CBA Interview
Joe “Mr. Prolific” Gill The Phenomenally Productive Writer Speaks Conducted by Christopher Irving
Below: Cover detail by Dick Giordano for a Fightin’ Five issue. Joe Gill created and wrote all of the quintet’s adventures! ©2000 the respective copyright holder.
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Holy smokes! Has Joe Gill produced a lot of comic book stories! The mountain of Gill scripts quite possibly surpasses the output of the late Paul S. Newman as the most prolific comic book writer of all time. A regular Joe with quick typing fingers, the writer remained at Charlton Comics virtually throughout its forty-year existence. While in his eighties and slowed down a bit since his days hitting the town with best buddy Mickey Spillane, Joe still plays cards now and then, still soaking in the good life in Central Connecticut. CBA hopes to have a longer chat with Joe in our sequel covering the Gentile/Wildman years of 1969-83, due early 2001. Christopher Irving: When did you work at Charlton? Joe Gill: I’ll tell you how it started: John Santangelo, the publisher of Charlton, was buying packaged comics from a couple of editorial services in New York, and the main one was Jacquet’s Funnies, Incorporated. I wrote comic books for Charlton, through Jacquet for a couple of years. Jacquet was a wonderful woman to work
for; she used to call me up in the morning and say, “Can you write a book for me this afternoon?” I’d say yes, go over and use the typewriter in her office, and she’d give me a check for $200 before she went home. That’s the reason why I wrote as many pages as I did: I had no critical editors, and that makes a big difference. Santangelo had his printing press in Derby [Connecticut], and a very good editor named Al Fago (Fago and his wife ran a comic book department). Santangelo wanted all of the artists and writers, the entire publishing operation, to be under one roof. He brought up a stable of artists like Dick Giordano, John D’Agostino, Pat Masulli, Charlie Nicholas, Don Campbell, Chic Stone, and they hired some outside people, too. I was the principle writer, and I wrote everything. Chris: Frank McLaughlin told me you wrote up to 100 pages a week at times. How many pages would you say you wrote per week, on average? Joe: In the beginning, for the first couple years, I’d write as many as I could get to write. I always had the capacity to write 30 or 40 pages a day. In the beginning, Fago needed scripts, and Santangelo didn’t want to pay a lot of money—he was only paying $4 a page; I was getting $10 in New York. The difficulty of being a comic writer in New York, and working for some of the “better” publishers like DC and Marvel, is that you’d have the ego of the editors to pander to. One editor would call me up and say that he needed a romance comic, and could I come over for a story conference? A romance story doesn’t warrant a conference! I can knock out a seven- or eight-page story in an hour-and-a-half, without any conference! When you’re working for a New York publisher, you have to go and kiss the editor’s ass. I lived in Brooklyn and had to take a subway over. After seeing that publisher, you might have to go halfway across town and see someone else. It’d be a very tiring and expensive day. When you got through, the editor would feel duty-bound to do a critical job of it and change this and change that. I’ve had an editor at DC call me in Derby to come to New York to change a couple balloons. I had some editors at DC who were good editors, and they bought my stuff and used it as is, with no compulsion to show what brilliant editors they were by changing things. At Charlton, John was underpaying artists and writers, and practically anything that artists and writers did was acceptable. There was very little criticism. The idea was to get the books out, and nobody at Charlton seemed to give a damn how good they were! When I say I wrote between 100 and 150 pages a week, you’ve got to realize that there was no one I had to please. If I had to work in the usual editorial structure, it’d be a lot less than that. Chris: You said before that you hated writing super-hero comics. Joe: That began in 1945 to 1946, when comics were first going in that direction. There was a choice as to what category you could work in. The western category was bigger than the super-heroes, and I wrote Kid Colt, Two-Gun Kid, and a million things for Marvel. I was Stan Lee’s favorite boy for a short while. Comics collapsed with the end of World War II, though it took a while to trickle down. By January or February of ’46, it was getting very difficult to get assignments. Mickey Spillane was forced out of writing COMIC BOOK ARTIST 9
August 2000