Alter Ego #48

THE LATE, GREAT

WILL EISNER 5.95 A MAN OF QUALITY!

$

In the USA

PLUS: PLUS:

No. 48

EISNER TA L K S ABOUT HIS D AY S AT QUALITY COMICS

May 2005

1940s QUALITY A RT I S T S

VERN HENKEL & CHUCK MAZOUJIAN TO P PROS PAY TRIBUTE TO T H E L E G E N D A RY A RT I S T OF THE SPIRIT! Spirit & related characters TM & ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner: Uncle Sam, Plastic Man, Blackhawk, Red Bee, & Doll Man TM & ©2005 DC Comics

Vol. 3, No. 48 / May 2005

™

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 Michael T. Gilbert

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

Production Assistant Eric Nolen-Weathington

Cover Artist & Colorist Will Eisner

And Special Thanks to: Vern Henkel Heidi Amash Hal Higdon Pedro Angosto Glen Johnson Ger Apeldoorn Faustino R. Arbesú Jeffrey Kipper Henry R. Kujawa Bob Bailey Stan Lee Mike W. Barr Alan Light Alberto Becattini Juan C. López Allen Bellman Sam Maronie John Benson Chuck Mazoujian Jon Berk Lou Mazzella Jerry K. Boyd John McDonagh Lee Boyett Will Murray Chris Brown Mikel Norwitz Nick Caputo Troy Pierce Gene Colan Bud Plant Pat Curley Teresa R. Davidson Ken Quattro Charlie Roberts Lee Dawson Ethan Roberts Al Dellinges Steven Rowe Roger Dicken & Wendy Hunt Diana Schultz Shel Dorf Marc Swayze Arnold Drake Tony Tallarico Sofia Carlota Greg Theakston Rodriguez Dann Thomas Equeren Mort Todd John Evans Anthony Tollin Shane Foley Stan Tychinski Stephan Friedt Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. Carl Gafford Dr. Michael J. Janet Gilbert Vassallo Donald F. Glut Chris Wallace David Hajdu Hames Ware Jennifer Hamerlinck Tom Wimbish Bruce Heller

This issue is dedicated to the memories of

Will Eisner & Bill Yoshida

Contents Writer/Editorial: The 30-Year Dinner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Only Real Middle-Class Crimefighter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Marilyn Mercer’s essay on Will Eisner, from The New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 1966.

“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork” . . . . . . . . . . 7 Will Eisner to Jim Amash on Quality Comics, Eisner & Iger, & The Spirit.

“Will Eisner... Still Cares!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Jim Amash takes a personal look at a comic art legend.

The Spirit of Will Eisner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Remembrances by Gene Colan, Stan Lee, Allen Bellman, Will Murray, Anthony Tollin, and others.

“The Last Spirit Story”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Artist Alex Saviuk on working with Will Eisner.

“I Was Doomed To Be An Artist” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Chuck Mazoujian on drawing Lady Luck and others.

“I Always Liked Working” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Vern Henkel on his days at Quality, Timely/Marvel, and elsewhere.

Comic Crypt: The Wonder Of It All! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Michael T. Gilbert presents Will Eisner’s 1939 “Wonder Man” story—reprinted in full.

Finding The “Inner Bud” – Part 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Bill Schelly concludes his talk with the founder of Bud Plant Comic Art.

Bill Yoshida (1921-2005) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Tribute to a veteran comic book letterer.

re: [comments, correspondence, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) #107 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 John Pierce & P.C. Hamerlinck on A.J. Hanley & Mark Swayze on comic strip syndication.

About Our Cover: The main image is from a “Spirit” poster by Will Eisner sent to comics shops by Kitchen Sink in the 1990s, probably in conjunction with its then-ongoing Spirit comics title. TwoMorrows head honcho John Morrow says: “My local retailer gave me my copy. It does have a plug for the thenupcoming Spirit TV movie.” John, working with Ye Editor, assembled this cover from his copy of that poster—a panel of Commissioner Dolan, his daughter Ellen, and Ebony—and a quintet of Quality Comics covers. [Eisner art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner; Uncle Sam, Blackhawk, Doll Man, & Red Bee TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

Above: This Will Eisner drawing has previously appeared in various places, including on the cover of The Spirit: The First 93 Dailies, published by Ken Pierce in 1980. Maybe The Spirit is on his way to kick down that door on our cover? [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

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

Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: 32 Bluebird Trail, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Single issues: $8 ($10 Canada, $11.00 elsewhere). Twelve-issue subscriptions: $60 US, $120 Canada, $132 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © Roy Thomas. Alter Ego is a TM of Roy & Dann Thomas. FCA is a TM of P.C. Hamerlinck. Printed in Canada.

FIRST PRINTING.

2

Title writer/editorial

The 30-Year Dinner I

t just doesn’t seem possible that Will Eisner is gone.

Though I never knew him well, he’s long been a Presence in the comics biz—always looming just over our collective shoulder, both intimidating and inspiring us not by verbal admonishment but by example, as well as by sheer force of personality.

When I entered the field in 1965, Will had been totally out of the mainstream comics industry for more than a dozen years, working in related areas but never really looking back. And yet, from the day he reentered our everyday consciousness in 1965-66— first with Jules Feiffer’s fulsome praise in Playboy and the hardcover volume The Great Comic Book Heroes, then with a brand new Spirit story and Marilyn Mercer’s perceptive article in a January 1966 edition of The New York Herald Tribune—it was as if Will Eisner had never been away. He instantly became, once again and virtually overnight, one of the most vital and important figures in comics, even when merely providing a few new stories or covers for reprints of vintage 1940s-50s Spirit material.

always suspected that the partnership of Stan Lee and Will Eisner might possibly have been an uneasy one, both men being strong-willed; but it remains a tantalizing “almost-happened” event, one perhaps realized on what I refer to as “Earth-22.”

A year or two later, at a con, I was flattered when I spoke with Will briefly and he suggested I might do something for his Poorhouse Press.

“There’s no one I’d rather go broke with,” he told me as he strode off— a phrase which startled me, since we hardly knew each other. But whether it was merely a pro forma compliment, or whether he actually meant it, even if only for that moment, I’ve never forgotten it.

After that, we merely met in passing at the occasional convention, mostly in San Diego, and I was always pleased and surprised that he remembered who I was, considering our minimal acquaintance. He remained an impressive figure. I recall the second-from-last San Diego Comic-Con I went to, sometime around 2000, when I attended the Eisner Awards ceremony and watched as several eager young people hauled a chair onto the stage for Will to sit on. He was already well into his 80s, but he ignored the chair and stood throughout the proceedings, as vital and alive as if he were half a century younger.

Last June, Paradise Conventions flew Dann and me to Canada for the 2004 Toronto Comicon, at which Will was guest of honor. He and I nodded to each other once or twice as our paths crossed (just barely), and that seemed fated to remain our destiny—ships passing in the night, or day, or whenever. Then, as some documentary filmmakers were finishing an interview with him, I saw Will momentarily alone. I figured he almost certainly already had plans for the evening, but, having nothing to lose, I walked up and suggested that he and Dann and I, as well as Michael T. Gilbert and his wife Janet, have dinner together. Will said he and Cerebus the Aardvark creator Dave Sim had very tentative plans, but why didn’t we all get together in our hotel’s dining room?

Sounded good to me.

Of course, it wasn’t Eisner’s nature to rest on his laurels, formidable though they were. While others over the decades from Quality Comics to Fiction House to Harvey Comics to Warren Publications to underground comix to Kitchen Sink endlessly reprinted The Spirit—and God bless them for doing so—Will forged ahead by becoming, if not necessarily the undisputed “father of the graphic novel” that some credit him as being, certainly one of the most influential progenitors and most skilled practitioners By chance, that evening, Will and I sat across of that evolving comic art form. A Contract from each other and talked while Dave and with God and the many graphic novels that Michael were mostly otherwise engaged a bit The cover of the program book of the June 18-20, followed may have built on his prior reputation further down the table. I found Will just as full 2004 Toronto Comicon featured an image of The as the creator of The Spirit and co-creator of of life as ever, giving out his own opinions on Spirit and Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark, Doll Man, Blackhawk, and others, but they matters related to the industry, but also drawing taken from The Cerebus Jam (1985). [Art ©2005 proved it was not only the younger generation of me out (which wasn’t all that hard) about my Dave Sim & Estate of Will Eisner.] comics/comix creators who could produce own take on things. It was an, er, spirited original material that moved beyond the exchange between us all, lasting a couple of hours, with Will’s only juvenile—and, moreover, that “adult” comics could mean more than concession to his advanced age occurring when he needed to excuse taking the easy route of sexual frankness, political outrage, and drug himself a time or two to visit the bathroom. “Goes with growing old,” references. he said with a self-mocking smile.

Myself, I never knew Will Eisner as well as Chuck Mazoujian, Jim Amash, and a couple of other folks represented in this issue. But I was definitely in awe of the man.

Before last summer, we had shared only one meal in the more than three decades since I first met him. Sometime circa 1973-74, when I was Marvel’s editor-in-chief, publisher Stan Lee asked me to have lunch with Will to discuss the possibility of his producing for Marvel a new magazine that would try to carve out a humor niche between the longestablished Mad magazine and the newly-successful and far brasher National Lampoon. Stan already had a good title: Bedlam. Will and I had our hour-or-so lunch, which I remember only dimly, and he went off to work up material. Things never quite jelled with Bedlam, and I’ve

If I’d been asked that night, I’d have found it almost unthinkable that, less than a year later, he’d be taken from us—at a time when he was still at the height of his artistic and intellectual powers, and was working, as always, on new and inventive projects—as witness Alex Saviuk’s relating on pp. 36-37 of his work with Will on a “Spirit” story for Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist for Dark Horse—not to mention the publication this very month by W.W. Norton & Co. of Will’s final graphic novel, The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocol of the Elders of Zion. One will look in vain, in those tales, for any real dimunition of Eisner’s powers as a storyteller or artist.

The man was a phenomenal talent—and a force in the comic book field.

writer/editorial.

3

A force, we hardly need add, for good.

I’ve never felt such a loss at the passing of any comic book figure I personally knew so slightly.

I’m grateful that, in 2004, Jim Amash was able to interview Will, primarily about his memories of Quality Comics and its personnel during the late 1930s and 1940s, and that Will personally approved both the text of the interview and the choice of cover art.

I’m grateful that DC Comics is carrying on the noble work of reprinting Will’s Spirit stories in a marvelous Archives series—15 volumes at this writing, with hopefully more to come till the run is finished—and that DC and others are keeping his graphic novels and related material in print.

And I’m grateful that Bob Andelman’s biography Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, prepared with Will’s cooperation, will see print in late summer.

Maybe for just a little while, all these things, and The Plot, will make us forget that the man himself is no longer among us.

But then, he is still among us, isn’t he—just as Homer and Hemingway and others are—as long as their words (and in Will’s case, pictures) have the power to grab us by our mental shirtsleeves and take us out of ourselves into another, more wonderful world.

Don’t go away for good, Will.

We need you.

Bestest,

™

05 Marvel Characters, Inc.] ; Human Torch TM & ©20 [Art ©2005 Mark Sparacio

# COMING IN JUNE 49 MARVEL MYSTERY MAN

Edited by ROY THOMAS

CARL BURGOS AND HIS FUMIN’ HUMAN TORCH! • Fabulously fiery, never-before-seen 1941 BURGOS cover art—painted for 2005

by MARK SPARACIO! • CARL BURGOS, artist/creator of The Human Torch, Iron Skull, The Thunderer, White Streak, the 1960s “Split-Xam!” Captain Marvel, et al.—remembered by daughter SUE BURGOS, in an in-depth interview with JIM AMASH! • Rare Golden/Silver/Marvel Age Human Torch art by BURGOS, BILL EVERETT, DICK AYERS, JACK KIRBY, EDD ASHE, JIMMY THOMPSON, ALEX SCHOMBURG, JOHN BUSCEMA, & et al!

• Never-before-published 1941 cover layouts featuring Human Torch and Sub-Mariner, drawn by CARL BURGOS & others!

• Two weird Torch wannabes! “The Blue Flame” by ZOLTAN SZENICS (yes, that’s a real name)—and GER APELDOORN on a pyrotechnic prototype by MANNY STALLMAN! • “TThe Timely/Atlas Implosion of 1957!” TOM LAMMERS tells why there almost was no Marvel Comics to revive in the 1960s! With tons of scarce 1950s art!

• FCA with MARC SWAYZE, C.C. BECK, & BILL BLACK—MICHAEL T. GILBERT says goodbye to the great WILL EISNER—BILL SCHELLY on ’60s comics fandom—ALEX TOTH—& MORE!!!

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4

The Only Real Middle-Class Crimefighter A Vintage Document Of The Mid-1960s “Rediscovery” Of WILL EISNER

by Marilyn Mercer

T

he January 9, 1966, issue of New York, the Sunday magazine supplement of the revered (though sadly fast-fading) New York Herald Tribune newspaper, was a very special one for comics fans.

It spotlighted what it called on its cover “The Great Comics Revival” with (a) an article on the recent Superman Broadway musical and the imminent Batman TV series; (b) an interview with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby about the rising popularity of Marvel Comics (a piece which, by the law of unintended consequences, inadvertently wound up greatly exacerbating the tensions in that fruitful collaboration); (c) an article by cartoonist/satirist Jules Feiffer about the intrinsic value of comic books; (d) a brand new 5-page black-&-white comic book manner. In the first installment, “Spirit” story by Will Eisner (his first Denny Colt, a young criminologist, is pursuing in more than a decade, and which was Dr. Cobra, a mad scientist. When Dr. Cobra’s reprinted in the still-in-print Alter secret formula explodes all over the laboratory, Ego V3#2)—and (e) an article by Denny is immobilized, taken for dead, and buried journalist and one-time Eisner in Wildwood Cemetery. assistant Marilyn Mercer about Will The photo of Will Eisner which appeared in the Jan. 9, 1966, New York magazine supplement of The New York himself. Over the past few years we at A few panels later, Denny arrives in Police Herald Tribune—and the cover of the issue itself. With A/E have attempted to locate Ms. Commissioner Dolan’s headquarters, explains thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. Also in that issue was Mercer—though Eisner himself had that he is alive but wishes to take advantage of his Eisner’s first new Spirit strip in years, opposite a page long since lost touch with her a second supposed death so that he can “go after criminals heading that read: “Now that [NYC] Mayor Lindsay has time, and said he thought she had the law cannot touch.” And so he puts on a blue been safely inaugurated, Will Eisner reveals how The passed away. We re-present this article mask and becomes The Spirit, operating out of Spirit returned from Limbo to combat backstage (with one correction of dates) for its Wildwood Cemetery with the assistance of skulduggery during the recent campaign.” [Cover ©2005 historical importance on the heels of New York Herald Tribune or its successors in interest.]

Dolan, Dolan’s beautiful daughter Ellen, and a the 1965 Feiffer book mentioned small Negro boy named Ebony. below (which had been excerpted earlier in Playboy), as Ms. Mercer’s Eisner, however, could not play it straight for long. As the strip sincere attempt to focus attention on one of the greatest creators in the progressed, The Spirit as serious crimefighter gave way to The Spirit as history of comics—by which we mean here both comic books and not so serious focal point for whatever zany fantasy Eisner felt inspired comic strips. Special thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. —Roy. to build around him that week. Crime became incidental; sometimes Eisner forgot to put it in. The stories ranged from adventures in the It started with Jules Feiffer saying in his book, The Great Comic mysterious East to politics in Central City to living soap opera. They Book Heroes, that in the golden age of comic books a seminal force in were always funny. the industry, the comic artist most likely to be imitated by other comic artists, was Will Eisner, who, between 1940 and 1952 with a few years A lot of people in those days wanted to work for Eisner. Marginal off for World War II, wrote and drew The Spirit, a comic-book-size types because of the fine, lunatic quality of his imagination; career comic seven-page supplement syndicated in Sunday newspapers. Not artists because of his technical excellence—for one thing, he drew better everybody remembers The Spirit, but those who do tend to remember it than anyone else. I worked for him between 1946 and 1948, along with distinctly and with passion.

Jules Feiffer, in a five-man shop at 37 Wall St. where we turned out a weekly Spirit, assorted comic book features, and an occasional adverThe Spirit was a burlesque of, among other things, the standard tising brochure. As I remember it, I was a writer and Jules was the office adventure comic. However, it started off (on June 2, 1940) in the classic

The Only Real Middle-Class Crimefighter

5

empty lot, turning out dirty books and selling them to little kids. And that, although you had to beg and plead with him, you finally persuaded the old tap dancer to do one more turn, before they rang down the final curtain.”

That wasn’t what I wanted to say at all, so we tried again. How did he feel about The Spirit now? Did he regret giving it up? “I gave up The Spirit,” he said, “because I had to make a choice. There were too many other things going on and I hated to turn it over to other people. So I dropped it. I decided I’d rather be an entrepreneur than an artist.”

Actually, Eisner started out as an entrepreneur. He was born in New York in 1917, the son of a Seventh Avenue manufacturer and, while in De Witt Clinton High School, had ideas of becoming a stage designer.

However, when he got out of school he went to work (“encouraged,” he says, “by starvation”) as a writer-cartoonist for the advertising department of the New York American.

This lasted until he discovered comic books. He observed their great financial success. Comic book publishers were paying a flat $5 a page for material and Eisner and a partner, Jerry Iger, undertook to meet the rate by setting up a factory. “I would write and design the characters,” he said, “somebody else would pencil them in, somebody else would do the backgrounds, somebody else would ink, somebody else would letter. We made $1.50 a page net profit. I got very rich before I was 22.”

When he was 23, greater things beckoned. He conceived the idea of a comic book insert for newspapers and, with the Register and Tribune Syndicate, launched The Spirit. For this, he knew, no assembly line would do. He really had to sit down at the drawing board, and he did. “I tried to write well,” he says. “I regarded it as serious writing. Others were cranking the money machine. With The Spirit, I didn’t have to. I had complete freedom. He was my medium. It was like making movies.

It gave me a chance to be actor, producer, author, and cameraman all at once.”

The cover of The Spirit #76, done in 1990 for Kitchen Sink’s color reprint series. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, thanks to Jerry K. Boyd. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

boy. As Jules remembers it, he was an artist and I was the secretary. Will can’t really remember it very clearly. It is his recollection that Jules developed into an excellent writer and I did a good job of keeping the books. Neither one of us could, by Eisner standards, draw.

When I discovered that Eisner, who had given up comic strips in 1952, was in New York, I called him. He had had other, similar calls since the onset of the Great Comic Book Revival. “It is,” he said, “interesting to be a legend in one’s time. What do you do when you’re a grand old man before you even have a chance to be a grand young man?”

I found him, reasonably grand and still reasonably young, in his office at 421 Park Ave. South, with a wall of bookshelves displaying a row of old, bound volumes of The Spirit. Now a full-time businessman and commuter (he lives in White Plains with his wife and two children), he has been engaged for the past 15 years primarily in publishing semitechnical instruction manuals. The principal client of his firm, American Visuals Corporation, is the Department of the Army, for which he turns out P.S., a monthly magazine that explains and encourages the proper maintenance of equipment in words, diagrams, and comic strip sequences. He produces similar material for industry and other government agencies. He owns two other enterprises, Educational Supplements Corporation (social studies enrichment materials) and IPD Publishing Company (foreign language instruction manuals), and for two years ran his own newspaper syndicate, Bell-McClure-NANA. But he didn’t think that made an interesting story. “What you really want to say,” he said, rising to the challenge—Eisner always wrote his own scripts better than anyone else—“is that after searching through the streets of the city you finally found Will Eisner, sitting on a box in an

The Spirit had barely got off the ground when, in 1941, Eisner went into the Army. Other artists took over while Chief Warrant Officer Eisner, attached to the office of the Chief of Ordnance in Washington, wrote, edited, and drew pictures for the ordnance journal Firepower.

Eisner came out of the Army feeling his strength, and his style shows off to the fullest in the post-war Spirits. He thought of comic strips as movies on paper and in The Spirit pushed this idea as far as it would go.

He made his format work for him; he rarely stuck to the conventional nine panels to a page but geared panel size to the speed of the action.

Sometimes there were no panels at all, just words and characters wandering around loose. His repertoire of visual gimmicks was limitless and he had a way of writing sound effects so that you could almost hear them.

He also displayed great virtuosity in his writing. Most adventure comics were at best semi-literate, and this may be an overstatement. The Spirit was not only literate, it was literary in the exact meaning of the word. Eisner, as a child, read constantly, most often 19th century short stories—Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, de Maupassant were his favorites— and it showed in The Spirit. He was a parodist by instinct. Some weeks he was Somerset Maugham. Other weeks Edgar Allan Poe. Or A.E. Coppard, or Norman Corwin, or Ben Hecht. He also took off from movie plots, confession magazines, news stories, hillbilly ballads, oldworld folklore (the folklore he generally made up, but it always sounded right). But, almost always, the plots and the humor depended on reference to an established literary, or sub-literary, convention.

The pattern carried over into his characters. The major ones, superficially at least, came straight out of pre-World War II pop culture. Dolan was a classic Irish cop. Ellen was a classic Irish cop’s pretty daughter.

Ebony was a small Stepin Fetchit.

6

A Vintage Document Of The Mid-1960s “Rediscovery” Of Will Eisner

was harassed by criminals, but also by Ellen Dolan, his He had a gallery of minor characters who seemed to more or less fiancée, by Ebony’s school teachers, and by come from some overzealous Central Casting. There the Department of Internal Revenue. There were times, were the dangerous women: P’Gell, Silk Satin, Plaster many times, when he just couldn’t cope. He of Paris. (After a while, some of them stopped being wandered through his baroque adventures sometimes dangerous; The Spirit at one point had P’Gell get with an air of disbelief, as if at any moment he might installed as headmistress of a girls’ school. But he turn around and say to his creator, “Eisner, you’ve could never really trust her.) There were the villains: got to be kidding.”

The Octopus, arch criminal (you only saw his hands), and Mr. Carrion, who had an unnatural relationship “The Spirit is, you could say, a pure existentialist, if with his buzzard Julia. There was Sam Klink, the I understand existentialism and I’m not sure I do. He honest rookie cop; Ward Healy, the political boss of was living in and dealing with the world as it was and Central City. There were the tragic heroines, Sand Saref (a solving crimes for no apparent reason. He was always, like strange choice of name for an anti-typeset, proeverybody else, a victim of circumstances. The visual man), The Spirit’s childhood sweetheart Art for the Will Eisner button in the Famous Spirit was the only real middle-class crimefighter.” gone wrong, and Sparrow Fallon, girl waif and allCartoonist Series, issued in 1975. Thanks to time loser. There was Inspector Guillotine of the Bob Bailey. [Art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

Couldn’t, I asked, the middle-class crimefighter Sûreté, Pancho the talking bull, Zoltan P. Yafodder, come back? The old tap dancer looked doubtful, who went around drawing mustaches on subway although he allowed that a West Coast television outfit had been after posters—well, the list could go on indefinitely. him with that very request. “It would be fun,” he said. “The Spirit to me The principal characters, in spite of their stock outlines, were quite real to Spirit fans, and to Eisner, too. Ebony, for one. He was the first Negro to play a major role in an adventure comic. “Ebony was really an attempt to introduce a Negro boy in a meaningful role,” says Eisner.

“He had a dignity all his own, even though he had a Southern accent.”

Ebony never drew criticism from Negro groups (in fact, Eisner was commended by some for using him), perhaps because, although his speech pattern was early Minstrel Show, he himself derived from another literary tradition: he was a combination of Tom Sawyer and Penrod, with a touch of Horatio Alger hero, and color didn’t really come into it.

The Spirit himself was, in the long run, the realest of all. Despite the mask, which Eisner eventually found an impediment, he was human. He

is like an old mistress—you hate her, but you still have a yen for her.”

Then Eisner the entrepreneur took over. “But I can’t do anything about that now. Do you realize,” he said, “that by 1970 one-third of the population of the United States will be in school? Did you know that?”—and he went on to describe, enthusiastically, several new approaches he’d dreamed up for teaching elementary school subjects through visual devices. “It’s a wide-open field,” he said, “ and it’s getting bigger. That’s the area I’m going to explore next, if I can ever find the time to get started.”

He always did have more ideas per week than he could ever possibly use.

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“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork” WILL EISNER Talks About Quality Comics, Eisner & Iger, The Spirit—And Other Stuff Interview Conducted & Transcribed by Jim Amash

W

ill Eisner wasn’t WILL EISNER: Originally, Eisner & considered a national Iger was doing business with Quality treasure by comic book Comics. We were packaging stories; fans for nothing. His that was the basis of the Eisner & Iger influence on the industry cannot be business. We were not publishers; we overestimated, and he remained a simply packaged for publishers, like vital, inspirational storyteller up to the Fiction House, Victor Fox, and all the Will Eisner in 1941 (left) and circa 1980, flanking one of his most day of his passing. Publisher Everett rest of the new companies. Our staff oft-reproduced images of The Spirit—used in this instance on the “Busy” Arnold’s Quality Comics was produced the insides of the books and cover of Ed Aprill Jr.’s Great Classic Newspaper Comic Strips (1968), an aptly named company, and Eisner we delivered them ready for publiwhich reprinted the 1942 daily Spirit strips. The 1941 photo appeared was their creative driving force in its cation. This is how we got to work for in The Art of Will Eisner (Kitchen Sink, 1982). Circa-1980 photo by early days. As important as The Spirit Quality. Jerry Iger was actually the Sam Maronie. [Art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.] was to comics, our main focus in this salesman for the company; I produced interview was on his other work for the merchandise.

Quality. Many of the characters he originated still survive in print to JA: The Eisner & Iger shop was in business before Quality, and this day, and now we’ll learn how they came to be, as we discuss, Feature Funnies was the company’s first book. among other things, Eisner’s relationship with Quality Comics, though we’ll stray off point a little and talk about Eisner & Iger, the EISNER: Eisner & Iger started in late 1936, and we were packaging comics shop begun by Eisner and partner S.M. “Jerry” Iger. Hey, features for Feature Funnies before Busy Arnold owned the title. It was anytime I can get a little more comics history on tape (and in print), only natural that we continued to supply work for Arnold. you know I will! —Jim. For example, Arnold would say, “We want to publish another magazine.” I’d come up with a rough idea for a magazine, like Hit Comics, and create the individual features. Then I’d submit the idea to him, and Iger was the one who took it over to Arnold. Sometimes I made rough sketches of the characters and Arnold would say, “Yeah, I’ll do that,” and we’d deliver the book to him.

JIM AMASH: How did you discover that Quality Comics was publishing? Did they come to you first, or did you approach them?

JA: So Arnold approved each individual feature.

“Packaging Stories…Was The Basis Of The Eisner & Iger Business”

8

Will Eisner Talks About Quality Comics–-– And Other Stuff

Publisher, Writer/Artist, And Editor (Above:) This photo, taken Oct. 13, 1941, shows Eisner at work on The Spirit as the comics feature editor of The Philadelphia Record (whose name is recalled as “Gup,” only because Will is dedicating the drawing to him) pretends to browbeat the artist. Grinning at left is Eisner’s partner and sometime publisher, Everett “Busy” Arnold. This photo appeared in the 1982 Kitchen Sink volume The Art of Will Eisner.

(Right:) Alas, we don’t have a photo of early Quality editor George Brenner, but here’s a page of “The Clock,” a series he drew both for Quality and, earlier, for Centaur. Repro’d from an English comics annual of the 1940s or ’50s; thanks to Roger Dicken & Wendy Hunt. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

EISNER: Yes. Broadly, he would do it, but not as hands-on as your statement implies. In other words, he wasn’t editorially involved.

Arnold was more of a businessman. His main forte was recruiting football players for his alma mater, Brown University. Actually, that’s how he found most of the talent that he dealt with.

JA: Did you deal much with the editors under him?

EISNER: It certainly is. Some things just stick out in your mind.

EISNER: In our case, we weren’t as heavily policed by his editors as were the other people he bought work from. That’s because we delivered the complete job. We didn’t submit story ideas for his editors to approve. We simply delivered a complete package.

JA: That’s what I like about doing these interviews. Those kinds of memories put a human face on these people, and that’s what I try to do, as you noticed in my Gill Fox interview [see A/E #12 for my interview with this artist. —Jim].

JA: Was Johnny Devlin there when you started?

EISNER: It was a very warm interview. I loved Gill’s conversation. He had an incredibly good memory, and I was in awe of it. I found myself saying, “Yeah, yeah.” He certainly was a good fellow.

EISNER: I think he was. The first editor there when I started was George Brenner.

JA: Not Ed Cronin?

EISNER: No. I originally met Ed Cronin at Ham Fisher’s office when I was applying for a job with Ham Fisher. [NOTE: Ham Fisher was the creator of the popular Joe Palooka newspaper comic strip. —Jim.] Ed Cronin was Fisher’s assistant, and he was the Quality editor before Gill Fox. Ed was a very sweet, wonderful guy: real solid, good, God-fearing gentleman. It broke my heart when he died of cancer. A fine man, very upright. Physically, I remember that he wore an apron when he was editing to keep his trousers from getting dirty on the job. [mutual laughter] Not the kind that a woman wears, just a half-apron.

JA: It’s funny what you remember about people, isn’t it?

JA: He sure was. By the way, I asked about Johnny Devlin because he’s relatively unknown today, even though he was an editor at Quality.

I’ve seen some of his artwork and he was pretty good.

Quality artist and editor, the late Gill Fox, shown circa 19992000 holding up his original art for the cover of Hit Comics #22 (June 1942), which featured the hero Stormy Foster.

Thanks to Jon Berk.

EISNER: He was. I think Devlin had done newspaper features before working at Quality. My contact with him was minimal. In fact, my contact with most of the editors up there was minimal.

Most of my contact was with Busy Arnold, and actually Jerry Iger was the one who originally opened up the contact. But Jerry and Arnold didn’t get along too well, so I came in and took over. It was a “good cop, bad cop” sort of thing. [laughs]

“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork”

“Will Eisner’s A Great Idea Man But His Stories Ain’t Good” JA: [laughs] Right. What did you think of [Quality publisher] Busy Arnold?

EISNER: That’s a hard question to answer, because the relationship I had with Arnold was different than, say, the relationship he had with Gill Fox. I socialized to some degree with Arnold, but was never really that close.

Busy Arnold and I had a very interesting relationship. I regarded him as a partner and he thought of me as an employee. [laughs] We had a different view of each other.

9

with Arnold, not them.

JA: Yeah, but no one put a gun to their heads and made them work for you. They had to know you were going to make some money off their work.

EISNER: Of course. You have to think about it as the nature of the business at the time. They were working for me full-time, on salary. I tried to avoid dealing with freelancers on a per page basis. One of the successes of the Eisner & Iger shop was the fact that I paid salaries, because it enabled me to remake a page without having to worry about their [the artists’] anger over losing money. I wanted to control the quality of the art. At that time, I was very idealistic; the quality of the art meant everything to me.

Jerry Iger didn’t agree with this system, but it worked for me.

Iger said, “We’re making frankfurters here. Let’s just keep this going.” We had to get a certain number of pages out each week in order to make a profit... which we did. We made a lot of money. The artists’ attitude was, “Okay, I’m going to get my salary at the end of the week anyway. What do I care?” It was a totally different atmosphere at the time. It was more like a ball club, and I was like the playermanager.

Busy Arnold was an astute buyer of comic book features. When all the other publishers believed in buying on the cheap, Three For The “Iger Counter” Arnold’s theory was to pay (Left:) The panel from Eisner’s 1986 quasi-autobiographical graphic novel well. He knew he could get The Dreamer in which young artist-hopeful Billy Eyron (= Eisner) meets Jimmy better talent by paying well. And Samson (= Iger), just as the latter’s comic book Socko – the Fun Magazine he had some strong opinions (a stand-in for Wow, What a Magazine!) is going down the tubes. The panels about talent. I would in which Eyron and Samson decide to team up were seen in A/E #34’s focus occasionally get a nasty letter on Quality Comics. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.] from him. I remember he told (Right:) Jerry Iger (on far right) at a 1970s comics convention with Alan Light, somebody that, “Will Eisner’s a founder of The Comics Buyer’s Guide. Thanks to Alan. great idea man, but his stories (Below:) A sketch by Iger, done on the back of a page of original DC Comics art ain’t good.” [mutual laughter] I in the 1970s. Thanks to Ger Apeldoorn. [©2005 Estate of Jerry Iger.] never knew what that meant.

Professionally, I think he regarded me very highly. But he was a tricky partner and JA: [laughs] I can relate because I was a could be difficult to deal with as one. player-manager in semi-pro baseball.

As time went on, I began to learn a lot more about business and became a little bit more demanding. For example, in the course of your conversation with Gill Fox, he mentions that [artist] Lou Fine was angry at me at one time, and so, actually, was [artist] Bob Powell. It was because of Busy Arnold. Busy and I were partners, and if your partner came in and offered your employee a higher salary so he’d leave and go to your partner, you’d be a little angry, wouldn’t you?

JA: I sure would.

EISNER: And so would the artist himself, because he’d regard me as inhibiting his career. Bob Powell got good and mad at me at one point and said, “You’re ruining my career. I could get twice as much as you’re paying me by working for your partner.” It became a very difficult thing. Same with Lou Fine. Both Lou and Bob felt I was inhibiting their careers. My quarrel was

EISNER: [laughs] Then you know what I mean. The player-manager always has a tough time. Of course, Arnold did not contribute to the relationship between me and my employees. My shop was always being raided, because I had a lot of good talent in the ship and I was always training guys. Most of the publishers in town, if they needed talent, would say, “Let’s go get someone out of Eisner’s shop.” It was a complimentary thing, but it was also a tough situation.

“The Sunday Papers Are Looking To Compete With The Comic Books” JA: Now, the partnership you had with Busy Arnold: was it a legal partnership?

EISNER: Yes. Let me explain that, because it’s very important for you to know. It bothers me when people say to me, “You

10

Will Eisner Talks About Quality Comics–-– And Other Stuff

Some of Eisner’s earliest published work—his cover for Wow, What a Magazine! #3, and the first page of the “Captain Scott Dalton” story from a 1936 issue of same. Thanks to Pat Curley for the latter scan. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

worked for Quality Comics.” Let’s go back to Eisner & Iger. Busy Arnold came to me with Henry Martin, who was the sales manager of the Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate. Martin was Busy’s partner, and Arnold literally worked for Martin. Anyway, Busy invited me up for lunch one day and introduced me to Henry Martin. I was awed because Martin was an important man from a big newspaper syndicate. Martin was a very well-spoken guy, very cool and smart. He said, “The newspapers in this country, particularly the Sunday papers, are looking to compete with the comic books, and they would like to get a comic book insert into the newspapers. I think I can sell that to them.

I’ve already had a couple of Sunday papers talk to me about it.”

Newspaper syndicates rarely ever come out with something that they haven’t pre-tested before they invest in it. A daily strip today costs anywhere between 25-to-50,000 dollars to launch. I know when I was running a newspaper syndicate, that’s what I would do. I’d wait until my salesman came back with an indication from a couple of editors, saying, “Yeah, we’d like a strip like that.” Then, I’d go ahead and get it done.

So anyway, Martin asked if I could do it. He said, “Busy Arnold tells me that you are very reliable and one of the best guys in the business.” I said, “Well, I don’t want to brag about that [laughs], but yeah, I’d be interested in doing it.” The magnitude of it was enormous and risky. It meant that I’d have to leave Eisner & Iger. Eisner & Iger was making money; we were very profitable at that time and things were going very well. A hard decision.

Anyway, I agreed to do the Sunday comic book and we started discussing the deal. The deal was that we’d be partners in this Comic Book Section, as they called it at that time. And also, I would produce

two other magazines in partnership with Arnold. I think they were Military and maybe the other one was Police or Hit. We were threeway partners, Arnold, Martin, and me.

I said I wanted the copyrights to the characters I created for the newspaper section and we got into a big argument. Finally, I negotiated what I thought was a very doable deal and they bought it. I said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you copyright the titles under Busy Arnold’s name, but in our contract, it’ll be mine.” They first wanted to do it under the Register and Tribune Syndicate’s name, but I thought I’d be better off, legally, having it under Busy Arnold’s name. Written down in the contract I had with Busy Arnold, and this contract exists today as the basis for my copyright ownership, Arnold agreed that it was my property. They agreed that if we had a split-up in any way, the property would revert to me on the day that happened. My attorney went to Busy Arnold and his family, and they all signed a release agreeing that they would not pursue the question of ownership.

JA: And that included the Mr. Mystic and Lady Luck features [which also ran in the Sunday section]?

EISNER: Yes. All three became my properties. I actually owned the features all the time. Arnold had other features that were similar to The Spirit, because if anything happened to me, it would signify the end of our agreement and the property would go to my estate. Then they would have to negotiate with my estate, and they didn’t want to get into that.

JA: I can’t blame them for that.

“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork”

11

Collector Chris Brown sent these splash pages from two other early Eisner efforts— “Man-Hunt” from Centaur’s Amazing Mystery Funnies #2 (Sept. 1938)—and an adaptation of a novel titled Jack Hinton, the Guardsman by one William Lever, from Globe Syndicate’s Circus – the Comic Riot #1 (June ’38). Hey, Will got lots better, but everybody’s gotta start somewhere! [©2005 the respective copyright

EISNER: Right, and I said it without any rancor. Busy never set out to hurt me, but his attitude about what a partnership was was totally different than mine. That was the basis of the business deal with Busy Arnold and me. The two magazines we owned together. Later, I had to give up on those, and I sold them to Busy and Henry Martin in the middle of the war because... there, I was being euchred. Busy was getting paper quotas, I wasn’t.

In those days, you needed paper quotas, which meant you could get a certain amount of paper under governmental license, if the publication had begun before the war started. The publications that started after the war couldn’t get much paper. Busy’s publications were booming in sales at the time because all publications were doing well during World War II and he needed more paper to print more copies. It was like printing money. The business was that good at the time. Arnold started diverting paper to his own books, and it was giving me a hard time. My sales were not as good as his because of that. I finally realized I was playing poker with a pair of deuces, so I had to fold and we made a deal. Arnold bought the two magazines from me, and they paid fairly well for them. I had been getting one-third of the profits, and when I sold them, I was paid in cash. After that, whenever he used a property of mine in those magazines, I got a page rate. That was the basis of my business dealings with Arnold.

This Eisner page from an "Espionage - Starring the Black Ace" story appeared in Quality's Smash Comics #8 (March 1940). Note the moody shadows and dark streets on this 3rd page, foreshadowing what was to come in The Spirit within a few months. Repro’d from photocopies of the original art, courtesy of Ethan Roberts. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

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Will Eisner Talks About Quality Comics–-– And Other Stuff because for several years after you left Iger, the artists were still drawing on page blanks with the Eisner & Iger logo at the top of the page.

Two creations/co-creations of Eisner’s that he had to leave with Jerry Iger when he departed to do The Spirit: Eisner panels from “Hawks of the Sea”—and an early “Sheena” splash. The artist on the latter is uncertain, but Hames Ware and Lee Boyett believe it’s early Robert Webb. Thanks to Al Dellinges. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

JA: So that explains why you owned The Spirit Section [as it is most commonly known] features but not the features you did for the magazines. You sold them.

EISNER: I’ll tell you about that. I had the blank pages preprinted with panel borders. That was done to save time, and when you’re only getting $5 a page, nickels and dimes mean a lot—especially those days. As a matter of fact, I started using a blue pencil to save on erasing.

JA: Perhaps Iger had a lot of extra page blanks with the old logo on them, or

EISNER: That’s right. It’s like “Hawks of the Sea.” I created that and “Sheena,” but when I sold my half of Eisner & Iger to Iger, along went the assets of the corporation, which were those comic book features.

“When I Started The Spirit, I Was Totally Divorced From [Eisner & Iger]” JA: I’d like you clear up something for me. I’ve interviewed several people who said that there was some overlap between your Eisner & Iger days and when you began The Spirit. That’s not true, is it?

EISNER: No. Jerry Iger was out of town when I had that lunch with Henry Martin and Busy Arnold. As I said, I had to make a decision about leaving Eisner & Iger and doing what became The Spirit Section.

Busy Arnold didn’t like Jerry Iger and didn’t want to deal with him at all. In fact, the person doing the biography of me unearthed a letter that Arnold sent to Iger, which was very critical of him. Arnold wrote that Iger was lucky that I had been in business with him, among other things.

I had to decide whether to pass on the offer Martin and Arnold made me or bring it into the company. I couldn’t do that, because they wouldn’t deal with Iger, so I had to sell my half of Eisner & Iger to Jerry. Iger and I had a stockholder’s agreement in which we both owned half of the company’s stock. The agreement stated that if either partner wanted to leave, he had to offer his stock to the remaining partner. Iger would leave the offices from time to time, and I didn’t know where he’d go. He had threatened to leave the company before, and I didn’t want to take the chance of being stuck with a partner I didn’t care for. That’s why I put the stock offer clause in the contract. But this meant that I had to offer Iger my shares of the company before I could leave. I made him a very good deal, because I didn’t trust Iger to abide by the deal. He was a very litigious man and I figured he might try to sue me over something. He got my share of the business very cheaply. But, no, when I started The Spirit, I was totally divorced from the company.

JA: Maybe part of the reason some people’s memories are inaccurate is

Chuck Cuidera’s imaginative splash for the “Blackhawk” story in Military Comics #11 (Aug. 1942). Script probably by Dick French. For great art and storytelling by Cuidera and Reed Crandall, seek out a copy of DC’s Blackhawk Archives, Vol. 1. Some day, if the gods are kind, there’ll be a second volume! [©2005 DC Comics.]

“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork”

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Fine & Eisner (Left:) The Ray’s origin—such as it was—from Smash Comics #14 (Sept. 1940)— with art by Lou Fine. Eisner preferred to say that he “thought up” concepts rather than “created” them, that he probably “roughed out” the first story (i.e., did sketchy pencil layouts that told the story, with or without precise dialogue), then turned both “The Ray” and “The Black Condor” over to the fantastic Fine. Repro’d from Alan Light’s over-size 1974 Special Edition Series: The Ray & Black Condor.

maybe he was slow in having the printer change the logo?

EISNER: It’s possible; I can’t say. The only overlap between my leaving the company and starting The Spirit was roughing up ideas for what I was going to do while waiting for Iger to sign the agreement. I was still in the shop for a couple of weeks before Iger agreed to terms.

“Use The Phrase ‘Thought Up’ Instead Of ‘Created’” JA: I know there’s been some debate about the creation of “Blackhawk,” between you and Chuck Cuidera. What do you recall about the feature’s creation?

EISNER: The issue came up at a panel during a San Diego Convention.

I’m perfectly willing to leave the creation to Chuck under the theory that the guy who has the initial idea is not as important as the guy who continues the feature. We had a freewheeling shop. Bob Powell, being Polish, wanted a Polish character in Blackhawk. Tex Blaisdell suggested one of the characters, too. It was a studio creation. Chuck was not a writer and never pretended to be a writer. It’s just that he’s identified with it, and he deserves it because he worked hard on it.

JA: Did Chuck write any of the early “Blackhawk” stories?

EISNER: My memory’s very vague on all those things. Half the time I don’t remember which Spirit stories I wrote or which ones Jules Feiffer wrote. There’s one story that we both disclaim writing. [laughs] JA: I had read somewhere that Dick French wrote some of the early “Blackhawk” stories.

EISNER: Dick French wrote many of the stories in the shop at the time, but he came along as the Eisner-Iger shop was ending. He was Tex

(Right:) Panels from the “Black Condor” entry in Crack Comics #18 (Nov. 1941), also by Fine. This story was reprinted in DC’s giant-size Superman #252 (June 1972)—and is repro’d here from an Australian black-&-white re-reprint, thanks to Shane Foley. Since that art had probably been touched up when shot from old comics, its linework is not quite 100% Fine’s, but it still gives a good approximation of what his original art looked like. Lots more Lou Fine art is on view in A/E #17. [Both images ©2005 DC Comics.]

Blaisdell’s brother-in-law. Dick was a good writer for comics. He wrote “Death Patrol” for Dave Berg. He was a slight, quiet fellow, short, and he had a way of muttering to himself when you had a conversation with him. About halfway through, while you were making a statement, he would make a statement and continue muttering while you were talking.

It’s the only peculiarity I remember, but he was a very nice, sweet guy.

And he was totally different than Tex, who was tall and outspoken.

JA: Did you create “The Ray” and “The Black Condor”?

EISNER: If you call creating, roughing out the first story and having the initial idea, then the answer is yes. But Lou Fine deserves the credit for both of those. The style of the Will Eisner shop was, if you can envision this, that I had an idea for a story, [and I would] sit down and rough out a character and hand it to Lou and say, “Here’s a new character. How about this?” Then Lou, with his brilliant draftsmanship, would make something good out of it. Most of the characters in my shop were created, if you’ll use the phrase “thought up” instead of “created”... that’s one of the things that bother me a lot about this industry. A lot of guys thought up something but someone else did the long-range creation.

JA: So those were your costume designs?

EISNER: Partially. Most of the time, Lou would do it.

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Will Eisner Talks About Quality Comics–-– And Other Stuff

Eisner said he generally drew the covers of first issues, either totally or at least in rough pencils—though we’re not sure which is true of the cover of National Comics #1 (July 1940), which introduced the Quality Comics superhero version of Uncle Sam. Eisner stated that he had future Fawcett and Mad artist Dave Berg pencil the story, after he “thought up” the character. Cover and splash are repro’d from the 1985 Blackthorne reprint volume, Jerry Iger’s National Comics #1. The contents of the original comic were produced by Eisner & Iger Studios, with Iger himself apparently writing the “Wonder Boy” feature as “Jerry Maxwell.” [©2005 Caplin-Iger Co., Inc.]

A Living Doll (Above:) The “Doll Man” feature premiered in Quality’s Feature Comics #27, but the hero made his first major cover appearance on issue #30 (March 1940). This cover is generally credited to Lou Fine, whether or not Will Eisner laid it out. [©2005 DC Comics.]

(Right:) This Fine “Doll Man” (then “Dollman”) page from Feature #32 (May 1940), as retouched by Greg Theakston, appeared in his 1991 volume The Lou Fine Treasury. We thank Greg for his permission to reproduce it. [Retouched art ©2005 Pure Imagination Publishing; Doll Man TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork”

15

JA: Of course, “Uncle Sam” was an easy one.

EISNER: Yeah, that was easy. I had no trouble with that. I did the first cover on that. Usually, you’ll find that the first covers were either my roughs or mine altogether. For instance, the first “Sheena” cover [i.e., on Jumbo Comics] was mine, and then Mort Meskin did the rest. Meskin was working on staff and I assigned the jobs. But he was working off of my costume design.

JA: Same thing with “Doll Man”? Your costume design?

EISNER: Yes. You’ll notice the costumes were all very similar.

They all had a cape and wore tight pants, very much like the standard costume of the time. The embellishments were generally added on by Lou; usually embellishments like that were dictated by a man’s drawing style. For someone as accomplished as Lou, there was no problem putting all kinds of bells and whistles on the costumes. Someone else might simplify it depending on his ability or inability, whatever the case may be.

“[Jack Cole] Was A Straight Arrow” JA: I know you wrote about Jack Cole for DC’s Plastic Man Archives, but I’d like to get your impressions of him for Alter Ego. EISNER: He was a straight arrow; he looked like he came out of a 4-H Club. He was a fine, decent, quiet-spoken, clean-cut young man. He did not guffaw; his sense of humor was a quiet, self-deprecating one, in conversation. I never heard him swear, for example, and never heard him say anything nasty about somebody.

The last time I saw him was with Gill Fox. I was running my own publishing company on 4th Avenue in New York. We were handling military contracts and doing a lot of industrial publishing. Gill showed up with Jack and they wanted to have lunch. Jack cleared his throat and said, “Actually, I’m here to ask you if you would like to work for Playboy. Hefner sent me to recruit you.”

Since the first six years’ worth of Jack Cole’s “Plastic Man” adventures have been reprinted in half a dozen volumes of DC’s Archives series, here’s a dynamic splash page from Plastic Man #21 (Jan. 1950)—as reprinted in Super Comics’ Plastic Man “#16” in 1964. [©2005 DC Comics.]

I pointed towards my shop. I had about 25 people working for me, a whole big floor of people working. I said, “I’m running a business here. I just can’t quit and do comics.” And Jack said, “Good. I’m glad to hear that because it’ll just reduce the competition.” I remember Gill Fox laughing hysterically over that. I took them both to the Advertiser’s Club for lunch.

JA: Do you happen to know why Jack Cole was 4-F’d out of World War II? EISNER: No, I don’t. I strongly suspect—and I wrote this in my forward for the Plastic Man Archive—that Jack had a drinking problem. We had lunch one day in Tudor City. I ordered a Scotch and asked Jack if he wanted one. Jack ordered a glass of milk instead, and I asked, “Don’t you drink at all?” He said, “No. My father died an alcoholic in a hospital.”

I remember talking to Hugh Hefner about it, and I said, “Maybe he had taken up drink again and that might have set him off into this suicide thing?” After the foreword I wrote appeared in print, Jack’s brother, Dick Cole, called me and said it wasn’t true. “Our father was not an alcoholic. It was Jack’s father-in-law.” So my guess at why he committed suicide is non compos mentis.

Jack was at the peak of his career. His strip Betsy and Me was beginning to take off. It was something he’d always dreamed of. I remember talking to a psychiatrist friend of mine about it; in his practice over the years, he’d had a couple of cases of suicide under the same

conditions. A man would start a business, the company would be doing well, and suddenly, the guy blows his brains out. My friend said, “There’s something that goes on inside of someone’s head where they think ‘I’m not going to make this. I can’t handle this burst of success.’”

Maybe that’s what happened, but nobody really knows. It was a shame, because Jack was one of the nicest, most decent guys in the business.

JA: That’s what everyone who knew him tells me. What do you know about the creation of “Midnight”?

EISNER: Well, I may get some argument on this, but my memory is that Jack Cole came to see me in my studio in Tudor City. I’d already been drafted and received an eight-month delay from my draft board, because I had these features to do. During that delay, naturally Busy Arnold was concerned about what we were going to do and so on. Jack Cole came by and asked to have dinner with me, which was the dinner I just mentioned. I said, “Sure,” and we went downstairs from my office and had dinner.

Jack said, “I got a problem, Will. Busy wants me to create a character just like The Spirit.” We both agreed that what Busy needed was a backup in the event anything happened to me. He said, “I feel it’s not morally right.” Actually, what he wanted was for me to give him a benediction and say it’s all right. I said, “Well, Jack, I can’t tell you not to do it because it’s your livelihood and, frankly, I don’t think I can sue

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Will Eisner Talks About Quality Comics–-– And Other Stuff

Busy over a thing like this. He has the right to create characters for his magazines, if he wants to.” In those days, everyone was doing knockoffs on other people’s characters; Arnold wasn’t the only one doing things like that. We joked around about it for a while, and I don’t know if it was Jack or me who got the brilliant idea to make him a funny character.

That way, Jack could satisfy Busy Arnold and it’d be a totally different character. And from there, he went on to create “Plastic Man.” That is as I remember it. Maybe Gill Fox has another take on it?

Incidentally, I’m very fond of Gill. He’s a very fine man, morally and intellectually, but we never had much contact. He worked in my shop for a very brief moment, but he was always Busy Arnold’s man. He never really edited my work. [NOTE: This interview was conducted not long before Gill Fox passed away. —Jim.]

“I Was My Own Editor” JA: And that surprised me when I talked to Gill. He told me that Busy Arnold selected all the writers and artists.

EISNER: No. After I sold him the magazines, our relationship got a little cooler because I felt I’d been euchred in that deal. It was a normal business practice on his part; I understood it to be that, but still, I was a little annoyed that it happened. We weren’t mad at each other. In fact, when the time came for me to drop The Spirit, Arnold gave me no legal problems. He was very cooperative.

JA: The Spirit ran a long time in Police Comics, though it was just reprints of the newspaper Sundays. Did you get a percentage for that?

EISNER: I probably did, but I can’t remember.

JA: Gill told me that Jack Cole got big bonuses.

EISNER: Oh, yeah. Well, I told you that Busy was smart. He paid very, very well, and his shop became known as a place where you could get good pay. Good talent would gravitate in his direction.

JA: Alex Kotzky told me that, even when he was in the service,

EISNER: He may have. He picked all the artists, there’s no question about it. But when you talk editing, you’re thinking about someone going over your artwork, saying “Change this, or this doesn’t work, or this story isn’t right.” Arnold never read the stories until after they were published, if he ever read them.

He picked the artists, however. Again, if you go back to the metaphor I used before, he was buying baseball players.

JA: And since you were handing him complete stories with camera-ready art, it seems to me that you were editing, too.

EISNER: Exactly. I had very little to do with anyone editing my stuff. The only time I ever got an editorial comment was when there was a spelling error or something like that. Ed Cronin was very good on spelling errors or commas. He would occasionally come down on me for bad spelling or punctuation. But as far as story, no. As a matter of fact, I had an incredible amount of freedom when I think back on it, even when I did Spirit stories that the syndicate got complaints on.

I did one story where this ape falls in love with this girl. I got nasty, threatening letters from an editor at the San Antonio newspaper, saying that I was promoting miscegenation. Those were times when that was considered a bad, bad thing. No one said to me, “You can’t do this because it won’t fly.” I was my own editor. Even when I was doing the magazines, no one was doing the kind of editing you see today.

JA: I’ve always wanted to ask you this question.

Nearly everybody I’ve interviewed who knew you at this time called you “Bill.” When did “Bill” become “Will”?

EISNER: [laughs] I think it was when I went into the Army. It was just an attempt to be arty. It’s like using a circle for a dot in the “i.” “Will” just sounded better to me. My brother Pete always called me Bill.

JA: When you got out of the service, you were still partners with Arnold because of The Spirit. Did you have much contact with him after that?

Quality publisher Busy Arnold may have liked the idea of owning heroes who wore blue masks, business suits, and hats—but Jack Cole clearly liked swamis, ‘cause here’s another one, this time from a “Midnight” story in Smash Comics. The splash of this tale appeared with A/E #25’s wall-towall coverage of Cole’s life and art. Sorry we’ve forgotten who sent us this scan. [©2005 DC Comics.]

“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork”

17

The Spirit Is Willing….

Because Eisner retained control and copyright, he was able to market reprints of the Spirit material again and again, often simply drawing new covers, like these for Kitchen Sink’s The Spirit, Vol. 1, #1 & #2 (Jan. 1973 & Sept. ’73). [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

Arnold sent him money.

bution to the writing of the story.

EISNER: One thing I have to say about Busy is that he was not tightfisted in his relationships with his artists. It wasn’t a question of generosity; it’s just that he was smart. That’s what I would have done, what I tried to do, anyway.

JA: And a lot of times, he went home and did a different story than the one they discussed.

JA: Today, characters like The Black Condor and The Ray don’t look anything like what you had originally envisioned. How does it feel to know that these characters are occasionally coming back?

EISNER: It’s hard to answer that question. Sometimes I get no feeling at all. It’s like putting a child up for adoption when the child was three months old and the child grows up to be the Vice President of the United States.

JA: That’s a good analogy. I know Jack Kirby didn’t look at his characters once he quit doing them.

EISNER: Jack Kirby’s a different situation. Jack felt that he was cheated.

I know he told me this and others, too, that he was angry at Stan Lee because Stan was getting the credit for being the writer and creator of all these properties when Jack felt he was the writer and creator, too. Jack had a partial case to make because the system that Jack was working with was that Stan Lee and Jack would come up with a story and Jack would come back with a completely penciled story, then Stan would put the balloons in. Now the question is: Whose story is that? Who’s the writer? Jack had good reason to believe that he made a major contri-

EISNER: That’s what he’d occasionally do. He had a good case. The problem with the industry is that there’s no classification suitable for him. Stan deserved credit for what he did and Jack deserved credit for what he did. It was like the original art. When you have a penciler, an inker, a colorist, and a letterer, to whom does the original art belong?

“We All Had A Slave Mentality In Those Days” JA: Off-tape, you told me a story about Busy Arnold and original art.

Would you mind repeating it for this interview?

EISNER: It’s perfectly all right. I was in the service at the time and came home on leave. I had a colonel in the Army who read The Baltimore Sun, where The Spirit was appearing. “Do you do that?” he said. I admitted I did, and he asked, “Could I get an original page? I like to collect original art.” I said, “Sure,” because it wasn’t worth very much.

I came back to New York and had lunch with Busy and said, “By the way, Busy. Can I have a page of original art from The Spirit?” He said, “What do you want it for?” I said, “This colonel would like to have an original, and I think it’d be very nice. After all, I’m in his outfit and it won’t hurt to butter him up a little bit.” Arnold said, “What do you need it for? You got proofs. Give him a proof.”

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Will Eisner Talks About Quality Comics–-– And Other Stuff

Luck, Be A Lady This Issue!

Between 1940 and 1946, four artists became associated with the 4-page Lady Luck strip that ran each week in The Spirit Section. [All art taken from the reprint volume Lady Luck, Vol., 2, published in 1980 by Ken Pierce; all art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

(Top left:) Chuck Mazoujian (whose interview begins on p. 38) was the original illustrator, working from scripts by Dick French. This page from Aug. 25, 1940, shows a more than passing influence of Milton Caniff’s popular Terry and the Pirates.

(Top right:) Nicholas Viscardi (now Nick Cardy) both wrote and drew stories between 1941 and early 1942, when he went into the armed services. This June 1, 1941, page spotlights her Italian/South American chauffeur Peecolo, which critic Cat Yronwode (writing in the Pierce volume) points out as emblematic of the “tongue-in-cheek humor” Cardy brought to the feature.

(Bottom left:) Klaus Nordling, the writer/artist whom Cat feels “most fans think of as the definitive Lady Luck artist,” handled the series from early 1942 through March 3, 1946. He’s the one who gave the heroine a light green, virtually transparent veil which somehow protected her secret identity as Brenda Banks. (Lord only knows how she’d got by before!)

(Bottom right:) Fred Schwab drew Lady Luck, in a style “which verged at times on surrealism,” from its return on May 5, 1946, after a brief hiatus, till the feature was dropped late that year, as the page count of The Spirit Section decreased. Reprints of her adventures, however, had begun in Smash Comics #42 (April 1943); and with #85 (Dec. 1949) that title’s name was changed to Lady Luck for its final five issues. The writer may be Schwab, as well.

“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork”

19

I said, “He doesn’t want a proof. He wants an original. Where are the originals, Busy?” He said, “They’re up in the printing plant at Greater Buffalo Press.” Greater Buffalo Press was our printer.

I should explain that in those days we were printing on a letter press with zinc plates. The artwork was originally transferred to zinc plates before they made mats. Now, the zinc plates were stacked up on top of each other and they’d scratch and create burrs and so forth, so they put the original art between the plates to prevent scuffing. I was never able to recover my original art and didn’t think it was worthwhile at the time.

None of us thought so. Nobody cared.

JA: But at some point, you began to care.

EISNER: When I got out of the Army in 1945, I started saving every piece of artwork that I did. I wasn’t saving it to make money, but the original art became personally valuable to me at that time. So I held on to it.

JA: So Arnold didn’t give you any problems about it once you were out of the service?

EISNER: That’s right. Once I was back and doing the art myself, I would send the art to the engraver and he would send it back to me once he had the film made. I wouldn’t let Busy get his hands on it.

JA: Before the war, you never once thought to yourself, ‘”Hey, I really like that cover I just did. Maybe I ought to get the original back?”

EISNER: Not at all. We all had a slave mentality in those days. We didn’t think that what we were doing was worth very much. The only person I knew that cared was Bob Kane, who I went to high school with. Bob would call me on Saturdays and say, “Let’s go down to the newspaper syndicates and get some strips.” The syndicates always threw the originals out, so Bob would visit them, grab a handful of strips sitting in a tub, and go home. Nobody cared.

JA: What changed your mind?

EISNER: During the war, I became aware of the fact that the artwork was worth keeping. You know, the publishers didn’t think the pages were worth keeping, and they convinced the artists that they weren’t.

When you’re only getting $5 a page, you just don’t think your work is worth anything.

JA: And it didn’t help that most comic book artists had a low opinion of comics. Most wanted to be illustrators or newspaper strip artists.

EISNER: Exactly! I was the only guy in the shop who believed he had a career in comic books. I thought it was going to be my life’s work, and everybody else dreamed of working uptown for the syndicates. Chuck Mazoujian left comics and became an art director. He’s retired now, living in Arizona, and painting. He was always a great guy.

Bob Powell, under the house name “W. Morgan Thomas,” wrote and drew Mr. Mystic for The Spirit Section from the very outset. Sorry, we’re not certain of the date of this splash. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

do, because The Spirit was a syndicated feature.

EISNER: In a sense that’s true. I was tired of writing stories for kids and wanted to broaden my audience. The comic book was a ghetto as far as I was concerned, and it wasn’t satisfying me creatively. With The Spirit, I could reach an adult audience.

“I Was Working Day And Night” JA: Who controlled the packaging of The Spirit Section while you were in the Army?

As you know, I didn’t stay in the comic book business. I became a publisher, though I did use the comics medium as a teaching tool in publications. I had a totally different attitude towards comics than the other guys did.

EISNER: Busy Arnold controlled the whole thing. We moved from New York to Stamford, Connecticut, so he could monitor and control it.

I had no physical control over anything, once I was in the service. For a short time, I wrote scripts for The Spirit and sent them up to Quality’s offices, but after that, I was busy selling the Army on comics and training materials.

JA: And some publishers wouldn’t hire people if they had worked in the comics.

JA: You were doing thumbnails with the scripts, too, right?

EISNER: I never looked for work. I do remember meeting with Harry Donenfeld, who wanted to own whatever we did for him. This was before Bob Kane did “Batman.” I said, “No way,” so he said, “Then there’s no way you’re going to work here.” When Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson sold the company to Donenfeld, he sold everything, and Donenfeld knew the value of ownership. So did I. JA: But in a way, you did the same thing that your staffers wanted to

EISNER: A little bit, yeah. I did the first few that way, but after that, I’d just write a synopsis.

JA: You know, I was just thinking about what you said about Dick French writing for your the shop. Did you ever work off other people’s scripts in those days?

EISNER: I never did, except maybe when I did an adaptation of a story, and of course, worked off that. Frankly, I always found it hard to work

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Will Eisner Talks About Quality Comics–-– And Other Stuff

off of someone’s script because I was always altering it.

JA: So Dick French never wrote a story for you?

EISNER: Oh, I would talk story with him because he wrote stories for all of our magazines. Chuck Mazoujian didn’t write, so he took scripts from Dick French on Lady Luck. Bob Powell could write, so he did his own scripts for Mr. Mystic.

JA: Did you edit those scripts?

EISNER: I would look them over. The way it was done in my shop is that the story was penciled, then lettered before being inked. I’d walk through the shop and look at the stuff then.

JA: Bill Bossert, who was an artist in your shop, told me something that I’d like to check with you. As you know, Bill married one of your writers, Toni Blum. Bill said that Toni wrote in what’s currently considered to be the “Marvel Style.” Bill said that Toni would go into your office and you two would have plotting sessions. Then she’d type up a plot, give it to an artist, and leave the pacing to him. After the story was penciled, she’d write in the dialogue. Do you remember working this way?

EISNER: Well, that was the way Stan Lee did it years later. It was an act of desperation on Stan’s part, because he didn’t have time to write stories. It’s possible we worked that way, because I remember her working at a typewriter all day long. Generally, I would discuss the story with the writer first, and after Toni typed up the story, she gave it to an artist. I know Jack Kirby wanted written scripts; it wasn’t until

This Eisner illo appeared on the inside front cover of Spirit Jam, a 1998 Kitchen Sink reprint of a long story that had appeared in The Spirit Magazine #30 (July 1981). Will was an unmatched master of recycling—which means, happily, that far more of his work is available to the non-wealthy reader than it would otherwise be! [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

later that he took an active part in writing and developing other people’s stories, not to mention writing his own stuff. Jack learned a lot about writing in my shop.

I have no trouble believing Toni worked the way Bill described. Toni was always at her typewriter. But I doubt she worked that way all the time; it was just sporadically. She might have worked that way with certain people. Some people needed a full script, like Lou Fine, who was only interested in drawing. Toni was like a “den mother,” very attractive, and she worked hard. She’d go out to lunch with the guys, and maybe that’s what led to her romance with Bill Bossert.

JA: Bill said that you dated Toni before he did.

EISNER: Yes, I did. We had a romance going for a while, but I really wasn’t very social. I was working day and night.

JA: Bill spoke very warmly of you and said that you were very good at running the shop, and helping people. [NOTE: Jim’s interview with Bill Bossert will appear in a near-future issue.]

EISNER: Oh, that’s very generous of him. I liked Bill, and remember that he was related to the Bossert Hotel family in Brooklyn. The Bossert Hotel was a very big hotel.

Another Lady Luck splash page by Klaus Nordling. Note the in-joke reference to “Busy Armonk”! [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

Toni’s father Alex worked for me. He was a very serious painter... a muralist, actually, when he came to work for me. He was a good painter

“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork”

21 Powell. Lou Fine was a very quiet guy, and so was Jack Kirby.

I hired guys based not so much on their portfolios, but on their personalities. I would interview a guy before I even looked at his portfolio. One of the things that you learn over the years is that you can hire a guy based on his portfolio, but that doesn’t mean that, when he works in your shop, he can deliver the same quality of work.

He might have taken ten hours to do one piece, and in a shop you can’t spend ten hours on one piece.

JA: Did you encourage your artists to write?

Will Eisner—as drawn in 1982 by Pete Poplaski, the artist who, among other things, has designed and drawn the covers of many of DC’s reissues of Golden Age material.

Flanking this portrait are an Eisner cover done for the Kitchen Sink reprint series, The Spirit #68 (June 1990)— and the corresponding page from the 1951 Spirit story.

In forty years, the Old Master hadn’t lost his touch—in fact, he never really did. [Portrait ©2005 Pete Poplaski; Spirit art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

and a good artist, a very nice man, and I loved him. He was such a decent man. As a matter of fact, I met Toni because of him. I liked Alex so much, and he brought her to the studio. I hired her, and we began dating, but the romance dwindled away. I was eager to go on and do other things with my life. I wasn’t ready to get married at 22 years old...

I wasn’t thinking about marriage at that time.

“I Trusted The Guys I Hired” JA: You were too busy! [mutual laughter as Eisner agrees] When you wrote stories, did you write a full script?

EISNER: No. I never wrote the dialogue [in the Eisner & Iger days]— Toni did. I would plot the story, and do breakdowns. That was very important to me. By the time we started doing stuff for Fiction House and Fox, we were mainly a packaging house. We had several European accounts, too.

JA: Did you write stories that you didn’t draw?

EISNER: I was involved in everything, but as we got busier, I became more concerned with designing new books and features. After that, Toni would take over and write the stories, except in the case of someone like Bob Powell, who wrote his own stories.

JA: Would you oversee Powell’s stories before he drew them?

EISNER: No. I would oversee most of the stuff, but I didn’t get that far into it. Bob knew what he was doing. We’d send stories to Fiction House, and once in a while, we’d come back and say, “No, no, no.

We don’t want it that way. We want this way.” I trusted the guys I hired. I gave the guys a lot of freedom.

It was a friendly shop, and I guess I was the same age as the youngest guys there. We all got along. The only ones who ever got into a hassle were George Tuska and Bob Powell. Powell was kindof a wiseguy and made remarks about other people in the shop.

One day, George had enough of it, got up, and punched out Bob

EISNER: I did when I became a teacher, but in my shop, I didn’t overtly do that. I never said that everybody had to be a writer, but the answer to your question is “yes,” depending on who the artist was. If Bob Powell wanted to write his own stories, I’d say, “Sure, go ahead and do it.”

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Will Eisner Talks About Quality Comics–-– And Other Stuff

Production was the most important thing in the shop, and anything that would make the guys produce faster and do higher quality work was okay with me. Many times, an artist would come to me and say, “I don’t like this script. Can I change it?” I’d always say, “Okay.”

JA: Was the studio usually quiet? Did you have a radio playing?

EISNER: No, we didn’t do that. We didn’t even have air-conditioning.

In fact, Bob Powell wore gloves when he drew because, as he said, he had sweaty hands. The shop was like one big classroom. I sat at the head of the classroom, and on the right-hand wall, facing me, were the lettering people. Jack Kirby sat on the right-hand side of the room and Bob Powell sat in the middle of the room. Lou Fine sat next to him.

People would get up and walk around to see what the other guys were doing.

“I Am Shamelessly Proud…When One Of My Students Does Well” JA: Have you ever reflected upon the fact that so many people who worked for Eisner & Iger became stars in one field or another?

EISNER: I haven’t reflected on it, but I am proud... shamelessly proud!

I’m a teacher and am always proud when one of my students does well.

It’s a reflection on me, obviously. The guys in the shop were all picked by me, and I had an eye for talent, and for discerning people’s personalities. Bernard Baily was a very bright guy, and while he wasn’t the best artist in the world, I saw that he was sharp and knew how to do things. A person’s personality dictates where a person will ultimately go.

used to find talent. Nordling (among others) responded to one of our ads. He was so bright and I liked him very much. Philosophically, I hired people who thought like I did, and he was in tune with my thinking. He was a good artist with a very conservative style. In fact, he stayed with me when I started doing industrial comics, though he didn’t work on P.S. magazine. P.S. needed people with military experience, and Nordling didn’t have that.

JA: I didn’t realize that military experience was a prerequisite in whether someone worked for P.S. Magazine or not.

EISNER: It was my prerequisite. Chuck Kramer, Mike Ploog... the only one I didn’t ask about that was Murphy Anderson. [NOTE: Murphy did serve in the Navy during World War II. -Jim]. Kramer was working at West Point as an illustrator, and Mike Ploog had been in the service. It wasn’t the main requirement, but I looked for it. It was a plus when I hired a guy.

JA: Since we’ve been discussing some of the people who worked for and with you, I’d like to ask you about Reed Crandall.

EISNER: I don’t remember much about Reed Crandall. I only met him once or twice, and he was not that dynamic a person. He came into the Eisner & Iger shop as I was leaving.

JA: So if you had someone who was a very artist, but might be difficult...

JA: Getting back to Lou Fine for a moment, it’s obvious to me that you thought a lot of him, despite the problems over money.

EISNER: I liked and respected Lou very much. I understood why he didn’t like me. There was a certain amount of competition, I guess.

JA: I’m glad you mentioned that. Alter Ego did a Lou Fine tribute in #17 and for that issue, I wrote a piece discussing Lou’s influence of other artists. For instance, Jack Kirby told me that Lou influenced him in regards to figure drawing and that they discussed it quite often.

EISNER: Then I wouldn’t hire them. Later on, Iger hired people willy-nilly, and began hiring all kinds of guys.

Remember, when I left Iger, I took the best guys in the shop: Lou Fine, Chuck Mazoujian, and Bob Powell.

JA: Not Klaus Nordling?

EISNER: Probably, because they were just an aisle away from each other.

EISNER: Nordling was a freelancer; he didn’t work in the shop. Nordling stayed with me all through the years, as did Andre LeBlanc. Neither man wanted to work in the shop.

JA: In looking at your work and Fine’s during that time, I noticed certain artistic elements appearing in both your work at the same time.

Like the way you rendered wrinkles and trap shadows.

JA: What was Klaus Nordling like?

EISNER: He was a nice, quiet guy. He had been writing plays for the Finnish Theatre in New York. We used to run advertisements in The New York Times, looking for artists. That’s how I

“The Art Is In Service To The Story”

A Reed Crandall-drawn “Doll Man” page from Feature Comics #103 (Oct. 1946).

Repro’d from a scan of the original art, courtesy of collector Troy Pierce. [©2005 DC Comics.]

EISNER: I’ll tell you about that. I got the idea for what you call trap shadows, which is stroking a shadow in lines, from J.C. Leyendecker, and

“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork” Lou Fine was a fan of his, too. If you look at Leyendecker’s shadows, you’ll see that they’re not flat, they’re “stroked in,” as you’d call it.

JA: I know you and Fine talked a great deal about storytelling because you wanted him to concentrate more on it than he did. Do you feel like you gained a whole lot, personally, from his working for you?

EISNER: Oh, sure. All of us gained from each other, though it’s hard to say just what specifically. I could tell you what I learned from Milton Caniff, and George Herriman, but from Lou Fine and Jack Kirby... actually, it’s like working in class together with three or four other artists. You’re invariably going to pick up something. Lou was really very impressive, and his work bounced off the page.

What I learned from Lou was what not to do in storytelling. Lou

23

it was designed to trap the colors.

JA: I’m thinking back before that, like “Hawks of the Sea.” Your work really starts changing and developing.

EISNER: Well, remember that I was growing and learning. No artist remains the same. If you’re any good in this business, you change and improve as you go along.

JA: As the boss of a shop, what do you feel your greatest contribution to those working under you was, paychecks notwithstanding?

EISNER: I think I showed them how to look at things, how to see things... the importance of storytelling. I always felt storytelling was as important as the artwork. Everyone’s ambitions in this field are pretty well dominated by the art and I always felt the story was the major thing. But then, I always believed that from the very beginning.

JA: That sounds like Jack Benny, because he paid his writers better than anyone else did. When asked why he did that, Benny replied, “Because without them, I’m a schlemiel!” [mutual laughter] EISNER: Well, he was right in the fact that stories are terribly important. There are many different definitions of storytelling.

Jack Kirby thought he was a storyteller, but his real strength was the dissemination of sheer power and excitement. That in itself was a story, if you will.

JA: Yes, but as you know, pretty pictures alone don’t tell a story, though some artists think that today. One thing about the Archie Comics I work on is that they are story-driven.

Eisner didn’t care much for super-hero comics, so made his Spirit as much parody as exemplar of that genre. Here, he draws (half-humorously) and writes about the super-hero in his classic 1996 book Graphic Storytelling. The photo at right is taken from the back cover of the original Poorhouse Press edition. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

didn’t like humor; he couldn’t understand humor. I noticed that Gill Fox noticed that Lou could never figure out how to put a hat right on somebody. Lou’s idea of fun was to say, “You ought to make Ebony a little funnier, because he’s the humor element in the stories.” He drew Ebony with a big, fat ass [laughs], and I thought that was really kind of silly. He had no idea of humor.

JA: Stylistically, I can see you two changing at the same time.

EISNER: That’s right. The art is in service to the story. Lou Fine couldn’t do an “Archie” story and have it as worthwhile and accurate as you would. His artwork would be so dominant that it’d simply overwhelm the story. The best stories are the ones where art is in service to the writing.

Jim and Will had tentatively planned a second interview a bit later, which would have dealt with Eisner’s connections (mostly through Eisner & Iger) with Fiction House comics. Sadly, this interview will never come to pass. But Will remained, to the end, what Jim calls him in his introduction— “a national treasure”—and he is no less so, simply because he no longer walks among us.

Monthly! The Original First-Person History!

EISNER: Maybe, because we were both learning at the same time. There was a lot of conversation going on in the shop about what’s good and what’s not good. That always went on. I taught for 17 years, and I can tell you that I learned a lot just by teaching. You’re always learning something.

JA: Do you think the Japanese brushes might have had something to do with the way both of you were developing? Both of you seemed to use a looser type of line when you brought those brushes into the studio.

EISNER: I don’t know how much it was an influence for him. My line work, when I was doing The Spirit, remained pretty much solid because

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

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Will Eisner Talks About Quality Comics–-– And Other Stuff

WILL EISNER Checklist [NOTE: The following is taken from information provided by Dr. Jerry G. Bails from his Who’s Who of 20th-Century American Comic Books. Readers wishing to know when the updated Who’s Who will be available should contact Jerry at JerryBails@aol.com; they will be notified when it is ready.Additions and corrections are invited. The names of features which appeared both in anthology magazines and in their own titles are not generally rendered in italics below. Key: (a) = full art; (p) = pencils only; (i) = inking only; (w) = writer; (d) daily comic strip; (S) Sunday comic strip; (g.a.) = graphic album.]

Full Name: William Erwin Eisner [1917-2005] (artist, writer, editor, publisher) A.k.a.: Will Eisner; Bill Eisner Pen Names: Farrell Cobb; Erwin; William Erwin; Carl Heck; Willis; Willis Nerr; Will Rensie; W. Morgan Thomas, Major Thorpe; Erwin Willis; Ed Wood (?) [NOTE: Many variations of Will Eisner’s name were used as house names at Quality and Fiction House; not all occasions were actually Eisner.]

Education: DeWitt Clinton High School (Bronx); Art Students League under George Bridgman Influences: Lynn Ward (wood cutter and engraver), George Herriman, Milton Caniff

Honors: Academy of Comic Book Arts Hall of Fame 1970s; Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award 1991; Eagle Roll of Honor 1983 (UK); Eisner Award 1992 Best Graphic Album 1992 (New/First US Publication); Eisner Award 1995 Best Archival Collection; Eisner Award 1997 Best Comics-Related Book: Graphic Storytelling; Grand Prix 1975 (Angouleme, France); Hall of Fame Award (Museum of Comic Art) (no date); Harvey Award 1988 Best Reprint Project; Harvey Award 1992 Best Graphic Album (Original Material); Harvey Award 1993 Best Cartoonist; Harvey Award 1993 Best Writer; Inkpot Award 1975 (San Diego Comic-Con); Jack Kirby Hall of Fame Award 1987; National Cartoonists Society Award 1980 Best Comic Book Art (Story Strips); National Cartoonists Society Reuben 1999 (no specifics) Syndicated Credits: Odd Fact (daily panel) (w/a) 1974; The Spirit (S) (w/a) 1940-52

NOTES: Bought out Bell-McClure Syndicate; withdrew from company 1971… had R&D contract with the US Dept. of Labor for Job Scene 1965-70s… merged with KosterDava [reading rack co.] 1958… produced P.S. [Army maintenance monthly] 1951-70… started American Visuals Corp. [president] 1962

Comics (Other Media): Connie Rod (w/a) and Half Mask (w/a) in Army Motors during WWII; Joe Dope (w/a) c. 1943 in Firepower and in Army Motors and The Flaming Bomb during WWII; Joe Dope (w/a) 1951-c.1970 in P.S.; The Spirit (w/a) 1966 in New York supplement to New York Herald Tribune (newspaper); The Spirit (w/a) 1991-99 in The Comics Buyer’s Guide (trade paper; reprints)

Member: Board of the International Museum of Comic Art 1991; National Cartoonists Society (charter member) no date Illustrator: contributor NCS portfolio; cover of Baltimore Colts giveaway 1950; dustjacket What Your Major Does 1970; Ev’ry Little Bug Sheet Music (drawing of The Spirit) 1947; Street & Smith pulp magazines; New York American (newspaper staff) 1930s; record jacket Tantra’s II Macumba 1983; Scholastic Book Services Writer & Artist: non-fiction paperbacks How Your Congressman Works; Helicopters in Action; Space Vehicles; Comics and Sequential Art 1985; Graphic Storytelling 1996

Creator or Co-Creator: Diary of Doctor Hayward; Inspector Dayton; Doll Man; Espionage; Uncle Sam; Hawk of the Seas; Z-5; Sheena; The Spirit; The Ray; Black Condor; Blackhawk; The Strange Twins; X-5, Spencer Steele Promos: (a) for Penny King Company; Operation and Preventative Maintenance (w/a) 1969; Spirit-Man (w/a) 1944 reprint

Still more creative recycling: a page from Baseball Comics, published by Eisner soon after World War II, became a part of a Spirit story for Aug. 24, 1952, as The Spirit Section neared its end. Thanks to Jerry K. Boyd. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

Editor: Firepower (World War II); Quality Comics (de facto editor) 1937-39, packaging editor 1940-42; Fox Comics (de facto editor) late 1930s

Producer: World Explorer Program; multi-media social studies 1967-69 Teacher: School of Visual Arts c. 1973-89 Art Director: Eve magazine (no date)

French Comics: Special USA (a) 1986; The New Comics Anthology (w/a) 1991 g.a. from France

Overseas Comics: Hawks of the Seas (w/a) 1937; Scrappy (w/a) 1937; Uncle Otto (w/a) 1938; various strips (w/a) 1936-40 through Editorial Press Service COLLECTIONS: Aardvark-Vanaheim: Cerebus Jam (a) 1985 [Canada] AC Comics: Black X (w/a) 1995 (reprint)

“I Always Felt Storytelling Was As Important As The Artwork” Baronet Publishing: A Contract with God (w/a) 1978 g.a.

DC Comics: The Spirit Archives (15 vol. to date) (reprint) Dial Press: The Great Comic Book Heroes (w/a) 1965 book with Spirit reprint Fantagraphics Books: The Best Comics of the Decade (w/a) 1990 g.a. reprint; Introduction (w) 1987 to Journey g.a.

Ken Pierce, Inc.: The Spirit Dailies (w/z) 1978/80 g.a. reprint

25

DC Comics & related: Blackhawk (w) 1989 (reprint); illustrations (a) 1984/89; Introduction (w) 1991 in Viking Prince: Viking Glory g.a.; Introductions in The Spirit Archives (15 vol. to date) EC Publications: Mad magazine (w/a) 1989 Eclipse Enterprises: covers (a) 1983; John Law (w/a) 1983 Eisner Comics: covers (a) 1949; Rube Rocky (w/a) 1949; The Spirit Collector’s Edition (publ/ed/w/a) 1972-73 reprint

Fiction House: covers (a) 1940; Hawks of the Seas (w/a) 1938-c.1939; Kitchen Sink Press: (col) 1980-83 on his own features; Baseball (a) Inspector Dayton (w/a) c.1938-39; Jumbo Comics (art dir/ed) 1938-40 1990/92 reprint; Big City (w/a) 1981-82; The through Eisner & Iger Studio; The Spirit Building (w/a) 1987 g.a.; The Christmas (w/a) 1952-54 reprint; Uncle Otto (w/a) Spirit (w/a) 1994; City People Notebook 1936; ZX-5 (w/a) 1939 [ROY: CHECK Z (w/a) 1989 g.a.; Comics Laboratory (w/a) OR X?] 1981; covers (a/paint) 1973-98; Death Rattle (a) 1985; The Dreamer (w/a) 1986 g.a.; Fox Comics: The Flame (w/a) 1939; K-51 (w/a) 1939; Wonder Man (w/a) 1939 Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood (w/a) 1995 g.a.; Eisner Vault (w/a) 1979; Essay on Globe Syndicate: Charles O’Malley (w/a) Comic Art (w) 1978-83; Family Matter (a) 1938; Jack Hinton (w/a) 1938 1998; Hawks of the Sea (w/a) 1986 g.a. reprint; Invisible People (w/a) 1992 g.a.; illusHarvey Comics: covers (a) 1966-67 (new trations (a) 1992; A Life Force (w/a) 1983-85 art); The Spirit (w/a) 1966-67 reprint/some & 1988 g.a. reprint; Life on Another Planet new material (w/a) 1978-80 g.a.; New York: The Big City (w/a) 1981-83 & 1983 g.a. reprint; Outer Heavy Metal: Heavy Metal (w/a) 1983 Space Spirit (dir) 1983 g.a. reprint; political Henle Publications: Bargain Bill (w/a), commentary (w/a) 1980; Signal from Space Captain Scott Dalton (w/a), cover (paint), (w/a) 1983 g.a. reprint/some new material; The Flame (w/a), Harry Karry (w/a) all 1936 Spirit and Will Eisner Quarterly (ed) 1977in Wow, What a Magazine!

88; Spirit Casebook (All About P’Gell) (w/a) 1999 reprint; Spirit Color Album (w/a) 1981I.W. Publications: The Spirit 1963-64 83 g.a. reprints; The Spirit Jam (w/a) 1981; reprints The Spirit (w/a) 1973 new; The Spirit (w/a) 1977-92 reprint; The Spirit: The Origin Years Marvel Comics: Crazy: Will Eisner’s (w/a) 1992-93 reprint; To the Heart of the Guide to Astrology (w/a) 1975-76 Storm (w/a) 1991 g.a.; text interviews/articles Poorhouse Press: 101 Outer Space Jokes (w) 1983-85; The Unpublished Spirit (w/a) (w/a) 1979 g.a.; Dating and Hanging Out 1981; The Will Eisner Reader (w/a) 1990 g.a. (w/a) 1970s g.a.; Ghostly Jokes and Ghastly reprint; Will Eisner’s 3-D Classics: The Spirit Riddles (w/a) 1970s g.a.; Gleeful Guide to (w/a) 1985; Will Eisner’s Color Treasury: The Communicating with Plants (w/a) 1970s Spirit (w/a) 1981 g.a. reprint; Will Eisner’s g.a.; Gleeful Guide to Graphic Storytelling New York (w/a) 1986 g.a.; Will Eisner’s (w/a) 1996 g.a.; Gleeful Guide to How to Quarterly (w/a) 1983-85 Eisner’s cover for his graphic album Dating Avoid Death and Taxes and Live Forever and Hanging Out. Thanks to Lou Mazzella.

Last Gasp Eco-Funnies: Strip Aids USA (a) (w/a) 1975 g.a.; Gleeful Guide to Living [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

1988 with Astronomy (w/a) 1974 g.a.; Gleeful Guide to Occult Cookery (w/a) 1974 g.a.; Scholastic Books: National Screw (w/a) reprint; Star Jaws (w/a) 1978 Gleeful Guide to Robert’s Rules of Order (w/a) 1986 g.a.; Gleeful g.a.

Guide to School Daze (a) 1982/86; Gleeful Guide to Spirit Casebook of True Haunted Houses and Ghosts (w/a) 1976; Gleeful Guide to Simon & Schuster/Fireside Books: Blackhawk (w) 1979 in America Star Jaws (w/a) 1978 g.a.; Gleeful Guide to Television Jokes (w/a) 1978 at War: The Best of DC War Comics g.a. reprint g.a.; Incredible Facts, Amazing Statistics, Monumental Trivia (w/a) Smithsonian Institution: The Smithsonian Comic-Book Comics 1974 g.a. (w/a) 1981 g.a. reprint Quality Comics: Archie O’Toole (plot) 1940-41, (w/a) 1938-39; Black Transtar Pacific: Hawks of the Sea (w/a) 1985 g.a. reprint Condor (w) 1940; Blackhawk (w) 1941; covers (a) 1941; Doll Man (w/a) 1939; Espionage (w/a) 1939-40, Hawk of the Seas (w/a) 1937-38; COMIC BOOK CREDITS (Mainstream US): Hercules (plot) 1941; Kid Dixon (plot) 1940-41, Lion Boy (plot) 194041; The Ray (w) 1940; Shark Bodie (plot) 1940; The Spirit (w/a) 1941-50 Centaur & related: The Brothers Three (w/a) 1937; centerspread fillers (reprint); The Strange Twins (w) 1940; Tommy Tinkle (plot) 1940; Uncle (a) 1937; Law in Caribou (w/a) 1930s; Man-Hunt (w/a) 1938; Muss ‘Em Sam (plot/I) 1940-41 (over Dave Berg’s pencils); X-5 (w) 1940 Up Donovan (w/a) 1937/39; Sapphire Eye of Sehkmet (w/a) 1937; Star Ranger (w/a) 1937 [imprint of Chesler]; Wild Tex Martin (w/a) 1937-39 Dark Horse: covers (finish) 1993

Warren Publications: covers (a) 1974-77; The Spirit (w/a) 1974-77 (reprint)

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27

“Will Eisner Still Cares!”

A Personal Look At A Comic Art Legend

by Jim Amash

E

ditor. Art Director. Writer. Artist. Letterer. Colorist. Painter.

Publisher. Businessman. Taskmaster. Teacher. Lecturer.

Biographer. Storyteller. Warrant Officer. Pioneer. Creator.

Mentor. Promoter of the Arts. Icon. Theoretician. Genius. Husband.

Father.

Will Eisner.

He was born March 6, 1917, in Brooklyn, New York. A keen observer of humanity even in his youth, this son of Jewish immigrants possessed a burning ambition to transcend the poverty of his environment, and the artistic temperament to succeed. Eisner’s first published artwork appeared in the DeWitt Clinton High School newspaper. He became hooked on the arts; now he had to make a living at it.

In 1936, Eisner found brief employment at Henle Publications, an early comic book publisher, creating the “Harry Karry” and “The Flame” features for Wow, What a Magazine. Along with the ambitious Jerry Iger, a cartoonist better suited for salesmanship, Eisner became the co-owner of the Eisner & Iger Studio, perhaps the first shop to package features for comic books and newspapers.

The legendary group of fledgling and down-on-their-luck cartoonists that populated the Eisner-Iger shop included Bob Kane, Jack Kirby, Lou Fine, Bill Bossert, Alex Blum and his daughter Audrey/Toni (possibly the first woman to write comic books), George Tuska, Bob Powell, and Chuck Cuidera. Eisner created or co-created most of the shop’s features: “Muss ‘Em Up Donovan,” “Hawks of the Sea,” “Doll Man,” “The Ray,” “Black Condor,” “Uncle Sam,” “Blackhawk” (though Chuck Cuidera disputed this particular claim), “Sheena – Queen of the Jungle,” “Espionage,” and numerous others. He also wrote and drew some of the features and covers, and acted as boss, editor (supplying camera-ready art to Quality Comics and other companies), art director, and inspirational force. Unlike most comic book creators of the time, Eisner and Iger also retained some ownership of their characters.

Eisner and Iger were making a lot of money, but Eisner grew increasingly unhappy. He wanted to do more than just children’s fantasy stories, and his relationship with Jerry Iger wasn’t harmonious. Enter Everett “Busy” Arnold, publisher of Quality Comics, one of Eisner & Iger’s main accounts. The Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate’s sales manager, Henry Martin, approached Arnold with an idea for syndicating comic books as newspaper inserts. Arnold liked the idea and contacted Eisner as the man capable producing the material. Eisner found an escape hatch from his situation and took the job.

The result of this venture was The Spirit Section, starring the strips/features Mr. Mystic, Lady Luck, and of course, The Spirit himself. Eisner took what could have been just another detective feature (the lead character’s mask, gloves, death, rebirth, and lack of socks notwithstanding), and created a legend. The pre-war stories were a cut above the ordinary, as Eisner stretched the graphic boundaries of standard comic book fare. That’s more than can be said for the war-time stories, even though luminaries such as Lou Fine, Jack Cole, and Manley Wade Wellman were responsible for some of them. Eisner was on his way to becoming the O. Henry of comics: the pre-war Spirit was full of adventure, humor, and pathos. However, it was the post-war Spirit

This art for the cover of The Will Eisner Companion (DC Comics, 2004) is all credited to Will himself, with design by Amie Brockway-Metcalf.

[Cover ©DC Comics; Art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

stories that really shone: Eisner refined and expanded the ordinary conventions of sequential storytelling into uncharted territories. Seldom equaled and never surpassed, this body of work catapulted Will Eisner into the pantheon of comic book greats. When The Spirit Section ceased publication in 1952, all rights reverted to Eisner, making him one of the few comic artists to totally own his feature.

During World War II, Eisner served in the Army as a warrant officer, creating instructional manuals and posters that sometimes featured his “Joe Dope” character. In 1948, he launched an ill-fated comic book company that crashed as soon as it took flight, taking Baseball Comics, Kewpies, and the unpublished John Law with it. (John Law’s adventures were later turned into Spirit episodes, before finally seeing the light of day as originally intended in the 1980s.) Eisner founded the American Visuals Corporation, a commercial art company that provided illustrations and comics for commercial and education purposes. He began producing P.S. magazine for the Army, a venture that lasted almost twenty years. He also took over the Bell-McClure Syndicate, briefly

28 returned to The Spirit for Harvey Publications and The New York Herald Tribune, and maybe even snuck in a nap or two.

Warren Publications revived The Spirit in 1974, with Eisner providing new covers and retouching art on the reprinted stories. Shortly afterward, Eisner launched Poorhouse Press, printing a series of graphic albums poking fun at darn near everything. He began teaching at the School of Visual Arts, continued doing various kinds of illustrations for an assortment of publishers, and in 1976, caught his breath long enough to begin work on the breakthrough graphic novel A Contract With God, which was published by Baronet Books in 1978. There was more work, of course, but the Eisner Checklist on pp. 24-25 details that.

A Personal Look At A Comic Art Legend with proper education. Pay attention to your teachers, but don’t forget that your own personal experiences, talent, and hard work will be the determining factor in what you become.”

I was awestruck by his personality, so much so that I sat silently as Eisner talked shop with Murphy Anderson during a lull in the convention. I tried to absorb their conversation, which mainly revolved around their plans to drive around Greensboro so Eisner could see the town where O. Henry was born. Eisner signed some books for me and patiently answered questions that, in retrospect, he had probably been asked dozens of times before. His warm, stately demeanor proved to me that Will Eisner didn’t rate people based on their status.

A few years later, I got a chance to do something for In addition, Eisner spent a the man who’d done so much great amount of time traveling for the business that I loved. around the world to comic We were talking on the book conventions, doing telephone about his book covers for Kitchen Sink’s Spirit reprint series, producing Will Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner’s Quarterly, and interwhen Eisner told me that he Eisner’s cover for Will Eisner’s Spirit Magazine #41 (June 1983). The periodical was planning a second viewing master storytellers reprinted not only The Spirit, but sometimes backup features Lady Luck and Mr. Mystic. printing. Since I was a comic such as Jack Kirby, Milton [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.] shop manager, he was interCaniff, and Joe Kubert. He ested in any marketing continued crafting graphic opinions that I had. I hesitated for a moment and Eisner noticed. He novels and books on creating comics, teaching, presiding over the said, “Don’t worry about being critical. What’s bothering you?” deservedly-named Eisner Awards, and winning enough honors himself to fill the Grand Canyon. Eisner never hesitated to promote comics, I said, “Okay, I’ve got to be honest with you. I can’t understand how giving interviews to every conceivable media outlet. Without question, a man who’s as market-savvy as you are could put such a weak cover on he was the best spokesman comics could have had, backing up eloquence that book.” Eisner was surprised and asked for an explanation. I with superior work. Unlike most creators, Eisner seemed to improve continued, “The cover you used is too old-fashioned. There’s nothing with age, as his latest published work, Fagin the Jew, demonstrates. special about it. The older readers snap it up because it’s an Eisner book, but the packaging doesn’t speak to young fans. You need to try another An inexhaustible fountain of knowledge, candor, and wit, Eisner cover.” expressed his inner self in his graphic novels as thoroughly and courageously as anyone who has attempted to follow his lead. His last, soonEisner asked me if I had any ideas, and I immediately made two to-be-published graphic novel The Plot: The Secret Story of the suggestions.

He asked me to sketch them out and send them to him. protocols of the Elders of Zion thoroughly debunks the anti-Semetic Later, he called me to say that he was using one of the ideas I had Russian tract. The Plot reveals Eisner the political/social activist in a submitted: a photo of him sitting at his drawing board. In the sketch (of new, exciting, and urgent way. Amazing as it seems, Eisner was still which I wish I’d kept a copy), I described how he should be sitting, growing as a literary force, and one wonders what else he might have which way to face, and a few other details. When the second printing of done had death not stilled his creative voice.

Comics and Sequential Art came out, there was my cover idea! Eisner Everyone respected Will Eisner, and I was no exception. We first met joked that if the edition didn’t do well, he’d make me go door-to-door in 1984, when Eisner was a guest at AcmeCon in Greensboro, NC, at and sell the extras. the invitation of his long-time friend Murphy Anderson. It took me a I wasn’t a close friend, but we were on good terms and stayed in little while to break through my nervousness to approach Eisner, but touch for many years. We spent a little time talking at various convenwhen I did, he made me feel like an equal and not the overgrown fanboy tions, but one conversation in the late 1990’s stands out the most. I saw that I was. He was taken by the fact that in addition to helping to throw Will Eisner at the back of a convention booth and went over to him. the convention and working for Acme Comics (the convention host), I “It’s good to see you again,” I said. “How are you doing?” Eisner was pursuing my master’s degree in fine art. His advice? “Stick with it. If frowned and said, “Why do people always ask how I’m doing? It’s like you have something to say creatively, you’ll be better suited to the task

“Will Eisner Still Cares!”

29

they’re worried I’m going to die or something.

All convention long, everybody asks me the same question.”

I was taken aback by his reaction, but I knew the answer. “You really don’t know, do you? Look around you; what do you see?

Nervous, scared people. They’re afraid their hobby’s dying out. Professionals—the ones who are working—are afraid they’ll be unemployed at virtually any time. Look at how many people are here, hoping editors will give them jobs so they can support their families.”

Eisner nodded his head as I continued. “When people see you at this show [San Diego], and see that, at your age, you’re still working, still enthusiastic and supportive, still promoting a positive future in this business, well, that makes them feel good. You’re their affirmation that everything’s going to turn out fine, and that comics are still going to be around for them to read and work on. They think, ‘Will Eisner’s still here, producing good work, and he still cares!’ You’re their reassurance.”

Eisner seemed thoughtful, but grateful for my response. “I never thought about it quite like that before,” he answered. Of course, he already understood and treasured his impact on his fans and the comics medium. I’ve often wondered how much he took what I said to heart. I hope he believed what I told him.

Will Eisner was more than the sum of my descriptions in this article; he was our security blanket. We needed him for all that he was to comics. And now, our security blanket is gone. We’ll carry on without him because we must, but comics surely won’t be the same. As long as higher achievement remains our goal in this art form that he helped define, his legacy will continue.

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Will Eisner at the 1984 AcmeCon mentioned in Jim’s memoir—and a 1970 Spirit sketch done by Will for fan (and 1960s Alter Ego contributor) Glen Johnson. Photo by Teresa R. Davidson.

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31

THE SPIRIT OF WILL EISNER Tributes To The Creator Of Denny Colt From A Handful Of Comics Pros And Fans

In A Spirit Of Friendship (Above:) Three veterans of the Golden and Silver Ages share a moment at the 1996 San Diego Comic-Con. L. to r.: Jim Mooney, Will Eisner, & Joe Giella.

[Photo ©2005 Charlie Roberts.]

(Right:) A vintage Spirit page, repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Ethan Roberts. Ethan says this page is "pure Eisner, both pencils and inks, with caricatures of Eisner, Andre LeBlanc, and Ben Oda." [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

S

ince the contents of this issue of Alter Ego were basically already in place before Will Eisner’s regrettable passing, we did not solicit tributes or comments on his life and career.

Even so, however, we found ourselves in receipt of several examples of same, so it is our bittersweet pleasure to feature them here.

Gene Colan Comics Artist Will Eisner will be greatly missed by everyone in or out of the comic strip industry. Although I never knew him personally, I was deeply influenced by his cinematic approach, even before my own career began.

The Philadelphia Record featured his famous strip The Spirit, and I would study his art like a wide-eyed kid with his nose against a toy window. The atmospheric effects he used so well to give a burst of sudden light to a scene, like a lightning flash, were captured so effectively.

I believe I heard somewhere that his father was a stage set designer.

What a fabulous background for Will Eisner as a youngster!

We certainly have been diminished by this loss.

Will Murray Writer

Spirit-ual Inspiration I first encountered Will Eisner through the Harvey Spirit giants of 1966-67. Although I was a dedicated Marvelite, I was enthralled by this dramatic yet whimsical character with the cool domino mask and cooler name. I didn’t know that The Spirit was a kind of take-off on Leslie Charteris’ Saint—and I doubt I would have cared. I saw him more in the

tradition of The Green Hornet or The Lone Ranger. He was classic.

Only two Harvey Spirits were released, but I read them over and over, and never forgot them. Or the mystery-man behind The Spirit, Will Eisner.

Flash forward to 1973. The Spirit was back, thanks to Kitchen Sink.

It was one of the few comics I still read after I dropped my Marvel habit.

I had no sooner begun my writing career than I encountered a problem.

I had signed my first two published articles with the name by which I was then known. Simultaneously, a new rising comic star was appearing in the media.

I didn’t want to be known as the “other” Bill Murray, but what to do? That was my name.

The exact moment of inspiration has faded from memory, but I know from whence it came. Little did I imagine that in changing from Bill to Will, I was following in the former Bill Eisner’s footsteps exactly. He had done the identical thing early in his career, too.

I paid Eisner homage during my 40-novel run on the Destroyer paperback series, when I had the convicted and “executed” ex-cop Remo Williams one day visit the grave where he was supposedly interred. In

32

Tributes To The Creator Of Denny Colt One might wonder what a Gibson and Eisner Shadow comics section might have been like. However, I’m pretty sure the universe created the right series of events. Walter’s later Shadow newspaper strips from 1942 (still not reprinted) show that he eventually mastered the strip medium, as the Shadow strip develops strong character-driven storylines that pit Margot against The Shadow’s crimefighting costumed partner Valda in the same kind of good-girl/bad-girl format favored by Lee Falk in The Phantom and Alex Raymond and his ghost writer in Flash Gordon. I doubt a Gibson-scripted Shadow supplement would have been any better than the Bill Woolfolk-ghosted Spirit sections of the war years.

It’s extremely unlikely that a Gibson/Eisner collaboration would have ever reached the artistic and creative levels of Eisner’s solo post-war efforts. So everything happened for the best.

The amazing thing about Will was that he was still at it, still breaking new ground and searching for new directions.

Certainly, none of us would have faulted him if he had done what so many other artists did, and simply churned out re-creations of his earlier Spirit cover and splash pages for big bucks… or created new Spirit stories from his earlier templates. But, no, Will continually reinvented himself and the comic book medium, taking the road less traveled… which we know makes all the difference.

Besides having the Eisner Awards named for him, Will was naturally on the receiving end of many honors over his lifetime, including the Haxtur Award presented by the Salón Internacional del Comic del Principado de Asturias, a major comics convocation held each year in Gijón, Spain. (The Haxtur is named for the famed hero/strip created by Victor de la Fuente.) In 2001, for the Salón’s 25th anniversary, past honoree Eisner sent his congratulations to all his fellow recipients. With thanks to Sofia Carlota Rodriguez Equren and her father Faustino R. Arbesú, who host the event, and to Juan C. López for sending us a photocopy of the above. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

the scene, he goes to Wildwood Cemetery in New Jersey to pay his respects to his old self. Next to his empty grave is another. The name carved on the headstone: D. COLT. I never met my adopted namesake, but I interviewed him by phone twice. Imagine my delight when he remarked, “I believe I’ve heard of you.”

Well, I’d gotten around by then. But I suspect Eisner was vibing on the spiritual reflection of one Will who was mirroring another….

Anthony Tollin Comics Colorist In case you weren’t aware, Busy Arnold in 1939 approached Shadow pulp writer Walter Gibson about writing a Shadow Sunday comic book supplement for newspapers. Walter brought Busy up to Street & Smith, which rejected the idea, having no interest in comics at the time. (Former newspaperman Gibson had been after them to feature The Shadow in comics since before Action #1.)

When Walter related the story to me, circa 1979, he didn’t know about Busy’s affiliation with The Spirit. The rest of the story seems pretty obvious: Busy recruited Eisner later to create a new hero who, like The Shadow, wore a slouch hat and dark garments and frequented the same warehouse and waterfront districts as The Shadow did.

Longtime comics writer Mike W. Barr writes: “The accompanying illo was done in 1990 as Will’s grateful response to the publication of The Maze Agency Annual #1, which included a “Spirit” pastiche by Rick Magyar, Darick Robertson, Wm. MessnerLoebs, Vickie Williams, Michele Basil, and myself, with cover by former Eisner apprentice Mike Ploog, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the strip. I’m occasionally asked if it’s for sale.

Sure—the opening bid is the contents of Fort Knox.” [Art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner; Maze TM & ©2005 Mike W. Barr.]

The Spirit Of Will Eisner FCA editor P.C. Hamerlinck says: “Will sent me this sketch, thanking me for assistance on the [C.C.] Beck material for his book Shop Talk.” We’d say you were well-paid, P.C.! [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

33 that Will Eisner had passed away, I got “all shook up” and emotional. We did not socialize, and yet, here was a man that I thought would continue to go on and on, though we all know better. I gave the reporter whatever info I knew and referred her to Michael Uslan, who is planning to do a movie based on his creation, The Spirit.

I wonder if they are publishing a comic book in heaven.

Stan Lee Comics Writer & Editor I’ve shared a podium with Will Eisner and always knew him to be a great artist, a wonderful raconteur, and, most important, a truly fine human being.

As an artist and storyteller, he was superb, in a class by himself.

Many is the time I’ve urged that he join the Marvel bullpen, in whatever capacity, whatever position he might desire. With a talent such as his, I felt Marvel could reach greater heights than ever before. But, although the offers intrigued him, he always preferred doing his own strips in his own way—and I respected him for that.

When Milton Caniff died, I got a number of greats like Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Everett Raymond Kinstler, Joe Kubert, and Jules Feiffer to write pieces for Comic Revnue’s Caniff tribute issue. Will Eisner wrote the lead editorial for me, and concluded: “Always, he [Caniff] staunchly maintained that he was producing entertainment that ‘sold’ newspapers. He sidestepped the issue of literary value. But, let me leave to all the historians the evaluation of his place in the growth of this art form. They can better classify his contribution.

Let me grieve for the man… for the loss.

“As long as Milt Caniff was alive and producing, I felt, as I did from my high school days, a student in his shadow. Now he’s gone and suddenly I’m an old man in the field.”

I bet a lot of others are feeling the same way today.

Allen Bellman Comics Artist I first met Will Eisner about fifty years ago, when I was freelancing and I went to his studio in search of work. He handed me a script, which I penciled and inked, working entirely in his office for an entire week. When I moved to Florida some twenty years ago, I had heard that he resided nearby. I phoned him at his studio and reminded him of the time I had done work for him. We met and had lunch.

I was working in the art department of the Sun-Sentinel at the time, and each year I was called on by the paper to preside over a comic strip program where I would draw a mural of comic strip characters and kids were encouraged to scribble their versions of their favorite characters. It was a big deal, as readers young and old were invited to visit, and the bigwigs of the paper attended. The following year, I was called on to run a seminar on comic strips before an invited audience. I asked Will if he would join me, and he agreed without charge to the newspaper. This was the kind of man he was.

So when I received a call from a reporter at the paper just recently

My greatest regret about Will is that we never were able to spend more time together. Except for our brief meetings at conventions, on some panel somewhere, or at some magazine industry function, we just lived too far away from each other—and that was my loss.

Others will describe his artistic talents far better than I can, but the one thing that is uppermost in my memory regarding the truly legendary Will Eisner is—he was one of the finest gentlemen I’ve ever known. We are all poorer for his loss.

Jerry K. Boyd Alter Ego Contributor The assortment of various longhaired twenty-somethings that owned and operated the three comics shops in downtown San Jose, California, had been heavily plugging the return the return of Will Eisner’s Spirit at Warren Publications for months during the rainy winter of ’73.

“Do yourself a favor, kid,” they pleaded, “and pick up this magazine when it comes out.”

“You have to see this guy’s stuff!”

“Eisner defines comics, man!”

Like any other cynically-minded pre-teen in my age group (that had to come to grips with the ongoing Watergate scandal and Vietnam), I doubted that anyone deserved the pedestal they had erected for this Eisner fellow. And yet, they’d gone on in a similar fashion over the EC Comics that had been rediscovered—and they’d been right about them.

I risked my sixty cents in ’74, sat down to read the Spirit magazine, and then sat stunned after having read only the first story. The entire issue was truly worthy of all the hype.

I told Mr. Eisner about this experience in ’89 and he grinned slyly as he finished signing my comics, no doubt knowing he’d blown a new generation’s collective consciousness yet again.

“Young man, I’ve received a lot of compliments for my work over the years, but that’s one of the nicest ones I’ve ever heard. Thank you,” he responded.

34

Tributes To The Creator Of Denny Colt made them stand in line with me. Being good friends, they eagerly joined me. Well, maybe not eagerly.

Finally, I stood before my idol and stammered some stupidity about the identity of The Octopus (not the Marvel version, mind you), and we had a chuckle. He then asked, “To whom would you like me to make this out?”

“Errr…Chris,” I said quite eloquently.

Horrors! That meant that the group I gathered would get my books made out to them! I could do nothing but walk away and wait. If I’d said anything to them, it would have blown my cover.

My future wife Pam was next in line and got the question same as I. “Make it out to Chris,” she stated in quite a wry manner.

Mr. Eisner smiled and signed my books.

Then Companion #3 walked up. “My name is Chris,” said Billy. At this time, Mr. Eisner, being no man’s fool, looked over to see me standing sheepishly over to the side.

He then glanced up at the next person in line. “Hi, I’m Chris and I love your work,” Adam stated. Nice touch. Maybe that’ll throw him off my trail.

No dice.

Mr. Eisner glanced again at me and did the only thing a man of his stature would do.

He smiled at me and signed the books.

I will never forget him or the impact his storytelling made on my life.

Nor will I ever get rid of those 20 books that all proudly state: “To Chris. All my best. Will Eisner.”

The Newsletter of Artistic Influence is published monthly by the Independent Press of Minneapolis, Minnesota, “emphasizing ‘The Arts and the Art of Storytelling from the Perspective of the Cartoonist, Comic-Book Illustrator and Sequential Story-teller.’” So it’s only fitting that an Eisner illo—excerpted from the Spirit Sunday section for April 3, 1949, and presented in a new design— graced the cover of their July 2000 issue, since Will qualified handily in all three of the above categories. [Spirit art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

And now I’ll be passing along, to any interested youngster willing to listen, that Will Eisner and The Spirit deserve all the accolades they’ve gotten… and then some.

Chris Wallace Collector Well over a decade ago, I got the honor to meet Mr. Eisner, the fellow who had given me so much join in the form of his creation, The Spirit. I was in my early twenties and a local convention brought me out with 20 copies of Warren’s black-&-white Spirit reprints in my arms. My full intention was to have the copies of my childhood introduction to wonderful art and storytelling signed by the man who created them.

A bit naïve was I, for the sign at the end of the line clearly stated, “Mr. Eisner must limit the items to be signed to five only.” I was dumfounded. What to do? My girlfriend (and future wife) and two friends were with me and close by.

Hmmm. 5 times 4 equals 20! I quickly grabbed my companions and

Sadly, almost unbelievably, Will won’t be attending any more San Diego Comic-Cons in the flesh, but we’re sure he’ll be there in spirit—and we mean that in several different ways. When he couldn’t make it to some of the earlier San Diego conclaves, he often sent his regrets in artistic fashion—in one instance, as reprinted in A/E #12, showing The Spirit chained to a dungeon wall.

He sent the drawing at right for the 1980 program book.

Thanks to Shel Dorf. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

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36

“The Last Spirit Story”?

A

Artist ALEX SAVIUK On Working With WILL EISNER

lex, comic book veteran who currently pencils the SpiderMan Sunday newspaper strip and inks Larry Lieber’s pencils on the daily, sent this hasty March 8th e-mail from Jacksonville, Florida, where he was “on my final week of storyboards on the new John Travolta-James Gandolfini movie Lonely Hearts,” getting home only on weekends. It has been, he writes, “a long but satisfying journey”—and I know he’d apply at least the latter adjective to his recent work for and with Will Eisner on what may well have been the final Spirit story from the master’s mind, pencil, and brush.

For, you see, Alex only recently finished assisting Eisner on a tale for Dark Horse Comics’ quarterly Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist, in which the two most Jewish heroes of comic book culture finally encountered each other. Alex, though moved profoundly by Will’s passing, preferred to dwell in writing on their collaboration. The story appeared in Escapist #6, which went on sale in April. Our thanks to Dark Horse editor Diana Schultz and publicist Lee Dawson for their permission and cooperation with regard to Alex’s tribute. —Roy. Will called me up and asked me if I would be interested in working from his roughs to help him out. Plus, he felt that, if I agreed, it would be a great way for Dark Horse to see what I can do.

Of course, I agreed, and he explained that he wanted me to take his roughs and do the pencils on the art boards he provided. Then he would make pencil adjustments to fit his style and rhythms, then ink and add some washtones. He specifically stated that it wouldn’t be the classic penciler-inker situation because of those reasons, but he assured me that he would insist that I get an art assist credit.

As you can see from the artwork, he did follow some of my work, I feel, especially on the splash re The Spirit’s pose, the courier, and the secondary figures in the windows—but there were enough additions elsewhere to make a true believer out of me. Very evident were the

A note from Will Eisner to Alex Saviuk, courtesy of Alex.

changes on page 2 in the big center panel, where he changed the composition of the attacking group and The Spirit’s poses, as well, and the addition of putting P’Gell on the fire escape, which was obviously a better introductory story element.

I don’t have access to my files at the moment to talk about other specific areas, but I think this sums it up pretty well. Also, Will asked me to keep it light, because, although a serious story, it still is The Spirit, which meant that there would be a humorous twist involved.

Will Eisner's rough for the panel in Dark Horse's Escapist #6 in which The Escapist meets The Spirit, repro'd from a scan of the original art. [Art ©2005 Dark Horse Comics; The Escapist TM & ©2005 Michael Chabon; The Spirit TM & ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

I know that, out of respect for his creativity, people may not want to know that Will wasn’t completely responsible for this Spirit story—but didn’t he also have assistants working for him back in the ’40s? He was such a genius at crafting a tale and in full control of all the elements of his work that to even suggest that he needed help might be sacrilegious to some. But all I ask for is acknowledgment that I helped in the creation—no, the production of something magical. The creation was and still is Will Eisner’s—but it takes skill and experience to be able to take those roughs and put some good drawings on a page. Of that I am proud—and no one can take that away from me.

And that’s about as much as I have ever “tooted” my own horn.

“The Last Spirit Story”?

(Clockwise:) Eisner’s roughs for the splash page of his story for Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist #6—Alex Saviuk’s tight pencils over same—and Eisner’s final inked/wash version, as printed. [The Spirit TM & ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

37

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40

“I Was Doomed To Be An Artist” CHUCK MAZOUJIAN On Drawing Lady Luck And Others

A

Conducted by Jim Amash

long with other greats like Lou Fine and Bob Powell, Chuck Mazoujian was part of the stellar Eisner production studio that produced The Spirit and hundreds of memorable stories for Quality Comics and other publishers. Although he only worked in the Eisner & Iger shop for a year and a half, Mazoujian made his mark on comics history when he created the Lady Luck series for Eisner’s syndicated Spirit Section. Still creating visual imagery, Chuck reflects back with fondness on simpler times, when a little Lady Luck smiled on his life and ours as well. Thanks to Dave Hajdu, author of the Bob Dylan/Joan Baez study Positively Fourth Street for putting me in contact with Chuck. —Jim.

Transcribed by Tom Wimbish JA: What got you interested in art?

MAZOUJIAN: I started drawing when I was five years old, right from the beginning. I drew a horse, and it looked pretty good, so I continued making pictures. From there on, I used to copy sports and religious subjects from the newspapers and magazines. Sports was the main thing I loved to draw, though. I played football in high school, and I’ve loved sports my whole life. I loved drawing religious subject matter, too. I’m a Christian, and I used to go to church and talk to the priest; I was fascinated by religion.

“I Drew All The Time”

I went to school, and the teachers noticed me drawing.

When I was eight or nine, I copied a picture of George Washington’s head in pencil. The teacher saw it, grabbed the drawing, framed it, and put it on the outside of her door. From that point on, I was doomed to be an artist.

JIM AMASH: When and where were you born?

CHUCK MAZOUJIAN: I was born in Union City, New Jersey, on August 24, 1917.

JA: I’m curious about your name...

MAZOUJIAN: It’s an Armenian name; they all end in “ian” or “yan.”

My father was an actor who played Julius Caesar at Swiss Turnhall, which had a theatre; the actors spoke Armenian. There was a big Armenian population in New Jersey then. My father was an artist, too. He was in the printing business, but he used to

Chuck Mazoujian today, beneath one of his paintings— bookended by a pair of pirate illos: a page from the Lady Luck story for Aug. 25, 1940, and his later book illustration for The Barbary Pirates

by C.S. Forrester. See the first page of the former on p. 18.

Photo courtesy of C.M.; book art provided by Lee Boyett. [Lady Luck art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner; other art ©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

Chuck Mazoujian On Drawing Lady Luck And Others

41

do fashion drawings for the old Butterick Magazine. He didn’t want me to go into the art world; he thought it was a tough business. I proved to him that I could make a living, though, because I worked for 20 years for Ogleby & Mather Advertising in New York, and they really paid me a lot of money.

I drew all the time, and I did good illustrations as I became a teenager. In high school, they’d find some colored chalk and tell me to get up and draw something on the board for each holiday. Anything that they wanted me to do, I did it for them.

As I was getting out of high school, my brother was going to Pratt Institute in the evenings. I went with him one time, and I was in heaven.

I graduated Pratt after three years but I didn’t get a degree. By the way, a lot of comic book people went to Pratt: Bob Powell, Ken Bald, Chuck Cuidera, among many others. Some of the greatest times of my life were at Pratt. I went there from 1936 to 1939.

I served in the military for over four years during World War II, and somebody spotted my work while I was stationed at Fort Hancock, and published a page of my drawings in Life magazine. That was in about 1942.

Later, one of my commanding officers also saw my drawings, and I was assigned to G-2 at the Pentagon in Washington, doing G-2 training manuals. I worked on four manuals, showing what the Germans and Japanese were doing. The bulletins that I worked on were disseminated to the servicemen.

“Lady Luck ... Was Patterned After My Girlfriend” JA: How did you you get into comics?

MAZOUJIAN: Bill Eisner and Jerry Iger had a comic book studio on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue. I had done a cover for some company with a King Kong type of character. Eisner saw my work, telephoned me, and said, “Come on over; I want to look at your stuff.” I went over there, and he said, “How would you like to work for me?”

And I said, “What can you pay me?” [laughs] He offered me a pretty good sum of money, and I worked for him for a year and a half, until I got drafted into the service in 1941.

Eisner was a marvelous writer; he had excellent ideas, and he never had more than a high school education. Bill was one of the finest writers of comics I ever saw, and a very nice guy. He once wrote an article for the first page of The New York Times magazine section, and he did a terrific job. His artwork was good, but he actually copied Lou Fine’s work. He had Lou Fine do a lot of his drawing; Bill did some layouts and Lou would do the artwork. Lou loved Bill, and he was a naturalborn artist. The reason I stayed with Bill was because of Lou Fine: I liked the guy, and I liked the way he drew.

Bill paid me $25 or $30 a week, and I was being paid more than anybody else. The rest of the guys were getting $15 to $18 a week. Later, when my work went into syndication, Eisner gave me bonuses. I was doing a lot of work for him, and he was getting extra money for the syndication, so I think he gave me a couple of $500 bonuses before I left there. That was nice of him. I know there were some people who weren’t happy with their pay, but those things happen.

I was working on Lady Luck at the time. She was patterned after my girlfriend, who later became my wife. Her maiden name was Edna Munson; she was a Swede. She was a beautiful girl: blonde, blue-eyed, gorgeous. She was going to Pratt, and as soon as I laid eyes on her, I said, “I’ve got to get to know this girl. Two years later, I married her. We had two marvelous kids: a daughter, Gwen, and a son, Craig.

For a time, I used the pen name of “Ford Davis” when I worked for Eisner. Davis was an old illustrator’s last name. Bill asked me to do it; I

The first page of Mazoujian’s second Lady Luck tale—from The Spirit Section #2, June 9, 1940. Thanks to Lee Boyett. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

don’t know why.

I did a lot in that year and a half. In addition to Lady Luck, I did some extra freelance work that Bill asked me to do. I’d work on that stuff at night, at home. I didn’t like the idea. I did it for a while, and then I thought, “What am I doing? I work all day, and then I come home and work some more.” My wife would say, “What the heck are you doing?

Get to bed.” So I quit doing freelance.

“Eisner And Iger Didn’t Like Each Other” JA: What did you think of Jerry Iger?

MAZOUJIAN: He wasn’t around very often. To tell you the truth, I never liked Iger. I didn’t like him because he was so damned businesslike, and he thought that he knew it all. Eisner used to say, “Don’t pay any attention to him; he’s here because he’s a good businessman,” which I guess he was. I didn’t deal with Iger much; I dealt with Bill. Everybody called him “Will,” because that’s the way he signed his comics, but I called him Bill.

Eisner and Iger didn’t like each other, but Eisner made a lot of money doing comic books. He published them himself, and he made a lot of money. He’s still making money. He’s still working. I was visiting somebody in West Palm Beach, Florida, and I found out where Bill was, so I drove down to see him. [NOTE: This interview was conducted before Eisner’s death. —Jim] Eisner was fine to work for. He knew from my work when I was

42

“I Was Doomed To Be An Artist”

Three features which Mazoujian drew indirectly for Fiction House, via Eisner & Iger, were “Nelson Cole,” which appeared in Fiction House’s Planet Comics #1 (Jan. 1940)—“Kayo Kiby” in Fight Comics #5 (May 1940)—and “Stuart Taylor” for Jumbo Comics #15 (May 1940). Thanks to Lee Boyett for the scans. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

doing Lady Luck that I was in a completely different category, and he paid me more than the other guys because of that. It was good luck that I wound up there, because he was looking for someone to do covers for his magazines, and I did a couple of very nice covers for him.

And Norman Rockwell! I met him at Grand Central Station. He had come down from New Rochelle to lecture at Pratt. He had a little bow tie on, and his curly, kinky hair, and I was able to pick him out immediately. I escorted him to Pratt for the lecture. The only thing he told me was, “Please don’t have them ask me how much money I get for The Saturday Evening Post covers.” One of the people in the audience asked him anyway, but he got around it somehow.

“Mainly, [Eisner] Left Me Alone” JA: Do you remember whether Eisner created the characters for his features?

MAZOUJIAN: I think so. He was a very bright guy, and he came up with some damn good stuff.

JA: Before you did Lady Luck, you did a series of filler features for Quality Comics. Here’s Jerry Bails’ list of them: “Sally O’Neil,” “Quicksilver,” “Jack and Jill,” “Samar,” “Z-11,” and “Zero.”

MAZOUJIAN: Yeah, I think I did “Sally O’Neil”; I’d forgotten about that. I don’t remember the others, except for “Samar,” which was a jungle character that I drew. I stopped doing those when I started doing Lady Luck.”

JA: In an early Spirit story, Eisner had a character named “Chuck Magoo.” Was that you?

MAZOUJIAN: Yes, that was me. I remember that! Some of the guys at Pratt had problems pronouncing my last name, so they started calling me “Magoo.” I mentioned that to Bill Eisner, who got a good laugh out of that, and one day he decided to use that name in a story.

JA: What do you remember about Bob Powell?

MAZOUJIAN: He wasn’t that good an artist. Powell was a big blowhard, as far as I was concerned. Bill apparently used him because he could sell whatever he was drawing.

JA: How about George Tuska?

MAZOUJIAN: Yes. He was a big, blond guy. He had kind-of a funnysounding voice, because he was hard of hearing. Of course, Chuck Cuidera worked for Eisner, too. He was always a nice, friendly guy.

JA: At Quality, Lou Fine was drawing “The Ray” and “Black Condor”….

MAZOUJIAN: Lou was excellent. He was a very good draftsman; he did a beautiful job. He was a very nice, easy-going guy, very bright and talkative. He had a tough time walking, because he’d had polio as a child. When we talked, it was mainly about drawing. I’d talk about the illustrations that were being published in the big magazines, The Saturday Evening Post, or Collier’s. We were fans of J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell. I loved Leyendecker as a kid, that very posterish style he had. He was out of this world, one of the best illustrators I know.

The Mazoujian-drawn “Zero, Ghost Detective” and the Tarzan wannabe feature “Samar” both debuted in Quality’s Feature Comics #32 (May 1940).

The above “Zero” page, supplied by Lee Boyett, is from the first “Zero” story. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

Chuck Mazoujian On Drawing Lady Luck And Others

43

MAZOUJIAN: I might’ve. Those are my initials; my name is Charles John Mazoujian. I do remember doing something for Timely Comics, but no details come to mind.

“We Want To Do A Lady Crimefighter” JA: When Eisner and Iger split up, you went with Eisner.

MAZOUJIAN: Yeah. Geez, they used to have arguments, and Bill got a little disgusted. Iger was trying to get his two cents in, trying to be a big shot, and thinking that he had something worthwhile to give to the field of comics. I think Bill just took it for granted and did whatever he wanted to do. Iger was a pain in the neck. He thought he had some talent, but I didn’t think he had any at all.

JA: The Spirit Section started after they split up. Who created Lady Luck?

MAZOUJIAN: I created Lady Luck. I think Bill came to me and said, “We want to do a lady crimefighter,” so I concocted the character based on Edna. Lady Luck wore a kelly green hat with a good-sized brim, and I put a cape on her with a shamrock on it. That’s all. I showed it to Eisner for approval, and he liked it.

JA: How was the writing done on Lady Luck?

MAZOUJIAN: I wrote the first two or three Lady Luck stories I drew, but after that, Bill asked a woman there named Toni Blum to write for

The character “Chuck Magoo,” named after Chuck Mazoujian, appeared in the Spirit story for Dec. 21, 1941. Thanks to Lee Boyett. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

JA: Eisner and Lou Fine worked together on a lot of covers. As I understand it, Eisner would do a rough breakdown, and Fine would do the actual drawing.

MAZOUJIAN: I don’t even know if Eisner did rough sketches that often; I think Lou usually did the whole thing right from the start. I think Bill gave him general ideas of what he wanted, but Lou usually did the drawing. Eisner and Fine used these Japanese bamboo brushes. I started using them myself; I liked the flexibility of them. You can get a thin line as well as a nice, heavy line with them, but they require a lot of control. Most of the other guys used regular brushes or pens. I did most of my work with a brush.

JA: You always inked your own pencils, right?

MAZOUJIAN: Yeah, I never inked anybody else’s work, but Bill inked some of my penciling occasionally.

JA: Did you have to get your pencils approved by Eisner before you inked them?

MAZOUJIAN: He would look at it, but he never made any criticisms.

He may have commented on some characters that needed some embellishment. Mainly, he left me alone. Alex Kotzky was there, though, when he was just a kid under Eisner’s wing. Bill would critique him much more.

JA: You did some work for a company called Novelty, and you signed the work “CJM.” Do you remember signing any work that way?

The climactic page of Lou Fine’s “Black Condor” story from Crack Comics #18 in 1941 was reprinted in 1972 in Superman #252—and is repro’d here from b&w Australian reprint pages sent by Shane Foley. See more art from this story on p.13. [©2005 DC Comics.]

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“I Was Doomed To Be An Artist”

Chuck’s cousin Art Pinajian drew (and even signed) “Reynolds of the Mounted” for Feature Comics #32 (May 1940) and the odd “Madam Fatal” feature in Crack Comics #5 (Sept. 1940). Thanks to Lee Boyett. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

me. I enjoyed writing Lady Luck, but I was spending a lot of time trying to do a good job on the drawing. I didn’t write any of the fillers you mentioned earlier. Toni was a lovely, talented woman, and a good writer. Her father, Alex Blum, worked for Eisner, too. He was a nice man, and he had some talent.

Most of Toni’s stories were pretty interesting, so I didn’t have any urge to change them. I wasn’t going to criticize a story as long as it was interesting and it worked. I was always happy with what she wrote, and Bill always looked over the scripts before they were drawn. Toni was good.

draftsman. He used to go to the Art Students League two or three nights a week to study figure drawing. He was very faithful about going, but he could never improve his work very much. He did some interesting, almost abstract drawings that I liked.

When we got together, we would talk about painting, art, and the guys whose work we loved: Norman Rockwell, Rembrandt, and the top illustrators of the day. Art loved painting, and that’s what he did later in his life. I got word that he had died about a year and a half ago.

JA: You said you were drafted in January of 1941? That’s early.

JA: Your cousin, Art Pinajian, also worked for the shop. He did a feature for Quality called “Madam Fatal,” about a male actor who fought crime while dressed as an elderly woman.

MAZOUJIAN: Yes. I was drafted about 11 months before America got into the war: January 31, 1941. I was at my uncle’s house in New Jersey planning my wedding when we got the news about Pearl Harbor. My cousin was trying to tell me that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, and I was saying, “What the hell are you trying to say? Don’t bother me!”

After we left there, I was returning to where I was stationed, riding the ferry from lower Manhattan to Fort Hancock, and I saw a guy reading a newspaper that said, “Pearl Harbor Bombed.” When I got back to the camp, they put me in a planning division for gun emplacements, just to give me some work to do.

MAZOUJIAN: Art worked there? I guess he could have been freelancing. He was a very bright, amusing guy, and he was a pretty good writer who could come up with nice ideas. He was a little older than me. We grew up together as kids, and I loved him; he was a marvelous man. Art was good with ideas, but he wasn’t a very good

I came out of the service in December of 1945. I didn’t want to go back to drawing comic books because I didn’t want that sort of life anymore. I wanted to get into illustration. That’s how I started working with Ogleby & Mather, as a freelance artist. I also started teaching at Pratt, from 1946 until 1962. I taught a day class and two night classes,

One of my classmates at Pratt, Bill Bossert, also worked at the shop with us. He was a very bright, funny, wonderful guy. He was one of the finest guys I ever knew; whatever he did was always interesting and amusing to me. Bill and Toni Blum dated, and eventually got married.

Bill was Christian and Toni was Jewish, but it didn’t make any difference to them.

Chuck Mazoujian On Drawing Lady Luck And Others

45

MAZOUJIAN: When I was 66. I figured I could get some health and social security benefits after I turned 65.

JA: What kind of art do you do now?

MAZOUJIAN: I do paintings. I’m a portrait painter, a landscape artist, I draw animals and scenes with beautiful horses. I’m an artist. I think in terms of pictures; everything to me is visual.

I have glass French doors leading out to a balcony, and I look out at the sunsets and make notations. I’ve painted three sunsets just from my notes. I get photographs of scenery, or horses, or horseback riders in profile views, and do paintings from them. I make up landscapes with horses in them, with trees, mountains, and nice, dramatic skies.

I’ve participated in two exhibitions here in Tucson, and I’m having a private show of my own in a couple of weeks. I still work because I have to; if I don’t work, I’m not living. Painting helps me to keep going.

JA: Well, I hope you keep going for a long, long time, Chuck.

MAZOUJIAN: I intend to. I’m in good shape and I still have a lot to do.

Alex Kotzky, mentioned by Chuck Mazoujian as “a kid under Eisner’s wing,” developed into the artist/co-creator of the long-running newspaper comic strip Apartment 3-G, as related in detail in A/E #34. In between, Kotzky often spelled Jack Cole on “Plastic Man”—including on this story, according to ace comics researcher Lee Boyett. This page is repro’d from one of the 1950s English boys’ annuals to which Busy Arnold apparently sold reprint rights to Quality material, and was sent by Roy’s buddies Roger Dicken & Wendy Hunt from the wilds of Wales. [©2005 DC Comics.]

and they paid me a very handsome amount of money. Five of my students ended up working at O&M, too. I liked teaching; it was a nice experience.

“I Still Have A Lot To Do” JA: While you were drawing comics, did you like doing them, or were you just waiting until you could move on to illustration?

MAZOUJIAN: I didn’t mind doing them. I got interested in it because of Lou Fine and a couple of other guys whose work was excellent. I couldn’t afford to be snooty and look down my nose at comics just because I considered myself to be an illustrator. As you know, I was also a member of The Society of Illustrators.

JA: You also did some illustrations for Coronet magazine in 1949.

MAZOUJIAN: Yes, I did some black-&-white pieces for Coronet, illustrating someone’s stories. There was no color in Coronet then.

JA: When did you retire?

This page appeared in Mazoujian’s fourth Lady Luck, in The Spirit Section #4 (June 23, 1940). Thanks to Lee Boyett. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

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“I Was Doomed To Be An Artist”

CHUCK MAZOUJIAN Checklist [NOTE: See p. 24 for explanation and key to this Checklist. Additions and corrections have been supplied by Hames Ware and by Chuck Mazoujian himself, and others are invited, either via Alter Ego or directly to Jerry. Key: (a) = full art; (p) pencils only; (i) = inking only; (w) = writer; (d) = daily comic strip; (S) = Sunday comic strip.]

Full Name: Charles John Mazoujian [b. 1915] (artist, occasional writer)

Syndication Credits: Lady Luck (S) (a) 1940-41

Nickname: Chuck

Comics Shop: Eisner & Iger Studio (a) 1939

Pen Name: C.J.M. (at Timely)

Comics Reprints: Lady Luck (a/some w) 1980 graphic album reprint; Lady Luck (a)(some w) 1983 reprint

Cousin: Art Pinajian Member: Society of Illustrators

COMIC BOOK CREDITS

Book Illustrations: Story of the Marines (1951), The Barbary Pirates (1953).

Fiction House Comics: Capt. Terry Thunder (i) 1941

Magazine Illustrations: Coronet (1949), Life (no date) Teacher: Pratt Institute

Quality Comics: Jack and Jill (a) 1941; Quicksilver (a) 1940; Sally O’Neil (a) 1939-41; Samar (a) 1940; Z-11 (a) 1941; Zero, Ghost Detective (a) 1940

Honors: Watercolor Prize at National Museum of Art; won nationwide Soldiers’ Art Contents

Timely/Marvel: Marvel Mystery Comics (a) 1940

We’ll close with a pair of Chuck Mazoujian artworks from different periods.

(Left:) An illustration done for Coronet magazine in 1949; he signed it below the baby carriage. (Right:) The fourth and final page of the Lady Luck feature from The Spirit Section for July 28, 1940. For the former, thanks again to Lee Boyett—and to Lee’s pal John Evans, who helped him get the best repro possible for many images printed with Chuck’s interview. [Coronet illo ©2005 the respective copyright holders; Lady Luck art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

Novelty/Curtis: miscellaneous (a/some w) 1941

47

“I’ve Always Liked Working” Artist VERN HENKEL On His Days At Quality, Timely/Marvel, And Elsewhere Interview Conducted & Transcribed by Jim Amash Vern Henkel in 1950 (at top left) and at the turn of the 21st century.

The older photo is from the front page of a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Sunday newspaper, dated Dec. 10, 1950. It and a photo of his friend and fellow artist Allen Ulmer appeared above the headline “Lancaster-Born Comic-Book Artists Find Product Losing Villain Role.”

The gist of the article was that comics appeared to be weathering the storm of controversy that had recently erupted concerning crime comics and the like—but of course Seduction of the Innocent and the Kefauver Subcommittee were still a few years in the future. The worst was yet to come! Courtesy of Vern Henkel.

York, which was publisher Busy Arnold’s first office. I had been working for Quality for a year when I received a letter from Frank Markey of the same address informing me that he thought my feature had newspaper syndicate possibilities and he wanted me to come to New York and meet him. I had never been up there before.

V

ern Henkel was an early contributor to Quality Comics. He had a clean, consistent drawing style, adaptable to any subject matter, and he wrote fun adventure stories, too. Publisher Busy Arnold’s unique treatment of Henkel, recounted below, speaks volumes of the esteem in which he was held.

Henkel also spent a fair amount of time at Timely Comics, where he fought crime and war at his drawing board. Later on, he hooked up with a famous comedian for a series of coloring books. “Fun” is a good description of what awaited anyone who ever read a Vern Henkel story. —Jim.

“[Busy Arnold] Wanted A Bunch Of Work From Me” JIM AMASH: I’ll start off with the basic questions, like when and where were you born? And how did you get your start in comic books?

VERN HENKEL: I was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where I still live, November 27, 1917. I remember seeing comic books as a kid in high school. I used to go down to the corner store and buy them.

Famous Funnies was one of the comics I bought. I liked all the comic books that were coming out. I used to copy the Sunday comics while drawing on the floor and started drawing around five.

In high school, my first published work was “Heroes of History” for Golden Fleece magazine, which was published in Chicago. It ran for about seven issues, and it got me going. This gave me the idea that I could do comics, and I started creating my own series. “Gallant Knight” was the first one I created, and Quality Comics was the publisher. That’s where I started my comic book career, in 1937.

Quality Comics was at 369 Lexington Avenue in New

I didn’t know that I was stepping into the middle of a reorganization. Busy Arnold had something going with McNaught Syndicate and I thought I’d meet McNaught, but I was steered away from him. Arnold wined and dined me at the Hotel Commodore and told me about this new comic book he was starting, so I began working directly for him. I even signed a year contract. As I dined, I noticed that the emblem on the bottle of the good Pilsner beer I was drinking was a pasteover. It read: “Made in Pilsen, Germany.” I peeled it off to see the original label, which read: “Made in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia.” Later, when I was on the train back to Lancaster, it dawned on me that I never did meet the guy who invited me up there. Just as the label on that bottle of beer had been switched, so had my meeting, and I would be working for the next eight years for the Quality Comics Group. [laughs] Talk about being wet behind the ears!

Vern says this is his “first published page”—a pen-&-ink drawing done during his senior year at Lancaster (PA) Boys’ High School in 1937—and, amazingly, published in the pulp magazine Golden Fleece, where he shared space with the likes of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan!

“Vernon Henkel” started out already pretty good, by our lights. Sorry for the curvature and darkness of the art at left, but it’s well-nigh impossible to photocopy a full copy of a page from a pulp without damaging its spine. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

JA: How did you get the “Gallant Knight” job?

HENKEL: I just starting drawing it and mailing the work to New York. It was like a syndicated feature, because it was published in several English-speaking countries. I

48

Artist Vern Hankel On His Days At Quality, Timely/Marvel, And Elsewhere

did the feature from 1937 to 1939.

Then I created other features, like “Chic Carter,” who was a reporter.

JA: Did you have much contact with Arnold before you met him?

HENKEL: Not too much, because I dealt with Ed Cronin, who was his editor. I liked Cronin, who was always smoking cigars. He was a very nervous guy. [laughs] So was George Brenner, who was doing some editing there. When he was drawing, he’d almost have to pin his thumb down so his hand wouldn’t move. I thought, “This guy could draw like that?” He was doing “The Clock” at the time.

I really didn’t get to know the people there because I always worked through the mail. Once, I went up there to learn how to ink with a brush because I’d been inking with a pen like all the newspaper artists of the time.

Everybody did pen work in the early years; all the syndicated artists did. But then Lou Fine and guys like that came in, and they were very prolific with the brush, doing great thick and thin lines. It was a much faster way to work.

character say, “Oh, a union guy!” and another character started piling away at him. I had to change that, and I never thought about things like that. Sometimes I tried to write stories around things I read in the newspapers.

That’s where I got my ideas.

Sometimes I just wrote and drew them and mailed them in.

That only lasted about two years, and then Arnold started sending me scripts. I’d have about seven or eight of them piled up at one time.

JA: Why did you stop writing?

HENKEL: It was hard to do both; I was pressed for time.

JA: Maybe Arnold thought you were more valuable as an artist than as a writer?

HENKEL: Apparently.

JA: Do you remember how much you were paid for writing scripts?

HENKEL: About $30 for an 8page story. I always got paid by the page.

JA: You always inked your own One summer, Arnold put me up The artist’s very first comics sale, featuring his hero “Gallant Knight,” appeared work? in Feature Funnies #7 (April 1938). Above is a “Gallant Knight” page sent by in a suite of rooms at Hotel 10 on Vern from one of his dog-eared vintage issues; issue number uncertain.

Park Avenue. It was really HENKEL: Yes. At first, I even In a separate note, Vern writes that he had mailed that first “Gallant Knight” something. The doorman wore did my own lettering. They had a story “to the editor of Feature Funnies. A return check from Everett M. Arnold white gloves and would salute me letterer on staff, Martin DeMuth, caused me to turn handsprings.

I was on my way as a freelance artist in the when I came in. [laughs] I set a who took over my lettering. He phenomenal first years of the comic book industry.”

[Art ©2005 the respective higher level for myself and was used to go down to Mexico every copyright holders.] looking at magazines like The year and paint on his vacations.

Saturday Evening Post and When I was at the offices, he used to play records of Mexican music, and Collier’s, and that spurred me on to do good work. language lessons. I liked him very much. He was an older man... everyone seemed older to me back then.

JA: What can you tell me about Busy Arnold?

HENKEL: There’s not much to tell. There was a guy up there, Henry Martin, who actually got the company going by reprinting newspaper strips. He came from Des Moines.

Arnold was wonderful to work for. He was very generous. He’d start you at $5 a page, then 10, 12, and up to $20 a page during the time I worked for him. He’d give big bonuses, like $500, every Christmas. One year, I got a thousand-dollar bonus. That was money! This was the Depression!

“We Had A Lot Of Fun” JA: Gill Fox, who took over for Ed Cronin, told me that you wrote your own features. He told me that Arnold hired the artists and writers, not him. Since you didn’t live in New York, how did you deal with getting stories and art approved?

HENKEL: Arnold did all the hiring. At first, I’d mail finished scripts up there. Sometimes he made small alterations and told me what I could and couldn’t do. Like, I couldn’t attack unions. I did a story and had a

When I got to New York, Arnold discovered I was just a kid. He thought I was a history professor because I drew those stories about knights and got the armor right. [mutual laughter] I fit the role now.

I’m an old codger now. We had a lot of fun.

“I’d Come Up With An Idea And Just Mail It In” JA: While you were learning how to ink with a brush in New York, did you get to meet Jack Cole?

HENKEL: Yes. He did “Plastic Man.” I didn’t get to know him, but we were friendly. I didn’t socialize much. Arnold didn’t have much of a staff in those days. When Quality moved out to Stamford, Connecticut, I used to deliver work there by train. Sometimes I mailed my work in. I visited the offices every three months or so. If there were any changes, they’d have me come up.

There was a time when Alex Kotzky inked my work. He was just a kid then. When I had too much to do, he inked some of my work.

JA: You did a lot of features for Arnold: “Abdul the Arab,” “Captain

“I’ve Always Liked Working”

49

“You Need Three Names To Be Famous And I Don’t Have A Middle Name” JA: Did you serve in World War II?

(Left:) Henkel’s “Chic Carter, Ace Reporter” started out in Quality’s Smash Comics #1 (Aug. 1939). In 1943 he would become “Chic Carter, Police Reporter” in the pages of National Comics. Originally Vern wrote the strip as well as drew it.

(Right:) In between, with super-heroes all the rage when Police Comics #1 debuted for Aug. 1941, Chic did time as a costumed swordsman. According to Jerry Bails’ Who’s Who, Henkel handled the art chores clear through the character’s demise in National Comics in 1945. [Both pages ©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

HENKEL: No. I was 4-F. There was a time when I was in line to take over The Spirit, but it never came about. I remember one time being in an elevator with Will Eisner, and he had his pages with him. I said, “You did all that in a week? That’s a lot of work.”

JA: Yes, but he did have assistants. Are there any writers you remember from

Fortune,” “Comet Kelly,” “Wings Wendall,” among others. Did you create these features?

the Quality days?

HENKEL: Yes. I’d come up with an idea and just mail it in. They’d say, “Let’s try that.” Sometimes I’d just draw a feature up and send it in and they’d print it.

HENKEL: Manly Wade Wellman is one that I remember. He was good.

I talked to him briefly when I worked in the office. One time, we went down in an elevator together...I met a lot of people in elevators.... and he had a circle of smoke around his face and said, “I think I’ll disappear for a while.” [mutual laughter] My God, he was living this stuff!

JA: That’s so unusual. Arnold normally kept a tighter rein than that on his creative help. He must have had a lot of confidence in you in order to take a new series on cold like that.

HENKEL: He must have.

JA: Did you talk to him on the phone very often?

HENKEL: Not often. We wrote letters. I had all that correspondence, but some guy from Reading, Pennsylvania, visited me once and bought it all. I don’t remember his name, though, but I wished I’d saved that stuff. [NOTE: Hey! That sounds like Jim Steranko, when he was writing his History of Comics. —Jim.] JA: I wish you did, too. It’d been great to read the letters. You didn’t do much super-hero stuff for Quality.

JA: I met Wellman a few times. Every time I did, he was smoking, and the cigarette was never in his mouth. It teetered at the edge of his mouth, stuck to his lower lip, and I could never figure out how it stayed there without falling.

HENKEL: I remember that! He talked like Humphrey Bogart, with the cigarette hanging from his lip. He must have had glued it on there. [laughs] It never touched the top lip at all. Is he still alive?

JA: No, he passed away around the mid-1980s. He drank a lot in his day, and I think it caused him problems later on. He was a diabetic, and they ended up having to take off both his legs. But from what I heard, he was feisty right up until the end.

HENKEL: They didn’t interest me.

I was more into adventure stories, like those in the movies. I liked realism.

JA: You also liked to draw airplanes. You did a lot of aviation stories.

HENKEL: I liked to draw airplanes...anything exciting.

JA: Was the fact that you knew war was coming have anything to do with it? You must have known that war was coming.

HENKEL: Oh yes, even in high school, I saw that a world war was coming.

“Abdul the Arab” and “Dusty Dane” were two exotic features Henkel drew for Quality, running in Smash and Feature, respectively. V.H. supplied these pages. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

50

Artist Vern Hankel On His Days At Quality, Timely/Marvel, And Elsewhere

A pair of pages of Henkel’s “Captain Fortune,” who buckled swashes in Feature starting with #25 (Oct. 1939). Feature Funnies had become Feature Comics with issue #21. Vern supplied the earliest page, at left. Thanks to Roger Dicken & Wendy Hunt for the later page, repro’d from a black-&-white British boys’ annual of some decades back. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

HENKEL: Well, he had to be like that, considering the kind of material he wrote. I was always fascinated by his name. You need three names to be famous and I don’t have a middle name. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t a success. [laughs] JA: Well, I’ll argue that with you, because you were a success and your work was popular. You worked for Arnold until 1946. Why did you leave Quality?

HENKEL: Lots of reasons. A death in the family...personal reasons. I got into commercial art in 1946. I wanted to expand and see what I could do in the commercial art field. I worked on staff at advertising agencies and learned a lot of things and then went freelance. It paid better than comics. It was hectic, but you knew where your bread and butter was going to be. In comics, books fell apart a couple of times and that was not a good inducement to stay in the field. I never knew when the rug was going to be pulled out from under me.

I’d be out of work for a while and make the rounds and it was the same story all over: they weren’t buying. I went through a couple of periods like that. Comics would sell like crazy and then drop off.

“Crime Does Pay”

that book. I did work in almost every title Stan had except super-hero. I even did a couple of romance stories, but that wasn’t my forte. I liked adventure.

JA: Did you ever meet Charlie Biro, who was the editor at Lev Gleason?

HENKEL: No, I never did, but I know he was a kingpin.

JA: Tell me about Allen Ulmer, because I don’t know much about him.

HENKEL: He was a great guy and quite an artist, though he never wrote. His work was beautifully tight, top quality. He worked for Holyoke for quite a while. He got me some work for them, too. For years, he drew for them. Allen died of cancer about 14 years ago.

I did a whole book for Victor Fox in 1949, and that was a bad thing.

He went across state lines and published it and didn’t pay me for it. He was a conniver; he got me for about a thousand dollars. I remember going down to Foley Square in New York, where they had bankruptcy proceedings against Fox, but I didn’t get anything out of it. I put in a claim, but taxes took all his money. Fox opened up again somewhere in Connecticut.

JA: In 1946, you did some Crime Does Not Pay stories for Lev Gleason. Was that through the mail, too?

The book I did for him was Last of the Mohicans. I wish I had a copy of it. I think I did that when Timely didn’t have any work for me. I went around looking for work and he stung me.

HENKEL: I think so, yeah. I didn’t do many, just a few. My friend Allen Ulmer, who had lived in Lancaster, kept up with the field and would tell me what was going on. I’d go to those places and get jobs.

Later, Timely came out with All True Crime and I did some stories for

JA: According to Jerry Bails’ Who’s Who, you did a crime comic for Fox, but I guess that’s inaccurate information.

“I’ve Always Liked Working” HENKEL: It is. The crime was that I didn’t get paid. [mutual laughter] I’d like to draw a comic book about Fox: Crime Does Pay! [laughs]

it memorized or I’d never have got it drawn in time.

JA: That book was based on a radio show, which I have copies of. Were you familiar with the show before you did the book?

JA: Charlie Biro would have loved you for that!

HENKEL: Yes, he would have.

HENKEL: Yes, I was. It was a CBS show that Timely got the rights to. I was happy to get the job, but Stan wanted me to draw three stories at one time. They were in a big hurry to get this book on the stands. Then I got sick and passed out in a restaurant. A waitress had to revive me with cold ice pressed to the back of my neck. I had strep throat. I was going at it too hard, trying to be a Superman at the drawing board.

“Stan Wanted Me To Draw Three Stories At One Time” JA: Tell me about Timely Comics.

HENKEL: I liked Stan Lee. One time, he almost choked me to death describing how to grab a guy by the neck. I loved that! He said, “You don’t have enough guts in this!

Do it this way!” He grabbed me from the back and pulled me down. He was great.

Stan was the one who hired me as a staffer when Timely was in the Empire State Building. I went around with my pages, looking for work, and Stan immediately grabbed me.

JA: Since you’d been in the business for some time, I wonder if Stan knew who you were?

51

JA: How fast an artist were you?

“Wings Wendall” was an aviator hero Henkel created for Smash Comics #1 (Aug. 1939). Later, according to Howard Keltner’s invaluable Golden Age Comic Books Index 1935-1955 (Revised Edition, 1998), he wore a costume of sorts, but never had a secret identity. He fought the good fight through Smash #37 (Nov. 1942). [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

HENKEL: No, I just walked in cold with my work. I had copies of the books my work was printed in. And I was always trying to create new features. I always had published and unpublished pages to show.

I started working for Stan around 1946 and stayed there until around 1954. I did a lot of work. Casey, Crime Photographer was one of the books I did, but it killed me to draw that camera press all the time. I had

HENKEL: Not that fast, because I researched a lot of my work. I used a lot of swipes to make things look authentic. I was not Joe Maneely, whom I admired so much! He had it all in his head—a photographic mind—and he was great. I didn’t have that ability.

JA: When you did Casey, did you have much photographic reference to work from? The second issue used a photo of Casey actor Staats Cotsworth on the cover.

HENKEL: I didn’t have any reference for the actors. I used a stock character face for Casey—one that I could repeatedly use throughout the stories. I also did Rocky Jorden - Private Eye, which I think may have been based on the radio show, too. [NOTE: The radio series Rocky

In late 1941, Wings Wendall battled a villain called “The Red Menace” (not identified as a Communist) over the course of Smash Comics #30-32 (Jan.March 1942). Issue #31 features what an unknown benefactor believes is “the first atomic bomb in a comic book. This is even before Pearl Harbor and WWII! The Feb. 1942 issue would have been on the stands in Dec. 1941.” We’ve reprinted the first two pages for your edification.

Fortunately, at story’s end, Wings blew up the Menace’s stockpile of A-bombs!

(See p. xx) Incidentally, we referred to an “unknown benefactor” because, though he wrote copious notes with the photocopies he sent to A/E a year or three ago, he neglected to sign his name! But he knows who he is—and hopefully he’ll let us know! [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

52

Artist Vern Hankel On His Days At Quality, Timely/Marvel, And Elsewhere Jordan (with an “a”) was about an American running a café in Cairo, Egypt. I’ve never seen the comic book version and cannot say for sure if it was based on the radio series or not. —Jim.] JA: I have you listed in Jerry Bails’ Who’s Who as doing Kid Colt, which was a Western feature.

HENKEL: I didn’t do any Westerns except for something Allan Ulmer and I did. We did the last few pages of a Lone Ranger book, but there were so many middle-men involved with that, slicing up the page rate, that it didn’t really pay. I did that for Dell, but we dropped it almost as soon as we got in on it. It was such a popular feature that everyone wanted in on it.

JA: How did Ulmer and you divide up the work since you could both pencil and ink?

HENKEL: I think Al penciled it and I inked. That was about 1954 or ’55.

JA: Okay. Now, when you worked for Stan, do you remember other editors besides him?

HENKEL: Stan had a few of them, but everything went through his hands. Stan checked all the pages. When I was working on staff, we’d take the pages at the end of the day to Stan’s office and he’d check them out. I remember that Don Rico and Al Sulman did editorial work, too, but I don’t remember anything about them.

“Joe [Maneely] Had Drawn Three Pages To My One” JA: Tell me about Joe Maneely.

While Henkel wasn’t the original artist of “The Sniper” series that began in Military Comics #5 (Dec. 1941), he drew the series from 1942-44. Ted Udall, who was later an editor at All-American, was the original writer, according to Jerry Bails. Photocopies supplied by V.H. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

HENKEL: He was on staff during the year or so that I was a staffer, which was around 1951. Joe heard I was working there because he kept hearing the name “Henkel.” Joe worked in another room and came over to me and introduced himself. He was just a kid, but what talent! He said, “I grew up admiring your work.” Joe had grown up reading my work at Quality and wanted to become an artist and do likewise. I inspired him.

He was a fun-loving Irishman. A nice guy. I got to know his wife and family and we became very close. Maneely, Al Ulmer, Al Lockwood (a former Timely staffer), and I had a studio together for a couple of years, though Joe only stayed for about six months. I’d finish a page and look over at Joe, who’d drawn three pages to my one. I kept thinking, “He’s making three times as much money as I am!” And he was doing a lot of covers, too. He did great work. We also did film strips. Constantine (Connie) Elliot worked in the studio, too.

We called the studio “Film Media.”

(Left:) “The Whistler” appeared in seven issues of Quality’s National Comics, commencing with #47 (April 1945), with Vern as artist.

Supplied by V.H. (Right:) Collector Lee Boyett has ID’d this “T-Man” splash as Henkel’s work. [Both pages ©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

“I’ve Always Liked Working” Maneely penciled with a very delicate, light line, and he did all his corrections and drawing with his inks. His pencils were just a guide. Joe inked with a crow quill pen first and then finished up with a brush to punch up the shading. He had a little bit of the Caniff flavor in his brush work.

dream about it and wake up hoping it was all a dream.

Tragedies like that get to you. I can’t look at the tapes of it anymore.

JA: I understand how you feel. Do you remember any of the writers at Timely?

I was at his house a few days before Joe died. His wife called me the day after he died and told me about it. What a tragedy! He was coming back from New York with work when it happened.

[NOTE: For the life and too-brief career of the great Joe Maneely, grab hold of a copy of Alter Ego #29. —Jim.]

HENKEL: Not really, though I would see their names on the scripts at times. Timely also hired storyboard artists from California to do comics. They were very good and fast and effective at doing comic books.

Some writers came from there, too.

I worked on staff for Stan Lee for about a year, before he laid off the entire staff. Then he hired back whom he wanted. That was right after the Korean War, before I started drawing all those war comics.

JA: Al Lockwood’s a new name for me.

Who was he?

53

“A Lot Of Faces Come To Mind” JA: What was it like to work on staff at Timely?

(Above:) Allen Ulmer's cover for Cowpuncher #1, a 1947 comic from Avon Periodicals. Thanks to Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.] (Top right:) Faded photo of Ulmer from the 1950 newspaper article mentioned on p. 45.

HENKEL: I met Al the same time I met Stan Lee. We were both hired the same day. Stan always called me “Al” and always called Al “Vern.” [laughs] That’s a funny one. I haven’t seen Stan in years, but I’d love to. Maybe he’d remember how he’d mix up our names.

Al was a tall drink of water and lanky. We didn’t look alike at all, but Stan always got us mixed up. Al drew romance comics.

HENKEL: I enjoyed it. We had a lively crew. One day, a group of us had a drink on the lower floor, then went outside and looked up in the air. We knew we’d get a crowd around us and the next thing you knew, there’d be a group of forty people gathered around us, looking up, trying to figure out what we were looking at. [laughter] We’d always do stuff like that—testing human nature.

I knew a lot of people, but I can’t remember their names now. A lot of faces come to mind, though. Carl Burgos was one of the guys in our crowd. I do remember Bob Stuart, who was a Rebel. He came from Georgia. We were friends and he inked some of my work. A lot of guys used to imitate his Southern accent. We had a lot of fun.

JA: Did you like doing war comics?

I remember Chris Rule, Morrie Kuramoto, Fred Eng, Mario Acquaviva, Dave Gantz, Gene Colan, Al Jaffee, and Syd Shores, who did good work. I don’t remember much about their personalities after all this time, though.

HENKEL: I did at first, but they got to me. I’d have nightmares about the enemy trying to get to me with bayonets, tanks, and planes. I enjoyed it, but it got to me. It’s like 9/11. You

Timely Treasures Dr. Michael J. Vassallo kindly provided this trio of Timely pages drawn by Vern Henkel. From right to left, they’re from: Casey, Crime Photographer #3 (Dec. 1949)—Sports Action #8 (Aug. 1951)—and Space Squadron #5 (Feb. 1952). [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

54

Artist Vern Hankel On His Days At Quality, Timely/Marvel, And Elsewhere You had to be clever and you had to be shrewd in order to survive in that field.

It was so competitive. Every time something new came out from one company, there’d suddenly be twenty new titles just like it.

JA: Why did you quit doing comic books?

HENKEL: I got tired of it, especially doing all those Korean War books. They Vern Henkel (left) with legendary comedian wore me down. I was a little Red Skelton at a press conference in 1976, perturbed about the held in conjunction with the giant Clown business. The main thing was Alley coloring book they had produced the lack of security, and I together. Thanks to V.H., and to Jim Amash didn’t think there was a real & Teresa R. Davidson for the scan. future in staying. The deadlines didn’t help, either. You know, working until three or four in the morning all the time is tough. I have to do a little of that now, but not often.

After I left my staff job, I continued to freelance for Timely. Once I was out of comics, I did all kinds of things. I did advertising work, film strips, coloring books... whatever kept me at the drawing board kept me happy. I also painted.

“Red Skelton… Was Awesome, Intimidating” JA: Before we began taping, you mentioned working with Red Skelton. I’d like to hear about it.

A page from the Timely mag Rocky Jorden – Private Eye, provided by its artist, Vern Henkel. The original title of the comics series had been simply Private Eye, but the licensed radio hero (or at least a character with basically the same name) appeared in issues #6-8 in 1951-52. In separate notes he sent us, Vern says that at that time he worked in “a studio room on E. 32nd Street” in New York City. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

HENKEL: We did three coloring books: one on ducks, one on elephants. These were things he created while on his way from Palm Springs to his studio in California. Red would write and draw, and he

JA: Well, I doubt you’ve thought much about this since then.

HENKEL: No, not a whole lot. There were so many people and so many genres! We had quite a group and we were really turning those pages out. We had a couple of rooms where the artists worked...there must have been about thirty artists working there. The drawing boards were lined up like desks in school. I enjoyed the camaraderie, but there was more freedom once I was on my own again as a freelancer.

JA: Could Stan be a tough boss?

HENKEL: He was likable and we got along well. He was related to publisher Martin Goodman, whom I didn’t really know. He left everything up to Stan. Stan also did a lot of writing, but I don’t think I was drawing his work. Stan was more of an editor than a writer, but he did his share of writing.

JA: Goodman had a lot of different company names. Do you remember what it said on your paycheck? Did it say Timely? Or Magazine Management?

HENKEL: It probably did. I’m not sure. I know he had several companies and different banks. I think each check had a different company name on it, depending on what comic book you were working on. But I’m not sure after all this time.

Vern says he got awfully tired of drawing Korean War stories. The date and title of this splash-page specimen he sent us are uncertain. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I’ve Always Liked Working”

55 hadn’t, I’d have gotten to meet Wayne. That would have been a good one. Talk about awesome!

I’d have really been intimidated.

I’d have had to wear six-guns and a ten-gallon hat.

All the giants are gone now.

dumped all this stuff on me in order to create a book. This was in the early 1970s.

At the time, I was freelancing for Sperry, Incorporated, and was tapped for this job. The publisher got Red Skelton in on it. Skelton came to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for a promotion, and we met at a reception party. He gave me all the material and I did the editing, writing and drawing. I just modified what Red wrote.

Red said, “I’m no artist. I’m not like you.”

I do some painting, when I feel like it.

Some are for presents, others are commissions.

JA: What keeps you working?

HENKEL: The desire to work. I’ve always liked working. I like to keep active.

JA: What was Red like?

HENKEL: I liked him, but to me, he was awesome, intimidating. I got along easier with Emmett Kelly. Red was on a pedestal.

He was serious and funny—a very decisive person. He put on a show here and it was quite good. I enjoyed him.

The book I did with Emmett Kelly detailed his life. He had started with the idea of doing it as a comic strip, but the project evolved into a book.

We were negotiating a deal to do a book on John Wayne’s life, but it fell through. If it

JA: I know that because you were mowing the lawn when I first called.

A pair of photos that accompanied an article in the Lancaster (PA) Intelligence Journal for Dec. 24, 1982. The caption for the former reads: “Artist Vernon Henkel puts the finishing touches on one of his popular paintings of sailing ships. Henkel will instruct at the Lancaster County Art Association.” Sandwiched between them is the finale of the “Wings Wendall” story from Smash Comics #31 whose first two pages were seen on p. 49. [Art ©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

HENKEL: I also like swimming and golfing. I go a few times a week to a club and swim. I tried to get a party going for the World Series, but couldn’t find any takers. I’m just like I was fifty years ago...all you need is beer and pretzels. I’ll crack a cold one when the game comes on.

VERN HENKEL Checklist [NOTE: See p. 24 for information on sources and key to abbreviations. Some additional data below has been provided by Henkel, via Jim Amash.]

Full Name: Vernon Henkel [b. 1917] (artist, writer)

Fox Comics: The Last of the Mohicans (a) 1950

Pen Names: Vern; S.L. Henkel (a joint credit with Stan Lee?)

Harvey Comics: miscellaneous features (a) 1941

Education: Washington School of Art; Art Students League

Lev Gleason: Crime Does Not Pay (a) 1946

Influences: Hal Foster

Magazine Enterprises: Keen Teens (a) 1947; misc. features (a) 1947

Illustrator: Advertising, 1960+

Marvel/Timely & related: All True Crime (a) 1950-52; Battle Action (a) 1952-53; Battlefield (a) 1952-53; Battlefront (a) 1953; Battle (p) 1952-53; Casey, Crime Photographer (p) 1949-50; Combat (a) 1952; Crime Cases Comics (a) 1951; Crime Exposed (a) 1951-52; Justice Comics (a) 1952-53; Kent Blake of the Secret Service (a) 1952; Man Comics (a) 1950-52; Marvel Tales (a) 1950-51; Men in Action (a) 1952; Men’s Adventures (a) 1952; Mystic (a) 1952-53; Rocky Jordan (a) 195152, in Private Eye; romance (a) c. 1950; Space Squadron (backup features) (a) 1952; Sports Action (a) 1952; Spy Cases (a) 1952; Spy Fighters (a) 1952; Strange Tales (a) 1954; Suspense (a) 1952; Uncanny Tales (a) 1953; War Action (a) 1952; War Adventures (a) 1952; War Comics (a) 1953; Young Men (a) 1951-53

Gag cartoons, as writer and artist: various periodicals Co-owner & Designer: Film Media: Educational film strips and industrial slides [partner = Al Lockwood] 1953-55 Creator: Abdul the Arab; Captain Fortune; Comet Kelly; Chic Carter; Gallant Knight; Wings Wendall Overseas Comics: Gallant Knight (w/a) 1938-39; see the same feature in Quality Comics, USA Notes on Comics: wrote his own comics in the 1930s Comics Reprints: Skywolf (i) (Eclipse) 1985 COMIC BOOK CREDITS (Mainstream US): DC Comics & related: Crusades (w/a) 1938 Dell Publications & related: Lone Ranger (i) c. 1955 (over Al Ulmer’s pencils)

Quality Comics: Abdul the Arab (w/a) 1939; Captain Fortune (w/a) 1939-40; Chic Carter (w/a) 1939-45; Comet Kelly (w/a) 1942; Don Q (w/a) 1941-42; Dusty Dane (w/a) 1940-41; Gallant Knight (w/a) 193839; The Sniper (a) early 1940s; Space Legion (w/a) 1940-41; Swing Sisson (w/a) 1943-46; Whistler (w/a) 1945; Wings Wendall (w/a) 1939-42; Yankee Eagle (w/a) 1943

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Collected for the first time as a trade paperback!

Roy Thomas and Ron Harris present their classic 1986 tribute to the Golden Age of Comics!

Full-color - 128 pages - $17.95 ISBN 0-929729-02-1 Can’t find it? Order it from:

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt

NOTE: Text to this month’s “Comic Crypt” follows this story, on page 63.

The Wonder Of It All!

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The Wonder Of It All!

The Wonder Of It All! (A brief history of Will Eisner’s Wonder Man!)

by Michael T. Gilbert Will Eisner was rightfully praised for innovative work on his syndicated hero, The Spirit, as well as for ground-breaking instructional comics for the military. Late in life, he repeated his success with a series of award-winning graphic novels. But, equally importantly, Eisner was also a pioneer in the earliest days of comic books.

In 1937, he and Jerry Iger formed the Eisner & Iger Studio, one of the first shops to package comic books for various publishers. Eisner, the creative half of the team, led a team of writers and artists as they produced entire comic books on a tight deadline. In the process, Eisner’s produced with helping create Blackhawk, Sheena, Doll Man, and other four-color icons. He’s also credited (or discredited!) with creating the very first Superman knock-off—Wonder Man! Publisher Victor S. Fox, one of the sleazier publishers of the freewheeling Golden Age, hired Eisner to create the character in 1939. Fox decided to publish comics when he learned about Action Comics’ redhot sales figures. As related in Ron Goulart’s Great History of Comic Books, Fox approached 22-year-old Eisner with a proposition:

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“‘Cover dated’ May 1939 means that Wonder Comics #1 actually appeared in March 1939.

DC obtained a preliminary injunction (a legal procedure to order the stopping of an act in order to prevent ‘irreparable harm’) on March 16, followed by a permanent injunction hearing on April 6, which quashed there ever being a second appearance of Wonder Man. As produced, Wonder Comics #2 contained no Wonder Man, Eisner related his encounter with Victor Fox—excuse but Yarko the us, Vincent Reynard—in his 1986 graphic novel The Great.”

Dreamer. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

“Fox, according to Eisner, had in mind a comic book that would star a character to be called Wonder Man. The new hero was to have a red costume, and the rest of the ‘specifications were almost identical to Superman,’ Eisner says. ‘We knew it was very much like Superman, that it was imitative, but we had no idea of its legal implications.’”

Cover-dated May 1939, Wonder Comics #1 came out almost simultaneously with Batman’s debut in Detective Comics #27—a mere eleven months after Superman’s introduction in Action Comics #1 (June 1938). Eisner wrote and drew Wonder Man’s first 14-page adventure, using the pen-name “Willis.”

Endowed with super-strength, rocksolid skin, and the power to leap great distances, Wonder Man bore an uncanny resemblance to Superman. At least that’s what DC claimed. They sued Fox, accusing his company of stealing their idea.

Comic historian Jon Berk describes what happened next: “Detective Comics, Inc. was not amused. Problem was that this was 1939, and no one else but Superman had this particular shtick. ‘Imitation,’ it is said, ‘is the highest form of flattery.’ However, in the cutthroat competition of funny books, imitation, flattering or not, was viewed as a monetary threat. Accordingly, Detective Comics, Inc. moved quickly.

In this 4-panel sequence from The Dreamer, we see thinly-disguised versions of Eisner, Iger, and Fox. [©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

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On April 7, 1939, the court decided that “there has been unfair use by [Fox] of [DC’s] copyrighted pictures and unfair paraphrase of [DC’s] text accompanying its pictures.”

During the trial, Victor Fox told Will Eisner to testify that Wonder Man wasn’t based on Superman. Mikel Norwitz describes Eisner’s difficult position on his Wonder Man web page, with information gleaned from Ron Goulart’s book.

“He [DC publisher Harry Donenfeld] hit Fox real hard,” according to Eisner, “and right away.” Fox, who was publishing Wonder Comics out of the same office building as DC, was slapped with a copyright infringement lawsuit. The case didn’t get to court— the Federal District Court in New York City—until 1940. Fox dropped the character after one issue (not risking a second appearance) but continued to fight the lawsuit, and replaced Wonder Man with Yarko the Great, still using the services of the Eisner-Iger Studio.

“Trouble arose between the Studio and Fox, however, when the lawsuit came to trial and Eisner truthfully testified that Fox had instructed him to copy Superman, thus causing the judge to rule in favor of DC Comics. In retribution, Fox refused to pay Eisner for any of the work the shop had done for him, causing Eisner to lose the then-enormous sum of $3,000.”

That effectively killed Wonder Man, and laid the groundwork for DC’s later legal battles against Fawcett and their super-guy, Captain Marvel. Will told the story in his 1986 graphic novel The Dreamer, with names altered to protect the guilty.

Wonder Comics had one more issue under that title, featuring Yarko the Great, before changing its title to Wonderworld. That title ended with issue #33 in January 1942.

Was this the end of the Wonder Man saga? Not quite.

Wonder Man’s debut came about a year after Superman’s in Action Comics #1, and “almost simultaneously” with that of Batman in Detective Comics #27.

But both the Man of Tomorrow and the Caped Crusader had, shall we say, rather longer and greater destinies ahead of them. [©2005 DC Comics.]

It seems Eisner drew at least one more “Wonder Man” story before the character went down for the count. I’ll let collector Jon Berk tell the tale in his own words: “Some time ago, I began the pursuit of a piece of Golden Age art… by Will Eisner from 1939. I had inquired of an individual if he had any Golden Age art. He said he had a Wonder Man page from Wonder Comics #1.

“Wow! It would be real neat to own a page of this historic book.

Since I owned a copy of the book, I asked the owner to identify the page by the caption. He did and I could not find it. Strange. So I asked him to reaffirm, which he did. A bit suspicious, I asked if he would mind sending a photocopy of the page. He did. The page (clearly marked page 3) was nowhere to be found in the comic.

Then it hit me. Could it be…?

Victor Fox may have swiped Wonder Man from DC’s Superman, but at least one artist at DC wasn’t above doing a bit of swiping from Fox, as well! Compare Lou Fine’s ape drawing from the cover of Wonder Comics #2 (June 1939) with Bob Kane’s simian from Detective Comics #31 (Sept. 1939). The ink on the Fox comic must barely have been dry when Kane did his “homage.” [Wonder Comics art ©2005 the respective copyright holders; Detective Comics art ©2005 DC Comics.]

“Comic books on a monthly schedule would have to have the contents of the next issue in progress [by the time the previous one hit the newsstands]. Could it be that this page was intended for the second appearance of Wonder Man, which never saw the light of day? The context of the page clearly refers to past adventures of Wonder Man and the interaction of [his girlfriend] Brenda with him. The owner never realized or thought about it. Without being a comic book collector or historian, he never gave it another thought. But I did.

“I sent a copy of the art to Will Eisner. Not surprisingly,

The Wonder Of It All!

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Ron Goulart’s Great History of Comic Books.

Last but not least, we’re particularly grateful to comic historian Jon Berk, who graciously scanned his (gulp!) near-mint copy of Wonder Comics # 1 for this issue’s Wonder Man reprint. Jon also wrote a fascinating article on Victor Fox and his comic books for Comic Book Marketplace #107. An updated version of Jon’s The Weird, Wonder(ous) World of Victor Fox’s Fantastic Mystery Men can be found online at: www.comicartville.com/victorfox.htm.

Our sincere thanks to all concerned!

But most of all to Will Eisner, for creating this unique piece of comic book history—and for continuing to create new comic history throughout his career. We’ll miss you, Will…

Till next time,

Next: Remembering Will Eisner.

DC also accused Fox of basing another character, The Moth, on Batman.

The Moth sputtered to Earth after only a few stories in Mystery Men Comics #9-12 (April-July 1940). Ironically, the artist of “The Moth,” Jim Mooney, later illustrated “Batman” stories for DC. This is the first page from the Fox hero’s debut. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

Eisner had no specific recollection of the page. (In fact, all interviews with Eisner demonstrate that this whole episode was distasteful to him. He refused to lie for Fox and, accordingly, his shop and Fox parted ways.) He did, however, identify the art as his own.

Comparing it to the art in the first issue, there is no question that the same artist did the art.

“Normally, ‘unpublished’ art has less ‘value’ than that which is published. But, viewing art as ‘history,’ what makes this unpublished piece of art historic is the fact (and why) it is unpublished. So another small piece of comic history—over sixty years later—now stands revealed.”

And a, er, wonderful way to end our Wonder Man saga! A more detailed version of Jon’s account can be found at: www.comicartville.com/willeisner.htm And Eisner fans should check out Ken Quattro’s excellent article, “Rare Eisner/ The Making Of A Genius” at: www.comicartville.com/lib.htm Oh, and while you’re web-surfing, don’t miss Mikel Norwitz’s nifty Wonder Man page at: www.angelfire.com/art/wildwood/ wonderman.html For more Wonder Man background, you’ll also enjoy the 1986 book,

The known extant page of the second (and unpublished) “Wonder Man” story written and drawn by Will Eisner, repro’d from a photocopy of the original art.

With thanks to Jon Berk.[©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

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Finding The “Inner Bud” ––Part 2––

Headline I T

Getting To Know The Owner Of Bud Plant Comic Art!

he mission was clear: get bookseller Bud Plant out of his “business mode,” and find out about the “inner fan”— how he got involved in this hobby, what kind of comics he collected as a youth, and what kind of involvement he had in comics fandom. Last time, we found out that he was a cardcarrying member of the MMMS (Merry Marvel Marching Society) in the mid-1960s, when he was in junior high school.

Not long after, he heard about fandom and began collecting EC comics, and building up a collection of Quality comics.

Now let’s find out how his involvement in fandom led him to open his first comics store, and how he discovered what would become his life’s work…

BILL: Okay, I think we have a pretty good idea of the kind of comics that interested you and pulled you into the hobby. What about fanzines? Did they interest you at all?

BUD: Absolutely yes!

Speaking of Marty Arbunich and Bill DuBay, I liked Yancy Street Journal. It was great. It was such a quality fanzine to me because it was printed really well. Another one that was a must-have was On the Drawing Board [later The Comic Reader].

It was the only thing that told you about what comics were coming out.

Eventually, DC started putting pages in their comics—around 1968 or ’69— with comics news, but they were more or less “hype pages.” The Rocket’s BlastComicollector was a must-

by Bill Schelly [Interview conducted by telephone on June 26, 2004.

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris; edited by Jeffrey Kipper.]

(Top left:) Bud with the staff of Bud Plant Comic Art, circa 1980.

(Left:) The cover of a very early Bud Plant catalog, from 1972. Except where noted, all art and photos accompanying this article were supplied by Bud. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

have. Everybody got a subscription to RB-CC and we would all search through it for the comics we wanted.

BILL: Was there anything you were getting that had “the good artists” then?

BUD: Yes. The very early days of Squa Tront and Spa Fon were filled with “the good artists.” Those were killer fanzines. Later on, I was selling both of them. To me, those were the absolute best zines coming out. Also, Bill Spicer’s Graphic Story Magazine was a really great magazine. I remember getting Star-Studded Comics [chuckles] and being a little bit underwhelmed by it. I figured that I would rather buy professional comics than spend 75¢ on amateur strips. But I got a couple issues of Star-Studded.

BILL: As good as it was, Star-Studded never sold quite as well as Alter Ego or Squa Tront, for exactly the reasons you cited. Amateur strips, no matter how well done, just appealed to a smaller sub-set of fans than zines with good articles and art about pro comics.

BUD: Also, I was buying a fair amount of fanzines, but I had to pick and choose because even at 25¢ to 75¢ apiece… that was a chunk of money. You could buy a few comics for that.

BILL: When did comic book conventions come into the picture for you?

BUD: The first convention I ever went to was for sciencefiction fans. It was Bay Con in 1968 in Berkeley. There was a little bit of comic book stuff going on in there. It was there that I started dealing comics. John Barrett, Jim, Tom, and I shared an eight-foot table, and we were selling comics in the dealers’ room. This is when I first got serious about the business end of comics.

It’s probably a terrible comparison, but working and dealing in comics was sort-of like being a drug addict. I mean, a lot of drug addicts go out and sell stuff in order to support their habit [laughs], and that is exactly what we were doing. I didn’t want to get into the business or anything, but The Basil Wolverton “Lena the Hyena” cover of Bill Spicer’s Graphic Story Magazine #12 (1970). Repro’d from Bill Schelly’s 1995 book The Golden Age of Comic Fandom, updated and republished in 2003. [Art ©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

Finding The “Inner Bud”–––Part 2

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in order to make more money to buy comics, I bought ones that I didn’t want, then sold those.

20¢ and sell them in our store for a quarter. We made a big nickel apiece on them. We wouldn’t buy a lot of them, just a small amount for a few for people who wanted to get theirs a little early. We didn’t even have the imagination to get our new comics directly from a distributor. That was just beyond our ken, so we were mainly dealing in used comics and used science-fiction paperbacks.

Also, the spring of 1968 is when we opened our first comic book shop, too—The Seventh Sons Comic Shop.

Paperbacks were easy to come by. We sold some used records, too.

We were in a really good location because we were close to the San Jose Flea Market. The Flea Market became a major source for our merchandise. I could go there and spend $5–$10 at a time and come back with a ton of comics. I would buy at a nickel a piece, then mark them up in price for resale. All of a sudden, I was actually generating some money, which, of course, went right back into comic books.

BILL: No one was thinking about having comic shops at that time, except for the bookstores in Hollywood that had old comics.

The Comics & Comix crew. Photo by Clay Geerdes; ©2005 Carol Kossack. From The Underground Comics Family Album by Malcolm Whyte Word Play >.

Publications <www.word-play.com> (That’s Bud in the striped shirt.)

BUD: Yeah, there was Collector’s Bookstore in Hollywood, Robert Blum’s Cherokee Books, and Gary Arlington’s San Francisco Comic Book Company. There has always been the question of who opened first—Gary Arlington or us. I think we may have beat Gary Arlington by a month or something. Gary became an institution because he was dealing full-time and selling underground comix.

BILL: How did your parents look at your business endeavors?

BUD: They were really cool about it for the most part. I think they had some concerns when some of my older friends—older only by a year or two—drove me around before I was able to drive myself. They might have thought it was sort of funny that I was going out and these guys would give me a ride to the other side of town. Tom Tallmon was one of these guys. He has since dropped out of comics, but we were really good buddies. He used to give me rides all over the place. We shared a lot of experiences.

By this time I was taking college prep classes in high school and planned to go straight into college after I graduated. I had no idea what I was going to do after college.

BILL: Were you a good student in school?

There were actually six people involved in Seventh Sons, but we had an “honorary” member because “Seven Sons” sounded better than “Six Sons” did. [laughs] The “Sons” were: myself, Michelle Nolan, Tom Tallmon, John Barrett, Jim Buser…. The sixth was this guy that wasn’t really a member, but he used to steal office supplies from the place he worked at for us. [laughs] That’s the story we’d get, anyway. The sixth was the notorious Frank Scadina.

Frank is a whole story unto himself. He was actually about five or six years older than the rest of us. He’d had polio when he was a young child and his mom took care of him. She was still being really protective of him when I met him. His mom thought our group would be a great thing for him and so, somehow, she got him involved.

BILL: Where was the store located?

BUD: It was on East San Fernando Street in San Jose, pretty close to San Jose State. It opened in April of 1968. Rent was 75 bucks a month. We had to pay two months’ rent in advance and split it up among six of us.

We found this to be a very affordable threshold for opening a comic book shop. By that time all our individual collections had plenty of duplicates. We wanted a way to make money and also get more comics for our personal collections. We decided to open our comic book shop to do this.

BILL: Were you able to get any access to new comics, or did you deal only with old and used comics?

BUD: We weren’t sophisticated enough to approach a distributor and deal with new comics. There was a distributor for the Gilroy area (which is just south of San Jose). We could get new comics from them a few days early. We would go and buy comics in Gilroy for the cover price of

Cover to fanzine published by Bud Plant, Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., and Al Davoren: Promethean Enterprises #1 (1969). [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

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Comic Fandom Archive in the wall. It had been converted from a stairway in an old hotel. [laughs] You could put your hands out and touch the walls on both sides of the shop. But the rent was right!

BILL: Did you get plenty of customers, or were there days when no one would come in?

BUD: It was pretty miserable. [laughs] We did a lot more card-playing than we did selling comics. We used to play a lot of gin rummy and poker. I remember making $27 on a Saturday and thinking that was a pretty damn good day.

BILL: Had you started mail order at that point?

BUD: A little bit. We were putting occasional ads into RB-CC, but not a whole lot. I was actually selling some old comics that I’d accumulated through the RB-CC. I started to do that just prior to when I started selling undergrounds and started what I would call the business today.

“In my parents’ driveway, ready to pack up and leave for the comicons in June 1970, when I just turned 18. First to Oklahoma Con, then on to New York to meet Phil Seuling for the first time and do the New York Comic Art Con. We bunked in Phil’s apartment.”

BUD: Yes. I was a good student, except for Trigonometry. [laughs] I sort of blew Trigonometry, I’m afraid, when I was a senior. But I was in all the English classes, four years of English and four years of Math and two of Spanish and all the prep stuff. My grades were good. I had many friends that were heading to the University of California and stuff. At that point, I still was in the comic book shop business. By the time I arrived at college age, I had been through a couple of comic shops. We ended up selling out The Seventh Sons Comic Shop to the honorary member of the group, Frank Scadina. He was the only one of us who could actually work it full-time until I was out of school.

BILL: Where was that second shop?

BUD: It was also in San Jose. It was just like a block away from the first one. [laughs] This part of San Jose was becoming hotbed of comics activity. John Barrett, Jim Buser, Dick Swan, and I opened up the second shop. It came about in conjunction with our going to comic conventions. The first comicon we attended was Houston Con in 1969. We came back from there and brought a bunch of comics with us.

BILL: You drove all the way there?

BUD: Yes, and we bought comics going and coming. First, we went to Hollywood and Los Angeles. We went to Bond Street Books, where we got really good deals on Disney comics. We got Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories and Donald Duck comics for something like 25 or 50¢ apiece. We found out that when we took them to Texas we could sell them for a buck or buck and a quarter. We returned to San Jose with a car jammed full of different comics than the ones we came with. We decided to open up another shop.

BILL: When did you really decide to make the comics business your profession?

BUD: 1970, the year I started going to college. I figured I didn’t have time to go to college and run a store. I wanted to concentrate on school and move forward. But I was involved with The Comic World store and four partners. So John Barrett and I decided to buy the other two guys out and shut the store down. We didn’t even try to sell it, just shut it down. Then, over that summer before I started college, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have any money coming in. [laughs] I had been dependent on my income from hustling comics. That was when I decided to start my mail-order business, in the fall and early winter of 1970.

BILL: Where did you go to college?

BUD: San Jose State, now known as San Jose University. I’d had an inspiring physics teacher in high school for both physics and chemistry, so I started out taking physics classes. I thought it would be really cool, but after a year I decided that I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t want to do calculus and all these equations and stuff. So I discovered really fast that physics was not my calling.

Next, I had a great English teacher in college. I’d always been into English, not so much “Literature,” but our kind of reading—escapist stuff, science-fiction, etc. But then I realized that I didn’t really fancy myself as a writer or teacher. I just didn’t think I could teach. I’ve never been really comfortable speaking to crowds. I get a lot of stage fright doing that.

So there I was, on the fringes. I was just taking a lot of English courses and general requirements. And it finally dawned on me: Here I was, running a mail order business and comics shops. (Comics and Comix started in 1972.) I decided studying business marketing made a

BILL: What was the name of the second shop?

BUD: Comic World. Our second shop had been Bead World previous to us moving into it. Bead World moved next door, but they left their sign up.

Imaginative kids that we were, we just whited out the “Bead” in Bead World and replaced it with “Comic” to make it read Comic World. It was a real hole

Bud Plant and his van, circa 1975—and an early-1980s photo of Phil Seuling and unidentified fans, with Bud on the right.

Finding The “Inner Bud”–––Part 2

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lot more sense for me. I wasn’t sure I was going to stay in the comics shop business… but I thought it might get me a “real” job in the “real” world. So I ended up getting a degree in marketing.

on a foldaway sofa. [laughs] We helped Phil at the show. That was our part of the exchange for getting put up at his apartment. We were the security in the dealer’s room.

BILL: You were certainly moving closer to what would end up being your life’s work. At what point did you realize you wouldn’t be going into a “straight” marketing job, but focusing wholly on your mail order and comic stores?

BILL: Did the New York Con have higher attendance than the Southwestern or Houston ones?

BUD: My mail order business just kept developing and progressing. The business didn’t go backwards. When I was in college, it was a part-time thing and it gave me enough money to live on and also to get more comics. I was firmly involved in the vending at comic cons by then. In fact, we even published a magazine from 1969 to1975, Promethean Enterprises. It was a gradual process that led me to realize that this would be my life’s career. Once I got out of college and actually devoted myself full-time to the mail order business, it took off. I realized that if I’d put my full time and energy into it, I could do pretty well.

BILL: So, Bud Plant Comic Art began in the fall of 1970.

BUD: Not much, but for some reason, I can remember the dollar figures. We did $450 in Houston and $750 in New York.

That I remember.

“A good copy of Action Comics #31, that’s a joy to behold.” [©2005 DC Comics.]

We were actually able to make money in New York with the books that were left over from Houston. But we spent every penny we had while in New York. For one thing, Phil Seuling had DC original art pages. He had Our Army at War and Our Fighting Forces drawn by Joe Kubert and Russ Heath. And I think he was selling them for five bucks apiece. We spent every penny we had and we came back to California owing Seuling about 500 bucks. [laughs] What blows me away is that Phil didn’t know us from Adam before then, and he let us traipse off to California, trusting that we would pay him. I had never had credit before in my life!

BUD: Yes. Back then, it was just called Bud Plant Mail Order. But that’s where I trace it from. The first comic shop started in 1968 doesn’t seem like the same thing. The real beginning, for me, was fall 1970.

BILL: I guess he figured he was a good enough judge of character and could tell that you guys were trustworthy. I guess that convention really was a pivotal point, and after that, it was “no looking back.”

BILL: Let’s go back now, and talk about that first New York Con you attended. How did you get there?

BUD: That’s right.

BUD: We drove. Between 1969 and 1975, the big comic shows were in Houston, Dallas, and New York. I think Houston had a show every year and we had gone to Houston, so we decided to go to New York the next year. I think Michelle may have been the driving force that got us on to New York. Michelle had gone there in 1968 and ’69. Michelle was always a “driving fool”! She told us we should go there and meet Phil Seuling (and how nice he was). She wanted us to meet the artists, like Frank Frazetta and Al Williamson. Our gods would all be there. We decided that we were up for it.

So, Michelle, a guy named Larry Strawther (who ended up working in Hollywood with Merv Griffin, and had quite a career), John Barrett, and myself made the trip. I think Dick Swan was with us, too. It was the five of us in my small van, one small van. [chuckles] I had to buy a van because I think we were in-between bigger vehicles. My father fronted me some money and I bought a used van and drove to some conventions. I have always had bittersweet feelings about this trip, because I blew off my last week of high school to do it. I actually lied to the high school and told them my parents were going on vacation. Somehow I engineered it. I got my tests done early, but I missed my whole graduation and the grad night. I feel kind of funny about it, even now, because I never really got to say goodbye to a lot of girls (who I thought were really cute) and a lot of friends of the male gender. Even though I missed that whole event, my motivation to go to the conventions was overpowering. First we went to the Houston con, and then we went on to New York.

Michelle had set things up with Phil Seuling so we could stay at his apartment. He put up the five of us. I think it was Luna Avenue. It was right off of Coney Island, and we were just sleeping in the living room

BILL: So that’s the “origin story” for Bud Plant Comic Art (and your comics stores) more or less. It all just grew out of your love of comics and your desire to make extra money so you could buy more. And it turned out that you had a knack for that kind of business. That’s how it all began.

Let’s jump forward, now, and talk a bit about your feelings and thoughts about comics these days. First of all, are you still collecting comics?

BUD: Definitely. Like I said earlier, it’s almost like an addiction. I really like Golden Age stuff. A big part of it is just that I can afford it. I’ve got a disposable income now, and I’m able to buy all of these childhood fantasies that I couldn’t have when I was growing up. I actually have been re-collecting the Marvel super-hero books right up to about maybe ’65 or ’66. It’s pure nostalgia for me. I had a complete Marvel collection, but when I was going to college and starting my business, I really needed money and these things were getting to be awfully valuable. So in 1972 or ’73, I sold a lot of my early Marvels off.

Fortunately, I didn’t sell a lot of other stuff. I hung on to my Golden Age and my Quality comics. I had a complete EC collection, but I sold that off when Russ Cochran started publishing his reprints. That’s the second thing I’m re-collecting [chuckles], some of those damn ECs. They are such beautiful comics. It’s just not the same to have a black-&white reprint.

BILL: But with the black-&-white reprints, you see aspects of the art that you never saw in the comics.

BUD: The black-&-white books allow you to appreciate the work from a totally different angle. I’ve always liked Jack Davis, but I learned to

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really appreciate Jack Davis from the Cochran books. George Evans was a master artist. But Johnny Craig was the big one for me. I used to think that Craig was a little on the bland side. But now I think he was doing incredible stuff in Extra!, which everybody considered a junky title.

BUD: One of my excuses is that I work in front of a computer screen at work all day so I don’t want to look at comics on the computer screen for enjoyment. At some point, I want to turn off the PC, and go sit down and…

BILL: It’s nice that you can afford to re-collect such things at today’s prices. The big price factor is, of course, condition. Do you collect only so-called “high grade” or what?

BILL: …Pick up a book!

BUD: I like having a book that is nice condition, but I’m perfectly happy having a “good” or “very good” copy of, say, a Golden Age comic. A good copy of Action Comics #31, that’s a joy to behold. It doesn’t have to be very fine and cost you thousands of dollars.

BILL: So the addiction goes on.

BUD: Yeah, well, that’s why I have backed into the nostalgia part of it.

I’ve been picking up a lot of Golden Age stuff. I have a complete collection of Fiction House but for Jungle Comics #1, a really bad book that I refuse to pay for. I have just about all the Qualitys. I’ve been upgrading some of the Qualitys from like “fair” or “good” copies to “very good” or “fine.” Also, I’ve been collecting a lot of oddball stuff, like Ace. BILL: Your love of comics is obviously undiminished. What about the future of comic books? Do you think the comic book pamphlet is going to go away at some point?

BUD: I think the pamphlet format is probably going to hang on, but I think it is going to adapt more towards the graphic novels. I’m no visionary but I think everyone kind-of agrees that seems the wave of the future. E-books and comics on computers have not really caught on.

Comics may be printed on plastic instead of paper, someday. I think that people will always want to read something they can hold in their lap or take to bed.

BUD: Or pick up a comic. I think what is likely is that it may become popular to download digital comics and print them out on your own printer. Now that makes sense to me. Then you’ve still got it on a piece of paper in permanent form. But, the computer screen is really a step down in a lot of ways. They are just too murky when they display illustrations.

BILL: I guess we’ve covered all my questions, Bud. Thanks for taking the time to give us a glimpse into the world according to Bud Plant.

BUD: My pleasure. It’s been fun.

A special note to everyone who has been reading my Comic Fandom Archive columns since Alter Ego returned in 1998: Please take a few moments to really check out the ad on p. 30 for my new book The Best of Star-Studded Comics. I want to assure everyone that this isn’t some “thrown-together” reprint book. I put a lot of thought into selecting the very best comic strips from that classic fanzine, and put together about 25,000 new words for a bunch of cool features: annotations, interviews, articles, etc. … so there’s plenty of editorial matter to complement the great comic strips, and I’ve assembled it with love and care. I’m writing this because this book is only available from Hamster Press, and your support is vital if you want me to continue doing “niche” books on very worthy subjects. You can purchase from the web site (www.billschelly.com), or via mail. Nuff said! —Bill.

BILL: Do you like to read comics on CD? BUD: That just does not have an appeal to me. I took a look at the microfiche comics when there was a guy putting those out, too. He sent me a microfiche reader because I was considering carrying those for him.

It’s just not the same as having a piece of paper.

BILL: Reading from a printed page is just different from having it on the screen. It is also less convenient. And the digital computer image, made up of pixels, is hard on your eyes when you look at it for a long period of time.

Bud and the staff of Bud Plant Comic Art in 2004—and the cover (by eun-hee Choi) of one of the company’s recent catalogs. [Art ©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

VISIT MY WEBSITE AT: www.albertmoy.com

Ken Bald Dave Bullock

Richard Corben

Mike Golden

Erik Larsen

Jim Lee

John Byrne

John Cassaday

Darwyn Cooke

Jae Lee

Sam Kieth

Jack Kirby

Bruce Timm John Severin

WANTED: Neal Adams (covers, sketches, roughs, pages, pencils, illustrations, and paintings).

Other artists of interest: Art Adams, John Byrne, John Buscema, Gil Kane, Adam Hughes, Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Joe Kubert, Wally Wood, Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, Charles Schultz, and many more. Interested in EC artwork, any Large Size covers, any Marvel and DC covers, large and small.

Exclusive Agent For: Jae Lee, Jim Lee, Sam Kieth, John Cassaday, Ken Bald, David Bullock, Bruce Timm, Peter Snejbjerg, Darwyn Cooke, Erik Larsen, and Aron Wiesenfeld.

Albert has much more art than the selection shown here. Please call him at (718) 225-3261 (8-11:30PM EST weekdays, all day weekends) if you are looking for something in particular and do not see it listed.

Peter Snejbjerg TERMS: Call to reserve art: (718) 225-3261. Will hold art for 7 days. $12 postage in U.S. $25 postage for Overseas orders. All Packages in U.S. are sent registered mail. Money Orders or Certified Checks accepted. We now also take payment via PayPal and Bidpay. Will consider trade offers — Let me know what you have to trade.

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In Memoriam

Bill Yoshida (1921-2005)

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by Jim Amash

illiam Saburo Yoshida was one of three children born to Ben and Chiyo Yoshida on December 2, 1921, in Brawley, California. Born during the Jazz Era, Bill’s hopeful youth was interrupted by the Great Depression, and he had to find jobs to help support his family.

Bill managed to keep his spirits high, and in 1940 won a Jitterbug contest in Los Angeles. However, the onset of American involvement in World War II brought unwanted changes: the Yoshida family was forced to leave their possessions behind when they were ordered to the Manzanar Relocation Camp.

Life there was difficult and tragic; Bill’s father died during the interment.

Upon leaving Manzanar in 1945, Bill relocated to Chicago, working as a chef and nightclub singer.

Around 1949, Bill moved to New York City, where he met Sachiko Terada, whom he married in 1955.

Bill worked as a cook at the Campus Grill on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near Columbia University. He also worked part-time as a pantry chef at Pine Hollow Country Club in Long Island, New York.

Bill bowled in an all-Japanese league in New York City. One of his teammates was famed comics letterer Ben Oda, who taught Bill how to letter. Under Oda’s guidance, Bill created a lettering portfolio, and broke into the business with Archie Comics Publications in 1965. While Bill lettered for other companies such as Tower Comics (T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, NoMan, and Dynamo), Warren Publications (Creepy), Harvey (“Richie Rich”), Marvel, and DC, he spent the majority of his career working for Archie.

In 1969, the Yoshidas moved from the Upper West Side of New York City to the very suburban Waldwick, New Jersey, where they became friends with a close-knit group of families in the neighborhood. Bill remained an avid bowler and loved to play golf, frequently scoring in the 70s. He also coached his sons’ Little League football and baseball teams.

Bill was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in November 1999, and underwent surgery and a succession of external radiation treatments.

Amazingly, none of this prevented him from working or carrying on his normal routine. He was unable to play golf due to a large tumor in his hip, and really missed it. During Bill’s last year and a half, he cut back on his lettering, working as his time and health permitted. Although he endured great physical pain during this period, he was still able to work until Christmas of 2004. Bill’s courageous fight finally ended on February 17, 2005. He is survived by his wife of 49 years, Sachiko, and sons Steven, Terence, and Michael.

Bill Yoshida with his (first and only) grandson William, age 2H, in a photo taken May 11, 2003; thanks to Bill’s son Michael—and a sterling example of Bill’s crystal-clear lettering from Archie’s Double Digest Magazine #114 (March 2000). Bill’s son Michael says that Mrs. Sachiko Yoshida is currently recovering from recent quadruple bypass heart surgery, and appreciates this tribute to his work. [Art ©2005 Archie Publications, Inc.]

Bill loved to cook and eat almost as much as he loved talking about it. Bill and Sachiko loved to visit Atlantic City and try their luck on the slot machines at various hotels. Bill also tried to teach Archie editor Victor Gorelick how to golf, with, as Victor put it, “No results.”

Bill’s life experiences informed his sense of humor, which ranged from the subtle to the absurd, as evidenced by the humorous notes he occasionally scribbled in the margins of the pages. Bill joked with fellow humorist and inker Rudy LaPick, Victor Gorelick, and anyone else in the Archie offices fortunate enough to spend a little time with him.

It was Bill’s love of humor that made him a natural for lettering the Archie Comics line. His style complemented the art, as good lettering should. Bill was a dedicated company man who never missed deadlines.

His lettering style became the company look. He was a tireless worker, averaging 75 pages a week for 40 years, for an approximate total of 156,000 pages. He was twice nominated (in 1996 and 1999) for a Will Eisner Award for Best Lettering.

Bill was able to do so much work partly because his wife Sachiko occasionally pitched in, ruling panel borders and erasing the pencils underneath the inked lettering. She provided a stable environment in which Bill could support his family, and allowed him to take the time to be a good father to their children.

Bill was a humble man who never sought the spotlight, or even realized there was one to seek. He didn’t attend comic book conventions and thought his lettering went unnoticed by fans. He was wrong: fans and fellow professionals knew and admired his work. Those who knew him will miss him as much for his fun-loving personality as for his dedication to his craft.

75 later developed that ghastly glowing figure under the bandages, he really became something else. But Bob was there when we midwifed Neg Man into being.

We wrote a storyline, “tore” it in half, and then went to our respective homes to write the script. I did the first half and he the second. Back in the city (he lived in Woodstock), we performed minor surgery to make the pieces fit neatly together. I wrote every story on my own after that. But Bob was there on Day One, and I’ve spoken of that countless times.

re:

He is a great loss. There was no one I was closer to in the field. Though we saw each other only once (’99 San Diego Comic-Con) after he moved to Mexico, I am going to miss him.

This has been a bitch of a year for me. And it doesn’t help much to say, “It comes with the territory.”

May you pass the story on? Certainly. I’ve told it many times, so I feel as if every comics fan knows it well. But Mark Evanier once advised me, “Keep on telling those stories. There are always people who never heard them. And even those who have appreciate hearing them again from someone who was part of the scene.”

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hat if Golden Age artist Al Bryant drew a picture of Biljo White’s hero Captain Ego? Might it look something like the above? It definitely would—if he were using the same Doll Man pose he’d drawn on the cover of Quality’s Feature Comics #100, as printed in Alter Ego #34— or if our Ozzie artist Shane Foley were using that pose as a basis for our “maskot” illo this ish, which is precisely what he did! Thanks, Shane!

Mail poured in on A/E #41, our joint Halloween/Frankenstein and FCA-oriented effort last October, and I (i.e., Roy) will get to it in a moment. But first, a more somber missive from Silver Age DC scripter Arnold Drake, co-creator of “The Doom Patrol,” “Deadman,” and other series, as forwarded with Arnold’s permission by Henry R. Kujawa. Arnold was commenting on the passing of his fellow writer Bob Haney, whose obit/tribute appeared, along with his photo, in A/E #46:

Called Carmine Infantino to give him the bad news, and then he gave me another hit: Irwin Donenfeld died about two weeks ago. He’d been very sick for many years. Had his colon removed about twenty years ago. Currently he was under dialysis. So the quality of life was miserable—despite all his money. Some will say the guy was better off dead. I would say, “That’s up to the guy to decide, not us.”

Love & knishes, Arnold Drake Heartfelt sentiments, Arnold, and we wish you a better year in 2005.

But Bob Haney and Irwin Donenfeld are missed by many who knew them, or who were touched by the work they did.

There follows a note from Tony Tallarico, the artist whose work on the Dell super-hero Frankenstein comic was the subject of an article by Stephan Friedt in #41:

Henry— Dreadful news. Bob was a very talented and decent man. We were extremely close for several years. Spent the summer of ’65 (I think it was) working on a thriller-satire called The Assassinator. (The word didn’t really exist. But we were turned on by its freshness.)

In the spring of ’62, I think it was, [DC editor] Murray Boltinoff asked me to come up with a new super-hero to try and save My Greatest Adventure. Overnight, I had most of “The Doom Patrol” shaped up: a scientific genius in a wheelchair leads a pair of super-heroes who don’t like being “freaks.” He cajoles/taunts them into shaking off their self-pity and using their fantastic qualities to build a better world.

When I brought the concept to Murray, Elastigirl and Robotman were well-developed. Murray flipped over it and said, “Write it!” But I was convinced I needed one more character. And I had only a weekend in which to find the character and write a 16-page origin story.

Coming out of Murray’s office, I met Bob in the hall and told him a bit about the DP. He also loved the concept. He had no weekend assignment, so he asked if he could help find the third super-hero. He was always a pleasure to work with, and time was breathing down my neck. I said, “Okay!”

So we sat down and began the search that eventually produced Negative Man. He was, I think, the most unique of the trio. And when I

Powerfully-written Bob Haney panels from the Batman/Green Arrow team-up in The Brave and the Bold #85 (Sept. 1970), which introduced G.A.’s “new look.” Art by Neal Adams (pencils) & Dick Giordano (inks). [©2005 DC Comics.]

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[comments, correspondence, and corrections]

Hi, Roy— Thanks very much for the October issue of Alter Ego and for the piece “Frankenstein: Monster in Tights.” But I spotted a couple of things that are incorrect: On page 34, the copyright should read “Dell Publishing Co.” They had split from Western Publishing several years before. Their first editor was Len Cole.

On page 37, the scripts were written by the then-editor “D.J.” Arneson—his name was not Don. Also—what a pleasant surprise to both Emilio Squeglio and myself for being in the same issue. We both went to the same high school in New York City—The School of Industrial Arts (as have many, many others in the business: Toth, Barry, Romita, Giella, etc., etc., etc.—might make a good article) and became friends a few years ago. He lives not far from me.

Tony Tallarico

(Top left:) Tony Tallarico worked with Bill Fraccio on this first issue of Dell’s Frankenstein (Sept. 1966). [©2005 Dell Publishing Co., Inc.] (Above:) Tony also writes: “Another thought for a short piece might be to do an ‘I Drew Batman!’—seems that just about everyone has—including me!” Here is a Tallarico-drawn page from a children’s alphabet book done some years ago. [©2005 DC Comics.]

Sorry about the errors, Tony—the Dell one from Dell, of course, the former launched the Gold Key comics group, while Dell published its own line for several years. And there’ll be more on your friend, longtime Fawcett artist Emilio Squeglio, in near-future installments of FCA. Next, a note about Bernie Wrightson’s classic portfolios of the 1970s: Roy— As regards Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein portfolios, the ones you show on page 5 are the 3rd (on the left) and the 2nd. I never got the 3rd because it was printed in France and was supposedly harder to find.

The first uses the “or the Modern Prometheus” on its envelope but doesn’t actually show the creature but instead has some skeletons, a female figure holding up something (this is from memory), and a real neat hand-drawn frame for the image.

Greg Huneryager Thanks for the info, Greg. And here’s some more, from “re:” regular Hames Ware: Roy— WONDERFUL issue! Maybe my favorite two covers of all! A few art IDs for ya: One article praises Charles Sultan’s art. Well, just a few pages away, that’s Charlie’s art on all those ACG “Spirit of Frankenstein” stories.

Erwin L. Darwin was a pseudonym used by Erwin L. Hess…and inexplicably so, as all his other many credits there were in his own name.

That’s the incredibly unique Paul Gattuso on the Chesler Dynamic cover art on p. 14, and Ralph Mayo on the art for the “Dan Hastings” “Never will I create another like yourself, equal in deformity and wickedness.”

Another of the numerous Wrightson illustrations which appeared only in Michael & Hilary Catron’s The Lost Frankenstein Pages, the source of much of Bernie’s Monster-ous art in A/E #41. The trade paperback is still available from the Catrons for $9.95 per copy postpaid at hcatron@earthlink.net. It’s nearly as great a treasure as the Marvel-published edition of the Wrightson-illo’d Frankenstein. [©2005 Bernie Wrightson.]

re:

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pages.

I’m uncertain if that’s Bert Whitman on “Master Man,” but I believe it may be…

And, as a final aside, Ron Goulart is right about Edd Ashe’s early work… but lemme tell ya, Edd Ashe wound up being one of the best artists ever to draw comics. It’s just that the places where he drew that well just rarely ever got seen. Since he often signed his work, Jim Vadeboncoeur and I haven’t really considered adding Ashe to our “Great Unknowns,” but realizing that no artist who wound up so good should only be known by his early terrible tuff, I will also copy this to Jim and see if we might just bend our rules and someday highlight the great Edd Ashe (whose father was a very famous illustrator, by the way!) in a future A/E. The Dick Briefer piece was just excellent, and I so wish he were still alive so that Jim Amash could interview this delightful and truly unique iconoclast!

Hames Ware So do we, Hames. But here’s another tidbit about Dick Briefer, whose “Frankenstein” work delighted so many readers in the 1940s and 1950s: Dear Roy, I have just received the October issue of Alter Ego. Great, as usual.

The Frankenstein stuff is super.

Concerning Dick Briefer, whereas lots of people know him because of his “Frankenstein” stories, not many are aware that during the wartime years (1942-45 or so) he drew a Sunday page entitled Pinky Rankin for the US Communist Party newspaper, The Daily Worker.

He signed that with his pen name, “Dick Floyd.”

Alberto Becattini Odd to think of Dick Briefer as a Communist, Alberto. Have you ever heard if he was an actual “card-carrying party member,” as the designation then was, or simply an artist looking for a regular gig? Either way, it won’t affect my personal enjoyment of his work… though I’ll admit I wouldn’t have felt that way in the ’50s.

Here’s a slightly different political comment from reader and one-time comics pro Mort Todd: Dear Roy, Can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the Frankenstein-themed issue of Alter Ego. Since it came out before the election, I would think the Republicans might’ve demanded equal time, what with all those cadaverous Kerry-looking images in the mag!

Also for your (and your readers’) information, I printed some Briefer “Frankenstein” when I was editor of Cracked. In Cracked Digest #2 (Jan. 1987), I reprinted “Frankenstein and the Mummies” (from what issue I don’t remember). I guess that attracted the attention of Al Dellinges and, with the help of writer John Arcudi, we printed some of the Briefer daily strips (the birthday sequence) in two-color (black & green) in Cracked Collector’s Edition #73 in early 1988.

Mort Todd Thanks, Todd, for another place to look for reprints of Briefer’s “Frankenstein,” besides the pages of publications of AC Comics, whose ad appears elsewhere in this issue.

Michelle Nolan wrote a fun little piece on the American Comic Group’s late-1940s series “The Spirit of Frankenstein” in Adventures into the Unknown, the first (if mild) regularly-published horror comic, on which Steven Rowe comments: Roy— In Michelle Nolan’s article in Alter Ego #41, she mentions that Richard Hughes wrote much of ACG’s output. This wasn’t true until

Original art to a “Frankenstein” page drawn and autographed by Dick Briefer, courtesy of collectors Hal Higdon & Al Dellinges. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

the late 1950s and the ACG implosion. And he didn’t write for the horror comics at all—leaving it to various other writers, including Manly Wade Wellman.

Steven Rowe So Wellman, who is mentioned in Michelle’s article, may have written the “Spirit of Frankenstein” series? Well, later pulp-writer Manly always looked down on his comics work—and, if Michelle is any judge, maybe in this instance he was right.

FCA editor P.C. Hamerlinck forwarded this note from Bruce Heller, nephew of comic artist Ralph Muccie: Dear P.C., After receiving Alter Ego #41, I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate you remembering my late uncle, Ralph Muccie, in FCA #100.

You wrote in your section that when C.C. Beck died in 1989 your interest in comics took a hit. Well, in a big way, I felt the same way when my uncle Ralph passed away.

When you corresponded with my uncle and discussed with him Golden Age comics, pulps, old-time radio, and serials, he would always get motivated to produce paintings after receiving one of your letters… as these were the thing he lived for. My uncle introduced me to all these great things of the past—things I would not even have known about otherwise. And as far as Golden Age comics were concerned, he was a walking encyclopedia!

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[comments, correspondence, and corrections]

I wanted to let you know that my uncle thought very highly of you and your work in FCA. I used to visit him all the time, and on days when he’d get a letter from you, he’d say with excitement, “Look—I got a letter from Hamerlinck today!” and then would read me the letter. As he took care of his ill daughter every day, he had lived a somewhat secluded life, so just receiving letters from you—as small as it may seem—was always a big deal and very important in his life. Thanks again.

Ditko both penciled and inked his own stories, until Rocke came aboard with the revival of Cap in Strange Suspense Stories #78 (Dec. 1965). The images on the cover are taken from the interior Ditko story, although it is possible that Rocke drew the Captain Atom face, which appears to be someone copying Ditko and is not from the interior story.

And page 20 incorrectly identifies the Space Adventures #42 page as Ditko/Mastroserio. This is an all-Mastroserio page of Captain Atom. Rocke drew the first two CA stories in SA #42.

The last CA story is all-Ditko.

One more question: are you certain that the Frankenstein Monster model sheet on p. 25 identified as drawn by Mike Ploog is not actually John Romita? It sure looks like Romita to me, and wouldn’t he have been producing model sheets for the artist working on the strip to follow?

Nick Caputo

Bruce Heller 18 Woodland St. Trenton, NJ 08611 Roy here: It’s always rewarding Ralph Muccie in 1998 with his painting re-creating the cover of Whiz Comics #23. to hear that a veteran comics pro Courtesy of Bruce Heller. enjoyed coverage of him in Alter Ego, Bruce. I view the comic book work done from the 1930s through the mid-1950s not just as just some “opening act” for the Silver Age, let alone for today’s more adultoriented comics, but as an body of work which deserves study and respect in its own right.

Thanks, Nick. Robin Snyder, editor/publisher of the excellent monthly oral comics history The Comics! dropped us a line containing basically the same info concerning the “Captain Atom” art. Robin adds that he liked the Mark Swayze art and montage on one of that issue’s two covers. So did we!

Now, here’s another note forwarded by P.C. about A/E #41, taken from an e-mail sent by Pedro Angosto: Hello, P.C. Hamerlinck— I’m an avid reader of A/E and of course your FCA section. I want to congratulate you for your hard work. I’m a comic book writer myself, and in fact have just finished a Big Bang Special starring the “Round Table of America” in which Thundergirl plays a big role.

The kind of articles I have enjoyed the most in FCA are those that contain information about the adventures of the characters, such as the ones you have run which analyze the different kinds of adventures of Captain Marvel and Marvel Jr. I like to read about their enemies, their secondary characters, etc. I intend to start buying DC’s Shazam!

Archives soon, and I’d like to get as much info about the old stories before they are reprinted.

In fact, I’m writing this to ask you to do some articles about other Fawcett super-heroes: Ibis (I really like him and other magic-based characters), Bulletman, Mr. Scarlet, Minute-Man, Spy Smasher, etc. I’m even interested in the more obscure characters such as Master Man, Devil’s Dagger, El Carim, etc. Thanks again.

Pedro Angosto P.C. replies: “Pedro: You got it! I am currently writing profiles and story analyses on various Fawcett characters such as Minute-Man, Golden Arrow, and your favorite, Ibis the Invincible. I am also compiling indexes for America’s Greatest Comics, Captain Marvel Adventures, The Marvel Family, Whiz Comics, and other Fawcett titles which I hope you and other fans will find interesting and useful. Thank you for your kind words and support.”

Bill Schelly’s “Comic Fandom Archive” section in issue #41, for a change, focused mostly on a pro—artist Rocke Mastroserio. It was wellreceived, although Nick Caputo sent this correction: Hi, Roy, Just finished another enjoyable issue. While reading Bill Schelly’s excellent coverage of Rocke Mastroserio, I noticed a few mistakes. Page 17 identifies Rocke as inking the cover to Space Adventures #40. Steve

FCA is about a lot more than “just” Captain Marvel and his marvelous family—as witness this ad for a Canadian edition of Spy Smasher which appeared in Grand Slam Comics #9 (Aug. 1942). It may be a bit dark, due to the condition of the paper in the original comic, but we’re overjoyed that reader Stan Tychinski sent it to us a couple of years back from his thennew Collectible Dreams shop in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. We’ll have more, as we promised, on the Golden Age of Canadian comics in a future issue, as well. [Spy Smasher TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

re: As for the Frankenstein concept drawing—we think you’re right, and that it definitely wasn’t done by Mike Ploog. John Romita, then Marvel’s art director, doubtless drew it at Stan Lee’s behest, as a guide for Mike— and because of my note thereon addressed to Mike, I didn’t look at it hard enough before crediting it to Ploog.

The name Shane Foley was already dropped above, since he drew the art spot that opens this letters section—but he had a few written comments re #41, as well: Roy, “You can go through life two ways. Save nothing—or save everything! Both ways you’ll be unhappy, but in one you’ll have a clean house.”

These words of Dick Briefer’s should be immortalized. Hilarious!!

And the rejected Frankenstein dailies were terrific, too. I love both Briefer’s sense of humor and his wonderful art.

Michael T. Gilbert’s column continues to be great fun, as well. Just think—that practice of re-scripting an already-drawn story is just a sideways step away from what Stan Lee would do with Kirby, etc., anyway. I’m continually amazed by the discovery of the second “Origins of the Inhumans” pencil copies, wherein it is clear that Stan has turned the entire motivation of Kirby’s already-drawn story on its head.

Annoying for Kirby, sure, but undeniably clever of Stan. (Did you often do that sort of thing, Roy? Or is my impression correct that you either directed your stories far more closely than Stan did, or usually tried to respect your artist’s intentions more?)

79 Stepping off my soapbox, I turn to comments by yet another longtime pro, colorist and sometime DC staffer Carl Gafford: Roy— Couple of things: “The Spawn of Frankenstein” ran in issues of The Phantom Stranger dated 1973, not 1971.

I was glad to see the Frankenstein-Dracula Wars Topps comic indicated in this Halloween ish. That happens to have been my last professional coloring assignment, back in 1995 or ’96. Even by then, most coloring was going to computer houses like Digital Chameleon, and only a few went the cheaper route of freelance coloring being sent to a separations house (KGM Graphics in Chicago, in Topps’ case). I enjoyed working on it and thought Claude St. Aubin did a great job on it. He was working on a Lone Ranger vs. Zorro mini-series about the time the axe fell on everything. I don’t know whatever became of it.

Carl Gafford If we ever run across any pages, Carl, we’ll either run them in Alter Ego, or send them to Michael Eury, editor of our TwoMorrows

The question that pops into my mind regarding Michael’s third example here is “Did Don Heck get paid for his Horrific cover?”

Probably not, eh? Well, at least he got more work out of it.

Something I’m sure you realize but probably have the very human need to be reminded about occasionally: You talk in your FCA editorial about your delightful childhood memories of “poring over the secondto-last chapter” of the Mr. Mind serial, etc. I hope you never forget that there are many thousands of us out here who have the same type of delightful memories about your stuff.

A great issue, Roy. Tar. (That means “thanks” in Oz talk, in case you are like Sarge and think I’m talking of black goo used to make roads.)

Shane Foley If a few souls remember my work as happily as I remember that of C.C. Beck, Otto Binder, and company on “Captain Marvel,” Shane, then I can die happy—though not just yet, thank you very much. And you’re right that I tended not to alter the motivations of Marvel (or DC) artists with whom I worked as much as Stan did. This was, as you guessed, partly because, unlike Stan as he got busier and busier in the later 1960s, I mostly continued to write out synopses for the artists. And where I didn’t always do so—as for instance in the cases of ofttimes artistic coplotters like Neal Adams, Barry Smith, John Buscema, Marie Severin, Herb Trimpe, and others—we were generally in agreement from the start on the basic thrust of the story.

If my artistic collaborators such as Neal and Barry, in particular, often threw in added plot elements they thought of along the way, I usually tried to work with them, partly because, after all, they had thought of them in the first place and, even if I thought of another way to approach the matter, I didn’t want them to feel insulted. Stan, who after all had already been Marvel’s editor in the early 1940s and had guided the burgeoning Marvel Age of Comics from 1961 on, was clearly less uninhibited about imposing his own motivations on artists’ storytelling.

And I’ve got to admit that I’ve never had much sympathy for the point of view expressed by some in the “Failure to Communicate” pieces in TwoMorrows’ flagship title The Jack Kirby Collector for those who feel that Stan should’ve always stuck to what Jack intended, though my own approach was understandably different.

Since in #41 we accidentally ran a John Romita concept illo credited to Mike Ploog, we’ll make up for it with this early Ploog Frankenstein pencil drawing.

It was sent to us by a benefactor whose name, alas, got detached from it— but as soon as we find out who it was, we owe him a free issue of A/E! [Art ©2005 Mike Ploog.]

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[comments, correspondence, and corrections]

companion title Back Issue.

But look at the bright side—at least Zorro did get to meet Dracula under Topps’ brief aegis. I greatly enjoyed my several-year stint writing for Topps— adapting the films Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (even if I was less than enthralled by some aspects of To underscore his comment about the 1959 first issue of the movies the mag that soon became Castle of Frankenstein themselves), “borrowing” Dick Briefer’s “Frankenstein” logo (compare the series with with p. 75), John Benson sent this copy of the cover. artist Esteban [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

Maroto that related the life of the historical Vlad Dracula (even if I did turn him into a vampire at the end), The Frankenstein/ Dracula Wars, Jack Kirby’s Secret City Saga, and, perhaps most of all, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, continuing the exploits of Mark Schultz’s characters from Xenozoic Tales. In fact, I still have copies of the script and art for a three-issue C&D mini-series which I hope winds up being printed somewhere, sometime!

A Few Final Additions and Corrections: Golden Age artist Sheldon Moldoff dropped us a line to let us know that the cover of Fawcett’s This Magazine Is Haunted #4, shown in the FCA section of A/E #41, was drawn by himself, not by Bob Powell as we had been informed. Of course, we already knew that that comic itself was Shelly’s basic creation.

P.C. Hamerlinck, editor of FCA, corrected Roy’s poorly-worded suggestion that Fawcett was still a going concern. He writes: “Fawcett Publications was sold to CBS in January 1977 for what Roscoe Fawcett in the late 1990s called ‘a very large sum of money, even by today’s standards.’ CBS soon sold everything to another corporation, and from there on everything dissipated and dissolved.” P.C. reminds us that he covered this point in his interview with Roscoe Fawcett, which is reprinted in the trade paperback Fawcett Companion, still on sale through TwoMorrows.

John McDonagh was one of several folks who reminded us of other Frankensteins in the comics (not that we were trying to cover every single one), including the fact that Timely/Marvel’s “Suspense #20 had William Frankenstein (he died in the novel, but I presume this one to be different from the novel’s brother of Victor) trying to build a good creature.”

Incidentally, the cover date of Suspense #20 was July 1952.

John Benson, editor of the legendary EC fanzine Squa Tront, says that when he got to pp. 17-18 of our Frankenstein issue, “I stared at the logos, and they looked awfully familiar. Sure enough, Calvin Thomas Beck ‘borrowed’ the Prize logo for his 1959 magazine Journal of Frankenstein (which was inspired by the 1958 debut of Famous Monsters of Filmland). After this one issue, Beck changed the name of his magazine to its better-known incarnation, Castle of Frankenstein.”

Stephan Friedt, who scribed the article on Dell’s mid-1960s

Frankenstein super-hero title, asked “what would be the best way to amend something in my bio? Somehow it ended up reading like I was the only administrator at www.comcspriceguide.com, when in reality I’m one of nine scattered across the US, Canada, and England. My fellow admins were understanding… after they finished razzing me… but I would like to set the record straight somehow. What would you suggest?”

How about this very paragraph, Stephan?

Pedro Angosto, in a separate e-mail from the one above to P.C. Hamerlinck, advises us that, “in the Bloodstone mini-series that Marvel published two years ago, starring the ‘Lara Crofty’ daughter of the fabled monster-hunter Ulysses Bloodstone, Marvel’s Frankenstein Monster resurfaced as a sort of ‘valet’ of the Bloodstone family, hidden in the basement of their mansion.” Thanks for the info, Pedro, though we weren’t generally dealing with material that recent.

And Donald F. Glut, whose “Frankenstein in Four Colors” was the longest piece in issue #41, writes that he “should have remembered (in case you don’t already know) that Dick Briefer drew a ‘Captain Marvel’ story (with vampires, etc.) in an early issue. It was reprinted in one of the DC Archives books.” Hmm… we hadn’t heard that before, Don. Is that perhaps the story “Capt. Marvel Battles the Vampire” in Captain Marvel Adventures #1 (1941), the entire issue generally attributed to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby? Did Briefer perchance assist them on that rush job?

Send your comments and corrections to: Roy Thomas 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135

Fax: (803) 826-6501 E-mail: roydann@ntinet.com

And be here next time when the red-hot spotlight of Alter Ego shines on Carl Burgos, creator of the original Human Torch!

COMING SOON FROM ROY THOMAS!

WORLD WAR II! YOU ONLY THINK YOU KNOW WHO WON! Learn the startling secret of— TM

A darker saga of an alternate Earth—and the heroes who were born to save it!

NOTE: The US debut of Anthem, originally slated for 2004, has been delayed by Heroic Publishing’s scheduling of Alter Ego: The Graphic Novel and Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt for earlier release. But watch this space for news of Anthem!

TM & ©2005 Roy Thomas & Dude Comics

[Art ©2005 P.C. Hamerlinck]

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83 the World’s Mightiest Mortal!

You see, seated around that table were people … wonderful folks … who saw comic books as no more than brightly colored items that took up space somewhere on the news rack … never to be touched … or opened … or read. I was certain that to them my working on a comic book character … this Captain Something-or-Other … amounted to having taken a step or two backward in the career.

By

mds& logo ©2005 Marc Swayze; Captain Marvel © & TM 2005 DC Comics] (c) [Art

[FCA EDITORS NOTE: From 1941-53, Marcus D. Swayze was a top artist for Fawcett Publications. The very first Mary Marvel character sketches came from Marc’s drawing table, and he illustrated her earliest adventures, including the classic origin story, “Captain Marvel Introduces Mary Marvel (Captain Marvel Adventures #18, Dec. ’42); but he was primarily hired by Fawcett Publications to illustrate Captain Marvel stories and covers for Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel Adventures. He also wrote many Captain Marvel scripts, and continued to do so while in the military. After leaving the service in 1944, he made an arrangement with Fawcett to produce art and stories for them on a freelance basis out of his Louisiana home.

There he created both art and story for The Phantom Eagle in Wow Comics, in addition to drawing the Flyin’ Jenny newspaper strip for Bell Syndicate (created by his friend and mentor Russell Keaton).

After the cancellation of Wow, Swayze produced artwork for Fawcett’s top-selling line of romance comics, including Sweethearts and Life Story. After the company ceased publishing comics, Marc moved over to Charlton Publications, where he ended his comics career in the mid-’50s. Marc’s ongoing professional memoirs have been FCA’s most popular feature since his first column appeared in FCA #54, 1996. Last issue, Marc continued his recollections of The Great Pierre, the comic strip that had finally led to his long soughtafter syndicate contract. In this issue, Marc enters the corporate world of 1956 with a packaging design assignment and, while there, contemplates his comics career… and what kind of future in comics lay in store for him. —P.C. Hamerlinck.]

Ashamed? I am more so now … for having been then!

I thought about that … and how much the comic books had meant to me … as I sat at my desk in 1956 … in the Packaging Division of OMCC … the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation. The curious vacillating tactics of Joseph Agnelli at Bell had continued on into the year. My purpose for being with the packaging people was to assist them in assembling a creative art department. The game plan of the new owners was to convert the existing industrial facilities to include retail packaging. Involving the consumer trade meant more sophisticated graphics. I found it all very interesting … although I understood my participation as temporary.

The Great Pierre, the feature for which I held a contract with Bell Syndicate, was, in comic strip terms, a realistic, continuous adventureromance … the kind I had hoped to spend my life writing and drawing.

It was the very kind of newspaper feature that had begun to slip from an uppermost position in the reader popularity polls … and was predicted to keep slipping. And … as was later learned … did!

I knew it … or should have … after fifteen or so years of intense interest and dedicated study and effort. Maybe I saw it and refused to acknowledge it. Human nature behaves that way sometimes, you know.

At the OMCC packaging offices my first move in the quest for appropriate artists was like I imagined Al Allard’s might have been … I looked around me. You’d have thought I was preparing for war. A World War II vet situated in the structural design lab of one of the plants was a qualified artist … and he knew the tricky language of packaging

Things were so different then! Before you made a single stroke with your pen, it had to be dipped into a very, very familiar little black bottle that occupied a special permanent place on your board, and contained opaque, slow-drying ink … the only kind you would have considered worthy of the small masterpiece taking shape before you.

Daily newspaper comic strips were delivered to the local publishers in the form of lightweight molds … made of a material capable of withstanding the heat of the molten metal used in making printing plates. And all of that was taken into consideration at the drawing board … because a line drawn too lightly might not print at all … whereas one too heavy might merge with an adjacent line, with an unsightly … well … blob!

Have you ever been troubled by little incidents that occurred long ago … and have never really been a bother … except when you remember them? On a brief visit back South during my early months at Fawcett, I was having dinner with friends at the Keatons’ in their hometown in Mississippi. Russell, the writer/artist/creator of the newspaper strip Flyin’ Jenny and always the perfect host, suggested that I tell of the work I was doing in the “Big City.” It’s hard to explain … but I was embarrassed!

Think of it! Ashamed … to talk about my old pal, Captain Marvel,

“Ashamed?!! To talk about drawing the World’s Mightiest Mortal?” Panel from “The Haunted Halloween Hotel” in Whiz Comics #36 (Oct. 1942), art

by Marc Swayze. [©2005 DC Comics.]

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Marc Swayze production. Downtown, clerking at an auto parts business, there was a young veteran of the Navy, already making a name as a cartoonist in commercial car journals. I saw need of the talents of both.

When the search extended out over the land, I was impressed at the enthusiastic assistance of the company personnel department. As a matter of fact, I was impressed with the whole organization. The team spirit was like at a home-game season opener … everybody excited with the new ownership and objectives.

Pierre represented my long-time goal. But just look at the situation … the uncertainty of it. Time changes things … comics change … reader preference changes. How many realistic comic strips do you see on the newspaper page today? I suspect that all the wishy-washy correspondence from Bell Syndicate was because Joe Agnelli saw a true picture … and just couldn’t help being a gentle soul.

There seemed to be a decision at hand. But leave the comics? I couldn’t do that!!!

Or could I …?

[Marc’s memories of the Golden Age continue next issue.]

“Leave the comics? I couldn’t do that!” Swayze on an assignment with the packaging corporation, in 1956. Photo courtesy of Marc.

[Capt. Marvel art ©2005 DC Comics.]

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85

Alan Jim Hanley: The Story Of A Good Guy

by John Pierce

Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

I

NTRODUCTION: FCA is proud to present John Pierce’s reverent review of the often-overlooked work of late fan artist Alan Jim Hanley, whose cheerful comic strips graced various fanzines—including his own Comic Book—throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Hanley’s original, Golden Age-inspired stories contained a genuine, warm, and humanistic feel—combined with a dry, gentle sense of humor.

I had corresponded with Hanley a couple of times before finally meeting him in person at a 1979 Minneapolis comic convention. As we exchanged bright ideas at his table (okay, it was mostly just me listening to his corny jokes!), he sat there with his ever-present pipe in mouth and sketched out a version of me—an awkward teenager at the time—as Captain Marvel Jr. As he belted out this masterpiece while we talked, I felt as if I were talking to that clean-living superhero himself, “Goodguy,” Hanley’s humble Captain Marvel-like creation. Even if you never had the opportunity to meet the amiable Mr. Hanley, but had read an issue of his Comic Book or any “Goodguy” adventure, then in a way you did indeed know the man, because his humor, opinions, and love for comics always shone through his work.

Commercial publishers had no need for him, even though Hanley aspired to see his work appear one day in “major league” comics. But he was in a league of his own, and most likely wouldn’t have been very content illustrating another writer’s script or having to depict things he truly felt were bad for comic books. The exception would have been a shot at drawing his admired hero from childhood, the Big Red Cheese, Captain Marvel. C.C. Beck himself suggested Hanley as the artist to succeed him on DC’s Shazam! comic after Beck quit the book. But drawing Captain Marvel for DC never materialized for Hanley, who held great disdain for the company’s handling of the character. He told John Pierce in June, 1980: “Let’s face it: the vision, the personality, and the luck that created the original Captain Marvel just ain’t there! A certain verve, independence of spirit, spunk, and a certain educated romantic mind—and maybe a few other highly individualistic qualities—are required to pull a guy like Captain Marvel together and put him over the top. Do I have enough of the above to do it? Looking over my past stuff in an increasing distant retrospect, I think it is obvious that I do. … It would have been nice to have had the opportunity to work with a good, knowledgeable editor on Captain Marvel.”

Even though Hanley didn’t “officially” contribute to the mythos of The World’s Mightiest Mortal, it certainly doesn’t diminish the enduring quality of the numerous creative contributions he gave to the world of comic fandom …work that was definitely in the same spirit as the original Captain Marvel. In addition, there would be no FCA in existence today had Hanley and Bernie McCarty not convened that one Sunday afternoon over 35 years ago at Hanley’s suburban Chicago apartment to discuss a way to revive the old Captain Marvel Club of their youth … a planted seed which McCarty would eventually develop into the Fawcett Collectors of America newsletter.

—P.C. Hamerlinck.

The first page of A.J. Hanley’s Comic Book #4. The artist drew himself wearing a badge saying “America’s No. 1 Starving Artist.” [All art reproduced with this article is ©2005 Estate of Alan Jim Hanley; all characters are TM & ©2005 the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Captain Marvel has had many devoted fans over the years. Some, such as E. Nelson Bridwell, Don Newton, Jerry Ordway, and Alex Ross, have even had the opportunity to work on one version or other of the character.

But no one else took his enthusiasm for Captain Marvel in particular, and comics in general, in the direction followed by one singular, creative fan: Alan Jim Hanley.

When Jim (as he was generally called) died an untimely death at the age of 41, on December 24th of 1980, he left behind an impressive body of work. But with the exception of some text illustrations for Charlton Publications, and a few for Crazy magazine, none of it appeared in professional comics. Instead, his work was seen in numerous fanzines of

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Alan Jim Hanley Finally, as one character observed, “Billy will need a convenient device for switching back ’n’ forth from his souped-up form to his runty little self.” Captain Marvel (not herein named, but obviously him) responds, “I know a nifty magic word!” “Nooo,” says another. “Magic words are definitely out! Midniteman has come up with this... a medallion—a panic button as it were—sensitive only to Billy’s touch.”

Thus, when problems arise, Billy Boyko has only to press the panic button in order to change into Goodguy, “the major marvel of this time.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Goodguy is dressed in a costume which borrows liberally from Captain Marvel’s tailoring, and on the surface the character is seemingly a blatant rip-off of the Big Red Cheese. In actuality, Goodguy was a homage to a character who had passed from the scene over 20 years before. The DC Captain Marvel revival was still a few years in the future, something hardly anyone at the time could have foreseen. Hanley was paying tribute to his favorite character of yore by creating a new version, crafted in the image of the original. And yet, Goodguy came to have his own voice and style, and moved beyond being a simple Captain Marvel imitation.

Not too surprisingly, Goodguy was later joined by a Goodguy Junior (also called Minor Marvel) and by a female version variously named Miss Marvel, Ms. Marvel (before Marvel Comics came out with a character by that name, herself being a distaff version of Marvel’s own name-stealing Captain Mar-Vell), and Bonniebelle. Hanley never seemed to run out of inspiration for names! While professional comics characters have numerous nicknames (Man of Steel, World’s Mightiest Mortal, Emerald Crusader, Scarlet Speedster, ol’ Web-Head, etc.), and of course their secret identity handles, very few have ever gone by more than one nom de guerre. Where else does one find such, except in the Bible and in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien?

A page from Goodguy’s origin in Comic Book #4, with a cameo by Captain Marvel.

Together, these three formed the Goodguy Gang (later some others, including a Moms Marvel, would be added), and not unlike The Marvel Family, they had adventures together and separately.

the late ’60s and ’70s, such as The Comic Reader, The Buyer’s Guide, FVP, Dynamic Magazine, Sense of Wonder, Fantasticomix, Comics Commentary, Comic Crusader, and many others, including his own Hanley’s Fandom and Comic Book.

In particular, he was known for his pastiches of Golden Age stars: All-American Jack (Captain America), The Spook (The Spirit), and various others.

But above them all stood his tribute to the original Captain Marvel, his own Goodguy, a.k.a. Major Marvel.

Goodguy was really Billy Boyko, a youngster and comics fan visited by the spirits of various comic book characters from Limbo. These characters were a mixture of pastiches (Supersam, Quickstreak, etc.) as well as actual figures, including Captain Marvel and Green Lama. Together they confer upon Billy “the special gifts of the Comic Book Limbo League,” including such powers as “flying ability, power over time ’n’ space, imperviousness, the ability to make small talk, super-speed, extraordinary sense of humor, courage, humility, aura-sensitivity, et cetera.”

From that list, it can easily be observed that seriousness was hardly to be the order of the day with Goodguy, as more typical super-powers are mixed with abilities which are hardly super at all.

(Though, in all honesty, I know some people who could use an “extraordinary sense of humor.”)

The Spook, Hanley’s homage to Will Eisner’s Spirit. Read this story today in Bill Schelly’s new book The Best of Star-Studded Comics, featuring highlights from that classic 1960s fanzine, which also sports the work of Landon Chesney, Gardner Fox, Grass Green, Roy Thomas, Alan Weiss, Biljo White, Dave & Steve Herring, and many more. Highly recommended by FCA! See Hamster Press’ ad on p. 30.

The Story Of A Good Guy

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In one particular adventure from Hanley’s Comic Book, Goodguy meets “the Most Dangerous Person in the World,” a kid named Quentin Quizby whose very presence causes misery and negativity to spread.

In reverse, this character was oddly prescient of the Elliot Maggin-created Sunny Sparkle, who would appear in a few early stories of DC’s revived Captain Marvel—a kid whose essence compelled people to be nice to him and give him things. But, whereas Sunny was cute and essentially harmless, Quentin was considered a menace, due to his ability to project his moods onto others.

The Champion of Clean Living (as Goodguy was sometimes called) is given an assignment from Mayor Morrison (who resembles Billy Batson’s boss, Sterling Morris) of finding Quentin and helping him “to see the better side of life.” But if that can’t be done, “he will have to be destroyed,” states the mayor. “Hm— Now I wonder what Captain Marvel would say to that!?!” thinks Goodguy as he flies off.

Soon Goodguy catches up with Quentin, who demonstrates more abilities than simply projecting moods, by conjuring up a red dragon to fight Goodguy. While GG takes care of the dragon, Quentin, not unlike Diogynes, wanders off in search of an honest person, whom he finds in Billy’s friend Pat Pebbles. Amazingly, through a few simple and childlike actions, Pat manages to get Quentin to smile—until Goodguy’s arch-foe, the Rotten Egg, shows up.

The Rotten Egg kidnaps Quentin, and when Goodguy follows, he is hit with a bomb containing ”a water sack—with human tears in it—my own weakness—I’m falling—must work fast!!!” (Thus, readers also see that GG has a Kryptonite-like nemesis, but one more logically and easily found.)

Goodguy quickly uses his panic button to change back to Billy, then tosses the button down to Pat. “Press it, Pat, ’n’ catch me! — Please!” Hanley pokes Cover for Hanley’s Fandom (1972), a portfolio of the artist’s early work. a bit of fun at himself at this point with a bogus some of his Limbo League benefactors, Robotman, Target, and the editor’s note, “Is this really possible? Editor,” with the response, “It’s a Guardian (actual comic book characters from the Golden Age, rather comic book — Writer.” than pastiches), who are robbing a bank. This gives a good excuse for a Possible or not, Pat catches the button and presses it, changing her review of the origin story, in which we see a variety of Golden Age (apparently for the first time) into Bonniebelle, a female version of heroes, including Captain Triumph, The Green Lama, Funnyman, Goodguy, who just barely manages to stop admiring her “cute outfit” in Captain Midnight, the original Atom, and even Hoppy the Marvel time to catch Billy. The transformed Pat flies Billy to the jail, where the Bunny.

Egg was planning to use Quentin to break out another foe, Czar Castic.

Later on, Goodguy catches the robbing Limbo Leaguers, who turn They arrive just in time to stop the jailbreak. out to be robots directed by the villainous Dr. Sin, a bearded Sivana However, the Rotten Egg tries to throw some tears onto Bonniebelle, take-off, whom GG had gone up against in at least one previous tale in but it doesn’t work. The transformed Pat informs the Egg that “Tears Comic Book #4. When GG confronts Dr. Sin, the latter plays his trump may be Goodguy’s weakness but it’s [sic] not mine. ’N’ now, you bad card. “How fortuitous!” exclaims the doctor. “For you see, Goodguy, I little boy!—” as she takes the Egg and administers a spanking! am prepared for this visit. I have one super robot super-hero that is your Meanwhile, Czar Castic is about to throw something called the Cloak of No. 1 benefactor—and it will intrigue me to register your reaction Despair over Billy to convert him to their side. However, Quentin has against your virtual twin...” Then to the robot he unveils from behind a “just decided to take the initiative! You can’t harm anyone! Go away!” curtain: “Captain Marvel, turn on—Get Goodguy!”

And by pointing his finger, he dispatches the Czar through the air, Goodguy, however, remains undaunted. Not wanting to destroy eliciting a “Good garbage!” (one of his favorite exclamations, his own “such excellent craftsmanship,” he simply lets the robots wear version of “Holy moley!”) from Billy. The story ends with Quentin’s themselves down while he goes after Doc Sin. resolve to become a “goodguy.”

Redemption also plays a role in “The Limbo League Crimes,” from FVP #5. In this story, dated March of 1971, Goodguy meets up with

On the last page, a caption informs us that “Shortly ’n’ soon, after Goodguy has worked his reformation powers on Doc Sin,” we see a reformed doctor, surrounded by many of his robot creations (including

88

Alan Jim Hanley too-lengthy and not-entirely-historically-accurate discourse about the evils of big-time capitalism. The story concludes poignantly with a scene of a pole holding signs reading “Oligarchy,” “1984,” “Fascism,” and “Pray.”

Perhaps Hanley’s own life as a freelance writer-artist and actor (barring great breaks, a virtual guarantee of living a less-than-affluent existence) gave rise to some of his viewpoints. It is obvious that he felt rather strongly on some matters. And yet, in spite of this somewhat different element in some of his stories, he really was not betraying the spirit of Captain Marvel. After all, as I have pointed out in earlier articles in Alter Ego, Captain Marvel’s stories often contained serious themes, dealing with matters such as inferiority complexes, despair, bigotry, snobbishness, etc., all cleverly done in adventurous format. While I’ve never come across any “Captain Marvel” stories which were overtly political [EDITORS NOTE: John is, of course, not counting Cap’s several World War II-era propaganda stories. —PCH]; nonetheless, the seeds for later development by others were there.

In a fan letter, I told Hanley of my preference for lighter fare in comics. His response, dated August 27, 1975, was instructive:

(Above:) Hanley poked fun at the barbarian genre in “Thug the Unkindly!”

(Below right:) Goodguy recites a nearly-identical version of St. Francis of Assissi’s prayer for peace during the “Thug” adventure.

Plastic Man, Black Terror, Miss America, Mary Marvel, the original Green Lantern, Black Cat, the original Daredevil, Crimebuster, and others), vowing to go straight. “Goodguy, I want to thank you for showing me the light. With an honest-to-goodness friend like you, maybe I can still find a legitimate place in the sun!”

Doc Sin, under the fuller name of Dr. Sinteriak, would appear in later Goodguy tales as an ally. I’ve often wondered just how Goodguy accomplished such a swift transformation in his foe. As an evangelical Christian, I’ve sometimes considered the possibility that he may have used an evangelistic approach. Nothing in the story or any of the stories indicates that, but I do know that Hanley was a Catholic, who had an interest in spiritual themes. In any event, however it was accomplished, it was certainly a different turn of events for a super-hero story, and showed Hanley’s genius not just for homage and pastiche, but for originality, as the character whom readers might have expected to become to Goodguy what Sivana had been to Captain Marvel, instead became a co-worker.

As time progressed, the mainly nostalgic story tone began to evolve into something different, as themes of social consciousness became more the norm. There are several ironies in all of this. First of all, they were quite different from the heavy-handedness of the Denny O’Neilscripted Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories from DC in the 1970s.

Secondly, they didn’t scrimp on super-hero action, as “message” stories often have tended to do.

One such example is “The Menace of Moneyman,” serialized in The Buyer’s Guide. Much of it is straightforward super-hero action, with Goodguy being aided by Bonniebelle as well as Minor Marvel, not to mention other Hanley creations such as Dick Drake (a Dick Tracy pastiche), All-American Jack, and the scientific expertise of Dr. Sinteriak. But the story’s end gives Hanley a chance to have Goodguy expound his (presumably Hanley’s own) philosophy, in a somewhat-

“Yes, I prefer lighter type stories, too. But there is a part of whatever cartooning talent I have that is very much in the editorial vein. I try to control it, but sometimes I get so angry at the powers that be who are forever selling the country down the river. Truly, the

The Story Of A Good Guy

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Captain Marvel stories, the moral, social and personal human interest stories, contributed to my education up until I was about 12. Stories about hate, inferiority complex, self-consciousness, fear and so many more was [sic] for me a lot of steps in the ladder of understanding both myself and people around me. The dumb fun and serious adventures were probably just as important from the standpoint of balance and giving weight to all spectrums covered by the CM stories. It was all believable. In the Goodguy ‘Moneyman’ story, I poke a lot of fun at money-power, at Greed, which, I believe, is at the center of all our problems, why things never will work out right. The National Character is dominated by greed overwhelmingly. Only on the last page on what becomes part ten in a GG sum-up speech does the story become ultraserious. The last picture is 100% editorial … very uncommercial. If one of the comic book companies was publishing GG, I wouldn’t indulge myself so. I would keep it all more broad and general, but I guess I figure fandom can take it. Goodguy was never meant to be a direct imitation of CM, just in the genre. If I were doing more GG stories more frequently, I am sure the stories would vary quite a bit.”

In another Goodguy story, “Thug the Unkindly” (also serialized in The Buyer’s Guide), Hanley pokes fun at the barbarian genre. Thug specializes, in his own words, in “war...blood...thieving [sic], wenching, boozing.” But Hanley left little doubt as to his own thoughts on the matter of barbarian “heroes” with a caption, “What I, your editor of this and other magazines of like ilk, am trying to say is that comics today ain’t ’zackly for kids!”

Later on, during a philosophical interlude within the story, Goodguy recites a nearly-identical version of St. Francis of Assissi’s Prayer for Peace (“Where there is hatred, let there be love …”). Later still, Goodguy comes upon a civil war, in which the forces of “Marvelmania”

“The Green Society of America”

have been fighting those of “Marvelzania.” (Subtlety wasn’t one of Hanley’s strong suits, obviously.) “Seeing wholesale bloodshed for the first time has an immediate, somewhat insane, effect on Goodguy,” and he “starts swinging at everybody.” The result is that the two opposing armies join forces against GG. He wears them down, and then pretends to die. Someone, apparently a king, and who looks an awful lot like Stan Lee, proclaims a holiday for the newly reunited Marvel Land. “Now everybody unto my place for coffee and doughnuts, etcetera, etcetera, excelsior!”

Goodguy is proud of his accomplishment, and is ready to head home, but he is confronted by Thug. “You left quite a trail of good deeds behind you, Mr. Goodguy—unselfish and payless … Say, what are you?

Some kind of radical fanatic? Tryin’ to change the ways of the world?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” answers Goodguy, waxing almost Messianic. “This is why I was created and have come into the world. To establish a brotherly peace, justice, and to stimulate the creative arts.

Such pursuit is my purpose and my destiny.” Not unlike Jesus, and even echoing His words somewhat (John 18:37), he knows and states exactly the reasons for his existence.

Goodguy then asks Thug to join him in “the forces of right ’n’ good,” but the barbarian has his doubts.

“Me? Hah! I’m a soldier! A warrior! Sure, I gets weary, but peace?

Brotherhood? With all men? I dunno... Sure would take some gettin’ use to.... Still, I think the long-range memory of man will well recall the name of Thug and his demon deeds. But, you, your name and fame will fade with the morning mists.…”

Hanley’s Captain Thunder faces the five most evil villains from the Golden Age in a great splash page from Comic Book #3.

In this story, Hanley set up not only an intriguing statement of good versus evil, but of evil being driven out by good, of violence overcome, if not with non-violence, then at least without violence being the total response and final factor. And of course, it was his own metaphor about the drift of comics away from the purity and, dare I say it, beauty of the

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Alan Jim Hanley The Collector and reprinted in Comic Book #7, was the story of Greenhorn, an alien invader. In this particular story, rather than using any of his usual characters (though Goodguy did appear in one panel), Hanley did pastiches of numerous super-heroes, most of them having “Green” in their name in some way: Green America, Supergreen, Plastic Green, Green Fate, The Green Atom, Green Mid-Nite, etc. As the story went on, it moved from a lighthearted adventure into much darker themes, particularly in the last chapter, when Greenhorn succeeds in taking over the Americas (in spite of the efforts of the Green Society of America and others). Now in power, Greenhorn orders that on the first day of each week, each person shall gain weight.

The second day was to be Laziness Day, the third Naked Ladies’ Day, the fourth Naked Men’s Day, the fifth Violence Day, the sixth Work-Like-a-Dog Day, and the seventh will be Hate God Day. “Finally, the 13th day of each month, for as long as the human race shall last, shall be known as Abortion Day!”

Whew. Obviously, things looked bad for the human race. Fortunately, one hero, The origin of Marvelmouse—and (below) the splash of Hanley’s funny-animal Plastic Green, has managed to avoid super-hero group—both from Comic Book #6.

Greenhorn’s clutches by disguising himself.

He writes a message of appeal on paper, and classic super-hero themes and into other realms … all done, in one enterthen stretches his right arm all the way up to Ukranus, the sixth planet, taining tale. where Limbo is located—a terrific feat. (“I just know I’m going to get The folks behind the “Captain Marvel” stories of the 1940s would, I arthritis somewhere....”) While waiting on help, Plas sets to harassing the think, have been proud of Hanley’s achievement. So, too, might have minions of evil, in his peculiar way, until help can arrive, in the form of been St. Francis, who might not have minded at all having virtually his own words utilized by someone else!

Besides the “Goodguy” stories, Hanley did many others. There were stories of All-American Jack. And the Mighty Buggers, his anthropomorphic super-hero group headed by the somewhat egotistic Marvelmouse, a rodent version of Hoppy the Marvel Bunny but with a decidedly un-Marvel Familylike personality. How about Captain America Bunny, who crossed Hoppy with the Star-Spangled Avenger?

Hanley also did his own Captain Thunder, a futuristic take-off on Captain Midnight—quite unaware at the time that Captain Thunder had been Captain Marvel’s original name.

One of Hanley’s more unusual stories, originally serialized in Bill Wilson’s

The Story Of A Good Guy

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Green Marvel (a capeless version of the Big Red Cheese).

Then, aided by numerous other heroes (not all of whom have “green” in their names), Marvel ends the domination of Greenhorn, bringing to an end what surely had to be one of Hanley’s most bizarre and thoughtprovoking tales.

Sadly, Alan Jim Hanley’s life came to an end when his car Author John G. Pierce in 1968, as left the road just a member of the Capital Guards ROTC block from his Marching Squad. home. Besides leaving behind a wife of eight years, Maureen, and two daughters, Kim and Krista, he left behind a tremendous legacy of entertainment, adventure, and pungent commentary on life. While it is sad that he never did find much of a home in the professionally published comics, perhaps he was just where he needed to be, in a venue where he was less restricted, and was able to speak with his own unique voice.

As Jim Engel eulogized him in The Comic Reader #188, “the hundreds of pages of delightful, heart-

Hanley’s intro page for Comic Book #3.

warming stories he has left us are a much greater achievement and infinitely more valuable than anything he could have done as a hired talent catering to someone else’s view of what makes a good comic. Maybe it seems too bad that Hanley could never conform enough to achieve a goal, but I think that what’s really too bad is that the rest of the world couldn’t conform a little more to Jim Hanley’s view of it.”

Your work was good ’n’ original, A.J. You were the real Goodguy.

Hanley drew this piece for Alan Light’s Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom #124.

[Capt. Marvel & Plastic Man TM & © 2005 DC Comics.]