Alter Ego #133

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No.133 June 2015

Edited by ROY THOMAS The first and greatest “hero-zine”—ALL-NEW, focusing on GOLDEN AND SILVER AGE comics and creators with ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA [Fawcett Collectors of America], MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY’S Comic Fandom Archive, and more!

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GOLDEN AGE JUSTICE SOCIETY ISSUE! Features on JOHN B. WENTWORTH (Johnny Thunder), LEN SANSONE (The Atom), and BERNARD SACHS (All-Star Comics inker), art by CARMINE INFANTINO, BOB OKSNER, HOWARD PURCELL, STAN ASCHMEIER, BEN FLINTON, and H.G. PETER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more! Cover homage by SHANE FOLEY to a vintage All-Star image by IRWIN HASEN!

Farewell salute to the COMICS BUYER’S GUIDE! TBG/CBG history and remembrances from ALAN LIGHT, MURRAY BISHOFF, MAGGIE THOMPSON, BRENT FRANKENHOFF, “final” CBG columns by MARK EVANIER, TONY ISABELLA, PETER DAVID, FRED HEMBECK, JOHN LUSTIG, classic art by DON NEWTON, MIKE VOSBURG, JACK KIRBY, MIKE NASSER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

DENNY O’NEIL’s Silver Age career at Marvel, Charlton, and DC—aided and abetted by ADAMS, KALUTA, SEKOWSKY, LEE, GIORDANO, THOMAS, SCHWARTZ, APARO, BOYETTE, DILLIN, SWAN, DITKO, et al. Plus, we begin serializing AMY KISTE NYBERG’s groundbreaking book on the history of the Comics Code, FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY and more!

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We spotlight HERB TRIMPE’s work on Hulk, Iron Man, S.H.I.E.L.D., Ghost Rider, Ant-Man, Silver Surfer, War of the Worlds, Ka-Zar, even Phantom Eagle, and featuring THE SEVERIN SIBLINGS, LEE, FRIEDRICH, THOMAS, GRAINGER, BUSCEMA, and others, plus more of AMY KISTE NYBERG’s Comics Code history, M. THOMAS INGE on Communism and 1950s comic books, FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

Golden Age “Air Wave” artist LEE HARRIS discussed by his son JONATHAN LEVEY to interviewer RICHARD J. ARNDT, with rarely-seen 1940s art treasures (including mysterious, never-published art of an alternate version of DC’s Tarantula)! Plus more of AMY KISTE NYBERG’s exposé on the Comics Code, artist SAL AMENDOLA tells the story of the Academy of Comic Book Arts, FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

Second big issue on 3-D COMICS OF THE 1950s! KEN QUATTRO looks at the controversy involving JOE KUBERT, NORMAN MAURER, BILL GAINES, and AL FELDSTEIN! Plus more fabulous Captain 3-D by SIMON & KIRBY and MORT MESKIN— 3-D thrills from BOB POWELL, HOWARD NOSTRAND, JAY DISBROW and others— the career of Treasure Chest artist VEE QUINTAL, FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

1940s WILL EISNER/”BUSY” ARNOLD letters between the creator of The Spirit and his Quality Comics partner, art and artifacts by FINE, CRANDALL, CUIDERA, CARDY, KOTZKY, BLUM, NORDLING, and others! Plus Golden Age MLJ artist JOHN BULTHIUS, more of AMY KISTE NYBERG’s History of the Comics Code, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, cover by DANIEL JAMES COX and JASON PAULOS!

CAROL L. TILLEY on Dr. Fredric Wertham’s falsification of his research in the 1950s, featuring art by EVERETT, SHUSTER, PETER, BECK, COSTANZA, WEBB, FELDSTEIN, WILLIAMSON, WOOD, BIRO, and BOB KANE! Plus AMY KISTE NYBERG on the evolution of the Comics Code, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLEY, and a new cover by JASON PAULOS and DANIEL JAMES COX!

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Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure heroes in comics! With art by FOSTER, HOGARTH, MANNING, KANE, KUBERT, MORROW, GRELL, THORNE, WEISS, ANDERSON, KALUTA, AMENDOLA, BUSCEMA, MARSH, and YEATES—with analysis by foremost ERB experts! Plus, the 1970s ERB comics company that nearly was, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

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CAPTAIN MARVEL headlines a Christmas FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) Fantasmagoria starring C.C. BECK, OTTO BINDER, MARC SWAYZE—and the FAWCETT FAMILY (presented by P.C. HAMERLINCK)! Plus: Comic book/strip star artist DAN BARRY profiled, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom history, and more! Cover by C.C. BECK!

GERRY CONWAY interviewed about his work as star Marvel/DC writer in the early ‘70s (from the creation of The Punisher to the death of Gwen Stacy) with art by ROMITA, COLAN, KANE, PLOOG, BUSCEMA, MORROW, TUSKA, ADAMS, SEKOWSKY, the SEVERINS, and others!

Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom history, and more!

75 YEARS of THE FLASH and GREEN LANTERN (a crossover with BACK ISSUE #80)! INFANTINO, KANE, KUBERT, ELIAS, LAMPERT, HIBBARD, NODELL, HASEN, TOTH, REINMAN, SEKOWSKY, Golden Age JSA and Dr. Mid-Nite artist ARTHUR PEDDY’s stepson interviewed, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom history, and more!

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Vol. 3, No. 133 / June 2015 Editor

Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout

Christopher Day

Consulting Editor John Morrow

FCA Editor

P.C. Hamerlinck

Comic Crypt Editor

If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,

Editorial Honor Roll

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Cover Artists Jim Mooney

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With Special Thanks to:

Jim Kealy Heidi Amash David Kirkpatrick Ger Apeldoorn Lee Laska Terry Austin Stan Lee Bob Bailey Jim Ludwig William Biggins Christopher Boyko Bruce Mason Doug Martin Robert Brown Dr. Jeff McLaughlin Bart Bush Brian K. Morris John Caputo Frank Motler Nick Caputo Mark Muller Shaun Clancy Will Murray ComicBookPlus Marc Tyler (website) ComicLink (website) Nobleman Dr. Amy Kiste Jon B. Cooke Nyberg Chet Cox Jake Oster Ray Cuthbert Barry Pearl Al Dellinges Robert Plunkett Michael Dunne Ken Quattro Mark Ellis Gene Reed Jean-Michel Bob Rivard Ferragatti Bernice SachsShane Foley Smoller Bob Fujitani Maggie Sansone Jeff Gelb Randy Sargent Janet Gilbert Vijah Shah Grand Comics Database (website) Darci Sharver Anthony Snyder Arnie Grieves Dann Thomas R.C. Harvey Herb Trimpe Heritage Comics Archives (website) Dr. Michael J. Vassallo Richard Howell Lynn Walker Alan Hutchinson Dr. M. Thomas Inge Rebecca Wentworth Eddy Zeno Marc Kardell

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Jim Mooney

Contents Writer/Editorial: Sunny Jim. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 “I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form” . . . . . . . . . 3 Golden/Silver/Bronze Age artist Jim Mooney interviewed by Dr. Jeff McLaughlin.

Seal Of Approval: History Of The Comics Code: Ch. 6 (cont’d) 49 From Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg’s groundbreaking study—the aging of the CCA.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! “Wertham Attacks!” . . . . . . . . . 55 Michael T. Gilbert takes a look at Wertham and the Code, pro & con, as seen in the 1950s.

Comic Fandom Archive: The RBCC Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Beginning Bill Schelly’s multi-part study of the foremost comics adzine of the 1960s.

re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 68 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #192 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 P.C. Hamerlinck presents Fawcett/Captain Marvel’s Otto Binder & “The Fawcett Invasion of France” - Part II!

On Our Cover: While Jim (“Madman”) Mooney contributed memorably to Marvel Comics in the late 1960s & 1970s, he’ll probably forever be even more identified with the DC heroes he drew from the 1940s through the ’60s. Our crazyquilt cover is composed of commission drawings he did for Robert Plunkett (Supergirl and her animal buddies) and interviewer Dr. Jeff McLaughlin (Batman & Robin) and Eddy Zeno (The Legion of Super-Heroes), plus a penciled Tommy Tomorrow figure from a proposed revival in the mid-1980s, supplied by Mark Ellis. Jim was drawing, and drawing well, right up until he left us. Photo courtesy of Eddy Zeno. [All hero art TM & © DC Comics.]

Above: One of the few times Jim Mooney drew Daredevil was when the Man without Fear sneaked past Spider-Man’s spider sense to clobber him (we forget just why—but hey, this was Marvel!) in Marvel Team-Up #25 (Sept. 1974). Script by Len Wein; inks by Frank Giacoia. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Alter EgoTM is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344.

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writer/editorial

I

Sunny Jim

never got to know Jim Mooney well… yet, somehow, he always made me feel I did know him.

to come upon… so we learned to appreciate it when we found it.

And when that dependability was part of a package that included top-class talent, you hung onto that artist with both hands.

From the handful of occasions we encountered each other in person, the main thing I remember is his smile. It lit up a room, shining out in front of him like a beacon, making you feel good even as you spotted him coming toward you across a room or a convention hall. For instance, there were any number of wellwishers who came backstage at Carnegie Hall after Marvel’s soldout one-night stand there in January of 1972, but somehow the only one I remember who wasn’t also in the show is Jim. It wasn’t anything he said. He just made you feel good, being in his presence. You felt he wished you well, and you returned the feeling.

In some ways, I almost wish I didn’t know that, during his last few years, Jim confronted a number of health problems… his beloved wife Annie passed away… and original art that he’d sent to someone he trusted suddenly started turning up for sale on eBay. On March 30, 2008, Jim took his own life. Such an ending seems sadly out of tune with so much of what we know about the rest of his life… but then, the human condition is a lot more complicated than any of us can ever completely know.

Stan Lee, who counted Jim among his closest friends in the comics business, always had faith that Jim would deliver whatever was needed from him, and so did I. And John Romita knew he could depend on Jim as finishing artist to pull together an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, whether the penciler was himself or John Buscema. Jim was one of the Dependables—and I don’t say that in a patronizing way. In a hectic world such as comic books were back in the day, dependability was often one of the hardest things

Alter Ego carried a shorter interview with Jim, conducted by Christopher Boyko, back in issue #107. At that time, we also had on hand this issue’s longer one from Dr. Jeff McLaughlin, and we knew we’d publish it at a later time. That day has arrived, and we think you’ll enjoy an extended visit with one of comics’ nice guys—Jim Mooney.

Bestest,

COMING IN JULY

134

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A SPECIAL MULTI-PART TRIBUTE TO

SOL BRODSKY —UNSUNG HERO OF 1960s MARVEL COMICS! • Cover montage of SOL BRODSKY art & a powerful portrait by JOHN ROMITA! • “JOLLY SOLLY”—the artist who designed the Fantastic Four logo, inked F.F. #3 & 4, ramrodded Marvel’s production team in the ’60s—and helped launch Skywald and Marvel UK in the ’70s! Rare & rip-roarin’ art from F.F., Ant-Man, Iron Man, Sub-Mariner, Gunhawks, Kid Colt, Blue Beetle, Captain Aero, Red Cross, horror comics, Cracked Mazagine, et al.—and reminiscences by his Marvel-colorist daughter JANNA PARKER (aka JANICE COHEN) and by Marvel cohorts STAN LEE, JOHN ROMITA, HERB TRIMPE, STAN GOLDBERG, DAVID ANTHONY KRAFT, & ROY THOMAS!

rs, Inc.] [Art TM & © Marvel Characte

• Plus ALBERTO BECATTINI on DAN BARRY (continued at last)— AMY KISTE NYBERG on the Comics Code (probably)—FCA— COMIC CRYPT—BILL SCHELLY—& MORE!!

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3

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form” Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist JIM MOONEY Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career Interview Conducted & Transcribed by Dr. Jeff McLaughlin

“I Don’t Like Spiders And Bats…”

But Jim Mooney, who’s flanked here by his art for two of the creepy costumed superheroes with whom he’s most identified, had no reason to warble those (slightly reworded) song lyrics. The splash page at left is from Batman #48 (Aug.-Sept. 1948), wherein he penciled all three stories (Charles Paris inked this one; scripter unidentified)—while the Spider-Man color illo was done circa 2006 for interviewer Dr. Jeff McLaughlin, and was inscribed by both Jim and Stan Lee. Photo courtesy of Mark Ellis. [Batman page TM & © DC Comics; Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Jim was a total pleasure to work with—a real pro. He was totally dependable as far as deadlines were concerned, and although he had a great sense of humor and loved to kid around, he took his work seriously and never gave any assignment anything but his best effort. If the world consisted of people like Jim Mooney, it would be a much happier place. —Stan Lee.

When I began working for Marvel, I lumped Jim in with the rest of the giants in the bullpen who worked for them. It was a friendly but intimidating environment in the bullpen in those days surrounded by all that talent, and Jim being strictly a freelancer, his visits were not frequent. I was impressed with his style and can easily picture his work in my mind. —Herb Trimpe.

Working with Jim was always memorable and always a joy. He never disappointed… he always gave more than I envisioned with a script. Jim Mooney was one of the two finest men I’ve ever met in my life. He more than justified his existence. I hope I can say the same about myself. —Mark Ellis.

I remember how delighted Stan Lee was when Jim came over to help us out with Spider-Man. Besides which, Jim seemed about as amiable an artist as ever I met. But I’ll confess, my main thought about Jim is that I consider him my “good luck piece,” so to speak. In 1965 I was [at DC Comics] proofreading a “Supergirl” story he had drawn when I received the surreptitious phone call from secretary Flo Steinberg that Stan Lee would like to see me. Right after that lunchtime I came back to DC’s office and handed in my resignation. Jim’s “Supergirl” was the last page of art I saw as a DC employee for 15 years. And it was always a pleasure to look at.

—Roy Thomas.

I was a fan of Jim’s since the “Supergirl” stories of the 1960s, and it was both an honor and a pleasure to work with him. We struck up a friendship which lasted for almost 25 years. Jim Mooney was many things: a superb comic book artist; a fine storyteller; an accomplished painter; a connoisseur of antiques, theatre, movies, and music; and a true gentleman. I expect that I’m not the only editor, or penciler, or collaborator who has a batter of “Jim Mooney saved my bacon” stories, but it’s worth reiterating that Jim’s output was not only miraculous in its turnaround, but it was expert, individualistic, and stylish—just like Jim himself. —Richard Howell.

4

Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Jim Mooney passed away March 30, 2008, as I was editing the following interview, which we had conducted over the phone during the previous month, while I was in Austria and he was in his home in Florida. I had met Jim at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2006 and had wound up spending most of my time just sitting with him and other legendary writers and artists as they told me story after story. It was one of the most enjoyable weekends I have ever had. And, as I write this introduction, it is one of the saddest moments, as I miss Jim a great deal even though I only knew him for a couple of years. We chatted at least once a month, sometimes once a week.

His grace, his humor, his honesty, and his decency, not to mention his sincere interest in others, made him a dear friend. Little did I imagine, as a kid reading comics, that I would have the honor of becoming a friend of the artist who drew so many of my favorites. Jim had been married twice and had three children: Bruce (deceased), Jimmy, and Noel. He also had seven cats (none of whom was named Streaky). In our conversations, I never asked him how he got the moniker “Gentleman Jim,” because I immediately knew the answer the first time I met him…. It is a cliché, yes, but I am truly a richer man for knowing him. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. It took place in February 2008. A few of my remarks have been interpolated in italics. —Dr. Jeff McLaughlin.

I

“The First Job I Got [In] New York Was A Strip Called ‘The Moth’”

Jim Mooney’s long comic book career spanned every age. It began when he did his first seven pages of pencils and inks back in early 1940 for publisher Victor Fox with Mystery Men Comics #9, introducing a character called The Moth. Fox was threatened with a lawsuit by DC Comics over that story, yet Jim would eventually be hired by DC because of it. But that is getting ahead of our story….

When a young Jim Mooney was riding his horse on one of his family’s three estates, it is unlikely that he was thinking about how so many people around the world would become familiar with his comic book art. Born into privilege on August 13th, 1919, in Mount Vernon, New York, James Noel Mooney would find that this wealthy lifestyle was not to last.

Although his father had made millions in real estate and when they traveled they stayed at the finest hotels in the world, James Mooney, Sr., would over-extend himself by investing in Arabian horses at a time when the world was about to enter the Great Depression.

Going from having servants to having almost nothing must have been a great challenge for the family. However, Jim’s mother Irene had her feet firmly planted on the ground. Even though she had not finished grammar school, she had done a little investing of her own and was able to buy a house to make the family moderately comfortable. While Jim’s father continued to struggle, his uncle Ed, who owned the Hartford Dispatch and Warehouse Company, was responsible for getting Jim into a Los Angeles art school. Jim did not want to finish high school because he didn’t want to “hang around for a lousy diploma” in something he wasn’t keen on and so jumped at his uncle’s offer.

Jim loved art school. He especially loved the sketching class, because the models were nude. When he brought his work home to show his parents, they probably wondered what they had allowed their son to get into, but he took a real liking to painting (especially watercolor) and to stained glass. It wasn’t long before his vast artistic talents would be shown off….

JIM MOONEY: [Science-fiction and comic writer] Henry Kuttner was instrumental in getting me my first job while I was still going to art school. He got me my first assignment in the national magazine Weird Tales. He talked to [editor] Farnsworth Wright and he said, “I’ve got a young man here and he’s very good—would you go along if I had him illustrate some of my stories?” So I illus-

Race Into Space Young Mooney’s cover for a mimeographed science-fiction fanzine dated Dec. 1939—featuring a spaceship from that future year 1940. The “Ackerman” listed as co-editor was Forrest J. Ackerman, founding editor in 1958 of the influential Warren magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. [© the respective copyright holders.]

trated some of Henry’s stories which appeared in Weird Tales at a time when I was still going to art school. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: A photo of young Kuttner was seen in A/E #107.]

There seemed to be a touch of glamor in the Mooney family, no matter what their financial situation. Jim’s older sister (by eight years) Julie was a very beautiful New York stage actress and had signed a contract with MGM. Subsequently, the family would relocate with her to Hollywood, California. Although Julie tried to get Jim involved in the movie business, where she found herself in small roles (including much later on in the film adaptation of Abraham Merritt’s Burn Witch Burn!), he discovered quickly that they didn’t need any more Dead-End Kids. So Jim began working at Earl Carroll’s Vanities.

Earl Carroll was famous (or infamous) for having the most beautiful and the most scantily dressed women on stage. Jim’s vocal talents led him straight from a brief appearance on stage to becoming a checkroom attendant. I asked him if he ever got to meet Earl Carroll....

MOONEY: Oh yeah, a couple of times. I showed him some of my stuff. He was interested. I was doing a little bit of sculpture and drawing at the time, and he was really quite nice. He was a very aloof person, but he was very encouraging, and, of course, his sweetheart was Beryl Wallace. They died together in a plane crash years later.

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

5

of course, was Hal Foster, who did Prince Valiant. Hal Foster was magnificent. He’s probably the best draftsman in comics. I wasn’t so much into Prince Valiant for the story as I was for the drawing.

Jim recalls seeing “Batman” on the newsstands, so he hitchhiked across the country back to New York, because that’s where the comic books were coming from and he thought they might provide him with an employment opportunity.

All Is Vanities Showman Earl Carroll, plus a poster for the 1945 movie version of his Broadway revue Earl Carroll Vanities.

Carroll’s show was the main competitors of the even more famous Ziegfield Follies.

JM: I’ve read that in his auditions the women had to be in the nude.

MOONEY: Oh yeah, yeah. He went to bed with every girl he could find. You know, it’s funny—I remember one of the parties we went to, when my first wife Carol was working in the checkroom [circa 1939].... Actually, Earl Carroll was very personable, very tall, slender, and spoke well and was a person who projected himself as being what he was—which was a very confident gentleman.

JM: Did you bring Carol with you?

MOONEY: Oh no…no…no. I took off by myself ’cause I could. She wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have expected her to do that. I sent for her six or eight months later, once I finally gained a little bit of employment. It wasn’t easy. The first job I got when I went to New York was for a strip called “The Moth.”

JM: Mystery Men Comics #9, April 1940.

MOONEY: And then they were sued by DC for that because they claimed I was copying “Batman and Robin.”

JM: Yeah, which apparently you were.

JM: And how beautiful were the girls?

MOONEY: Oh, none of them was working there if they weren’t beautiful and didn’t have a good figure. The showgirls were a certain height, the chorus girls were a certain height, and they were all pretty girls, every darn one of ’em. You know, I used to love to get an assignment where I had to go backstage and bring a message.

I remember one time when Errol Flynn came up. He went into the ladies’ room and he was raising hell and they finally had to toss him out. I didn’t have the physical stature to stand up to Errol Flynn nor did I have any inclination….

Clark Gable was there. I met Clark Gable at the studio through my sister one time. He said “Hi” and shook my hand. I thought “Wow, this is real celebrity!” He was personable. I don’t know how he was otherwise, but he was nice enough to take and treat a kid brother who didn’t amount to a row of beans as if, you know, you had some reason for being.

JM: So you were working at Earl Carroll’s while you were at art school.

And then you quit there, right?

MOONEY: I quit there because my first wife Carol and I were having a fling. We were close but we were warned: Don’t see each other. Don’t make it apparent that we were together. And this was from Earl Carroll himself. And we, like a couple of damn fool kids, just said, “Well, we’re gonna do what we want!” And you know, he did what he wanted and he said we were fired. [laughs] So we lived on our unemployment insurance for a while.

Comic books were becoming popular, so Jim thought perhaps this might be an opportunity for his artistic side. Like every other kid, he read some of the newspaper comic strips, and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon was one of his favorites.

MOONEY: Alex Raymond was really a very good draftsman. He really knew how to draw. I thought it was pretty professional.

Although Milton Caniff was a very much-loved artist, Caniff did not draw as well or as accurately as Alex Raymond. Another one,

Magno Mistake About It! For Ace Periodicals, Mooney drew the adventures of “Magno the Magnetic Man” and his teenage sidekick Davey. Seen above is the splash page for Super-Mystery Comics, Vol. 2, #4 (Oct. 1941). The German-accented prisoners are seen in a Canadian POW camp because, in mid-’41 when this story was published, Canada, like the rest of the British Empire, was at war with Nazi Germany—but the United States was not, at least not officially.

Writer unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

6

Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

Like A “Moth” To A Flame (Top row:) Maybe it’s just because DC was already angry at Fox Comics for copying “Superman” with “Wonder Man” in Wonder Comics #1 (May 1939), over which they successfully sued to prevent the publication of a second “Wonder Man” adventure— but somehow, the Mooney-drawn series “The Moth” that debuted in Fox’s Mystery Men Comics #9 (April 1940) doesn’t seem to us to closely resemble the elder company’s “Batman,” as DC claimed when threatening a second lawsuit. A different artist drew “The Moth” in #10; then, on Mooney’s splash page for #11 (June ’40), note how the writer cleverly worked in a reference to a “bat.” Still, with his power of flight and his creature-of-the-night costume, The Moth seems to us halfway between Superman and Batman.

The bylines “Godfrey Clarke” and “Norton [later ‘Norman’] Kingsley” seem more like authorial house names than Mooney pseudonyms; the writers are unknown, in any event. Thanks to Jim Kealy.

(Right:) Oddly, though, with Mystery Men #13 (Aug. 1940), “The Moth” was dropped and Mooney instead drew the first episode of a new strip, “The Lynx with Blackie the Mystery Boy,” which definitely brought to mind “Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder.” This time, DC did sue Fox again—even though these new Fox heroes, too, could fly! (Incidentally, the spacing in some of the balloons and captions suggests that The Lynx’s name was originally something with more than seven letters total.) After the debut story, others took over “The Lynx” art chores. Scripter again unknown. Thanks to Chet Cox, Gene Reed, Darci Sharver, & the ComicBookPlus website for the scan. For more on “Wonder Man,” “The Moth,” “The Lynx,” and the DC/Fox lawsuits, see Ken Quattro’s well-documented coverage in Alter Ego #101. [© the respective copyright holders.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

From “Flash” To “Lash” On The Splash Maybe National/DC was a bit touchy about the hero “Flash Lightning” over in Ace Periodicals’ Lightning Comics, as well—and once again Jim Mooney would’ve found himself in the middle of things. Between Lightning, Vol. 2, #1 (June 1941, above left), and V2#2 (Aug. ’41, bottom right), the hero’s name suddenly became “Lash Lightning.” Mooney drew both stories, and even signed the cover of the latter (above right). Thanks to Jim Kealy & the ComicBookPlus website. [© the respective copyright holders.]

MOONEY: In a way, I think that might have been true.

JM: That was for Fox. You did “The Moth” for Mystery-Men Comics #9, #11, & #12.

MOONEY: After that thing, I latched onto Ace Magazines, doing “Magno and Davey” and “Flash Lightning” and so on.

JM: What did you think of drawing those characters?

MOONEY: I liked them. I enjoyed them ’cause I was allowed to do covers and I really thought, “Boy, you know, this is great!” They trusted me enough to do covers. They were just getting into comics, when they had done pulps before that. It was very exciting. And I stayed with them for quite a long while, and I’m trying to think where the hell I went from there. I finally did take work for about eight or nine months at Fiction House on staff. That was when I worked with Ruben Moreira, George Tuska, and that group of guys.

JM: Didn’t a friend of yours get you involved in pulp magazines?

MOONEY: Oh, Bob Turner, yeah. That was at approximately the same time in the early ’40s. Bob wrote Gunsmoke and moved out to

7

8

Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

Spreading Like “Wildfire” Artist Jim Mooney and writer Robert Turner co-created “Wildfire,” a super-heroine series that lasted 13 issues (not six, as Mooney recalled) of the Quality group’s Smash Comics. Seen here are the first three pages of the origin story from Smash #25 (Aug. 1941). Thanks to ComicBookPlus. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Hollywood. And later on, when I moved to Hollywood, we were very close. At that time, my father-in-law had a cabin up in the San Bernardino Mountains. And we used to go up there and have some really nice long weekends.

“It’s Funny, Eisner & Iger...”

JM: When did your character “Wildfire” come about?

MOONEY: Um, I’m trying to think. That was something that we came up with that we thought we could sell. And I did sell it to [Everett “Busy”] Arnold in Stamford, Connecticut, thinking it would go well, but it lasted only about six issues.

It was a real flop. I don’t know why. I mean, he put it in one of his better magazines.

Arnold was a heck of a nice guy; I always liked him. I had high hopes for it and it just didn’t take off. It was fairly well-written. It was drawn as well as I could at the time. But I just sort of thought it was going to be more successful than it was; but it was [laughs] one of those early failures. You have to learn through those [experiences].

JM: She had long flowing red hair, is that correct?

Robert “Bob” Turner The pulp, comics, and TV writer helped young Jim Mooney get into drawing for pulp magazines.

Thanks to Will Murray.

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

9

MOONEY: She was rather nude for that time. That was considered just a little bit far out—the fact that she wasn’t wearing many clothes.

JM: You would do the pencils and then the inks, but who would do the color?

MOONEY: I don’t know who did color at that time.

I imagine someone in Arnold’s office. Usually, I had nothing to do with the color[ing] or lettering on any of the strips. I stayed away from lettering [laughs] because it was time-consuming and I wasn’t great at it.

JM: When you were drawing, would you leave spaces for the letter boxes or…

Three Of A Kind?

(Left to right:) Three Golden Age artists that Jim Mooney admired both as talents and as people—George Tuska, Nick Viscardi (later Cardy), and Ruben Moreira. Thanks to Dewey Cassell for the photo of the former. Cassell covered Tuska in A/E #99, Jim Amash interviewed Cardy for #65, and some of Moreira’s comic book and Tarzan strip work was seen in #129.

MOONEY: Yeah. I would use a ruler to determine how much space it would need, and I would try to allow them enough space for the balloons. I’d just indicate the balloons roughly. A lot of the artists did letter, and most of the ones that did it were good letterers. I mean they were fast. But my feeling was this: I wasn’t that good, I didn’t like it, I wasn’t that fast, and I could make more money by just drawing than I could by lettering.

JM: Tell me a bit about your brief time at Eisner & Iger [comic shop].

MOONEY: I was on staff for about two weeks. I just felt I wasn’t quite ready for it, as there were other very fine artists there and it was a little intimidating at that time. From there I went to Ace Magazines. I just felt like I was just out-classed. I looked at stuff that Lou Fine was doing [at Eisner & Iger]. He really turned out to be quite an illustrator later on. And of course George Tuska was good. George at that time was, I think, quite a bit better than I was, even though he was just a beginner. And there were a few others. I felt that I really was a little bit beyond my depth.

Its funny, Eisner & Iger: talk about having hardly a posh set-up there for their artists. They had whatever kind of a makeshift chair the artist had. And then there was [something] like an orange cart, and it was used for a taboret. It was unbelievable. It was so makeshift that at that time I thought: “This is the way that comics are made? This is incredible!”

JM: For sure. I understand that Tuska had a pretty intimidating physique.

MOONEY: He was one of the early body-builders. He wouldn’t look like Schwarzenegger in his prime, but he was good. Most of us were under six feet, and George was six feet or even a little bit more. George has a really bad speech impediment, which limited him to some extent. So we never could converse to any great extent, but we always got along okay. It was, you know, no palsywalsy or anything like that.

JM: He is still drawing, you know. [NOTE: Tuska passed away in 2010.]

MOONEY: He’s amazing. You know, in the early days before he got married, before he became involved with his wife, I met him once down in the village when I was just raisin’ hell down there, drinkin’ at all the places. And he came along and hung out with us at quite a few of the places where we went. And he didn’t have much to say, although he drank pretty well.

JM: And you mentioned that Nick Viscardi—who later changed his name to Nick Cardy—was at Eisner & Iger.

MOONEY: Nick and I always got along very well. Nick is a nice guy. I owe him a phone call. I still like to keep contact with him.

[NOTE: Nick Cardy would pass away in 2013.]

JM: Ruben Moreira seemed to be someone who impressed you, as well.

MOONEY: Yeah. Ruben and I were very close friends. We worked together at Fiction House. Ruben is a Puerto Rican, and just a hell of a nice guy. We just hit it off probably better than most anybody else in the business at that time. We used to lunch together and drink together and we’d date together and so on. It’s just unfortunate that Ruben decided he wanted to go back to Puerto Rico and I lost track of him, because I was never much of a correspondent. His mother used to call me once in a while. He did Tarzan for a while. He did his own penciling and inking and did it beautifully. He was one hell of a good artist.

JM: What was your parents’ reaction to your work when they saw your comic book work?

MOONEY: At that time when I was doing it, my dad had lost most of his money. And as far as my mother was concerned, “Anything you’re doing that’s bringing in money is okay with me.” And my dad just said, “You know, that’s fine.” They weren’t that terribly impressed, but they were happy that I was able to make a buck and not have to depend on them.

“It Was Pretty Much The Same Pap”

JM: During the war you did a lot of freelance work.

MOONEY: Well, you see, I was classified “limited service.”

[NOTE: Mark Ellis reports that “Jim told me that he had rheumatic fever as a child that affected his heart. He tried to enlist [in the military] a couple of times. I think he was finally assigned to an Army print shop or something, where he worked with Stan.”]

JM: Which meant?

MOONEY: They never got around to me. Ruben Moreira was another who was classified “limited service.” George Tuska was another one that—well, he was classified 4F, actually. So the group of us who were undesirables for potential future soldiers had a little clique, because we had one thing in common: they didn’t want us. [mutual laughter] JM: What was the industry like then while the war was going on?

MOONEY: We had a tremendous amount of female artists that gravitated toward doing comic book work. It gave some of the female comic book cartoonists a chance to do some work which they probably might not have gotten earlier.

10

Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

How The Ginch Stole The Comic Book Splash pages of “The Ginch and Claude Pennygrabber” from Timely’s Terry-Toons Comics #11 & 12 (Aug. & Sept. 1943).

Art by Jim Mooney; script by Stan Lee. Note that Jim drew himself into the second story; since there’s no Stan Lee byline for this one, maybe Mooney wrote this one, as well. During this period, Lee was in the Signal Corps. Thanks to Dr. Michael J. Vassallo. [Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JM: Was there any change in what was being drawn? Or who the audience was?

MOONEY: Not that I recall. It was pretty much the same pap.

JM: Did you have to work any war stuff into your comics?

MOONEY: Anything that they needed I would do. But most of the time…you see, that’s what Stan Lee was doing at Duke University.

He was doing promotional posters for the troops. One time I went down to visit him. We were doing “The Ginch and E. Claude Pennygrabber,” which was a funny-animal strip. He wrote it, and when I say he wrote it, it was typical of Stan: he’d give you a paragraph and say, “There’s the story. You write it.” Well, you know, you’d break it down and of course put some dialogue in, and I couldn’t work in my hotel room because Jimmy, my son, was three or four at the time, and noisy, and my wife couldn’t constantly take him downstairs, take him to the park, and so on. So [Stan] got me a place to work in the pathology laboratory at Duke.

And I’m sitting there trying to get this damn thing out. I had a [drawing] board, of course. I’m surrounded by pickled eyeballs and diseased brains.

JM: And you’re trying to be funny.

MOONEY: Trying, well, yeah. Well, just trying to draw. It got to

me. I don’t think I ever drew faster in my life!

JM: [laughs] You might have had a couple EC horror covers out of that.

MOONEY: Well, that would’ve been the place to do it.

Jim Mooney & Stan Lee (Jim’s the one on the left) hanging out at Stan’s Los Angeles digs, 1990. From Comic Book Artist #7. Thanks to John Morrow and Jon B. Cooke

JM: Let’s talk then a little bit about meeting Stan. I understand when you first met it wasn’t a match made in heaven, shall we say.

MOONEY: Well, at that time I would say I was probably a little cockier than was necessary. And I remember coming in, and Stan of course was a little bit above office boy at the time, he was subeditor or something like that. [NOTE: Actually, since late 1941, Stan Lee had been editor of the entire company that was Timely Comics.] And he asked me what I did, and I said, “I write,” and he said, “Oh, you write?” And I said, “I draw, I letter, I ink, and so on.” And it pissed him off. I remember he said, “Do you publish the damn books, too?” [laughs] So we got over that pretty well. It was a just a little bit of annoyance at the time. I’m sure Stan has told you that story.

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

11

SIDEBAR:

When Stan Lee Met Mooney

STAN LEE: I distinctly remember our first meeting. Jim came up to the office seeking some work. I asked what he did. He said he could do pencilling, inking, lettering, coloring, or even write the stories. Somehow, he said it with such confidence that, before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “I suppose you can work the printing press, too!” He fired right back at me, “I could if I had to!” So we were immediately antagonistic to each other; therefore, what could be more natural then that he would become my best friend!

Like so many other really good artists, Jim had his own style. I could recognize a Mooney drawing among dozens of others. And I liked his style. It was clear, clean, dramatic, and pleasant to look at. Also, Jim was very versatile. He could do adventure, super-heroes, comedy, animation, just about anything one could think of.

JM: Yeah… he’s told me that one. What else where you doing with Timely at this time?

MOONEY: I was doing mainly fill-in stuff. I drove Stan’s car down to Duke for him. He had a car in storage. That was one of the reasons for me going down there. He paid for everything. He was without a car at the time.

JM: You also did some jungle comics around this time, like “Camilla” [for Fiction House]. Did you like doing those? Did you have a preference for what kind of genre you did?

MOONEY: No, but I enjoyed doing “Camilla,” and later on, when I got into the horror stuff, I thought that was kind of fun.

JM: I understand you didn’t like doing Westerns.

MOONEY: No, I never did. I never liked drawing horses. [laughs] I mean, I could draw ’em… but if this character was on a horse and the other characters were on a horse, then I was going to be drawing horses, horses, horses. When they did come along, I never took them again.

JM: Did you ever use a pseudonym when you were doing some of your work?

From Har-De-Har To Horror Jim Mooney’s (signed) splash page for a Timely/Atlas horror story from Strange Tales #10 (Sept. 1952), as edited by Stan Lee. Writer unidentified.

Thanks to Dr. Michael J. Vassallo. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

MOONEY: No, I think I signed it if they wanted it signed. The thing is, I loved to write some of those stories. I wrote a few. But it was impossible, because Stan was doing all the writing.

And he didn’t want anybody [else], obviously, [as] that was one of his sources of income. He could write the stuff real fast. I said, “Look, hey, let me write one,” and I think he let me write one or two of them, but it was just that he did not want me to encroach on his territory. [mutual laughter]

Let’s Have A “Pow-Wow”!

Perhaps Jim Mooney never liked to draw Westerns or horses, but circa 1985 he drew this concept sketch for a potential revival of the 1950s DC series “Pow-Wow Smith”—with what provider Mark Ellis calls a “steampunk SF slant”—and with a mutated cougar apparently standing in for the standard cayuse!

[Pow-Wow Smith TM & © DC Comics; other art © Estate of Jim Mooney.]

12

Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

Rumbles In The Jungle Mooney drew, and even signed, such stories as “Camilla” in Fiction House’s Jungle Comics #45 (Sept. 1943) and “Kaänga” in Jungle #48 (Dec. ’43). Clearly, he liked drawing voluptuous women—and his editors liked having him do it! Scripters unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

JM: But, even though he would just give you a paragraph, you would wind up writing it anyway… would you not?

MOONEY: On some things, yeah. On the horror stories, he usually wrote those page to page, panel to panel.

JM: When I look at the list here from Grand Comics Database, I don’t see any horror stories listed during the war with your name….

MOONEY: Probably it was unsigned at that time. I can spot it when I see it, but I don’t think they wanted us to sign it necessarily. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Of course, there were no real horror comics during WWII. They came about in the late 1940s.]

JM: Did it bother you that you couldn’t sign your work?

MOONEY: No, not really. The only reason that I started doing it was, of course, in the early days when you needed work, if you thought rival companies were looking over the magazines. They could look through hopefully and say, “Hey, I like this guy’s stuff. Jim Mooney—let’s see if we can find him.” Of course, I was never in the phonebook at that time; nobody had listings. But they could check around and find out from this artist or that artist where I was and how to get in touch with me.

JM: Ah. Did that happen?

MOONEY: It did, it did once or twice, yeah.

Bee Careful What You Wish For! Another Mooney-illustrated (and signed) horror comic from the early ’50s: Timely/Atlas’ Mystic #7 (March 1952). Scripter unknown. Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

13

“DC Was… Looking For Somebody To Do ‘Batman’”

JM: And it happened with “Batman,” right?

MOONEY: Well, the reason I went to DC [circa 1945] was that I understood they were looking for somebody to do “Batman.” When they asked why I thought I could do it, I mentioned the “Moth” lawsuit [where they argued that I had copied the character Batman]. I guess it amused [editor] Whitney Ellsworth.

And he said, “Okay, here’s the script.

Take it home and let’s see what you can do with it.” You know that story by heart now.

JM: [laughs] One of the things I find interesting is that you had heard

From Moth Balls To Bat Boy (Above:) We don’t know precisely which was the first “Batman” story Mooney was assigned to draw by DC über-editor Whitney Ellsworth—but here are his cover and splash page from what may be his first effort for Detective Comics—#132 (Feb. 1948), with inks by Charles Paris. Scripter unknown. The cover is reproduced from the online Grand Comics Database, the splash from DC’s hardcover Batman Archives, Vol. 6. [TM & © DC Comics.]

somehow that they wanted someone to do “Batman,” and yet on the other hand apparently it was “all Bob Kane.” How did that situation gel?

Kane was supposed to be drawing it, but there were a number of people actually doing it.

MOONEY: Well, I met Bob [just the one time] and I disliked him intensely.

Whitney Ellsworth Editorial director of DC Comics, 1939-53— after which he relocated to Hollywood to oversee the Adventures of Superman TV series.

JM: Did he know who you were in terms of drawing “Batman”?

MOONEY: Oh, yeah. He just [acted] very much superior. I mean, it was like you were barely noticeable as far as his scrutiny was concerned. The only reason I went to meet him is because I wanted to talk to Bill Finger at the time.

“There’s Always A Joker In The Pack…”

Jim did this color print depicting Batman and various heads of The Joker circa 2006—based on the cover of Batman #44 (Dec. 1947-Jan. 1948), which is depicted on p. 46. Thanks to Mark Ellis.

[Batman & Joker TM & © DC Comics.]

Bill Finger I liked very much. He was a prince. Unfortunately, Bill was an alcoholic and died bankrupt. He got credit for some of the stuff. But I think that Bill was Bill, in spite of being one the better writers in the business. But he was his own worst enemy. He was a far-gone alcoholic.

14

Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

JM: And at this time there were artists like Dick Sprang around and Jerry Robinson.

MOONEY: I never met Jerry Robinson, though I liked his stuff. I met Sprang. But we were not close or anything like that. Sprang I felt was a very, very accomplished artist.

You know, it’s funny. Of all the artists—I don’t know why I mention this, I happened to be looking at something… a tribute to Jack Kirby.

Of all the guys, Kirby, I guess, was probably the sort of cornerstone of the comic industry as far as the ultimate comic book artist. We never got along. He was the hardest guy to talk to. Aloof. Not physically aggressive or anything like that, but he had a tendency to totally overlook you as if you didn’t exist. He was really immersed with “Jack Kirby” and rightfully so. He was, I would say, probably of all the comic book artists, close to being tip-top.

JM: Who else would you put up there in terms of tip-top?

Jim Mooney—No Mere Carbon Copy (Above:) The legendary Dick Sprang drew the cover of Batman #38 (Dec. 1946-Jan. 1947)—but Mooney drew all three of the stories inside.

Jim particularly remembered “The Carbon Copy Crimes,” written by Batman co-creator Bill Finger and inked by Charles Paris. Thanks to the GCD for the cover, and to Doug Martin for the splash. [TM & © DC Comics.]

MOONEY: There were so many that were so good. But he just seemed to epitomize the comic book style—that strong, simple style. Kirby had another thing, too. That guy was so damn fast that it was amazing. I’d be lucky if I could do a page of pencils and inks a day, and that guy would do three.

JM: You did Batman #38 from 1946.

MOONEY: I remember that one story, “Carbon Copy Crimes.”

JM: Did you emulate anyone while drawing “Batman”?

MOONEY: Well, I was supposed to emulate Bob Kane—you know, make it look like Bob Kane. But of course everybody was told that. It was like, did Dick Sprang stuff look like Bob Kane? God, no. Did Jerry Robinson’s stuff look like Bob Kane’s? God forbid! Jerry Robinson was one hell of a draftsman.

When The Red, Red Robin…

Bill Finger

Our interviewee had less than stellar memories of the “Robin the Boy Wonder” series he drew for years for Star Spangled Comics. This splash page is from issue #76 (Jan. 1948). Well, at least the story was written by Jim’s favorite, Bill Finger! And to judge from the only byline, that Bob Kane sure got around! Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Co-creator of Batman, circa 1945.

Thanks to Marc Tyler Nobleman.

JM: I know some readers can look at the Batman insignia and they can tell who the artist is. Did you have any little touches that you put in to say, “This one’s mine. This is my Batman and not Dick Sprang’s”?

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

15

Three Of A Kind = A Full House Mooney drew all three of the stories in Batman #48 (Aug.-Sept. 1948), including the one depicted on p. 3 of this issue. “1001 Secrets of the Batcave” was scripted by Bill Finger. Inking of all three tales is by Charles Paris, though the writers of the other two yarns are unidentified. Thanks to Bob Bailey.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

MOONEY: No, it never occurred to me.

JM: And you also did “Robin the Boy Wonder” in Star Spangled Comics for a while.

MOONEY: Oh, God, what a bore that was. Did that for a long while.

JM: [laughs] Why was it not that exciting for you?

MOONEY: Well, it was a pot-boiler.

JM: We were talking about Bill Finger a moment ago. Why do you think people want to talk about him so much? When they talk about Batman, they say, “Don’t forget to give Bill Finger credit!”

MOONEY: Bill should get credit. He was a joy. When I’d get a script, I’d think, oh God, I’d pray it would be by Bill Finger. ’Cause he had a lot of tricks. He knew how to oppose large and small. In other words, if you had a large cash register, you had small Batman and Robin. So that you had the contrast of sizes, which made it a hell of a challenge to draw, but also made it interesting to the reader.

JM: What did you think about “Batman” at the time?

MOONEY: I was really pleased when I got it, ’cause it took me a long while to get it. I remember when I first applied there and then they turned me away. I felt quite excited that I acquired that as an assignment.

I enjoyed it because, most of the time, there were a lot of mysterious shadows and so on. And I could play around with it. Like, there was one I did I remember called “Secrets of the Batcave” that was kind of fun. I could go into all of the intricacies of the things that were in the Batcave and contrast them, etc., etc. Lots of light and shadow. The giant penny and whatever.

JM: Did you follow “Batman” at all as a reader while you were doing other things? In other words, did you read other comics?

MOONEY: No, it was not one of the strips I really followed because I wanted to read it. To me it was an assignment. If it was my assignment, I was involved with it. But if it wasn’t, I just didn’t pay any attention unless it was an artist whose work I wanted to see. Jerry Robinson, as an example.

“If I Had Not Been Involved In Making A Living Doing Comics…”

JM: Were there any comic books that you read just for your own pleasure?

MOONEY: I was really not that much into it. I did an awful lot of “Legion of Super-Heroes.” One thing I did like, which was my own strip, though a few other guys did it, was “Tommy Tomorrow.” But it was a job, and I wanted to do the best I could with it and I wanted to try to turn out a type of work that would make them want to come up with another script. But I never was all that

16

Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

I Am “Legion” (Above:) Gentleman Jim’s first “Legion of Super-Heroes” work consisted of a two-part story in Adventure Comics #328 (Jan. 1965), both scripted by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. At that time, he was spelling regular artist John Forte. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

enthused about it, really.

When I was out in Hollywood, I was working with a portrait painter out there who became famous. I loved to paint. When I had a little spare time, I spent most of my time either sculpting, doing tile, or just painting. I did some stained glass… unfortunately, almost all that stuff is broken; it got just smashed. I had several windows I did. Some of the tile is still around, though.

JM: Jim, with comics in general, what’s so special about them? What captivates us about them? Why do we like them?

MOONEY: Why? I don’t know. I mean, I think, frankly, if I had not been involved in making a living doing comics, I probably would have paid very little attention to them. ’Cause I was far more interested in painting. But I didn’t want to slough it off, because I figured, look, you don’t [just] make a buck that way, you make a bad reputation for yourself. But if I had my druthers and my dad had still had the money so I could have done what I wanted, I sure as hell wouldn’t have done comics. [Jeff laughs] Maybe I would have helped him raise more Arabian horses.

“Tomorrow, Tomorrow, I Love You, Tomorrow…”

The first “Tommy Tomorrow” story drawn by Mooney appeared in Action Comics #172 (Sept. 1952)—behind a Superman cover, of course.

The writer is unidentified. Thanks to Doug Martin. [TM & © DC Comics.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

JM: Speaking of money and comics, I just saw the auction price of a copy of Captain America #1 that sold for over a $100,000.

MOONEY: Oh, God, I keep thinking of the comics I’ve had through the years, the stuff I left at my studio in Hollywood that I didn’t bring with me. I had every bound first issue of Batman—it was six or eight issues, leather-bound, and they let me have it at the office and I kept it there for a while. I kept it in the studio and somebody stole it.

Unfortunately, I allowed too many people in that studio in Hollywood. A bunch of fans, and just people in general. And I guess whoever took it realized what they had. I don’t know what that would be worth today, but I assume it would [be worth a lot], so I wouldn’t be terribly worried about money [if I had it].

“It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s Supergirl!”

(Above:) Supergirl made her grand entrance in Action Comics #252 (May 1959), behind a cover penciled by Curt Swan and inked by Al Plastino; the story inside was drawn by Plastino and written by Otto Binder—who in the 1940s had co-created Mary Marvel, the twin (yet somehow also kid) sister of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel.

(Right & bottom row:) The next month, in Action #252, Jim Mooney began his long stint on her regular series, as he and scripter Binder recapped her origin and Superman set up her secret life on Earth, which would endure for several years.

Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

17

18

Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

JM: Did you have any sense of loyalty to any of the characters that you were drawing?

MOONEY: I was not that involved with them.

As I say, I liked “Tommy Tomorrow.” I liked “Supergirl”… although “Supergirl” was a bore, a tremendous bore. It was the same thing over and over again. A few of the things I enjoyed doing, but it wasn’t something that, if I had my choice and had had the money, I would have ever gotten into it. I know that.

JM: Did you look at any other comics or any of the other artists’ work, while you were working away?

Steve Gerber in a photo that appeared in Marvel’s FOOM Magazine #19 (Fall 1977).

MOONEY: Oh yeah, yeah. As I said, Ruben Moreira was excellent.

Jerry Robinson was very, very good, and there were quite a few others through the years. I can’t come up with names right now, but the guy that has the school… Joe Kubert… Kubert was good, awfully good.

JM: Did you have any tricks or tips when you were drawing?

MOONEY: I don’t know. I mean, I guess my feeling was, if you needed a model, get a model. If I needed a model, my wife might pose for me for a hand or pose in one way or another. And occasionally some of my friends, if I needed something in particular, would pose. But most of the time it came from my imagination. I didn’t need a model. Very seldom did I have anyone model for me unless I needed a particular pose, which was really unusual.

JM: Did you incorporate any of these people into your characters?

MOONEY: Wildfire was based on my first wife Carol. The figure, anyway. Carol was not terribly tall, but she had one hell of a voluptuous figure.

“Steve Gerber Was An Excellent [Writer]”

JM: Was there any writer in particular that you really enjoyed?

MOONEY: I can’t say that there were any writers that I was particularly fond of besides Bill Finger. A good script was a good script, and I really never singled [one] out and said, “Hey, who did this?”

JM: Steve Gerber?

MOONEY: Oh, I see what you’re getting at. That was a different period. I always thought Steve Gerber was an excellent one. I enjoyed those Omega [the Unknown] strips.

They were one of the minor strips, but I found they were probably as interesting as anything I ever did. Certainly more interesting than “Supergirl.”

Certainly more interesting than “Batman” or

Alpha-Steve And Omega Steve Gerber conceived and co-wrote the Marvel series Omega the Unknown, with Jim Mooney as co-creator and original artist. Seen here is their splash page for issue #1 (March 1976). For more on both Steve and Omega, see our TwoMorrows sister mag Back Issue #31 of a few years back! [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Legion of Super-Heroes.” I really just enjoyed them immensely.

JM: Why?

MOONEY: Well, I guess it was [that] I had a certain degree of freedom. Nobody said to me: “Hey, somebody else has drawn ‘Batman,’ maybe draw a little bit more like this.” I realize that Supergirl was my own [after her first appearance by Al Plastino]. I don’t know, I just had a certain degree of freedom [with Omega] and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the stories tremendously. Steve was a really excellent writer. But, strangely enough, the few times I tried to make contact with him, it was almost impossible to touch base.

You don’t want to fluster somebody by saying, “God, I love your work, it’s wonderful!” But I’d always express my admiration for something, or how well I thought he had done it, but never, never got much response [from Gerber].

JM: Did you ever put any little hidden things in artwork? You know, little nods or little cute inside jokes or…?

MOONEY: No, the only thing I did was, occasionally I’d incorporate a picture of myself.

Another Tangled Web A hard-working college teacher grading papers—while Spidey attempts to purloin his own handiwork— gave Jim a chance to draw himself into The Spectacular Spider-Man #41 (April 1980). Script by Tom DeFalco. Thanks to Mark Muller & Bart Bush. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

Okay, Invaders, Here We Come!

(Above & top right:) When regular artist Frank Robbins had to be spelled on The Invaders, writer/editor Roy Thomas was happy to invite Jim Mooney to pencil the WWII exploits of Captain America, The Human Torch, and SubMariner in issue #16 (May 1977)—and again in #22 (Nov. ’77), which expanded on the origin of Toro, the Torch’s young ally. Inking in both cases was by Frank Springer. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Right:) A commission sketch done by Mooney of the Golden Age Torch battling the Sub-Mariner near the Statue of Liberty, a scene right out of the old Marvel Mystery Comics. Thanks to Lee Laska. [Human Torch & Sub-Mariner TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JM: Oh, yeah? Do you remember anything that I could look up?

MOONEY: God, it’s been so long, I’m tryin’ to think of one. I didn’t do it too often, but once in a while I put myself in the story as an incidental character. [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: For example, Jim drew himself into The Spectacular Spider-Man #41, 1980.]

JM: How hard did you look for real examples for cars and buildings?

MOONEY: Oh, I had what they call a morgue, a swipe file. If I had to draw a 1948 Cadillac, I probably had it. Or if I had to draw a particular type of military tank, I had it… uniforms or anything like that… any war stuff. I didn’t do much war stuff, but I had a lot of great war photographs and so on.

I have most of [that morgue] left. I’ve got a file, and I’d say that any artist that draws without some sort of pictorial reference like that is limiting himself, because it takes that much longer.

JM: Must be fun to look through it nowadays.

MOONEY: I don’t even bother with it now. I’ve got a great big double file, and it’s full of stuff that’s there from illustrators, cartoonists, cut tanks, military. You name it, it’s there.

JM: Was there ever an instance when you would draw like other cartoonists?

MOONEY: At one time, because he was so good, I sometimes would swipe from Alex Raymond—or [Burne] Hogarth, or just whatever I might need. I tried not to do that, but every once in a while it would save a hell of a lot of time.

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

through, [laughs] or we’d turn out some pretty crappy stuff. We’d start and keep going until the dawn’s early light. But we didn’t do too many of those, because they would knock you for a loop.

JM: Another thing I noticed is that you’ve done almost every type of character and every type of genre.

MOONEY: Well, I kind of liked that, because you don’t want to go to a restaurant and just eat steak. Maybe you want a lamb chop now and then, or pork chop. I think the variety is primarily what kept me going.

JM: So that’s why, if you’re on something for a number of years, it got to be a little bit tiring.

MOONEY: Well, “Supergirl” was a perfect example of that. I was so damn bored with that. I was on that nine years, and I mean, I tried to do the best I could with it….

JM: I have some questions about her later on. So walk me through a typical assignment. You get the paper, you have your inkwell, you have your pencils… what kind of pencils did you use? Do you remember?

MOONEY: Oh yeah, I just used regular graphite pencils. India ink and brushes and pen.

JM: Did you prefer brush to pen or…?

MOONEY: I used a little bit of both. Because I thought they always complemented each other. You couldn’t and you didn’t want to do all of it with a Crow Quill [pen] or a Speedball. And most of the delicate stuff, the shading and so on, would be done with a sable brush.

JM: If you’re doing the pencils and the inks on your own work, would someone look at the pencils and give you the okay, or…?

The Company She Kept (Above:) Maybe Jim Mooney found drawing “Supergirl” to be a bit boring, but a generation of DC readers was anything but bored by his efforts. In this splash from Action Comics #350 (May 1967), repro’d from the original art, the Maid of Steel encounters Batman, Green Arrow, and Green Lantern— both real and fake versions! Script by Leo Dorfman. [TM & © DC Comics.]

(Right:) Naturally, Jim was happy in later years to do commission drawings of Supergirl, as per this (later colored) one of her with her pet cat Streaky, a Mooney co-creation. Thanks to Mark Ellis for both scans. [Supergirl, Streaky, Superboy, & Krypto TM & © DC Comics.]

“The Variety Is Primarily What Kept Me Going”

JM: In those early days, did you do any all-night sessions with other artists? You know, when you were working with Timely?

MOONEY: Oh, God, yes. We had quite a few of those. When the whole group was working together, we used to work in the David Building. In the early ’40s, Don Rico and Stan Lee would be there—the whole group. Although Stan didn’t do any drawing, sometimes he’d sort of cheer us up by being there or take his whip out and keep us going. But we’d work; we’d work on a few allnight sessions to make deadlines.

JM: Were they kind of crazy?

MOONEY: Nah, they were okay. We’d try to stay awake and try not to drink too much—you know, not drink until we were

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

21

“Tomorrow” Is Another Day—Er, Feature!

And Tommy’s final appearance in Action Comics occurred in #255 (Aug. 1959).

By the time Supergirl encountered a young lad of the then-distant 21st century— who turned out to be the future Tommy Tomorrow, a fellow orphan—the latter’s feature, which her own had displaced in Action Comics, had been absent for a while from the monthly anthology title. But it still appeared in World’s Finest Comics, and clearly DC wanted to call a bit of attention to it.

Art by Jim Mooney; script by Otto Binder. Thanks to Gene Reed, Doug Martin, & Mark Muller. [DC Comics.]

MOONEY: It was always necessary for the editor to see the pencils before he okayed going ahead with the inks. Say, for instance, I got an assignment for a job and it was an eight-page story. They would get all eight pages of penciling. And they [might mark] a correction and say, “Why don’t you change this or put an extra panel here?” and they’d give it back to you to make the corrections, ink it, and that was finished. I never did my lettering, so usually I’d do the penciling, it would go to the letterer, he’d letter it, it’d come back to me, and I’d ink it, then it would go to the colorist.

“Fans Have Wanted Me To Draw Them A Picture Of A Nude Supergirl”

JM: So let’s go into some of your characters here. You mentioned “Tommy Tomorrow.” I was reading a reprint of the old “Supergirl” in DC’s black&-white Showcase Presents a couple of weeks ago, and Tommy Tomorrow makes an appearance. She goes off to the future and meets him.

At the end there was an announcement that said he was moving on and Supergirl was taking over his place in the back of Action Comics. I thought it was kind of interesting that you had a crossover there between the two different strips.

MOONEY: Right. “Tommy Tomorrow” was an end-of-the-book character. I guess, when they moved him on, they tried “Supergirl” out as an end-of-the-book character.

JM: With “Tommy Tomorrow,” how did you come up with all those little gadgets that he had? I mean, it’s one thing for the writer to say, “He’s

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

A Girl’s Best Friends Sorry, we can’t share any of Mooney’s “nude Supergirl” commissions with you, but at left and right are a familyfriendly one with Streaky and Comet the Superhorse, posted online by Alex Johnson—and the faux black-&-white cover of a non-existent Supergirl 80-Page Giant, courtesy of David Kirkpatrick. [Supergirl, Streaky, Comet, & Superman TM & © DC Comics.]

The Shape Of Things (Left & below:) Jim Mooney clearly enjoyed drawing the female form, and he had plenty of chances! Here are two more: a drawing for a gag-cartoon magazine called Romp (cover-date April 1960), and a Vampirella commission drawing from some years later. Thanks to Ger Apeldoorn and Mark Ellis, respectively.

[Gag cartoon © the respective copyright holders; Vampirella TM & © Dynamite.]

Mooney & “Mr. Silver Age” (Right:) Soon after Craig Shutt (longtime “Mr. Silver Age” columnist for the Comics Buyer’s Guide—see A/E #122) wrote a column about Jim Mooney in 2000, the artist sent him this large, inked sketch of Supergirl—complete with colored Green Kryptonite!

(Above:) Around that same time, Mooney also sent Craig a note, on his stationery awash with heroes. The pertinent part, in case it’s hard to make out here, reads: “Incidentally, beware of information that supposedly came from me. If I’m bored and can’t remember, I just make it up.”

Hope he wasn’t doing that in this interview! [Superman, Batman, Supergirl, and Tommy Tomorrow TM & © DC Comics; Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

“Tomorrow” And “Tomorrow” And “Tomorrow”…

(Clockwise from above left:) In World’s Finest Comics #113 (Nov. 1960), Tommy Tomorrow traveled back to that wonderful year 1960—and was rescued by his own great-great-grandfather! Art by Mooney, script by Jack Miller. Thanks to Bob Bailey.

In WFC #115 (Feb. ’61), Tommy was arrested by his own colleagues of The Planeteers—who, to a later audience, would look like the road company of the Green Lantern Corps! Art by Mooney, scripter unknown. Thanks to John & Nick Caputo.

The “Tommy Tomorrow” story from Action Comics #233 (Oct. 1957) is one of many that was translated into French. “Demain,” of course, is French for “tomorrow.”

The script was by Otto Binder, the art by Mooney. Thanks to Jean-Michel Ferragatti. [TM & © DC Comics.]

walking down the street,” but when you get “He’s walking down the street with… ‘insert some gadget here’’… it is quite different. How do you stop yourself from repeating yourself or coming up with some inane thing?

MOONEY: It’s funny, I don’t recall. I mean, whatever came to mind, I guess I just stuck it in there.

JM: Hmm. ’Cause you quite effectively handled such things in “Dial H for Hero.”

MOONEY: Well, “Dial H” was a whole new ball game. I mean, boy, that took a lot of work. I know you liked it a lot, but it was a hell of a lot of work. Tremendous. But it was challenging. I added an awful lot of that stuff myself. They would say, “Do a particular character.”

Sometimes the writer would say what they wanted as far as the uniform was concerned, but most of the time I just made it up totally.

JM: Did you have a file of things that you had already done [for “Dial H”] and couldn’t repeat yourself?

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

MOONEY: Well, I tried not to be repetitive. Unless the same character was called for, I tried not to repeat it.

JM: How did you remember all that?

MOONEY: I probably kept reference on it.

JM: I mentioned “Supergirl” a little while ago. One of the things I noted in reading “Supergirl” was that, in the last panel, she often would look at the reader and wink or smile as if you two were in on the same secret.

MOONEY: Yeah, I remember using that. You know, as an inclusive thing with the reader, like we’re in cahoots.

JM: Exactly. I didn’t notice that in other books too much. The story ends and that’s it. There’s no sort of “ah-hah” where the character and the reader have a secret to share.

MOONEY: Yeah, it was sort of an addendum that I thought worked, I don’t know.

JM: And of course there were times when she would take off her wig and everyone would go, “Wow, it’s Supergirl!”

MOONEY: That was funny, that was such a staid and really, I would say, very, very acceptable strip morally. As the years go by, the [number of] fans that have wanted [me to draw them a picture of a] nude Supergirl are almost too numerous to mention. I have one—in fact, the last one I did—in color. She’s just coming up from the depths in the nude and there’s a sea serpent there who’s grabbed her uniform—have you seen that one?

JM: No, I haven’t seen that one. I saw one where…

MOONEY: I’ve sold a lot of that one in black-&-white. I have the original color painting. It’s one of those things you can’t put up on the Internet yet… you have to, you know, mask it a little bit.

JM: I saw one where Krypto is flying away with her costume.

MOONEY: Oh, yeah. I really milked that to death—the Supergirl nudes after a while. I finally got a little tired of it. They were easy to do… I could probably knock them out in half a day. It paid for a few bills now and then. But, like anything else, it got a little boring, monotonous, tiring…

JM: But I understand you drew her in the nude to begin with.

MOONEY: Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. But usually I’d make a very rough nude and then I’d put her costume on.

JM: Okay. Ms. Marvel. You did her for a while…

MOONEY: Yeah, I enjoyed that very much; that was one of my favorites. Joe Sinnott did the inking on it.

JM: Joe was kind enough to send me a comment, let me read it to you:

“My good friend Jim Mooney was one of my favorite pencilers to work with. His work was clean, complete, and highly professional. I can recall a number of books that Jim and I collaborated on, particularly the Ms. Marvel pages. We did issues #4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 13, plus the cover to #8. Ms. Marvel was a really great character to work on and a lot of fun!”

Call Me Ms.!

(Top center:) In the online Grand Comics Database, this cover is listed as having been penciled (maybe!) by Keith Pollard—but Joe Sinnott told Jeff McLaughlin that Ms. Marvel #8 (Aug. 1977) was the one cover of that series that Mooney penciled and he (Joe) inked. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Above:) Jim later did a commission drawing of two fightin’ females he drew for four-color competitors: Supergirl and Ms. Marvel. Thanks to Mark Ellis. (Oddly, in their civilian identities, the ladies share the last name “Danvers”—so perhaps that surname was lodged in Roy Thomas’ subconscious somewhere along the line, since he’s the one who christened Carol Danvers, when he and artist Gene Colan created her for the “Captain Marvel” series in Marvel Super-Heroes #13 (March 1968)—never dreaming that one day she would become Captain Marvel!) [Supergirl TM & © DC Comics; Ms. Marvel TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

MOONEY: Evidently Joe liked doing it. I liked his stuff. Joe was one of those inkers… there was no way of approaching his style and doing it better. I always considered myself a pretty good inker and I think I was; but, ah, Joe was just absolutely superlative. I guess that is why he is still doing the Sunday Spider-Man.

“[The Artwork Was] Just Taken Down To The Cellar And Trashed”

JM: Well, then let me ask a really stupid question, unlike the other ones I’ve been asking… [laughs] What makes a good inker?

MOONEY: What makes a good actor? It’s just something that is

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

25

Be My Guest (Artist) “Legion of SuperHeroes” splash pages from Adventure Comics #329 & #330 (Feb. & March 1965), the second and third of four issues Mooney guest-illustrated to spell regular artist John Forte.

Both were scripted

by Jerry Siegel.

Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

there. The talent is there and they develop it and develop it and develop it so that it’s probably better than most of their contemporaries.

JM: Here’s another stupid question: so, the pencils are down and the inker comes in. What does the inker add to the whole project?

MOONEY: He just tries to follow what you’ve indicated in the pencils… and maybe add a flourish or two, but not too many of his own. Frank Giacoia is an example of a good inker. Frank did a lot of inking over my stuff, and he would often add something that I didn’t [have]. I’d think, “Hey, that’s pretty good what he added”… he added a flourish here and there, he’d put a little more detail here, a little more detail there. Frank’s only problem was he just couldn’t make deadlines. But he was good. Gosh, he was good.

JM: When the hurricanes came [to Florida], I imagine you lost a lot of original art.

MOONEY: No. I have a big flat office file that is tight as a drum; everything came through fine. But a lot of stuff was destroyed when we lost one of our roofs. The comics are in deplorable shape.

Some of them I had to throw out. Occasionally somebody will ask for something and I think, “Oh my God, what issue of Action Comics was that?” or what issue of whatever the hell it was.

But thank God for my flat file, ’cause I had some really good material, some of my early work. I have a double page there from Man-Thing that I really like. Pretty much a prize. [My daughter] Noel really wants it; she has got her dibs in for that. She said, “Dad, don’t sell that.”

The early “Supergirl”—most of those damn things were really just trashed at DC. They were just taken down to the cellar and trashed. But I have a few of those… not a hell of a lot. I’ve got a Man-Thing and I’ve got one or two Omegas.

JM: I understand that at one time you had your original pages up in a bookstore.

Mooney Gets Swamped Mooney penciled this splash page for Man-Thing #2 (Jan. 1980). Hope you can read the other credits! Repro’d from the original art, with thanks to Mark Ellis. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

concentrate on the inking and listen to a story, too, but I couldn’t when I was penciling. Because the penciling actually had to be creative—not that the inking wasn’t creative, but it was a mechanical type of thing. I could be listening to something and still know where I wanted the brushstroke or the pen stroke. The penciling, I actually had to think about, how am I going to do this figure so it looks like its flying through space?

JM: Did you always start at the upper left hand side of the page?

MOONEY: I would immediately lay it out panel-wise, and usually I’d just start first panel, second panel, lay it out roughly, and then finish it up more completely with pencil.

JM: Did you use a blue pencil?

MOONEY: Sometimes they objected to that, because sometimes the blue would reproduce. You had to make sure that you had a non-reproducible blue pencil. Sometimes I’d make a very, very light outline with it. But most of the time it was just with graphite.

“How Did I Feel About Being ‘Limited Service’?”

JM: Jim, we were talking earlier about the war and about how the female artists were coming in. As a more of a personal question, what were the war years like for you? Growing up, living in America at the time?

MOONEY: You mean how did I feel about being “limited service”?

JM: Yeah.

MOONEY: Well, obviously I was a young able-bodied guy. I certainly looked like I was perfectly capable of shouldering a rifle and putting a helmet on. I got into one or two situations in a bar that I handled okay, but it was a little bit difficult.

Man-Thing Blues This version of a “Man-Thing” page shows Jim working in blue pencil—this time in far more detail than the “very, very light outline” he speaks of in the text. Thanks to Mark Ellis. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

MOONEY: I did, indeed. In fact, my wife at one time was working at a local bookstore. So some of my pages were up on the wall, and most of those the owner of the store took with her when she closed up. So there were quite a few originals I lost that way.

I was looking through this Supergirl reprint today, and my Legion of Super-Heroes as well, which was my all-time favorite.

“Dial H [for Hero]” was a lot of fun, Superboy I really enjoyed, but there’s something about those “Legion” stories that was a little bit more sci-fi. I didn’t enjoy drawing it, because there were so many characters. But I remember that, when I had that assignment, I was busy, busy, busy. In fact, that was when Annie and I had moved up back to Woodstock for a while. And we were snowed in a lot, so I had enough time to lavish on some of the “Legion of SuperHeroes,” though I didn’t really enjoy it that much.

JM: When you were working, what was your set-up like? Did you have the radio on or no music?

MOONEY: When I was penciling, I had no distractions, no music or anything like that. But when I was inking, I would play the radio or I had books on tape that I used to play sometimes. I could

I think the most difficult thing of all was when I went down to visit Stan Lee in Duke [while he was in the Signal Corps]. My wife and my first son were with me, and we’re on a train and suddenly all the rest of the train fills up with troops. I’m the only civilian there with a wife; a rather good-looking and attractive wife. And a son. But the guys were great. They could’ve been real nasty. No way at all. But it was embarrassing, it was very difficult. Occasionally I would feel very conspicuous.

I mentioned that Ruben Moreira was in the same boat; George Tuska, a few of us went through that. Occasionally when we would go nightclubbing or something, you’d just have to avoid getting into any sort of a confrontation if possible. It usually worked out pretty well, but it was uncomfortable. Many of my friends were overseas, some were killed. One was in the socalled Invasion of Normandy; his landing craft was blown up and he was in the hospital. But then, you know, I had a lot of other friends that were active and I was conscious of it, let’s put it that way. Nick Cardy was there, of course. I think he drove a tank for a while.

JM: Some artists were embarrassed by what they did, and others were okay with it. Previously you told me that it really depended upon who you were talking with.

MOONEY: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I remember one situation when I was up in Woodstock. This guy

Theodore Dreiser, (1871-1945), author of the acclaimed novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, was a neighbor of young Jim Mooney’s—but the feelings between them weren’t very neighborly.

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

was into selling guns and ammunition and so on.

And I remember… we didn’t come to blows, but obviously it was a bad situation. I think Stan was there at the time, too. [The guy] was mentioning how reprehensible he thought it was to be drawing comics and, you know, doing something that was so trivial, when something more important could be done… you could write a great novel or do some contribution to society instead of these trivial comics that were probably a bad influence on children anyway. It was a tough situation. I got a little bit upset. Stan took it pretty well.

27

as hell, I guess—and let me have whatever she was fixing, a cup of tea or a cup of coffee or milk or something like that. I don’t know what made me recall that, because I had no use for Theodore Dreiser, who was famous then for An American Tragedy.

John Romita & Jim Mooney (that’s Jazzy Johnny on our left), partners in wonder during the late 1960s.

JM: It’s interesting you mention a great novel. I think the impact that people like you had on kids like us was probably far greater than what the great American novel would do.

MOONEY: That’s interesting; it’s probably true. Incidentally, along that line, I don’t know why it occurred to me… but before we lost our money, we had our estate in Mount Kisko and my next-door neighbor was [the influential novelist] Theodore Dreiser. And believe me, he had no use for me. He had no use for my family. But his housekeeper was very, very nice, and occasionally when I’d wander over there she would let me come in—she was lonesome

JM: This is a completely separate question. Your signature… when you write: Jim Mooney,” your “e” [is written] with three strokes.

MOONEY: Yeah, usually it is. I don’t know why.

Another way I used to sign was to have a sort of a crescent moon and an “e” in it.

JM: I pay attention to the way people sign things. I remember as a kid always practicing writing my signature. Did you practice how you would sign your pieces?

MOONEY: I never thought my signature was that significant or that well-done. But I think of some of the signatures of some of the other guys… like, John Romita had a really beautiful signature.

And so did the other guys. I mean, they looked really professional.

I can’t truly say that mine… I’ve had it for years now, but I can’t say that it is outstanding.

The Amazing Spider-Mooney (Left:) Mooney’s Amazing Spider-Man debut was on issue #65 (Oct. 1968), seen here, and he became the regular pencil-finisher and inker of the strip over John Romita’s breakdowns with #67.

(Right:) In ASM #69 (Feb. 69) and numerous other issues, he was listed as “illustrator” to Romita’s “innovator” or some such phrase. Scripts in both cases, of course, by Stan Lee. Thanks to Barry Pearl for both scans. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

you would get something new. It was one of the more pleasant assignments I had.

JM: The fact that you could pose him in different positions would help a lot. He wasn’t just flying in the air.

MOONEY: That is true. Romita’s work was not too finished, but I still had absolutely no problem at all. I think probably the most gratifying thing to me was that it was Stan’s decision [to give me Spider-Man]. There were an awful lot of other guys who had worked before me on that. But he seemed to feel that I gave the character more—I put in more blacks, I gave it more solidity, more pizzazz, and John went along with it, too, so it was a very compatible situation while I was working on that with Stan and with John.

JM: About this, Stan Lee told me: “I needed a new artist for the SpiderMan strip at that time and Jim seemed like the most likely one. And he did an exceptionally good job.” You just answered a question I was going to ask, namely how your Spider-Man differed from Romita’s.

MOONEY: I tried to make it look as much like the Spider-Man that had already been established. Certainly I wasn’t going to make it look like Ditko. Ditko was outstanding. Compared to John, he didn’t draw as well, but it was distinctively Ditko. John’s stuff was just a lot easier to follow, because it didn’t have that singularity of style.

“Streaky Was My Own Character”

JM: How did you and others around you get to create new characters?

We talked about Wildfire, for example.

From John To John (Left:) In Amazing Spider-Man #73 (June ’69), he performed the same duties when John Buscema stepped in as guest penciler. Script by Stan Lee. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Right:) Jim would also, when pressed, draw a mean sketch of Mary Jane Watson (later Parker), as well. From the webpage of dealer Anthony Snyder (www.anthonysnyder.com/art), with thanks. [Mary Jane TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“[Spider-Man] Was One Of The More Pleasant Assignments I Had”

JM: You mentioned John Romita. What was it like taking over a Marvel flagship character from him?

MOONEY: You mean taking over [The Amazing] Spider-Man? I had a great time with John, because he drew well. He was a remarkably good artist. Once in a while, on some of those Spider-Man books, [the art] was all mine—pencils and inks on inserts or specials and so on. Most of the time when I was on [Amazing] Spider-Man, except when I was doing Spectacular [Spider-Man], which at times I drew myself totally, I was working with John.

JM: John Romita had this to say about working with you: “Jim Mooney was inking me on Spider-Man for quite a while (often working from lastminute “blue pencil” art with not a lot of detail, making it tricky for most, but Jim is such a solid artist, he made the stuff looked polished)... I was so busy in those years that I welcomed artists of Jim’s calibre with a smile.... That character took a lot of effort to make it work, and Jim never missed a beat.” Did you like doing Spider-Man?

MOONEY: Yeah, I enjoyed it. I wasn’t mad about it. Like most comics, it was the same thing over and over again. Once in a while

MOONEY: Well, Streaky was my own character. I just put him in.

Superhorse and all that other stuff were already established characters.

JM: And did you come up and say, we need a cat now to add to the barnyard?

MOONEY: No, I just patterned it after a cat that I liked, and then of course later on I had my real-life Streaky. O.B.— Orange Blossom—is my real live Streaky now.

He’s enormous. He’s a glutton. He’s 10 or 11 years old. [Streaky is] the only character that I did create. The other stuff, the Superhorse and Supermonkey and all the other superduper characters, they were already established.

JM: I was reading the Streaky origin story last week, about “XKrypton,” I believe it was called. And this is what turned an ordinary cat into a Supercat.

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

29

MOONEY: Yeah, I do remember that, to some extent. I don’t know whether it was one of my stories or not. It probably was.

JM: I think it was with you and Jerry Siegel. You worked on “Supergirl” with him on a couple of issues. What was that kind of relationship like, given who he was and what he had created?

MOONEY: Well, he was not dictating how I should draw or anything like that. I met him a couple of times. I liked his stuff. I wasn’t mad about it. You know, I didn’t think it was that great. We certainly had no real compatibility, but we got along fine. I thought he was a decent, nice guy. I felt very sorry for him ’cause I thought he got screwed royally.

JM: “Here’s the guy that co-created Superman.” Did that sort of take your breath away a bit? Or did you just go, “Okay, it’s just another person I’m working with”?

MOONEY: That did not impress me particularly. I mean, Jerry Siegel and [Joe] Shuster were not exactly what I would call impressive people in any way. They didn’t have the personality of, say, a Weisinger or a Lee or some of the others that were active in

First Come…

(Above:) At this late date, Jeff McLaughlin couldn’t recall where he’d seen the precise story he mentions on this page, in which Supergirl comes to Earth before Superman—but perhaps it was this one from Action Comics #332 (Jan. 1966), drawn by Mooney, one of the famous “Imaginary Tales.”

Actually, it was a two-parter that continued into #333, but it was scripted

by Leo Dorfman, not Jerry Siegel. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Thereby Hangs A “Tale” (Above:) Jerry Siegel wrote and Jim Mooney drew the “Tales of the Legion” feature for Adventure Comics #331 (April 1965), the last of Mooney’s fourissue fill-in that marked his “Legion of Super-Heroes” debut. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

(Right:) Siegel and Mooney had had an earlier encounter, though, when serviceman Jim snapped this photo of visiting pop-culture royalty for the Midpacifican Armed Services newspaper in September 1944: Edgar Rice Burroughs (creator of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, et al.), Major Laurie York Erskine (creator of Renfrew of the Mounted), and Corporal Jerry Siegel (cocreator of Superman). ERB was, at that time, the oldest war correspondent in the Pacific war theatre. Thanks to Ray Cuthbert.

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

Partners In Peril (Clockwise from above:) In Mooney’s later years, he and writer Mark Ellis collaborated on such comics material as the graphic novel Lakota—the horror short story “A Trip to Necropolis” for Innovation’s Angry Shadows anthology—and illustrations for Ellis’ 1989 book Shreek Show. Mark was of great help assembling some of the key visual materials to accompany this interview. [© Mark Ellis & Estate of Jim Mooney.]

Mark Ellis with colleague/friend Jim Mooney. A comics writer since the mid-1980s, Mark (as “James Axler”) also created the highly successful Outlanders series of books. Seen at right is the cover of one of them.

[Cover art © the respective copyright holders.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

31

The Merry Marvel Marching Society, Phase 2 This photo of major Marvel professionals was snapped at the 1998 San Diego Comic-Con. (Left to right:) Dorothy & George Tuska, Joan & Stan Lee, Marie Severin, Dick Ayers, Jim Mooney, unidentified, and Annie Mooney. Stan has said that his wife and the Mooneys loved to drag him antique-hunting with them.

Thanks to Mark Ellis.

the field. Mort was a very strong personality. A very successful man, too. He sold an awful lot of stuff aside from comics. And Stan, although he didn’t have the personality, thank God, of Mort Weisinger, was a very strong [personality]. He liked to speak. He came across very well, very strongly. You were well aware that he was in charge.

JM: With Weisinger, you had sort of had a split relationship with him, I understand… a working relationship and a personal relationship

MOONEY: He came out to Hollywood one time. I took him out; we went to a few nightclubs and I think we had fun, but that was about it. It wasn’t a really terribly close relationship in any way.

And of course we had the relationship in the office, and I’ve gone through that one a hundred times or more.

JM: One of the things that’s interesting, going back to “Supergirl,” is that one of the stories you did with Siegel is that she has a dream when she becomes the first person from Krypton on Earth as opposed to Superman. And what happens in the story is basically a re-creation of the Superman myth, but with Supergirl in place of him.

MOONEY: I do recall a story of that sort.

JM: I remember it as being somewhat interesting, given that here you were doing a story that was basically a repeat of Superman’s origin and you’re doing it with the guy who created Superman.

MOONEY: [laughs] That’s strange. To say the least, it’s coincidental. I really don’t have a strong remembrance of it. It was something that came along, and the fact that he was the creator, that I was working with him… I wasn’t terribly impressed by it or anything like that. I just thought, well, this is the way that the ball bounces.

JM: Did you ever try to come up with other characters?

MOONEY: Well, of course, that’s one of the things you’ll see if you get that The Everything Guide to Writing Graphic Novels by Mark Ellis that I told you about. I worked on it a lot. As an example, I did one strip which I don’t know if you’ve ever seen. The old man in the graveyard. I’m gonna try to remember to find a copy to send to you. That was one of my favorite strips. Mark Ellis wrote that. I was always very pleased with it, probably far more pleased with that stuff than I was with, say, “Legion of Super-Heroes” or “Supergirl” or “Superman” or “Batman” or “Spider-Man” or any of the so-called well-known personality comic book characters.

He and I also worked on Lakota. You’ll see a lot of Lakota there.

So I did some stuff other than what DC or Marvel published through the years.

[INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Mark Ellis was kind enough to provide me with a few details concerning the work Jim is referring to. He told me: “The ‘old man in the graveyard’ story is called ‘A Trip to Necropolis,’ and it originally appeared in an anthology called Angry Shadows put out by Innovation in 1989. On Lakota, I provided Jim with what I thought were fairly detailed page and panel layouts simply to cut down on his labor and time. He followed them for the most part, but his finished work made my layouts look like the scrawlings of a half-witted Neanderthal flailing away with a blunt piece of charcoal.]

I think the only thing I created was “Wildfire,” and that I worked on with Bob Turner. I did write a few [stories, but] I didn’t get a chance to do much of it, because Stan was writing most of those horror stories.

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

“I Guess I Really Didn’t Know Anything Else [But Comics]”

JM: Did you plan on staying in comics when you were into it?

MOONEY: I guess I really didn’t know anything else. I really wasn’t trained for anything else. I mean, I had art school, sure, and I did my own painting and I had kind of hoped that I might get into painting. At one time I nearly got into doing tile work. Then I thought, this could be more of a bore than it’s worth, because a lot of the work would have been doing the bottoms of swimming pools for wealthy people, and I thought, no, that’s not for me. [laughs] And as far as painting is concerned, I never had any chance to exhibit it at any galleries or anything like that, so it was sort of a sideline.

I guess it wasn’t a case of whether I wanted to [do anything else] or not. I just knew comics. It was a way to keep going. I would have preferred a lot of other stuff. When Annie and I were active, we went antiquing from Boston to New York, and we used to do a lot of the shows, and that of course took me away from comics and kept my production down for a while. I couldn’t take on quite as much. But we had our own shop; we had the Stamford Antiques Association, and we did a lot of shows. I remember one show… my God, one show in New York was seven days! We did that.

It’s Reigning Elephants!

We know Jim Mooney didn’t like drawing horses—but how did he feel about elephants? Pulp & comics veteran Manly Wade Wellman wrote this tale of a planet ruled by super-intelligent elephants for Strange Adventures #11 (Aug. 1951). There was page after page of pachyderms! Inks by Frank Giacoia. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

JM: What was your life like outside comics? You were mentioning clearly that, while it was a good job, it wasn’t the be-all and end-all of your existence.

MOONEY: Well, Annie and I were quite active socially. We had a heck of a lot of friends that were with us in the antiques association. We socialized, we went out to parties and visited and so on.

After Noel was born, we just didn’t think it was right because we had a penthouse, a beautiful old mansion, and we worried about her getting out on our penthouse porch there. And so we moved.

We searched around where we were going to go, and finally we ended up in Florida.

As far as I’m concerned, it was not necessarily a very good move socially. ’Cause we had loads of friends [up north], we had parties and we had everything, and we came down here and it was like “Hey, wow, what do we do?”

The Mystery Comic Of 1956 A bit of Mooney’s horror fare for Timely/Atlas was seen earlier in this interview. His post-Comics Code work for DC’s House of Mystery was, necessarily, done in an even less raucous vein, as per this splash page from issue #53 (Aug. 1956). Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

It was nice that at that time I was in pretty good shape. I was scuba-diving and Annie liked snorkeling. I was very active at the time and I just loved the beaches. But we just never made the amount of friends or had the amount of social activity that we had when we were in the Northeast.

JM: So when you moved, you would have your work sent down to you?

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

Author! Author!

Jim Mooney drew a story for each of the first five issues of DC’s seminal science-fiction comic, Strange Adventures, cover-dated (clockwise from right) Aug.-Sept. and Oct.-Nov. 1950, then monthly Jan. to March of 1951. Editor Julius Schwartz patterned SA after the SF magazines with which he’d once dealt as a literary agent, giving credit to writers Gardner Fox, Robert Starr, and David V. Reed.

Thanks to Doug Martin.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

Tomorrow Is Here!

In the 1980s Jim got a chance to draw Tommy Tomorrow again—both for the spaceman’s page in DC’s first Who’s Who in DC Comics series, and the 1985 pencils for a possible revival as “The Planeteers,” taking the name of the group to which Tomorrow belonged. Thanks to Tom Ziuko and Mark Ellis, respectively. [Who’s Who art TM & © DC Comics; “Planeteers” art © the respective copyright holders.]

MOONEY: Yeah. I had a contract, too.

JM: And it’s also one of the reasons that you did more interiors and not a lot of covers?

MOONEY: Yeah, that’s true. They wanted somebody in the office they could confer with before they committed and gave you a cover to do.

JM: What year are we talkin’ approximately, that you moved down from New York to Florida?

MOONEY: Early ’70s.

“A Lot Of Comics Went Under [In The Mid-1950s]”

JM: Let’s go back to the ’50s. Did [the campaign against comics in] the ’50s hurt you as much as it did other artists?

MOONEY: Oh yeah, it did affect comics to a great extent and it did a lot of guys [in]. A lot of comics went under. The stuff that had been produced was no longer being produced. The horror stories that we used to publish [after 1954] were something you could have put in a Ladies Home Journal. They were pretty mild, they were innocuous. In fact, I think they were just stupid. I mean, they had no point. [Jeff laughs] If you’re going to tell a horror story, make it horrible. Don’t be namby-pamby.

I got by okay, thank God. A lot of guys were hit pretty heavy, pretty hard.

JM: And what did you think of that whole situation?

MOONEY: I thought to some extent [Wertham’s criticism] was

justified. But most of the time I thought it was an overblown reaction. A lot of the stuff that was being published by the horror magazines was pretty dreadful. I mean, they were in bad taste, if nothing else. Some of the stuff was okay, but I will say that some of it I wouldn’t want my ten-year-old grandson to read.

JM: Did you think at the time, speaking of how they might have been tasteless or offensive, that comics were an art form?

MOONEY: No, I never really considered them an art form. I know a lot of people did. An art form, no. A phenomenon, yes.

JM: Looking back over the different styles and years, did you see a changing for the better for the worse?

MOONEY: I thought the drawing generally got better as the years went by. For one thing, we were not quite as hurried. And there were artists like Jerry Robinson—who was good, even in the very beginning. And Kubert was good early on. I just think, probably, as time went on, not having to rush this stuff out as we did in the early ‘40s—Eisner & Iger and that type of thing—you could take a little bit more time, and some of the guys did. You know, some of the stuff is very well done. Neil Gaiman, who did The Sandman… I thought that was very well done. In other words, I think a couple of times it came very close to being a viable art form.

JM: Right. Do you think it is now, or not?

MOONEY: I think it’s just a business. Of course, I shouldn’t say that, ’cause I am out of touch. I don’t see what’s being published. I haven’t had stuff from Marvel or DC for a decade or more. So I

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

35

The Unexpected Jim Mooney Mooney also drew science-fiction for DC’s Tales of the Unexpected—including a non-series story in #24 (April 1958) and part of the long-running “Space Ranger” feature in #40 (Aug. 29). Scripters unknown—since editor Schwartz’s experiment of writer credits was not continued by all later DC editors.

Thanks to Bob Bailey and Gene Reed, respectively. [TM & © DC Comics.]

really don’t know, unless somebody mentions it, who’s doing what and how well they’re doing it. I think John Romita, Jr., did some pretty nice stuff. We worked on a few Amazing Spider-Mans, but that was a good many decades ago. There’s undoubtedly some that I haven’t seen that I might appreciate very much. I haven’t seen anything contemporary for a long time. I’m sort of like Rip Van Winkle.

JM: When did you head over to Hollywood and open up your studio?

MOONEY: I’m trying to think of what year it was—’56, ’57. My wife wanted to see her parents. We’d been away and they were pretty much for it, and I was getting kind of tired of our preRevolutionary house. We were way out in the country. It was very lonesome. We didn’t have any friends and we thought, well, let’s go back to the origin.

[At the studio,] I had a lot of commercial work that I did. And one of my good friends, Leon Franks, who was a very famous painter, had a studio there. I used to occasionally take off and paint in his studio. I would get models for him and so on.

JM: Did you do any animation work?

MOONEY: Very, very little. Nothing that you would remember or that was memorable in any way. I used to take it all. You know, so many things that came in. A lot of the stuff that came into my studio at that time, other than the stuff from Marvel or DC, was primarily just local stuff. Sometimes advertising, sometimes the

limited animation, and so on.

JM: But you had a good time when you were there?

MOONEY: Oh, I loved it. That was probably one of the happiest decades of my life. I had the studio right on Hollywood Boulevard.

I had a lot of friends there. I knew all the characters of that time. A few, you know, just street people that were fun. Billy the Midget used to come in. Sometimes I’d be working away, and if I had the door open, I’d hear a voice and there would be Billy down at my knee, sayin’, “Hi Jim, how ya doin’?”

I wouldn’t be able to give you his credits, but Billy was in many, many movies. And [another guy] Wild Bill did extra work and so forth. [NOTE: Perhaps “Billy” was Billy Barty. And there had been a Wild Bill Elliott starring in Western films in the 1940s, though the “Wild Bill” Jim mentions is probably some later performer.]

JM: Looking back, is there anything in the industry itself that you’d have liked to have changed, besides the page rate?

MOONEY: I would have liked to have seen more editors and publishers giving some credibility or importance to the opinion of the artist. In other words, some feedback from the artist’s standpoint. ’Cause most of the time it was only you and the editor.

JM: What do you think of the idea of artists owning the characters?

MOONEY: I think it’s great, because that’s actually in a way what

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

Give ’Er The Gun! If (suspected) writer Bill Finger wrote this splash page for Batman #76 (April 1953), the scripter knew but artist Jim Mooney probably didn’t that, in the early days of the feature, the Dark Knight had used a gun to lethal effect more than once. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

syndication was. You know, like Terry and the Pirates and Flash Gordon. I mean, that was a joint ownership, but there was ownership there and a nice return.

JM: Did you ever have any thoughts about that whole situation with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the returning of artwork and so on? Do you remember that story?

MOONEY: In what respect? I never got along too well with Jack, so obviously I would probably be prejudiced in siding with Stan.

JM: Just the idea that as an artist you’re an employee and what you do belongs to the company and not to you.

MOONEY: I don’t think that’s right, no. Perhaps [they should have] some of [the artwork], if they needed it for publicity or something, but I really feel all of it should be returned to the artist.

It’s the artist’s work. And I think that Jack should have gotten all that stuff back.

Wish Upon A Star (Right:) More science-fiction in something of a “Tommy Tomorrow” vein drawn by Mooney, in conjunction with writer/co-creator Mark Ellis, for Adventure Publications’ Star Rangers #1-4 in 1988. Also seen, above, are the artist’s model sheet and some concept sketches. [© Mark Ellis & Estate of Jim Mooney.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

37

JM: What did you like about the comic business?

MOONEY: I’d like to come up with a really pithy statement. I guess it was the first time I was ever able to make a living other than at Errol Carroll’s as a checkroom boy. I went to New York and brought some of my samples and suddenly people said, “Hey, I think we might give this guy some work.” So I guess it’s all that I’ve known most of my life.

It’s one of those things… you don’t toss it aside.

Yeah, I would’ve liked to have said, “Boy, I’m a famous artist. All the galleries are buying from my work.” That wasn’t the case.

JM: When did you start to realize that you had fans out there?

MOONEY: Only when I went to the conventions. I really had no

Robin Channels Superman (Above & top center:) Mooney’s cover for Batman #150 (Sept. 1962) was inked by longtime “Bob Kane” ghost Sheldon Moldoff—but Jim drew the interior story on his own. Script by Bill Finger. Thanks to Bob Bailey.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

concept of it otherwise. I was kind of surprised… pleased and surprised, to say the least.

JM: That people would know your work or...?

MOONEY: Well, usually, you know, people aren’t gonna come up and tell you how lousy it is. [laughs] JM: [laughs] Well, you never know!

MOONEY: They’re not going to say, “Hey, you got twenty minutes? Sit down, I’m gonna tell you how to do this right!” There was no real communication there, but I accepted the compliments.

Some of [the fans] waste too much of your time—but that was par for the course.

JM: Jim, where do you think your forte lies? What do you think of when you stand back and say, “You know, I’m good at doing this”?

MOONEY: I think I composed and put the stuff together pretty well, and I tell a pretty good story. ’Cause most of that time it wasn’t caption by caption and word for word. Sometimes you had

Dial “SH” for “Super-Heroes” A (colored) commission drawing by Mooney of The Legion of Super-Heroes, dialed up by Robby Reed. Thanks to Mark Ellis. [Heroes & Legion TM & © DC Comics.]

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

to kind of break it down yourself. Yeah, I thought when I was confronted with it, I could tell a pretty good story. Then again, as I say, I had a chance to do a little bit of writing, but not much. I thought I wrote pretty well on some of the horror stuff. I wasn’t going to get a literary award for it, but I thought I did pretty well.

“I Just Wasn’t There When [Other Artists] Were In The Office”

JM: You left DC in the late ’60s. I recall in one interview you said that you felt that there was a new style of art coming in, that was more illustrative rather than cartoony.

MOONEY: When did I leave DC and why? I think primarily it was that I just didn’t get along too well with the editor there, with Carmine Infantino. He was nuts about Neal Adams, and what I was doing then was “Supergirl,” which was semi-cartoonish. And I don’t think he was that pleased with it. He didn’t say, “Hey, Jim you’re fired.” But I was pretty well aware that I wasn’t getting the work that I might. Finally I approached him, I said, “Hey, look, at least let’s get things out in the open.” And he said, “Well, maybe you should try someplace else.” And that’s when I went to Marvel.

JM: Did you ever work with Julius Schwartz?

MOONEY: We never did much of anything together. I always

thought Schwartz was a nice guy. Decent. And Jack Schiff was okay. Murray Boltinoff I didn’t get along with too well. Also, George Kashdan was a heck of a nice guy. [NOTE: All the preceding, of course, were DC editors.]

JM: Do you have any comments about the up and down of comic books through the ’50s and ’60s?

MOONEY: Well, I weathered it, I guess. An awful lot of people were reduced to getting gainful employment elsewhere.

JM: Some of the people that you worked with you never actually met, is that correct?

MOONEY: Yeah, right. Bill Finger I knew. I didn’t know him that well, but I had a great admiration for him.

JM: For example, you worked with John Buscema. Did you meet him later on?

MOONEY: I never met him. I always admired his work very much. I worked with Sal. I never met Sal, either. We were all freelancers, and unless you happened to come to the studio at the same time they were there, you never met them.

JM: Did you ever meet some of them afterwards? You know, twenty years later?

Two Of My Greatest Adventures Two splash pages by Mooney for My Greatest Adventure #21 (May-June 1958) and #27 (Jan. 1959). Scripters unknown. Thanks to Bob Bailey.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

39

daughter is beginning to take an interest now, but I don’t think when she was little she really paid much attention to it.

Now she’s working with me, so she has much more awareness of what I did and what might have some salability, what she should save and so on. But I won’t say the kids were really all that impressed by it; they just weren’t involved.

JM: For me it would have been, “Wow, my dad did ‘Batman’!” “My dad did the ‘Legion of Super-Heroes’!”

What’s New, “Pussycat”?

“Pussycat” was a strip originally published in the back of some of Martin Goodman’s “men’s magazines,” à la Playboy’s “Little Annie Fanny.” Marvel later published a collection or two of the stories. This Mooney-drawn page may or may not have been written by Larry Lieber, who scripted many of the “Pussycats.” Seen at right is a commission drawing of Pussycat done a few years later by Mooney. Thanks to Anthony Snyder and ComicLink, respectively. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

MOONEY: I met a few of them, briefly, at conventions. But [I had] very little contact with many of those who might have been working at that time. I just wasn’t there at the time they were in the office.

JM: I’m sure you preferred inking your own artwork.

MOONEY: Oh yeah, yeah. Definitely.

JM: What was it like inking other people?

MOONEY: If the guy was a good penciler, it was kind of fun. I was never against it; in fact, sometimes I could add a little flourish of my own. And usually I got pretty good feedback from the pencilers that I worked with, and I appreciated it. You know, “You did a nice job,” which was pleasant. Some guys thought my inking over their pencils was more than acceptable, which was quite nice.

“Cultural Dreck”

JM: What did your children think of your work?

MOONEY: Bruce, of course, was away; he was living in Canada at the time. And Jimmy never paid any attention to it at all. My

MOONEY: When I first came here [to Florida], I used to go around to the schools and speak at the library in the schools and so on. I guess Noel at that time was about four or five, and I went to her school to speak to the kids. She was pleased, but she was like a shrinking violet: “This is my dad,” and she just kind of huddled up. But I remember that very well. I did an awful lot of speaking at the schools, and I went from here to West Palm and down up to Fort Pierce and so on. I don’t know why I Larry Lieber did it, but I guess maybe [because] there were a lot of newspaper articles about me. from the 1969 Fantastic Four Annual.

Oh God, I have one in particular where I’m at the local comic book shop showing some of my originals to the owner. And then I had another one where I remember one little guy was really sick and the one thing he was interested in was comics and I brought him an original page and later they sent him to Canada for special treatment. I never knew whether he recovered or not, but they did a very nice human-interest article on me on that in the paper.

JM: What would you talk about when you went to the schools?

MOONEY: Primarily I would just mention that I did comics, and if they had any questions I would try to answer them. And I would also make some drawings on the blackboard. Remember, these were primary grade school kids, and their questions were kid questions: “How long does it take you to do this, that, and the other thing?”

I played around with that for a while. I think an awful lot of it was because I was a little bored down here. I guess I was just trying to find something to do other than sit at the drawing board.

JM: You’ve mentioned in every interview how bored you were of “Supergirl,” but in reading other DC comics from the same era, they were pretty much the same story.

MOONEY: Yeah, over and over again.

JM: So if you got out of “Supergirl,” and were put onto something else, you’d probably wind up with the same kind of repetitiveness. Was that just a trend or is it laziness, or…?

MOONEY: Well, it was just a living, you know. I took it, I did it. I think that probably would have more to do with somebody who was in the editorial end of it.

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

JM: I know that newspaper strips seem to be the Holy Grail of many cartoonists.

MOONEY: Oh yeah, there was a lot of money to be made in it. I never did submit anything, though, for syndication. The one thing I have, and I’ve never done anything with it: I’ve got a whole month’s sequence with a strip called Doc. Doc was supposedly a funny strip, and it was one of those things that I thought might take off. I’ve got a full month of Doc. I’ll see if I can find some copies of it that I can send you. I thought it was a pretty good strip, but I guess there were a lot of things going on at the time and I never really got around to submitting it to any syndicates.

JM: What do you think about comic scholarship these days? You know, people like myself are getting interested in looking at comics as more than just a five-minute or ten-minute entertainment.

MOONEY: I find it rather interesting. I mean, the very fact that you as a professor would have this much interest in something that was put down as being pretty trivial. Cultural dreck, let’s say. I find it very intriguing. I guess I never really expected it, and when somebody does take it seriously as you do, I find myself surprised.

Pleased, but surprised.

JM: You can use other words if you want. [laughs]

MOONEY: No, no. I have nothing derogatory to say about it. It’s just that, especially in the period when the comic books were so denounced, you began to feel you were doing something pretty non-essential, to say the least. And you were not being exhibited in galleries. I had articles in the paper and so on, but they were news of interest for what it was. But no, it’s rather impressed me that some of the comics are being taken seriously now.

way. Today it certainly wouldn’t be. Thank God that all that racism and that attitude has at least lessened to a great extent.

JM: You never saw examples then of why someone would want to change their name?

MOONEY: Well, just the ones I mentioned… Well, look at Stan Lieber. Stan immediately came up with Lee. His brother Larry would never, never change it at all. He just felt the hell with it. I worked with Larry on Pussycat and quite a few other things. Larry was a total contrast to Stan. I always liked Larry. I thought he was a really nice guy in many, many ways. He draws quite well. Larry primarily was writer more than artist.

I enjoyed doing Pussycat very much. I always liked doing sexy girls. And certainly she was a sexy girl. And another thing to do with that time: they paid me very, very well for it. I was surprised.

A hell of a lot better than most of the other comic books. It was a magazine, really, of course, so they paid magazine rates instead of comic book rates. I enjoyed that very much.

“I Think I Would Have Enjoyed Doing Tarzan”

JM: I have to go back to the Legion and “Dial H,” ’cause they’re…

MOONEY: Your favorites.

One of the guys that fascinated me early on was Frank Frazetta.

My God, his stuff is so beautiful, and you know he’s got his own galleries and so on. And certainly he’s made it into almost an art form. Well, it is an art form. Some of that stuff is just beautifully done. And the guy was a painter and wasn’t just a cartoonist. Of all the comic book artists that had evolved into doing more serious stuff, I think Frank was probably the very best. He was good early on, even when he was doing the Tarzan-type stuff.

JM: His stuff sells for crazy amounts of money. He has a website where you can buy original work for $40,000, $50,000…

MOONEY: Gee, is that all? I’ll have to go visit and see what I can pick up. [laughs] JM: Did you ever see any of Carl Barks’ work?

MOONEY: Yeah, I did indeed. I met him at a convention many years ago here in Florida. I saw his work early on, thought it was really quite, quite interesting.

JM: I was reading Danny Fingeroth’s book, Disguised as Clark Kent, where he talks about the Jewish influence in comic books and he tries to make a connection between the Jewishness of some of the artists and the writers and the comics themselves.

MOONEY: That’s an interesting concept. I always think of Jack Kirby changing his name in the early days because he didn’t want that Jewish name. I think an awful lot of the guys in the early days, at least, seemed to feel that their ethnic background could be detrimental as far as them getting work or being accepted. Nick Viscardi is a perfect example. You wouldn’t think that being Italian would’ve bothered him, but he changed his name to Cardy.

And I remember that a lot of the guys, why I don’t know, felt that their being Jewish would be detrimental for them in some

The Cat’s Out Of The Bag! Batman meets The Cat-Man, courtesy of Mooney and writer Bill Finger, in Detective Comics #311 (Jan. 1963). Whether or not either artist or scripter knew there’d been a comic book and super-hero called The Cat-Man back in the 1940s is a moot point. But hey, knowing how Bill Finger made the rounds of the companies—we wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he wrote Holyoke’s “Cat-Man” at one time or another! Thanks to Doug Martin.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

JM: Yeah. Were there any characters there that you remember doing that you just thought were so stupid, that you just couldn’t believe what you were doing?

41

And he makes it into the Legion, whereas this other guy doesn’t!

JM: What did you think about Supergirl dying back in the ‘80s?

MOONEY: An awful lot of them! I couldn’t designate you one, two, or three. But I thought a lot of them were pretty inane.

Particularly in the “Legion of Super-Heroes.” I mean, those were established characters that I thought really didn’t have much validity that I could see.

MOONEY: Well, I got asked about that by a lot of people, and I just thought, maybe this was a convenient way of getting rid of her and maybe reinventing her, which they did.

But then I really never had any great attraction for [that character]. I mean, I did it, it was a living and so on. I tried to make it schmaltzy and as attractive as possible, but it wasn’t one of those characters that I said, “Boy, I’ll really miss drawing her.”

JM: I just read one this morning with the Legion of Substitute Heroes…

MOONEY: Oh God!

JM: And this one fellow, Stone Boy… his talent was he could turn himself into stone, but once he did that he was a statue and he couldn’t do anything else… so he turns himself into stone, and this creature comes along and just knocks him over and breaks him into a million pieces. Then they called him Pebble Boy. [laughs]

JM: Sort of like Joe Simon’s Captain America being killed off last year… or maybe that’s a little bit different.

MOONEY: I don’t know how many people were terribly upset by that. I know I wasn’t. [laughs]

MOONEY: Or even Bouncing Boy, this big, fat character that just bounces all over the place.

JM: You know who the new Captain America is?

MOONEY: No.

Dial H For House Of Mystery Mooney drew the cover and first story (and many more besides) of the series “Dial H for Hero” that began in House of Mystery #156 (Jan. 1966; script by Dave Wood), with his finding the mysterious, power-giving Dial—and, among many others, #160 (July ’66), which spotlighted young Robby Reed changing into an “old” super-hero, no less than Plastic Man—and #166 (April ’67) with The Yankee Doodle Kid! Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

From Super To Nuts!

Jim Mooney could do it all—from the sheer, exuberant fun of Supergirl (as seen in this Halloween commission art) and The Legion of Super-Heroes (another commission) to the super-heroic soap opera that was the vintage Amazing Spider-Man. In the latter splash page, from #82 (March 1970), Stan Lee, John Romita, and Jim Mooney share equal— and unspecified—billing on a moody scene depicting Peter Parker’s anguish. Thanks to Mark Ellis and Barry Pearl, respectively, for the art. [Supergirl & Streaky TM & © DC Comics; ASM page TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JM: Captain America’s old sidekick Bucky is now the new Captain America.

MOONEY: Well, at least I know now. I won’t have to wonder.

JM: You can sleep tonight. [laughs] Jim, can you tell me a funny story— one that you can repeat in mixed company?

MOONEY: [laughs] Well, there are so damn many. I’d have to think about that.

JM: Okay, what would be a tragic story or a missed opportunity?

MOONEY: Well, I won’t say tragic, [but] I think one of the things I missed out on was that I tried to get the assignment of doing the Jungle Jim [top-strip] for Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. And I submitted [samples] and I was kind of hoping I would get it, but I didn’t.

JM: What other strips or comics would you have liked to do?

MOONEY: I think I would have enjoyed doing Tarzan. I would’ve liked that, and of course Prince Valiant. I would have liked to have done that.

JM: One thing we haven’t really mentioned is whether you were influenced by anyone, when you were drawing.

MOONEY: Lou Fine used to work at Eisner & Iger. He went into commercial work later. I was very much influenced by him. I thought he was very, very good. My friend Ruben Moreira. When I say “influence,” I mean that I certainly admired his stuff so, while I can’t say I copied it, there was an influence. As an example, I saw one thing he did with the Statue of Liberty, and I had done something similar before, and I thought, Jeez, he did that so much better than I did.

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

43

You know, the Martian series [John Carter of Mars]. As far as I was concerned, that guy was a literary giant. You know, the Tarzan books and all the other stuff.

JM: Did you have favorite music as a kid growing up?

MOONEY: I enjoyed music, but I was totally incompetent as far as playing went. I tried to play the guitar, I tried to play instruments.

I was just a total, total loss. I used to like a lot of folk music, but I might as well face it, I don’t think I could have, even if I’d pursued it, played any music. We had a piano, and the cats might have been jumping up and down on the keys for all the good I did with it. [laughs] In particular, I liked some of the folk music like the “Keeper of the Eddy Stone Light.” I liked a lot of Burl Ives’ stuff— not the best singer, but the most famous. I had quite a fairly large collection of folk music.

JM: One last question, talking about artistic influences. Outside of comic books, were there any artists that influenced you?

MOONEY: Oh yeah, very definitely. You’ve heard of Virgil Finlay the illustrator? He was one of my early influences, when I was working with Henry Kuttner and I got some of my stuff in Weird Tales early on. Virgil I knew. We got together quite often; we were good friends. I always thought that Virgil was very much appreciated, but I think he somewhat underachieved as far as fame and acceptance were concerned. He did a lot of stuff for Weird Tales; a lot of fantasy stuff.

JM: Well, I think we’ve gone through more than enough questions. With regards to the questions I’ve had for you, is there anything I’ve missed that you think I should mention?

MOONEY: I think you pretty well covered it!

Me Tarzan—You Kaänga!

Maybe Jim Mooney never got the nod to draw the long-running Tarzan newspaper strip, but this signed “Kaänga” splash page from Fiction House’s Jungle Comics #50 (Feb. 1944) suggests he’d have been up to the task. Other Jungle alumni who did draw the Tarzan feature at one time or another were his buddies Ruben Moreira, Nick Cardy, and John Celardo. Scripter unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

JM: Did you change your style at all over the years?

MOONEY: No, but I think I probably was a little bit more careful about trying to draw as well as I could. I think frankly that I don’t think my style ever evolved into anything that serious… that welldone, or what I considered well-done, probably not until the late ’50s, early ’60s. Also, when I was beginning to do things like Omega [the Unknown], Man-Thing, and so on, I think I gradually evolved a more mature style through doing those strips.

Postscript: Perhaps Jim, whom I did not really know for very long, was frustrated by the fact that his health was not cooperating with him… perhaps it was his sincere disappointment over the professional behavior of others (in an incident it is not possible to go into at this time)… or perhaps it was because he missed his beloved wife Annie, who had passed away in 2005. For whatever reason, with dignity and self-determination, Gentleman Jim Mooney put away his inks and ended his adventure on March 30, 2008.

Dr. Jeff McLaughlin is an associate professor of philosophy at Thompson Rivers University and the editor of the books Stan Lee: Conversations and Comics as Philosophy. He is about to embark on a sequel to the latter work.

JM: That’s a number of years after you started.

MOONEY: Yeah, quite a bit. Some of my early stuff, I look at it and I realize how primitive it was and how I had a good bit to learn.

Certainly some of that early stuff like “Flash Lightning” and “Magno and Davey”—some of it was pretty amateur.

JM: Here are just some fun questions. What’s your favorite movie?

MOONEY: I always liked Gone with the Wind. I’m trying to think of some of the more current movies. The Sting was kind of fun.

Nothing really stands out.

JM: What were your favorite books then as a kid?

MOONEY: Oh, I was nuts about all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stuff.

If Three’s A Crowd, What The Heck Is This?

Jim Mooney and (on right) Dr. Jeff McLaughlin, our genial interviewer— perhaps at the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con, where they met.

44

Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

JIM MOONEY Checklist

[This Checklist is adapted from information found in the online edition of The Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999. Names of features that appeared both in comic books with that title and in other magazines, as well, are generally not italicized. Key: (w) = writer; (p) = pencils; (i) = inks.]

Name: James Noel (Jim) Mooney (1919-2008) artist

Pen Names: Jay Noel (used for inking); (with others) M. Hands

Education: Grand Central School [Harvey Dunn]; Los Angeles Art Institute Family in Arts: Ed Jurist (brother-in-law)

Print Media: Artist: science-fiction fanzines 1937; juvenile books 1958-83; coloring books 1983; magazines 1936-45; Weird Tales 193641; Young Catholic Messenger 1942-45; magazines Adam (dates uncertain), Stag (dates uncertain but incl. 1970s-80s)

Comic Shops/Studios: S.M. Iger (p)(i) circa 1939-40; Sangor Studio (p)(i) c. 1942-43

Performing Arts: Studio owner (advertising, cartooning, TV spots, animation) 1953-63 Commercial Art & Design: Toys

Honors: Inkpot Award (San Diego Comic-Con) 1996; Presidential Citation (for Spider-Man premium about drug abuse) (date uncertain)

Comics in Other Media: “Life of Columbus” (p)(i) in Young Catholic Messenger 1942-c. 1943; “Pussycat” (p)(i) 1970s-80s; Fun House; Popular Jokes; Spider-Man (p)(i) in Electric Company Magazine Promotional Comics: Spider-Man (p) for National Commission for Prevention of Child Abuse 1984; Spider-Man and Hulk (i) for Chicago Tribute Supplement 1980 COMIC BOOK CREDITS (U.S. Mainstream Publications):

Ace Periodicals: Captain Courageous (p)(i) 1941; The Flag (p)(i) 1941; Flash (a.k.a. Lash) Lightning (p)(i) 1940-42; Magno (p)(i) 1940-42; The Raven (p)(i) 1941-42; The Unknown Soldier (p)(i) 1940s; Vulcan (p)(i) c. 1941

Atlas/Seaboard Comics: The Dragon (i) 1975; Hands of the Dragon (i) 1975; The Scorpion (i) 1975

It’s A Blast!

While not specializing in humor work in his later career except for “Pussycat,” Jim Mooney had work in the first two issues of G&D Publishing’s Mad-style magazine Blast! #1 in 1971. Thanks to Jim Ludwig for this double-page spread from #1. Scripter uncertain. [© the respective copyright holders.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

45

Lashing Out! Another Mooney splash panel of “Lash Lightning” (after he’d changed his name from “Flash L.”)—this one from Lightning Comics, Vol. 2, #6 (April 1942). Thanks to Jim Kealy. [© the respective copyright holders.]

The WHO’S WHO of American Comic Books 1928-1999 Online Edition Created by Jerry G. Bails FREE – online searchable database – FREE www.bailsprojects.com – No password required

Artist Jim Mooney and writer Robert Turner co-created “Wildfire,” here seen from the splash panel in Quality’s Smash Comics #29 (Dec. 1941).

Thanks to ComicBookPlus. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Call Of The “Wildfire” The splash page from the Jim Mooney-drawn, Robert Turner-written feature “Wildfire” from Quality’s Smash Comics #28 (Nov. 1941)—decades before there was a male of that appellation in DC’s “Legion of Super-Heroes.” With thanks to the invaluable ComicBookPlus website. [© the respective copyright holders.]

46

Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Artist Jim Mooney Talks About A Long & Landmark-Laden Career

Better/Nedor Publications: Finny Fish (w)(p)(i) 1942

Claypool Comics: Elvira (i) 1995; Soulsearchers and Company (i) 1993-95 Comico the Comic Company: Jonny Quest (i) 1988

Dark Horse Comics: Creepy (p) 1992; Flaxen (i) 1992

DC Comics (& Affiliated Companies): Aquaman (p)(i) 1960-64; Aquaman and Aqualad (p)(i) 1947; Astra (p) 1950; Batman and Robin (p)(i) 1945-63; Blackhawk (p) 1965; covers (p)(i) 1947-50, 1962-67; Dial H for Hero (p)(i) 1966-67; Falling in Love (p) 1956; The Flash (p) 1988; House of Mystery (p)(i) 1952-59, 1966-67; House of Secrets (p)(i) 1956-58; Jimmy Olsen (p)(i) 1966; Legion of SuperHeroes (p)(i) 1965, 1967; My Greatest Adventure (p)(i) 1955-59; Mystery in Space (p)(i) 1952; Perfect Crime Mystery (p) 1948; Robin the Boy Wonder (p)(i) 1947-53, 1968; romance (p) 1959-60; Space Ranger (p)(i) 1959-60; Strange Adventures (p)(i) 1950-53, 1965; Superboy (p)(some i) 1968, 1972, 1990-91; Supergirl (p)(i) 1959-68, 1974-75; Supergirl and Wonder Woman (p) 1965; Superman (p)(i) 1959-64; 1966, 1991; Superman and Batman (p)(some i) 1961-64, 1969-71; Superman and Supergirl (p)(i) 1962; Superman team-ups (p) in Action Comics (1989); Superman, Nightwing, Green Lantern, and Deadman (p) 1989; Tommy Tomorrow (p)(i) 1952-59; The Vigilante (p)(i) 1953; Who’s Who in the DC Universe (p)(i) 1986-87 entries

Eclipse Enterprises: covers (p)(i) for Legion of Super-Heroes Index 1987 (imprint: Independent Comics Group); Lars of Mars (i) 1987; Twisted Tales (i) 1987; Xyr (i) 1988

Elite Comics: Cover (p)(i) for Official Legion of Super-Heroes Index 1987 Fawcett Publications: romance (p)(i) 1950-52

Fiction House: Camilla (p)(i) 1943; Kaänga (p)(i) 1943-44; Norge Benson (p)(i) 1943; Suicide Smith (p)(i) dates uncertain; U.S. Rangers (p)(i) 1943 Fox Comics: The Lynx (p)(i) 1940; The Moth (p)(i) 1940

G&D Publications: Blast (p)(i) 1971

George A. Pflaum: Treasure Chest (p)(i) Perky Penguin and Booby Bear 1946-47; [same magazine] cartoon features (p)(i) 1946-49, 1959

Batman & The Man Of “Tomorrow” (Top of page:) Two classic Mooney “Batman” art jobs—from the same issue!

His cover for Batman #44 (Dec. 1947-Jan. 1948), inked by Charles Paris— and his own penciled-and-inked splash page for the lead story. Thanks to Doug Martin for the splash. [TM & © DC Comics.]

(Right:) Mooney’s 8th “Tommy Tomorrow,” from Action Comics #179 (April 1953). Scripter unknown. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

“I Never Really Considered Comics An Art Form”

47

Call It Timely, Call It Atlas, Call It Marvel—But Above All, Call Jim Mooney!

(Left:) A Mooney pre-Code splash page, from Spellbound #5 (July 1952). Scripter unknown. Thanks to Dr. Michael J. Vassallo.

(Right:) Spidey and The Black Widow (in her first real costume) share a splash page in Amazing Spider-Man #86 (July 1970)—coincidentally, the very issue in which she dons the black jumpsuit destined to become her trademark. Whoever dreamed that, one day, the two of them would be in dueling multi-milliondollar movies—and that then it would take several years and protracted negotiations between major studios before the twain could meet on the silver screen!

Script by Stan Lee, art by John Romita & Jim Mooney. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scan. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Harvey Comics: Champ Comics (p)(i) 1941 (unconfirmed)

Marvel/Timely: A-Team (p) 1984; Amazing Detective Cases (p)(i) 1952; The Avengers (i) 1971-72, 1979; Battle (p)(i) 1959; Battlestar Galactica (p) 1980; The Beast (i) 1972: Black Panther (i) 1976; Captain America (i) 1972; cartoon/funny animals (p)(i) 1943-44, 1985-86; The Cat (i) 1973; Combat Kelly (i) 1972; covers (p)(i) 197386; Daredevil (i) 1974-77; The Defenders (i) 1972, 1978, 1980; Doc Savage (i) 1972; Fantastic Four (i) 1972, 1974, 1977; Ghost Rider (p)(i) 1973-74, 1978; Ginch and Sourpuss (p)(i) 1945; The Ginch and Claude Pennygrabber (p)(i) 1943-44; Godzilla (i) 1977; The Golem (i) 1974; Gullivar Jones (i) 1972; Gunsmoke Western (p)(i) 1957; Hulk (i) 1983; Hulk (p) 1978; Human Torch and Iron Man (p) 1975; Human Torch and Thor (p) 1974; illustration (p) 1987; The Inhumans (i) 1977; The Invaders (i) 1976; Iron Man (i) 1971-75; Jungle Adventures of Gregg Knight (p)(i) 1953-54; Ka-Zar (p)(i) 1939; Lovers (p)(i) 1953; Luke Cage and Iron Fist (i) 1978-79; ManThing (i) 1972, (p)(i) 1975, 1979-80; Marvel Tales (p)(i) 1956; Marvel Universe (p) 1987; Master of Kung Fu (i) 1977; Ms. Marvel (p) 197778; mystery/occult (p)(i) 1956; Mystic (p)(i) 1952; Omega the Unknown (p)(i) 1976-77; The Patriot (p)(i) 1944; Planet of the Apes (i) 1975; Questprobe (i) 1985; romance (i) 1973-c. 1975; Sgt. Fury (i) 1972; Son of Satan (p)(i) 1974-75; Spellbound (p)(i) 1952; Spider-Man (p)(i) 1968-87; Spider-Man and Captain Marvel (i) 1973; Spider-

Man and Cat (p)(i) 1973; Spider-Man and Human Torch (i) 1972, (p) 1973; Spider-Man and Iron Man (p)(i) 1978; Spider-Man and Thor (i) 1973, 1977; Spider-Man and Werewolf by Night (i) 1980; SpiderMan, Thing, Dr. Strange, Scarlet Witch, and Quasar (i) 1982; SpiderWoman (i) 1977, 1980; Star Wars (i) 1982; Strange Tales (p)(i) 1952-53, 1957-58; Sub-Mariner (i) 1970-74, (p)(i) 1990; Sub-Mariner and Dr. Doom (i) 1976; Tales of Atlantis (p)(i) 1973; Tarzan (i) 1979; Team America (i) 1982; Terry-Toons Comics (p)(i) 1940s; Thing and SpiderMan (i) 1982; Thor (i) 1982-83; Thundercats (p) 1985-87; Tuk, Cave Boy (p) 1941; Uncanny Tales (p)(i) 1956-57; Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction (i) 1975; Vision and Scarlet Witch (i) 1985-86; war (p)(i) 1959; Western (i) 1968-c. 1975; What If Daredevil…? (i) 1978; What if Spider-Man…? (p) 1981; White Tiger (i) 1980; World of Fantasy (p)(i) 1958 Quality Comics: Manhunter (p)(i) 1942; Wildfire (p)(i) 1941-42

Ziff-Davis Comics: romance (p) 1952; science-fantasy (p) 1950-51

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49

Dr. Amy K. Nyberg

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code Continuing Chapter 6 Of Our Serialization Of The 1998 Study

By AMY KISTE NYBERG

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Despite our previous two issues’ last-minute forced omission of a chapter, we near the conclusion of our reprinting of Dr. Nyberg’s groundbreaking history of comic book censorship—a work we’ve felt honored to be able to re-present, with a wealth of added illustrations, for Alter Ego’s audience. As we’ve said before, Seal of Approval is “footnoted” in the MLA style which lists book, article, or author name, plus page numbers, between parentheses in the main text: e.g., “(Hart 154-156)” refers to pp. 154-156 of whichever work by an author or editor named Hart appears in the bibliography (which will be printed at the conclusion of our serialization, a few issues from now). When the parentheses contain only page numbers, it’s because the other pertinent information is printed in the text almost immediately preceding the note.

A/E

We’ve again retained such usages and spellings from Nyberg’s book as

“superhero,” an uncapitalized “comics code,” “E.C.” and “DC,” etc. In the captions we ourselves have added, however, we have reverted to A/E house style and preference. These captions, of course, do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Dr. Nyberg or of the University Press of Mississippi, the original publisher of the book—the original edition of which can still be obtained from UPM at www.upress.sate.ms.us. Our thanks once again to Dr. M. Thomas Inge, under whose general editorship the volume was originally published in 1998 as part of its Studies in Popular Culture series, and who was of great help to A/E in arranging for its reprinting here… to William Biggins and Vijah Shah, acquisitions editors past and present at the U. Press of Mississippi… and to Brian K. Morris for retyping the text on a Word document for Ye Editor to, what else, edit.

The first part of Chapter 6, seen in A/E #130, dealt with the first few years of operations under the Comics Code, which was adopted on October 26, 1954….

[Main text continued on p. 52]

Do, Do, That Vooda…

The evolution (or maybe devolution) of an Ajax/Farrell title (left to right): Voodoo #18 (Nov.-Dec. 1954), that mag’s final issue as a horror comic… #19 (Jan-Feb. 1955), as, with censorship becoming an inevitability, a switch was made to reprints from Seven Seas Comics, etc.… and Vooda #20 (April 1955), which featured “South Sea Girl” stories from Seven Seas, altered to star the new heroine and to give Ajax/Farrell a shot at avoiding having to pay the Post Office to register a new title for second-class mailing privileges. Wonder if it worked? Artists unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

50

Continuing Chapter 6 Of Our Serialization Of Amy K. Nyberg’s 1998 Study

“The Judge, He Holds A Grudge…” [Bob Dylan, ca. 1967] A real rarity! On the “Today in Comics History” website, Michael T. Gilbert ran across this two-page feature (reprinted on this and the facing page) obviously prepared by DC Comics personnel. It sports art by Winslow Mortimer; the scripter is unknown—though editor Jack Schiff is a likely suspect, as it closely resembles DC’s public-service pages, many of which he wrote. This piece was apparently never printed in a National/DC (or any other) comic, but was most likely sent out for public-relations purposes on behalf of the Code and its parent organization, the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA)—if it was ever distributed at all. It was probably someone at DC who handwrote “Produced in 1955” on this copy that was sold in 2005 via Heritage Comics auction, and originally retrieved from its website by Frank Motler. Thanks also to Jim Kealy.

Seal of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

51

“Judge Murphy,” of course, is Judge Charles F. Murphy, who served as the first administrator of the Code, from 1955-56. Frank M. notes that the DC covers depicted on the first page are those of Our Army at War #33, A Date with Judy #46, Strange Adventures #55, Real Screen Comics #85, and Adventures of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis #20, all of which would be cover-dated April 1955—though there were, he reports, slight changes made to those covers before they went on sale. At any rate, the giveaway must’ve been prepared really early in ’55, if not at the end of ’54! [TM & © DC Comics.]

52

Continuing Chapter 6 Of Our Serialization Of Amy K. Nyberg’s 1998 Study

Chapter 6 (Continued)—Evolution Of The Comics Code

B

y the CMAA’s fifth year of operation, there were signs the industry was recovering. [President John] Goldwater reported to CMAA members that circulation of comics was approximately six hundred million annually, and while it was true that a number of companies had not survived, the overall circulation of the comic book industry had increased by almost 150 million annually. He urged members to experiment with new types of material and new approaches to material while maintaining high standards (CMAA Files [Address of the President, 14 Apr. 1959]). While funny animal, teen, and romance comics performed adequately on the newsstands, the publishers were in search of a genre that would appeal to the baby-boom youngsters who were now teenagers. Their “experiment” would be to resurrect the genre that started the industry, that of the superhero. National Comics [DC] led the way with the reintroduction of a 1940s character, the Flash. He made his debut in Showcase #4, cover-dated October 1956. His success was to launch a revival of the genre, and comic book historians use the reappearance of the Flash in 1956 as a marker to indicate the start of the Silver Age of comic books (Benton, Comic Book 177). Archie Comics hired Jack Kirby and Joe Simon to revive their 1940s superhero, the Shield, but the revival lasted only two issues. Next, they tried an original character, the Fly, who had insect-like powers (Benton, Comic Book 59).

As DC revived more of its 1940s heroes, it decided to put them all together in the Justice League of America with an issue coverdated October 1960. It was tremendously popular. Martin Goodman at Marvel, seeking to capitalize on the superhero team concept that had been successful at DC, gave writer Stan Lee the go-ahead to develop a team for Marvel. Lee’s answer was The Fantastic Four (November 1961). The team consisted of a scientist who could stretch, a teenager who burst into flame, an invisible girl, and a monstrously ugly strongman. The team also represented a departure from the traditional superhero formula; instead of

being perfect and god-like, these four behaved “more like human beings who happened to be superheroes than heroes who happened to be human” (Benton, Comic Book 63).

This new approach to superheroes would eventually pay off for Marvel. By 1965, every other comic book publisher was rushing to introduce its version of new-and-improved superhero characters.

And the success of the campy Batman television series in 1966 created a new superhero craze. Sales of all comic books rose as a result, and the Batman comic book reached an all-time high of 900,000 copies, the best performance by a comic since the pre-code days. It was the revitalization of the superhero comic that lent impetus to making revisions in the comics code. The new breed of superheroes, with their human problems, were creatures of the 1960s, a decade very different from that of the Golden Age superheroes of the 1940s. The social upheaval of the 1960s, with its liberalization of attitudes toward sex and the rise of a drug culture, led publishers to push for a code that adhered to more contemporary standards.

But the first comic books to escape the constraints of the comics code came from outside the industry in the form of underground comics. These comics were the product of the counterculture that flourished in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At first, underground comic books were available only by mail order or directly from the artist, but eventually a network of retail outlets, including alternative record stores and bookstores, along with socalled head shops, was created for distribution. Historian Mark Estren identifies the first underground comic book as God Nose, produced by Jack Jackson under the name Jaxon, which appeared in 1963. It was not until 1967 that underground comics began to emerge as a unique medium. A whole new alternative comics culture was established, with its peak years coming between 1968 and 1974 (Estren 45, 50; Sabin 41).

Two Faces Are Better Than One In A/E #105’s “Tales from the Code” coverage, we displayed the panels in “The New Crimes of Two-Face!” from Batman #68 (Dec. ’51-Jan. ’52) in which the acid-hurling that led actor Paul Sloane to become the second Two-Face was softened for reprinting in Batman Annual #3 (Summer 1962). Here, from left to right, are pre- and post-Code versions of the aftermath of that criminal assault—which the Code had forced DC to alter into merely a freakish accident. Script

by Bill Finger; pencils by Lew Sayre Schwartz (with Batman and Robin figures by Bob Kane); inks by Charles Paris. Thanks to Gene Reed. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Seal of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

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Three That Made A Decade A trio of the most important comic book-related events between mid-1956 and early 1966: Showcase #4 (Sept.-Oct. 1956), on sale in July of that year, introduced an updated version of DC’s shelved hero “The Flash.” Cover penciled by Carmine Infantino, inked by Joe Kubert; the stories inside were scripted by Robert Kanigher and John Broome, with editing by Julius Schwartz. [TM & © DC Comics.]

The Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961), from what remained of Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics, was the first mag of what would, by 1963, become the Marvel Comics Group. Pencils by Jack Kirby; inks probably by George Klein. The writer and editor of the issue was Stan Lee. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] The “campy” Batman TV series became a smash hit when it debuted in January 1966, starring Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin. [Batman & Robin TM & © DC Comics; still © the respective copyright holders.]

Underground comics (sometimes spelled “comix” to distinguish them from their more mainstream counterparts) dealt with taboo subjects of interest to the counterculture, specifically sex and drugs.

Most contained a liberal dose of graphic violence as well. Estren notes: “The comics of the forties and early fifties were very often cast in a cops-and-robbers format, while the violence in the underground comics is more likely to cut across all strata of society and to be completely pointless—an accurate reflection of present-day America” (146). The quality of drawing ranged from amateurish to polished and utilized a variety of artistic styles. Underground comics never completely died out, but they decreased in popularity after the decline of the counterculture. Also contributing to the decline of underground comics were increasing production costs in the 1970s, a wave of obscenity prosecutions, and the closing of head shops under new anti-drug paraphernalia laws (Sabin 174).

It was not the intention of the underground comics producers to compete with mainstream publishers for their audience. Rather, the underground artists, who grew up with comic books, found comic books to be the perfect medium to express their defiance of social norms. What better way to demonstrate their disdain of conservative taste than to pervert what the public perceived as children’s entertainment? The underground comics represented no real challenge to the comic book industry, however. The limited circulation of underground comics posed no economic threat and also meant that there would be no public confusion about the mainstream product and the comics offered by the underground artists.

Despite their relatively short lifespan, underground comics were important to the mainstream comic book industry in three ways. First, they demonstrated that there was a market for adult comics. Second, the retail network developed for distribution was an important

Hey, Adults—Comix!

Jack Jackson, aka “Jaxon.”

The cover of the premier issue of reputedly the first of the “underground comix”—God Nose, which the Grand Comics Database lists as debuting in 1964 rather than ’63 as related in Nyberg’s text. [© Estate of Jack Jackson.]

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Continuing Chapter 6 Of Our Serialization Of Amy K. Nyberg’s 1998 Study

precursor to changes in the way more mainstream comics were distributed in the 1980s. And finally, some underground artists went on to make a name for themselves with the new mainstream adult comics that were to emerge in the 1980s. The most notable success was Art Spiegelman, who emerged from the underground with Maus, a tale of the holocaust in comic-book form.

While the “comix” added a new dimension to the medium, it was the rebirth of the superhero in the late 1950s and early 1960s that brought new life to the floundering industry. The number of teenage readers was growing, and the stories of superheroes whose human flaws (rather than their fantastic powers) were emphasized appealed to this older group. But just as it had in the 1940s, the interest in superhero comics waned; by the late 1960s the industry was desperately casting around for new material. One response was to introduce new “socially relevant” comics. The leader in this respect was a DC superhero team consisting of Green Lantern and Green Arrow. Comic book historians Will Jacobs and Gerald Jones note that the characters served as “a mouthpiece for [writer Denny O’Neil’s] own 1960s radical orientation” (160). Despite its short run, lasting only fourteen issues, the Green Lantern/Green Arrow comic book opened the way for a challenge to the outdated rules of the code. O’Neil sought to introduce fantasy rooted in the issues of the day. Stories tackled problems such as overpopulation, racism, sexism, and judicial due process. One subject the comic could not deal with was drugs, a topic forbidden by the comics code (McCue and Bloom 52).

The code made crafting such socially relevant stories very difficult. Comic book characters lived in a perfect world where good and evil were supposed to be clearly defined and where figures of authority were never corrupt. This vision was not consistent with the social unrest that reverberated through the 1960s, when the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and other issues led some to question the very structure of society. The 1954 code allowed no acknowledgement that the world had changed. To bring an element of realism to comics, the publishers had to go outside the code.

To be continued...

The Greening Of Comic Books Green Lantern #76 (April 1970) was the first of the series of issues of that title often referred to as “Green Lantern/ Green Arrow,” a “socially relevant” approach to comic books. Cover art by Neal Adams. The story inside was written by Denny O’Neil, who has said that neither GA or GL was a “mouthpiece” for his own precise viewpoint, contrary to one quotation utilized in Seal of Approval. Photos of both were seen most recently in A/E #123.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

Art Spiegelman.

The Maus Factory Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus was serialized in his and wife Françoise Mouly’s underground comix Raw, beginning in 1980; the first of the work’s two volumes, whose cover is depicted here, was published in book form in 1986. Maus was completed in 1991, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. [© Art Spiegelman.]

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OK, we admit it!. Michael T. shamelessly swiped Norm Saunders’ Crime Clinic #5 cover (Summer 1952), from Ziff-Davis. See it bigger in A/E #128. [© the respective copyright holders.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Revenge Of The Comic Guys!

C

by Michael T. Gilbert

omic book creators must have felt like Custer at Little Big Horn as Dr. Wertham and other comic critics savaged them in the media. Some fought back the only way they knew— with humor.

For a while it was open season on Wertham and his fellow critics. Al Capp got his licks in, as did Marvel head honcho Stan Lee. And then there was Myron Fass.

Myron Fass’s short-lived Mad knock-off, Lunatickle, took broad swipes at both the good doctor and his arch-foe, EC Comics.

Issue #2’s “The Horrible Comic Story behind the Horror Story Comic Books,” featured unflattering parodies of Fass’ competitor Bill Gaines (Sam Grisly) and Dr. Wertham (Dr. Frederick Von Werthless). Werthless, it was said, was inclined to offer his “unbiased and unasked for opinion.”

The story blamed EC for the excesses that led to the Code. Ironically, the story’s artist, Lee Elias, drew some of the most excessively gruesome pre-Code horror comics for EC’s rival, Harvey Comics.

Piling On! (Above:) “Dr. Werthless” stars on this page from Myron Fass’ Lunatickle #2 (April 1956).

Art by Lee Elias. Writer unknown (see p. 58). [© the respective copyright holders.]

(Left:) Stan Lee’s story “The Witch in the Woods” from Menace #7 (Sept. 1953) depicts an editor’s worst nightmare ––comic-hating parents! Art by Joe Sinnott. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Right:) In “The Raving Lunatic!” from Suspense #29 (March 1953), editor Stan gives a piece of his mind to another angry comic book critic. Art by Joe Maneely.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Revenge Of The Comic Guys!

Capp Attack!

When defending horror comics, a popular tack was to compare them to the even more gruesome classics by Edgar Allan Poe and the Brothers Grimm–– not to mention true horror tales taken from newspaper headlines. Al Capp (and his studio) drew this for Harvey’s Li’l Abner Comics, Vol. 2, #68 (Jan. 1949).

It actually defends comic strips, not comic books—but Capp also defended the latter, in other venues. [© Al Capp Estate.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Lunatickle’s contents page credits the story to Jack Mendelsohn, but when I asked Jack about it recently, he said that was incorrect: “As for the EC-Bill Gaines/Wertham satire... I can’t take credit, or blame, for any part of it! How my name was ever attached to it — I haven’t the slightest clue. I might have freelanced a few articles to Lunatickle during my period of writing for [EC’s] Panic, but that certainly wasn’t one of them. Nor would I ever malign Bill Gaines, portraying him as such a hateful lamebrain. Gaines was always very kind and generous with me, as he was with most of the talented folks in his employ.”

And On The Opposing Side...

The good doctor certainly had his critics.

But to be fair, not everyone disagreed with Wertham. A different point of view can be seen in “You Are Citizens… Now!” from Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, Vol. 13, #10. Treasure Chest was primarily a publication for Catholic school students. In this story some kids are about to buy some trashy comics, but kindly Officer Brennan steps in to smack some sense into the impressionable teens. We see him holding up copies of Slime and Crime (oddly enough, the only two issues missing from my collection! If you have ‘em, tweet me!). Other titles on the rack include Bad, Stinko, and Junky Comics. Hey, real subtle, guys!

Trashy Comics!

Tough talk from a concerned citizen. However, by the time this story came out in 1958, Little Lotta and Archie were about the scariest comics on the stands. From Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, Vol. 13, #10 (Jan. 16, 1958). Writer & artist unknown. [© Geo. A. Pflaum.]

Revenge Of The Comic Guys!

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The kindly officer tells the kids that he doesn’t want to lecture them… and then proceeds to do so! “This kind of magazine is on the increase, and as they increase, delinquency increases, too.

There’s a direct connection.”

I find the timing of this statement odd, since this story came out in January 1958—more than two years after the Comics Code castrated the field. If there was ever a tamer time for comics, I have yet to see it. But hey, maybe Slime and Crime had been lying in the storeowner’s basement for a few years, and he was trying to dump them on some innocent Catholic School students. If so, it was a sucker’s game.

The kids decide to boycott candy shops selling those dreadful comics, but instead are talked into blackmailing the magazine dealers, who immediately cave in. From then on, the town’s candy stores only carry “good” comics—presumably comics like Treasure Chest. Who doesn’t love a fairy tale ending? I’ll bet Dr. W. adored this one!

Oodles Of Doodles!

And Finally...

In Sugar & Spike #75, (Feb. 1968), Doodles Duck tackles the subject of comic book censorship. In a clever six-page story written and drawn by Sheldon Mayer, Doodles discovers his young nephew Lemuel reading a comic book. Well aware of the dangers of such an unhealthy activity, Doodles hits the roof.

Shelly Mayer answers comic book critics with this delightful story from DC’s Sugar & Spike #75 (Feb. 1968). Thanks to Lynn Walker. [“Doodles Duck” art on this & following page TM & © DC Comics.]

When young Lemuel explains that his teacher says the comic is a “perfectly nice one,” Doodles is undeterred. “What does your teacher know about it? Why don’t you ask me? I know all about it. I read an article!” Presumably one penned by kindly ol’ Doc you-know-who.

Uncle Doodles orders his nephew to read a “real” book. Young Lemuel doesn’t see any difference. “I have to read the words to find out what the pictures are about… and there are between 150 and 250 words on every page… same as any other kids’ books!”

Hey kid, back off. Nobody likes a smart aleck!

Doodles counters by asking, “What’s in those words? How much sense do they make?” Lemuel responds by saying “Same as any book. Some make sense, and some are dopey!” Doodles remains convinced that comics are bad. “I read one once, and I know!” he snorts.

He tries to get Lemuel to read a nice fairy tale book instead, but the lad says he once read a fairy tale and it scared him. “Oh nonsense!” says Doodles. “Come here! I think I can find some the ones I used to read when I was little!”

He starts reading “The Little Match Girl,” only to find she freezes to death at the end! Horrified, Doodles tries “Hansel and Gretel” instead. When they get to the part where the kids’ evil stepmother tells her hubby to lose them in the woods, Lemuel is appalled. “Hey, Unc… they’d never let a story like that in a comic book! That story threatens the security of a child!” I can almost picture Sheldon Mayer chuckling over that!

Later, the kids try to find their way back by secretly dropping bread crumbs taken from their home. “That’s stealing!” yells Lemuel. “The Comics Code would never let that get by!”

Doodles tells his nephew not to get so technical and continues reading. But when he reaches the part where the sweet little kids burn an old lady in an oven, even Doodles finally reaches his limit.

He tosses the fairy tale book and grabs Lemuel’s comic.

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

“After a session with one of those so-called “children’s books,” a good comic is kind of a relief!” he says.

You tell ‘em, Doodles!

‘Till next time...

Michael T. Gilbert

“5¢ To See Four Selebrities!”

For the cover of DC’s house fanzine Amazing World of DC Comics #5 (March 1975), multi-talented writer/artist/ editor Sheldon “Shelly” Mayer drew himself to go with the art he’d originally done decades earlier for the cover of Comic Cavalcade #23 (Oct.-Nov. 1947)—with a bit of help from a youngster named Alex Toth. The humorous characters were Cottontop Katie and a couple of her friends. [Art & characters TM & © DC Comics.]

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The RBCC Story Beginning A Multi-Part Tribute To G.B. LOVE & Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector Excerpted from the 1995 book The Golden Age of Comic Fandom

by Bill Schelly

A

UTHOR’S INTRODUCTION (2015): Comic fandom has a lot of reasons to commemorate the late Gordon Belljohn Love, publisher and editor of the advertising juggernaut RBCC... or, to spell it out, Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector. I was well aware of this when I wrote The Golden Age of Comic Fandom, way back in 1995.

Therefore, to begin our multi-issue tribute, which will include a series of interviews and other special features from his friends and colleagues, here’s the story of G.B. and his fanzine, made up of excerpts from that tome (with a few revisions). And remember, Gordon was still very much alive when GAOCF was published.

The excerpts begin after I had covered the origin of Alter-Ego and its likewise Jerry Bails-edited-and-published offshoots The Comicollector and The Comic Reader in 1961, as well as Parley Holman’s early fanzine Spotlite….

1961: “Something To Occupy My Time” 1961 was not yet over, and there was one more development with far-reaching implications to occur: the publication of a brief four-page fanzine called The Rocket’s Blast. Only six to eight copies of the first issue were produced, using carbon paper. There could have been no humbler beginning for this acorn which would one day grow into a mighty oak.

The Rocket’s Blast editor Gordon (G.B.) Love was born in 1939 in Atlanta, Georgia. He became a comic fan early with his love for the original Captain Marvel comics in the 1940s. He dreamed of performing feats of derring-do, but, unlike other boys, even modest feats of physical prowess would remain outside his grasp.

For G.B. Love had cerebral palsy. He had had it since birth, when doctors found certain motor functions of his brain had been damaged.

In 1959, G.B. and his family moved from Georgia to Miami, Florida. When the 20-year-old was tested by the rehabilitation people, he was told they had nothing for him. Goodwill offered him a job for $25 a week, but he wouldn’t take that. G.B. Love had a great deal more to offer than charity make-work, even if his cerebral palsy made telephone communication an uphill battle, and he could only type by clutching a pencil in one hand and striking the keys of an electric typewriter laboriously, one by one.

Love Is What Makes An RBCC An RBCC (Above top:) Gordon Belljohn Love. According to Robert Brown, who snapped this photo circa 1980, “The cap was part of a Kool Aid pilot’s kit I got at one of Don Maris’ shows. G.B. loved the caps. There was a ‘hostess’ cap for girls. He was happy to pose for the picture.”

(Right:) Cover art on Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector [RBCC] #60 (1968) by the remarkable John G. Fantucchio. Mid-decade, this artist began producing a string of superb, idiosyncratic covers that upgraded the appearance of the fanzine.

His first appeared on RBCC #44 (1965). His photo will be seen in a near-future issue—as it was in A/E #122. [Art © John G. Fantucchio.]

In a recent [1990s] interview, Love remembered how he decided to publish a fanzine: “[In 1961] I was looking for something to occupy my time, and hoped to develop something that might eventually become profitable. My original idea was to combine sf and comics in a fanzine, but I quickly dropped the sf and concentrated on my first love, comic books. I picked the name The Rocket’s Blast myself but I really don’t remember how I came up with it.”

A letter from Love printed in [the DC comic book] Mystery in Space announced his intention to start a club and put out a newsletter. “At the time I produced the first issue of RB, I was unaware of anyone else trying it, too. After I began publishing, I think the first fanzine I discovered was Alter-Ego.”

Love published under the aegis of the SFCA. This originally stood for Science Fiction and Comic Association, but was changed to South Florida Comic Association. In any case, it was merely the name of Love’s company.

The RBCC Story

Be It Ever So Humble…

(Clockwise from above left:) G.B. Love seems to be welcoming one and all to the SFCA headquarters in Miami, Florida.

His letter printed in Mystery in Space #92 (Dec. 1961) set the wheels turning for the publication of The Rocket’s Blast. The editor who published it was Julius Schwartz. Courtesy of Alan Hutchinson. [TM & © DC Comics.]

The Rocket’s Blast #1 (December 1961) consisted of two legal-sized pages, “reproduced” by means of carbon paper. Here’s page 1. [© Estate of G.B. Love.]

The Rocket’s Blast was not, at first, primarily devoted to ads. The comics-oriented articles were generally brief and of variable quality. Some were profiles of Golden Age characters; others consisted of commentary on new comics. None of the first eight issues exceeded five legalsized pages.

1964: The Great Merger

2015 NOTE: One of the unique things about the various fanzines originated by Jerry Bails is they were continued by others when he moved on to other projects. The Comicollector and Alter-Ego were passed to Ronn Foss, who handled them into early 1964. Then, when Ronn decided to focus exclusively on creating his own comic strips, he passed Alter Ego (he’s the one who dehyphenated its name) and The Comicollector to Biljo White, best known for his fanzines Komix Illustrated and Batmania. White soon turned A/E over to Roy Thomas (co-editor of the early Bails issues) instead of editing/publishing it himself, remaining as its official art editor, but he commenced editing and publishing The Comicollector with #13.

Soon Biljo White learned what Ronn Foss had: producing an advertising fanzine involved a tremendous amount of record-keeping, and typing pages and pages full of numbers. No fun at all! This, combined with some personal problems that were happening in his life at the time, caused him to look for a successor after publishing just two issues. #15 would be his last issue.

Would The Comicollector die? It had burned out three of fandom’s most capable editor/publishers in two and a half years. What about all the subscriptions that were unfulfilled?

Biljo White turned to G.B. Love. Would he be interested in taking over the reins of CC?

It should be pointed out that Love had not, at first,

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Beginning A Multi-Part Tribute To G.B. Love & Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector

office and comic book collection, leaving him badly shaken.

G.B. recounted the traumatic event recently. “I remember the night very well. We had a room that was adjacent to my house, where I had my office and about ninety percent of all my equipment, and my comics. It happened about 7:00 at night.

“I was in my house and I noticed smoke coming from my office door. When I opened the office door, the flames flared up. My Dad grabbed a water hose and got it pretty much under control by the time the Fire Department got there. But by then most everything had either been destroyed by fire or ruined by water. That included my desk, typewriter, printing equipment and supplies, material for the next Rocket’s Blast (#16), and my comic collection, which included two copies of Fantastic Four #1.

“The one thing that I had kept in my bedroom was my subscription files. Still, that night I was utterly devastated. I cannot begin to tell you how demoralized I was and I could not comprehend trying to continue to publish. But, by the next morning I re-grouped and, with the help of several contributors... and a little insurance money, I got going again and was only about two weeks late with RB #16.”

As The Rocket’s Blast passed issue #20, its circulation had reached two hundred copies, and the number of pages of ads had increased substantially. Advertisers were attracted to RB’s record of on-schedule publication, month after month.

Rick Weingroff.

Early Daze (Above:) By The Rocket’s Blast #12, the newsletter-type format had changed. It sported covers, though it was apparent the artist (Love?) struggled with tracing onto mimeograph stencils, as in this case depicting Dick Ayers’ version of Magazine Enterprises’ mid-1950s hero “The Avenger.”

Soon Love purchased a spirit duplicator, and the cover art improved markedly. [© the respective copyright holders.]

(Above left:) Rick Weingroff was a 15-year-old aspiring writer when he wrote the “Collector’s Corner” column in Rocket’s Blast #3 (Feb. 1962).

“Rocketeer Gossip,” his popular, long-running column, began in #5 (April).

That same issue introduced Robert Harner’s “Best of SF” column, which became a regular feature. Buddy Saunders and Bernie Bubnis also wrote articles in RB in its first year.

been accorded much respect in comicdom, due to the crudeness of his earliest issues. He was neither a talented artist nor writer, nor a particularly knowledgeable collector, and thus was not a part of fandom’s inner circle, if it can be said there was such a thing. In RB #12, he wrote, “We have had problems, man have we had problems, but we… are solving them.” The Rocket’s Blast had improved considerably during its second year of publication.

That’s when its record of regular, monthly publication began attracting advertisers.

RB gradually attracted a talented group of young writers and artists, and had come up in the world. Rick Weingroff’s “Rocketeer Gossip” proved to be well-written and popular with the fans; “Best of SF” by Robert Harner III was a mainstay; various features on Golden Age super-heroes by Raymond Miller appeared with increasing frequency. With art by Buddy Saunders, Alan Weiss, and Howard Keltner, and articles by Paul Gambaccini, Bill Spicer, and others, the non-ad material was among the best fandom had to offer in 1964.

All had not run smoothly for G.B. Love. In early 1963, he suffered a major blow. Three weeks into January, a fire ravaged his

In The Comicollector #15, White’s last issue, Love responded: “When Biljo first approached me with the idea of taking over CC I felt extremely honored to have been asked because, as we all know, CC has been one of the mainstays of fandom.

“My first thought was to publish CC as a separate zine and charge the same price for it—30 cents per copy, and to have the same ad rates... and so on. However, I hit on an idea I think all my regular RB readers and the regular CC readers will be very happy about—I’m going to publish both zines and staple them together into one issue, and yet, now get this, you will pay only the regular price of the RB (35 cents per copy).

“Some of my main objectives will be: to make sure that CC retains its own separate identity (both zines will be sectioned off, except for the ads which, of course, will appear throughout both zines); to try and revive some of the things that made CC so popular in the past—the first of these will be the Hall of Fame series, which Biljo White will handle; to continue to come out on a monthly basis, which I consider to be extremely important; to bring all the latest news about upcoming comics direct from the editors via Jerry Bails’ Comic Reader, which will appear regularly in CC. Biljo tells me that he, Ronn Foss, and Roy Thomas will also all be regular contributors. And also, CC, like the RB, will be ditto.

“I know I have promised you a lot and I know it must sound too good to be true but I don’t believe I have promised you anything I can’t fulfill.” Love also agreed to honor all CC subscriptions, thus absorbing CC’s customer base.

Thereby lies the tale of the fateful merger between The Comicollector and The Rocket’s Blast, resulting in the nowlegendary Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector (RBCC). With #29 (April 1964), the first double-issue debuted, with the cover (of the Golden Age Daredevil by [Buddy]

Miller Time Raymond Miller, 1966.

His “RBCC Information Center” was the fanzine’s longest-running column.

The RBCC Story

65

A Couple Of Blasts From The Past The two star artists from The Rocket’s Blast in its ditto days were Buddy Saunders (as “Don Fowler,” as per the Green Lama cover of RB #26, 1964) and Howard Keltner (who drew The Web on RB #27, 1964). [The Web TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

Buddy Saunders.

Saunders) sporting the blurb, “For the 1st time in fandom history you now get two of fandom’s greatest zines for the price of only one.” True to his word, Love had a separate CC section starting at about the halfway point.

At first, G.B. Love was daunted by the amount of work involved (the mere amount of printing and collating was staggering) and was forced to briefly go to a bimonthly schedule. “It became a full-time job,” he said. “I usually worked on the RBCC from about 8 p.m. to about 2 or 3 a.m. I found I got more done working at night. I lived with my parents at the time and my set-up took about two-and-a-half rooms.” Soon he returned to a five-week or monthly schedule. The circulation grew to seven hundred, then eight hundred, and in 1966 topped one thousand. By Love’s own reckoning, he received four hundred inquiries from a plug in Justice League of America #30 (September 1964).

By this time, RBCC had become a modestly profitable enterprise. Love recalls, “For the next ten years, RBCC was my primary source of income. I am a firm believer in the capitalistic system and make no apologies for it.” Indeed, some short-sighted fans scorned Love’s profit-oriented ethic. Yet, the fact that the magazine could turn a profit provided an impetus for continuous publication, and in large part accounted for RBCC’s incredible longevity.

Love himself has acknowledged the importance of the role that The Comicollector played in the eventual success of the double-zine.

He calls the merger “the first major highlight” in the history of RBCC. Possibly RB would have gone on to become a powerhouse on its own, but taking over CC instantly placed G.B. firmly in the

center of comicdom, and doubled his circulation. It also brought with it more frequent contributions from Ronn and Biljo.

However, Love’s plan to publish two Howard Keltner. fanzines in one, with a separate section for The Comicollector, soon fell by the wayside. It was simply not practical, and didn’t make a lot of sense. Inevitably, the features migrated toward the front, and the ads (roughly 75% of each issue) comprised the remainder.

To be sure, RBCC had its shortcomings. Aside from the typos and strikeovers, Gordon Love did not have the finesse of a Foss or White. The layouts were functional, and no more than that. But RBCC was dependable, the ads were readable, and there was enough in the way of columns and letters to provide a modicum of entertainment. Most fans subscribed to RBCC, and virtually every fanzine advertised in its pages.

Enlarging Fandom With Love

Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector was the meeting place for these new collectors, the dealers who served them, and all the others who were interested in the fanzine ads and articles. Its circulation crept closer and closer to 1000, surpassing that benchmark in 1966. (It would peak at 2,500 copies.) More and more fans began dealing comics seriously, and RBCC carried most of their sale lists.

The switch to photo-offset printing—introduced gradually, complete by issue #50 (early 1967)—relieved G.B. Love of the task of running off every page on a spirit duplicator or mimeograph machine. (Soon, with the introduction of saddle-stitched binding,

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Beginning A Multi-Part Tribute To G.B. Love & Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector

he was also relieved of the task of collating the pages and stapling each copy, a back-breaking task.) Although he had the part-time assistance of his close friend Andy Warner, Love continued doing ninety-five percent of the work until 1970, when he hired James Van Hise as his Assistant Editor. (It wasn’t just RBCC, either. The SFCA also published numerous fanzines, including The Golden Age, the RBCC Specials, Fighting Hero Comics, and various specials and other mail-order offerings.)

Love was always trying to find ways to enlarge fandom. In 1965, he’d written an Open Letter to fans, asking them to list the addresses of newsstands and stores in their local area that carried comics, so that he could attempt to convince them to sell RBCC right next to the comics. This effort proved to be unsuccessful, but by dint of sheer effort, Love was able to push the envelope further. He was the first person in fandom to advertise in a Marvel comic book on their classified page. His ad was for The Illustrated Comic Collectors Handbook and cost about $350, a lot of money at the time. After Jerry Bails, G.B. Love deserves credit for bringing more people into comicdom in the 1960s than any other fan (though the efforts of others in this direction should not be denigrated). At the time, a few grumbled that Love Biljo White. was only interested in increasing the circulation of RBCC, but that automatically led to gains for fandom across the board, since virtually every fanzine and fan organization advertised in its pages.

Perhaps as a result of the large circulation, RBCC attracted a staff of some of the most talented cover artists in fandom. By the time the conversion to photo-offset printing was complete, dazzling work began to appear by John G. Fantucchio, Don Newton, Berni Wrightson, Steve Fabian, Robert Kline, and many others. Newton and Fantucchio, in particular, were mainstays.

John Fantucchio was already an established commercial artist by the time he began sending illos to G.B. Love, having attended an art school in Boston for three years; his work showed an extraordinary sense of design, and a brilliant use of zip-a-tone or BenDay screens. Don Newton’s black-&-white drawings ranked a close second to Fantucchio, but his secret strength lay in his painting ability. His color cover of Flash Gordon and Dale Arden on RBCC #76 (November 1970) is especially gorgeous. (Fantucchio and Newton both did a lot of work for Bill G. Wilson’s The Collector.)

Because of its emphasis on ads, fans don’t often mention the quality of the RBCC covers from 1967 onward. Those covers were among the most impressive ever produced during fandom’s Golden Age. [EDITORS’ NOTE: More covers by John Fantucchio and Don Newton will accompany later segments of this multi-parter.]

As was the practice in comic fandom (adapted from customs in sf fandom), this work was uncompensated. G.B. Love confirms, “Usually I would give the contributors (mostly artists) extra copies of the publication their work appeared in. With Don Newton, who never asked for a thing, I would send him a few dollars because he did so much work for me and was very dependable.”

The ads, of course, were the main reason fans subscribed to RBCC. Long-time dealers like Claude Held, Howard Rogofsky, and Ken Mitchell were joined by regular advertisers like Buddy Saunders, Russ Cochran, Gary Dolgoff, Richard Burgess, Mike Nolan, Lucas Dang, Bruce Hamilton, Donald Puff, Dick Hoffman, P.J. Iacovone and Bruce Hershenson. The Grand Book Center and Passaic Book Center were regular advertisers, as were the Cherokee and Collectors Book Stores in Hollywood. In the days before price guides, fans learned about the values of comics by reading the ads in RBCC.

A Momentous Merger (Above:) Though first Jerry Bails, then Ronn Foss served as editor/publishers of The Comicollector, it was Biljo White of Columbia, Missouri, who finally handed fandom’s first adzine over into the hands of G.B. Love in early 1964.

(Right:) Buddy Saunders’ version of the Golden Age Daredevil celebrated the formation of The Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector, an unwieldy moniker that was often shortened to a more manageable RB-CC. (Eventually, even the hyphen was dropped.) Love’s cover blurb claimed: “This first combined RB-CC will undoubtedly become one of the greatest of collector’s items. You are now about to read the most widely circulated zine in comic fandom!!”

[Art © Buddy Saunders; Daredevil is now a TM of Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Coming Of The Buyer’s Guide For Comic Fandom

It was inevitable that G. B. Love’s Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector would eventually face competition for advertising dollars. Despite early efforts like Bob Jennings’ short-lived Comic Advertising Review (1964), no one seemed willing or able to mount a serious challenge in the early days. Of course, there were gripes about RBCC’s haphazard layouts (especially before 1970), and the high prices Love charged for his SFCA zines, but in general the fanzine was well-liked and well-supported by fandom. Still, where there was one successful adzine, there could be two.

Alan Light had responded to a plug for Comic Crusader in Mark Hanerfeld’s column in Adventure Comics #374 (1968), and was soon cranking out fanzines like Comic Cavalier and All-Dynamic. After considering adding other kinds of publications to his roster, Light decided to publish an ad-zine called The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom.

“It was named, not too originally, after a local free shopper called The Big River Buyer’s Guide,” Light recalled in an article celebrating the thousandth issue of TBG’s successor, Comic Buyer’s

The RBCC Story

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Guide. “I remember holding my breath to see if G.B. Love would publish my ad, since I was an obvious competitor out to take business away from him. That ad was critical to my success.” Love did print the vital two-page ad for TBG #1 (in RBCC #76, December 1970). The first issue was mailed out in February 1971, at no charge to the recipients. Light wrote, “Never in our wildest imagination did we expect the paper to be as successful as it turned out to be.”

Meanwhile, RBCC had grown to such proportions (with a peak circulation of 2,500) that G.B. Love finally hired an assistant. James Don Newton.

Van Hise had been a subscriber to the original Rocket’s Blast since 1963, and met G.B. Love when he moved to Florida in 1970. Soon Van Hise was working for Love. Around this time, the magazine’s layouts improved markedly. Van Hise contributed various articles, which he accounts for giving him a great deal of writing experience. Since Love’s cerebral palsy made verbal communication difficult, Van Hise took a lot of the phone calls. They worked together for the next four years, until, in 1974, G.B. Love decided to sell the SFCA to Jim.

Why, after thirteen years and over a hundred issues, did Love give up his business?

He put it this way: “At the time, RBCC was supporting me and I was also paying Jim a salary. However, it was becoming less profitable. Also, the comic industry was showing signs of going in directions I did not want to go. I just did not enjoy it as much, because of the changes I could see coming.” But the overriding factor, which is inherent in Love’s comment about the shrinking profitability of RBCC, is that in the space of three years, The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom had attracted much of Love’s ad revenue, and the trend was proving irreversible. In G.B.’s last issue (RBCC #112, July 1974), only nineteen of its ninety-two pages were paid ads. To be continued….

Coming Next: Alter Ego reprints an article about G.B. Love that appeared in The Miami Herald newspaper in 1971. After that comes the first part of our interview with Jim Van Hise about meeting Love, what it was like working with him, and more. And stay tuned for at least a half-dozen columns devoted to Gordon and RBCC! Comments to Bill Schelly can be sent through Bill’s web site www.billschelly.net. Be sure to check out his new Fantagraphics book Black Light: The World of L. B. Cole.

Comes The Don Along with John Fantucchio, the other key RBCC artist in the second half of the 1960s was Don Newton, whose painting of Flash Gordon and Dale Arden fronted issue #76 (1970). It graced the walls of Love’s office for years to come. As for Fantucchio, a sample of his work can be seen on p. 62; a photo of him appeared in A/E #22, and others will be viewed later in this series on RBCC. [Flash Gordon & Dale Arden TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

Black Light: The World of L.B. Cole Introduction by Alter Ego ’s Bill Schelly!

272 pages of the most bizarre, proto-psychedelic, eye-popping comic book covers of all time!

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not only know a bit about his life but, thanks to her photographs, I can now banish the mental picture that I had concocted for the man (turns out that he looked nothing like Salvador Dali!).

As a comic book-devouring kid in the ’60s, I quickly began to recognize art styles in the early DC super-hero titles, and as much as I doted on the uncredited Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino, and (mostly) Joe Giella teams of Green Lantern and The Flash, I found myself searching the spinner rack at Sam’s Drugs time and again for the gorgeous but anonymous Mike Sekowsky and Bernard Sachs artwork on Justice League of America. The kid me used to wonder why the members of the JLA looked so much prettier (for lack of a better term) and more pleasant in that book than in their individual titles (at Marvel Comics, that phenomenon is known as “the Joe Sinnott effect”)—once credit boxes arrived, I was quick to attribute the difference to the stunning brushwork and artistic acumen of Bernie Sachs! After all these decades, I’m still amazed at the surety of line and sheer beauty of the individual strokes accomplished by the consummate skill of the now largely (and unfairly) forgotten Bernie Sachs. Sachs truly brought out the best in anyone he inked, whether it was Infantino, Kane, John Romita, or Alex Toth.

mega the Unknown, the comic artist Jim Mooney did with writer Steve Gerber, came along in 1975, just after the usual chronological franchise of Alter Ego—but since Jim discussed that work with Jeff McLaughlin in this issue’s key interview, it seemed fair game for our marvelous “maskot” artist Shane Foley to use an Omega figure as the basis for an introductory figure of Captain Ego. Thanks, Shane—and thanks to Randy Sargent for applying the colors!

[Captain Ego TM & © Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly; character created by Biljo White.]

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I’m genuinely pleased to find out from his lovely wife that Bernard’s life was a relatively happy one, filled with all the work he wanted and surrounded by the friendship and support of so

I (that’s Roy, natch) was frankly thrilled to be privileged, in Alter Ego #121, to present no fewer than three interviews with the wives and daughters of artists and writers who had worked on the Golden Age “Justice Society of America” feature and/or the members’ related solo strips. Nor was I the only person who was excited by that prospect and its realization, as witness the missive below from Terry Austin, one of the premier comic book inkers of the 1980s and since, noted particularly for his sterling work on The X-Men in the era when it rose to become one of Marvel’s most popular titles….

Hi Roy—

I’d call it a “Christmas miracle,” except that it arrived in November. For years I’ve been aching to learn something about one of the greatest inkers in the history of comics, and now I feel that Clarence the Angel himself must have dropped Alter Ego #121, containing Richard Arndt’s interview with the widow of Bernie Sachs, into my mailbox—perhaps I was exceptionally good this year?

Together with Murphy Anderson and Joe Giella, Bernie Sachs inked DC’s Silver Age. Frustratingly, unlike the other gentlemen named, who are happily still in our midst, Sachs seems to have departed from the field (and then, us) prematurely and missed being welcomed on the convention circuit and celebrated for his stellar career in the pages of fanzines and comic book histories.

Bernie had already left comics behind by the time I entered it in the early ’70s, and, decades after woefully neglecting to ask Julie Schwartz or Carmine Infantino about him when I had the chance, I’ve found myself desperate to learn something (anything!) of this man whose work I so ardently admired and who thus may have been partly responsible for setting my feet on the road to becoming a professional inker myself. Thanks to Bernie Sachs-Smollet, I now

Black X Marks The Spot In A/E #121 we printed the splash page of the “Espionage – with Black X” spy thriller which a young Bernard Sachs both penciled and inked for the Quality group’s Smash Comics #42 (April 1943). This was, according to provider Bruce Mason, perhaps the earliest known work by Sachs—so here’s the climactic page of that same yarn. [© the respective copyright holders.]

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many good people in the comic book profession. It truly seems fitting for one who brought so much joy to the rest of us by virtue of his astonishing talent!

Terry Austin

Your enthusiasm speaks for us all, Terry. But we have to mention one flagrant error that somehow crept into the transcription, of which I was not aware until too late to do anything about it. Namely, the former Bernice Sachs’ last name now is not “Sachs-Smollet,” as stated over and over in the interview. Rather, she is Bernice Sachs-Smoller. Bernice herself (to the surprise of no one who read the interview) was not at all bothered by the error… but we’re eager to correct it here. Incidentally, you’ll hear more from Bernice in a near-future issue!

Bob Bailey, who regularly helps us out with scans of DC work from the Silver and Bronze Ages, sent us a “little story” (his term) which touched on Sachs and his work: Hi Roy,

Way back around 1979, when I was a student at the Joe Kubert School, one of my favorite classes was with artist Ric Estrada. He

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had never been one of my favorite artists. I considered him a weak version of Alex Toth. However, as an instructor he rivaled Dick Giordano and Bob Oksner as the best. He really cared.

One day he brought in some advertising storyboards to show us. One of the pages I thought looked slightly familiar and beautifully done. I asked who did it and he said it was Bernie Sachs. I replied, “The guy who used to ink Mike Sekowsky on the Justice League?” Rick said, “One and the same.” I said something like, “Wow, he should have been drawing the JLA by himself. Why is this so good compared to his comic art?” That’s when Ric explained that when you’ve got a family to feed, you do the lowerpaying work (comics) the fastest way that you can and that you can really only give your all on the better-paying jobs (magazine illos, advertising art, etc.).

He then showed us some of his comics work and compared it to his advertising art. It (his ad work) was just like the Sachs work: great. And the difference was, he was paid five to ten times as much for it as for his comic work.

Bob Bailey

Of course, how hard one works at writing or drawing a comic book is one’s own choice, Bob, regardless of payment. Not that we fault the late Ric Estrada, Bernard Sachs, or anyone else if they gave comics no more than they felt they were paid for (at the same time certainly giving it no less)!

The lead-off spot in A/E #121 was given to Rebecca Wentworth, daughter of John B. Wentworth, co-creator of the “Johnny Thunder,” “The Whip,” and “Sargon the Sorcerer” features for the All-American branch of DC Comics. Reading over the first-named feature in its Flash Comics appearances in preparation for that issue, I was startled by how inventive they were. All the more regrettable, then, that I realized too late to change that I had accidentally written “1993” as JBW’s year of death in one caption. Fortunately, the 1995 date actually given by Rebecca was given two or three times in the course of her interview by Richard Arndt.

In addition, A/E reader Jake Oster did some research on his own and says: “The U.S. Social Security Death Index lists John B. Wentworth as having died in 1995, with “Social Sec. #130-12-1476 (indicating New York), and Death Master File says, ‘died 15 August 1995.’ Of course, it’s possible it was a different John B. Wentworth.”

I asked Rebecca about this, and she replied:

Dear Roy,

As far as I know, Dad died aged 89, and he was born in 1908.

So I did the math. (Mom died in 1998 at the age of 93.)

I am very happy that Dad’s ideas have lived on. The work you do is very therapeutic and meaningful. I will not forget all our interactions. I wonder if there is ever a gathering of comic artists and families? I would like to thank you for connecting me to this part of my father’s life and necessarily myself. It’s been a surprise avenue to me as I pass the family story on to my children and now grandchildren.

Rebecca Wentworth

Uber Has Nothing On Thunderbolt!

“Johnny Thunder” writer/co-creator John B. Wentworth was ahead of his time!

In Flash Comics #78 (Dec. 1946), Johnny decides to help out the people of his city by commanding his want personified Thunderbolt to fly anybody and everybody where they want to go, the moment they holler “Taxi”—so naturally a regular taxicab driver complains to the city government!

Art by “Stan Joseph,” real name Stan Aschmeier. Thanks to Al Dellinges.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

As Rebecca knows, I also wrote her asking if she could explain why her father’s latter-day résumé stated that he wrote comics through “the middle of 1949,” which would mean for comic books that would come out late that year, if not in 1950—when we have no known credits for John B. Wentworth after 1947. That’s when Robert Kanigher took over the writing of the “Johnny Thunder” feature in Flash Comics and quickly turned it into a vehicle for The Black Canary, almost immediately adding insult to injury by appropriating the moniker “Johnny Thunder” for a Western feature he [RK] co-created with artist Alex Toth—a secret-identity cowboy strip with a horse named Black Lightnin’

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[comments & corrections]

Super-Heroes, Sorcerers, & Skirt-Chasers (Clockwise from above, in chronological order:) Splash page of “The Atom” story from All-American Comics #28 (July 1941)— reportedly written by Bill O’Connor and drawn by Bernard (Ben) Flinton—and quite possibly (though not for sure) inked by Len Sansone, who had embellished the feature when it started in AA #19. Thanks to Bob Rivard. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Sansone drew, and even signed, a number of “Mystico” stories in Better/Nedor’s Startling Comics. Here’s the final page of the magician’s exploit in issue #17 (Oct. 1942). Writer unknown. From the “Nedor A Day” website. [© the respective copyright holders.]

As detailed in A/E #121, during much of World War II, Sansone created, wrote, and drew The Wolf, a popular panel in military newspapers like Yank. As can be seen in this vintage (and apparently accurate) chart, only Milton (Terry and the Pirates) Caniff’s strip Miss Lace surpassed Sansone’s creation in popularity—and both regularly and greatly outpolled all competition for the duration. This chart was featured in R.C. Harvey’s biography of Caniff, and was sent to us by daughter Maggie Sansone. [© the respective copyright features.]

(a four-legged version of the original Johnny’s Thunderbolt?). Rebecca had no information re what her father’s supposed post-1947 comics writing might have entailed, however. Maybe “1949” was just a slip of the typewriter?

Maggie Sansone was the go-between for the third interview with a surviving loved one in #121, in this case Shaun Clancy’s talk with her mother, Mrs. Emily Sokoloff. Her father, Leonard Sansone, inked some of the earliest “Atom” stories in All-American Comics, and thus may be, for all we know, a virtual co-creator of the Mighty Mite. Maggie also contributed considerable art and information to the piece. But then it

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occurred to us that we hadn’t actually included the dates of his birth and demise in the interview, so Maggie helped us out one more time: Hello, Roy,

Leonard Sansone was born May 4, 1917, in Norwood, Massachusetts, and died in Miami, Florida, in a car accident on October 6, 1963.

Maggie Sansone

Thanks, Maggie. His wonderful Wolf cartoons during the Second World War made military service just a wee bit more endurable for any number of G.I.s.

The triple-threat interviews with “Justice Society of America” artisans, however, were far from the only thing in A/E #121. Jeff Gelb had this to say about a couple of other things in the issue….

Hi Roy—

I got a big laugh out of Michael Gilbert’s column about Ace Comics and their feverish fans. Count me as one of them. For some reason, I love that starfish on Captain Courageous’ mask! And actually, the Jim Mooney covers on some early issues were very, very good. Mooney was great right out of the starting gate! I just wish he’d drawn more inside art on these books. I recognize that Ace was an also-ran Golden Age company (what with Magno and Davey battling The Clown issue after issue, à la Batman and Robin vs. The Joker)… but there’s a charm to their super-hero stories that I have always enjoyed. (And don’t even get me started on the offbeat super-heroes of Hillman Comics! Hey, Michael, turn your spotlight on Zippo sometime… or Airmale and Stampy!

Also got several big laughs out of the “Two Flashes vs. The Purple Slagheap” reprint. Genuinely funny—and was Landon

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Chesney a multi-talented artist or what? Kudos to Bill Schelly for the idea of reprinting this!

Jeff Gelb 15260 Ventura Blvd., Suite 300 Sherman Oaks, CA 91403

It seemed to Bill and me that, since the late Bhob Stewart colored the story for Xero #10 (Spring 1963), we ought to re-present it that way. It was, and remains, a gem. As for the abilities of Jim Mooney, you’ll find no arguments to the contrary here—or in the first half of this issue of Alter Ego, for that matter!

Meanwhile, if you find yourself on the Internet, why not head on down to the Alter-Ego-Fans online chat group to learn more about upcoming features in this mag—to get a chance to unselfishly help us out with needed art and photo scans (thereby winning yourself a free copy of an issue of A/E)—and to discuss Alter Ego, the Golden and Silver Ages of Comics, and anything else that might be on your mind? You’ll find it at group.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans. If you run into any problems signing up, just contact our genial overseer Chet Cox at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he’ll walk you through them. You’ll be glad you signed up—and so will we!

Any complimentary or crushing or otherwise cogent comments on this issue? Please address them to: Roy Thomas e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135

And remember—don’t miss next issue’s salute to Sol Brodsky, Timely/Atlas/Marvel artist, Marvel Age production chief, and (among many other things) inker of Fantastic Four #3-4!

COMICS’ GOLDEN AGE LIVES AGAIN! RULAH • BULLETMAN CAT-MAN BLACK TERROR AVENGER PHANTOM LADY DAREDEVIL CRIMEBUSTER CAPTAIN FLASH SPY SMASHER SKYMAN • STUNTMAN THE OWL • MR. SCARLET COMMANDO YANK PYROMAN • GREEN LAMA THE EAGLE • IBIS

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Hero then goes out and slings lead with the badman and hits him… or rounds up a posse and hits the hull-danged gang!

Art ©2015 Mark Lewis

Love stories have much more range and variety.

Adventure stories have no narrow restrictions to keep within. Murder mysteries, which can be in a mold of their own, still have an infinite horizon ahead of them.

Part XIV Abridged & Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

tto Oscar Binder (1911-1974), the prolific science-fiction and comic book writer renowned for authoring over half of the Marvel Family saga for Fawcett Publications, wrote Memoirs of a Nobody in 1948 at the age of 37, during what was arguably the most imaginative period within the repertoire of “Captain Marvel” stories.

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Aside from intermittent details about himself, Binder’s capricious chronicle resembles very little in the way of anything that is indeed autobiographical. Unearthed several years ago from Binder’s file materials at Texas A&M University, Memoirs is self-described by its author as “ramblings through the untracked wilderness of my mind.” Binder’s potpourri of stray philosophical beliefs, pet peeves, theories, and anecdotes were written in freewheeling fashion and devoid of any charted course— other than allowing his mind to flow with no restricting parameters. The abridged and edited manuscript—serialized here within the pages of FCA—will nonetheless provide glimpses into the idiosyncratic and fanciful mind of Otto O. Binder.

In this 14th excerpt, Otto shares his thoughts on writing Western stories. —P.C. Hamerlinck.

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Westward Ho! i, pardner! Put away that thar six-shooter and let’s have a rootin’ tootin’ palaver together. I’ll git down off’n my great horse Swayback and jine yuh at th’ bar!

But the Western story has been told over and over again, without any real variation whatsoever. And yet, people keep begging for more and more, and not just kids. Why, consarn ye, a good “A” Western will draw the grownups like cheese will mice. And among those mice you will find me, too.

Pardner, I’m baffled. It ain’t hooman!

Perhaps the only logical explanation is that the brawling, lawless, heroic days of the Old West strike some ancient spark in all our souls. Maybe under the veneer of civilization we’re all just aching to be he-men and she-women, and live a rootin’ hootin’ wild and free life.

Of course, that’s the wonderful picture presented to our imaginations. Actually, if you and I were suddenly transported back to those days, we’d find it quite different, I think. We’d find it dirty and boring and sordid and full of villainy and injustice. And I imagine a Westerner transported from then to now would take one look at our set-up, toss away his shootin’ irons, and never go back.

I think he’d find our civilization, with all its faults, pretty good to live in. And he wouldn’t miss those bullets whistling past his ear at all.

Yes, pards, it’s nice to think about those old Western days as times of glory and adventure supreme, but take it from me: you never had it so good as right here and now. Of course, we have wars killing off 20 million and such but, uh, let’s not get into that.

Wars may come and wars may go, but yuh kin bet yore bottom dollar that the days of the Old West will live on and on— untarnished, indestructible. All you Western writers can sit back and relax. You’ve got a sure thing. Take it from this hyar varmint.

Next: FINIS!

As you might dimly surmise, I’m now going to froth at the mouth about the Golden West. At present writing, the Westerns in all forms—books, movies, radio, and comic books—are enjoying another heyday. Periodically they rise to a seat of eminence in the minds and imaginations of the American public. Then, for a while, they will suffer a mild eclipse or slowing down, but year in and year out, the Western story is as durable as a rock.

It’s an amazing phenomenon. Why should that period of history live on in story and song without the slightest dimming of its luster and glory by time? When you analyze it, you run into a blank wall. First of all, the stage is so limited. You can only have one kind of hero: a gun shooting Westerner. You can only have one kind of villain: the ubiquitous badman. And your heroine must always be the soul of virtue.

Your plots are strictly bounded, too. Cattle rustling. Range fights between cattlemen and sheepmen. Pioneering and wild Indians.

The brave sheriff cleaning up a lawless town. Think of another one if you can! And the basic formula is as cut-and-dried as peeling potatoes: your hero has a rollicking fist-fight with the badman.

Then the hero is framed of something. His girl loses faith in him.

Go West, Shazam Man! The author (seen above circa 1944) of so many “Captain Marvel,” “Marvel Family,” etc., stories during the 1940s & early ’50s also wrote his fair share of cowboy yarns for Fawcett during that era, such as (see facing page) his adaptation of the Saturday matinee film The Gunmen of Abilene starring Allan “Rocky” Lane (Fawcett Movie Comic #7, 1950; interior art by Bob Powell)— and the original yarn “The Redwood Robbery” for Ken Maynard Western #6 (Oct. ’51; art by Carl Pfeufer). Also seen is the photo cover of Ken Maynard #5 (Aug. ’51). Otto Binder also penned the Western heroics of Golden Arrow, Rod Cameron, and Gabby Hayes. Pages © the respective copyright holders.]

Memoirs Of A Nobody—Part XIV

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76

The Fawcett Invasion Of France – Part I T

by Jean-Michel Ferragatti Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

he American comic book invasion of France began in 1939 with the first appearance of Superman in Aventures, the “newspaper for children” (périodique pour enfants) from publisher La librairie moderne (The Modern Bookshop). Soon, the Man of Steel was followed to France by DC’s Batman, Zatara, Hop Harrigan, Jon Valor the Black Pirate, and Dr. Mid-Nite; Centaur’s Masked Marvel, Fantom of the Fair, and Amazing-Man; Fox’s Yarko the Great, Blue Beetle, and The Flame; Street & Smith’s The Shadow; and Quality’s Black Condor, Alias the Spider, and The Voice.

But this first period in French comics was halted by another invasion: the Nazi occupation of France in June 1940 and the subsequent eviction of all American material from the French publishing industry.

Nevertheless, with the victory of the Allies in 1944-45, some relations with old partners were revived in France, and publications featuring Superman and Batman started up again. These also included DC’s Sandman, Slam Bradley, Hour-Man, Green Lantern, The Spectre, and The Crimson Avenger; Centaur’s The Eye; and Quality’s Red Torpedo, The Clock, Doll Man, and Merlin the Magician.

Additionally, new relationships were formed with new partners.

After the war, the supply of paper was rationed in France. Only people who had made acts of resistance by cutting their publication production during the Nazi occupation, or who had launched resistant newspapers, could ask for a quota of paper to publish again. George Dargaud (later best-known for publishing Tintin in France, and launching Asterix and the career of artist Moebius) fulfilled such requirements, as his company, established in 1936, re-started in 1946 with new characters “Bob & Bobette.”

After publishing one hardcover album, Dargaud launched a small-format (190 x 285 mm) newspaper for children, with its cover page starring none other than Fawcett’s “Hoppy the Marvel Bunny”! While only one adventure of Chad Grothkopf’s funnyanimal creation was published before Hoppy disappeared from the paper’s contents, the Fawcett invasion of France had begun!

Bernadette Ratier was a resistant and had published some leaflets and a few publications for the Resistance. Her codename was “Dorothée,” and she had even published a resistant magazine for women named Femmes patriotes (Patriotic Women). With her friends from the Resistance network “Combat,” she created a weekly newspaper for children named Mon Journal featuring many French artists.

However, starting with #9 (10-31-46), a series named “Liana fille

Hoppy Trails To You! (Left:) Amazingly, out of all the Fawcett characters, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny was the first to land in France, beginning with his appearance in Le journal de Bob et Bobette #2, 1946 (Editions Dargaud); art by Chad Grothkopf. All art in this section supplied by Jean-Michel Ferragatti.

(Top of page:) A year later, a blue-clad Hoppy bounced over to Les albums de Pippo #1 (Editions Mondiales), as noted on p. 78. This cover was drawn by an unidentified French artist, clearly inspired by Chad’s Hoppy figure from the cover of Fawcett’s Funny Animals #26 (Feb. ’45). [Hoppy TM & © DC Comics.]

The Fawcett Invasion Of France – Part I

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Junior Version “Captain Marvel Jr.” was the second Fawcett hero-feature to appear in France. A unique version of the World’s Mightiest Boy ran for over a year in the children’s newspaper Mon Journal; above is the adventure for issue #74 (1948), drawn by French artist Jean Cézard. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

de la jungle” (“Liana the Jungle Girl”) was included inside the magazine, which was printed in black-&-white for budgetary reasons; only cover pages were in color. This series translated stories of Fawcett’s feature “Nyoka the Jungle Girl,” which was the only foreign strip in the newspaper at the beginning.

Don Winslow of the Navy, composed of Bell Syndicate newspaper strips, began being published in France in 1936. The character continued to appear after the war, his Fawcett-produced stories being translated in many publications.

Mon Journal partnered with Fawcett Publications and, with issue #21 (1-23-47), “Captain Marvel Jr.” became its cover star and main feature until the end of its run with issue #86 (4-22-48).

The first “Captain Marvel Jr.” story translated into French was “The Underwater Bandits” by Otto Binder, from Master Comics #69 (June 1946 cover date in the U.S.). The American Master #69 cover featuring Mac Raboy art was later used for a “trade paperback” edition of Mon Journal—a compilation of unsold copies bound together, much like Fawcett’s Gift Comics and Xmas Comics.

The first caption of the “Captain Marvel Jr.” story was totally rewritten, and the origin of Junior was completely changed by French writers: “Raised by a Hindu mage, the young crippled Freddy had received from his master a magic formula! Thanks to the three words “Captain Marvel Junior,” he could be transformed—under a generous feeling—into a flying athlete! He is now ready for his marvelous life of crime fighting….”

At the beginning, each episode was usually split into three parts or “covers” of Mon Journal. But CM Jr’s popularity with readers caused his publishing frequency to accelerate. Soon, three pages of the newspaper (out of a total of 8) were dedicated to the Blue Boy’s adventures. The character’s success prompted French artist Jean Cézard to use Cap Jr. in a brief cameo within his own series, Les mirobolantes aventures du Professor Pipe!

“Junior” had a total of 42 episodes in France, derived from his solo adventures in Fawcett’s Master Comics and Captain Marvel Jr. Unfortunately, the sales of Mon Journal were not as high as Bernadette Ratier would have liked, mainly due to the format of the publication. The trend was moving away from large-sized, thin newspapers for children to smaller-sized but thick paperback publications. “Captain Marvel Jr.” was relegated to the inside of the Journal and was soon replaced by Charlie Chan comic strips until the publication folded. However, not long before that occurred, another Fawcett hero jumped into the Journal:

“Ibis the Invincible” was the third Fawcett feature published in Mon Journal, lasting for six episodes, translated from Fawcett’s Whiz Comics. “Ibis” was less popular than “Captain Marvel Jr.,” but big enough to star on a cover of one of the Mon Journal “trade paperbacks.”

After Mon Journal was cancelled, the Fawcett characters would not be forgotten by the French. Cino Del Duca was an Italian who spent a large part of his life in France. He had created a large publishing empire on both sides of the Alps called Les Editions

78

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America]

Aventures Merveilleuses de Pippo (The Marvelous Adventures of Pippo).

Yet, once again, the series folded with the seventh issue (Dec. ’48).

Nevertheless, Les Editions Mondiales would continue to publish some “Hoppy” adventures from time to time in their publications L’intrépide and Bambino.

Meanwhile, Fawcett Publications had changed their publisher in France, moving to the established La Société Parisienne d’Editions (SPE), an old French publisher owned by the Offenstad family.

During the war, the Offenstads had been evicted from their company by the Nazis because they were Jews. After the war, they recovered their company and re-launched some of their newspapers for children. One of them was Junior, which had previously reprinted the comic strips Tarzan, The Katzenjammer Kids, Flyin’ Jenny, and Terry and the Pirates.

The new version of Junior still featured Tarzan, but now within its b&w interiors were two “Mr. Scarlet & Pinky” Wow Comics adventures in #23 (7-3-47) to #27 (7-31-47). During the same period, another Fawcett series was published in Junior: “Radar the International Policeman,” also for two adventures, coming from Master Comics. “Radar” had moved from Junior to Les Editions Mondiales L’Astucieux. In issue #47, “Superman” and “Batman” were replaced the following week by “Tarzan” and “Mr. Scarlet & Pinky.” But, contrary to the SPE translation, which had been respectful of the “Mr. Scarlet” series, the staff of the publishing company of Cino Del Duca made some very strange changes.

First, the series was re-christened “L’imbattable Pinky” – “The Unbeatable Pinky.” This name had already been used for a series in the past, and the staff at Les Editions Mondiales clearly wanted to capitalize on its previous success. So, while young Pinky kept his name, Mr. Scarlet became Mr. Barlett (sic—and the name has no

What’s Black-&-White But Not Red All Over?

(Left:) Mr. Scarlet and Pinky’s outfits were colored mostly yellow in Les Editions Mondiale’s reprinting of their stories—even if the feature was still named after Pinky!

(Right:) In April of 1948, French publisher Société Parisienne d’Edition released two issues of Les Albums Junior:.. the first devoted entirely to “Mr. Scarlet & Pinky,” and the second giving a reddish-orange-costumed “Commando Yank” the spotlight. Both covers are French artists’ reworkings inspired by Carl Pfeufer illustrations in the U.S. Wow Comics. [Mr. Scarlet & Pinky TM & © DC Comics; Commando Yank TM & © the respective copyright holders.]

Mondiales. Before the war, Del Duca was one of the publishers who had put American super-heroes into print in France, and he started up again after the war. In May 1947 he launched L’Astucieux (The Clever One), whose pages featured Superman, Batman… and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny!

Rechristened “Pippo le merveileux copain” (“Pippo the Marvelous Friend”), from the Italian name for Goofy from Mickey Mouse cartoons, “Hoppy the Marvel Bunny” was published in L’Astucieux for a total of four stories in issues #1 to 18—the first one in color, the others in b&w.

It seems that Cino Del Duca had high hopes for the Marvel Bunny. He quickly split him off from L’Astucieux to launch his own publication: Les Albums de Pippo in May 1947. But even with a more inviting format (saddle-stitched, 32-paged, 180 x 260 mm-sized comic book), Les Albums de Pippo lasted for only four issues, ending August 1947. The Marvel Bunny only appeared in two of the issues, with his fellow Fawcett’s Funny Animals friends—Billy the Kid & Oscar, Willie the Worm, and Sherlock the Monk and Chuck—filling in his boots.

Almost a year later, Les Editions Mondiales launched another series starring Hoppy and the Funny Animals crew titled Les

The Fawcett Invasion Of France – Part I

79

Marijac was the pen name of Jacques Dumas, a French artist who had been part of the French Resistance against the Nazis. After the war, he became a publisher with a series of newspapers named Coq Hardi (The Bold Cock). He was also head of the union of artists in France and fought in political circles for the protection of the “French Production of Comics.”

Thar’s Gold In Them Thar Parisian Hills Magazine Coq Hardi featured Whiz Comics’ Western hero feature “Golden Arrow” (“Flèche d’or”) in eight issues in 1947-48, marking the first time French artists created original cover illustrations of a Fawcett character. Above is the cover of Magazine Coq Hardi #35 (Edition de Chateaudun) drawn by an unknown French illustrator. [Golden Arrow TM & © the respective copyright holders.]

special meaning in French)! Secondly, the colors of the heroes’ costumes were changed to primarily yellow, so they weren’t even scarlet and pink!

The SPE had obviously held onto their material from Fawcett, because in April of ’48 they released two issues of Les Albums Junior, collections compiled undoubtedly to quickly dispose of previously purchased material. The first of these issues was titled Mr. Scarlet & Pinky and contained two tales of the duo. The second volume was titled Commando Yank, and featured three Fawcett stories. The wartime hero was unfortunately colored on the cover with a dark orange, almost red costume!

After August of 1948, Mr. Scarlet & Pinky were never seen again in any French magazine until they popped up in a military publication titled Baroud (Sept. ’74), from a very small publisher named Rhodos-Press. (“Baroud” could be translated as “Fighting.” The expression “baroud d’honneur” is equivalent of “last-ditch battle” or “last stand.”) The hypothesis is that some forgotten Fawcett material of the SPE came to light and was purchased for a small amount and published as a one-shot.

On September 18, 1947, another French publisher entered the Fawcett fold with Pic et Nic et Cendrillon—a re-launch of an older publication that had been started near the end of the war under the Nazi regulation by La Société Anonyme d’Editions Techniques et Littéraires (SAETL). Identified as a “Nazi-controlled” company, the newspaper was shut down by the French Authority of the Liberation. Les Editions Lenoir became a newly-formed company (but seemingly with the same SAETL shareholders!) and kept the same title for their new publication.

Pic et Nic et Cendrillon was a strange newspaper. Most of the features were “American”-sounding names like “The Adventures of Laurel et Hardy,” but all were drawn by French artists until issue #49, when French readers were introduced to Mickey Malone, aka “The Phantom Eagle” (“Policier de l’air,” or “Policeman of the Air”), as “Récit traduit de l’américain”—“translated from the American”). The series had two exploits from Fawcett’s Wow Comics and lasted up to issue #60.

It was a little surprising to see Dumas release a collection named Magazine Coq Hardi featuring “Golden Arrow” (under the name “Flèche d’or,” which means—“arrow of gold,” a.k.a. “golden arrow.”). The Western hero from Whiz Comics appeared in eight issues of Coq Hardi for a total of 16 tales from Whiz and Golden Arrow between mid-July ’47 and June ’48. This marked the first time that French-produced illustrations of Fawcett features were used for the covers (with the exception of the Captain Marvel Jr. cameo in Les mirobolantes aventures du Professor Pipe).

Naturally, out of all the Fawcett heroes, Captain Marvel reached the largest and longest print run in France within 69 issues, for a total of 118 stories coming from Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel Adventures.

The World’s Mightiest Mortal landed in France on December 15th, 1947, at Editions Populaires et Modernes, which soon became Periodiques et Editions Illustrées. In fact, all these companies were from the same publishing group, la Société Anonyme Générale d’Editions (S.A.G.E.), which subsequently became Sagédition. (The company is well-known for having introduced “Superman” in Aventures.) The reason why its owner Ettore Carrozzo had so many different companies would seem to be the same as it was for Martin Goodman: tax and legal consequences!

The series Capitaine Marvel was the first French publication titled from a super-hero himself and was, for the most part, dedicated exclusively to the Big Red Cheese. It was very successful. Its dimensions were 210 x 287 mm for 12 pages; later on, the format was reduced to 185 x 270 mm but with the same number of pages.

During those 118 adventures, French readers discovered not only Captain Marvel and Billy Batson, but also met Shazam, Mary Batson, Freddy Freeman, Uncle Dudley, the Lieutenant Marvels, Sivana, Aunt Minerva, Mr. Atom, and Mr. Tawny—the latter becoming very beloved by his French audience. The “Captain Marvel” city-visiting stories were also translated, as was Otto Binder’s complete “The Cult of the Curse” serial featuring Oggar.

The main interest of Capitaine Marvel for American collectors are its covers, which were created by French artists. At least three different artists drew covers, one being Pierre Frisano, the brother of Jean Frisano, who later illustrated French-published covers for Marvel during the ’70s.

The Capitaine Marvel series ended in October of 1950, shortly after the formation of the French Comic Code Authority. Enacted on July 16, 1949, under the pressure of Catholic & Communist lobbies (both had a large publishing divisions carrying their ideological views), as well in cooperation with the French Union of Artists (including Marijac, who had published “Golden Arrow”

80

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America]

just a few years earlier), the Loi sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse (Law on the Publications Intended for the Youth) created a Comic Code Authority (Commission chargée de la surveillance et du contrôle des publications destinées à la jeunesse et à l’adolescence).

American comics were specifically targeted by the French Code, zeroing in on “Tarzan,” “Fantax” (a French copy of “HourMan”), and superheroes in general.

Consequently, “Captain Marvel” became a victim of Marvel Double Action the Code’s new laws; he and Capitaine Marvel (published by Périodiques et Edition Illustrées) flew into France in December of 1947, achieving an impressive 69 issueSheena, Queen of run—until the formation of the French Comics Code in 1950—with numerous French-drawn stories as well as U.S. reprints. Seen here are the covers of Capitaine Marvel #47 by an unknown French artist, redrawing “The Arabian Knights of Today” (from Captain Marvel the Jungle, were Adventures #27, Sept. 1943) and Capitaine Marvel #51, illustrated by French artist Pierre Frisano, reinterpreting “The Mirror of Evil” the final two (CMA #23, April ’43). [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics; other art © the respective copyright holders.] heroes still standing in various black-&-white publications. How it happened remains a France, but eventually they were both terminated, as well. mystery. However, the French Comic Code Authority was as strict as its American counterpart, and the pre-code Fawcett horror French comic readers would have to wait nearly seven years stories all had to be altered by French artists to avoid censorship. before super-heroes began to slowly rise again, courtesy of French publisher Artima. Interestingly enough, Artima also went on to The horror tales were nearly the final glimpse of Fawcett in translate Fawcett horror comics from the ’50s, and publish them in France.

The revival of Captain Marvel in DC Comics’ Shazam!

1968! during the ’70s was translated and published in France. Otherwise, French readers had to wait years for a licensed AC Comics French Years after Fawcett ceased publication named Golden Titans just for some reprints of “Mr. their comics line in the U.S., Scarlet and Pinky.” stories from their old titles Worlds of Fear, Beware! Terror But France was not the only French-speaking country to fall in Tales, Unknown Worlds, love with the Fawcett characters. In Part II of our article, appearing Strange Stories from Another next issue, you’ll learn how a non-American artist known World, and others began worldwide was involved in Fawcett-French comics history! appearing in Artima’s The cover of JMF’s super-hero history, with cover by legendary French cartoonist Jean-Yves Mitton, whose work was seen in Alter Ego #30’s coverage of the original Silver Age super-heroes of France (which is still available from TwoMorrows).

[Characters TM & © their respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Jean-Michel Ferragatti.

Jean-Michel Ferragatti resides near Paris with his wife, their two children, and their two cats. He discovered American comic books at the age of eight and never stopped reading and collecting them. As a leading comics historian, he possesses one of the largest collections of French comic books in the world, has written numerous articles on comics for French magazines, and is the author of L’Histoire des Super-Heros, a history of super-hero comics published in France from 1939-61.

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