs] New York, in 1929. August 27, 1929.

CBA: You were at the perfect age for growing up with comic books. Were you introduced to them at a young age?

Don: I loved comics when I was a kid. Ever since I can remember, I used to read comic books.

CBA: Were you interested in the newspaper strips?

Don: Oh, yes. All the time. That was one of the things that I loved. Among my favorites were Milt Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. I enjoyed Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan.

CBA: The good adventure stuff.

Don: Yeah. I liked to read the funny stuff, too, and I can draw “bigfoot.” I’ve done some Scooby Doo, panel gags, and I’ve gone from one end of the spectrum to the other. But I like the adventure stuff the most.

CBA: Did you start drawing at a young age?

Don: Oh, yes. I did my first mural when I was six years old. I was supposed to go into Kindergarten and came down with scarlet fever. In those days, the city Board of Health would come down and quarantine you. I was in my bedroom for 30 days. I couldn’t do anything and I drew pictures on the walls with crayons. I don’t remember what I drew, but I do recall the day the guy came and took the quarantine off. I had my favorite food that day: Frankfurters—still my favorite to this day. [laughs] CBA: Was it a nice neighborhood?

Don: It was a rural part of Brooklyn that wasn’t built up much at that point. It was

called Canarsie and it was famous for two things they always talked about in the movies at that time: Mosquitoes and the garbage dump.

During World War II, we used to go into the dump with a wagon— you know, one of those little red Radio Flyers—and a BB gun to shoot the rats. We would pick up all the metal and the rubber we could find for scrap drives. It was recycled into weapons for the war.

CBA: Were you a collector of comic books?

Don: Well, not a collector in today’s sense. Kids used to trade them. You know, you’d read it, then somebody else would read theirs and you’d trade comics and re-read them until they fell apart.

CBA: Did you have favorite characters?

Don: My favorite was Batman. I always liked the wisecracks Batman and Robin used to make between each other when they were fighting with the bad guys.

CBA: Were you known in grade school as an artist?

Don: I had this fifth grade teacher that would give out Christmas presents to all the kids in her class. At Christmas, she bought all the girls little handkerchiefs and all the boys some kind of nickel yo-yo, or something. She gave me a book on how to draw cartoons which was different than everybody else got.

CBA: Did you use the book and learn from it?

Don: I can still remember the book. Yeah, I learned from that book.

CBA: When you were a kid, what were your aspirations? What did you want to do when you grew up?

Don: I wanted to be a cartoonist.

CBA: Who were your cartoonist idols?

Don: Burne Hogarth was my idol. When I was in high school, about 14 years old, and Hogarth had put an ad in some of the high school papers, announcing that he was going to hold a class on Saturday morning for people interested in cartooning. A friend of mine showed me the ad and I presented it to my dad. He called Hogarth and enrolled me in the class. We went to Hogarth’s apartment, which was on Central Park West. He looked at my work and said, “Fine.” He took me in the class and eventually I met Al Williamson there (who was also a student), who was I guess about a year or two my junior. We became friends so after class I’d go over to Al’s house. He, at that point, lived in Manhattan which was nearer the school. Hogarth always represented class, to me, in his person and in his art. He was my favorite. He was the one I met when I was young. I hadn’t met any of the others until later on in life.

CBA: He had a reputation for being highly critical. Was he tough?

Don: Well, I don’t know whether he was tough. He would sit down and spend time working with you. I remember one time I was working on a comic strip panel and there was a picture, a difficult angle of these two guys shaking hands. Hogarth sat down and he wouldn’t get up until he had it worked out well. He was a stickler. He was a COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

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good artist and wanted you to achieve as much as you could. A tremendous lecturer, he was very interesting. When he started doing lectures in school, he used overhead projectors. He would draw and you could watch it on the screen. The room was jam-packed.

CBA: Had he left the Tarzan strip at that point?

Don: He was doing Tarzan when he told us he was going to quit and do Drago, a strip about a gaucho.

CBA: How long did you stay?

Don: Oh, a couple of years. When the school started expanding and I could no longer afford to go, I had to drop out.

CBA: It was a four-year program?

Don: There was no program. The school was actually Hogarth. He had rented a loft and worked with you on an individual basis. He had about anywhere from six to eight students. Then he got hooked up with something called the Stevenson School. When that happened, I dropped out and didn’t go back until later when it became the Cartoonists and Illustrators School.

CBA: How much time would Burne individually spend with you?

Don: Well, you’d get there at nine, from nine to twelve, and he’d spend a little bit of time with each person. Then, maybe, he would stop and show everybody something. He’d bring in the Sunday originals he did on a weekly basis, he’d bring in these Tarzan pages and, you know, they were quite a sight to see.

CBA: Was anyone, that you know of, assisting Burne at the time on a strip?

Don: When I went to C&I, Ross Andru was there at that time and I think he may have worked on Burne’s material. It may have been somebody else again, I don’t know.

CBA: Did you meet Ross?

Don: Yes, I knew Ross then. He worked with Mike Esposito. I knew Mike. We renewed our friendship when I was working up at Marvel.

He inked a couple of things I did.

CBA: What kind of guy was Ross?

Don: Ross was a nice guy, a quiet, intelligent fellow.

CBA: He’s kind of a mystery, you know? He was apparently the shy one and Esposito the outgoing one. At the time, was there a choice for you between being a syndicated cartoonist and a comic book artist? Did you want to be a syndicated cartoonist?

Don: I went to comic books because, at that point, it seemed more practical. It would be easier to get into.

CBA: Not as hard to sell as a syndicated strip, you mean?

Don: Yes. There were many different publishers at that time. Some were kind of shady like Fox Features Syndicate. They did a lot of crime comics, didn’t pay well, and didn’t pay on time. Eventually, they went bankrupt and a lot of the cartoonists were caught holding the bag; they lost some money on that. I remember they had some editors who would take a dollar a page kickback.

CBA: Did you have to suffer through that?

Don: Well, I didn’t suffer too much because I was a pain in the ass. [laughs] I would do a job and they’d say, “You get paid in 60 days.”

When 60 days came around, they expected me to start yelling for my money, I started yelling before that, like when 30 days came. So when 60 came, I usually got paid. That saved me. I lost about $150 on the deal when Fox went bankrupt, though there were some who lost a couple of thousand dollars.

CBA: [laughs] Did it look like a crooked business to you?

Don: What, the whole comic book business? No, no. Just this Fox company. I met a lot of nice, decent people in there. Some peculiar folk, but nice, decent people.

CBA: Do you recall when you first started working there?

Don: The first job I ever had was at Fox. It was some crime story. I penciled it and got Pete Morisi to ink it. I knew Pete because he was going to the same school and we both had the same instructor, a really great guy named Lee Ames. He worked for Charlie Biro and Bob Wood, and he did book illustrations. Lee put Pete and I in touch.

CBA: Pete was moonlighting at the time or was this before he joined the New York City police force?

Don: It was way before he joined the force.

CBA: Did you hang out with any frequency with Al Williamson?

Don: That’s when we were younger. When I left the school, I didn’t see him again for a while.

CBA: What other cartoonists did you encounter while at Fox? May 2001

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

Don: I met Jack Abel there. In the early-’50s. I had this rented studio, a one-room thing down near Cooper Union. It was an old building, built in the Civil War and the room cost me $35 a month, which I couldn’t afford. So I took in a couple of guys, Pete Morisi and Sy Barry.

CBA: Sy Barry? Dan Barry’s brother?

Don: Yes, and he had an assistant. (I don’t remember his name, though his first name was Sam.) Then I rented a space to a guy by the name of Al Gordon. We kept that place until 1953. In that year, I was drafted. I went into the Army and they gave up the studio.

CBA: After Fox went bankrupt, what work did you do?

Don: I got a job with Jerry Iger, working on staff.

He had been a partner of Will Eisner, they split, and Iger had his own staff. We produced material for Fiction House. He hired me to erase pages, fill in blacks, draw the lines around panels, you know….

CBA: Who was running the studio at the time?

Was Jerry there all the time?

Don: Jerry had the studio upstairs in this two-story building. I think it was up on 53rd Street. He had a partner, a woman named Ruth Roche, and he had one of the more experienced guys act as manager.

Above: This superb Perlin pencil & ink cover image looks suspiciously like an unused piece intended for Werewolf By Night, but it appeared in the 1976 Seuling Con souvenir book. ©2001 Don Perlin.

Below: Don in the Army, 1954.

Courtesy of the artist.

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CBA Interview

Tony’s Terrors (and Tigra, Too!) The writer/editor’s tenure in the Haunted House of Ideas EDITOR'S NOTE: Ye ed profusely apologizes to interviewer Jon B. Knutson and subject Tony Isabella for the severe editing done to their interview but space constraints dictated the cuts.

Below: An issue of Haunt of Horror, edited by Tony Isabella, contained this photograph of the writer/editor with exotic dancer Angelique Trouvere, then darling of New York cons. Tony says, “She made these incredible costumes and had the attitude and body to wear them. She’s wearing a Satana costume here.

Great costume. Strikingly beautiful woman.” Courtesy of Tony. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Conducted by Jon B. Knutson I first encountered Tony’s writing in his heyday at Marvel in the ’70s.

I particularly remembered his story in Giant-Size Creatures #1, featuring the Werewolf by Night and transforming Greer Nelson, a.k.a.

The Cat, into Tigra the Were-Woman. Little did I know then that over 20 years later, thanks to several e-mail exchanges, that I’d be interviewing him on his career at Marvel and elsewhere! “The World’s Longest Tony Isabella Interview” was originally conducted via telephone, but when I got ready to transcribe the five (!) tapes from the two-day phone call, I discovered my tape recorder didn’t get anything! Tony was gracious beyond belief when he agreed to redo the interview via e-mail. Some portions of this have previously seen print in The Comics Buyers’ Guide, in Tony’s column there, as well as on his Web page, Tony’s Online Tips! <www.wfcomics.com/tony>. Parts two and three will be appearing in Alter Ego and Comicology. —JBK Jon B. Knutson: Let’s begin with the first question that seems to come up in all CBA interviews: Where were you born?

Tony Isabella: In Cleveland, Ohio, on December 22, 1951.

Jon: Do you remember how old you were when you first saw and read a comic book, and do you recall what it might have been?

Tony: I learned to read from comic books when I was four. My mother used to bring home three-for-a-quarter bags of IW reprints, mostly of the funny animal variety. The earliest comics I can remember would be an issue of Fighting American, which I probably got from an uncle, an issue of IW’s Red Mask featuring the Presto Kid, and an issue of Superman or Action Comics. Unfortunately, I can’t pin it down more exactly than that.

Jon: What were some of your favorite comics as a kid?

Tony: Superman. Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, which was probably the first comics I bought for myself. Batman.

Challengers of the Unknown.

Cosmo the Merry Martian. I bought lots of DC Comics as a kid, mostly those with giant and not-too-scary monsters on the covers. I really got into the Marvel super-heroes around 1963 or so.

Jon: What else did you read, aside from comics?

Tony: The Hardy Boys. Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr series. And all of the science fiction I could get my hands on. I had an argument with an elementary school librarian who didn’t want me to take out a book called Under The Harvest Moon. I thought it had to be a science-fiction book; I mean, it had “moon” in the title, right? But it was actually a romance novel. I still shudder when I think of reading that

one.

Jon: What were some of the other things you enjoyed as a kid? For example, I know you’re a big fan of Japanese monster movies, like Godzilla. Did that start when you were a kid?

Tony: I think the first giant monster movie I saw was Gorgo. Our church used to show movies on Saturday afternoons. Then I saw King Kong vs. Godzilla on a big screen and I was hooked. After that, I never missed a chance to see a giant monster film at the movie theater or on TV. I was fortunate in that the local TV stations ran a lot of them and ran them often.

I was also into baseball. I collected baseball cards and played in the Little League. I still love the game, but I’d rather watch my kids play than watch the Cleveland Indians. I just can’t get past the cruel caricature that is Chief Wahoo anymore.

Jon: When you were a kid, did you create your own comic characters, and create homemade comics with them?

Tony: Of course, especially after I met Terry Fairbanks and Mike Hudak at Frank’s Model Shop. Frank’s was about a 30-minute bike ride from my house, but he had a pretty good selection of old comic books in addition to the model stuff.

I couldn’t draw, so I ended up writing all the scripts for our own bimonthly comic book: Marvel Madhouse. My creations include Light Wave, a Russian super-hero, and Johnny Bravo, a non-super-powered adventurer. We even teamed-up our heroes in something called “The M.A.R.V.E.L. Squad.” I forget what the name stood for.

We used to send Marvel Madhouse to Stan Lee and get these friendly letters back from Flo Steinberg, Roy Thomas, and even Stan himself. That was an enormous thrill for us.

Jon: When did you first think about a career working in comic books? Were you thinking about writing then, or drawing, or both?

Tony: The day I read Fantastic Four Annual #1, perhaps the greatest comic book ever published. Although I’d seen the occasional credits here and there in my comics reading, this was when it hit me that people got paid for making comic books… and I knew that I wanted to be one of them someday. Having no artistic ability to speak of, my interest was always in writing comics.

Jon: Did you have an interest in writing something other than comics?

Tony: Yes, but my passion was for writing comic books. If I couldn’t make the grade as a comic book writer, I figured I would settle for being a world-famous reporter or science-fiction novelist. And, if those didn’t work out, I could write for television. I definitely had some unique priorities going for me.

Jon: I understand you did some fanzine work before you started working for comics. In an interview I transcribed, someone mentioned a Creeper story you worked on with someone that’s never seen print, for example. Do you recall which fanzines you worked on, and what kind of stuff you did for them?

Tony: I wrote for every fanzine that would have me: Concussion, Fantastic Fanzine, Yancy Street Gazette, Minotaur, and dozens more.

I wrote opinion and review columns, prose fiction, comic-book scripts, and weird little comedy pieces starring myself and other contributors to Concussion. I even won an award as best fan writer of 1971 or so, the year before I broke into comics professionally.

As for the Creeper story, that came about because I really loved the character and wanted his adventures to continue after his book was cancelled. So I wrote DC publisher Carmine Infantino and asked if I could publish a Creeper fan magazine featuring new stories of the character. Much to my surprise, he said yes. I wrote a 26-page story COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

that picked up after the last issue of the actual Beware The Creeper comic book. It was supposed to be drawn by a fan artist by the name of Klaus Janson—I wonder if he ever amounted to anything—but he never turned in even a single page of artwork. As this was about the same time I was working my way out of college and starting to work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I was too busy to pursue the project further.

There was supposed to be a second series in the magazine as well. It was called “The Yank in London” and was basically the story of a young writer—not unlike myself—having great adventures with a beautiful Brit who was not unlike Emma Peel. Dave Cockrum— there was a lot of talent in the fanzines of the late 1960s—was going to be the artist, but I never even started writing the first script. If memory serves me correctly, I was involved in my first serious romance about that time, which sort of negated the need for me to get “lucky” in my fiction.

Jon: What’s your educational background? Were you originally progressing towards a different career than comics?

Tony: I was a National Honors Society student at St. Edward High School in Lakewood, Ohio, and then went to John Carroll University for a little under a year. The latter wasn’t a good fit. I didn’t care for the Jesuits, the jocks, the ROTC, or what laughingly passed for the campus radicals. I did have some fun writing for the college newspaper and radio station… and I did have a brief but wonderful affair with one of my teachers… but college was just not where I wanted to be.

I’d intended to major in Journalism anyway, so when I left college, I applied for a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I was hired as a copy boy and figured I’d work my way up. Well, that didn’t work out either. Even though I did do some writing for the newspaper, sometimes ghosting articles for “real” reporters, I never got more than a copy boy’s paycheck. To my mind, I was under-appreciated and underpaid. Between that and my growing realization that the Plain Dealer was a pretty crappy newspaper—it did pretty much whatever the local robber barons and politicians commanded of it—I was more than ready to make a new plan.

Jon: How did you break in to comics?

Tony: I’d been corresponding with some of my favorite comics and editors of the time: Murray Boltinoff, Steve Englehart, Dick Giordano, and Roy Thomas. When the Plain Dealer went on strike and our picket lines was subsequently attacked by mounted policemen—sent to the scene by the publisher’s good friend, then-Mayor Ralph Perk— I was knocked to the ground in the ensuing panic. When I saw a hoof come down on the ground less than a foot from my face, I figured it was time to end my Plain Dealer career.

I phoned Roy that night and asked him if there were any jobs open at Marvel. Stan Lee and Sol Brodsky needed an assistant editor to work on Marvel’s new British weeklies. The qualifications for the job were meager: They needed someone who could proofread and write well enough to do letters pages and other editorial material… and who knew the characters and the stories.

Jon: When did you move from Ohio to New York?

Tony: October of 1972.

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Jon: What was Marvel like when you started? Who did you deal with on a regular basis, and what were they like?

Tony: Marvel’s offices were only about a third of the floor they were on when I started working there. There was a reception area, behind which was Nancy Murphy and the film/photostats library.

There was a semi-large production room wherein worked John Verpoorten, John Romita, Mike Esposito, Frank Giacoia, Morrie Kuramoto, Tony Mortelarro, Dave Hunt, Marie Severin, and probably some folks I’ve forgotten were there. Across the hall from that was a very small office wherein lurked Marv Wolfman and Don McGregor. (I did some time in that office as well.) Behind them was Stu Schwartzberg and his stat machine. Also across from Marv and Don were the offices of Roy Thomas and Stan Lee. Stan had the large corner office; I think Carla Joseph, his secretary, was in there, too. She married Gerry Conway a year or two later.

There was a bean counter who had an office around the corner from Stan, but I can’t remember his name.

Martin Goodman and the men’s magazines were on another floor. At the end of all this was an office shared by Sol Brodsky, George Roussos, Pablo Marcos, sometimes Rich Buckler, sometimes another production worker, and myself. Thinking back on it, it’s amazing how many comic books and magazines came out of offices that were less than half the size of my present house.

I dealt with Stan (on the British book covers and Monster Madness), Sol and Pablo (on the British books and black-&-white magazines), Roy (on the magazines and some comics stuff), and the production department (on all of the above).

Jon: According to the text piece in Astonishing Tales #22, you began at Marvel assisting Sol Brodsky on Marvel’s British weeklies around Halloween 1972. What exactly did you do with those books?

Tony: I forget what my title was, but I designed the covers with whoever was doing the covers at various times (Jim Starlin, Rich Buckler, Dick Ayers, and

Above: The Mirthful One’s at it again! Here’s a Marie Severin cartoon depicting Titanic Tony amongst his Marvel editor peers from an issue of a b-&-w mag.

Courtesy of Tony Isabella. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Apparently Tony’s creation, Tigra the Were-Woman has quite a loyal following! This Will Meugniot drawing—purportedly drawn when the artist was assigned to Tigra’s shortlived Marvel Chillers series—is courtesy of Tigra fanatic Andy Ihnatko. ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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CBA Interview

Pablo’s Amazing Journey From Peru to Florida, “Zombie” artist Pablo Marcos speaks Inset right: Drawing by 15-year-old Pablo Marcos (1952), courtesy of the artist Opposite page inset: Pablo and his wife Myriam in the mountains of Columbia (1990).

Courtesy of Pablo.

Opposite page right: Perhaps Pablo’s most fondly-recalled work is his series (with writer Steve Gerber) in Tales of the Zombie. Courtesy of the artist, here is a detail from one of his pages. Steve Gerber, at the very last minute, generously contributed the testimonial. Art ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Two Pablos and a baby named Pablo make three Pablo Marcoses! A picture of, from left: The artist, grandson, and son taken in New York in 2000 photo. Courtesy of Pablo, Sr.

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Translated by Gisella Marcos A few years back, my esteemed publisher attended MegaCon in Florida and was approached by a humble, sweet-natured artist by the name of Pablo Marcos, the selfsame contributor to Marvel’s Great Age of Horror. Well, needless to say, after John gave me the contact info, I was determined to find a way to fit the unforgettable delineator of Simon Garth—a.k.a. The Zombie—in Steve Gerber’s unforgettable stories in Tales of The Zombie, and we are delighted to include the following interview. The South American-born artist— whose command of English is much better than he admits—asked to do a written Q&A (which was translated from Spanish by Pablo’s daughter Gisella, and slightly edited by myself). Pablo—with the help of wife Myriam—also sent us a huge pile of artwork, much of it original, and we apologize for only being able to include a tiny fraction here (but look for Pablo’s work in our upcoming Atlas/Seaboard, Heavy Metal, and Warren celebrations!). CBA profusely thanks Pablo, Myriam, Gisella, and last-second contributor Steve Gerber.

Comic Book Artist: When and where were you born?

Pablo Marcos: I was born in Peru on March 31, 1937 in the small town of Laran in the province of Chincha Alta, 180 kilometers from the capital of Lima. When I was five-years-old, my family—my father Pablo Marcos and my mother Maria Ortega—moved to Lima.

At that time, there were only four children: Gloria, Berta, myself and Manuel. A couple of years later my brothers Alfredo and Oswaldo were born. My father worked as a gasoline truck driver and also a cab driver. We were very poor and after World War II all the countries had been economically affected and Peru was no exception.

CBA: Did you develop an early interest in art? When did you start drawing?

Pablo: I went to public school until high school, Bartolome Herrera. There were lots of classmates with artistic talent around me at this school. I recall during this time there was a famous mural artist who painted the yards of the school for years. These were al fresco

paintings of Inca designs. During this time, I met a teacher who gave classes in comic book art named Juan Rivera Saavedra. He was very involved in comics and magazines. Through him, I began to meet other Peruvian artists.

Here’s a story about my schooling I must tell: I had classes such as anatomy, zoology, botany, and geography. The teachers in those classes knew that I liked to draw and they would request that my regular teachers “loan” my services to them, and I would draw posters for their classes. Since there were 14 classes in all, I would draw, for example, the digestive system in many different ways and would learn about anatomy because I did so many sketches. The same was true with maps and animals.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, this helped me a great deal as I later drew much of this from memory.

CBA: Were you attracted to comics strips or comic books at a young age?

Favorite titles and characters?

Pablo: My friend and a teacher, Juan Rivera, would give me comics as I liked them so much. Most of these were from Argentina, Chile, Italy, and some from the United States. The comics from Argentina were such as El Tony, Misterix and Rico Tipo. The most popular from Chile was El Peneca. I admired the work of Alberto Breccia very much as well as Hugo Pratt, Jose Luis Salinas and from Chile, Arturo Del Castillo. Another comic I liked was Corrieri del Picolo from Italy.

Comics from the U.S. that I liked were Donald Duck, and the newspaper strip Mandrake. Another great character was Tarzan by Hogarth. Others I recall were Jose Luis Salinas’ Cisco Kid, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon and Secret Agent X-9, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, Harold Foster’s Prince Valiant, Vincent T. Hamlin’s Alley Oop, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Fred Harmon’s Red Ryder, Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, and Joe Shuster’s Superman.

CBA: What artists had the strongest impression in your youth?

Pablo: Arturo del Castillo, Alberto Breccia and Burne Hogarth, especially, were the artists that made the biggest impression on my youth.

CBA: Did you have formal art training?

Pablo: Unfortunately, art school was too expensive and I was not lucky enough to attend any formal schooling.

CBA: What was the state of the comics industry in your native country?

Pablo: During that time in Peru, there were comics circulating from local artists such as Hernan Bartra, Juan Osorio and Javier Flores Del Aguila. Their styles were totally local. Similarly, there was a magazine which was very popular called Tacu-Tacu. This publication joined the work of a lot of artists which were cartoonists and caricaturists. In general, comic book production was very small. Most of what was COMIC BOOK ARTIST 13

May 2001

there came from overseas.

CBA: How did you come to be involved in drawing comic art?

Pablo: When I was still in school, at the age of 13, a friend of mine, Juan Rivera, introduced me to well known Peruvian caricaturist Julio Fairle, and Julio told me he had not been able to find a substitute caricaturist as he was going on a month’s vacation. He looked at my caricature work and told me that my style was very different and if I would attempt to imitate his approach. I did a couple of pieces and he liked what he saw. So I worked at that magazine company for a month. When he returned, he said that no one had noticed the change in style. We stayed friends and about a month later he showed up at my home and told me there was a newspaper that was just opening up. I arrived at the office and the director took me on as a political caricaturist. I stayed there for a couple of years while finishing my schooling and then I went on to the university majoring in economics. In my parents’ opinion, economics was a more lucrative profession and being an artist was not. At that time, I was already married to Norma Martinez and we had my oldest daughter, Judith. I graduated and worked for a political magazine named Rochabus, and after that I worked for another political magazine called Zomba Conuto.

In 1960, a newspaper came out called Expreso. The editor of the paper—who had been my best man at my wedding—called me to work on the paper. I did some comic work and also some serious illustrations such as police events, airplane accidents, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.

In December of 1963, my daughter, Gisella was born. It was during this time that they named the new evening paper edition of Expreso called Extrcl. It was there where I did the first comic strip of James Bond, Agent 007, based on Ian Fleming’s spy character. I also did a daily strip called Benito Puma (a local police adventure). I was never able to work as an economist as I was making good money as an artist. I was making in a month what I would as an economist in an entire year. I worked on those two strips for three years. After that, I began working on the weekly supplement of Expreso called Estampa. I was now working as an illustrator exclusively and no longer as a cartoonist or caricaturist.

During this time I had an experience which resulted in something very difficult to erase from my memory. The Peruvian court had sentenced a rapist to death by firing squad in a jail located on a small island. Carlos Sanchez, the editor at the time, asked me to go with him to cover the event as there were no cameras allowed. I went with him and a couple of other reporters. It was 2:00 A.M. and I was asked to wait in a room until we were called to witness the execution. This was the first time that I would see a human being die. There were six soldiers and only one of the guns had a bullet which killed the convict. After the rapist was executed, I felt a dryness in my throat and wanted desperately to get out of the jail and off the island and forget what I had just seen, but I was never able to. From there I went directly to the paper and drew what I had just witnessed.

During this time I covered significant world events such as the Seven-Day War, the capture and death of the famous guerrilla leader Che Guevara, and two big earthquakes; one in Peru and the other in Italy. I also did a lot of illustrations of our national sport, soccer.

My third daughter, Norma, was born on December 29,1966. In 1967, I traveled to Mexico on vacation and took some samples of my work and, with Marino Sagastegul, I went to the Editorial Novoro.

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There I met the director and they offered me a job as an artist. I returned to Peru and quit my job which I had for several years. My son, Pablo, was born on December 19, 1967, and in 1968 I returned to Mexico alone and began working at Novoro on the series Legends of America. I subsequently created a series called Hata Yoga which I continued doing until November 1970. My wife, Norma and my four children joined me in Mexico in 1968.

CBA: Can you describe your experiences working in American comics?

Pablo: In 1970, I arrived in New Jersey and my situation was not very good. I did not speak English, had no job, and had a wife and four children. I knew New York was only an hour away so I began doing some illustrations to present to any company who would see them. In the meantime, my wife took on a job in a clothing factory. She said all she wanted to do was make sure there was enough money for food. I finished a project and took it to the editor of Warren, Billy Graham. He gave me an assignment and I went home and proudly told my wife to quit her job because I had gotten work. She told me that until she saw the cash, she was not quitting. The job I was given was due in one month and I finished it in one week. I do not recall if this was ever published. That day the editor told me to go to a company called Skywald which was publishing a couple of black-&-white comic magazines.

At Skywald, I met Israel Waldman, the owner of the company and an incredible human being. To my fortune, he spoke Spanish. The director of the company was Sol Brodsky. I worked with him for a long time. Even when I later went to work at DC and Marvel, I never stopped contributing to Skywald. When Mr. Waldman died a few years IF YOUchanged.

ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, later, the company TOback ORDER THIS Sol BrodskyCLICK changedTHE jobs LINK and went his IN Comics.

PRINTHeOR DIGITAL positionISSUE at Marvel asked me if I FORMAT! wanted to go work with him. I asked Mr. Waldman and his response was: “Go. Skywald is your home. You can come back and work with me whenever you want.”

I began working at Marvel steadily and Sol Brodsky wanted to help me with my immigration status. He also introduced me to a great Peruvian artist, Boris Vallejo.

Boris has since guided me professionally, and overall helped me with the language.

He has been one of the people who has always unselfishly given me a hand.

In the early-1970s I worked as Sol Brodsky’s assistant. He along with Stan Lee produced some weekly for theHORROR British #13: comics MARVEL 1970s Marvel Horror and focus,I from Satanand to Ghost Rider! market in which Norma did Son theofcolor Interviews with ROY THOMAS, MARV WOLFMAN, GENE Zip-A-Tone work. did some covers andGARY illustraCOLAN, TOMI PALMER, HERB TRIMPE, FRIEDRICH, tions forDON suchPERLIN, comics as Captain Planet TONY ISABELLA, Britain, and PABLOS MARCOS, plus a Portfolio Section featuring etc.

RUSSSince HEATH,I went MIKE PLOOG, DON of the Apes, Hulk, Dracula, PERLIN, PABLO MARCOS, FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE, and to Marvel every met a cover! lot of the artists more!

Newday, GENEICOLAN and writers.

(112-page magazine) SOLD OUT Edition) $3.95 CBA: Did you work for(Digital the overseas marhttp://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_56&products_id=529 ket while also freelancing in the U.S.?

Pablo: I worked for Italy in 1980 on a comic book called Lanclostory: Tremila Dollari Per Ebenezer Cross Western Story. In 1982, I worked for an editorial magazine, Ejea, in which I created a series called Dragon. I did the first five series and I had to stop doing it as it was 32 pages weekly and I could not concentrate on my work for the U.S. That series lasted for 15 years.

Horror isn't just about supernatural entities and extreme violence. It has a sensual component.

Absent that component, the terror of the unknown and the harm done to characters' bodies and minds are about as emotionally affecting as a video game.

Pablo's work on series like Tales of the Zombie exemplifies this principle.

The characters, even the Zombie himself, are unmistakably human. Their faces are real. Their bodies are real. Their sexuality is real. Their vulnerabilities are real. For that reason, when horror invades their lives, it becomes more than just an extravaganza of splattered blood and special effects.

The terror becomes almost palpable, a part of the reader's life as well as the characters'.

—STEVE GERBER April 11, 2001

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