Alter Ego #54

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GOLDEN/SILVER AGE ACE INKER

MIKE ESPOSITO ON ROSS ANDRU, SPIDER-MAN, WONDER WOMAN, & MORE! EXTRA:

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No.54 ROBERT KANIGHER ON CREATING THE METAL MEN

November 2005

& SGT. ROCK!

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Is This The End Of Andru & Esposito and Wonder Woman?

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[Art ©2005 Mike Esposito; Wonder Woman TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

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

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

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

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

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

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ALTER EGO #135

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ALTER EGO #137

Gentleman JIM MOONEY gets a featurelength spotlight, in an in-depth interview conducted by DR. JEFF McLAUGHLIN— never before published! Featuring plenty of rare and unseen MOONEY ART from Batman & Robin, Supergirl, Spider-Man, Legion of Super-Heroes, Tommy Tomorrow, and others! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Celebrates SOL BRODSKY—Fantastic Four #3-4 inker, logo designer, and early Marvel production manager! With tributes by daughter and Marvel colorist JANNA PARKER, STAN LEE, HERB TRIMPE, STAN GOLDBERG, DAVID ANTHONY KRAFT, TONY ISABELLA, ROY THOMAS, and others! Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Cover portrait by JOHN ROMITA!

LEN WEIN (writer/co-creator of Swamp Thing, Human Target, and Wolverine) talks about his early days in comics at DC and Marvel! Art by WRIGHTSON, INFANTINO, TRIMPE, DILLON, CARDY, APARO, THORNE, MOONEY, and others! Plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MR. MONSTER’s Comic Crypt, the Comics Code, and DAN BARRY! Cover by DICK GIORDANO with BERNIE WRIGHTSON!

BONUS 100-PAGE issue as ROY THOMAS talks to JIM AMASH about celebrating his 50th year in comics—and especially about the ‘90s at Marvel! Art by TRIMPE, GUICE, RYAN, ROSS, BUCKLER, HOOVER, KAYANAN, BUSCEMA, CHAN, VALENTINO, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’s Comic Crypt, AMY KISTE NYBERG on the Comics Code, and a cover caricature of Roy by MARIE SEVERIN!

Incredible interview with JIM SHOOTER, which chronicles the first decade of his career (Legion of Super-Heroes, Superman, Supergirl, Captain Action) with art by CURT SWAN, WALLY WOOD, GIL KANE, GEORGE PAPP, JIM MOONEY, PETE COSTANZA, WIN MORTIMER, WAYNE BORING, AL PLASTINO, et al.! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Cover art by CURT SWAN!

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Science-fiction great (and erstwhile comics writer) HARLAN ELLISON talks about Captain Marvel and The Monster Society of Evil! Also, Captain Marvel artist/ co-creator C.C. BECK writes about the infamous Superman-Captain Marvel lawsuit of the 1940s and ‘50s in a double-size FCA section! Plus two titanic tributes to Golden Age artist FRED KIDA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

JIM AMASH interviews ROY THOMAS about his 1990s work on Conan, the stillborn Marvel/Excelsior line launched by STAN LEE, writing for Cross Plains, Topps, DC, and others! Art by KAYANAN, BUSCEMA, MAROTO, GIORDANO, ST. AUBIN, DITKO, SIMONSON, MIGNOLA, LARK, KIRBY, CORBEN, SALE, SCHULTZ, LIGHTLE, McKEEVER, BENDIS, and more!

Cover by RAFAEL KAYANAN!

Golden Age great IRWIN HASEN spotlight, adapted from DAN MAKARA’s film documentary on Hasen, the 1940s artist of the Justice Society, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Wildcat, Cat-Man, and numerous other classic heroes—and, for 30 years, the artist of the famous DONDI newspaper strip! Bonus art by his buddies JOE KUBERT, ALEX TOTH, CARMINE INFANTINO, and SHELLY MAYER!

From Detroit to Deathlok, we cover the career of artist RICH BUCKLER: Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Black Panther, Ka-Zar, Dracula, Morbius, a zillion Marvel covers— Batman, Hawkman, and other DC stars— Creepy and Eerie horror—and that’s just in the first half of the 1970s! Plus Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, FCA, and comics expert HAMES WARE on fabulous Golden Age artist RAFAEL ASTARITA!

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Vol. 3, No. 54/November 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 Mike Esposito (after Andru & Esposito)

Cover Colorist

Contents Writer/Editorial: “The Triple Pillar Of The World”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Part II of a tintinnabulatin’ talk about Andru, Kanigher, Lee—and Up Your Nose!

“It Wasn’t My Turn To Do Another Showcase”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Tom Ziuko

Lynn Woolley and Robert Kanigher on the creation of the Metal Men.

And Special Thanks to:

Who Created Sgt. Rock? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Heidi Amash Don Mangus Bob Bailey Joe & Nadia Mannarino Pat Bastienne Don Markstein Allen & Roz Bellman David Massengill John Benson Matt Moring Daniel Best Frank Motler Al Bigley Mark Muller Dominic Bongo Paty Doug Bost Ken Quattro Michael Browning John G. Pierce Mike Burkey Ken Pierce Bob Cherry Gene Reed Ernie Colón Jerry Robinson Tom Conroy Herb Rogoff Ray A. Cuthbert Eric Schumacher Teresa R. Davidson David Siegel Tony DeZuniga Robin Snyder Mike Esposito J. David Spurlock Mark Evanier Jim Stanley Michael Feldman Jim Steranko Ed Fields bhob Stewart Creig Flessel Marc Swayze Shane Foley Dann Thomas Dave Fontaine Alex Toth Carl Gafford Michael Uslan Janet Gilbert Dr. Michael J. Vassallo Dick Giordano Pete Von Sholly Stan Goldberg Tom Watkins Matt Gore John Wells Gary Groth Jennifer Hamerlinck Ted White Robert Wiener Jack C. Harris Tom Wimbish Heritage Comics Marv Wolfman Larry Ivie Lynn Woolley Rob Jones Rodrigo M. Zeidan Joe Kubert Rodriguez Zelis Larry Lieber Eddy Zeno Mark Luebker Michael Zeno Glenn MacKay Michele Maki

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

John Albano, Jim Aparo, Sam Kweskin, & Byron Preiss

Robert Kanigher, Bob Haney, Joe Kubert, & Robin Snyder take the Easy (Co.) way out.

Comic Crypt: Focus On John Stanley – Part II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Michael T. Gilbert takes a second look at the brilliant writer of Little Lulu.

“Paint With Your Pencil”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Alex Toth with advice for aspiring—and professional—artists.

1966: The Year Of The THREE (Or Maybe 2H) New York Comicons – Part II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Bill Schelly on Day Two of the landmark John Benson con.

Tributes to Sam Kweskin, Jim Aparo, John Albano, & Byron Preiss. . . . . 71 re: [comments, corrections, & correspondence] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Rogoff, Uslan, and Bellman write us. Who says the fans should have all the fun?

FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) #113 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 P.C. Hamerlinck spotlights Marc Swayze, Michael Uslan, and Brazil’s Capitão Marvel!

About Our Cover: To illustrate the sterling work of the Ross Andru/Mike Esposito team at DC, Marvel, and elsewhere over the past half century, Mike Esposito could’ve re-created any number of fondly-remembered and well-composed covers, featuring Wonder Woman, the Metal Men, Spider-Man, or other characters. But Ye Editor unabashedly prevailed upon his old poker buddy to do a slightly different riff on that of Wonder Woman #108 (Aug. 1959), with the mugs of Ross and Mike replacing that of the original Princess Di on the “Wanted” poster. Incidentally, the original art of this cover—and numerous other commissions—is for sale by Mike, who can be reached at Espo@mightymikeesposito.net; or see his website at: http://mightymikeespo.net/ [Art ©2005 Mike Esposito; Wonder Woman TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

Above: An Andru & Esposito panel from The Amazing Spider-Man #156 (May 1976). [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] 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: $9 ($11 Canada, $12.00 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 writer/editorial

2

“The Triple Pillar Of The World” S

ure, the Shakespearean quote above (from Julius Caesar) is a tad hyperbolic when applied to comics creators (or to most triumvirates, come to that), but it seemed like the logical title of this page—just as the way the three-man theme that emerged for this issue of Alter Ego seemed the most natural thing in the world.

For the three names seem destined to be intertwined forever, in some thick underbrush of comic book history: Ross Andru—Mike Esposito —Robert Kanigher.

We began, of course, with the second half of Jim Amash’s epic interview with Mike, which would deal in large part (though far from solely) with the years he and partner/penciler Ross Andru spent drawing Wonder Woman, Metal Men, and “The War That Time Forgot” for DC, before they became a bit less of a team first at Marvel, later at DC again, as well.

And since Robert Kanigher was both the editor and writer of virtually every one of the stories Ross and Mike drew for the three above series, and for a few other tales as well, we were delighted when Lynn Woolley showed up with notes written by RK himself about the origins of the Metal Men. For good measure, we asked Robin Snyder for permission to reprint material from his excellent monthly magazine The Comics! (née History of Comics, about a decade and a half ago) which

was written by Kanigher—as well as by the late Bob Haney, by Robin as moderator of sorts, and by artist Joe Kubert (who’s long since given us his blessing to print any old material of his that we run across—as long as we don’t ask him to draw anything new on his backbreaking schedule). Maybe Ross and Mike were just as well out of that one, though they did draw other war stories for Kanigher.

You’ll find some disagreements in these pages as to who did what, and when, and to whom—but that’s par for the course in any situation that deals with history, and not merely that of lowly comic books.

Basically, though, despite a few harsh words exchanged in print a few years back between Kanigher and Haney, two great talents who sadly are no longer with us, we hope you’ll find this issue a celebration of them as well as of Mike Esposito and Ross Andru, and the numerous other collaborators with whom one or the other of that team worked— including Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, Julius Schwartz, Gil Kane, John Romita, Barry Smith, the Brothers Buscema, Marie Severin, Gerry Conway, even a Thomas named Roy. Well, every issue can use a bit of comedy relief.

Bestest,

COMING IN DECEMBER

#

Special Fawcett & Christmas Issue!

55

The Marvel Family, Bulletman, Captain Midnight, & The Men Who Made Them Live (Plus ISIS)!

• Full-color flip covers! A fabulous painting of the mighty Marvel Family

by ALEX ROSS—and WWII pin-up Veronica Lake as Liberty Belle!

• An FCA Special! “A Real-Life MARVEL FAMILY!” JACK & OTTO BINDER— legendary Golden Age artist-and-writer brothers—in a candid self-interview never before published! Plus rare art by C.C. BECK, PETE COSTANZA, BILL WARD, BOB McCAY, KURT SCHAFFENBERGER, MAC RABOY, et al.!

• Golden Age artists (& brothers-in-law!) KEN BALD & VIC DOWD—plus colleague BOB BOYAJIAN—all interviewed by JIM AMASH about the years at Fawcett, Quality, and elsewhere!

• Special double-size FCA section! Fawcett artists MARC SWAYZE & EMILIO SQUEGLIO—JOANNA PANG of TV’s “Isis” speaks!—Marvel Family Christmas stories—& Brazil’s Capitão Marvel!

Comics.] vel Family TM & ©2005 DC [Art ©2005 Alex Ross; Mar

Edited by ROY THOMAS

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• Christmas Bonus! ALEX WRIGHT presents a brand new 1943 Pin-Up Calendar starring Mary Marvel, Wonder Woman, Bulletgirl, Phantom Lady, et al.— portrayed by your favorite movie femme fatales of World War II! • Plus—BILL SCHELLY intros a fabled 1966 panel about the Comics Code — MICHAEL T. GILBERT’s Comic Crypt—& MORE!!

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Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years

3

Part II Of A Tintinnabulatin’ Talk About ANDRU, KANIGHER, LEE–––And Up Your Nose!

Interview Conducted by Jim Amash

Transcribed by Tom Wimbish

G

olden/Silver/Bronze Age inker Mike Esposito has had primarily a two-pronged career—as half of the longrunning team of Ross Andru & Mike Esposito, and as an inker (and, in the early days, penciler) on his own.

Last issue dealt with Mike’s early years in the comics field, how he and Andru teamed up in the postwar 1940s—and even briefly became, in the pre-Comics Code 1950s, publishers with their own companies, Mikeross (also sometimes spelled MikeRoss), and Mister Publications, with such titles as Mister Mystery, Mister Universe, 3-D Romance, 3-D Love— and Get Lost, which resulted in their being sued by EC as an imitation of the fourcolor Mad! During this long period they also drew for Timely/Marvel, Ziff-Davis, Standard— you name it. At the end of Part I, Mike related how he and Ross first began doing work for DC Comics, the company with

Four On The Floor— And Amid The Skyscrapers (Top left:) “Mighty Mike” Esposito at work at Marvel, 1975. Courtesy of the artist.

(Left:) A late Andru & Esposito teaming at DC—the first page of the lead story in The Flash #182 (Sept. 1968); with script by another Silver Age legend, John Broome. Thanks to Carl Gafford. [©2005 DC Comics.]

(Top right:) Marvel reprinted Andru & Esposito’s Amazing Spider-Man #141 (Feb. 1975) in the 1995 trade paperback Spider-Man: Clone Genesis. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Above:) This rare photo of Rapturous Ross Andru appeared in Marvel’s FOOM Magazine #15 (Sept. 1976). [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

4

JA: I know how Kanigher treated some people; he was brutal to Mort Meskin.

ESPOSITO: Oh, he ruined Mort. He almost gave him a nervous breakdown. [Meskin had already suffered one such breakdown. –Jim.] One day, I was coming into the office as Mort was leaving, and he was holding a package of drawings under his arm. He had a frozen look on his face. I opened the door for him and said, “Hey, Mort,” and he was just staring. I said, “Are you all right?” He kept right on staring. I put my arm around his shoulder and said, “Come on, Mort. Relax.

Everything’s all right. Things are going to be fine.” It was like he was on drugs; his eyes were frozen as if he’d been on heavy tranquilizers. That’s when I realized that he’d probably had a nervous breakdown, though not at that very moment. He seemed like such a nice guy.

Ross was very upset with Kanigher for being that way. Years later when Kanigher had his nervous breakdown, I felt sorry for him; I shook his hand and asked how he was feeling. Ross said, “What’re you doing?” I said, “I’m sorry, Ross, but I can’t carry my anger to this stage, where I’m feeling well and he’s feeling terribly.”

Ross felt that Bob’s mistreatment of freelancers and tight deadlines were unjust, but that was just Bob’s style. He didn’t mean it. He was like General Patton. [Mike wordlessly imitates George C. Scott’s growling for several seconds.]

The Kanigher Touch The caricature at right of DC editor & writer Robert Kanigher appeared (first?) in conjunction with an RK interview in The Comics Journal #86 (Nov. 1983), and was drawn by Ernie Colón. With thanks to Ernie, Gary Groth, and Fantagraphics. See RK photo on p. 41. [©2005 Ernie Colón.]

(Above:) This Andru-&-Esposito-drawn “Suicide Squad” page from The Brave and the Bold #26 (Oct.-Nov. 1959) has all of RK’s trademark flourishes, including multiple-panel sequences in the top and bottom tiers. Whether or not he was the “first” to employ such cinematic techniques in comic books as he and others often claimed, he was definitely an early and prolific (and skillful) user of same. Thanks to John Wells. [©2005 DC Comics.]

which the Andru-Esposito team is forever associated in the minds of many comic aficionados. This issue focuses on their DC work during the 1950s and beyond—and on their later work (both separately and together) at Marvel and occasionally elsewhere.

“Kanigher Was Our Man” JA: When you went back to DC, you worked strictly for Kanigher, right?

ESPOSITO: Kanigher was our man. If I liked him at the time, it was only for fear of not liking him. I was so afraid of losing the jobs we had that I wouldn’t do anything to disturb his temper or his mood. Once, Ross and I made the mistake of going to Howard’s Clothing Store and buying matching suits. So we walked into DC wearing the same outfit. [chuckles] Bob Kanigher looked over and said, “What’re you two, the Bobbsey Twins?” So we got a reputation: it was like we were Siamese twins; we were glued together.

He was tough on the workers, but not on everybody; he was a great man to his friends. He was very close with Irv Novick. Later on, he mellowed, but I’m sorry to say he wasn’t always like that. After his nervous breakdown, I wrote some nice things about him in a magazine. He wrote an article for another magazine in which he said, “Thank you, Mike. I wish my family could hear you say that.” I said nothing but complimentary things about him. I praised him for his genius work on Metal Men, and the way he handled Wonder Woman. He was a brilliant writer for comics, and I can’t help but appreciate that he gave me a chance to develop what I do today. I respected him for what he gave me and what he gave Ross. Ross didn’t; he had his own feelings.

I’ve always had nice things to say about Bob, because if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be as good as I have become. I meant it; he may have been tough, but he made me work. He made me not hack. He made me worry about the quality of what I was doing, and even if it wasn’t up to other people’s standards, he made me believe that I had done the best I could.

He didn’t have to do that to Ross, because Ross was damned good, and he knew what he was doing. Bob was responsible for helping Ross and myself to develop as we did, whether Ross believed it or not. He knew we were a team. He said to Ross, “Think of this as a TV screen.

It’s not a giant movie screen. Get close; get in there on the faces, and then put those other things behind it.” Ross got a little better at it, as you can see in some of his war and Metal Men stories. Bob thought that Ross was a genius at storytelling. He taught him how to get up close, so that we could read the characters’ expressions. It rubbed off on Ross, whether he would have admitted it or not. We were good to Bob, and Bob was very good to us; he kept us working when other places had no work to offer us. When things got tied up at the office and he had no work for us, he recommended us to other editors. That was unheard-of: each editor had his own stable of artists, and there wasn’t much sharing, but Bob let us do Rip Hunter for Murray Boltinoff.

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years Bob also recommended me to Jack Miller. When Ross bolted to Marvel, Jack Miller pulled me in to do Swing with Scooter, Inferior Five, and The Maniaks. Finally, he agreed to try Ross out on a romance story. Ross penciled the story and made it really powerful. Jack Miller didn’t like it, but Bob Kanigher said, “You’ve got to admit that it’s dramatic.” It was; Ross saw it as a really dramatic story. It wasn’t pretty; it wasn’t in the Bernie Sachs style, or Bob Oksner’s, with those pretty legs on the women. That wasn’t Ross’ style. Ross was a dramatist, a storyteller, and Bob defended Ross when he heard Jack’s criticism.

Eventually, Miller decided that since everybody else was saying it was a good job, it must be.

Bob had his moods. Sometimes I’d think, “Gee, what a nice guy he can be.” But then he’d make me feel very uncomfortable. Once I said to him, “Y’know Bob, we’ve never had a vacation.” He said, “You had all of last month off.” I said, “What do you mean? You were away for the whole month, and we were out of work!” He saw that as a vacation. We were biting our fingernails for six weeks while he was skiing in Switzerland. He had said, “Take off, boys. I’m going away.”

When Christmas time came, he would tell everybody what he wanted for Christmas.

One time he was going skiing, and he wanted something that had to do with skiing. I couldn’t afford to buy it, though. But we always had to buy him Christmas presents.

JA: Or else?

ESPOSITO: Or else. When we went to Marvel, they said, “We don’t do that here. We don’t buy Christmas presents for the editor.”

Big difference. [NOTE: It was never company policy at DC, either. —Jim] There were times when Ross and I would have to pull all-nighters in order to finish a job. When that happened, we’d be so involved in what we were doing that we’d end up sleeping in our clothes. After one of these sessions, I went to Bob Kanigher’s office, tired and beat—my hair wasn’t combed, my clothes were a little wrinkled, my shirt was open at the collar, and I wasn’t wearing a tie.

But here I was, feeling like a hero because Ross and I had broken our backs getting this job done on time for Kanigher, and I was thinking I’d at least get some praise for delivering the work under those conditions.

Kanigher looked at me and said, “Don’t come in here looking like that. When you come in here, wear a coat and tie.” Thanks for nothin’!

5

“[Kanigher] Couldn’t Take Any More of Harry G. Peter” JA: How did you and Ross get the Wonder Woman job?

ESPOSITO: Kanigher wanted a change. He couldn’t take any more of Harry G. Peter. Peter was always late with his work, and Bob didn’t know how to get rid of him. I was in the office one day, and I heard Kanigher saying very gently to Peter, “Do you like to go fishing? Do you want to keep going fishing?” Peter said, “Yeah, I love to fish,” and Bob said, “Then you’ve got to keep turning the jobs in, to get the money. You can’t be late all the time, unless you want to retire.” This went on for a while, and then one day Bob said to Ross and me, “I think maybe, down the line, you may be able to do Wonder Woman, because I think Peter’s going to retire or be eased out.” We were elated, but Ross was a little frightened by it, because he didn’t think he could draw pretty girls. And he couldn’t, at the time. His work wasn’t pretty like Johnny Romita’s.

We got the OK to do it in about 1957.

Ross started laying it out and got very upset.

I said, “Let me call Johnny Romita and ask him if he’d like to do just the women’s figures and faces.” I only vaguely knew Romita then. Johnny was a couple of years younger than I, and all he was doing at the time was romance stories for DC. I called him at his home, and he wasn’t too keen on the idea. He drew very slowly, and he probably wasn’t too sure of himself. Taking on a lot of responsibility is not too good for a guy who doesn’t draw that quickly. A guy like Mike Sekowsky would say, “Hey, give it to me,” because he’d do one story with his left hand and one with his feet, but Johnny and Ross gave the work so much of their attention that they couldn’t split themselves up and still do good jobs. Ross could never do more than one thing at one time. I think Johnny is the same type of guy. When he does a job, he breaks his back to do it; he gives it all of his attention. When I suggested the Wonder Woman thing to him, he backed off.

So Ross said we would do it on our own.

I had a lot of arguments with him about it.

Sometimes he drew her eyes too big—they The Wonder-Full Worlds of Robert Kanigher were buggy—but that’s the way Ross wanted To any but the youngest readers, Wonder Woman to draw her. When Ross left DC for Marvel, seemed overcrowded with quasi-clones of herself as Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot—with even Hippolyta Irving Novick drew a couple of issues, and I dubbed “Wonder Queen” for a time, as per the was amazed at how attractive his Wonder A&E cover of WW #124 (Aug. 1961)! The 1961 Alley Award Woman faces were compared to Ross’. He fan-poll named Wonder Woman the “series most in approached it differently. It wasn’t that Ross need of improvement.” [©2005 DC Comics.]

We cartoonists were always dealing with couldn’t do it; he saw the attractiveness in deadline problems. We lived for the euphoric other ways: in gestures and movements, in joy of getting a job done under tough conditions and turning it in, so we bending the arms and fingers gracefully. Guys like Novick and Romita could start the vicious cycle anew. The euphoria of doing our job under stamp an attractive look on a character that is undeniably pretty. It such conditions was spoiled by the bucket of ice water named Kanigher. doesn’t look labored; it doesn’t look like they struggled to do it. You don’t even have to be an artist to see it; you just look at it, and it looks JA: Do you know what triggered Kanigher’s breakdown? right. With Ross, it looked good, but it looked labored. It was great when he did The Punisher, but not when he did Wonder Woman.

ESPOSITO: It might have just been the old cliché, that he saw himself in the mirror. He was sort-of a run-around, too, a womanizer. That JA: Did Peter retire, or was he forced off the book? could have come down on him; maybe he had problems at home because of it. Who knows?

ESPOSITO: He might have been eased out, probably with a pension. I think they gave him a few hundred dollars a month.

6

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

Ring Out The Old—Ring In The New (Left:) By the time H.G. Peter drew the splash at left, circa 1953-54, he’d been illustrating “Wonder Woman” for more than a dozen years. In 1957 Kanigher would replace him on her mag with Andru & Esposito; Peter passed away the following year. But, when the Amazing Amazon became a hit on TV in the series starring Lynda Carter and Lyle Waggoner (center), it was HGP’s work that was reprinted in a 1978 black-&-white paperback, albeit with art and copy rearranged. The title of this story was “Wonder Woman’s Wedding Day!” (Right:) As for A&E’s Wonder Woman work: well, let’s see. We could either reprint the cover of the issue that featured their first interior story, “The Million Dollar Penny” (#98, May 1958)—or #99’s space cover—or the archetypal striding Amazon from an issue or two later—or one of her encounters with Egg Fu—or the cover that was re-created by Mike for this ish of A/E. Or we could show you a bit of all of the above by showcasing the powerful composite cover of Comic Book Marketplace #79 (May 2000)! Yeah, that’s what we’ll do! [WW art ©2005 DC Comics; CBM composition ©2005 Stephen A. Geppi.]

JA: While you were still on Wonder Woman, you started working on “Metal Men.” What do you remember about it?

ESPOSITO: Editors at DC had to take turns doing Showcase. Each guy created a series that would run for several issues, featuring a set of new characters. If a series caught on, it would become a regular title. One was “Suicide Squad,” and Murray Boltinoff did “Rip Hunter, Time Master.”

When Bob Kanigher’s turn came up, he did “Metal Men.” He only had a week to develop it, and he was going crazy trying to think of something till he finally got the idea to try robots. Robots were a big thing in the B-movies of the ’50s.

He looked up the properties of metals, did all the research on it. Then he called up Ross and we went down to see him. We got the script, but we had to develop the characters. I remember the first one, with the big stingray. On the cover, the Metal Men are on a rooftop, about an inch high, and the stingray takes up three-quarters of the space. Ross had wanted to highlight the characters, but Bob Kanigher said he wanted to play up the stingray. So even though Ross laid out the cover, Bob dictated the layout. He gave us a byline on the book, because “Metal Men” was something we had developed. [NOTE: See the following article for Robert Kanigher’s own take on the creation of “Metal Men.”] “Charles Moulton” [Dr. William Moulton Marston] was the creator of Wonder Woman, and he got a credit for years after. Even after he died, his estate or somebody kept putting his name on every “Wonder Woman” script. We didn’t get a byline in the book until we had been working on it for years. It wasn’t “Wonder Woman by Andru and Esposito;” it was just a little box on the splash page, listing us as the artists. DC didn’t give bylines in those days. Later, at Marvel, Stan Lee

realized that personal identification between the reader and the people who created the comics meant something. He was right: fans started writing in, saying they liked this guy’s work or that guy’s work. They identified the artists with the characters. Credit lines didn’t matter to Ross, but I wanted people to know what I was working on.

I remember when Marv Wolfman came up to Ross and me at DC and said [nerdy little voice], “Mr. Andru? Mr. Esposito? Can I have your autograph?” Ross looked at him and said, “What do you want my autograph for? I’m nobody. I’m no different than a garbage man. I’m no celebrity.” Marv said, “But I really want your name in there, Mr. Andru.” So I signed it: “Heck, yeah, I’ll do it for you.” Ross finally did, too. Years later, Marv was Ross’ boss.

JA: Did Kanigher always tell Ross what to put on the covers?

ESPOSITO: He used to have conferences with Ross. He would tell him what the story was going to be about, and then they would choose an exciting scene for the cover.

JA: As a kid, I liked the art on Wonder Woman, but I didn’t think Kanigher’s stories were very good. I don’t think that was his best writing.

ESPOSITO: His tongue was in his cheek so deep that he couldn’t get it out. He wasn’t writing for self-satisfaction; he was just hacking it out.

They were just impossible stories, fantasies. He’d borrow from the movies. But you have to remember something: he had to turn that stuff out, page after page, book after book. He’d turn out a story in a day. In those days, he got $10 a page, and he made a lot of money. If you got paid $25 a page to pencil, you got garbage: two pages a day if you were lucky.

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JA: He had more of an emotional investment in the war stories than in Wonder Woman, right?

ESPOSITO: I don’t think he believed in what he was doing with Wonder Woman. He did for a while in Metal Men. The war stories were personal things to him, though. He identified with the soldiers that he wrote, and he liked to add little personal touches.

Wonder Of Wonders!

There was a story about a hand grenade that was a Just for the record: at top left is the first dud, but the soldier carried it around with him Wonder Woman cover by Andru & Esposito— anyway. Finally, a tank was coming at the end of #94 (Nov. 1957), four issues before they were the story, and in desperation, he threw the dud at handed the artistic reins of the interior art. the tank, and it blew up. The touches that he put [©2005 DC Comics.] into those little five-page stories made them And, at top right: a montage of some of the unique. Later on, Stan Lee used the same kind of most unforgettable Wonder Woman villains personal touches in Spider-Man. of the Kanigher era. (At least, we’ve never JA: There’s no denying that when Kanigher was at his peak, he was very good.

ESPOSITO: He created some good characters: Black Canary, Rose and Thorn, which Ross and I did in the 1970s. The best thing I thought he did in my time was Metal Men, because they had so many personalities. All my life, I loved things where people have character, movies like The

forgotten them, though Lord knows we’ve tried!) This montage appeared in the company’s house fanzine, The Amazing World of DC Comics #15 (Aug. 1977). [©2005 DC Comics.]

Still, Ross and Mike were good sports about it all, as per the above photos taken from the same issue of AWODC.

Fiends Of The Fourth Wall (Left:) In this panel from Wonder Woman #158 (Nov. 1965), Wonder Woman can only gawk and stare at writer/editor Robert Kanigher (his face modestly averted from readers’ eyes), who had cold-bloodedly ordered artists Ross Andru and Mike Esposito to kill off her Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot manifestations. Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs... as we were telling Egg Fu just the other day. Thanks to Carl Gafford for the issue ID. [©2005 DC Comics.]

Light That Failed, or Mrs. Miniver. The people are real, and they have character. Bob did that in the Metal Men.

“[The Flash] Wasn’t My Style, And It Certainly Wasn’t Ross’” JA: Was Ross the type to change a script?

ESPOSITO: Not with Bob. Up at Marvel, he got to be very friendly with Gerry Conway. He would suggest things to Gerry, and Gerry would tell him to go ahead. He never spoke to Stan Lee about it. With individual writers like Marv Wolfman or Len Wein, he would come up with things that he wanted to do in the stories. Ross had a very good, creative, script-writing mind. When we were self-publishing, he had some great ideas.

JA: Ross and you also drew some Sea Devils stories.

8

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

ESPOSITO: We did a couple where we drew ourselves into the stories. There’s a panel in one story where Ross and I are meeting the Sea Devils. We’re shaking hands and introducing ourselves to them. I think we only did one or two issues.

about it, he had problems. He was very unhappy with it because he knew he wasn’t getting the speed out of the character. He wasn’t lithe and swift. When Carmine drew him, The Flash was going 90 miles an hour; when Ross did it, he was chuckin’ along at 35. Never got a ticket.

JA: Let me ask you about The Flash. You and Ross took over after Carmine Infantino, which must have been daunting.

ESPOSITO: We were shocked that we were asked to do it, because it wasn’t the kind of thing we would do. It wasn’t my style, and it certainly wasn’t Ross’. I could ink Carmine up to a point, but I couldn’t do what Joe Giella did; Joe was a master at handling Carmine’s artwork. Carmine would really cut up the paper; he’d go over and over it until he had black, massive lines. I did a better job with him on Spider-Woman at Marvel. He had a style, and I liked doing his stuff, but I got intimidated by all the lines.

Joe Giella knew how to take his eraser and clean the pencils up, then find the rhythm.

Carmine had a rhythm to his underdrawings, and Joe could find it and put it in the inks. It wasn’t sketchy when he got through; it had a consistency, as if it had been penciled exactly like that. I had difficulty doing that. I had the same problem with Ross until Joe Giella showed me what to do, which was to erase Ross.

Then I got better.

JA: Do you think Julie liked what you guys did?

Metal Of Honor In the selfsame issue of Amazing World of DC Comics, word balloons were removed from this “Metal Men” panel to display a primo example of Andru & Esposito’s artistry on that series, which Mike E. feels is one of Robert Kanigher’s finest creations. [©2005 DC Comics.]

ESPOSITO: I don’t know if he appreciated the look deep down inside, but he did appreciate the storytelling. John Broome and Gardner Fox were good writers; they really understood the science-fiction quality of The Flash. Some of the scripts were pretty involved. Ross had a way of animating action; he wouldn’t do one picture with speed lines behind it; he’d actually show the leg in four different positions. I really liked the cover he did of The Flash racing with Superman for issue #175. Ross never repeated himself. He was always thinking, “How can I have this character do this in a way that you’ve never seen before?” Ross wanted everything to look like you were seeing it for the first time.

In so doing, sometimes it didn’t look familiar enough; you wouldn’t recognize it right away.

JA: Did you like working for Julie Schwartz?

Carmine and Joe Giella were brilliant on The Flash. It had a slick, science-fiction look. It was metallic, sterile, and clean. When Ross and I did it, The Flash looked muscle-bound, as if he’d been weightlifting, and he had slowed down ten miles per hour. He didn’t have that speed. Ross—with his Slavic and Russian background—drew himself, with muscular legs, thick wrists, and biceps. Artists draw themselves.

When I draw myself, I need a brassiere.

Carmine suggested Ross and me for The Flash because we were the hot team, and Carmine knew that Ross could really tell a story. I don’t think Julie Schwartz was crazy about Ross’s pencils, but Carmine liked it because it was completely different from his own Flash. Editorially, Julie grew up with Carmine; Carmine developed the whole sci-fi look of Julie’s books. He set the pace at DC, the way Alex Toth did at Standard Publications. I appreciate that Carmine gave us the book, because he showed respect for Ross and me as a team, but when Ross heard

Flashes Of Two Pages Two more quick glimpses of the Fastest Man Alive by Andru & Esposito.

(Left:) A page repro’d from a black-&-white Australian reprint, with thanks to Mark Muller.

(Right:) Flash and Kid Flash, from issue #189 (June 1969). Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Mike Zeno. [©2005 DC Comics.]

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years

9

My wife and I were thinking about buying a house in Dix Hills on Long Island. It was a very nice ranch with a kind of upper-class price, and I said to the guy, “I don’t know if I want to commute between here and New York City.” The guy said, “What do you do?” I said, “I’m a cartoonist,” and the guy said, “Oh! You must know Mort Weisinger! He’s buying the house four doors down from here!” I turned to my wife and said, “I ain’t moving here!” It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; I just didn’t want to live that close to my boss. I had no problems getting along with Mort, I just think he’d stayed too long at the fair. He’d been at DC since 1941, and he didn’t take his job as seriously as some of the other editors. He was a fixture.

ESPOSITO: Yeah, but he was a little flippy with me. One time I did a story overnight; 16 hours, actually. He came out, grabbed a pencil, figured out what I’d made per hour on the job, and said, “Oh my God!” I had to point out to him that I hadn’t had time to sleep in two days.

JA: At one time, you and Ross did a few Superman issues for Mort Weisinger.

How was he to work for?

ESPOSITO: He was a strange man. I saw him one day—when he was in a happy mood—go tiptoeing through the hallways, pirouetting. That was so uncharacteristic of him, because he was a very heavyset guy. I’d bring a “Lois Lane” or “Superboy” story in, and he’d take out the pages and open them up one by one. He seemed to delight in looking at them, but I don’t think he was really paying attention. He had to look at the pages because he was the boss, but his mind was somewhere else; he was just going through the motions. I could have slipped in a page with a woman with no clothes on, and he never would have noticed it. (Of course, I’m kidding.)

I also worked for Jack Miller at DC. He was a nice guy, and I was very sad when he died of lung cancer. He was crazy about Ross and me. I called him up a couple of times with ideas, and he flipped out over every one. He felt that everything we talked about was bigger than comics. He’d say, “Mike, don’t waste this on comics; we’ve got to go to TV with this!” We had this idea for a character named “Garlic-Man,” for No Flash In The Pan Up Your Nose and Out Your Ear. We wanted Buddy Hackett to play As Mike says, Carmine Infantino was a tough act to follow on The Flash—as witness the Infantino-penciled, Joe Giella-inked page at top left from issue #124 (Nov. Garlic-Man. He’d have been perfect.

1961); script by John Broome. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, Anyway, Jack Miller loved it. courtesy of Bob Cherry; you can read the whole story in DC’s Flash Archives, Vol. 3.

But Andru & Esposito gave it their best shot, as per the dramatic cover above and powerful pair of pages below from the two tales in Flash #182 (Sept. 1968)—“The Flash’s Super-Speed Phobia!” and “The Man Who Stole All the Money in Central City!” Both were scripted by John Broome—his only Flash issue that year, though he’d write a few more final stories in 1969, as we’re informed by contributor and longtime pro colorist/staffer Carl Gafford. [©2005 DC Comics.]

JA: You did some “Batman,” right?

ESPOSITO: Oh yes, in The Brave and the Bold. Ross penciled all of

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

10

DC Comics = Dinosaur Comics Mike says that what Ross enjoyed drawing most was: “Dinosaurs!” As he mentioned in the first part of this interview, as teenagers the two of them spent hours in New York’s Museum of Natural History sketching the great prehistoric reptiles—which turned out to be excellent preparation for their years at DC! Here’s a triptych of their dinosaur covers: Wonder Woman #119 (Jan. 1961)—The Brave and the Bold #38 (Nov. 1961)—and Star Spangled War Stories #108 (April-May 1963). And there’s plenty more where these came from! The day DC decides to publish a War That Time Forgot Archives, we’ll be standing in line! [©2005 DC Comics.]

those. Neither of us was wild about doing Batman. Ross couldn’t pencil it his way because he had to follow the “house” Batman approach. Some guys like Jim Aparo handled it nicely. When Ross and I did it, it had kind-of a cartoonish look. Visually, we were closer to the TV show. Ross probably could have made the style work if he wanted to sweat bullets to do it, but we were working on more than one feature at the time.

ESPOSITO: Ross was always a crude artist; his work was never attractive. It wasn’t slick. I don’t know if you ever saw Ross’s pencils, but they were very hard. He would cut into the paper. Not like Johnny Romita or John Buscema, where it was very attractive to look at, or Mike Sekowsky, where you just wanted to run your ink right over it.

You didn’t have to draw; it was all there.

JA: We haven’t discussed Suicide Squad yet...

Ross was very difficult to ink, because even though it was all there, it was crude. It was all design, lacking any warmth. The drawings on the backs of some of John Buscema’s pages are better than the fronts, but the backs of Ross’ pages were nothing but thumbtack holes and places where his pencils had cut through the paper. You could hold his pages up and rays of light would come through the holes. When I would ink it, the point of the pen would get stuck in the holes. The guy was a brilliant storyteller, but he labored over his stuff. You couldn’t even use a pen because it would catch in the grooves. I showed the pages to Joe Giella, and he said, “Take an eraser and get rid of all that build-up.” By doing that, you take away some of that crudeness, and you can reshape it your own way. Ross was a great artist and storyteller, but the pages were very unattractive in pencil. They were dirty; they had coffee stains on them; one of them had spaghetti sauce on it, because something fell out of a sandwich onto the page. There were thumbprints, grease prints from the pencil... I loved the man, but he wasn’t the neatest. [laughs]

ESPOSITO: I liked it. I never got any of my originals back, unfortunately. That was a shame: all the originals were shredded or given away.

The artists didn’t get them back in those days. We didn’t even know enough to ask for them. We were naive, and we didn’t think we were supposed to get them back. We didn’t find out until years later, when Sol Harrison joined forces with Stan Lee and said, “We’ve got to give back the art.” All of a sudden, carloads of pages started coming in, but we didn’t get any Wonder Woman or Metal Men back. They told us those pages no longer existed, but actually, certain people got them all and sold them to collectors.

“[Ross’] Work Was Never Attractive. It Wasn’t Slick.”

JA: What do you think Ross was most at home drawing? What did he enjoy?

ESPOSITO: Dinosaurs! He loved the war stories about the dinosaur period, “The War That Time Forgot,” in Star Spangled War Stories. He had been schooled by Hogarth in drawing trees and jungles. He understood how to bend them, and how to get the depth of field. He didn’t have to worry about anatomy that would be recognizable to other humans. It’s always easier to draw animals, because you don’t have any critics. [laughter] Nobody knows if you get a joint wrong; you can fake it.

JA: What did you think of Ross Andru as a penciler?

Ross was very difficult, though. He would say, “I wanted that guy’s chin that way; I wanted those eyes bigger.” When a character stepped down on his foot and the back of his heel would be pushed back, Ross said, “I do that for a reason: to show that it’s being pushed down.” I’d say, “I see what you mean, Ross, but it doesn’t look good.” He’d say, “Well, that’s what I want.” To team with him for all those years, I had to make sure it was exactly the way he penciled it. Sometimes it was unattractive, and people thought it was me. It wasn’t me: it was the way he penciled it.

Ross was brilliant in storytelling and layouts, and was one of the few guys who did multiple planes: the picture would go in and in and in. It

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years

11

wasn’t just a figure, a wall, and that’s it. And that’s not a very pretty thing for the young fans to see; they didn’t understand it. The ones who understood it were people like Gil Kane and Roy Thomas. And Bob Kanigher, of course.

JA: What was it like to work for Murray Boltinoff?

ESPOSITO: Murray was a really nice guy. He was a little guy, and he used to smoke a lot of cigars. He gave me a job in the early ‘80s, when things were slow and I was working for neither DC nor Marvel. It was a war story that had been penciled by Sam Glanzman. Glanzman was late or something, so Murray gave it to me to ink. Murray lived pretty close to me on Long Island, and I brought the pages to his house. The work didn’t keep coming, though, because he didn’t have many stories to hand out. He was freelance-editing at that point. He was getting older, and he wasn’t always in the office. He only had one or two books to produce.

He was nice enough to give me the job, though, and we remained friends. He’s gone now.

JA: Roy Thomas wanted me to ask if you remember an editorial conference in which Irwin Donenfeld or somebody said that the secret to Marvel’s success was “bad art.”

ESPOSITO: What I remember is a meeting with all the freelancers, in which Carmine Infantino said, “We’ll beat them with good drawing. If there’s a table with a dish, a napkin, and a cup of coffee on it, we want the fork there with every point on the fork, and we want the spoon, too.

We want them to look like a fork and spoon, not faked, and we want all the detail.” Carmine also said they would start putting word balloons on the covers, because Marvel was doing that. At the time, DC’s covers were like posters, while Marvel’s had enough blurbs and dialogue to be entertaining all by themselves. The editors at DC just didn’t understand that Marvel was succeeding because Stan was doing characters with whom the readers could identify.

At the same meeting, Frank Giacoia stood up and said, “I’m sick and tired of the way you colorists color the books.” He was talking to Jerry Serpe and Jack Adler, who were doing all the coloring. If they had dipped a brush in blue, then they’d put blue wherever they could. If they had red on the brush, they’d put red wherever they could. So we had blue horses and red mountains. Frank was right. He said, “You aren’t thinking out each page; you’re just indiscriminately covering everything with color.” They were coloring that way because it was expedient. If you look at the old books, you’ll see some really strange coloring.

JA: Speaking of colorists, what do you remember about Raymond Perry?

ESPOSITO: He was an old man, kind of heavy-set. He may have been coloring part of the time, but another part of his job at the office was to bring guys up to show the editors their samples. I came upstairs one time and showed him my stuff, and he said, “Wait a minute,” and went in to talk to Julie Schwartz. That was the day Julie looked at one of my pages and said, “The one with the ugly girl.” Perry was like a troubleshooter; he would screen the people coming into the office so that the editors wouldn’t be disturbed.

By the way, I want to say that Carmine was very good to me. There was a point where I wasn’t getting enough work, and Carmine saw to it that I got what I needed. I had an emotional down period and Carmine really picked me up, told me to take it easy and not worry about anything. He even offered to let me have space in the DC offices to work.

JA: Who else did you ink at DC? ESPOSITO: I inked Kurt Schaffenberger on Superboy and Jimmy Olsen. I also inked Curt Swan on Lois Lane. Curt was a handsome guy.

His artwork was very clean, but it didn’t have any punch. I’m not the

It’ll Be A Cold Day In Hell…

Circa 1966, with Batman riding high on TV and Marvel breathing down DC’s neck on the newsstands, Andru & Esposito were briefly forced by editor Kanigher to draw Wonder Woman in a campy style imitative of H.G. Peter.

This illo of Princess Diana and Prime Minister Blizzard, as extrapolated from b&w art for Amazing World of DC Comics #15, was one result.

Mike doesn’t recount the story here, but Roy Thomas has a crystal-clear memory of being told by Mike, one night during a poker session at comics dealer Phil Seuling’s Brooklyn apartment, that the powers-that-be at DC had decided the secret of Marvel’s success was “bad art”—end quote—which was the “reasoning” behind the pseudo-Golden Age approach. Not that H.G. Peter’s 1940s art was really bad, of course. This was not long before Carmine Infantino became DC’s editorial director. [©2005 DC Comics.]

inker to ink a guy like that; I inked it exactly like his pencils, so it was very quiet-looking.

I also worked over Win Mortimer on Inferior Five. I loved Mortimer’s pencils; they were so attractive. He was very good with design, fashion, and pretty girls. I inked a lot of his stuff at Marvel on Spidey Super Stories. [NOTE: See p. 31.] I loved it because it was very animated, very clean. It wasn’t noodled up with a lot of detail; it was very attractive and graceful. I also worked over Joe Orlando in the first “Inferior Five” story. I thought he was damn good, and had a nice touch for humor. And I inked Mike Sekowsky on “Maniaks” for Jack Miller, and on The Inferior Five. I thought he was great. He was a tremendous animator; his stuff was alive.

Joe Kubert was like that, too; Joe’s pencils were very loose and beautiful. I only inked Joe when he was editing. He became uncomfortable with Jack Abel’s finishes while they were working on the Tales of the Green Berets syndicated strip, and he was looking for somebody else to ink him on his war titles. Jack Abel was very literal, and used very clean, thin pen lines. That was Jack’s style, though: he was very precise, but he would ink a gun butt, a tree, and blonde hair with the same texture. Kubert preferred bolder inks. He gave me a couple of pages to ink, and I did them in a little room with a Coke machine in it, at a desk they kept in there for guys to come in and make corrections.

He seemed very impressed; he didn’t know I could do it the way he wanted, because my stuff with Ross was completely different. I managed to find the rhythm of Joe’s pencils, though, and I felt very flattered. I always enjoyed inking other guys, because I was usually only inking Ross.

I remember working on some “Robin” 6- or 7-page backup stories for Batman. Business was slow, and I called up Julie. He said, “I have a short ‘Robin’ story for you. Come on down, and I’ll give it to you if you get here before 12:00.” I got over there, and when I walked in, Julie

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reason he was being replaced was that he never finished any work. I went up to the office, and Frank showed me a stack of stuff—about 40 or 50 pages—to be corrected. John Verpoorten, who was in charge of production, found a desk for me and gave me maybe 20 pages to correct. I finished them in about 20 minutes. I walked into Verpoorten’s cubicle and said, “Got anything else?”

He said, “You’re finished?” He was stunned. I said, “That wasn’t much to do, and it didn’t take me long.” He said, “Geez, Frank would have taken all week.” That’s why they hired me. Frank had just been sitting around talking with everybody.

“How I Came To Be ‘Mickey Demeo’” JA: So it’s the ’60s, and you and Ross are working at DC for Bob Kanigher,

Esposito Plays The (DC) Field A few examples of Mike’s inking of other artists at DC. [Clockwise from top left, all ©2005 DC Comics:] Awkwardman of “The Inferior Five” takes the plunge in Showcase #65 (Oct-Nov. 1965), a tale parodying Marvel’s X-Men. Pencils by Mike Sekowsky, script by E. Nelson Bridwell. Repro’d from an Australian b&w, with thanks to Shane Foley.

Next, Mike E. inks Bob Brown in Superboy #152 (Dec. 1968). Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Gene Reed. Script by Frank Robbins.

Orlando inked by Esposito in Swing with Scooter #12 (April-May 1968), with a plot by Barbara Friedlander, dialogue by Jack Miller. Thanks to Bob Bailey for the scan.

And, last but not least, Mike E. inks Carmine Infantino, of all people, in The Adventures of Bob Hope #103 (Feb-March 1967).

Of the latter, collector Bob Bailey, who provided the art, writes that veteran comic artist Tex Blaisdell, who was his teacher at the Joe Kubert School some years back, had worked on DC’s humor titles circa 1967-70, and confirmed that the art in Bob Hope #103 was penciled by Carmine—as a fill-in issue, to spell a very busy Bob Oksner. By then, at the suggestion of writer Arnold Drake (see A/E #17), DC had introduced the character Super-Hip into the series, and would soon drop the Hope title altogether. Blaisdell told Bob that “he had heard the book was still selling okay, but that Hope’s manager wanted to raise the licensing fee, and that’s why DC dropped it but continued Jerry Lewis for 2-3 more years.” This full-page Infantino-Esposito panel depicts Batman and Robin (still big on TV), Ringo Starr (who at the time belonged to a rock group whose name we forget), sultry siren Sophia Loren, Frank Sinatra (then squiring the much-younger Mia Farrow, hence the gag), and comedian Phyllis Diller—as well as DC characters Stanley & His Monster, and a little girl named Nancy. Why this particular assemblage? You’ll have to ask Arnold and Carmine!

had a sad expression on his face, and said, “I’m sorry, I gave it to Frank Giacoia.” Frank had that style and personality where he wanted to ink everything, but he never delivered. He couldn’t let a story go by without grabbing it; he wasn’t happy unless he had 15 jobs on the floor. Julie said, “What was I going to do? He was hanging around, and he said, ‘I want that.’” And Julie just gave it to him.

Years later, in 1973, I got a call from Roy Thomas to work on staff at Marvel, because things were slow for me. I think I had done a freelance job in which I tightened and finished Johnny Romita’s breakdowns on a SpiderMan story. Roy said, “There’s a spot here for you, if you don’t mind working for $75 a week.” That was pretty low, but that was all the budget would permit them to give me.

What I had to do was corrections on other guys’ artwork when the editors didn’t like something. I was perfect for the job, because I could pencil, ink, and do corrections. The guy I was replacing was Frank Giacoia, and the

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years but you started working for Stan again, independently of Ross. Why did you do that?

ESPOSITO: Stan called me up. They were beginning to build Marvel into what it would become. They were offering very low rates, and he told me to use a pen name because I was still at DC. He said everybody was doing it. That’s how I came to be “Mickey Demeo.” He said he wanted to put everybody’s names on the books: pencilers, inkers, letterers, everybody. I had used the name “Demeo” in the Mister Mystery issues I did with Stanley Morris; I did it in honor of a relative of mine. Years later, I used the name Joe Gaudioso, which was the name of my wife’s brother. Stan introduced me to Jack Kirby, and Kirby tried to show me how to finish his layouts.

Later on, Stan saw “Joe Gaudioso’s” inks on a Sub-Mariner story, and he ran in to Marie Severin, Johnny Romita, and Tony Mortellaro and said, “Who’s this guy Joe Gaudioso? He’s good! Reminds me a little of Esposito.” They said, “It is Esposito; he’s using another pen name,” and Stan threw the pages down and walked off in a huff. [laughter] JA: Since you were already working at Marvel as “Mickey Demeo,” why did you also use the name “Michael Dee”?

ESPOSITO: Stan did that. I was inking Barry Smith’s first issue of X-Men, and I had a lot of trouble with it because Barry was still learning to draw. The proportions were wrong, and I couldn’t make it out. Stan said, “Hang in there; this guy’s going to be good,” and of course he became good. Anyway, I didn’t want to sign the job, so Stan said to just make it “Michael Dee.”

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panels, there would really be nothing there but a couple of bluffs out in the desert while the Hulk was bouncing around. If I didn’t know the character and setting, I would have had a really difficult time trying to decipher what was going on.

JA: What did they pay you for penciling and inking over Kirby’s layouts?

ESPOSITO: They gave me $28 a page. At that point, my regular inking rate at Marvel was $10 a page. I was making $23 a page at DC, but Stan said, “We’re going to be bigger than DC, so we’re going to give you more than DC.” When I got that chance to work for $28 a page, I didn’t do any penciling on the stuff. I would try to draw with my pen, then fill in blacks and textures. Some of it was pretty bad, but the kids liked it.

There was a contest in FOOM magazine about who drew the Hulk best, and Mickey Demeo got a hell of a lot of votes.

JA: Then there’s a period on “The Hulk” where it’s Kirby layouts, Bob Powell pencils, and your inks.

ESPOSITO: Powell took over while I was still doing it. He got bawled out because there were some characters [The Leader’s humanoid horde] that didn’t make sense, and he said he was just doing them the way I had done them in the previous issue. A lot of people were yelling behind my back.

JA: I also have you down as being credited as “Espoia” at Marvel, probably on a job that you did with Frank Giacoia.

ESPOSITO: I don’t remember that, but Frank and I did a lot of jobs together in the mid-to-late ’70s because of deadlines he couldn’t meet.

The byline usually says, “Frank Giacoia with Dave Hunt.” Dave Hunt was doing the backgrounds; we gave him his first work, and it was nice of Frank to give him a byline. Dave put everything into those backgrounds; he really made them sing. He’d put in things that Frank and I would never put in. We also gave Klaus Janson his first jobs.

One time, Frank needed work and was bugging me about it. Finally, I said, “All right, I’ll give you a break on something.” I was doing The Incredible Hulk, I think. John Verpoorten said to me, “You’ll be sorry.

He’s not going to come through for you. You’ll be late on the job.” I said, “We’ve got to give the guy some work; he’s really having a hard time.” I sent Frank the pages, and then I called him up and asked him how he was doing.” He said, “I’m going to drop the pages off. I’m doing fine; I’m on page 16.” And this was only a 22-page story. I called up Verpoorten and said, “See? He’s on page 16! He’s doing fine!” And John said, “Ehh, we’ll see, we’ll see.”

The next morning, I got up at around six o’clock. Frank pulled his car into my driveway, and then disappeared. I thought, “Good; he dropped the pages off.” When I opened my door, I only found one page: page 16.

I called him about it, and he said he hadn’t said that he’d inked 16 pages, just that he was working on page 16. He was always ambiguous when you’d ask him about how much he had done. He did that all the time.

“[Lee & Kirby] Were About Equal In the Creative Process” JA: You finished Kirby’s layouts on “The Incredible Hulk” stories in Tales to Astonish. What did you think of his layouts?

ESPOSITO: Kirby was plotting those stories as he laid them out— which saved Stan a lot of work—but I couldn’t understand a lot of it.

The pencils were light, and they were far from breakdowns like Sal Buscema’s, which you can read. Kirby left a lot of stuff out. He’d get involved with splash pages—and they’d be pretty good—but in other

Mike Slips Marvel A Mickey “Mickey Demeo” makes his debut as finisher/inker over Jack Kirby in Tales to Astonish #68 (June 1965), as reprinted in b&w in The Essential Hulk, Vol. 1. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

My rate went back down when Powell took over the penciling, but I think I was finally getting $23 a page, the same rate as DC was paying me. Covers were a better rate.

I think they were $50 at DC, but I don’t remember what Marvel paid for them.

JA: What did you think of Stan’s writing in the ‘60s?

ESPOSITO: Stan was a whiz.

I have nothing bad to say about Stan professionally. He had the ability to portray the human side of the characters, and he had his finger right on the pulse of the readers. Years ago, Ross and I were doing Wonder Woman, and I walked out of my studio and found my little daughter, seven years old, reading an issue of SpiderMan that had been drawn by Steve Ditko. I said, “Do you like that?” She said, “Yes, I like it, daddy.” “But the heads are too big,” I said, “and the drawing is out of proportion.”

She said, “I like it, daddy. He’s worried about his homework.

He’s worried that his Aunt May is going to get mad because he tore his pants.” I thought, “Oh, my God, Stan hit it! Stan put his finger right on the pulse. He gave them human interest.” The college kids ate it up.

Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Move Over!

Two more Esposito nom de plumes: (Left:) Okay, so maybe his penciling in X-Men #53 (Feb. 1969) wasn’t a career high point for Barry Smith, now Barry WindsorSmith. But give the kid a break: he was fresh off the boat from England, with no apartment of his own, drawing on park benches during daylight hours. We hear he got better. Till he did, though, Mike preferred to sign this fill-in as “Michael Dee.” Even his “Mickey Demeo” pseudonym now had a pseudonym—and he wasn’t done yet! Well, at least scripter Arnold Drake always used the same name.

(Right:) “Joe Gaudioso” launched his illustrious career inking Marie Severin’s pencils in Sub-Mariner #14 (June 1969), the issue in which the original Human Torch’s young ally Toro returned—just in time to get bumped off for good! [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

DC Comics couldn’t figure it out. Carmine would have meetings where he would say, “We gotta draw better. We gotta draw better. We gotta draw better.” But it wasn’t that; it was the stories. Stan, in his simplistic way, told a story that my father could have understood when he was 12 years old, even though he never went to school to learn to read. It wasn’t deep with a message. Some of the writers at DC would get out of hand; they thought they were writing movies. They got carried away with their own ability to write. Stan didn’t do that. Stan wrote by numbers, so to speak: he was simple to the point that they could understand it.

JA: Do you have an opinion on whether Stan or Jack Kirby did more of the creating?

ESPOSITO: I can only offer my opinion. I always thought that Stan was a creative writer, and that Kirby had the creative eye in the developing of things. Stan might say, “Let’s do a Jekyll and Hyde kind of guy,” and they’d turn that into The Hulk. But it was Jack’s ability to design the face like a Frankenstein monster that probably caused Stan to think more about the on-again, off-again, demons-within nature of the character. Kirby made these drawings, and Stan found the characterizations in them. I’d say they were about equal in the creative process.

They’d bounce ideas off one another like Disney with his storyboard men.

JA: Did you deal personally with Jack Kirby much at that time?

ESPOSITO: I attended a wedding once; Kirby’s niece was marrying a friend of mine. He came over to the table, and my friend was very proud that Jack Kirby was going to be his uncle-in-law. Jack was sitting there at the table with my wife and I, and he was talking constantly, and referring to me as Ross. [laughs] I said, “Jack, I’m Mike Esposito, not Ross Andru,” and he said, “Oh, yeah yeah yeah.” A couple of minutes later, though, he was calling me Ross again. He had probably had a few too many drinks. We were talking comics, and he was talking about the politics at Marvel, and what was going on there. I don’t remember what he said specifically, because I was drunk, too.

“We Wanted The Transition Between Ditko And Romita To Be Smooth” JA: When you and John Romita took over for Steve Ditko [Amazing Spider-Man #39], how aware were you that John was trying to emulate Ditko?

ESPOSITO: Oh, I knew immediately. He had to do it. We wanted the transition between Ditko and Romita to be smooth; we didn’t want to shock the readers. You can see in the Lizard issues [Amazing SpiderMan #44-45] that Johnny tried to get big, black areas and decorative folds on the Lizard’s lab coat. That’s not the way he had worked before.

It takes Johnny a long time to do something. He doesn’t hack. He doesn’t know how to hack. I think that Johnny put a lot of pressure on

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years himself when he took over for Ditko. He didn’t want to pull away from Ditko’s style by doing it completely his own way. Johnny thinks more like Milton Caniff than he does like Ditko, so he had to work more twodimensionally, he had to do more design. In the first story, he must have struggled with it; I felt it wasn’t really Johnny. When Stan told him the book was his and he didn’t need to worry about following Ditko any more, he really took off.

JA: When you inked those early Romita issues, were you given any instructions to try to make it look like Ditko?

ESPOSITO: No, as an inker, I just followed the penciler. I followed Johnny, not Ditko. If I had tried to incorporate my interpretation of Ditko on top of Johnny struggling to get away from Ditko, it would have looked like hell. When I inked Jack Kirby, I tried to make it look less decorative and more real. Stan Lee was watching me one day and said, “What are you doing to the guy’s face?” I said, “I’m drawing nostrils. He didn’t have any.” He said, “But there aren’t supposed to be any nostrils! This is Kirby! Put two holes, that’s all. Don’t try to draw.”

Frank Giacoia came over and said, “Mike, just trace. Paint by numbers.”

When I came to Marvel from DC, I was doing a lot of pen work, and they told me to stop that. They wanted bold, thick brush lines, because Johnny had started incorporating that into the house look. Marvel comics were very brushy. I had to learn how to ink all over again, because I had to be able to snap the brush line to get that bold, thickand-thin look. In the Spectacular Spider-Man book, you’ll notice that my lines are much thinner and lighter, because I wasn’t doing Johnny; I was drawing over breakdowns where there was virtually nothing there, so I ended up doing most of it with a pen.

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cuts, and he would get bawled out by Johnny Romita sometimes because his work could be too simplistic. He was very good, but he was fast, and sometimes he wouldn’t spend as much time in areas that other guys would put more effort into. That didn’t take anything away from his ability.

I liked Don as a person. I drove him home one day. He was divorced, and lived in a little ranch house in Centereach. We talked about horses; he owned a trotter. I drove him all the way home from Marvel, and then I had to drive all the way back to my house in Dix Hills. Years later, I wound up moving to the same town. When he died, I went to his funeral. I think he had problems with smoking, got lung cancer, and it killed him.

JA: Do you recall inking for Not Brand Echh at Marvel?

ESPOSITO: I don’t remember what I did in that title. I did ARRGH!, but they were reprinting Ross’ and my stuff from Get Lost and Up Your Nose. They gave Ross and me copyright credit for our stuff, down at the bottom of the splash. I think they paid us $25 per page for the reprint rights. It was Roy Thomas’ idea to use our stuff in it.

JA: You inked Dick Ayers’ work on Sgt. Fury. What did you think of his pencils?

ESPOSITO: For what it was supposed to be, it was fine. It was very clean, very understandable, and I had no problems understanding what he was doing. I would have had a problem with someone like Mike Ploog, though, because he had an unorthodox style. It was almost storybook-like.

Getting back to Kirby for a moment: I inked the “Nick Fury, “Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” feature in Strange Tales #143 and 144 over Kirby layouts and Howard Purcell’s pencils. I also inked Kirby’s covers for those issues. The first one showed a bunch of guys flying around. The other was a close-up of three guys holding a bomb.

Kirby did tight pencils for those, and I followed him closely. They were great covers.

JA: You also inked Don Heck.

ESPOSITO: Oh yeah, a lot of Don Heck. Johnny Romita had gotten way behind on Amazing Spider-Man, so he would lay it out in breakdown form, Heck would tighten it for the inker, and I would finish it. We were like a three-man team.

I liked Heck’s work at Harvey when I was still a kid. As he became more advanced, he found short-

Goblin Up the Competition Call him Esposito or Demeo or Dee or Gaudioso—just as long as you call him to team up with Jazzy Johnny Romita on the very first post-Ditko issue of The Amazing Spider-Man (#39, Aug. 1966)! Comics readers who weren’t into credits hardly noticed the difference; yet, in the months to come, sales of the book, already Marvel’s #2 title, soared even higher! Script by Stan Lee, who else? [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

16 Mad About Andru & Esposito

Ross and Mike drew a new cover for the final issue of Roy Thomas’ low-budget (almost no-budget) monster-parody comic. Arrgh! #5 (Sept. 1975) reprinted two A&E tales from the 1954 Get Lost #3, plus “Count Varicose” from their 1972 b&w mag Up Your Nose. “The Something” (see page at right) lampooned the 1950 movie The Thing from Another World in which the decided moment comes when the besieged Antarctic scientists decide their alien foe resembles nothing so much as a vegetable. “So what do you do with a carrot?” one asks. “Boil it,” replies Scotty, the reporter. And they do—with cascading electricity, in the film’s climactic scene. Once again, the artists/editors (and their writer, of course— probably future science-fiction author Harry Harrison) had proved that they understood the reason for the success of Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad better than most of its mid-1950s four-color bandwagon-jumpers.

For scenes from “Count Varicose,” see the forthcoming book Andru and Esposito: Partners for Life by Mike Esposito & Daniel Bell, spotlighted on p. 37. [©2005 Mike Esposito & Estate of Ross Andru.]

JA: You also worked on Iron Man for several different runs.

ESPOSITO: I did a run of Iron Man issues over George Tuska that lasted for several years. I loved his pencils; I’d been a fan of Tuska’s ever since he did Crime Does Not Pay, when I was 14 years old. I loved the buck-toothed gangsters he drew. He would do caricatures when he drew gangsters. It was simple to do and I could emulate it. I found the work of people like Wally Wood, Alex Raymond, and Hal Foster beautiful to look at, but difficult to emulate. I liked the beauty and simplicity of Noel Sickles, Milton Caniff, Alfred Andriola, and Tuska; their work was more my speed and my taste. Tuska’s pencils were very hard and clean; it was all there. It was easy to ink his stuff quickly, because I didn’t have to worry about redesigning, softening, reshaping, or cleaning up.

Sal Buscema, who could turn out five pages a day, was not easy to ink, because nothing was completely there. Some guys can take the pen and just build on top of the breakdowns. For example, Tom Palmer could take breakdowns and make them look great. I used to have to repencil Sal, though. With Sal Buscema on Spectacular Spider-Man, I used to be credited as the finisher, because he was just doing breakdowns. He would do great stuff, all in blue pencil. He told the story, but I had to build on top of it because there was no detail in his pencil work. When he penciled a story tight, he was good, but when he did five pages a day in blue pencil, the inker had to add everything. Sometimes, he’d just put a circle for a head. Around issue #170, Sal was developing a technique that was very scratchy; he was using a million lines, and editor Jim Salicrup said that I had to make it look like Sal’s own inking. I asked John Tartaglione to do the backgrounds like Sal would. He did a good job and added a lot of texture. I handled the figure inking, and Marvel was surprised, because it didn’t look like my regular inks over somebody like Ross, Johnny Romita, or John Buscema. This was detailed and noodled up, and I had fun doing it. It was like another stage of inking, going beyond just tracing. [mutters conspiratorially] (I shouldn’t say “tracing,” should I? Inkers trace! Oh, my God!)

JA: Anything you’d like to add about George Tuska?

ESPOSITO: He was a handsome, wonderful guy. I visited him and his lovely wife at his house in Hicksville, Long Island, a few times. I was buying original pages from him; Jim Salicrup and I bought space in The Comics Buyers’ Guide to sell original artwork, and George gave us some of his pages to sell.

JA: On The Avengers, you inked...

ESPOSITO: The wedding story [Avengers #59]! I love that story. John Buscema, at his best. It was like silk to ink; the brush just went (whoosh!). The pages weren’t cut up. Ross’ pages had crevices all over the place where he’d cut into the paper, but John Buscema hardly touched the paper! Yet it was all there and beautiful. And the backs of the pages—the sketches he’d make in preparation—were more brilliant that the fronts!

That story is a real favorite of mine. There’s something about the beauty of it. I just loved the way it looked... the wedding gown, the lacy silkiness of The Wasp’s outfit. I was doing a lot of Ross’ stuff, and a lot of Johnny Romita’s, and this was just head-and-shoulders above even those guys. Buscema could draw so beautifully. Ross was probably a better storyteller, but he couldn’t touch the smoothness of Buscema’s figure drawing. Buscema’s pencils at that time were very complete. I also inked a Thor story of his around 1975, and I still have some beaten-up pages from that book that I look at from time to time. He was so good.

John, Ross, and I tried to start a business together in 1978. Ross and I had this idea of putting out super-hero greeting cards: pictures of superheroes with little whimsical messages. The three of us went out for

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years

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breakfast together, and John fell in love with the idea. Ross and I put together a couple of sample cards—a Valentine card with Conan dragging a woman by her hair—and then we found out that we were in trouble because these characters didn’t belong to us. We tried to skirt that by creating our own characters, but that wouldn’t have the same appeal. It was a good idea, but we were stymied. We couldn’t use the characters without approaching Marvel and DC for permission, and if we approached them, they’d take the greeting card idea and do it without us. So we couldn’t do it. It’s a good idea, though; still possible...

“Up Your Nose And Out Your Ear” JA: How did you get started at Skywald?

ESPOSITO: For years, I had been asking Sol Brodsky why he didn’t publish his own stuff, and he always told me he was too busy. One day, I got a call from him, and he said, “I’ve left Marvel, and I’m forming a company called Skywald with Israel Waldman.” He wanted me to work exclusively for Skywald, with Ross. He wanted to get some hot names.

He got guys like Bill Everett and Syd Shores, too. He gave me a contract that paid $300 a week—which wasn’t bad in those days—just to do a story here and there. There was no quota; it was $300 a week, whether I

When Spiders Clash Spidey tackles Tarantula in the first issue of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, cover-dated Dec. 1976, with pencils by Sal Buscema, inks by Mike Esposito. The comic was launched when longtime Amazing Spider-Man scribe Gerry Conway briefly returned to Marvel as editor-in-chief and wanted to resume writing the Wall-Crawler’s adventures. The new mag avoided displacing ASM scripter Len Wein; turns out Stan Lee had been thinking for some time about debuting a second Spidey title. Repro’d from Vol. 1 of the Essential PPTSSM series. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

worked or not. Ross also got $300. One of the first things we did for him was Hell-Rider. We created that for him. He wanted wash tones on it, so we did some of that, and other times we got somebody else to do it. Ross and I also did a couple of Heap stories. I liked the character; he [the original Hillman character] was the forerunner of Swamp Thing and Man-Thing.

Iron In His System George Tuska pencils and Mike Esposito inks (by now under his own name), in this page from Iron Man #61 (Aug. 1973). Script by Mike Friedrich.

Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Mike E. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

There was a guy there—Jack Katz—who had a weird style. Sol Brodsky’s wife loved his work, and Sol asked me what I thought of it. I said it was weird, and Sol said that’s what he wanted on his black-&white horror books. Vampires, rats... he was great at drawing rats. One day, Katz came into the office, and he looked as weird as one of his characters. He was a real hippie guy, long hair and jeans. We all dressed like that, but he looked like his drawings. Not in an unattractive way, but he had a strangeness about him. He really enjoyed doing piles of detail on detail. I was amazed at how much he could put into a picture.

He was like Basil Wolverton, who would over-design things. He could never do a simple-looking drawing; everything had to be ornate and detailed.

Israel and Sol bought tons of original artwork from bankrupt

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

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Anyway, I told Sol that I would publish Up Your Nose and Out Your Ear myself. Since Kabel News was the distributor for Israel Waldman’s books, Sol was able to arrange for Ross and me to meet with them about publishing the book. He loved the idea of doing something like Mad, bought it right away, and put us under contract. I called Sol in and gave him a 10% partnership. There could only be 100% total in a partnership, and we had about 150%, so we were like The Producers. [chuckles] Sol accepted, and he came up with the name of our publishing company, Klevart, meaning “clever art.” Sol was very clever at writing gags and things. The inside back cover of Up Your Nose featured photographs of the staff, and Sol wrote gags about each photo.

Problem was, the name of the book was Up Your Nose, and the lead character—who was named after someone my daughter knew—was “Joe Snow,” so the retailers mistook it for a drug book. We weren’t into drugs and knew nothing about them, so we didn’t realize what we had done. We had named the book after something Johnny Carson used to say: “May the bird of paradise fly up your nose.” I said, “Why don’t we call it Up Your Nose and Out Your Ear?” What I meant by that was that we had had it up to here with all the phoniness and politics, and the

I’ve Got The Wedding Bell Blues One of Mike’s most fondly-remembered assignments, inking John Buscema’s strong yet sensitive pencils, is the wedding of The Wasp and Yellowjacket, in The Avengers #60 (Jan. 1969). At Marvel, such nuptials can be a trifle perilous, as Jan learned when she cut the cake. (YJ turned out to be Hank Pym with amnesia, or didn’t you know?) Roy Thomas scripted part of this story on his own honeymoon cruise in late summer of ’68. You are cordially invited to read it in Essential Avengers, Vol. 3. RSVP. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

companies—some from Fawcett, some from Fiction House, wherever they found a warehouse of the stuff—and they’d buy it for a penny on the dollar, a penny a page, 20¢ a page. He was putting out magazinesized books that were longer than 32 pages, so they’d use a lead story that was new, and backup stories that were all reprints. I told Sol that it wasn’t going to work, because there was such a vast difference between the new material and the backup stories. The new stuff was nice and modern, and the backup stories were often just crude, with bad writing and bad artwork. Unfortunately, I was right, and it fell apart after about six months.

Then Israel Waldman promised me that Ross and I could do our own book, and he would publish it. That was going to be Up Your Nose and Out Your Ear. I said I wanted to do it like Mad magazine: black-&white, and magazine-sized. Then Skywald went bankrupt, and one day, Israel said to me, “Mike, I know I promised you I would publish a book for you, but I can’t. I’ve already lost $60,000.” Everything was going out, and nothing was coming in to cover the costs, so they had to discontinue. I felt sorry for Sol, because he had left Marvel to do Skywald, and now he was out of a job. He had been making more money at Marvel, too.

A Bug By Any Other Name In the mid-1960s, Ross and Mike had produced this cover, among many others, for Israel Waldman’s “IW” (a.k.a. Super) reprint line. Though the mag was titled The Human Fly, it featured clearly-announced reprints of earlier Fox “Blue Beetle” material. Go figure! Michael T.. Gilbert, who sent the scan, tells us that “IW/Super was so cheap that they dropped the [first Blue Beetle] splash page entirely, so it starts with page 2 (or maybe 3, since it’s not numbered)! Classy outfit, IW!” [Art ©2005 the respective copyright holders; Blue Beetle is now a trademark of DC Comics.]

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years

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canvassed some local stores, and when I asked a little old lady at a candy store why our book wasn’t up there, she said, “It’s a dirty book; it’s a drug book.”

Before you know it, we had to stop production. We had just started the third issue when all hell broke loose. Sol and I were stunned, and we just ran out of money. We couldn’t look for a new distributor. That was the demise of Klevart. Sol and I remained very close friends after that, so close that he was more than a brother to me. I still have a portrait that Johnny Romita made of him after he died. I have it sitting on the bookcase right opposite my bed. It looks exactly like Sol. I look at it every morning. He’s been dead since 1984, and I’ll just never forget the guy.

The Day The “Sky” Fell Sol Brodsky, the “Sky” half of the Skywald name, relaxes in his office—on his “last day” there, according to the 2004 trade paperback The Complete Illustrated History of the Skywald Horror-Mood, written by the late Alan Hewetson, who also took the photo. “Five minutes after this photograph was taken,” wrote Alan, Sol “left the Skywald editorial offices forever.” That left just Israel Waldman as publisher. The book was published by the UK company Headpress/Critical Vision; you might check if their website <www.headpress.com> is still up and running, and if the tome is still available. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

hypocrisy of racial prejudice. That was my theme. Ross and I were very liberal guys, and we wanted to hit back at all the bigots and anti-Semites.

Some people thought we were just being cynical, but the college audience got it. They understood that when we showed a little boy who becomes super when he says, “Muhammad Ali,” we were taking a slap at the plantation owner. But we got some very bad criticism from black institutions; they thought we were racist. I had to take my name and address out of the phone book, for fear that we would be bombed.

Sol lived near Trump Village in Coney Island, where Nathan’s Hot Dogs is. I used to play card games at his house. My son and daughter used to say, “Let’s go to Sol’s house and drop off pages.” Right after we left Sol’s, we’d drive to Coney Island and eat from one end to the other; fried clams, frankfurters, you name it. One time, I broke out in a rash. I think I was allergic to the soft-shell crab. I felt terrible. I told my son, “Mark, I don’t think I can make it.” He was only ten years old, and he was going, “Oh, my God, Dad! Keep driving!” We made it home, I went to bed, and woke up the next day with welts all over me and a terrible headache.

In the late ’50s, things had gotten bad for Sol. Timely had briefly stopped publishing comics, but he still had connections that he had made through Magazine Management, and he was able to pick up some advertising accounts. He asked me to help him on an issue of Adventures of The Big Boy, for the Big Boy restaurant chain. I did figures and backgrounds, and Sol did the heads so that it would look like his work.

He paid me $8 a page.

JA: When Skywald fell apart, did Sol have trouble getting back in at Marvel?

ESPOSITO: Oh yeah; it wasn’t easy. It was basically the same as when I tried to come back after selfpublishing. They regarded us at competitors.

We were being very naive; there was a whole world out there that didn’t appreciate what we were saying.

This was on the heels of Archie Bunker, and I’m sure Norman Lear was bombarded with criticism, too.

First, we got a call from the distributor saying, “We’ve got a winner! We’re going to outdo Mad!” We went out to a big lobster dinner to celebrate, and toasted each other. Sol was almost in tears.

Then we got a telegram that said, “Stop production!” The books started coming back in Weird Wheels & Wild Westerns unopened cartons.

A Whitman’s Sampler of Andru & Esposito work for Skywald.

Wherever they had been (Left:) Double-page splash by Andru & Esposito for Skywald’s black-&-white Hell-Rider #1 (Aug. 1971). The name was distributed, they were coming hyphenated on the cover, if not inside. The hero was the brainchild of writer Gary Friedrich, who had earlier co-created the back unopened, because the motorcycle-riding Ghost Rider for Marvel. Repro’d from the Hewetson volume mentioned in the preceding caption. retailers thought it was a drug (Right:) A&E’s cover for Butch Cassidy #2 (Aug. 1971). There was a Skywald Sundance Kid comic, too. Thus, to cover the book. They weren’t even entwined lives of the two real-life outlaws, as per the recent hit movie with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, would’ve being put out on the stands. I required a four-color crossover! [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

20

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

Up Your Nose And Down In Flames Ross, Mike, and associates made a real effort with the two issues of Up Your Nose (and Out Your Ear), but the parody mag’s title— and maybe the cover of #2—led some folks to think it was aimed at the drug culture, and they shunned it.

Marie Severin painted #1’s cover over Andru’s pencils.

The boys’ “Garlic Man” feature from #1 was also tried out as a syndicated strip; to learn more about it, pick up the forthcoming Partners in Life book. [©2005 Mike Esposito & Estate of Ross Andru.]

JA: How did you feel about Israel Waldman personally?

ESPOSITO: All I can say about him is that he was a sweet, sweet man. Mildtempered, never got upset or irritated, would never insult you; he was a really nice guy. I felt sorry for him when his company went out of business. Near the end, when Sol was being more or less eased out, Waldman brought in his son Herschel—who was very young—as art director. I did a lot of work for him. I was being paid a salary, and I didn’t deliver a few stories that I had been paid for. He said he wanted the stories, so I finished them and delivered them to him. He was surprised, but that’s always been my style: if I owe something, I’ll finish it, no matter what it costs. I brought him the stories, and he was sort-of amazed. They never got a chance to use them because the company was going bankrupt, but he’d paid for them, and I delivered.

The Waldmans continued in the business, publishing coloring books.

Stan Goldberg and I did some coloring books for them years later, when Stan was out of work. It was for a very, very low price: I think we did them for $25 a page, pencils and inks.

Israel Waldman drove a Lincoln, and when I saw it, I decided that I would buy one. I bought a ‘69 Lincoln Town Car. It was a big car; today, you’d think it was a stretch limo. One day, Sol, Stan Lee, and I went to an ACBA meeting, and on the way back, I offered Stan a lift.

He got in the car and said, “Wow, what kind of car is this?” Because it was very big. Sol said, “It’s Mike’s Lincoln; they just bought it.” Stan

was delighted with the car. He was like a big kid after Marvel started to become popular; he was always in an “up” mood. He was really outgoing, and walked with a hop in his step.

He even bought a motorcycle. He did all sorts of things that he had never done before.

JA: Waldman used to run a publishing company called IW, and you did some covers for them...

ESPOSITO: Yes, I think Sol was providing covers to them—acting as an agent—and I did several with Ross, and a couple on my own. Waldman didn’t pay much, so we just knocked them out. They were quickies, but it was a little extra money.

“I Started Working On Staff At Marvel In 1973” JA: After things fell apart at Skywald, did you have trouble finding work again?

ESPOSITO: At Marvel, yes, but DC was no problem. They really didn’t care. Marie Severin painted the first cover of Up Your Nose for us over Ross’ pencils. When it was published, she ran down the hall to the Marvel bullpen, holding it up and saying, “Look what the boys did!”

Ross and I were known as “the boys.” They were very impressed. Sol Harrison at DC wasn’t, though, because we’d used the cheapest paper and printing we could find—Canadian printing—he was judging it for all the wrong reasons: he wasn’t looking at the stories or art, but at how it was produced.

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years

21

Ross and I met him again when Sol Brodsky and Israel Waldman started Skywald Publishing. Sol was bringing in all these guys from Marvel to work there, and Bill Everett would come in once in a while.

He was working in wash at the time, applying shades of grey to his inked artwork to make it look more finished, because the books were printed in black-&-white.

At Marvel in the ’70s, Everett inked Ross on a job, and he used a million lines. It turned out so badly that Ross was afraid he was going to be fired.

JA: I remember that! They did a “Defenders” story together in Marvel Feature, with Doctor Strange, the Hulk, and The SubMariner teamed up. Everett was unhappy with Ross’ pencils because they were so overworked, so he inked every line. Roy Thomas says Stan Lee got very mad at Bill Everett for doing that.

ESPOSITO: I think Everett did it for spite. He thought, “If this is the kind of crap I’m getting, I’ll give ’em crap back.” That was Everett’s way.

Personally, I thought he was a lot of fun. He would kid around with everybody in the bullpen. I had respect for him, because he had been doing “Sub-Mariner” when I was 12 years old. Carl Burgos did “The Human Torch” at the same time.

JA: I’d like to know what it was like working on staff at Marvel.

ESPOSITO: I started working on staff at Marvel in 1973. Cadence Industries, which owned Marvel, had sent a guy [NOTE: Al Landau] down to build up the business. He was in charge, above Stan and everybody else. Cadence assigned the guy to Marvel because a lot of double-vouchering had been going on. People were putting in vouchers, getting paid for work they hadn’t done yet. Eventually, when they owed the company a whole lot of work, they’d jump ship and go to work at DC. The Cadence executive gave contracts to some of the freelancers. My

Indefensible “Defenders” The Hulk, Sub-Mariner, and Dr. Strange in the “Defenders” origin story in Marvel Feature #1 (Dec. 1971). Scripter Roy Thomas recounts: “Ross Andru’s pencils were great, but had a kind-of scratchy, unfinished look—sometimes he’d lay down 2-3 pencil lines for the same artistic detail, and the inker had to choose which one to ink. Bill Everett was in a mood to get annoyed at this, so he deliberately inked every line Ross had penciled—and the result was a sketchy-looking mess, although it looked better when colored than it does in pure black-&-white. When he saw the finished art, Stan realized Bill had acted out of general cantankerousness, and he was furious. I suspect Bill did it partly so he wouldn’t have to ink Andru again—but everything got smoothed over, and the third issue is also by the ‘team’ of Andru & Everett!”

Repro’d from Essential Defenders, Vol. 1. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

I don’t know that much about Sol Harrison, but I know he was a wonderful person. A very good family man with a sick child. Sol was always good to me. I went through a low period once, and he was nice to me and my family. I always thought of him as a warm guy. He wasn’t like a Bob Kanigher, who might hurt you psychologically.

JA: Tell me about Bill Everett.

ESPOSITO: I met Bill at Timely in the late ’50s. He was called in when Stan Lee was trying to start the company back up in the mid-’60s, like Ross and I were, but Stan was trying to get everybody to work for very little money. Bill was living upstate, I think, and Stan’s assistant Flo Steinberg called him. She said he was all excited about working again, but he wanted to make sure he would get paid. Stan told her to tell him not to worry, that he’d get his money. I didn’t know it, but Everett was a heavy drinker, and that’s why he was so concerned about getting his money. He came down and they gave him a book to do. This was after that Daredevil issue that he drew.

…And The Horse You Rode In On While Mike was on staff at Marvel in the 1970s, fellow staffer Paty caricatured him and his racetrack betting. Paty, who penciled an issue of The Cat, is now married to fellow artist Dave Cockrum. [©2005 Paty.]

22

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

contract specified that I had to do so many pages per week to earn a certain amount of money, but the guy told me that if I exceeded my quota, I’d get paid extra for the work. I worked on staff for about a year, and built up a big backlog of extra work, but they just kept paying me the weekly amount specified in my contract. I expected them to either pay me for the pages, or give me paid vacation in exchange for the extra work I had done, but they didn’t do anything.

Finally, I went to see Sol Brodsky and said, “Sol, the company owes me about $5,000 for extra pages I’ve done. Are they ever going to pay me?” And he didn’t answer. I asked Sol what I should do, and he said, “Well, just do whatever you think is best,” and what I thought was best was to go back to freelancing. I never got paid for all that extra work. It turned out that the Cadence executive was doing the same thing to a lot of artists, and eventually, he was kicked out for it.

just sitting on somebody’s desk and talking. He loved life, and he was always saying, “Let’s go out!”

My son came by one day while he was attending the High School of Art and Design down the block.

We went to a restaurant called Alfredo’s, and my son couldn’t believe the way we ate! I was on staff for two or three years, and we ate and drank and ate and drank!

I’m not talking about having a slice of pizza for lunch; I mean plates of spaghetti, ricotta, parmesan, the whole bit. When we’d get back to the office, we’d fall asleep. My son asked if we ate like that every day, and Frank said, “Yeah, we do it every day!” By the time I went back to freelancing, I’d gained about 30 pounds.

Frank just enjoyed life. His pet expression was, “I love to indulge myself,” and he liked to have his martini. With all his deadline pressures, with everybody mad at him because he was late, he would smile through it all. Maybe the pressure finally got to him and he developed his heart problem, but you’d never have known it. He was always hugging and kissing people, and smiling all the time.

Frank made ends meet by selling off his originals whenever he needed money. When he died, there weren’t very many of them left.

When I went back to freelancing, Marvel gave me a contract that said I had to do so many pages per month to earn a weekly salary. I was making about $50,000 a year, and I was supposed to meet a page Guess Spider-Man Took The Issue Off! quota every week. If I didn’t reach Mike teamed up with his old pal Frank Giacoia to ink this Gil Kane-penciled my quota, I would owe the story in Marvel Team-Up #18 (Feb. 1974), as seen in Essential Marvel Teamcompany the money they’d paid me Up, Vol. 1. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] for the pages I hadn’t done. One day, Jim Shooter told me that I had fallen behind quota, and that I owed JA: Stan Goldberg told me that Frank opened a restaurant at one the company $2,500. I went home and wrote out a check for $2,500, time. then gave it to Marvel’s bookkeeper with Jim Shooter standing there.

They looked at me, surprised that I would pay it, because nobody else ESPOSITO: Yes; it was very unsuccessful. He and his brother were did! It put me in good stead with them, though, and they gave me a new partners in it, and it was more of a diner than a restaurant; they served contract without a quota, so I’m glad I did it. breakfast and lunch. It was out on Long Island, not too far from where Frank Giacoia also had a contract with a quota, and fell so far behind that he used to cry to me, “Please Mike, help me finish this job. You lay it out with a pen, and I’ll put the blacks on.” We produced work so fast that you wouldn’t believe it! In the summertime, they used to shut the air-conditioning off at a certain hour at Marvel, and we’d sit on the floor and draw all night. I got him back into shape. His wife called me up once and said, “Thank you so much! Money’s coming in now.” I put in vouchers and got paid for the work I did on Frank’s assignments, but it enabled Frank to catch up to his quota.

Another problem with Marvel’s quotas was that even when the company didn’t have any work for you, they still paid you. Eventually, they’d say to you, “Wait a minute, you haven’t done your pages,” and you’d have to point out that they hadn’t given you enough to do. That’s when they realized that the quotas weren’t working. They found out that the best way to go was freelance, not quotas.

Those pages Frank and I did together were very good. I paid attention to the drawing, and Frank slapped in those powerful blacks that tied everything together. He was very good at that. He could make a simple picture sing. He learned it from looking at Milton Caniff’s work.

Frank was a terrible procrastinator, though. He would spend an hour

he lived. I went in there one day and ordered breakfast, just to give him a little business and wish him luck, and he spent all his time talking with me. He wasn’t a counterman; he didn’t have the desire to work that hard even at his own business. He would distract himself with B.S. He was on stage all the time, talking about the comics business, and it got in the way of his work. The diner only lasted a few months.

JA: Tell me about inking Gil Kane’s work.

ESPOSITO: He was a tough guy to ink, for just one reason: he put a lot in. You couldn’t ink him quickly, because his drawing was full of design.

I did a couple of Metal Men issues with him after Ross left the book. I thought it was pretty good. It was different than Ross’ work, but I thought Gil had his own way of telling the story. He complimented me to Bob Kanigher. I always wonder if the penciler is going to like my inks; I learned to think that way from Ross. It made me feel good that Kane told Kanigher that he liked my work. I thought that our stories were inferior to what Ross and I did, but Kanigher liked it.

I also did a couple of stories with Gil for Tower Publications’ “T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents” comics, after I had worked with him on Metal Men. He came to my house one day, we sat in the kitchen, and he

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years Happy Girth-Day! A recent photo of Stan Goldberg (once a Marvel colorist & “Millie the Model” penciler, now a top “Archie” artist)—juxtaposed with the two art pages from a birthday card he drew for his longtime buddy Mike Esposito a few years back. [©2005 Stan Goldberg.]

asked me to help him with the job. We did a couple of stories, and he paid me out of his pocket: I don’t think he wanted me to know how much he was getting paid. He was a great penciler, a great artist. Gil was very keen on Ross; he used to say that the most underrated artist in the business was Ross Andru.

JA: It seems to me that there was more construction than finish in the pencils of Kane’s figures...

ESPOSITO: If he was going to ink the work, he would just finish in ink; there was no need to do finished pencils. Burne Hogarth was the same way: he would do all of his drawing with his brush. Some guys can do that. Ross never could; if he was going to ink his own stuff, he had to pencil as tight as could be. He would have great difficulty inking unless he had first drawn finished pencils.

Gil Kane could really draw. We were up at his house one day, and he showed Ross some sketches he had done of a live model. For instance, the way he drew the arm: you could feel the bone structure under the flesh, even though you didn’t see it. The way the arm bent, around the shoulder, under the armpit: there was something very silky about it. I thought, “Damn it, this guy can draw!” We’d seen Green Lantern in the same stances with Sid Greene inking on it—a million lines—and it was a thrill to see the same kind of drawing undamaged by ink.

“Would You Play Cards? Are You In Or Are You Out?” JA: By the way, have you ever heard of Roy Thomas?

ESPOSITO: I love Roy. He used to come to my house and sit in the basement when he was just a young guy starting at Marvel; he wasn’t an editor yet. Ross and I were working on syndicate strip ideas. We had some good ideas: we were way ahead of the times... the movies weren’t even doing them yet. We had a guy with a transistor in his head, stuff like that. We would bounce these ideas back and forth with Roy, and he loved them. We never got them into syndication, of course; that’s such a losing game.

I loved Roy’s card games. We’d go to Phil Seuling’s house on Coney Island, and we’d play cards with Phil and his friends. We would play high-low, and I didn’t know the game all that well. I kept trying to build low hands with face cards I’d been dealt. Phil’s wife would be typing in another room, and comic books were all over the place. I love that smell of old paper, old comic books.

I lost a lot of money one night, maybe $200 or $250. They were

23 playing pretty high stakes at that point. Phil said to me, “You don’t live far from here, do you? Got any old artwork or comic books?” So I went home, and found a Thropp Family page

by Lou Fine and Don Kamisarow that I’d gotten back when I was in the Hogarth school. I brought the page and some old Dell give-away comics from the ‘40s back to Phil, and he gave me $400.

That stuff was probably worth much more. Phil couldn’t lose. I said, “How long has this been going on?” Phil said, “It’s a business; it’s what I do.”

Then I’d go to Roy’s house for card games.

His house was like a museum. He had Carl Barks oil paintings hanging on the walls. He had a beautiful apartment on East 86th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue that was filled with collector’s items. We’d have great card games up there, with Sol Brodsky, Stan Goldberg, Johnny Romita, Roy, and me. Later, Al Milgrom started coming, too.

Stan Goldberg was probably the best card player. I was pretty good, and Roy was pretty good. Johnny Romita was terrible. He’s that way in life; he’s always second-guessing himself: “No, no, I don’t think, uh, I don’t know, gee, is that enough...” Until we were going crazy: “Would you play cards? Are you in or are you out?” [mutual laughter] And he’d go, “Oh, I don’t know,” and then we’d find out that he had a full house, and he was worried that somebody else might have four of a kind. I’d say, “How can you worry about that, Johnny? You’ve got to play your cards like they’re the best!” He was always afraid he’d lose.

He didn’t lose any more than anybody else, but he had an inability to take a chance and say, “I’ve got the best hand.”

Al Sulman, who was an editor at Magazine Management at the time, used to play, too. He was very quiet, well-educated. He had a clean look about him, sterile and clean, almost like a doctor or lawyer. He was wellscrubbed. A couple of times, when I’d come back to the table from the bathroom, he’d ask, “Did you wash your hands, Mike?” I’d say, [sweetly] “Yes, I did.” [laughter] We’d go to a restaurant to eat, and I’d order steak and onions or something, and he’d say, “I’ll just have some rice pudding, because my stomach’s a little off.” He was a smart guy who saved his money and traveled around the world, one of the few comics people who took extended vacations and enjoyed them. We’d be worrying about deadlines and paying our bills, and Al would be off to Paris. He never married, but he had girlfriends from time to time.

Morrie Kuramoto played cards, too. What a great guy! He didn’t play at Roy’s; we would play up in Marvel’s bullpen, or at some other guy’s house. Sol and I went to pick him up one day, and when he opened the door of his loft, Sol was stunned. There were paintings and pages from the floor to the ceiling! Piles! It was unbelievable. He was a painter, an illustrator, and a very fast letterer. He was also a great fisherman. He used to come to my house when I lived in Dix Hills in the early ‘80s after he’d been fishing at Montauk, and he’d bring me two big striped bass. Morrie also suffered through interment in an United States detainment camp for the Nisei during World War II.

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

24

I taught him my racetrack system, and he went nuts over it. I refined it when I was 16; it had to do with speed ratings, class, and weights of the horses. He fell in love with it. He started doing it at the track, with a calculator. He played it religiously, and he won with it. He became a big horse-racing fan: I ruined him!

I did pretty well with that system. I would get $20 from each guy in the bullpen who wanted to bet, and I’d go to OTB, and play one or two races a day.

The idea was not to play every race, because that’s how you lose. The first race we played was a daily double, and we put down $120 and got back $1200. I’ll never forget it. In those days, I was good at that.

JA: What was Roy Thomas like to work for when he was an editor at Marvel?

ESPOSITO: He was a very bright, creative guy, and I respected him. He was

Strip Teases In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Roy Thomas worked with Andru & Esposito on a trio of ideas for newspaper comic strips: (Above:) Ross and Mike had already drawn a number of sample dailies for Genesis, which featured Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As per the first daily, each time the Snake slithered by, he caused them to think impolitic thoughts.

The second deals with the naming of the animals. Circa 1970, they invited Roy to become a partner on the strip and to write additional dailies. He suggested the title Adam Ribbed as potentially less offensive to Bible Belters, but the strips he wrote (one of them dealt with naming a clumsy insect a “bumble bee”) were never drawn, and the strip never sold. [©2005 Mike Esposito & Estate of Ross Andru.]

(Right center:) Roy suggested the three of them develop a strip called At the Earth’s Core, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar novels, then take it to ERB, Inc. But though three of their sample dailies eventually appeared in Richard Kyle’s magazine Wonderworld (Vol. 3, #1, Aug. 1973), and for years Roy held onto Ross’ rough pencils for the first week or two of continuity, nothing more ever came of the idea. [Strips ©2005 Roy Thomas, Mike Esposito, & Estate of Ross Andru; Pellucidar & characters TM & ©2005 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.] (Bottom right:) Roy, his first wife Jean, Ross, and Mike collaborated on this concept drawing and a few sample dailies for Libby Nation, a lighthearted look at the women’s liberation movement. If Roy recalls correctly, Jeanie was originally going to be basically a “front”—with her name and not his on the strip as writer, for purposes of publicity. Jeanie, however, soon became a full and active participant, though the strip never got off the ground. [Art & concept ©2005 Roy Thomas, Jean Thomas, Mike Esposito, & Estate of Ross Andru.]

More examples of these three comic strips, and several others that Andru & Esposito worked up, will be seen in Esposito & Best’s forthcoming book Andru and Esposito: Partners for Life.

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years

25

a very good dialogue writer; he wrote more sophisticated dialogue than most of the other guys. It had a lot to do with Stan Lee’s training, where you write the dialogue after the pictures are laid out. That’s where Roy excelled. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t write full scripts, but he was trained to do it Stan’s way, and that’s the way Marv Wolfman and Len Wein wrote at Marvel, too.

Roy was so good when he adapted Conan from Robert E. Howard’s pulp writing. The style of speaking, the flavor of it, you really felt it was Howard’s writing. He did it the pulp way. When he teamed up with John Buscema and those Philippine inkers—Alfredo Alcala in particular—those stories were explosive. He was a brilliant lyricist; he had a very poetic sound to his writing.

Roy used to come to my house at Howard Beach in the early ’70s. At the time, he was married to a woman named Jeanie, and she had an idea for a syndicated strip called Libby Nation. Ross and I had contacted an agent who specialized in syndicate strips, and Ross, Jeanie, Roy, and I went to the agent’s apartment to show her Jeanie’s idea. It was very topical for that period, because of the women’s liberation movement. The woman was very impressed with it, and I think we did character sketches for it. Ross and I were excited about it, and if Roy and Jeanie were going to write it, we wanted to draw it. Somehow, though, it never fully materialized.

At about the same time, Ross and I came up with a strip idea called Genesis, which satirized the Bible. It was all about everything that happened before Adam and Eve ate the apple, when they were still innocent. I loved it, and I still think it’s funny. We did quite a few sample strips for that one, and we took it to the New York Daily News. The editor said, “I love it, but I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, because the Bible Belt readers would never buy our newspaper again.

This is okay for New York, but you can’t do it for the Midwest.”

Photo Finish We dunno if Len Wein remembers any differences with Mike E. along the lines the artist recalls, but the two of them and Ross Andru did some undeniably good work together, as witness this splash from Amazing Spider-Man #171 (Aug. 1977). At any rate, Mike assures us that, as far as he’s concerned, it’s all water under the bridge. The photo of Len is from FOOM Magazine #15, 1976. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Years before, though, in the early ’50s, we did a strip called Martha Hart, which was written by Burne Hogarth. Burne wanted Ross and me to do the art, and we worked hard on it. He was too busy with his work at the school to draw it, and he was already doing lots of other things.

He picked Ross out of the wild crop of young artists he had. Ross had previously helped Burne on Tarzan, and they had become close friends.

Hogarth had a salesman, an Irish guy, who was going to sell the strip to papers around the country. The guy was an alcoholic, and Ross and I were a little worried that he wouldn’t be able to do the job. Then he went on the road, and came back with about 50 papers! We all got very excited, and then all the cancellations came in. The guy had gone around the country getting editors drunk and convincing them to buy the strip, and when they sobered up the next day, they didn’t want it. The deal failed, and Burne lost a lot of money.

The Lineup Roy Thomas figures his mug’s been seen enough in A/E lately, but since Mike mentions him so prominently, Ye Editor used that excuse to print a shadowy photo of number of pros at a 1998 banquet hosted by the American Association of Comicbook Collectors, held in conjunction with the San Diego Comic-Con. (L. to r., standing:) Ramona Fradon (“Aquaman,” “Metamorpho”), John Broome (writer of the Silver Age Flash, Green Lantern, et al.), Paul S. Newman (one of comics’ most prolific scripters), John Severin (EC, Cracked, etc.), Roy, Joe Simon (of Simon & Kirby, natch). (Seated:) Dick Sprang (“Batman”), Jim Mooney (“Supergirl,” et al.), Julie Schwartz (Silver Age super-editor), Vin Sullivan (original editor of Action Comics and of “Batman” in Detective Comics, later publisher of Magazine Enterprises). Just being in the picture was a real thrill for Roy the Boy! Photo by Dave Siegel.

There were two other strip ideas that we tried. It’s a Man’s World? was a satire about henpecked husbands and domineering wives. Ross and I would work on strip ideas during down-times, and this was one of them. If my memory serves, it was done in around 1959 or ’60. Ross and I wrote it together.

In the early 1960s, we tried another strip idea that barely even got to the sample phase: Not Wanted. The word “Wanted” was drawn as it would look on a wanted poster. It was a series of jokes at the expense of the not-so-nice people in the world.

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

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“[Marvel] Was A Completely Different Ballgame By That Time” JA: Getting back to Roy, was there much of a difference when he was editor-in-chief as opposed to Stan Lee? ESPOSITO: It was a completely different ballgame by that time. Stan was out of the picture, because he had moved up to being publisher. It probably made a difference to the people in the office, but I was freelancing at the time. When Len Wein was editing Spider-Man, I had a problem with his nit-picking. Some writers get upset when the art comes back and doesn’t look just the way they imagined it would. When they see the art, they expect to hear the music that goes along with the movies they’re creating in their heads.

I came in one day, and Len was very irritated with me. I had inked a story involving Doctor Octopus, in which he wore a mask over his face that had a glass window in it. When I got the pencils, Ross had only drawn faint impressions of Doc Ock’s face in the window, because we were mostly supposed to see a sheen of reflected light coming off the glass. Len was going nuts, angry at me for not making more of Doc Ock’s face visible through the window. Ross was there, and he said, “But that’s what I put down.” And of course, Ross had me trained to ink exactly what he drew.

friendly, talking about things like inking 20 pages in two days. It was as if we were having battles over who was the bigger money-maker as an inker. Of course, he also had assistants. For instance, on Spider-Man, he’d just put a little figure swinging around, and everything else was done by his backgrounder.

Vinnie was good and friendly in a lot of ways, but he was a really strange guy. He wanted my jobs. He went to Marv Wolfman and told him that he wanted to ink Spidey Super Stories, because he figured that it was easy, and he would be able to knock out five or six pages a day.

Despite that, we had a good relationship. Poaching books from each other was part of the game, as when Frankie Giacoia got that “Robin” story that Julie Schwartz had promised to give to me. Julie Schwartz was a politician. He gave the story to Frank even though Frank wouldn’t be able to finish the pages he already had under his arm. “If you want something done,” Sol Brodsky used to say to Stan Lee, “Give it to Mike, not Frank.” Stan would say, “But Frank’s jobs are so beautiful.” And Sol would say, “If you want it at press time, and don’t want to lose $3,000 in press charges, give it to Mike.”

JA: Did you believe the rumors about Vinnie’s connections to the mob?

ESPOSITO: Well, Vinnie let people think that. Even if there was no connection, he figured he could use it as a weapon to scare people into giving him work. I have no proof of this, but it seemed as if he used that attitude to keep people off-balance, to make them think, “Wow, I’d better be nice to this guy.” In addition, he knew a lot of beautiful women—models and actresses—and he could get people dates. One of the actresses was very famous: Lois Chiles. Vinnie used to date her.

They called Johnny Romita in from another room to take a look at it, but he didn’t want to get involved.

I couldn’t blame him! Anyway, Ross stood up for me, and that bothered Len Wein. He got no satisfaction. He wanted Ross to take his side, and it wasn’t going to happen. I said to Len, “You hear music that’s not there in your script. It was never going to be there; you’re imagining it.” He just stared at me, as if to say, “You’re finished, man.” And that was the end of my career with Len Wein, even though I had invited him to my house, and we had shared movies in an office movie club.

I had a little tumble with him— verbal, and almost physical—one day when everybody at Marvel played softball in Central Park. Stan Lee had been pitching, and said he didn’t want to pitch any more; he said he shouldn’t be doing it. Flo Steinberg was the catcher, and she almost got killed because she wasn’t wearing a mask. The ball bounced off a bat and almost knocked her over. All the guys were there—Vinnie, Frankie Giacoia—and I was going to pitch.

JA: Tell me about Vinnie Colletta.

ESPOSITO: I was at Belmont Racetrack one day, going up the escalator to the second floor, and there was a guy slightly behind and to my right. I looked over my shoulder, and I saw prematurely grey hair that had been beautifully styled, like he had just come from a beauty parlor.

He was a good-looking guy; very Hollywood in his style and manner.

He was nattily dressed, and had beautiful shoes. When we got to the top floor, I turned around and introduced myself. I said, “My name is Mike, and I’m a cartoonist.” He said, “Oh, yeah? I’m a cartoonist, too. My name is Vinnie Colletta.” He went on and on about himself. We got to be

Thor Like An Eagle Vince Colletta’s photo appeared with those of other Bullpenners in Marvel Tales Annual #1 (1964). Vinnie began his long stint on “Thor” features by inking the “Tales of Asgard” back-up strip in Journey into Mystery #106 (July 1964), and soon became the long-running, popular embellisher of the entire comic. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Vinnie was playing first base, and he came over and said, “I just made a bet with Tony Isabella that we’ll win.” At the time, the score was something like 9-0 in our favor.

Around the fifth inning, though, my arm went dead, and I started to lose my coordination. You get tired, even if it’s just softball. Everybody started hitting the ball, even Flo and Irene Vartanoff. We had been playing balls and strikes, and Irene wanted to play without them, so that she could take as long as she wanted to hit. Finally,

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years everybody agreed to that, so I couldn’t strike them out. I couldn’t fake them out with change-ups.

They just stood there and waited for fat pitches to come along.

Little by little, the score became 9-1, then 9-2, then 9-3. When it got to be around 9-7, Vinnie came over and said, “Mike, I think you’d better quit and let somebody else finish.” I said, “No! I’m not gonna stop!

There’s nothing wrong!” [laughter] So I kept going, and another guy hit, and Jack Abel—who was playing third—fell in the mud and missed the ball. We lost. Vinnie was really mad because he lost a $20 bet to Tony Isabella. On the way back to the office, all Vinnie did was walk beside me and berate me: “Ehhh, you jerk!” Finally, I got so mad, I said, “I’m gonna mop the floor with you.” And he didn’t say anything.

That was the worst thing I could have done, because I figured that somebody with a baseball bat was going to come after me. It didn’t happen, of course, but he lost favor with me.

27 JA: How did you feel about the Punisher issues of Spider-Man? ESPOSITO: I had problems with them. I had trouble with the skull on his chest. Sometimes, with certain pencilers, you couldn’t tell what it was. When Ross did it, it was pretty clear, because it was all contours. I never read the script; that probably would have helped.

JA: Tony Mortellaro was your assistant for a while; what can you tell me about him? [NOTE: See A/E #50 for a photo of Tony M.] ESPOSITO: Tony used to work for me when I was publishing Mister Universe, Get Lost, and Mister Mystery. He penciled and inked the “Me, The Verdict” story for Get Lost. It was kind of heavy-handed, but it was good. He got the job done. After a while, though, I guess he couldn’t find any work in comics, and his wife’s father got him a job at a printing place. It wasn’t a creative job; he was manning a press or something.

Around 1967, I was getting all I was doing a lot of gambling, a this work from Carmine lot of horse-playing. Once I bought Infantino—Inferior Five and lunch for everybody in the Marvel Maniaks—as well as three or four bullpen because I had won $500 on a books in the humor division, and race. I had it catered by some deli, they were paying me top dollar. I and it cost me a bundle. Everybody called Tony up one day and asked was eating up a storm, even Chris Comics Publishing Is No Picnic him if he would like to do Claremont. Chris and I weren’t too In the 1970s artist Tony Mortellaro’s signature mostly showed up on buildings backgrounds for me. He got all friendly. There was a little snobbery in The Amazing Spider-Man when he inked backgrounds for John Romita— excited, because he hadn’t worked but in the 1950s he drew numerous horror stories. This splash page from because he was the writer and in comics in a long time. He took Mister Mystery #13, after Andru & Esposito had relinquished the comic, was [whispers] I was just an inker, a the job, and I think I paid him $4reprinted in the b&w Australian reprint Stark Terror; thanks to Daniel Best. “tracer.” Before he succeeded with $5 a page. He would come to my Tony’s photo appeared in A/E #50. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

X-Men, the editors would give him house at two or three o’clock in the worst assignments because they the morning, when he got off work at the printing press company. didn’t appreciate his writing. He was a proofreader and a small writer.

Finally, he said, “I can’t take that printing press anymore. Can you get As I remember it, they gave him X-Men because nobody wanted it. me a job up there?”

Ross did an X-Men story that was inked by John Tartaglione, and got fired because they didn’t like the way it turned out. At my daughter’s I called up Sol Brodsky at Marvel, and I said, “I have this fellow wedding reception, Ross got me off to the side and said, “Mike, I’m in who’s doing my backgrounds. How about giving him a chance in the trouble. I think Stan’s going to let me go because he didn’t like the Xbullpen?” So he got the job. It got to the point where they were crazy Men I penciled. I’m going to have to go back to DC.” about him because he was so fast at handling production work. They gave him his own office—which nobody ever had—and he was The first story I did with Ross for Roy Thomas after coming back to overseeing the coloring, getting stuff to the engravers, and returning the work in the Marvel bullpen was the first issue of Marvel Team-Up, artwork. It went to his head. Tony was kind-of crude, too, and it turned with Spider-Man and The Human Torch. Ross broke his back on it and a lot of people off. did a good job. Little by little, certain editors like Len Wein started to really like Ross, and got him into Spider-Man. We did a run of SpiderTony lost interest in doing backgrounds for me in the early ’70s, Man featuring The Punisher, and a story involving the tram that goes because Vinnie Colletta told him that he would give Tony a dollar a page over to Roosevelt Island. Ross got on the tram with Natalie, and took more than I was paying him to do backgrounds. Tony told me he was Polaroid pictures from every angle. He was that way. In fact, Marvel going with Colletta, and I said, “What are you talking about? I got you almost got sued once because Ross took some pictures of an old house the whole job, and I’ve kept you working for five years. It’s not going to near his home in Rockaway, and used them in a story. Unfortunately, work out with Colletta.” Colletta had invited him out to his estate, there was a character in the story who was supposed to be mildly though, and Tony’s wife was very impressed. retarded, and the people who lived in the house said, “That’s our house So what happened? One day, he sent me a letter that said, “Mike, you and that’s our son.” I don’t know how that all turned out, but Ross was were right. Vinnie dropped me like a hot potato. I was wrong.” When told to throw his Polaroid away. [laughter] He believed—like Leonard Tony worked with me, I gave him pages even if all he had to do in the Starr, Alex Raymond, and Stan Drake—that artists needed models.

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backgrounds were clouds. But not Colletta: the only pages he gave Tony were loaded with backgrounds. I never replied to his letter. That’s the first time I ever did that to anybody. I’ve always been such a softie, always giving in and getting kicked in the ass. Later on, Johnny Romita gave Tony a job doing backgrounds.

“DC Lured [Ross] Away With The Promise Of An Editor’s Job” JA: At some point, Ross became an editor at DC Comics. Why do you think Ross wanted that job?

ESPOSITO: He didn’t want to do it; he was just desperate to get out of Marvel. DC lured him away with the promise of an editor’s job, but when he got there, they wouldn’t let him have it. He had to work his way into it. It was a war between the two companies: we take your men, you take our men.

“I’m sorry, Mike, but we’ll have to use Dick Giordano.” Terry Austin did the backgrounds, because it was such a large project that Dick couldn’t handle the whole thing. Anyway, that really ticked me off. You can’t blame me.

Marv and I had some creative moments after that, though. He, Ross, and I were developing a syndicated newspaper strip for The New York Daily News. It was called The Unexpected, and it was about a girl who specialized at ghost hunting. Marv wrote it—a very good script—and he got Ross and me to pencil and ink it. We all got bylines. We did eight weeks for the Daily News. As usual, everything in life is about timing. Marv had sold the strip to them, they were all excited, they had already paid us for the first eight-week run, and then the Daily News strike started. It lasted about six months, and knocked us right out of the box. The whole project was shelved by the News.

JA: Ross’ editorial stint at DC didn’t work out for him, did it?

ESPOSITO: Ross made a big mistake at DC. He was all thumbs sometimes; his mind was so wrapped up in his penciling that he would make mistakes. He would drop things, or lose his

The saddest thing in my life at the time was when Sol Harrison called me and said that they were going to put out a crossover book featuring

Spider-Man and Superman. He said they wanted Ross and me to do the job as Andru and Esposito, as we had worked at DC. It made me feel good that he remembered us that way, as a team. He wanted us to treat it the same way we’d done Wonder Woman, Metal Men, and all that stuff. It would be a chance for Ross and me to work together again on a major project.

Ross and I were doing Spider-Man stories for Marvel at the time, with Dave Hunt doing nice backgrounds for us; he was very good in the way he handled all the detail.

Then I got another call from Sol, and he said, “Mike, I have some bad news. You can’t ink the job.” Marv Wolfman was the editor at Marvel at the time, working under Stan, and he had called up Sol and said, “You can have Ross Andru to pencil the book, but you can’t have two of our guys, so you’ll have to find another inker.”

Why he said that, I’ll never know. Sol said,

Supes Meets Spidey Circa 1975, DC publisher/editorial director (oh yeah, and artist!) Carmine Infantino drew these three preliminary sketches for the cover of the first DC/Marvel super-hero company crossover, Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, which would be published in 1976. The finished cover art (directly above) was penciled by Ross Andru over Carmine’s layouts, and inked by Dick Giordano. Note that one of the prelims is signed by both Carmine and Stan Lee, who were then helming their respective companies. Mike greatly regrets not getting to ink his longtime partner Ross on this landmark issue. Thanks for the art copies to Joe & Nadia Mannarino of All Star Auctions; see their display ad on p. 54. [©2005 DC Comics & Marvel Characters, Inc.]

wallet, or forget where he put his pencil.

One day, he put the wrong date on the cover of a book. It screwed them all up; they went into a panic when they discovered that it had gone to the engraver with the wrong date. He said to me, “Please don’t tell anybody,” so I waited 20 years, and now I’m telling you.

Anyway, he was very upset, and he said, “Please, you’ve got to help me out.” So I called Sol Brodsky up at Marvel and said, “I think Ross would like to come back.”

He said, “Well, I don’t know,” because Tom DeFalco was the editor then. We went out to dinner with Tom, and he told Ross that if something came up, he would let Ross know. Tom finally did, Ross and I did a couple of things together for them, and little by little, Ross got back up there.

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SupermAndru While Ross was an editor at DC (a tenure Jerry Bails’ Who’s Who in 20thCentury American Comic Books lists as lasting from 1978-86), he also contributed artwork to its books. Above is a specimen of pencils from a “Superman-Batman” story for World’s Finest Comics #300 (1983), as printed in David Anthony Kraft’s Comics Interview. At right is the splash of Superman and His Incredible Fortress of Solitude (Summer 1981), an all-new 64-page tabloid, inked by Romeo Tanghal; this was one of the first projects Roy Thomas scripted when he left Marvel for DC in late 1980. [©2005 DC Comics.]

In 1990 or ’91, we did a graphic novel called Spider-Man: Fear Itself with Gerry Conway. Jim Salicrup edited it. It was very well-written, but Gerry quit the book before it was finished. He wanted to get out and write bigger things. Ross and I were left waiting for the last third of the book. So Stan Lee was called in to finish the writing, and he hadn’t written in a long time. I don’t know if anybody knows this, or if he got credit in the book, but Stan finished the last 10 or 20 pages. You could see the writing difference: Stan’s writing was lighter and more tongue-incheek. Conway had been writing an epic; it was powerful and full of deep meaning. But Stan just did his thing the way he normally would.

That would have been fine if the book was started that way and the whole story had that rhythm, but you can tell the difference if you read the whole book. I think Ross and I did one or two 8-page “Punisher” stories after that, but Spider-Man: Fear Itself was the last big thing we did for Marvel. It was supposed to be the big one that put us back in good stead with Marvel, but it didn’t come off, because it was screwed up with the colorist and the schedule, it was late to the printers, and the distribution was late.

JA: You also inked Jim Mooney.

ESPOSITO: Oh, I love Jim Mooney’s stuff; it had a nice, cartoon look.

He wasn’t sketchy; his shapes were very smooth. In fact, they just sent me copies of the latest Marvel Essentials Spectacular Spider-Man, and Jim Mooney penciled a couple of the stories in it. I liked his pencils.

Ross didn’t understand Spider-Man, and he didn’t draw the character attractively. Mooney’s version had a nice soft look to it, though. He and I did some sort of promotional comic once for the Dallas Cowboys that looked nice and clean. I felt he was closest to Johnny Romita in the way he would shape the characters. He got that soft look to the faces, almost a coloring-book look.

I also did Spidey Super Stories with him. They were a lot of fun. He gave those a good, snappy, simplistic look. He didn’t overwork it or get it too involved. Super Stories had to look very clean and simple.

JA: Why do you feel that Ross didn’t understand Spider-Man? ESPOSITO: Ross wasn’t very good on some of the underwear characters because he was very heavy-handed on the anatomy.

JA: Ross drew the Jackal as a maniac, with eccentric postures and expressions, but in contrast, Spider-Man didn’t move like a lithe, spidery character.

ESPOSITO: No, Ross didn’t quite capture the way Johnny Romita or Steve Ditko did it. Both Johnny and Ross researched Ditko’s work when they started on Spider-Man, but I think Ross went a little overboard with the bending of the figures; they were almost unattractive. Ditko’s work was pretty attractive; there was a nice line on everything, a nice shape to the anatomy. What I didn’t like so much about Ditko were his heads: they looked like dolls. The heads were very still. He really worked on Spider-Man’s figure, though.

“Some Other Pencilers” JA: Let’s talk about some other pencilers. Did you ever work over Steve Ditko?

ESPOSITO: Ditko came in on the tail end of a book called U.S. 1. Al Milgrom had created the book, and a lot of it was done by Frank Springer. I loved working over Frank’s pencils. They were very attractive. His work was such a departure from Ross. Ross’ work was on the crude side, but Springer drew these beautiful faces and flowing hair.

His work had a touch of advertising art in it. It was swift and clean, and while he may not have had the most dynamic approach for comics characters, I felt that he was damn good. He designed the trucks for the first few issues of U. S. 1, and I loved doing them. It didn’t last, unfortunately.

At the end of the book’s run, Ralph Macchio sent me the last issue,

30

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

and it was penciled by Ditko. It was like breakdowns. I said, “I don’t want to do this!” It was going to be so laborious to do it. I went to Ralph’s office and said that I didn’t want to do it, and he said, “You’re contracted to do 12 issues; this is the 12th issue.” I said, “I can’t do this justice; it’s not my approach. I’d rather not.” I didn’t ink that issue, and he never hired me again. Some guys are funny that way. You try to speak your mind and be honest. If I’d done a crummy job, he’d have probably treated me the same way, but I tried to tell him that I didn’t want to do a crummy job. Ditko was not the sort of penciler I could understand on the very first story. I could probably have done a good job on Ditko in his prime, but this just looked... unfinished. There wasn’t enough there for me to handle it without trying to re-pencil the whole thing under deadline. My honesty didn’t pay off.

not your look.” Frank would give the pencils a very graphic, powerful look with his blacks and the subtleties of his line. Gil Kane was Gil Kane, but when Johnny Romita would ink Kane on a cover now and then, you would swear it was Johnny’s penciling. He would shift to his own way of doing things.

Herb Trimpe worked in the Marvel bullpen, and we used to play softball together. He was a damn good softball player. He was fast, skinny as hell, a good glove man. He met his wife, Linda Fite, when she worked in the bullpen, too.

JA: You knew George Roussos when you worked on staff at Marvel.

What do you remember about him?

ESPOSITO: He was a great guy, and a fast worker. He used to build a wall around himself out of temporary partitions, so that he could work in a little cubbyhole where nobody could see him. You couldn’t get in. He’d sit in there, and knock out coloring pages by the thousands. He was fast. He was in his own little world. The bullpen was in plain view of all the supervisors and managers, but he was hidden. He was like an unknown, and he was a coloring machine.

JA: You inked Carmine Infantino on a few issues of Spider-Woman.

How was that?

ESPOSITO: Unless you understood how to ink him—as Joe Giella did— you could get a little lost. The guy who was inking him before I took over, Al Gordon, inked it like it was stone.

I grew up in comics with a different guy named Al Gordon, who worked with Mo Marcus and me at a studio on 47th Street. Al was a competent man, and in later years, he has been designing and illustrating toy boxes. He used to work on comic books with Mo Marcus. Al would get jobs and Mo would pencil them.

Anyway, the way the younger Al Gordon inked Carmine, there was nothing soft about anything. I thought about how Joe Giella inked him on The Flash, and decided that I should speak to Joe, or try to remember how he inked it. Giella was a genius at cleaning up guys who penciled like Carmine. When I got the pages, I used an eraser to lighten up the pencil, the way Joe used to do. After that, I was able to to what I thought was a fairly decent job. It started looking more silky and attractive.

I used to visit him at his house in the morning, to drop off or pick up pages. I went over there once, and his wife said that he was in the back yard eating breakfast. I went back there and found him sitting at a picnic table on his patio, drinking coffee and cracking nuts, with a squirrel siting right next to his elbow, eating the nuts with him.

He’d crack a couple of nuts, take one, and give the other to the squirrel. When the squirrel saw me, it started to get nervous, but George said, “Relax, it’s all right.”

They were buddies.

George was a great collector, too. He had original Hal Foster A climactic page from the 1991 graphic novel Spider-Man: Fear Itself Prince Valiant pages, and —one of the last artistic team-ups of Ross Andru & Mike Esposito, with script whenever he needed a few bucks,

by Gerry Conway and Stan Lee. Mike told biographer Daniel Best, who sent he would sell one. He had gotten us this scan, that Ross penciled the art for this g.n. in the old "twice-up" The guy who did the best job on them over the years from size because of his failing eyesight. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] somebody he knew at the Spider-Woman—though he didn’t syndicate’s warehouse or stay on the book too long—was something. My friend at the syndicate was Burne Hogarth, who said to Frank Springer. I though he did a great job. He’s an excellent artist, and a bit of an actor, as well. He used to appear in plays in Northport, Ross and me, “Take what you want from the warehouse; they’re just Connecticut. going to rough them up or lose them in a flood.” George knew the value of the pages.

JA: You also inked Herb Trimpe...

JA: When did you meet Stan Goldberg?

ESPOSITO: Oh yeah. We did quite a few Hulk stories together. His work was very clean, very exact. He loved to draw tight, so when you ESPOSITO: I met Stan very early in the ’50s. He was only a kid then, inked him, it really looked like him. Some inkers—like Frank Giacoia— and he’s five or six years younger than me. When he started coloring, he stamp every job with their personal style. That’s why Ross didn’t like was a nice, friendly kid, very impressed with all the professionals. I met Frank’s inks on him: Frank would ink every mouth, every bottom lip him again after Timely had shut down for a while, when he started the same way. Ross didn’t like that, but I told him, “That’s what sells. drawing Millie the Model. Frank Giacoia inked one of his stories, and That’s what the fans like, and what Stan Lee likes. He likes Frank’s look, Stan said, “Wow, did I draw that?” Frank made it look a lot more lifelike

Going Out With A Bang

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years

31 were collecting original prints of movies.

JA: Gene Colan.

ESPOSITO: He was so good doing black-&-white stuff. He worked from photos, and it was a whole different approach. He didn’t use line; he used light and dark. It’s hard to ink that stuff. I remember Frank Giacoia used to say to me, “It’s tough to ink because it has no outlines.” The reason it was so good for an inker like Tom Palmer is because he was able to use an illustrator’s approach.

He illustrated it, rather than giving it a cartoon or comic book look. That’s something I could have learned to do, but after 50 years of working in line—y’know, contour, contour, contour—you develop a certain approach, and trying to change it in midstream is almost impossible.

JA: What do you remember about Joe Sinnott?

A Four-Color Cornucopia—In Black-&-White We’re sorry we can’t showcase examples of all the pencilers Mike Esposito has worked with, but then, at one time or another in his long career, Mighty Mike has inked just about everybody. A few cases in point [clockwise from top left]: “Call me Greenskin!” The Hulk and The Abomination mix it up in this page from Moby-Dick—er, we mean, The Incredible Hulk #137 (March 1971). Pencils by Herb Trimpe; script by Roy Thomas (from an uncredited plot by Gerry Conway), as reprinted in Essential Incredible Hulk, Vol. 3.

In this splash of Sub-Mariner #46 (Feb. 1972), Mike embellished Gene Colan’s penciling of Prince Namor, his father, Llyra, and Tiger Shark.

When Marvel and the educational organization called The Electric Company teamed up to do Spidey Super Stories with younger readers in mind, Mike inked veteran Win Mortimer, beginning with issue #1 (Oct. 1974).

Spider-Man and The Thing made a mighty Marvel Team-Up in issue #6 (Jan. 1973) of that title— but so did Gil Kane & Mike Esposito! Script by Gerry Conway. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Al Bigley. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

that Stan’s pencils. Then Stan started doing humor stories, and his career just took off. He did Leave It to Binky and Swing with Scooter for DC. I did some Scooter too, inking Joe Orlando: it was a bit more straightlooking. I inked some of Stan’s work at Archie, too. Stan’s a great guy; we used to go to Atlantic City and have a good time.

JA: What did you think of Gerry Conway?

ESPOSITO: Gerry Conway was a fantastic writer. One of the best ones they had. He does a lot of television work now. He had a spark. He came over to my house once, when I lived in Huntington. I showed him the basement movie projection setup that my son and I had put together, back when John Romita, John Verpoorten, and I

ESPOSITO: Remember that picture of me with Joe from the Joe Sinnott interview [in Alter Ego #26]? Remember the stupid jacket I had on? Joe sent me that picture once—it was taken at a convention—and he wrote, “Well gee, Mike, we can’t all be beautiful and good.” [laughter] I also knew Don Perlin very well. He was 3 or 4 years younger than me. He was a big guy, and he wanted to be a wrestler. When he came out of the Army, he tried professional wrestling. On the train one day, he was telling me about

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Hulk Stomp! No—Hulk Pass Out! Mike Esposito tells Jim Amash that he began working on the late-’70s Incredible Hulk newspaper strip after the first few weeks, which had been embellished

by Frank Giacoia. By the time of this Nov. 28, 1978, Mike was inking. With thanks to penciler Larry Lieber for the photocopies of the original art. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

wrestling a woman. She got him in a headlock, with her thighs around his neck. He said, “That’s it for me,” and he quit.

Don’s pencils were pretty good; he was very competent. He didn’t have a recognizable style, the way Mike Sekowsky, Alex Toth, or the Buscemas did. He was a typical Marvel penciler of the late ’50s: not flashy. He worked hard, though, and everything was in there. I liked his Ghost Rider.

JA: You inked Captain America over Frank Robbins. What was that like?

ESPOSITO: Very nice. He didn’t draw heroic figures, though; his proportions were always undersized. His characters weren’t seven heads high. That was his style from syndication: they were a little cartoonish, and they weren’t powerful, big figures. But Frank Giacoia loved it; we did a couple of Robbins stories together. I also did a pretty good one with John Tartaglione, where I outlined and John finished. Tartaglione had my old staff job in the corrections department at the time; I had recommended him to John Verpoorten when I gave it up.

Frank Robbins was a hell of a sweet guy. A very nice guy, always smiling. Stan Goldberg became a good friend of his. I was a big fan of his work in The New York Journal-American when I was a kid. He did Johnny Hazard, and I remember he did a great dinosaur sequence.

JA: How did you find working with Rich Buckler?

ESPOSITO: He was a good man. We were talking once at night, when I was still in the bullpen and he was working late on some pages. He told me that he had created a character, “Deathlok.” I asked if he was doing it for Marvel, and he said yes. I said, “I think you’re making a mistake; you’re not going to get any credit for this. They’re going to own it.” He said, “Oh, no, I have a contract.” I said, “I’m telling you right now, they’ll find ways to own this character. Someday it’ll become famous, and you’ll be known as the guy who drew it, but they’ll make movies, and they’ll own it.” That isn’t verbatim. I tried to explain what had happened to guys like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster at DC, and Jack Kirby at Marvel. I don’t know what happened to the character. Maybe they honored his contract; I don’t know.

JA: You inked Paul Gulacy on Master of Kung Fu...

ESPOSITO: Oh, yeah! That guy penciled like it was engraved. It was shiny black. Where he put his blacks, you couldn’t even see the pencil marks; it was like it was smeared perfectly grey. It was clean as a whistle, as if the black areas had been painted in pencil. It was not my style of

penciling. I wouldn’t say it had a lot of excitement, but it fit what he was doing. I sharpened that job, but I made it look like Gulacy. When he saw it, he said, “That’s my work.” The Kung Fu period didn’t last, though, but I am proud of that job.

JA: What was your experience at Marvel like after Jim Shooter became editor-in-chief?

ESPOSITO: I felt very uncomfortable when he didn’t want to renew my contract.

JA: Yeah, he did that to Sam Grainger and Chic Stone, too, when they both had health problems. Do you want to talk about that?

ESPOSITO: Only to say that whatever Chic said about it, I second the motion. [mutual laughter]

“I Really Enjoyed The [Spider-Man] Strip” JA: Ok, tell me about the syndicated Spider-Man strip.

ESPOSITO: Well, Johnny Romita was doing it, and he was having trouble handling it along with all his other responsibilities at Marvel, so I think Sol Brodsky recommended to Stan that I ink Johnny on it, and Johnny said, “Ok, give it to Mike.” I really enjoyed the strip when Johnny was penciling it. I like Johnny’s stuff and I had been working with him for years, so I could understand everything he put in there.

Then Fred Kida took over the penciling, and Fred didn’t like what I was doing. He had them take his name off the strip, so Stan’s became the only name on the strip. Fred didn’t like what I was doing because he’s an inker as well as a penciler, and I can’t think exactly like him. I think his complaint had to do with the some of the faces; he didn’t like the eyes or something. Then Kida pulled out, and Dan Barry did a few strips, but that didn’t last, either. Then it went to George Tuska, who did even less of it. He was okay, but the art didn’t have the flavor of Johnny Romita or Fred Kida. Fred had been pretty good at it. In Fred’s eyes, and maybe in mine, too, Fred did more justice to it than I did. Schedule-wise, I always considered the book to be more important than the strip.

Stan was satisfied with the strip, though. He would send me my share of the originals. At one time, the penciler and inker were supposed to split the originals, but for some reason, they started giving the writers some. After that, one of the artists walked up to one of the writers or editors, said, “Here’s your share of the art,” peeled all the word balloons off the pages, and handed them to him.

JA: Who started the odious concept of the writers getting a share of

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years

33

“The Horse Won, But The Jockey Fell Off”

the art, which thankfully didn’t last too long?

ESPOSITO: I’m sure Marv Wolfman and Len Wein had a hand in it. I don’t think Roy was that petty, but I think Stan went along with it because he got some pages out of it. [NOTE: My good friend Mike is in error here. I always was, and still am, in favor of the writers receiving a small percentage of pages of original art.

I’ve never made any apologies for having that opinion, and don’t consider it “petty” or “odious” at all.

—Roy.]

JA: While you were at Marvel in the ’70s and ’80s, did you have a favorite title?

ESPOSITO: My favorite title was always Spider-Man. I also enjoyed The Hulk, and I liked inking George Tuska on Iron Man and Planet of the Apes. There were so many other characters that it’s hard to say. I didn’t like doing one-shot characters, because there wasn’t enough there to get involved. I did some Thor, but not enough to develop an affinity for the character.

JA: You inked The Incredible Hulk newspaper strip for about a year.

ESPOSITO: I hardly remember doing that. It didn’t mean anything, and it didn’t last. Frank Giacoia originally got the ink job on the strip, but they took it away from him and gave it to me because Frank couldn’t meet his deadlines, and that really ticked Frank off. He came into the office, screaming and yelling at Irene Vartanoff, who was in charge of producing the strip.

Frank had fallen in love with it. He had always wanted a syndicated strip, and he’d had several in the past and lost them all because he couldn’t meet his deadlines.

JA: You inked some Sub-Mariner over Marie Severin.

ESPOSITO: I inked it as “Joe Gaudioso.” She was a great artist. I liked her stuff. Her drawing was very masculine. It didn’t have that delicate look about it; it was very powerful. I found I couldn’t make a fast buck inking her, because she put everything in. There were three people in my career who worked that way: Marie, Ross, and Stan Goldberg. If any part of the page was a little empty, they’d find something to put in that space. I A Cast Of Thousands did a coloring book with Stan JA: I also have you down as having Marie Severin and “Joe Gaudioso” got a chance to draw darn near Goldberg, and I couldn’t believe how inked a run of the Apartment 3-G every blamed Marvel super-hero around at the time in this page much work he put into it. Same thing strip in 1979 and 1980. from Sub-Mariner #14 (June 1969). Script by Roy Thomas. happened when Ross and I did a [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] ESPOSITO: Yeah, I did that for couple of coloring books: he had to André LeBlanc. He called me up and fill every page. If there was a space at said that the regular artist, Alex Kotzky, was sick, the bottom, he’d put in a mushroom with two and that he was recommending me to pencil and ink caterpillars talking to each other. I also inked Sal it until Kotzky was well enough to return. I went Buscema on Sub-Mariner, and maybe a couple of over to Kotzky’s house and talked with him. He’d other guys, too. just gotten home from the hospital, and wouldn’t be JA: You and Marie did a pin-up Sub-Mariner able to do the strip for five or six weeks. He asked page that was a tribute to Bill Everett when he me to help him out, and said that the syndicate died. [NOTE: See Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #3.] would pay me. I called the syndicate and said that I wanted $500 a week, and they said okay. When Kotzky found out about that, he was livid, because he hadn’t been making $500 a week. The writers owned the strips, so they got the biggest cuts of the money from the syndicate. The artists were just laborers.

I got John Tartaglione to help me out; he penciled a couple of great Sunday pages. Shooter was upset that I was doing the strip because he was worried that it would hurt my work for Marvel, and when he saw one of John’s Sundays, he said, “Look at this good work you did for the syndicate, and look at the crap you do for me.” Somebody else laid out the dailies for me, some guy I can’t remember, and he wasn’t that good. Finally, after about six months, Kotzky got better and returned to the strip. They never paid him the rates that they paid me.

ESPOSITO: I might have done that, but I don’t really recall it.

JA: In the 1980s, you started working for Archie Comics. How did you get started there?

Archie & M.E. Mike in 1996, with one of the greatest “Archie” artists ever—the late great Dan De Carlo. Mike inked for Archie through much of the ’90s. Photo by David Siegel.

ESPOSITO: I’ll never forget that. I got a call from my stockbroker one morning, when I was still half asleep. He said, “Mike, did you read the paper?

Your friend, from Archie... something’s happened.”

I thought something had happened to Stan Goldberg. We had just left the funeral for Sol Brodsky, and Stan, John Romita, I, and our wives had gone out to dinner together, and everything had seemed fine. It turned out that Stan’s daughter had died. It’s the furthest thing from your mind that something like that could happen.

Anyway, it was a very rough time for Stan. The

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

34

Archie publishers came down to see him at his apartment in Jericho, Long Island, and we sat at his kitchen table. It was Richard Goldwater, Michael Silberkleit, Stan, and me.

Richard or Michael told me, “Come on down; we’ll give you all the work you want,” so I went down there, and they started me on Katy Keene. I was picking up pages one day and the editor, Victor Gorelick, got a telephone call. It was Vinnie Colletta. With me sitting right there, Victor said, “Vinnie, I’m not giving you the next Katy Keene. I’ve got a different inker. Vinnie must have asked who, because Victor said, “Mike Esposito.” Then BLAM! he slammed the phone down. I asked him what happened, and he said, “As soon as I said ‘Mike Esposito,’ he hung up on me. Boom!” Evidently, old wounds never heal.

When I started there, I met Barry Grossman. The first day we met, Barry told me he didn’t like me, but he loved me after that. We became great pals. Archie started me at $25 a page. I worked for Archie until the mid-1990s.

JA: In the early ’90s, you worked on a book called Zen for Archie Comics Publications.

ESPOSITO: Yes. Steve Stern created and wrote Zen with another guy named Cote up in Maine. Ross and I did the artwork. Archie only published four issues of it, but Steve controlled the copyright of the character and later self-published it. We continued to work on the book after Archie dropped it.

JA: Tell me about self-publishing in the 1990s.

Chemo-Cal Reaction

ESPOSITO: In 1992, when we decided to publish again, our backers saw the sales of Image Comics reaching over a million copies per issue.

When we did the math, we realized that Image was making over a million a month, and we thought we could hit it big. I discovered that this wasn’t the case at a convention, when one kid brought me 20 copies of the same comic to autograph. I realized that the buying audience was much smaller than we thought, and that as soon as these kids got interested in girls, they would lose interest in the comics, and the fad would be over.

Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti were all set to come and work for us; we were going to give them 25,000 shares of stock in our company. We met them at a convention and said we wanted to work with them. They were all excited, and it was going to happen, but the backers didn’t come through. They pulled out, they lied, they scammed us, and we didn’t get a penny. We couldn’t publish the books. The timing was everything; there was a short period when we really could have had something, but after that, forget it. The horse won, but the jockey fell off.

JA: What have you been doing since you left Archie Publications?

(Top center:) Mike in 1996, signing autographs and drawing sketches as a comics convention. (He sent us the photo with the balloon already pasted on it!) Above, the Metal Men face their greatest adversary, Chemo, in Showcase #39 (July-Aug. 1962), as written & edited by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Ross Andru & Mike Esposito. For more on these effervescent elementals, see the very next article in this issue of A/E! With thanks to Carl Gafford. [Metal Men page ©2005 DC Comics.]

Toy Story In this panel from Metal Men #16 (1965), Kanigher had Andru & Esposito draw toy versions of many of the heroes he handled (some of which he had co-created) for DC. Ross and Mike even drew a “Sgt. Rock” story once, as detailed in the second article following. [©2005 DC Comics.]

ESPOSITO: Since then, I’ve been doing re-creations of covers and splash pages that I originally inked.

My best fan is Brian Brack, who’s the biggest Spider-Man fan I know outside of Mike Burkey. Brian comes from Canada, and was nice enough to visit me twice this year.

He’s really a great guy. I’m not rich, but at least it makes me happy. I get to do what I want to do for fans who appreciate it. And of course, I’ve spent the last ten years giving you this interview. [laughs] NOTE: If this issue and the last didn’t include any material from your favorite Andru and/or Esposito comic, relief is at hand— in the form of an entire book devoted to this epoch-making artistic pair. See p. 37.

Mike Esposito: The DC & Marvel Years

35

MIKE ESPOSITO Checklist [NOTE: The following is adapted from information provided by Dr. Jerry G. Bails from his Who’s Who of 20th-Century American Comic Books website. Those wishing to know when the updated version of the Who’s Who will be available should e-mail him at JerryBails@aol.com; they will be notified when it’s ready. Some data updated by Mike Esposito, via Jim Amash. Some names of features which appeared in more than one magazine (e.g., “Wonder Woman”) have not been placed in italics below. Key: (a) full art; (p) = pencils only; (i) = inks only; (w) = writer; (S) = Sunday (for newspaper comic strips); (d) = daily Monday to Saturday (for newspaper comic strips).]

Name: Michael Esposito [b. 1927] (artist, publisher) – generally known as Mike Esposito Pen Names: Joe Gaudioso, Michael Dee, Mickey Demeo, Espoia (with Frank Giacoia), M. Hands (as one of numerous artists on a feature) Education: Music and Arts High School; Cartoonists and Illustrators School Syndicated Credits: Apartment 3-G (S,d)(i) 1979; Incredible Hulk (S,d)(i) 1981; Spider-Man (S)(i) 1986-87; (d)(i) 1982-86, 1994-99 Staff: Klevart (publisher: Up Your Nose) 1972; MikeRoss Publications (publisher) 1953-54; Mister Publications (co-publisher) 1951 (sold out to owner Harry Kanter) Advertising/Industrial/Educational/ Promotions/Religious comics & premiums: Adventures of the Big Boy (i) for Big Boy Restaurants; Spider-Man (i) for the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse; Spider-Man and the Dallas Cowboys (i) 1983 for Dallas Times Herald Comics for United Kingdom (also see strips marked “[UK]”: Captain Britain (i) 1997 [Marvel UK]; covers & art corrections [Marvel UK]

DC & related: All-American Men of War 1953-64; The Atom 1973; Batman 1969-70; Batman & Adam Strange 1970; Batman & Atom 1968; Batman & Metal Men 1967; Batman & Metamorpho 1966; Batman & Phantom Stranger 1970; Batman & Spectre 1967; Batman & Wildcat 1970; Bob Hope 1967; Captain Storm 1965-66; covers 1953-74, 1980; Falling in Love 1972; The Flash 1967-70; G.I. Combat 1957-60, 196364; G.I. Joe 1956-57; Girls’ Love Stories 1969-72; The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told (reprint); Gunner and Sarge 1959-60, 1970; The Haunted Tank 1969; Heart Throbs 1967-68; House of Secrets 1970; Inferior Five 1966-68; Jimmy Olsen 1972; Jonni Thunder, a.k.a.

Thunderbolt 1985; Judge Gallows 1969; Kings of the Wild 1956; Legion of Super-Heroes 1969, 1971; Lois Lane 1967-71; The Losers 1972-73; Mademoiselle Marie 1960; Maniaks 1967; Metal Men 1962-68, 1973, 1977; Metamorpho & Metal Men 1966; The Minute Commandos 1959; My Greatest Adventure 1960; Our Army at War 1953-65, 1971-72; Our Fighting Forces 1954-67, 1971-72; Reach for Happiness 1967; Rip Hunter, Time Master 1961-62; Robin 1969-70; Robin Hood 1957-58; Rose and The Thron 1970-72; Sea Devils 1960, 1963; Secret Hearts 1969; Secret Origin: Robin (p) 1969; Secret Origin: Wonder Woman 1959, 1998; Sgt. Rock (1959; Showcase 1956; Star Spangled War Stories 195359; Suicide Squad 1959-62, 1964-66; Superboy (i) 1968-70; Superman (i) 1968-70; Superman & Batman & Robin 1968-70; Swing with Scooter 1966-67; Tank Killer 1958-59; Task Force X – Suicide Squad 1959, 1961;

NOTE: Assisted Frank Giacoia on inking at Marvel, mid-1970s; shared a studio with Ross Andru, Jack Abel, Arthur Peddy, & Bernard Sachs, late 1950s COMIC BOOK CREDITS (Mainstream US Publishers): [NOTE: All credits below are for inking, unless noted otherwise.]

Archie/MLJ, etc.: Archie 1985-92; Bayou Billy 1989; Betty 1987-88; Betty and Me 1981; Betty’s Diary 1988-89; covers 1988; The Fox 1985; Katy Keene c. 1985-89; Life with Archie 1985; Little Ambrose 1985, 1987; Little Archie 1987-88; Mighty Crusaders 1985; Zen 1992 Avon Comics/Realistic/Avon Books: Westerns (p/i) c. 1953 Better/Pines/Standard/Nedor: crime 1954-55; Date with Danger 1952; Exciting War 1952; horror 1954-55; Jet Fighters 1952; Joe Yank 1952-53; Lost Worlds 1952; New Romances 1953; Out of the Shadows 1952; The Unseen 1953 Charlton Comics & precursors (Charles/Levy/Frank Comunale): covers 1956; Foxhole (?) 1954

The Korean War In Four Colors Ross & Mike drew “The War That Time Forgot”—but here’s the type of war that humanity would rather forget—but which was nonetheless well-rendered by the Andru-Esposito team for these two comics published by Standard/Pines/Nedor.

(Left:) A 1952 page from Jet Fighters, repro’d from a scan of the original art, courtesy of Ken Quattro.

(Right:) A dramatic sequence from an issue of Joe Yank, circa 1952-53. With thanks to Dominic Bongo & Heritage Comics’ invaluable archives site. [Both pages ©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

36

Andru, Kanigher, Lee–––& Up Your Nose!

TNT Trio 1960-61; Trigger Twins 1955-57; The Unexpected 1969-70, 1972; War That Time Forgot 1961-65; War Words 1958; Wonder Girl 1959-65; Wonder Tot 1961; Wonder Woman 1958-68, Wonder Woman Family 1961; Young Love 1967 Fawcett Publications/Fawcett Comics: romance or Westerns c. 1950 (through Rinaldo Epworth) Fox Comics: crime (a) 1959; Outlaw Women (p/i) 1949 Harwell Publications/Hardy Comics/Comic Media: Danger c.

1953-54; Death Valley c. 1954; Weird Terror c. 1953-54 Hillman Periodicals: cars 1952; crime 1951-53; horror 1951, 1953-55, romance 1952; war 1952; Western 1951 I.W./Super Comics: covers 1960s Klevart Enterprises: Up Your Nose (and Out Your Ear) 1972 Lev Gleason/Comic House & precursors: Crime Does Not Pay (p/i) 1950; fillers (p/i) 1950; romance (p/i) – on staff a few months Major Magazines & related: Cracked c. 1987 Marvel/Timely & related: Annie Oakley 1955-56; Ant-Man 1972; Apache Kid 1955; Arrgh! (1970s reprints from Get Lost & Up Your Nose); Astonishing 1955-56; Aunt May and Franklin Richards 1984; The Avengers 1966, 1969, 1973-74, 1976, 1979-88; Battle 1955-56; Battlefront 1954, 1956; Battleground 1955; The Beast 1973; The Brothers Link 1971; Captain America 1975, 1978; Captain Marvel 1976; The Champions 1975, 1977; Chuck Norris 1975, 1977; Combat Kelly 1972; covers 1966-82; Cowboy Action 1955; The Defenders 1975-75, 1979-80, 1982; Dr. Doom 1971; Dr. Strange 1973; Dracula Lives! 1974; Fantastic Four 1975, 1980; fillers (w) 1974; Frankenstein 1974; Frontier Western 1956-57; G.I. Joe 1982, 1985; Gabriel 1974; Ghost Rider 1975, 1980-81; Girl Comics 1951; Guardians of the Galaxy 1969; Gunsmoke Western 1955, 1960; Haunt of Horror 1974; Hulk 1965, 1971-72, 197780; Hulk & Ka-Zar 1981; Hulk, Luke Cage, & Iron Fist 1980-81; Human Fly 1978; Human Torch 1965; Human Torch & Hulk 1974; Human Torch and Iceman 1974; Inhumans 1976; Iron Man 1965, 196971, 1973-74, 1977-78, 1982; Journey into Mystery 1955-56, Journey into Unknown Worlds 1955, 1957; Justice Comics 1955; Ka-Zar 1974, 1976; Kid Colt Outlaw 1960; Luke Cage & Iron Fist 1981, 1986; Luke Cage & Son of Satan 1982; Marvel Tales 1955; Master of Kung Fu 1974-77; Men’s Adventures (a) 1951; miscellaneous 1949 over Ed Winiarski – genre unknown; Moon Knight 1978; Mystery Tales 1955-57; Mystic 1953, 1956; Navy Action 1955-56; Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD 1966, Night Rider 1980; Not Brand Echh 1967; Nova 1979; Omega the Unknown 1977; Pecos Kid 1960s; Planet of the Apes 1974-75; QuickTrigger Western 1957; Rawhide Kid 1960; Rick Davis 1955; Rock Murdock 1955-57; Rom 1982; Sailor Sweeney 1956; Sandman 1990; Secret Wars 1984; The Sectaurs 1986; Sgt. Fury 1972; Skull the Slayer 1976; Son of Satan 1974; Sons of the Tiger 1975; Spider-Man 1966-68, 1970-84, 1987; S-M & Ant-Man 1981; S-M & Beast 1975, 1982; S-M & Black Panther 1974; S-M & Black Widow 1984; S-M & Cannonball 1985; S-M & Captain America 1976, 1981, 1983; S-M & Captain Marvel 1984; S-M & Daredevil 1982, 1984; S-M & Dazzler 1981; S-M & Deathlok 1976; S-M & Devil-slayer 1981; S-M & Doc Samson 1981; S-M & Dr. Doom 1976; S-M & Dr. Strange 1976; S-M & Dominic Fortune 1982; S-M & The Falcon 1982; S-M & Fantastic Four 1983; S-M & FrogMan 1982; S-M & Gargoyle 1982: S-M & Hulk 1977; S-M & Human Torch 1972, 1975, 1982, 1984; S-M & Iron Man 1976, 1981, 1984; S-M & Jack of Hearts 1983; S-M & Killraven 1976; S-M & King Kull 1981; S-M & Kitty Pryde 1983; S-M & Machine Man 1980; S-M & Man-Thing 1982; S-M & Mr. Fantastic 1974, 1983; S-M & Moon Knight 1984; S-M & Moondragon 1976; S-M & Nick Fury 1984; S-M & Nighthawk 1981; S-M & Nomad 1984; S-M & Paladin 1981; S-M & Professor X 1982; SM & Quasar 1982; S-M & Sandman 1984; S-M & Scarlet Witch 1976,

Doc Ock Makes A House Call Just for kicks, we’ll end this in-depth interview and chock-full checklist with an Andru & Esposito-drawn page from The Amazing Spider-Man #156 (May 1976), as scripted by Len Wein. No Spider-Man… not even the SpiderMobile… just adorable Aunt May and her sometime paramour, Dr. Octopus.

Ain’t love grand? [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

1983; S-M & She-Hulk 1981; S-M and Shroud 1980; S-M & Sons of the Tiger 1975; S-M & Starfox 1984; S-M & Thing 1973; S-M & Thor 1982, 1984; S-M & Tigra 1983; S-M & Valkyrie 1982; S-M & The Vision 1972, 1976, 1983; S-M & The Watcher 1983; S-M & Wolverine 1982; S-M & Wonder Man 1983; S-M & X-Men 1976, 1985; S-M, Moon Knight, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, & Daredevil 1981; Spider-Woman 1979-80; Spitfire 1987; Strange Tales of the Unusual 1956; Sub-Mariner 1969-72, 1980; Tales of the Zombie 1974; Thing & Captain Marvel 1978; Thing & Dr. Strange 1974; Thing & Ghost Rider 1975; Thing & Human Torch 1965; Thing & Spider-Man 1976; Thing & Valkyrie 1975; Thing, Avengers, Hulk, Doc Samson, Fantastic Four, Thor, Alpha Flight, & X-Men 1982; Thor 1974; Tower of Shadows 1970; The Transformers 1985; Two-Gun Kid 1966; Two-Gun Western 1956; U.S. 1 1983; Uncanny Tales 1956; Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction 1975; War Comics 1955-56; Western Gunfighters 1956; Western Outlaws 1955-57; Westerns (p) 1949 – no specifics; What If Avengers 1982; What If Captain America 1981, 1983; What If Hulk 1980; What If Sharon Carter 1983; What If Spider-Man 1980; What If Spider-Woman 1979; What If Wolverine 1982; What If Yellowjacket 1982; Wild Western 1955-56; Worlds Unknown 1973; X-Men 1969, 1987 MikeRoss Comics: crime 1954; Get Lost 1954; 3-D Love 1954; 3-D Romance 1954 Skywald Publishing Company: The Bravados 1971; Butch Cassidy 1971; The Butterfly 1971; covers 1971; Hell-Rider 1971; The Wild Bunch 1971 Stanmore/Timor & related: covers 1951052 Star Publications: Western (p) 1954 Toby/Minoan: one story about chess characters (a) c. 1952 Tower Comics: Menthor 1965 Ziff-Davis: Famous Stars 1951; G.I. Joe 1951; romance 1951; sciencefantasy 1951; Western 1951; Wild Boy 1951

37

“It Wasn’t My Turn To Do Another Showcase” But That Didn’t Stop ROBERT KANIGHER From Dreaming Up The Metal Men!

by Lynn Woolley (with documents by RK)

I

ntroduction: The Fantastic Four, flagship of what would soon be Marvel Comics, was less than half a year old when DC writer/editor Robert Kanigher (1915-2002) conceived “The Metal Men” for Showcase #37 (March-April 1962). Naturally, if anyone had ever dared suggest in his presence that his new series was a response to (let alone a “copy” of) the F.F., that might have led to the first anecdote of a comic book editor throwing somebody else out a window! In 1977, Lynn Wooley, the author of several books on comics, sent a letter to “RK,” as he liked to sign himself, positing several questions about the offbeat series. Lynn’s precise questions do not survive, but Kanigher’s answers do, on DC stationery—and Lynn’s queries can easily be deduced.

Thus, we’ve chosen to lead off Lynn’s article, written some years back for an issue of Amazing World of DC Comics but never published till now, but never published till now, with a reproduction of the editor’s actual 2-page note. Oh, and of course, by A/E’s definition, RK was actually the co-creator of The Metal Men, along with artists Ross Andru & Mike Esposito, but why quibble?

—Roy.

Robert Kanigher—photo printed in The Comics Journal #86 (Nov. 1983). Thanks to Gary Groth.

Heavy Metal (Top left:) The splash page of Showcase #37 (March-April 1962)— the debut of the “Metal Men” feature, credits and all—as seen in the Australian black-&-white reprint comic Giant Flash Album #10, which also contained most of The Flash #214. Thanks to Eric Schumacher— who’s not even Australian! [©2005 DC Comics.]

(Left & above:) This two-page letter from Kanigher to Lynn Woolley, on the stationery of the company then known (and trading on the New York Stock Market) as National Periodical Publications, speaks for itself.

38

How Robert Kanigher Dreamed Up The Metal Men

Mr. Kanigher Shows His Metal

size of a planet, or a spectacular dogfight in outer space. It just can’t be done.”

Somewhere—in between the original Robotman and the team of SeeThreepio and Artoo-Detoo—there was a band of “droids” with quite a following of its own. No, not a multi-million-dollar screen extravaganza like Star Wars, but in fact a comic book.

Another man suggests: “Mr. Producer, why don’t we just put our heads together, and do a Metal Men comic book?”

That’s right. A comic book.

Suppose editor/writer Bob Kanigher is instead producer/director of a major motion picture house in 1962. And, just for kicks, suppose his new project, Metal Men, is to be a feature-length thriller for the big screen. Suppose producer Kanigher has called a meeting with his special effects crew to discuss the optical illusions he wants created for the epic.

Now, with the scene set, we turn the clock back to 1962, and listen in….

“I guess you’re all wondering why I called you here,” says Kanigher as he clutches his chin and paces back and forth across the floor. “I just want to let you know that I’ve got a plot outline here for Metal Men, and I want to introduce you to the main characters.”

The crew of effects men look at each other and nod. The producer continues: “This is a science-fiction flick—so we’ll need a scientist. We’ll call him Doc Magnus.”

“Sounds reasonable,” someone puts forth.

“And from there, it’s all downhill. We’ll need five male robots, and a girl robot, each representing a different metal.”

At this point, we hear a faint murmur from the assembly.

The idea is acclaimed by all, and it comes to pass later that year. And Producer Kanigher never even got to the part in the movie where the villain comes in—a 50-story walking test tube with arms and legs that gurgles as it moves about its errands of menace.

Enough supposin’. In reality, the Metal Men concept was destined from the very first to be a comic book—and a darn entertaining one at that.

Panel one of the very first adventure summed up the origin in one sentence: “Forged in the fiery foundries of science and rising like gleaming ghosts out of boiling steam, is the most fantastic band of heroes the world has ever known—the Metal Men.” If the truth be known, the story didn’t spend much more verbiage than that on the group’s beginnings. The adventure began, as a matter of fact, with the origin of the first menace the group was to fight.

“Irwin [Donenfeld] Said, ‘Go Ahead’” “The Flaming Doom” was the title of that first story, which starts off with a giant manta-like creature being frozen in ice back in prehistoric days. (Prehistoric, that is, for everything, except comics.) The creature predictably thaws out in the ’60s and sets about using its flaming nostrils to turn the Chrysler Building into a giant torch.

And you thought you had sinus problems.

“Hold it down,” continues producer Kanigher. “The leader of the android band will be a golden robot who can stretch into a wire fifty miles long. That should look great on the screen.”

Later, at a national defense emergency nesting, Colonel Henry Jasper proclaims that the answer to the problem is to call the man who “makes science fiction ideas practical.”

A hush falls over the crowd. Kanigher is undaunted.

Jasper immediately makes tracks to what is called “the huge laboratory complex of the inventive genius whose millions from countless patents have been turned back into continuous inventing….”

“Now, our lead and iron robots are strongmen. Heh heh. They can change shape at will. Right off the bat, we’ll have Iron change into a giant crane, and we won’t use animation, either.”

Guess what Col. Casper found?

One of the effects men faints and is carried out on a stretcher.

He found Dr. Will Magnus dancing with a woman-shaped platinum robot. That’s right, trivia buffs—the first Metal Man was indeed a metal lady. It takes the Colonel a while to realize that Tina is an android (due to her faulty responsometer), but before long, it’s down to business as the military man explains the problem of the radioactive flame creature.

“Our Platinum lady robot can form instant coils to travel from place to place [chuckles], our Tin robot can form himself into a shield, and here’s the best effect of all…”

Two more men lose control, and are escorted away.

Magnus stares at a photo of the menace, noting that it should be combated chemically, then he ponders, “Hmmm—I’ve long toyed with an idea.”

“…our hot-under-the-collar robot, Mercury, shrinks when the temperature falls, and expands when it rises. And he can be splattered into thousands of slippery little globules, and then re-assemble. Well, guys, can we do it? Huh?” One of the few remaining effects men rises to his feet, and with a lump in his throat offers: “Gosh, boss, it sounds impossible. We might as well try to film a space station the

They do… and he does. But we’ll tell the story in a bit more detail.

One For All & All For One! On this skillfully-designed Andru & Esposito cover for Showcase #37, all six of the Metal Men get a chance to strut their stuff—except, of course, poor hapless Tin. [©2005 DC Comics.]

That “idea” is, of course, the Metal Men, and in the space of one panel, Dr. Magnus pours the molds that eventually bring forth the new band of do-gooders.

One additional panel is used to introduce the Metal Men to the readers, and to each

“It Wasn’t My Turn To Do Another Showcase” other, then it’s down to the business of seeking out the flaming monster, and subduing it.

(Oh, you might be interested to know that Doc Magnus never intended Tina [Platinum] as a member of the Metal Men. He was about to donate her to a science museum, until she convinced him otherwise.)

The Metal Men battled the creature to a standstill before finally winning out— and being destroyed themselves in the process! But what the heck—that’s the big advantage of being robots. The Doc simply put them back together again. It was a process that would be repeated many times.

The group’s origin was handled again in Metal Men #27. Editor Bob Kanigher did darn near everything on the strip except the artwork; he edited, plotted, wrote the stories, and put together the letters pages. His major objective in the strip (besides entertainment) seemed to be characterization. The ironic thing about that is the fact that it worked so well with robots.

39 robots. But her reply was cold: “What kind of robots are you?

Speaking of emotions as if you were real people. Robots have no emotions. Only built-in memory responses.”

As you might suspect, the Tinaimposter didn’t last long. Doc and company headed all the way to the moon to find the remains of the authentic Platinum. They did, and then Doc managed to accomplish what all the King’s horses and all the King’s men could never do for Humpty Dumpty.

But was she the same? You bet. Just witness her first comment after being reassembled: “Why, Doc—you really care about me. I can see it in your eyes, darling.”

Yessir, that Metal Man was a real lady.

Tina wasn’t the only precious metal in the bunch. Bob Kanigher chose Gold, the royal metal, as the leader of the Metal band. Gold was a fast thinker, as Iron once commented: “I wish Doc had installed as good a responsometer in me—as he did in you.”

A Fistful of Doc It may have been the uniqueness of the A cliffhanger ending to the first chapter of the “Metal Men” tale Metal Men’s personalities that originally Gold had a heart to match his in Showcase #39 (July-Aug. 1962). Don’t worry—Doc Magnus got sold the idea to the powers-that-be at namesake: he always seemed to care away!

By Kanigher, Andru, & Esposito—with thanks to Bob Bailey DC. As Kanigher explains it, “It wasn’t about his fellow team members, as he for the scan from the original art. [©2005 DC Comics.] my turn to do another Showcase. But the begged the Doc not to leave a disobeother editors hadn’t come up with an dient Tina behind in issue #7. idea. Irwin Donenfeld asked me if I had any. I immediately said, ‘Metal men with human characteristics.’ Irwin said, ‘Go ahead.’ That was In the absence of the Doc, it was Gold who gave the orders—much to Friday. Saturday morning, I took my daughter Jan to her ballet class. I Mercury’s dismay. But Gold could usually soothe the temperamental sat in my convertible and gave myself a crash course in a subject of metal somewhat, as in Showcase #39: “Somebody has to give orders in which I knew nothing, Chemistry, and started writing. Monday an emergency, Mercury.” morning, I came in with the finished script.’

But Gold was as good as gold, and with the possible exception of Mercury, everyone admired him greatly. He also provided somewhat of a father figure for Tin, who was always trying to impress him.

“What Kind Of Robots Are You?”

Kanigher wrote and edited all issues of Metal Men (including of course their initial four stories in Showcase) until he took a leave of absence from DC some years later. But in the meantime, he took those concepts of personalities, and perfected them, at a time when most comic book characters were lacking in characterization. Not so the Metal Men. Tina—Platinum—can best be described by the title of a Bob Dylan song: “Just like a Woman.” Her responsometer, the little gizmo that made her tick, worked too well. That was the explanation in the comic book, but as Bob Kanigher remembers: “Tina, being female, would inevitably be unpredictable, and would fall in love with Doc Magnus.

Remember, I created the entire DC romance line.”

And being female, Tina disliked being referred to as “it” by the military brass in that first issue. Sometime, she even managed to convince the Doc. (“I do have control over my robots, but you know women,” he said of Tina in Showcase #37.)

There was a time when Tina was all robot, though it was short-lived.

It happened in issue #3. The Metal Woman had been destroyed in the previous issue, and rather than repair her, the Doc decided to build a new Tina. When Platinum II arose from the “operating table,” complete with a working responsometer, she was warmly greeted by the other

As you’ve probably gathered by now, the hot-under-the-collar Mercury was another team member with distinct human tendencies. He provided a springboard for some of the first feuds among partners in comics history. The thing he hated most was all the attention given to the beautiful Platinum. When Tin referred to Tina as a precious metal in Metal Men #1, Mercury spouted back, “What’s precious about her? I’m liquid at room temperature.”

Four panels later, when Lead tried to protect him from the rays of the sun, he protested vigorously: “I didn’t ask for protection, Lead.”

When Mercury got mad—which was often—his body would shoot all the way to the ceiling. Two panels after that incident with Lead, Doc Magnus smiled, and explained how his robots could respond to every situation science could think of. Bob Kanigher was probably smiling, too.

Lead, the heavy metal, was never heavy on the brainpower side, but he did make a nifty all-occasion umbrella. He was a jolly sort, always ready to lead a helping hand, and always shielding the others from everything from sunshine to deadly radiation. Once, he transformed himself into a giant curtain to shade Doc and Tina as they sailed down a river on a boat made of Gold.

40

How Robert Kanigher Dreamed Up The Metal Men

The density of Lead—and we mean his body, not his brain—paid off in many a dangerous situation. He was a guy Superman would have liked to have known on many an occasion.

Every group must have a strongman, and in the Metal Men, who could it be but Iron?

When Lead would form himself into a giant shield or hammer, someone had to be muscular enough to lift him and use him as a weapon. Iron filled the bill perfectly.

Last, and quite possibly least, is Tin, the humble metal. But get ready for a surprise. When asked whom the readers preferred, Bob Fourth Time’s The Charm!

Kanigher points to the The cover and splash of Showcase #40 (Sept.-Oct. 1962)—the finale of the uncharacteristic four-issue tryout in smallest Metal Man. Showcase #37-40 before the Metal Men got their own mag. Art by Ross Andru & Mike Esposito; script & editing “I believe Tin was the

by Robert Kanigher. With thanks to Carl Gafford. [©2005 DC Comics.] most popular. As the teenager over at the other comics company was just then being bitten by lowliest of the MM, I gave him an inferiority complex, which I that radioactive spider. manifested by his stammering. This endeared him to the fans.”

While Tin had no trouble impressing the editors, the readers, and even the other Metal Men, he had a heck of a time impressing himself.

He was always having an identity problem (“I’ll do my best to be worthy, if you’ll all give me a chance.”), but Gold or the Doc always found a task for him. Tin may not always have succeeded at that task, but you can bet he gave it everything he had, often providing some comedy relief in the process.

Tin’s one big starring role came in Metal Men #4 when he was transformed into a giant, and briefly lost his shy personality.

Doc Magnus, of course, had a distinct personality as the leader and creator of the Metal Men. Even though they were robots, he grew to love them as though they were human. One had to wonder if he didn’t really enjoy all that attention from Tina, even though he kept threatening to send her to a science museum.

“Andru/Esposito Brilliantly Carried Out My Wildest Ideas” The Metal Men’s individual personalities were derived, of course, from their metals, and so were their powers. Kanigher comments, “Before I started each script, I gave myself an instant refresher course to guarantee that each Metal Man acted within his chemical boundaries.

Whatever he did was stretched to the nth degree . . . but never violated it.”

All this attention to characterization may seem the norm nowadays, but you must remember that Kanigher was pioneering. Why, that

It was a unique and different project, but it wasn’t a cinch. Kanigher explains that’s why he killed the group off in the first issue: “They were so difficult to do—I didn’t want to do a repeat performance.” But in retrospect, he concedes, “I was wrong.”

Speaking of something not being a cinch, it became Kanigher’s task to select an artist to transfer his images to bristol board. It would require an artist who could cope with the unpredictable situations the characters would face. It would take an artist who could give a human look to a character, yet portray the non-human aspects of a robot. In short, it would require an artist with versatility.

In the final analysis, it was a team of artists who transcribed the Metal Men onto the comic book page. Ross Andru and Mike Esposito were perfectly suited for the job, though they both maintained it wasn’t easy. Andru, the penciler, said it was difficult working with so many characters in a single strip. But he and his partner pulled it off beautifully.

The selection was made by Kanigher personally: “I selected Andru/Esposito to illustrate Metal Men, as I assigned Joe Kubert to do the art for my Viking Prince, Sgt. Rock, and Enemy Ace; Irv Novick for my Silent Knight, Johnny Cloud, and Captain Storm; Russ Heath for my Haunted Tank and Sea Devils; and Jerry Grandenetti for my Gunner and Sarge—because each in his own way was uniquely suited by skill and temperament to project my visions onto another dimension.”

Kanigher wasn’t about to hand the script over and forget about it. He did the panel breakdowns himself, working with Ross Andru: “On Monday morning (after the script had been written), I went over the breakdowns with Andru, striving for a different approach. I had a cover

“It Wasn’t My Turn To Do Another Showcase” in mind. Ten days later the book was finished, cover to cover, from the initial Friday.”

combo seemed natural enough: the Metal Men and Metamorpho, the Element Man. The next several team-ups put the Metal Men in touch with The Batman. The unlikely pairings with the Gotham City Goliath took place in issues #74, 103, 113, and 121. In that first meeting with Batman, our heroes bump into each other at (of all places) a robot convention being held in Gotham City, put on by a squatty, bearded character by the name Dr. Daedalus (and his amazing robot, Icarus). Naturally, the good Doctor and his suspicious-looking robot turn out to be the villains.

After all that loving care and attention to detail, you might wonder if Kanigher was satisfied with the rendering of the strip by Ross and Mike. He doesn’t hesitate to answer that question: “Yes. Andru-Esposito brilliantly carried out my wildest ideas. Fans have still to recognize the uniqueness of their work, in what is probably the most taxing of comic characters.”

Both artists have commented that they enjoyed working on “Metal Men,” and they were the only ones to tackle the strip in the early years. Later on, the artistic reins would finally pass to others— people like Walt Simonson. Even so, the Andru/Esposito Metal Men provided the model for all “Metal Men” stories of the future.

Adventures And Adversaries

41

Probably the most notable of all the Metal Men’s adversaries was the ever-gurgling Chemo, whom we’ve already alluded to as a giant walking test tube. Chemo first appeared on the scene in Showcase #39 in a story called “The Deathless Doom.” He didn’t make the cover, but boy did he make waves in the story.

Andru & Esposito’s cover for Metal Men #1

The chemical menace was the unwitting (April-May 1963). [©2005 DC Comics.]

A brief history of appearances by the Metal creation of one Professor Ramsey Norton.

Men is in order at this point. The group’s debut Norton had built a secret lab to work on experiments designed to find was in Showcase #37 (March-April 1962). More adventures followed in quick cures for disease, famine, and ring-around-the-collar, but unfortuissues #38 and #39, with the Doctor informing the group at the nately, he wasn’t having much luck. The Environmental Protection conclusion of #39 that the preceding tale would be the last, unless the Agency was obviously breathing down his neck, because instead of readers responded. In the final panel of that issue, the robot band ask in dumping all his chemical failures into the most convenient river, he unison: “Well?” One other story followed in Showcase #40 before the poured them into a large glass container shaped like a person. “Chemo,” super-team won its own magazine. he called the large basin jar, which was to be a reminder of his failures.

But Chemo did substantially more than remind—he dang near broke the Metal Men #1 hit the stands with an April-May 1963 cover date, and Professor’s neck. It happened just as the scientist had filled the container continued through issue #41 (Dec. 1969-Jan. 1970). The book was to the top, and was about to discard him. Suddenly, Chemo began to revived with #42 (Feb.-March 1973), with that run lasting through issue grow. #44 (July-Aug. 1973). Issues #42 through #44, published in 1973, were reprints. The book was again continued as of April-May, 1976, with No sooner did the menace achieve giant size than he spewed fiery issue #45. chemicals at the prof, causing him to grow. The Professor died soon after, leaving Chemo in the hands of Doc Magnus and his metal crew.

The Metal Men’s most notable guest appearances have been in teamEven though Chemo didn’t show much intelligence, it took the rest of ups in The Brave and the Bold. Their first outing there was in issue the issue to immobilize him. #55, sharing top billing with the Mighty Mite, The Atom. The next B&B The robots were treated to Chemo-therapy once again in issue #14, only this time, the gurgling goliath was cover-featured. The group happened upon Chemo again in #25, and as one of them commented, “It doesn’t seem possible to knock him out for good—once and for all.”

But isn’t it that way with all good comic book villains, chemo-sabe?

Metal-ing With Success (Left:) The Metal Men vs. the equally inhuman Chemo, in Showcase #39. (Right:) The final panels from Showcase #40.

Next stop: Metal Men #1! With thanks to Carl Gafford. [©2005 DC Comics.]

Not surprisingly, a good number of the other Metal Men villains were robots themselves. Our heroes were pitted against “Missile Men,” a “skyscraper robot,” a “centaur robot,” a “cannibal robot,” and— well, you get the idea.

42

How Robert Kanigher Dreamed Up The Metal Men That brings us to the part of the article reserved for supporting characters.

There’s just one problem: in a book with seven lead characters, there’s not much need (or room) for a supporting cast.

But finally, in issue #13, a real live (well, not really live) supporting character came along.

It happened because Tin couldn’t find anything to do. He sees Mercury busily admiring himself in a mirror, Tina oozing after Doc, Gold giving a chemistry lesson to Lead, and Iron doing strongman exercises. So what would you do in such a predicament?

That’s right. You’d go to a toy store and buy a do-it-yourself robot kit, and make a companion for yourself. That’s just what Tin did. He charged the kit to Doc’s account (at a toy store?), borrowed a spare responsometer, and came up with—ta da—another tin robot. The new female metal-person was even more humble than Tin, but soon fit into the team as a regular cast-member.

That same issue launched a massive reader campaign to select a name for the new Tin-Lizzie. Over the next several issues, she was called simply “nameless.” (Does anyone remember if she ever got a name?)

Artists and Modules Ross and Mike weren’t the only artists to draw the “Metal Men” series.

(Above:) The six mighty metalloids prepare to receive human identities from a “Mr. Conan” in a page penciled by Mike Sekowsky for Metal Men #37 (April-May 1969). Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Gene Reed. (Well, actually, Mike did ink this story.)

(Top right:) In the Sept. 1966 Brave and Bold, Doc Magnus’ elemental everymen teamed up with the Silver Age Atom. Cover art by Ramona Fradon & Charles Paris. [Both pages ©2005 DC Comics.]

The robot-menace theme continued in issue #6, but oh, what a difference. In that epic issue, Magnus was transformed into a robot himself due to an accident in outer space—an accident that turned him against the Metal Men. After being locked up in his lab by Gold, the Magnus-turned-robot-fighter constructed a new gang of robots, representing not metals, but gasses.

They were labeled The Gas Gang: Oxygen, Helium, Chloroform, Carbon Monoxide, and Carbon Dioxide. What a fight to the finish before the Metal Men finally won the battle and restored Doc Magnus to humanity! The Gas Gang (from the nickname of the 1930s Cardinals baseball team, “The Gashouse Gang”) proved popular enough for a return engagement issue #10.

Other than robot menaces and dependable old Chemo, the theme most prevalent in those early issues was problems within the ranks. Who could forget the cover of issue #4, with the Metal Men in the shape of a gun—each hero forming a different part of the firearm—pointed at Doc Magnus?

Metal Men was a comic that strained one’s “willing suspension of disbelief” almost to the breaking point, but in the midst of all that fancy was quite a bit of fact. For instance, the Metals were always spouting off about unique properties, their melting points, their atomic numbers, and so on. And if that wasn’t enough, most issues contained a page or two of text information on metals, with some issues even sporting a two-page spread done in comics form called “Metals: Fact and Fancy.”

As one reader put it in an early letter column: “What a painless way to study chemistry.”

43

Who Created Sgt. Rock?

ROBERT KANIGHER, BOB HANEY, JOE KUBERT, & ROBIN SNYDER All Give Their Own Answers To That Question

S

gt. Rock of Easy Company is (pun intended) easily the most successful war-comics hero of all time, beating out Marvel’s Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos and Combat Kelly and even the original G.I. Joe from Ziff-Davis. Over his long career, which hasn’t totally ended even yet, Rock has spouted words and bullets devised by several writers (particularly Robert Kanigher and Bob Haney) and artists (most notably Joe Kubert and Russ Heath, but also several others). The series lives on, with no less than three hardcover DC Archives volumes to date—as many as there are of the 1960s Flash, the veritable harbinger of the Silver Age! But who created this crag-faced classic character? In the early 1990s, onetime pro writer and editor Robin Snyder asked that question in the very first issue of his monthly oral-history magazine History of Comics (now renamed The Comics!)… thereby willingly poking his finger into a veritable hornet’s nest. With Robin’s blessing, and with minimal editing, what follows is the initial posing of the query… and the impassioned answers from Those Who Were There.

All comments are ©2005 by those who originally made them. The first three entries are all from the same first issue of History of Comics; other comments are identified where they appear. —Roy.

Like A Rock Sgt Rock barks a command in a powerful full-page drawing

by Joe Kubert—which was almost certainly scripted by Robert Kanigher. But holding off the German Army was a breeze, compared to trying to get a consensus on “Who Created Rock?” Repro’d from a black-&-white Australian comic, with thanks to Shane Foley. [©2005 DC Comics.]

(from History of Comics, Vol. 1, #1 – Jan. 1990)

Who Created Rock?

by Robin Snyder A simple enough question. But what’s the answer?

Comics historian Will Murray, in “Pieces of Rock” [Comics Scene, Dec. 1989], says: “Rock… was created by writer Robert Kanigher and artists Ross Andru and Mike Esposito for Our Army at War in 1959.”

[What does he mean by “created”? Is he implying all three men originated the idea, each contributing onethird of the whole? Including Esposito, who, one could assume, simply inked Andru’s pencil drawings? Which issue is he referring to?]

Mike Gold, in “The Rock of Easy” [Sgt. Rock Special #5, Sept. 1989], says the first story was “The Rock of Easy Company” [Our Army at War #81, April 1959] and that it was not written by Kanigher.

Rockin’ Robin (Left:) Robin Snyder’s monthly “oral history of the past, present, and future of The Comics” has gone by a couple of names since its 1990 debut as History of Comics—but it’s always been worth any real comics fan’s dime. (Well, actually, he has to charge a bit more than that for it—see ad on p. 53—but it’s still a bargain!) The mag’s logo drawing is by the great Creig Flessel, who was interviewed in Alter Ego #45. [Art ©2005 Creig Flessel.]

(Above:) “The Rock of Easy Co.!” in Our Army at War #81 (April 1959) was written by Bob Haney—and drawn by a couple of artists whose names you may have run across earlier this issue: Ross Andru & Mike Esposito. The editor, of course, was Bob Kanigher. This became the second story printed in DC’s deluxe hardcover Sgt. Rock Archives, Vol. 1—preceded only by “The Rock,” of which more in a moment. [©2005 DC Comics.]

44

Robert Kanigher, Bob Haney, Joe Kubert, & Robin Snyder Whatever I did in the drawing was my attempt to graphically dramatize that which was written. The graphic effects are mine—the initial creation is his.

Upon This Rock…

(Above:) A confab of comic artists at the 1989 AcmeCon in Greensboro, North Carolina. (L. to r.:) Jim Amash (wonder whatever happened to that guy)… Joe Kubert (’nuff said!)… Charles Paris (inker of many a classic Dick Sprang “Batman” tale, among his other accomplishments)… and another war comics artist/writer/editor of some note, name of Harvey Kurtzman. The fella with the visible belt buckle standing behind them is artist Tim Truman. Photo by Ed Fields.

(Right:) Thumbnail sketch of the first page of a Kubert-drawn “Sgt. Rock” story from the March 1976 issue; by then the name of Our Army at War had been changed to Sgt. Rock. All 11 pages of thumbnails for this tale were recently auctioned off by Heritage Comics (<HeritageComics.com>). With thanks to Dan Mangus & Eric Schumacher. [©2005 DC Comics.]

But, “Clearly, Bob [Kanigher] created Rock,” and “the only thing that makes… [it] the first Sgt. Rock story is that it was the first time the character was called Sgt. Rock.”

Then he quotes Bob Haney: “Oh, yeah. I remember that one. I wrote it.”

Gold concludes: “So here we are faced with an unusual situation, wherein the writer of the first story isn’t really the creator of the series— nobody challenges Kanigher’s claim, and Haney freely volunteers he was writing to his editor’s exact specs. But, as a matter of historical fact, Bob Haney was the man who wrote the first bona fide Sgt. Rock story.”

[Only Gold can say what his attentions were when he wrote this piece. If no one is challenging Kanigher’s statement of creating Rock, why does Gold mention it? If “The Rock of Easy” was the first story, if it was the first time the character was called Sgt. Rock, if Haney wrote that story—wouldn’t that make Haney the creator? By Gold’s logic?]

So who created Rock? To find the answer I made Xeroxes of key stories in my files and sent them to the men who were there in the beginning. To Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert. Asking them that question.

In re: Rock

by Joe Kubert If you hadn’t included Xeroxes of those early stories, I’d never have remembered that I did ’em. In terms of determining who did wot n when—I’m the last one in the world who’d have those answers.

But… As far as I’m concerned, RK is the creator and originator of the Sgt. Rock character. All I did was illustrate his incredibly graphic prose. And if you’ve ever seen any scripts from writers who’d written for RK, editor, you’d know that he had more than just a light scanning effect on any of those he accepted. He was the editor—so—he edited.

409966

by Robert Kanigher Your questions can only be answered by people whose whole lives are comics, who keep records, receipts, cassettes, and ledgers in some subterranean vault electronically guarded against moisture and thieves feverishly bent on destroying their deathless work. Since I’ve never kept records or copies of my work, except for the few where I could have immediate access to research material, you’ll have to rely on my memory.

As you surely must know, I was occupied with writing poetry, plays, short stories, movie treatments and scripts, radio plays, novellas, and that big book on writing, travelling, sketching obliging nudes, doing oils and water colors, skiing, fencing, making love daily, being a supporting father to my parents for 25-28 years, from chewing gum to coffins, being a husband since 1942 and a father, twice. This is for public knowledge.

The agony and ecstasy and violence and ESP I’ve experienced is my own business.

Anyway, I’m a writer and editor. I re-wrote most of Haney’s scripts. I don’t understand the logic of his conversations with Gold. Haney said he wrote “The Rock of Easy,” which Gold said was the first Rock. Then Gold said I created Rock. The two are irreconcilable. Why this hallucination now, decades afterward, when I have been given credit in so many publications, including the first movie script, for so many years?

The chances are that I re-wrote Haney’s story from start to finish and even titled it. In Gold’s mind that becomes the first Rock tale.

It’s all so much bull****.

One glance at the Xeroxes of earlier stories you sent me tells another story. Here it is.

Unlike all my other characters which sprang fullblown, as from Zeus, Rock came to full term in his own good time, without my consciously being aware of his kicking to emerge.

In the beginning he was “The Rock,” an ex-sports star, the man they couldn’t budge. He carried that “reputation with him into combat” (“Combat Anchor Man,” All-American Men of War 28, December, 1955).

In “Fireworks Hill,” G.I. Combat 45, February, 1957, he was an exsports reporter who stood like a rock against the human wave of NK vets.

He was just a nameless marine on a cover, wounded, choosing to remain behind, TG in his hands, his back against a tree, to cover his buddies’ retreat, to his own death. (All-American Men of War 49,

Who Created Sgt. Rock?

45

Between A Rock And A Hard Place (Left:) Robert Kanigher worked with many of the best war artists in the business.

On this cover drawn for The Comics Journal #85 (Oct. 1983), which featured the first half of a major interview with RK, Joe Kubert put several of those artists in uniform behind the pipe-smoking writer/editor: John Severin, Irv Novick, Joe himself, Ross Andru, Jerry Grandenetti, and Russ Heath… while Sgt. Rock relaxed amid the superheroes below. [Art ©\2005 Joe Kubert; characters TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

(Center:) Kanigher provided The Comics Journal with this photo of himself at Fort Dix, New Jersey, during World War II. With thanks to Gary Groth and Robin Snyder.

(Right:) Kubert’s splash page for “The Rock!” in G.I. Combat #68 (Jan. 1959). This story vies with “The Rock of Easy Co.!” for the honor of being the first “Sgt. Rock” tale, though it isn’t clear in the former if “Rock” is the soldier’s name or only a descriptive nickname—and he isn’t a sergeant. Hey—maybe we should count it as an origin story! Script by Robert Kanigher. Repro’d from an Australian b&w reprint, with thanks to Shane Foley. [©2005 DC Comics.]

September, 1957, drawn by Grandenetti.)

He was a marine drill instructor in “The DI—and the Sand Fleas” (G.I. Combat 56, January, 1958) who inspired the boots he trained, even though he never reached the front, except in the minds of his trainees.

Next, he was an ex-heavyweight contender who listened to his manager when he was knocked down, to take the count of nine; he got up too late, lost, and vowed he would never stay down again. When he was dazed by an exploding shell, he thought an enemy tank was the Champ and that he was back in the ring. He fought the tank to the death (“The Rock,” G.I. Combat 68, January, 1959).

Since Kubert drew these stories, the visual similarity to Rock is obvious.

Then came “The Rock of Easy.”

But the first, authentic Rock was “The Rock and the Wall,” again drawn by Joe, in Our Army at War 83, June, 1959. Which shows a Rock which could easily be published, and recognizable, today.

I created and wrote and edited Rock from the beginning. Alone.

Without assistants or co-editors.

I find this obsession with credit for the uncreditable disgusting and another reason why the assembly line work in comics cannot ever be taken seriously despite the recent deceptive PR. You’re obsessed, too, but it’s for a worthy cause: the truth. Good luck and the best. Just remember I’m doing this the classic way, on a battered typewriter, not a word processor. I just received a very touching letter from someone and

I’m thinking of giving up the typewriter for the goosequill pen. Bach is playing in the background. Now to return to my other world of magic, mayhem, mystery, and madness… painting.

Who Created Kanigher?

by Bob Haney (from History of Comics, Vol. 1, #4 – April 1990) I applaud Robin Snyder’s History of Comics and hope it will truly serve its stated purpose—the real, straight, honest, and thorough who, when, what, where, and why of the panel-ed world.

That in mind, I must take exception to R. Kanigher’s “memory” of the Sgt. Rock genesis. [All that embarrassing, adolescent self-serving stuff I won’t even comment upon.] Kanigher’s main point was: “I rewrote most of Haney’s scripts”… and “chances are I rewrote Haney’s [first Rock] story and even titled it.” (Italics mine.) Like much of what Kanigher says in fanzines, it’s another bikini—what it reveals is provocative, but what it conceals is crucial.

To understand the Rock genesis, let me explain what writing for Kanigher was like. I’d come up with a hook or story line, as I did for the first Rock strip, he’d make some minor input, I’d write it, Kanigher would edit it. That editing was, in the main, a travesty. In about the time of the average Mike Tyson fight, he’d slash out every panel and rewrite them pretty much as already written. Even after I learned to simply mimic his own slapdash impressionistic style, this “slash and burn” editing continued. Reason: Kanigher was in intense competition professionally, personally, psychologically, with any writer.

I soon learned not to object to his kind of “editing”—when dealing

46

Robert Kanigher, Bob Haney, Joe Kubert, & Robin Snyder kind of fakey emotion, they had. Also good art. Kanigher had a shrewd eye for good art and layout. And, of course, he was fortunate to have the great Joe Kubert as Rock’s main delineator for so long.

Rock On! (Above:) Bob Haney (on left) with his old friend and colleague Arnold Drake, posing for a pic at a 1990s comicon.

Though Haney says in this piece that Drake claimed “sole creation” of the Doom Patrol, Arnold was actually quite insistent in his interview in Alter Ego #17 (as well as elsewhere) that Bob came up with the concept of Negative Man and co-wrote the first “Doom Patrol” story with him. Photo courtesy of David Siegel.

(Right:) Haney got another crack at Sgt. Rock in Our Army at War #86 (Sept. 1969), the seventh outing reprinted in The Sgt. Rock Archives, Vol. 1… and again in “The Silent Piper!” in OOAW #90 (Jan. 1960). [©2005 DC Comics.]

with deficient egos there can be no teamwork or true collaboration. That only came later when I switched to writing for other DC editors for whom I did my best work by far, work of which one main distinction was tight plotting, little need for editing.

That first Rock story I recall didn’t get too much of the Kanigher kamikaze editing; it was tightly written, a big 8 pages. I was usually assigned meagre 4-to-6-pagers by the great god editor, who thought I was new to the medium. [To this day I doubt Kanigher is aware I’d spent seven years writing comics for several publishers, such titles as Black Cat, GI Joe, John Wayne, etc—and in many genres.] In a big 8pager, I could develop a story a bit, establish a basic character. So “chances are” I did write that first Rock pretty much as it appears today in reprint. As for the title, I recall having in mind how Stonewall Jackson got his sobriquet, came up with a title like “The Sgt. Who Stood Like A ‘Rock’”—which Kanigher probably did change.

So what I am saying here is that I wrote the first story containing the basic Rock identity. Nothing more or less. I am scrupulous in matters of attribution, since I’ve been too often unfairly mangled by the “bad memories” of others—i.e., Murray Boltinoff claiming he “created Metamorpho,” a property he had absolutely nothing to do with—or Arnold Drake claiming sole creation of the Doom Patrol, which was a joint and equal collaboration between him and myself.

So it was for accuracy and minor reprint rights, so recognized by DC itself, that I claimed, rightly, authorship of that first Rock script. As for Rock after that, it is all Kanigher. He evidently saw something in that 8pager that triggered the series and any title that runs that long, sells that much, must command respect. Personally, and this is only my own subjective taste, I never cared much for the series. Too many stories were simply stretched-out hooks—plotting and development are not Kanigher’s strong points. Most of the soirees telegraphed their payoffs from the start, the middles were usually padded. Atmosphere, action, a

Character in comics in those days was paper thin. I defy you to tell me Rock’s character, I mean his real identifiable human character. He was just another macho icon, with attitudes striking off the story “situation.”

Fine, for comics of that era. Even in my own use of an older, grizzled Rock in the long-running The Brave and the Bold series, his character was not too developed. The Easy Co. joes were all pretty much cute stereotypes inspired by war flicks. In fact, in the Kanigher ethos, whether Rock or other titles, late-show movie stuff was repeatedly recycled. But as I say it worked, it sold, and must command respect.

Kanigher calls this Rock genesis controversy “bull****.” I agree—to an extent. I in no way intended to take any credit that was not truly mine. I informed Mike Gold I had written that first story almost as a reflex of memory. Why? Very simple. An 8-page script that got superior art and not too much chainsaw editing was rather unusual—and, most significantly, how could I forget I had written a story that within a short time had sent the great editor off and running on a major long-lived series?? No way.

But bull**** or not, with the comics medium now reaching a ripe many-decades-old history, with so much being researched, written about it, and quarreled over, the only benchmark should be reasonable accuracy, fair and sensible analysis, and a cold-eyed view of human nature and egos.

The Rock

by Robin Snyder (from History of Comics, Vol. 1, #10 – Sept. 1990) “Unlike all my other characters which sprang full-blown, as from Zeus, Rock came to term in his own good time, without my consciously being aware of his kicking to emerge.” [Robert Kanigher, “409966,” History of Comics 1, Jan. 1990.]

In All-American Men of War #28 (Dec. 1957), the legend of “Combat Anchor Man” reads: “Ernie Clark was called ‘The Rock’—the man they couldn’t budge! That was the reputation he had in civilian life!

Then came the war, and ‘The Rock’ and his reputation went into combat!” Edited by RK, written by Ed Herron, and drawn by Joe Kubert, according to editorial records.

From “Fireworks Hill” in G.I. Combat #45 (Feb. 1957) by writer/editor RK and drawn by Kubert, according to editorial records: “The enemy swept up the hill like a human wave… and Vic sat there like

Who Created Sgt. Rock?

47 ground together… ‘Spread out!’”

a rock… nothing moving except his hands swiveling the Fifty… until the wave fell back….” And: “Then suddenly, the human wave that couldn’t be stopped—fell back before the human rock that wouldn’t move… that just stood there—frozen….”

“The Rock” (G.I. Combat #68, Jan. 1959) featured a character who was an ex-heavyweight contender who had been knocked down and out in the ring. Come the war and he promised himself he would never stay down again. Delirious in battle, he faced an enemy tank, thinking it was the champ. He stood. Like a rock.

Drawn by Kubert, written and edited

by RK [from his editorial records].

In “Combat Tag,” G.I. Combat #55 (Dec. 1957), written by Bill Finger, illustrated by John Severin, edited by RK [from his records]: “Sweeper— Rock—Trapper—they’ve all earned their fighting names by what they did!

Sweeping mines! Standing like a rock!

Trapping the enemy!”

“The Rock of Easy Co.” was written by Bob Haney, drawn by Ross Andru, inked by Mike Esposito and edited by RK [from evidence provided by RK and Haney].

Featured a character named Sgt. Rocky of “the fabulous fighting E Company,” a buck Sgt. E-5.

“The DI—and the Sand Fleas,” drawn by Kubert and written and edited by RK [from his editorial records], appeared in G.I. Combat #56 (Jan. 1958). “We ran right into the enemy artillery sights… but even above the sound of exploding shells— we still heard the DI shouting…

‘Spread out, you sand fleas!—or one shell’ll spread you all out!’” And, “We heard the DI’s voice just before the next shell slammed the sky and the

Then came “The Rock and the Wall” in Our Army at War #83 (June 1959). Written and edited by RK, drawn by Kubert. The first, authentic Sgt. Rock. According to Kanigher.

Just a joe doing his job. A weary Master Sgt. E-8. Unnamed. But

Rock Gets In Your Blood (Above:) One of the most justly-celebrated “Sgt. Rock” collaborations of Kanigher & Kubert was “What’s the Color of Your Blood?” in Our Army at War #160 (Nov. 1965). Jackie Johnson purposely loses this slugfest with the Nazi boxer to save the lives of Easy Company—and, at story’s end, when that same Nazi needs a blood transfusion, it’s Jackie who gives it…to the Nazi’s grudging admiration.

Jackie Johnson’s name was probably a combination that of Jackie Robinson (who in 1947 broke the “color barrier” to play Major League baseball) and especially Jack Johnson, black world heavyweight boxing champ in the early 20th century. The story itself contained echoes of the two legendary world championship matches between African-American Joe Louis and the German Max Schmeling. In 1936 Schmeling bested Louis, but lost to him two years later, thereby forfeiting his elevated status with Adolf Hitler as primo “Aryan superman.” But Schmeling was no Nazi, and even helped Louis out financially in the latter’s later years, when the Bronze Bomber was down on his luck. [©2005 DC Comics.]

Prehistoric Rocks (Far left:) “The Rock,” a.k.a. Ernie Clark, in “Combat Anchor Man” in All-American Men of War #28 (Dec. 1957)—perhaps the first use of the descriptive term “Rock” (actually “The Rock”) for a soldier in a DC war comic.

Script by Ed Herron; art by Joe Kubert.

(Above:) The term “rock” in a lower-case sense was used to describe a dogface in the Kanigher-scripted “Fireworks Hill” in G.I. Combat #45 (Feb. 1957). Art by Joe Kubert.

(Center:) “Rock” is definitely the name, or at least nickname, of a soldier in the Bob Kanigher/John Severin “Combat Tag” in G.I. Combat #55 (Dec. 1957).

[All art above ©2005 DC Comics.]

Thanks to Bob Cherry for all three of the above scams.

48

Robert Kanigher, Bob Haney, Joe Kubert, & Robin Snyder then there are few success stories in his field. Of those few, Robert Kanigher stands at the peak. His stories depict real people in real situations and he portrays the timeless themes.”

View From The Rock “The Rock” seen first as prize-fighter, then as soldier, in G.I. Combat #68 (Jan. 1959). Script by RK, art by Joe Kubert. Repro’d from that Australian b&w, courtesy of Shane Foley. [©2005 DC Comics.]

And: “His creations are legend, almost without number. A few of the most prominent: Rock, Flash, Metal Men, Enemy Ace, Mary Robin, Haunted Tank, Sea Devils, Viking Prince, Black Canary, War That Time Forgot, Lady Cop, OSS, Ragman, and Diablo. How many do you recognize? How many did we fail to mention?”

Plenty. Including: Johnny Cloud, The Ghost, The Falcon, Trigger Twins, Mercenaries, Wonder Tot, Snow Man, Fighting Devil Dog, April

nicknamed The Rock, a combat tag denoting his rock-like stature.

And it was this character who became the star of Our Army at War. Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the story Kanigher wrote for The Brave and the Bold a few years later, he was finally given a name.

“Sgt. Frank Rock.” In another story drawn by Kubert.

Occasionally, over the years, Kanigher still referred to this character by the nickname, The Rock, but at least by May 2, 1971, when The New York Times reproduced the cover to Our Army at War #233 (June 1971), on the cover of that publication, he had become Sgt. Frank Rock.

With no more looking back.

From The World Encyclopedia of Comics, edited by Maurice Horn, Chelsea House, New York, 1976, pages 419-420: “Kanigher, Robert….

His word production for the company is well into the millions. He has worked in every genre from love to super-hero to war to fantasy to adventure…. Among the many features he has been acclaimed for are Sgt. Rock and Easy Co., probably the pre-eminent war strip of all time….” And, page 608: “Sgt. Rock was the creation of writer-editor Robert Kanigher as the first recurring feature in National’s line of war comics.”

From America at War: The Best of DC War Comics, Michael Uslan, editor, Simon & Shuster, New York, 1979, featuring 10 of 19 stories by Kanigher: “Many of these early comics were written by Bob Kanigher, whose often psychological approach ripped into the emotions, fears, and madness of war and produced bold, affecting stories for a quickly growing readership... [page 9].”

And, page 67: “‘The Rock and the Wall.’ Created and written by Robert Kanigher. Drawn by Joe Kubert.”

1982. In the text piece “Kanigher,” in DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #21, May: “If a media only touches art when it touches reality

Rock Solid While Russ Heath didn’t start drawing the exploits of “Sgt. Rock” till a bit later, he’s definitely one of the Rockster’s greatest delineators, as per this splash repro’d from a black-&-white Australian reprint, courtesy of Shane Foley. [©2005 DC Comics.]

Who Created Sgt. Rock?

49

O’Day, Samson, Airline Stewardess, Mlle. Marie, Robot Dog, Knights of the Galaxy, Mouse Man, Honcho, Harlequin, TNT Trio, Star Sapphire, The Bouncer, Johnny Thunder and Black Lightnin’, Force 3, Kana, and… and….

Back to Rock. “Originally the creation of Mr. Robert Kanigher, the most astounding writer in the field.” (I’m quoting here from memory. Of Kubert, writing in “What Makes a Rock, Sgt. USA?” in an issue of Sgt. Rock, circa 1982.)

How real is Rock? From Charlie Company, Peter David, et. al. (William Morrow and Company, New York, 1983), page 48: “Omega Harris was worried about his men, too. It was why they called him Sergeant Rock, not just because he was good with an 81 mm mortar, but because he was concerned about getting them home alive.”

Who created Rock? “RK is the creator and originator of the Sgt. Rock character.” And, “I created and wrote and edited Rock from the beginning.” (Kubert and Kanigher, writing in History of Comics Vol.1, #1, 1990.)

Monthly! The Original First-Person History!

Rock Of Ages Fans of Golden Age and Silver Age super-heroes think of Joe Kubert as the artist of two high-quality versions of Hawkman, but perhaps his most important contribution to the comics field is his work on “Sgt. Rock.” This gorgeous cover from Our Army at War #222 (July 1970) is repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Mike Burkey. [©2005 DC Comics.]

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

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* (©1965 Peekskill Evening Star.)

John Stanley—photo courtesy of Jim Stanley.

*

52

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt

Stanley Comics Help Quell Furor

by Dorothy Krumeich The old furor over comic books has pretty much died, and chances are that comics such as those produced by John Stanley were a factor in the demise.

The Continental Village man, a pioneer in the comic field, has written the stories for Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and Porky Pig, and comics about other animated cartoon characters, such as Little Lulu and Woody Woodpecker, all of the wholesome, not horror, type.

Created “Thirteen” For the last few years, Mr. Stanley has not only written, but drawn (“the whole deal,” he says) a comic called Thirteen.

This is a 32-page comic, as are most, according to Mr. Stanley, who creates three or four a year. Each contains six separate picture stories of six pages each.

In the years when parents, teachers, and general do-gooders were giving their attention to the evils of comics, they were thought of as “just growing”—no one ever conceived of the books as “being born.”

But the creation of comics is not an assembly-line process, it can be deduced from Mr. Stanley’s conversation.

“In fact,” he says, “right from the beginning, I always felt ‘I can’t do another’ at the completion of every book—there never seemed to be an idea left in me.”

John Stanley at his drawing board in 1965. This was the only photo that appeared in the original Peekskill Evening Star newspaper article.

Comics Started 60 Pages Comics were originally of 60 pages, Mr. Stanley reports; then went down to 40, finally to the 30 or 32 that most are today.

But there always was, and probably always will be.

The price was ten cents; is now up to twelve.

For one thing his Thirteen deals with the problems of that age group, and these problems are ever-changing and always new to those just attaining the teens.

The apparent decline in comic book popularity is not that at all—it’s transference, in Mr. Stanley’s opinion.

“Watching television is now the thing kids do that parents and teachers and educators disapprove of,” is his view, giving the impression that adults have to have something to focus “agin’” as far as children are concerned, but also conceding that there is considerable basis for much of the TV disapproval.

Wholesome, Plus The comics in which Mr. Stanley has had a hand weren’t only wholesome but popular as well.

[Little] Lulu, for one, was a top seller for 14 years, up to a decade ago.

“Comics at their worst never approached the mayhem rampant on the TV screen today,” he says.

Mr. Stanley has been in the field since the first of the Walt Disney comics. His involvement in the story-writing came about more or less by accident, as do many careers.

“There is much good television” he feels, “but it’s up to mother and father to guide the selections.”

“I just drifted in: I was a commercial artist and letterer in New York,” he says of his past, “when a friend who was in the comic book business asked for some help.”

Enters “Real” Book Field He has just entered a new but related field, with the publication by Rand and McNally of his first “real” book.

“I did the artwork, but was unhappy with the story and suggested I write my own,“ is the way he tells about his start.

He trained at the New York School of Design, and in his early days worked in the animating department at the Fleisher Studio, where Betty Boop and Popeye movie cartoons were produced.

Issue #3 of John Stanley’s Thirteen (Going On Eighteen) comic (May-July 1962). Dell published 26 issues from Nov. 1961 to Dec. 1967. Three additional issues were reprinted between 1969 and 1971. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

It’s Nice to Be Little is “for very little children, “ the writer says.

Jean Tamburine made the drawings for the 32-page (Mr. Stanley can’t get away from the comic format) full-color

Stanley Comics Help Quell Furor

53

volume, which, he marvels, “sells for $2.75.”

“It is simple, as all things should be for very little people,” the creator comments.

“Being Little...”

“Being little is the time when every day is for play—when you are closest to your best friend, to flowers, apples that fall to the ground, and lost nickels, “ are just a few of the one-to-a-page lines which conclude— “never, never again will you have the fun you had when you were little.”

3.

There are two “littles” in the Stanley household. Linda is 7 and James

Mrs. Stanley, the former Barbara Tikotin, is a native of Germany who came to this country as a child.

This cover from Little Lulu #17 (Nov. 1949) should appeal to both the gun lobby and the animal rights folks! And isn’t this the perfect Lulu image for our Thanksgiving issue? [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

residential neighborhood in southwest Putnam County, NY, located north of the city of Peekskill.

The frontispiece of Stanley’s 1965 children’s book, It’s Nice to Be Little, illustrated by Jean Tamburine. [©2005 Rand McNally & Company or successors in interest, or the respective copyright holders.]

Copies of the article were provided by Pete Von Sholly, who also put me in touch with Stanley’s son Jim. In addition to sharing these rare photos, Jim was also kind enough to answer a few questions about his dad. And so, without further ado……

She grew up in New York City, where her husband was born and raised and lived until the imminent debut of Linda.

“With a child due to arrive, we felt we had to get out of the city,” said Mr. Stanley, who notes in an aside: “I was never happy there anyway.”

They lived in Greenwich Village before moving to Continental Village, where they have a pond on their property with a rowboat and fish and a sandy little beach, and where they skate in winter.

Aside from the work which earns the family living, Mr. Stanley is the putterer around the house—and he loves it.

“When my daughter first went to school and the kids were asked ‘What does your father do?’ her answer was: ‘He fixes things.‘”

The End John Stanley was born on March 22, 1914, and died on Nov. 11, 1993.

Between those years, Mr. Stanley wrote and drew some of the most beloved kids’ comics ever, his timeless “Little Lulu” stories chief among them. Little is known of this quiet genius, so we’re particularly pleased to reprint this John Stanley article for the first time since its original appearance in the Peekskill Evening Star newspaper on August 11, 1965.

In case you’re wondering, Continental Village is a rural

This photo was taken the same year the Peekskill Evening Star article appeared . Jim Stanley says that this 1965 photo “was taken in Putnam County, New York, at our house on Old Albany Post Road. Along with my father is one of my cousins and me at the ripe old age of 3 (my daughter just turned 3 and the similarities are uncanny).” [Photo ©2005 Jim Stanley.]

54

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt

The Jim Stanley Interview MICHAEL T. GILBERT: What was your dad like— friendly, moody, whatever?

JIM STANLEY: He could be somewhat moody and no-nonsense depending on the day, but generally he was a very intelligent man with a quick sense of humor and friendly way about him. He was extremely well-read and opinionated on a variety of subjects. If you disagreed with him on something, he could be very articulate and persuasive in explaining his views. He also had a very private side and liked to read constantly. It seemed like he felt guilty about all the reading he did, as if it was his escape from the world.

MTG: Were he and your mom on good terms, and is she still living?

Do you have any brothers or sisters?

STANLEY: He had about twenty or so good years with my Mom, but then the marriage started to disintegrate around the time that he left the comics business. This is also around the time when we left our apartment in New York City and moved back upstate. They went from having huge fights to long stretches of silence, until he finally moved out to my aunt’s house in Croton.

My mom died of cancer in 1990. I have one sister, Lynda, who is an excellent photo retoucher working in NYC. MTG: What was it like for you having a dad who drew comic books?

What was his work schedule, and did he spend a lot of time with you?

STANLEY: Since he stopped when I was in second or third grade, my memories of him actually creating comics are pretty dim. He had his drawing board in my room, so I remember him working on the Gold Key stuff—Choo-Choo Charlie and O.G. Whiz—when I was 8 or 9, and that’s about it. It’s too bad, because I wouldn’t fully appreciate his gift and stature in the comics’ world until much later in life. I knew growing up that he was exceptionally talented and had this other previous life and body of work that he was renowned for, and I was proud of this.

Jim Stanley comments on this photo: “My guess is it was taken in the late ‘50s when my parents lived on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. He was an avid reader. Did I mention he read a lot?”

horror stuff because they received so many complaints from parents. I think he was kind-of proud of that. He was never a huge fan of the artwork in those comics—personally I thought it was quite effective.

MTG: Did your friends know that your dad drew comic books and did they stop by and visit? If so, did you dad try to pick their brains about being a kid and what kids like?

We had great times going fishing, taking drives to the local deli Sunday morning for rolls and hanging out watching TV. When he was happy and not overcome by his demons (#1 being alcohol), he was a loving, caring and funny person. By “demons,” I mean mainly that he suffered from depression and alcoholism, and surely they exacerbated each other. He also smoked pretty heavily his whole life, and tried unsuccessfully to quit numerous times.

MTG: Was your dad child-like himself?

He seems to have related very well with children and their concerns throughout his career.

STANLEY: He did relate well with children and he had a terrific sense of what appeals to children and understood their thinking. Was he childlike? Yes and no ... he could be very stern and no-nonsense, and very “authoritative” with my sister and me, yet other times he could also have a silly sense of humor, singing and carrying on when he was in a good mood. He also could have a fearsome temper and put the fear of God in us just by raising his voice. So his mood really made the difference, and it could go far in either direction.

MTG: Were you a Little Lulu fan?

STANLEY: I was never a huge Lulu fan. I remember reading and enjoying it, but I preferred Melvin Monster, Ghost Stories/Tales from the Tomb, and even Thirteen (Going on Eighteen). He loved the reading material I brought home in the ’70s, such as Mad and National Lampoon.

MTG: Anything you could tell us about his horror comics and how they came to be?

STANLEY: Only that I remember him telling me Dell had to take him off the

STANLEY: My friends all loved my dad because he had a great sense of humor and could be “one of the guys.” He had a great way of relating to teenage boys, in a sort of “I know what you guys are up to ... wink-wink” sort of way.

Cover to Little Lulu #81 (March 1955). [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

MTG: I’ve heard your dad was somewhat resentful of his comic career.

Was he? If so, why—and did he talk about it?

Stanley Comics Help Quell Furor

55

STANLEY: He could have a gruff way about him, so his outward attitude (to me) towards the attention he received from fans was “What’s the big deal?,” but my sense was that he was actually very humbled and appreciative about it all. He was proud of the fact that there was a demand for the Lulu covers that he painted when he finally was motivated to work. But I’m sure his drive and desire to turn out work were severely hampered by his drinking, depression, and failing health.

He suffered from severe headaches that were debilitating.

MTG: Why did your dad finally decide to leave comics? Was there any one “straw that broke the camel’s back”?

STANLEY: It’s a mystery whether there was any one thing. Of course, I was too young to know anything at the time—8 or 9—and I never seriously asked him later on, or he never gave me a serious answer. I suspect it was a combination of things—clashes with management at Gold Key/Western, his own comics at the time (O.G. Whiz) not being a success—that’s my guess. We moved back upstate when he left the business in around ’70-’71.

MTG: How did he react in later years when he learned he had many devoted fans? I wonder what he thought about all his “Little Lulu” stories being collected in to deluxe editions like the Little Lulu Library.

Issue #4 of Stanley’s hilarious Melvin Monster (July 1966). [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

STANLEY: He probably had more in-depth conversations on this subject with the few people who tried to get through and inspire him to work again, like Don Phelps, Denis Kitchen, and Craig Yoe. MTG: Anything you remember about his post-comics career?

STANLEY: His post-comics career was unfortunately spent in a small factory building in Cold Spring, New York, churning out silk-screened aluminum rulers. Even there, the company’s owner (whom my father constantly complained about) recognized his abilities and tried to convince him to run the company for him-–but my father would have none of it.

We had a lot of good times hanging out in his house in Croton, which is now the house I live in. I would bring over a VCR and we would watch a few movies, have a couple of glasses of wine together, and shoot the breeze about this or that. He loved a good Clint Eastwood movie or a good comedy. One of the last movies I remember bringing over was Midnight Run, which he loved until he inevitably fell asleep about 75% of the way in.

MTG: What were his final days like?

Those terrible, terrible horror comics! John Stanley got tossed off writing horror comics like this because the kids’ parents thought the stories were TOO scary!

This Tales from the Tomb 25¢ one-shot giant was published in 1962. If you look closely at the photo of Stanley at his drawing board in Peekskill article, you’ll see a copy of this comic—as well as Ghost Stories and Thirteen! [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

STANLEY: His last few months before succumbing to esophageal cancer were pretty rough. I think he knew that he was in bad shape, but he was in total denial, as most of us would be. I think he was just terrified of dying in a hospital bed.

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt

MTG: What do you do for a living, Jim? Anything inspired by your dad?

STANLEY: I currently work for as a graphics department manager for an environmental planning firm and do various website design and print projects on the side. I was an environmental consultant for about 12 years or so before I got interested in computer graphics and basically changed careers around 5 years ago.

MTG: What’s your overall feeling about your dad nowadays?

STANLEY: Of course, I regret that he didn’t seek help for his personal problems that drove him to abandon his gift, but my overall feeling is that I’m proud to be John Stanley’s son and proud of his work and the impact it had on other people. I’m very grateful that people continue to enjoy his work and keep his memory alive.

The End That’s it for this issue, folks! If you’d like to read some vintage Little Lulu stories, Dark Horse Comics is currently reprinting many of the best John Stanley stories. Our thanks to David Massengill, Don Markstein, Michele Maki, Dave Fontaine, Pete Von Sholly and, of course, Jim Stanley. Join us next month, as we conclude our John Stanley trifecta!

Jim Stanley, his wife Joan, and daughter Isabel, taken a couple of years ago.

What a cute family! [Photo ©2005 Jim Stanley.]

Till next time……

Missing a Back Issue?

Got a hole in your Mr. Monster collection? We’ll gladly e-mail you a free Mr. Monster EEEK-Mail Catalog! Just Contact Michael T. Gilbert at:

mgilbert00@comcast.net

For a printed version, send one dollar to Michael T. Gilbert, P.O. Box 11421, Eugene OR 97440

57

“Paint With Your Pencil” ALEX TOTH With Advice For Aspiring— And Professional—Artists

E [Art ©2005 Alex Toth.]

DITOR’S NOTE: Two issues ago, the legendary comics storyteller suggested that all would-be artists do “the best damn work possible”—undeniably good advice. This time around, he looks at the other side of that coin, as perusing a recent book on artistic use of the pencil over the centuries inspires him to remind tyros and pros alike to do at least some things strictly for their own enjoyment, and not for the money. —Roy.

Some pencil “doodles” by Toth done in the past few years. Of course, some doodlers are more skillful than others. [©2005 Alex Toth.]

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

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A Comic Fandom Archive Special Multi-Part Series...

1966: The Year Of THREE (Or Maybe 2H)New York Comicons!

by Bill Schelly

Part 2: The 1966 New York “Benson” Con - Continued

“May I Have Your Autograph?”

(Above:) A page of signatures collected at the 1966 Benson con by one comics fan (whose name, alas, escapes us at the moment)—surrounded by examples of work those pros were doing at the time or had done previously. [On this and facing page:] Jim Steranko began drawing for Marvel only at about this time. His first “S.H.I.E.L.D.” art, with pencils & inks over Kirby layouts, would hit the newsstands that fall, in Strange Tales #151 (Dec. 1966). [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Otto O. Binder, until recently, had been writing for Mort Weisinger’s “Superman” line, but attended the con mostly to talk about his glory days (1941-53) on Fawcett’s titles. This Binder-scribed splash drawn by artists C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza is from Captain Marvel Adventures #144 (May 1953). [©2005 DC Comics.]

Len Brown, a young Topps Chewing Gum exec, had scripted the first two “Dynamo” stories for Tower’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, leading artist/editor Wally Wood to name the hero’s alter ego after him. Dynamo had been created as Thunderbolt, but Len’s name for his foe in issue #2 (Jan. 1966) became the hero’s name instead, with the villain redubbed Dynavac. Repro’d from DC’s hardcover T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents Archives, Vol. 1. [©2005 John Carbonaro.]

Larry Ivie, along with a bit of work for Tower, had scripted the “Human Torch/Thing” offering in Strange Tales #132 (May ’65). [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Jack Binder had drawn (and even headed a comics studio) for Fawcett in the early 1940s. This tale from Mary Marvel #18 (Nov. 1947), probably scripted by his brother Otto, was recently reprinted—in full color!—in Mike Bromberg’s Mary Marvel Fanzine #3. All three issues are available at <www.designbymike.com/fanzines>. Check ’em out, okay? (BTW, the next issue of A/E features a 1970s self-interview (with photos) by Jack and Otto.

Check that out, too!

Roy Thomas had begun writing and editing for Marvel the previous summer; his fifth X-Men issue (#24, Sept. 1966) came out around the time of the con.

It’s currently on view in both Essential Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 1 and the hardcover Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men Nos. 22-31 (color). Collect ’em all! [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Gil Kane, co-creator of the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom, penciled this splash for The Atom #9 (Oct.-Nov. 1963); it’s repro’d from a black-&-white Australian reprint comic, sent by Mark Muller. [©2005 DC Comics.]

Sal Trapani drew these studies of actor Patrick McGoohan while doing research for Dell’s 1961 Danger Man comic. Courtesy of Ray A. Cuthbert. [©2005 Estate of Sal Trapani.]

Rocke Mastroserio, though he usually did full artwork (see last issue), also inked some of Steve Ditko’s Captain Atom—including #82 (Sept. 1966), on sale around the time of the Benson con and featuring a script by rival 1966 con-host Dave Kaler. For more, see DC’s Action Heroes Archives – Captain Atom, Vol. 1. [©2005 DC Comics.]

1966: The Year Of Three (Or Maybe 2H) New York Comicons

L

ast issue, we discussed the fact that, after a small initial comics convention in 1964 and David Kaler’s somewhat larger “Academy Con” in 1965, the year 1966 was destined to see no less than three cons in New York City—a “mini-con” sponsored by Calvin Beck’s Castle of Frankenstein magazine early in the year (the “H” of our title), followed by no less than two full-scale comicons in Manhattan, only three weeks apart, organized by John Benson (July) and Dave Kaler (August)... with a perhaps unavoidable touch of acrimony between them. Because we have more information (including photos, albeit relatively few) about Benson’s event, we’re covering it first, with the Beck and Kaler cons to follow over the next few issues. But don’t expect to be inundated by only fannish doings… because all three cons had pro guests on hand, and from the Benson con we have audio tapes of several of the speeches and panels.

In A/E #53, we covered Day One of the latter convention, spotlighting Jack Kirby’s keynote speech (a full transcription of which appeared in The Jack Kirby Collector #43), a discussion between journalist Don Thompson and Comics Code acting administrator

59

Leonard Darvin about comics censorship, and a Ted White/Archie Goodwin/bhob Stewart panel about the so-called “Forgotten ’50s,” particularly EC Comics—with the latter two events scheduled for the full treatment over the course of our next few issues. That first day ended with a Pro Reception/Party by invitation only, and a film program hosted by old-movie expert Chris Steinbrunner. And now…

Comicon: Day Two “The Fabulous ’40s” Sunday, July 24, began the same way as Day One, with the doors opening at 10:00 a.m., and no formal programming to compete with the dealers—in this case, until 12:15 p.m. (according to the program). All these times must be taken with a grain of salt, because they are coming from the comicon agenda. But, among his other outstanding qualities, John Benson is known for being well-organized, and it’s a safe bet events

60

The 1966 New York “Benson” Con–––Continued

pretty much happened according to plan.

One change at the last minute, however, occurred when veteran fan Larry Ivie was drafted to fill in for Mad associate editor Jerry de Fuccio on the first panel of the day. It was called “Comics in the Golden Age of the ’40s,” which is re-titled here as “The Fabulous ’40s” as suggested by moderator Ted White in his opening statement.

“The panel today is devoted to the Golden Age of comics, the Fabulous ’40s,” White began. He then introduced the rest of the panel: Klaus Nordling, principal artist on Lady Luck in The Spirit Sunday comic section, who also worked for Quality Comics; Otto Binder, referring to his long stint writing Captain Marvel and The Marvel Family from 1941 through 1953; and Larry Ivie, who had both written and drawn for pro comics, including 1965’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents from Tower, but who was there mainly for his expertise on the history of comics.

the ’40s was mass confusion,” he said. “Nobody really knew what they were doing. They had this new medium, a communications medium— the comic book—which was suddenly a big success, and nobody really knew what to do with it or where to go from Superman. So everyone figured they’d play it safe by imitating Superman.” Ivie theorized that this was the reason super-hero comics became the dominate comics genre. He seemed to suggest that if it had been a Western comic that had “made” the field, then Westerns would have become the dominant genre.

Then he turned to the next guest in line: “Let’s pass the mike to a man who was instrumental in writing one of the most popular Superman-inspired heroes… Otto Binder.”

White called on Ivie first, to “sketch in a little bit of the general background of the Golden Age.” Larry began by filling the audience in on the comics of the mid-tolate 1930s to set the scene, then commented on what the industry was like after “Superman” created such a sensation starting in 1938. “I believe the first act of

“Ted’s got it a little wrong,” Binder impishly responded. “I didn’t make Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel made me,” to much laughter from the audience.

Otto concurred in part with Larry: “The big splash that Superman made was really astounding. None of us knew what was going on. In those days, you didn’t come in with just a script, you came in with a raft of characters.” For Binder, the peak of the Golden Age didn’t occur from 1938 to 1942, as most comics scholars contend, but slightly later. “I feel 1945 was a time of real inspiration for all of us writers and artists.

The “Fabulous ’40s” Panel—Plus!

Thank Crom for Jack C. Harris and his 1965 camera! (From left to right:) Klaus Nordling also worked for Quality, et al., wrote and drew the “Lady Luck” feature for the weekly Spirit Section from 1942-46, as reprinted in Ken Pierce’s 1980 publication Lady Luck, Vol. 2. [Art ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

Otto Binder wrote in the 1940s for Fawcett, DC, Quality, and just about every other outfit! He also scripted the second and last Golden Age “All Winners Squad” story (in JSA format) for Timely/Marvel’s All Winners Comics #21 (Winter 1946). The latter tale was reprinted—in hastily-retouched fashion, as seen below—in Marvel Super-Heroes #17 (Nov. 1968); Roy Thomas had the words “The” and “Squad!” added to the splash logo. Syd Shores probably contributed to the art. And boy, do we wish Marvel’d reprint this issue the way they did a few years back with All Winners #19, the first “Squad” story! [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Larry Ivie, who’d scripted the intro story in T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1 (Nov. 1965), was, as Bill Schelly says in his 1995 book The Golden Age of Comic Fandom, “one of the most knowledgeable comic fans” around; he soon launched his own magazine, Monsters and Heroes. [©2005 John Carbonaro.]

Moderator Ted White had been one of the most active of early EC fans, and in 1966 was becoming a pro science-fiction writer and editor, as will be described next issue.

1966: The Year Of Three (Or Maybe 2H) New York Comicons

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Pleasing the editors was our main concern, and they were a lot of fun. It’s fun to be creative.”

Klaus Nordling, attending his first (and only) comicon, said, “A lot of fly-by-night publishing companies came up. They’d publish for maybe two or three months.

Then the stands would be flooded, and the little guys would drop out. Then again, later, you’d have some more fly-by-nights come in. Now, the outfit I was with—Quality Comics—managed to last all throughout the ’40s, and well into the ’50s.” After reciting a partial list of his credits, Nordling mused: “When I look back on it, I wonder how the heck I produced all that stuff. But I used to think it easy and they were a lot of fun, and I made a little money at it.” He then talked about his working relationship with Will Eisner, and explained why he left comics.

“Why? Television. I left the comic books around 1951, I think. And it wasn’t so much my leaving comics as the comic books leaving me.” He later went into doing advertising art, often in sequential art form, and some educational comics. Nordling proved to be an amusing, avuncular speaker and went over well with the crowd.

[NOTE: A more complete transcript of Klaus Nordling’s remarks will appear in an upcoming issue of Alter Ego.]

“OOB” Forever!

By the time of the Benson con, Otto O. Binder (left) and Dick Lupoff, who had first brought Otto to the attention of early-’60s science-fiction and comics fans in his and wife Pat’s fanzine Xero, had become fast friends. This photo by future DC editor Jack C. Harris is the only known pic showing the two of them together. Otto probably scripted the book-length “Sivana Battles Captain Marvel and the Freedom Train” for Captain Marvel Adventures #85 (June 1948), of which we’ve reprinted the final page (see the splash in All-Star Companion, Vol. 1). He also wrote that issue’s 2-page “Jon Jarl of the Space Patrol” text story, to boot! “OOB,” as he often humorously signed himself, was as prolific as he was talented!

[Art ©2005 DC Comics.]

After each of the pros had had his “moment in the sun,” White opened the floor for questions, but time permitted only a few. Then John Benson indicated that the allotted time was up, and announced another auction: “We’re going to auction up all the rest of the material that we have. And at the same time as the auction, we’re going to be setting up an exhibit of art from the collection of Jerry Robinson.”

Indeed, after a half-hour session, fans were treated to an incredible display of original art from comic book covers of the ’40s. Most of them were from DC (then National) Comics, which makes sense, since that’s where Robinson had worked through much of the Golden Age, primarily drawing “Batman.” The pages on the easels represented only a fraction of his collection, but it was a dazzling array. Hovering near the artwork was a paid guard. Robinson was taking no chances that any of the art would be damaged or stolen, and had insisted that John Benson take out insurance on the art and hire a security guard.

Everyone milled around for a while, ogling those timeless treasures, though a few no doubt drifted back into the dealer rooms. In fact, there was only one more item on the formal program, and it wouldn’t begin until 3:30 p.m.

“Comics Today” One reason Dave Kaler gave in 1966 for hosting his own convention, after Benson’s had already been planned, was that he had understood that the latter would be primarily for science-fiction fans who were also into comics, and for EC fans. Actually, Benson’s con had something for everyone: “The Fabulous ’40s” for fans interested in the Golden Age, “The Forgotten ’50s” for fans of EC and other comics of the 1950s, a speech and Q&A session by Jack Kirby (who had never been bigger

than in the then-current Silver Age), a focus on the Comics Code which was certainly relevant to fans in 1966, and then, to finish things off, a panel devoted to “Comics Today,” with representatives of four different comic book companies: Marvel (Roy Thomas), DC (Gil Kane), King (Bill Harris), and Charlton (Dick Giordano).

This final panel was billed as “Pros Answer Questions from the Floor,” but it began with each participant making a statement of some sort. Actually, it began with a prolonged period during which Benson tried to quiet the crowd, which seemed to be having such a good time (to judge by the decibel level in the room) that they were oblivious to everything else.

The noise, and the fans, settled down at last, allowing Benson to state: “The way this panel is set up, you can ask questions from the floor of any one of these gentlemen, and maybe all four of them. Or, if there’s a controversial question, maybe more than one will answer.”

The first question was for Bill Harris, former Gold Key editor who had cast his lot with the new King Comics, which unfortunately was destined to last only from 1965 through 1967 “At the last [1965 New York] comicon,” began an unidentified fan, “you mentioned that you didn’t feel there was a future in comics. What changed your mind?”

Laughing, Harris replied, “I said there wasn’t a future in comic books. I was wrong. [applause] We still have work to do.”

Dick Giordano was asked: “What happened to Blue Beetle?” This was a reference to the 1964-65 version written (mostly) by Joe Gill and drawn by Bill Fraccio and Tony Tallarico, which had recently ceased publication.

Dick broke a surprising bit of news: “‘The Blue Beetle’ will be back in a greatly changed form. It will be completely different. The only thing we are maintaining is the title. At this time, it’s still in the early stages. I don’t think I’ll be letting the cat out of the bag by telling you that the new one is being done by Steve Ditko, story and art. [loud applause] If

62

The 1966 New York “Benson” Con–––Continued

All That Glitters Here Is Gold (As In “Golden Age”) As per his interview in A/E #39, 1940s “Batman” artist Jerry Robinson amassed quite a collection of Golden Age original art—most of it just before it would’ve been thrown out by the printer! In 2004 he loaned part of it for a major exhibit at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, from whose catalog these images are taken: Fred Ray’s cover art for Superman #12 (Sept.-Oct. 1941)— and Simon & Kirby’s Sandman and Manhunter cover for Adventure Comics #78 (Sept. 1942).

[Art ©2005 DC Comics.]

the new one seems strong enough, we’ll consider putting him in his own book.” Giordano answered another Charlton question, “Who is P.A.M.?” He responded, “No comment. I can’t answer because he wanted it that way. He’s doing government work and isn’t supposed to be also doing other part time work.” (We know now, of course, that “P.A.M.”—the late and very talented Pete Morisi—was a moonlighting policeman.)

Others questions cascaded: “Will King Comics be publishing any 25¢ editions?” “Why did the latest Marvel Annuals drop to 68 pages?” “Will there be more Golden Age reprints from Marvel?” Fans were hungry for answers directly from the pros themselves.

John Benson posed this question to all four professionals: “What age group do you think comics sell to, and what age group would you like comics to sell to?”

Gil Kane responded, “I understand that most comics sell to 9and 10-year-olds, but I don’t have any actual figures on that.

I’d like to do the kind of stuff similar to the kind of work that was being done in the pulps in the 1930s. I think that the story qualities and level of writing would be just about right, would be the next logical step-up from what’s being done now, and the pulps had everyone reading them.

They had 10-year-olds and 60year-olds. It was the common ground for everyone. But I don’t see how it can be done under the structure they have now, with the Code. You simply can’t get a more dimensional story and still do comics as we know them.”

I’d Rather Be Blue…

Charlton editor Dick Giordano was as good as his word—and ere long a new Blue Beetle, drawn by the inimitable Steve Ditko, emerged, soon gaining his own mag. This ad for the “Action-Hero” line is taken from Thunderbolt, Vol. 3, #58 (July 1967). Not long afterward, both Dick and Steve split for DC—which eventually bought The Blue Beetle, so that this version continues to appear in comics to this very day. [©2005 DC Comics.]

Loose Cannon The late Pete Morisi (as “P.A.M.”) drew this head of his character Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, for Marv Wolfman in the late 1960s. Thanks to Marv for sending it. [©2005 Estate of Pete Morisi.]

1966: The Year Of Three (Or Maybe 2H) New York Comicons

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“Comics Today”—If Today Is 1966 The four panelists for this event, in Jack C. Harris’ photo, were (l. to r.): Bill Harris (King Comics, which featured new stories of King Features’ comic strip stars)—Roy Thomas (representing Marvel), Dick Giordano (Charlton)—and Gil Kane (DC). Representing their work in this era are: The cover of King’s Flash Gordon #7 (1967—cover by Reed Crandall?), edited by Bill Harris. [©2005 King Features Syndicate.]

The splash of the one and only “Shape” story from Charlton’s Charlton Premiere, Vol. 2, #1— anonymously conceived, character-designed, and plotted by Marvel staffer Roy Thomas, then penciled & scripted by Richard “Grass” Green—and inked, ’twould seem from the “Mac” reference, by Frank McLaughlin. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

Before he became Charlton’s editor in 1965, Dick Giordano was drawing his hero Sarge Steel— and he’s still at it from time to time, as per this recent commission sketch. Thanks to Dick and to Rob Jones. [Art ©2005 Dick Giordano; Sarge Steel TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

Gil Kane penciled this 1960s “Space Cabbie” story for DC editor Julie Schwartz’ Mystery in Space, with script by Otto Binder and inks by Bernard Sachs, as per credits added for a reprinting. Repro’d from an Australian b&w, courtesy of Mark Muller. [©2005 DC Comics.]

Dick Giordano added, “Whatever information we have says comics are bought by 8- to 12-year-olds. We’d have to be at least partially insane to try to aim too far over that. We do have a system where we try to get the pictures to appeal to the 8- to 12-year-olds, and try to get the words to appeal to a slightly older group. I think more comics are being read by older readers than ten years ago, and I think the greatest part of the credit goes to Stan and Marvel.”

Productions” logo was all about, and the emphatic suggestion that the so-called “hip” dialogue in many DC Comics be dropped. All in all, it was an intelligent exchange of ideas, thanks in large part to the caliber of the panelists.

“I think a lot of the credit for it also goes to the comic book fans,” said Gil Kane, “who started sending their fan magazines to the editors.

No one really had any idea that older comic book readers even existed!

And from that time forward, that new awareness on the part of editors has had a big effect, because then they knew there were older readers out there. So a lot of the credit for this belongs to the fans in the early 1960s.”

The Aftermath

To this, Roy Thomas added, “Editors do pay attention to the letters. I know Stan does. He’s interested in comments, ideas, and suggestions.”

There were questions about how to break into the comics industry, why Kirby was doing layouts for capable artists like John Severin on “Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” what the short-lived “Marvel Pop Art

Finally, the dinner hour arrived, and the comicon closed shortly thereafter.

While there may have been some who griped or quibbled and this or that, it seems clear that everyone had a great time. The convention was given good marks all around, and how could that be otherwise? Any time you could bring 180 fans and pros together, and offer them comfortable surroundings and have things well-organized, success was a foregone conclusion. Comicons were only in their third year of existence. No one had had time to become jaded. Merely the opportunity to be in the same room with people like Al Williamson, Wally Wood, Jack Binder, Jack Kirby, and more was an incredible privilege.

And, for the pros, the adoration was a completely new phenomenon.

Most had toiled for years without meeting more than a handful of

64

The 1966 New York “Benson” Con–––Continued bargaining in the well-carpeted hall, underneath the magnificent Shrine of Anal Retention.”

Show Me The Money!

The receipt presented to John Benson when he paid the balance owing to the hotel.

admirers, if that. Now they were the equivalent of rock stars to this crowd. Good feelings all around.

True, there had been no masquerade. But otherwise, it had matched or exceeded the 1965 New York Con—in a much nicer facility.

The Darvin-Thompson-White dust-up would be long remembered, not only because of the fireworks displayed in the interactions, but because of its importance from an historical standpoint, being the first time the Comics Code Authority had been called to task in public by hardcore EC fans, who had more than one bloody axe to grind.

From a financial point of view, the convention worked out well. True, it turned out that perhaps as many as fifty fans attended without paying registration or signing the roster, due to a lack of policing the doors; nevertheless, John Benson figured he came within a few dollars of breaking even. (In a recent estimate, he calculated that the registrations, dealer tables, and program book ads brought in $592, while the costs of the hotel convention rooms, insurance for the art display—$150!—and other miscellaneous expenses added up to $589. As much as $50 to $150 in profit was probably lost on those who didn’t pay the registration fees.) Since John had only been concerned with covering his costs, he was satisfied with the result.

Paul Krassner’s article about the con, titled “The Funny Book Fanatics,” appeared in the November issue of Cavalier, a popular magazine of the day that was more or less along the same lines as Playboy. Krassner’s tone is rather sarcastic and condescending, but this was typical of the times; it was, at least, accurate with its facts and relatively amusing. “Many compulsive collectors,” he wrote, “did their

Closers By Kane We’ll bookend this installment of “The Year of the Three Comicons” with art from one of the Benson con’s most articulate panelists, Gil Kane.

(Left:) His stellar contribution to Marv Wolfman’s sketchbook—a nice pencil drawing of his 1950s Western hero Nighthawk.

(Right:) Gil’s sketch (probably done with markers) at a 1990s Atlanta con, which became one of the covers of A/E #32. We figured you’d also like to see it in untrammeled black-&-white. Were we right? [Art ©2005 Estate of Gil Kane; Nighthawk, Star Sapphire, & Green Lantern TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

On Leonard Darvin’s presentation, Krassner wrote: “When Darvin was introduced, boos and hisses emanated from the audience.”

Much of his column deals with the subject of the censorship of comics, and concludes that the Comics Code was in thrall to DC Comics, since DC was the largest member of the CCA and the Code couldn’t survive without DC’s support. Darvin, in fact, had vigorously denied that sort of thing.

Krassner—Pronounced

“Crass-ner” In a recent email, John Benson said, “Would I do it again? No. Paul Krassner wrote a sarcastic report on the comicon for the Once was enough, but I’m not sorry Nov. 1966 issue of Cavalier. He that I did it. And, overall, it was fun. was apparently more enthusiastic But, boy, it was a lot more fun to go about having Wally Wood draw a to the Seuling conventions and just pornographic Disney-character enjoy myself. I recall, at his cons, the montage for The Realist, the huge dealer rooms and the long magazine he (Krassner) edited. hours. You could wander around at 8:00 in the evening in there, or any time, and constantly meet people you knew, fans and pros, and talk in the aisles, go to wonderful programs, and then look for old comics in between. They were great cons!”

Yes, the Seulingcons were great, John. But you know what? So was yours!

Once again, with grateful acknowledgement to Jack C. Harris, bhob Stewart, Tom Conroy, and John Benson for their help on various aspects of this two-part introduction to the 1966 Benson con, including much of the visual material. Extended quotes from the convention’s panel tapes were transcribed by Brian K. Morris and edited by Bill Schelly.

Next issue, we’ll cover Leonard Darvin’s speech in full—as well as the truly explosive question-and-answer session that followed it.

Along with Ted White’s vituperative comments are supporting appearances by Paul Krassner, Don and Maggie Thompson, and a certain Rascally Marvel writer whose rapid-fire delivery on the tapes was unmistakable. Be there!

And, for those who want to delve further into the history of fandom’s first great decade, the third printing of Bill Schelly’s Eisner-nominated book The Golden Age of Comic Fandom is still available. His cogent text is augmented by dozens of rare photos and illustrations, including an 8-page color section and fanzine cover gallery. See ad on p. 70, or check out Hamster Press’ website at www.billschelly.com.

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ALTER EGO, the greatest ‘zine of the ‘60s, is all-new, focusing on Golden and Silver Age comics and creators with articles, interviews and unseen art. Each issue includes an FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) section, Mr. Monster & more.

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JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby and his contemporaries, feature articles, and rare & unseen Kirby artwork. Now full-color, the magazine showcases Kirby’s art even more dynamically. Edited by JOHN MORROW.

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In Memoriam

Jim Aparo

67

(1932-2005) “He Could Draw Any Character In The DC Universe”

by Jim Amash

J

im Aparo was a rarity: a beginning comic book artist with a fully-formed drawing style. He spent one semester at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut, and was mostly a selftaught artist. His comic art influences were the usual suspects: Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, and Harold Foster. He spent the first ten years of his art career in advertising, which partially explains why he was more advanced in his craft than most comics neophytes when he started at Charlton Comics in 1967. Unlike most artists of the time, Jim also lettered his own stories, something he took great pride in doing. Jim penciled, inked, and lettered one page a day with amazing consistency.

For Charlton, Jim drew a wide variety of stories in anthology books like The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, Gunfighters, Cheyenne Kid, Love Diary, Space Adventures, and Strange Suspense Stories. He drew a few series like “Tiffany Sinn,” “Wander,” “Nightshade,” “Miss Bikini Luv,” “Thane of Bagath,” and most notably, The Phantom. Jim’s Phantom work was stunningly realistic and far superior to any other comic book version of the character.

In 1968, Charlton editor Dick Giordano left the company for a similar job at DC Comics, taking Jim and several other freelancers with him. Giordano gave Jim a difficult assignment when he tapped him to take over the Aquaman art chores from top DC artist Nick Cardy. Jim knew Cardy would be a tough act to follow, thinking, “I can’t believe I’ve got to follow this guy!” Jim wasn’t happy with his first few stories, but before long, he brought his work up to a level he was happy with.

Aquaman, a higher-profile book than any that Jim had drawn at Charlton, catapulted him into the readers’ consciousness and made him a rising star in the business.

Jim was still doing The Phantom for Charlton, but left the company entirely when editorial director Carmine Infantino offered Jim another DC book to do: The Phantom Stranger.

In my opinion, Jim’s version of The Phantom Stranger was the definitive one. Jim also did one of the best versions of The Spectre, and of Batman, too. Jim’s art, along with terrific Bob Haney scripts, really stood out in this era. Jim proved he could draw any character in the DC Universe with stunning believability. Few other artists could take the humorous

Plastic Man character and smoothly meld him into The Batman’s world.

Carmine Infantino, who was DC’s publisher at the time, said that The Brave and the Bold (where Jim made his mark on the character) outsold the other Bat-titles, which was impressive considering people such as Neal Adams were drawing “Batman” in some of those books. For twenty years, Jim’s Batman appeared in one book or another, including team books like The Outsiders.

After a certain point, Jim scaled back on his workload and left the lettering and inking to others. But he never lost his enthusiasm for comics or the people who made and read them. For those of us who knew him, Jim was a delightful, charming, perhaps slightly shy man, and if he liked you, he really liked you. When he was a guest at the San Diego Con, we ate most every meal together, with Jim picking up the tab. Every time I tried to pay, he said, “Look, I made a bunch of royalty money on Batman #400, so I can afford to do it. Indulge me.” No matter who ate with us during that show, Jim cheerfully treated all.

A couple of years before that, Jim had agreed to come to one of my conventions. Unfortunately, deadlines on “The Death of Robin” series forced him to cancel out. He always felt badly about it, and one day an unexpected package arrived in my mail, containing a beautiful Batman drawing. I called to thank Jim (profusely, I might add), and naturally, he refused payment, which was typical of him. When you buy the new Art of Jim Aparo book from TwoMorrows, look at the cover and you’ll see why I treasure that drawing so much.

When I was trying to break into comics as an inker, Jim sent me some pencil Xeroxes to use as samples. It was an education, and while I didn’t think I had captured his style all that well, Jim liked the work. At one point, Jim tried to get me on as his inker, but his editor at the time picked someone else. Jim wasn’t happy about it, but being a loyal DC freelancer, he didn’t complain (except to me). He was a great artist and a wonderful human being, and I will miss him.

[TwoMorrows recently published The Brave and Bold Art of Jim Aparo by Scott Beatty and Eric NolenWorthington, a careerspanning biography of this fine artist.]

Artist Jim Aparo (top right) with Jim Amash at a comics convention some years back— plus art from issues of two of Aparo’s best-remembered series: Aquaman #49 (Jan.-Feb. 1970), and the cover of The Phantom Stranger #25 (June-July 1973). The former is repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, signed for collector Al Bigley by Aquaman editor Dick Giordano—the latter scan was sent by Bob Bailey. [Art ©2005 DC Comics.]

68

In Memoriam

Sam Kweskin (1924-2005) “A Quick Wit, A Gentle Soul, And A Wonderful Storyteller”

by Dr. Michael J. Vassallo

I

’m extremely sad to report that artist Sam Kweskin passed away on June 23, 2005, after a short illness. This is doubly sad for me because I had gotten to know Sam well over the last few years, after he had established contact with my pal Ken Quattro, upon reading Ken’s article “In Search of Bill Everett’s Ghost” on the Comicartville.com website.

Sam found the speculation there that he had passed away quite humorous. From that point, Sam gave Ken and me much background on his art career and he would stop by my office in Manhattan for lunch whenever he came up from his home in Boca Raton, Florida, the final time being three or four weeks before his death.

Much of what follows below is taken from Sam’s own words. Sadly, a full career-spanning interview was in the works and planned for the immediate future, but never commenced.

Sam Kweskin was born in Chicago on February 24, 1924. As a boy he filled sheets of paper with drawings, as he balanced a love for art with a love for sports. At age 16 he won a scholarship to the Studio School of Art and had the unique opportunity to visit with Prince Valiant artist Harold R. Foster at his own studio (through a contact with Foster’s brother). Kweskin was in awe of Foster and was regaled with stories about Foster’s career. At age 17 Sam met Bill Maudlin at a summer art course at The Chicago Academy (where Maudlin was studying political cartooning) and soon went into the Army, where he was sent overseas with a mortar battalion, sketching at every opportunity.

In January 1945 Kweskin entered the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a BFA, and upon graduation in 1949 got married and worked with Disney artist Sam Singer doing local cartoon shows for ABC television, among other projects on his own for television. His next job was drawing Biblical stories for the David Cook Publishing Company in Illinois; this would soon lead to his entry into the comic book business.

In 1952 Sam and his wife attended a party at which one of the guests worked in some capacity for Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management company in New York. Wanting to try something new, in August or September of 1952 Sam came to New York and went up to Timely Comics armed with samples of his recent comic-book-style Biblical stories. Stan Lee was extremely impressed and immediately gave Sam a horror script to draw, which he did (pencils and inks) overnight. With this, Sam began freelancing for Stan Lee’s Atlas line, which was burgeoning with scores of redundant titles in all genres. Beginning with cover date Feb. 1953, Kweskin drew by my count approximately 30 stories for 1953 (cover-dated) issues in all genres including horror, war, and Western, and was even on the familiar ground of Bible stories in the debut issue of Atlas’ Bible Tales for Young Folk #1 (Aug, 1953), where he drew the story of Noah’s Ark. Many of the scripts for these stories were written by Carl Wessler and Paul S. Newman, and Kweskin did a fabulous job utilizing a photo-realistic art style that wonderfully

Sam Kweskin (photo by Doc V.)—plus his re-creation of his cover for Adventures into Terror #17, done as a commission for Doc Vassallo. Photo & all art for this piece provided by the latter. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

complemented the dark, grim settings of the pre-Code horror and war titles.

One of my absolute favorite Kewskin stories, and one of Sam’s best, dealt with the theme of a Jewish concentration camp and a brutal Nazi camp commander. This was “The Butcher of Wulfhausen” in Kent Blake of the Secret Service #14 (July 1953). In this dark tale, a brutal and sadistic death camp commander escapes after the war and by 1952 is trying to sneak behind the Iron Curtain, all while being pursued by an American agent. Ultimately, he is chased right over the site of his old, now long-gone, death camp and is pulled screaming into a mass grave pit by scores of corpses of his old victims. This tale, better suited for Adventures into Terror than Kent Blake, mirrors the classic Twilight Zone episode “Death’s Head Revisited,” which would air on TV in 1961. Another excellent story is “I’ll Only Die a Little Bit” in Astonishing #25. Dark, eerie, and realistically rendered, page 5, panel 4, shows a surgeon about to perform an autopsy, and Kweskin gave the surgeon’s face the likeness of an opera baritone friend of his, Leo Postrel, who played Woody Allen’s father in Annie Hall.

Sam Kweskin would also have the honor of drawing a single preComics Code horror cover for Atlas, the cover to Adventures into Terror #17 (March 1953), at a time when 90% of the horror, war, and Western covers were handled by Joe Maneely, Bill Everett, Russ Heath, Sol Brodsky, Carl Burgos, and Syd Shores. The cover image is hauntingly gruesome, depicting a bound young woman being dumped into an open grave and menaced by the approaching hands of skeletal corpses. I had the wonderful privilege of having Sam re-create this cover for me a few years ago, realizing it was the only one he ever drew for TimelyAtlas.

1954 saw two additional stories by Kweskin, but the handwriting was on the wall for the comic book industry, with criticism over the perceived child-harming content of the horror and crime titles populating the pre-Code period. Sam saw this coming and moved back to Chicago (freelancing his last stories from there), and entered the

In Memoriam

69

commercial art world.

Even so, he freelanced approximately nine more stories for Stan Lee when time allowed in 1957, using a slightly different art style without all the crosshatching and detail.

Back in commercial art, Kweskin first worked as a studio artist, then as an art director for an industrial film organization, followed by a job as a television art director for a large ad agency, and ultimately having a small agency of his own, all while occasionally freelancing jobs, including medical illustrations for the renowned Merck Therapy Manual.

Sporadic freelance comic book art would Two Kweskin pages done 20 years apart for Marvel: the splash of the powerful story from Kent Blake of the Secret Service #14 pepper this period (July 1953) which is examined in this tribute, and his splash for Daredevil #99 (May 1973). [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Super Green Beret in 1967), and by 1972 Sam this time as a penciler. Starting with a “Dr. Strange” story in Marvel went back to Marvel looking for additional work. He would receive it Premiere #5 (Nov. 1972) under the pseudonym “Irv Wesley” (his real first name and an Anglicization of his family name), Kweskin added some mystery stories (his own scripts) to the newly-resurrected mystery titles, as well as penciling an issue of Daredevil (#99, May 1973). But the bulk of his 1970s Marvel work was on Sub-Mariner, because Namor’s current artist, Bill Everett, was having medical problems that would shortly take his life. Stan Lee planned to have Sam take over SubMariner and suggested he go out to lunch with Everett to talk over potential artistic approaches to the character and basically get any artistic advice he could from the Sub-Mariner’s creator. According to Sam, This is copyrighted material, NOT intended Everett pretty much left the art design in Kweskin’s hands, having been for downloading anywhere except our impressed with Sam’s body of work for Stan Lee in the 1950s Atlas titles. Kweskin contributed only pencils or layouts to six issues of Subwebsite. If you downloaded it from another Mariner between issues #58 and #63, some issues such as #61 even website or torrent, go ahead and read it, having several artists, making art identification extremely difficult.

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Shortly after this, advertising work precluded maintaining his comic book work, and Sam left comics for good. He continued his own art agency, became art director for Ziff-Davis magazines, freelanced as a storyboard artist, and worked numerous other freelance ad campaigns.

Painting became a source of great pride also, and Sam’s paintings have hung in galleries across the country, with his favorite theme being depictions of vintage airplanes. Sam moved to Florida in 1993, where he continued to pursue his love of painting, take art commissions, and freelance for magazines.

Sam Kweskin had a quick wit, was a gentle soul and a wonderful storyteller. Our friendship was too short, but I’ll always cherish the time we did have. He is survived by his son, artist Joel Kweskin, and by his daughter Jean Siegel.

[Dr. Michael J. Vassallo is writing a more extended piece on Sam Kweskin’s life and art for a near-future issue of Alter Ego.]

70

In Memoriam

Byron Preiss

(1953-2005) “American Popular Culture Lost One Of Its Most Productive And Visionary Champions”

A

by Jim Steranko

The company eventually published an extensive range of material, including many authored and co-authored by Preiss, such as: 1973 – The Electric Company Joke Book, The Silent “E”’s from Outer Space 1976 – One Year Affair

round noon on July 9, 2005, writer-editor-developer-publisher Byron Preiss was involved in a fatal auto accident as he drove to his synagogue on Long Island, New York—and American popular culture lost one of its most productive and visionary champions.

For more than three decades, Preiss spearheaded a multiplicity of mediaforms—from comics and ebooks to electronic games and CDROMS—that fused words and images in ways that few other individuals would achieve in the entertainment arts. As an author, he generated dozens of books, from hard science and history volumes to profuselyillustrated children’s literature. As a packager, he produced a stream of quality fiction and nonfiction titles for almost every primary publishing house, including HarperCollins, Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Rizzoli, Scholastic, and Oxford University Press, in addition to developing projects with numerous institutions, including Microsoft, Forbes/American Heritage, Fox Interactive, Comedy Central, MSNBC, Imax, Scientific American, the Grand Ol’ Opry, and Yahoo!

Born in Brooklyn in 1953, he subsequently attended the University of Pennsylvania (graduating magna cum laude) and received his master’s degree from the Stanford Film School. I met him in 1969 at a Manhattan convention, a tall, handsome kid with perfect teeth and thick black hair who radiated enthusiasm like a human atomic reactor. He recounted his publishing dream so convincingly that I agreed to create some art for his first venture, a fan calendar, just to give his budding career a jump start.

Neither of us realized that our connection was the beginning of a friendship that would grow, ferment, agitated, evolve, bluster, and ultimately endure for the next 35 years. He was my best friend and confidant for more than half my lifetime—and his presence had a profound impact on me, professionally and personally.

One of our earliest projects involved an anti-drug comic book that he conceived for near-illiterate grade school students (he was teaching at a Philadelphia elementary facility at the time). On a zero budget, we produced The Block, the tale of two inner-city brothers who choose to walk different paths, which was distributed citywide and met with exceptional success with both educators and students (some classes colored the panels, others read the story aloud, and one even transformed the tale into a rock opera). Preiss promoted it from New York City to Atlanta, achieving solid student acceptance and continual praise from all who saw and used it, right up to the majors at Sesame Street. The comic premiered in summer of 1970, a year before the much-heralded Spider-Man and Green Lantern/Green Arrow drug mags.

Over the next few years, we spoke often about the future of comics, discussion which became the architectural foundation of his initial 1974 publishing venture, Byron Preiss Visual Publications (and recently ibooks), and a

series of books that were among the first to use the term “visual novel” and “graphic novel.” My hardboiled detective thriller Red Tide was one of his offerings. Preiss was the first to regularly and continuously publish adult, book-length comic-panel novels by the field’s top creators. His recent effort, Joe Kubert’s Nazi concentration camp epic Yossel, stands as positive tribute to Preiss’ unyielding vision and belief in the form, as does his 2005 Harvey Awards win for Best American Edition of Foreign Material for Blacksad 2.

1977 – Weird Heroes (several volumes of pulp-related stories illustrated by top comics artists); Son of Sherlock Holmes 1979 – Dragonworld; The Beach Boys 1981 – The Art of Leo and Diane Dillon; The Dinosaurs 1982 – The First Crazy Word Book 1983 – Not in Webster’s Dictionary 1984 – The Bat Family 1985 – The Planets 1987 – Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party; The Universe 1990 – First Contact: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – with Ben Bova 1991 – The Ultimate Dracula; The Ultimate Frankenstein; The Ultimate Werewolf 1992 – The Vampire State Building 1993 – The Ultimate Zombie; The Ultimate Witch 1994 – Instant American History 1995 – The Ultimate Alien 1996 – The Best Children’s Books in the World 1997 – The Rhino History of Rock ’n Roll: The ’70s – with Eric Lefcowitz 1999 – Are We Alone in the Cosmos?

2000 – The New Dinosaurs 2003 – The Ultimate Dragon; The Ultimate Frankenstein; The Little Blue Brontosaurus Additionally, he edited hundreds of others.

Always on the leading edge of trends, he moved into interactive books, CD-ROMs, virtual comics, and online entertainment, generating a staggering volume of product, including many Marvel-related items.

His audiobook The Words of Ghandi snared a Grammy Awards in 1985.

Byron Preiss (at right) with friend (and comics art legend) Jim Steranko. Photo supplied by J. David Spurlock. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

Often working under severe licensing, financial, deadline, and distribution constraints, Preiss had an uncanny knack of believing in his product and his collaborative talent. He had a hands-on approach to every stage of production, a staggering juggling feat that blossomed into an operation so large it eventually filled two floors of a midManhattan skyscraper.

Nonetheless, hardly a week went by that we didn’t connect in person or on the phone, often recalling the early days when I’d crash at his apartment for a couple days and we’d strategize our futures at all-night skull sessions

In Memoriam at the Silver Star Diner on 3rd Avenue.

During the next few decades, we alternated between practical jokes and serious soul-searching. And somewhere along the way, we became brothers.

71 design and narrative technique, and, in similar fashion, passed the torch along to others by discovering new talent and giving them the opportunity to break out with showcase projects, in addition to supporting his favorite vets with ongoing assignments. He redefined the term loyalty.

We worked together constantly on a myriad of projects, many of which were highly experimental in nature, His recent line of celebrity-created not to mention risky—and, in this children’s books includes contribucase, the risk was with his money. But tions from Billy Crystal, Jerry he loved to break new ground, even if Seinfeld, LeAnn Rimes, Stephen it took a few layers of skin off his hide.

Ambrose, Carl Reiner, Jane Goodall, I still recall his shock when I insisted Philip Caputo, Jay Leno, and Stan I’d only work on The Illustrated Lee. Several months ago, I pitched a Harlan Ellison if the story was printed One of Preiss’ earliest successes was the 1976 One Year Affair, a comic fantasy series in a revolutionary new in 3-D (he purchased thousands of strip he wrote and Ralph Reese drew. It had originally appeared in format to him and immediately glasses and had them bound into the National Lampoon magazine from 1973-75, and was issued by Workman received the green light. Now, that volumes) or the Captain America book Publishing Co. [©1976, 2005 Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.] light has dimmed. cover I wanted produced without any type because, I explained, my painted figure of Cap said it all in every He married and had two beautiful daughters, who became the pride language (the volume had a phenomenal 89% sell-through) or the Wild of his life. And somewhere along the way, I became part of the family (I Cards series title I recommended be run upside down in gloss varnish (it always thought I’d adopted him, which only proves how clever he was could only be read when angled toward the light, but was a knockout at making me believe that certain things were my idea). visual surprise).

Preiss was a subtle, yet seminal force in contemporary popular He backed them all and many others, some of which required him to culture and specifically in the evolution of narrative illustration. His go toe-to-toe with printers, publishers, and distributors. Preiss took a vision will continue to inspire all those who knew him—and those who sensible, cool, controlled approach to his proceedings, but I like to think found something special in his work.

I taught him a few things about fighting dirty to get the job done. We broke a few rules along the way and perhaps set a couple of precedents, too.

He is survived by his wife Sandi and daughters Karah and Blaire.

Unlike many publishers who only talk the talk, Preiss walked the walk.

Jim Steranko has worn many hats and achieved many Although our evenings ultimately migrated to the Friar’s Club, his things since he first attracted the attention of comics fans with dedication to the work—to the comics form and its creators—not only his work on Marvel’s “S.H.I.E.L.D.” series in the latter half remained steadfast, but relentless. He cited me as his mentor for graphic of the 1960s.

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72

In Memoriam

John Albano (1929-2005) Co-Creator of “Jonah Hex”

by Mark Evanier

J

ohn Albano, the veteran comic book writer and cartoonist, passed away in early June in an Orlando hospital near his home in Altamonte, Florida. His sister-in-law says the cause of death was a heart attack followed by a stroke. He was 82 years old.

Albano had a long, varied career that included stints as an editor for The National Enquirer (for seven years) and magazine cartoons for an array of clients, including Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. Comic book fans know him best for his time at DC in the 1970s, where he wrote for Joe Orlando’s ghost comics (House of Mystery, etc.), Plop!, Supergirl, Jimmy Olsen, Swing with Scooter, the revival of Leave It to Binky, and many others. He was the Academy of Comic Book Arts award for Best Humor Writer in 1972; ACBA was an organization of comic book professionals.

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John Albano (above left)—and a recent illustration by original “Jonah Hex” artist Tony DeZuniga of his and Albano’s acclaimed and offbeat Western hero.

This illo appears in the new book Concepts: Tony DeZuniga. For information please contact <www.bigwowart.com>. [Art ©2005 DC Comics.]

His most famous work was probably when he co-created—with artist Tony DeZuniga—the long-running Western character “Jonah Hex,” who originally appeared in All-Star Western in 1972. Albano wrote the first eleven tales of the scarred gunfighter, but a dispute arose over the film rights to his co-creation. A lawsuit was settled, with Albano receive money, but his relationship with DC Comics was effectively destroyed, and others wrote “Jonah Hex” for years after.

Albano also worked for the short-lived Atlas Comics line of the 1970s (Phoenix, Planet of Vampires, etc.) and for Gold Key Comics on Underdog, Heckle & Jeckle, and other comics produced out of the firm’s New York office. He wrote for National Lampoon, authored some children’s books, and did a lot of work for Archie Comics beginning around 1984. He was write for Archie as recently as a year ago, and had recently been devoting himself to the script for an offBroadway play.

My thanks to his friend Michael Browning for gathering information and the photo of John which accompanies this tribute. I don’t think I ever crossed paths with John, but if I had, I would have told him how much I enjoyed his work.

[The above appeared, in slightly different form, in Mark Evanier’s online website www.newsfromme.com and is used with his permission.]

73 Before we start—our abject apologies to our pal Ray A. Cuthbert, who was understandably less than thrilled that, as of A/E #46, “it’s now in print that I said the Superman #167 artwork was by Swan and Anderson, when I said the art was by Curt Swan and George Klein!” It was totally our typo, Ray—so we wanted to correct it up front.

Now, first up, a note about Bill Everett and his work by Tom Watkins, who in the past has contributed various pieces of art to A/E: Roy—

[Art ©2005 Shane Foley; Alter & Capt. Ego TM & ©2005 Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly.]

Kudos to all for the “Wild Bill” issue! I’m glad I had the Metamorpho sketch to assist the graphics in the E. Nelson Bridwell piece.

Your Everett list missed Pussycat, from Marvel/Magazine Management 1968. This black-&-white magazine collected strips from MM’s gag and “good girl” zines. The first strip was a Wally Wood tone job; then there were Bill Ward strips (love those nylon tops!), Jim Mooney, and Stan Goldberg (I think those last two are in it; I’ve not seen Pussycat since 1978 or so). Everett did a stunning color painting for the cover, and a gray-tone pin-up centerfold. Both quite nice! For 35¢ you got a great deal!

I’d personally pay $50 or even more for 200+ color pages of Bill E.’s art & story in these categories: #1: Pre-war years Sub-Mariner, Fin, & other Timely strips. #2: Post-war Namor/Namora, Venus, Marvel Boy. #3: At least 2 or 3 volumes of B.E. horror, sf, war, crime (Atlas, 1950s).

R

oy here (first person and all) to guide you through a mirthful morass of missives and emails re Alter Ego #46, which showcased my circa-1970 interview with Wild Bill Everett and other tidbits from the original 1961-78 incarnation of A/E, plus Jim Amash’s heart-to-heart with artist Lew Glanzman and our much-esteemed regular departments. But first, a thumping thank-you once again to Shane Foley, who recently sent us the above drawing of two of our “maskots,” Alter & Captain Ego—in a scene based on Jack Burnley’s cover for World’s Finest Comics #20 way back in Winter of 1946. “Of course,” as Shane says, “Burnley’s gag is lost with the weight on the scales covered by the ‘re:’—but I hope this doesn’t matter too much.”

Not to us, Shane— and we suspect our readers can readily tell what the gag was 60 years ago, even if they don’t own a copy of the original comic or the cover’s reprinting in DC’s Batman: The World’s Finest Comics Archives, Vol. 2.!

Girls, Girls, Gills Bill Everett showed his versatility by painting the cover and a pinup for Marvel’s Pussycat #1 (Oct. 1968). The mag also reprinted stories from earlier Magazine Management mags by acclaimed good-girl artists Wally Wood and Bill Ward. A real collector’s item—“the kind men like!” Thanks to Frank Motler, Glenn MacKay, and Bob Bailey for all sending art from that issue—including a few other pages we hope to print one of these days.

Still, just as a reminder of what Wild Bill was most noted for—well, in 1968 he was mostly coloring and doing production work and occasional inking for Marvel, but above right is his splash for a tale from Sub-Mariner #35 (Aug. 1954) which was reprinted around the same time, in Marvel Super-Heroes #16 (Sept. 1968), featuring a monster familiar to every fan of 1950s horror movies. Script by Paul S. Newman—which may be the reason it lacks Bill’s trademark signature. It was also reprinted in full, in color, in Les Daniels’ 1992 book Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

74

[comments, corrections, & correspondence]

#4: ’50s Sub-Mariner revival—to have all that in one volume, with that great coloring.

Bill Pearson’s story [of the fire and the destroyed artwork] stunned and sickened me. We met at a New York City con in the ’70s. I bought Grave Tales (and maintained my “charter” witzend sub for ages). I’ve sold most of my collection over the years, but had the satisfaction of knowing that someone benefited from a sale. To lose what he’d gathered must be a blow of incalculable impact. If any A/E reader could send even one item to act as a “token” to fill in some of his gaps, I’m sure it would help. A Prince Valiant printed page is a small token for B.P.’s years of support to reprint publishers and starting artists. He’s right on those PV Sundays. I’ve seen enough to know, re the Red Line/Drop Out codings. [Writer/artist Harold R.] Foster used that to key “non-trapped” clouds, water, etc. He added a nice 20% “K-Tone” gray to storms, etc.

The Valiant coloring (done by DC’s Sol Harrison and associates for years) was to Foster’s work what Greg Tolland’s camera was to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane: a technical support of uncommon grace (i.e., Val’s rosy cheeks, gray armor, etc.) to an already vital line rending and story.

Tom Watkins Thanks in particular for the reminder about Pussycat, Tom. Should’ve remembered to shoehorn that reference in, since I well recall when Bill drew it. See accompanying illos (as if you could miss ’em!).

Thanks, Michael. We’re aware that Centaur and Comic Corporation of America weren’t one and the same, and should’ve made that distinction. But you know a lot more about that dichotomy than we do, and we appreciate your sharing your information with us. Alter Ego, after all, is a joint effort—pros and fans and collectors alike, pooling their knowledge of comics history.

Next, a point raised by John Benson, whose 1966 comicon is covered

by Bill Schelly in this very issue: Hi Roy! Don’t you guys realize that comics fandom existed before 1961?

Your statement that a Kirby drawing was “the very first artwork created by a professional especially for any of the burgeoning new fanzines which were emerging in the early 1960s” may be technically correct, but it makes about as much sense as saying that “John Kennedy was the very first American President in the early 1960s.” You’ll soon be getting Squa Tront 11, which reproduces the April 1959 cover of Mike Britt’s Squa Tront 1, done by John Severin especially for Mike specifically as a cover illo (drawn right onto the ditto master, I believe). And there’s Al Williamson’s offset cover for Larry Ivie’s Concept 5, Fall 1959, not to mention Williamson’ earlier cover for Concept 2, December 1956 (traced onto a mimeo stencil by Ivie). Those are just examples that come to mind. Sigh.

A/E #46 featured interviews by two artists who had worked on the early hero “Amazing-Man”—creator Bill Everett, and later artist Lew Glanzman, which led researcher Michael Feldman to comment about one aspect of our coverage: Roy, Just went through your recent A/E. I noted you added to Lew Glanzman’s comment about his first publisher that Comic Corporation of America was another name for Centaur.

Just for future reference: although every reference also asserts this—it’s not the case. Centaur went bankrupt in November 1940—I have the New York Times notice of it.

Amazing-Man was published by Comic Corp. of America and marketed with the other Centaur titles. It had different though possibly overlapping ownership and was packaged initially by Lloyd Jacquet’s Funnies, Inc. It was never published by Centaur. This is verified by the Trademark and Copyright registrations, among other things.

Comic Corp. of America picks up some abandoned Centaur titles briefly in 1941. By 1942 they stop doing comic books and move on to other cheap magazines, many girlie gag digests, crosswords, etc. The core company was actually the publisher of Bandleaders, a semi-slick popular magazine of its day.

Comic Corp., under the senior editorship of Harold Hersey, continues well into the 1940s.

Michael Feldman

That’s Amazing, Man! Bill Everett had a casual attitude toward the standard super-hero costume, as seen in his early “Sub-Mariner” stories—and in this effort from Amazing-Man #6 (Oct. 1939), which he dated “1939” below his signature. Michael Feldman informs us that, although Amazing-Man was marketed with the Centaur titles, it was actually published by the Comic Corporation of America, a separate entity “though possibly [with some] overlapping ownership.” Thanks to Robert Wiener for providing color Photostats of this classic tale. [©2005 the respective copyright holders.]

John Benson As you know, John, no offense was intended by that caption to you and others of what is sometimes referred to as “post-EC fandom.” Bill Schelly and I are both aware of that fandom which existed in the latter half of the 1950s and into the early ’60s, centered primarily around the EC comics of the first half of the ’50s—but our point is that Dr. Jerry G. Bails’ Alter-Ego #1 in early 1961 became a focal point of the Golden Age heroes that were being revived by DC and Marvel, and these comics had helped Jerry form a mailing list that by 1964 contained 1600 names.

Only a small percentage of the people on that list had been involved in EC fandom. Most instead came through the letters columns of DC and Marvel, and were interested primarily in super-hero comics. Evidence of this can be seen in 1960s issues of Rocket’s BlastComicollector, which carried few paid ads for pulps, science-fiction, or Edgar Rice Burroughs material. Thus, as we see it, the comics fandom that sprang forth beginning in the early 1960s was mostly unrelated to what had come before—which is not to denigrate that earlier fandom, certainly. In fact, Bill covered it to some extent in his 1995 book The Golden Age of Comic Fandom—a seminal work which celebrates its tenth anniversary this very year!

Michael Uslan, one-time comics writer and now a producer of such films as Batman Begins, is becoming a fixture in these pages, and we couldn’t be happier about it! He’s long been intrigued by the origin of the term

re: “Silver Age of Comics,” and recently wrote to Comics Buyer’s Guide coeditor Maggie Thompson about a welcome discovery—but he gave A/E permission to print the letter, as well: Dear Maggie: I knew I wasn’t crazy! I read in Comics Buyer’s Guide a claim that the expression “The Silver Age” of comics wasn’t used until circa 1971-72. Yet I was certain the general term was in our vocabulary in the mid-’60s as fans and collectors. I had a recollection of its having been coined in either a letter or in a response to a letter in a comic book or fanzine.

And so, “Sherlock” Uslan went to work. No one from the glory days seemed to recall where it originated, though every oldtimer I communicated with agreed it was in common usage in the ’60s.

75 relating to comic book history. And let’s hear it for Scott Taylor, wherever he is today!

Michael Uslan Hear, hear, Mike! Just one point, harking back to the first sentence of your letter: we know good and well that you are crazy, just like the rest of us, to care about where the term “Silver Age” was first used! But, as far as we’re concerned, it is, as per the title of a book and movie some years back, “a fine madness.” For more Uslan madness, readers can turn to the FCA section of this very issue, which contains the first half of an interview with the man who’s currently working on turning Shazam! into a major motion picture!

In issue #42, Jim Amash interviewed Herb Rogoff, who in the 1940s50s was an editor first at Hillman, then at Ziff-Davis. Knowing that Herb would like to see a piece on Fawcett executive editor Will Lieberson that we ran in a previous issue of A/E, I sent him a copy—and received this anecdoteladen missive in response, which I thought worth sharing with you:

I checked my issues of Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector, Alter Ego, Batmania, and others. I asked [DC president & publisher] Paul Levitz to check his The Comic Reader/On the That Silver-Aged Lantern Of Mine Drawing Board archive. I could not find Whenever it started and ended—whoever first used the term— the elusive culprit. My next logical guess Dear Roy: look up the phrase “Silver Age of Comics” in a good dictionary was that it came from a Julie Schwartz and you’ll find a picture a lot like this one next to the entry: Gil Thanks for sending the “Lieberson” letters page. With the generous help of Kane and Sid Greene’s splash for a tale from Green Lantern #29 issue of Alter Ego. Although I knew of Allan Asherman, I checked suspected (June 1964), with script by John Broome and editing by Julius him as editor at Fawcett, I never Will issues of Flash, JLA, Showcase, Green Schwartz. Or else it’ll be something drawn by Carmine Infantino while he was in comics. I met him years or Jack Kirby! Repro’d from a photocopy sent by Shane Foley, Lantern, Atom, Batman, Detective, after, when we were both out of the from an Australian black-&-white reprint. Great way to see Hawkman, and annuals. I found many industry. He was in the process of something resembling the original art! Or, if you wanna read references to “The Golden Age” (as on the story in color, pick up a copy of The Green Lantern Archives, starting the Junior TV magazine, and the cover of Flash Annual #1), “The Vol. 4. [©2005 DC Comics.] somehow—I forget the “how”—I got to Modern Age,” “Earth-One,” and “Earthdo the monthly comic strip featuring Z,” the “old” Flash and the “new”Flash, Junior TV. I drew the little guy wearing a beanie with a TV antenna etc. But still, I couldn’t find that magic word “Silver” in the mystical instead of the proverbial propeller, and I gave him eyes that were two letter or response to a letter I had hollering to me from some longblack circles. When I conceived the character, it never occurred to me slumbering brain cell. but was later pointed out by wags of my acquaintance that his eyes Until… represented orbs that were burnt out from watching too much television.

I found the letter column in Justice League of America #42 (Feb. How appropriate!

1966)…an issue which, Paul Levitz informs me, had an actual on-sale Later on, after the TV magazine venture bit the dust, I worked with date of December 9, 1965. You remember that issue—“Metamorpho and for Will on the military supplement, writing articles and illustrating Says ‘No!’” One Scott Taylor of Westport, CT, wrote to Julie: a few of them. I did this work on a freelance basis while I was public Dear Editor: Great, magnificent, superb, and anything else you might care to add. What am I talking about?

“Crisis on Earth-A,” that’s what! Nothing has equaled it and I don’t think anything else will! If you guys keep bringing back the heroes from the Golden Age, people 20 years from now will be calling this decade the Silver Sixties!

Fans immediately glommed onto this, refining it more directly into a Silver Age version of the Golden Age. Very soon, it was in our vernacular, replacing such expressions as Jerry Bails’ ponderous “Second Heroic Age of Comics” or “The Modern Age” of comics. It wasn’t too long before dealers were differentiating their sale of, say, Green Lantern #3 by specifying it was a Golden Age comic for sale or a Silver Age comic for sale.

I’m happy to set the record straight on this small but seminal issue

relations director at the Grumbacher Artists Materials Company. I left the company and my freelance business behind when I left New York for life with Helen Van Wyck and a career with her in fine arts at Rockport, Mass. I would try to see Will whenever we traveled to NYC to deliver material for Palette Talk, the publication Helen and I created in 1967 and produced for Grumbacher (more than 100,000 copies printed). In all, we did 83 issues.

So, once again, thank you for sending the magazine. As you have just seen, the short piece on Will sparked me to remember those halcyon days when we were young, beautiful, and in love with life and career.

Herb Rogoff And it was quite a career, Herb—for both you and Will Lieberson.

Drop us a line anytime you recall something that wasn’t touched on in your interview. In fact, we try to issue a standing invitation of that sort to all interviewees—and one who took us up on it, recently, was artist

76

[comments, corrections, & correspondence]

Allen Bellman, who labored in the Timely/Marvel bullpen in the late 1940s and who was covered in A/E #32. Below, Allen has written his remembrances of his first attendance at the MegaCon in Orlando, Florida:

Going Home: My First Megacon, Orlando – Feb. 2005

by Allen Bellman

The luggage was in the car! My wife Roz and I were off to Orlando, where I was going to participate in my first comic book MegaCon. However, I was in a dilemma. I haven’t drawn for 15 years, since retiring from the art department of the SunSentinel. Instead, I’ve been concentrating on photography. Would anyone know who I am? Where in the world was I going? The only thing I could think of was to take a dozen or so copies of Alter Ego #32 with the 27-page interview that Doc Michael Vassallo did about my career during my days at Timely/Marvel.

I could autograph these copies and sell them, donating the money to our local chapter of the Autism Society. We have an autistic grandson, and I knew the money would go to a worthy cause.

Attending this convention with no pre-planned itinerary made me feel as though I was invited to sit down to perform a piano recital without knowing how to play. I decided to play it by ear, no pun intended! On second thought, it was intended. The anticipation of meeting people I’d worked with on staff at Timely/Marvel was enough to put everything else aside. I was going to turn back the clock.

never knew existed. I started to draw characters I’d drawn for the comic books. It didn’t take long before collectors were buying my artwork. I’d have been happy to do it for free, but I didn’t want to hurt the other artists, who were getting paid for their work, and rightfully so.

One gentleman came to me with an armful of old comic books, claiming he had been looking for me for over 20 years, hoping I would sign his books containing my work. I signed all his books with pleasure.

Roz could not believe what she was hearing, sitting in awe. A family carrying an autograph book asked for a sketch and an autograph.

A young lady with her mom asked me to draw a picture of The Human Torch, and wanted to know how much I would charge her. I asked the young lady to return later and the drawing would be waiting for her, and not to worry about the charge. I asked one of the artists how much I should charge for this pix drawn on a 5x7 Bristol board. He suggested about $20-$25, and the greatest compliment I received was his “If she doesn’t, I will for $20.” That really made my day.

So many people knew me from the Alter Ego interview. They were aware of my work and style of drawing.

It was a great experience, and at the age of 80, meeting old friends and colleagues was a pleasure. It was just that the lapse in time was startling.

When I last saw them, we were all young men, and now… Well! Time didn’t stay still for me, either.

Our sincere gratitude for all the thoughts you’ve shared, Allen—and we know you have others in the pipeline.

Next time, we hope to run them as a separate page, rather than as a part of the letters section.

Lastly this time around, P.C. Hamerlinck informs us that the photo of early “Sub-Mariner” and Fawcett artist Carl Pfeufer on p. 17 of A/E #46 doesn’t actually date from the Fawcett era of 1940-53, as we said; rather, it’s from a Fawcett-Binder Shop reunion Patriot Act that took place in the 1960s. P.C. Page 2 of the Allen Bellman-drawn “Patriot” story from believes that former editor Wendell Marvel Mystery Comics #62 (March 1945). With thanks to Crowley sent it to FCA’s own Marc Dr. Michael J. Vassallo. [©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Swayze, who provided it to us. We’ve Michael T. Gilbert and his wife Janet already corrected that on a later use of the photo. Oh, and all art on p. 88 sat to one side of us, and Roy Thomas on the other side. Also present of #46 is by C.C. Beck—no Kurt Schaffenberger. Somehow we both was George Tuska, who did not work on staff in the old days, but made missed that in proofing. his appearance in the bullpen whenever he delivered work to Stan Lee Any more comments, corrections, or caveats? Send them to: and never failed to say hello to all of us.

It was about 3H hours alter that we reached our hotel in Orlando, Florida, and checked in. Then, out in the pouring rain, boarding the shuttle to Convention Hall. We found our space, and there he was: Gene Colan! I recognized him immediately—the same quiet, gentle person I remembered! Even though more than 50 years have passed.

Now was the time to set up shop—with nothing else to offer but a dozen or so autographed copies of Alter Ego #32! I waited patiently for someone to stop by my booth. I didn’t have to wait long. In a short time, all the magazines were sold out. Luckily, the TwoMorrows booth was nearby, and they sold me whatever issues they could spare. These additional issues sold out, as well. Now what would I do for an encore?

People in attendance wanted drawings, so Roz found a kiosk that sold art supplies and I was ready to go. There were collectors who knew who I was from my work that appeared in the Timely/Marvel comic books. It seems there is a clan of comic book collectors—something I

Roy Thomas Fax: (803) 826-6501 32 Bluebird Trail e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com St. Matthews, SC 29135 Don’t miss our Fawcett-heavy Christmas issue coming your way in just 30 days—featuring the words and pictures of Jack & Otto Binder, Ken Bald, Vic Dowd, Bob Boyajian, and more—not to mention a brand new 1943 super-hero pin-up calendar! Didn’t think you were gonna see one of those, didja?

[Art ©2005 P.C. Hamerlinck; Capt. Marvel & Batman TM & ©2005 DC Comics; Spirit TM & ©2005 Estate of Will Eisner.]

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79 of course, took place during the noon hours ... and mostly after five ... over beers.

There may be a tendency here to exaggerate that drinking bit. We drank ... but didn’t just about everybody? Ever notice in the old movies of that era?

Any time your favorite star, male or female, made an appearance, one hand held a cigarette, the other a highball! On the subject, this needs to be said: in the lifetime that I knew Rod Reed, I never once saw him intoxicated. Because I was always intoxicated first? No. That was Jess Benton’s little joke. Not true.

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. This issue, he takes us back to the time he and writer/editor Rod Reed formed the Fawcett baseball team. —P.C. Hamerlinck.]

I never saw any booze around the Fawcett offices, either. Except ... at the parties ... and there weren’t all that many of those ... one or two, that I recall.

Several times during the years of our friendship Rod and I attempted to collaborate ... always on original comic strips ... and always, for whatever reason, without success. One joint effort, though, was a success ... a never-to-be-forgotten one. It came about during one of those after-five beer chats. When the subject got around, as it frequently did, to baseball, the question suddenly popped up, “Why don’t we organize a Fawcett baseball team?!!”

No time was wasted listing likely prospects in the comics and art departments. Estimating athletic ability from past bowling bashes and office bragging, we came up with what looked like a formidable squad ... on paper.

I think we had held our first victims ... er, opponents ... in mind all day. By the time a game was arranged with the Jack Binder art studio, we were certain we were ... well ... ready for ’em!

When we reached our destination one bright Saturday afternoon they were already at the field and obviously feeling “ready for us.” And they were impressive! Big ... tanned ... some of them crunching around in baseball shoes ... with spikes. It looked as though Jack had recruited his artists from the roster of the New York Yankees!

We called them the “Binder Bunch” ... that gang of major league baseball players ... posing as artists ... out in Englewood, New Jersey.

Rod Reed has been quoted as having been the first outsider to do a Captain Marvel script after Bill Parker, the super-hero’s originator. Taking “outsider” to mean freelance, as opposed to salaried employee, and possibly more profitable, that’s understandable.

In another interview there was a statement by Reed that began: “One day when I was pretty new in the comics department, editor France Herron said ...” Those words shed a bit of light on the affiliation of Rod Reed with Fawcett ... first as independent writer, then as employee with editorial duties. Also suggested is the period ... late ’41 and early ’42, prior to his becoming executive editor of the comics department.

That was around the time I got to know him.

He and I talked a lot ... about comics ... about music ... and sports ... especially baseball. Turned out we both had laid away boyhood visions of performing in major league stadiums. Such chatter,

“The Binder Bunch” This photo, also printed in Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #3, in conjunction with an interview with Binder shop artist Nat Champlin, shows that studio’s baseball team in 1942. (L. to r., rear:) Bob Boyajian, Dick Ryland, Bill Ward, Wendell Crowley, Kurt Schaffenberger, John Westlake. (L. to r., front:) Bob Butts, Vince Costello, Nat Champlin, Vic Dowd, Ken Bald, Jimmy Potter. The latter, sadly, was killed in action during World War II. Of the photo, Champlin said that he “set the camera on delayed action and jumped back into the picture.” Sure wish we hadn’t lost touch with Ned after that interview!

80

Marc Swayze I also tried to ignore the little drama being slyly played for our benefit. Those guys were having fun! So smug ... ignoring us as though we weren’t even there! They were winning the ball game and it hadn’t even begun!

I can’t recall the final score ... and it doesn’t matter. Rod and I both were pleased at the performance of our gang ... and were surprised at the great infield work of Stanley Kauffman and Tom Naughton of the comics editorial department and the overall play of Vic Capalupo of the art department.

And the Binder Bunch? Highly competitive, of course ... that’s the only way to enjoy baseball.

First class on the diamond ... and first class elsewhere. Each seemed to consider himself host of the occasion. At the get-togethers that always took place following the games, they were witty, joyous groups ... fun to be around.

Take Me Out To The Ball Game…

Like the Fawcett and Binder teams, Captain Marvel liked to play baseball… only he played it on Mars!

Splash pages from the final issue of America’s Greatest Comics (#6, Summer 1942). Art by Fawcett’s bullpen, supervised by chief artist C.C. Beck. [©2005 DC Comics.]

And those guys were throwing the ball hard! As they warmed up I tried to ignore the ultra-loud smack of ball meeting glove, an intentional maneuver, of course, intended to shatter our confidence, should there be any left.

In recent years I have seen interviews of several members of the Binder studio. With each reading I was disappointed ... maybe even a little hurt ... in having to realize that I was not remembered. But that’s all right ...

I remember them!

[Marc Swayze will be back next issue for more memories of the Golden Age of Comics.]

In Print In The USA At Last!

Hollywoodchuck

81

Part I

Batman Begins Co-Producer MICHAEL USLAN On Captain Marvel & Other Wonders

I

by P.C. Hamerlinck

NTRODUCTION: Michael E. Uslan’s journey began by reading comic books, a place where dreams are made but seldom meet reality. But his passion for comics enabled him to make his own dreams come true. The executive producer of five Batman feature films—including this year’s awe-inspiring Batman Begins—he is currently developing feature film versions of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, as well as Shazam! Captain Marvel fans should rest assured that the film, currently in the latter scripting stages, will magnificently capture the World’s Mightiest Mortal in the style of the original character created and formed by Bill Parker, C.C. Beck, Otto Binder, William Woolfolk, et al. —PCH.

Jersey Kid How do you get there from here? What do you do when you ultimately want to produce motion pictures about characters you care about? What do you do when you don’t know anybody in Hollywood, have no relatives in Hollywood, and don’t come from wealth? How do you get there from here?

For Michael E. Uslan, it was having dreams ... and perseverance.

Michael’s mother told him he learned to read from comic books when he was just three years old. He was first exposed to comics by his older brother’s bringing them into their Jersey shore home, and by finding them stacked up at the local barbershop. Casper and other kid-faves soon gave way to the guy with the big red “S” on his chest, which led

him to his favorite, Batman, and to other heroes. It was also down at the barbershop that he first saw an issue of Captain Marvel Adventures.

Ocean Township, just north of Asbury Park, was Uslan’s New Jersey Shore stomping grounds, with wall-to-wall kids. Out at the playground one day in 1961—shortly after the Justice League of America comic first appeared—Uslan’s friend Barry Milberg informed him about a “different” Justice League book that had just appeared on the stands: “But it’s just about four of them,” his pal explained, “with some guy who can turn into flames.”

“I didn’t know what he was talking about,’ Uslan says, “so I went hunting to as many candy stores as I could until I finally turned up a copy of Fantastic Four #1.” That purchase confirmed his passion for comic books ... early Marvels by Lee, Kirby, and Ditko ... Schwartz’s DC hero revivals ... and good ol’ boys The Spirit, Captain Marvel ... and Batman.

At 12 years old, Uslan merged his comic collection together with that of Bob Klein, his best friend, who also shared his enthusiasm for comic books. The boys ascertained that many comic book creators lived in New York or New Jersey ... and that most of the major comics companies were located in New York City. Living just an hour outside of NYC, the two Jersey lads would beg Uslan’s parents to take them into the city, where the boys would go on the DC Comics tour, then go over to hang out in the lobby of Marvel Comics. “Anybody who was walking in or out of the door we would ask them for their autograph,” Uslan recalls. “Then we would ask them, ‘Who are you?’”

Michael Uslan—A Real Whiz Kid A young Mike U. had his copy of All-Flash #25 autographed by John Broome and Julie Schwartz during a tour of DC Comics. Also shown are the covers of Flash Comics #1, Batman #1, and Captain Marvel Jr. #1. Batman #1 was among the comics young Mike saw Jerry Bails auction off at the 1965 New York comics convention. [Covers ©2005 DC Comics.]

Batman Begins Co-Producer Michael Uslan On Captain Marvel & Other Wonders

82

Fandom

Julie

The two youngsters were soon indoctrinated into the world of comic book fandom during its infancy, by sending away for a fanzine, The Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector. “We could not believe there were other geeks like us that were really into this,” Uslan remarks about his and Klein’s realization of fandom. “We really thought we were the only two guys in the world into comics. We had no idea there were other people like us.” Besides the RBCC, the two friends became charter subscribers to such seminal fanzines as Alter-Ego, Batmania, and On the Drawing Board.

The boys, now heavily involved in fandom, learned about the Golden Age as they were living and breathing what later would be known as the Silver Age. Uslan favored the DC books by the “good” editor: “Bobby and I didn’t know his name early on, but we knew was that he was the ‘good’ one, and you could always pick out his books. Then I learned his name was actually Julius Schwartz, not JULIUS SCHWARTZ EDITOR.” Uslan began corresponding with Schwartz, and the editor passed along to him tidbits of background information about DC and the company’s history and current activities. It was at that initial DC office tour where he first met Julie Schwartz: “Walter Halitchek was the production guy who was taking us around this particular tour. Then he took us to the section and showed us original artwork. Sol Harrison stood in front of a paper-cutter and started to cut out sections of Wayne Boring-drawn original Superman Sunday strips, and gave each of us a tier of Sundays.

Bobby Klein and I seemed to be the only people there who were horrified by what was going on! Everybody else on the tour was excited, but Bobby and I had made such a stink about it that finally, just to shut us up, Sol gave us a full Sunday page.”

The kids began to amass a huge collection—dating back to 1936 and eventually numbering over 50,000 comics—thanks to a backdate magazine stand at a flea market near Uslan’s home.

“Every Friday night my parents would take Bobby and me there because that was the night the guy would come in with boxes of comic books ... old comic books ... but because they were ‘old’ and Julie And The Captain therefore had ‘no value’ he only charged Julius (Julie) Schwartz, of course, was the editor the Silver Age a nickel apiece for them,” Uslan says. versions of The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, The Atom, Spectre, “We picked up Superman #2, Mad #1, and Justice Society (as the Justice League), but he would also be the Police Comics #1, Captain Marvel Jr. first editor of the revived Captain Marvel, with the publication by #1 ... all for a nickel apiece.’ The party DC of Shazam! #1 (Feb. 1973). As the box remarks, it had been just was over when word started to filter out a few months shy of two decades between the death of Fawcett that old comic books actually had value.

Comics and the revival of the Big Red Cheese—whom Michael Uslan But the boys’ excitement had already is now working on turning into a major Hollywood movie. been fueled, with a common interest to [©2005 DC Comics.] study the history of comics and meet as Julie Schwartz was standing there and saw 12-year-old Uslan carrying many comic creators the artists as possible. a copy of All-Flash #25. Schwartz asked the boy, “Are you a Flash fan?”

In 1965 the two 7th-graders attended the first full-fledged comic book Uslan replied, “Yeah, I’m a big Flash fan!” “All right, come with me.” convention in New York City, held at the decrepit Hotel Broadway Schwartz took Uslan off the tour line and escorted him over to his Central Hotel near Greenwich Village. “We were there with a bunch of office, where he announced, “This is the guy who writes The Flash. other comic fans ... and a bunch of rats and roaches scurrying about,” Would you like him to sign your comic book?” In Schwartz’s office sat Uslan says. “I couldn’t believe that my parents actually stayed with us in John Broome, where both he and Schwartz autographed Uslan’s comic. that fleabag just so we could go to this thing ... but being at the first Then Schwartz said, “There’s something else I’m sure you’ll like ... comic convention was an amazing experience. They had a masquerade; I stay here!” Uslan clearly remembers the moment: “Julie leaves his office, dressed up as the original Sandman from 1940 and Bobby dressed up as then returns a few minutes later with a bound volume containing Flash The Shadow.” During the con, Jerry Bails auctioned off Action Comics Comics #1. That was a turning point. It opened my eyes to the Golden #1 and Batman #1. Uslan remembers the excitement: “CBS-TV had a Age. Bobby and I would soon pursue Golden Age comics like you local camera crew there for the auction. Action #1 went for around $40. wouldn’t believe! But there was Julie, mister gruff exterior with a heart Then came Batman #1. Batman was absolutely my favorite super-hero of of gold, who saw this 12-year-old kid standing in line and just went out all time, and I wanted that book. So Bobby and I pooled all the money of his way like that. It would be several years later when my first dream we had saved for the convention: $20. The bidding starts. We can see that in life came true: to write ‘Batman’ comics, something which I had been the book was going to go higher. I tell Bobby to try to stay in the wanting to do since I was 8 years old. Julie Schwartz made that dream running while I go to find my parents and get more money. I return with come true and was one of several people important to my life career.”

5 extra bucks I got my dad to cough up. We now bid our $25 for it, but it ends up going for $37 ... so by twelve dollars I miss owning Batman #1 at that time. I wound up getting it later in life ... but I don’t even want to tell you what I paid for it.”

Otto

Uslan and Klein started writing for fanzines, thus making more trips to Manhattan, and frequently haunting the hallways of Marvel, DC, and beyond. “We went up to see Joe Simon when he was editing the Harvey action line,” Uslan remembers. “We went to see Sam Schwartz at Tower ... we saw Bill Harris at King ... we were hitting everybody we could.”

Another fanzine opened up another door—literally the front door— to the home of one of comics’ greatest writers. It was in Alter Ego #7 (1964) that Uslan read extensive coverage of The Marvel Family and Fawcett Publications’ most prolific and imaginative scripter, Otto Binder. “I found out that Otto lived not too far from us,” Uslan says.

“So Bobby and I made arrangements to go meet him. My parents drove

Hollywoodchuck — Part 1 us, and we spent from early morning to late at night at Otto Binder’s house, where we asked a million questions. Otto further opened up our world to the Golden Age of Comics.”

Binder also put the two young fans in touch with others who had all played an integral part in the Marvel Family saga: C.C. Beck, Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. Through corresponding with Fawcett alumni, the boys worked very hard with the noble intention of putting together a fanzine called The Fawcett Story, which, ultimately, never materialized.

Uslan and Klein had already been in contact Binder prior to that first-ever comic book convention at the flea-infested Broadway Central, where Binder was a guest of honor. “We were looking around for Otto,” says Uslan. “He knew we were there, we knew he was there. We finally found him in the bar sitting next to this guy, so we go sit next to them.

Since this was the Broadway Central, nobody seemed to care that two 12-year-olds were in the bar sitting next to these two older guys. Otto and his friend were putting ’em down pretty good, and then Otto asked, ‘How’d you kids like to meet the guy who created Batman?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he’s my favorite character!’ Otto announced, ‘Well, this is the guy who created Batman!’ Sitting next to Otto was Bill Finger. It was magic.

There’s no other word to describe that moment.”

The two boys always jumped at the chance to go to Otto’s house. “I totally flipped over his daughter Mary,” Uslan recalls. “She was this beautiful blonde, just slightly older than me. It was the perfect thing: here’s a girl whose father wrote Captain Marvel and was writing Superman ... she loved and knew about comics ... she was pretty.…”

Then tragedy hit the Binders in 1967 when an automobile hit their daughter as she kneeled to pick up books she had dropped in the school driveway. Mary’s death destroyed the whole family. “It was horrible,” recalls Uslan. Otto’s wife Ione just lost touch with reality and went to a very dark place. She was trying to burn down the house one day. Otto had to have her institutionalized, and it wasn’t long thereafter that he died of a heart attack.”

Still, it’s those visits to Otto’s house and the man’s kind and generous nature that Uslan will never forget. “As we would be

83

leaving his house, Otto would say things like, ‘Here, boys, here’s some Captain Marvel tie clips for you! ... You know, my first story I ever wrote in Captain Marvel Adventures was ‘Captain Marvel Saves the King’—here’s a copy each for you guys ... here’s ten copies of Master Comics that I think you’ll like.…” Bobby and I would always walk out of his house with our hands down at our knees, holding stacks of comics and stuff he’d give to us. He was that kind of guy.”

College Meets Comics After he graduated from high school in 1969, Indiana University put Uslan on the path to making more dreams come true. IU was the huge stepping-stone to getting him to where he wanted to go via an opportunity to teach the world’s first accredited college course on comic books. IU had an experimental curriculum department in the early 70s where, basically, if you could prove to a panel of deans and professors at the Arts & Science school that you had a non-traditional course worthy of academic credit to be taught on campus—and if you could get a department on campus to back you in it—then you could have the course accredited and you could teach it. Uslan decided to go for it.

“I went over to the Folklore Department to convince Dr. Henry Glassie that comic books were a modern day folklore ... that the characters, the plots, and the motifs were a continuation of what had been and that comics were our modern day mythology,” Uslan said. He received Dr. Glassie’s full support. Then he went over to pitch comic books to the panel: “It was like going into the original Justice League secret sanctuary. There was this huge conference table in a dark-paneled room, and at the end was a Dean of the school, who had the little halfglasses sitting on the end of his nose. I remember him looking down at me and saying, ‘So you’re the fellow who wants to teach a course on funny books at my University?”

Uslan stood in front of the Dean prepared to launch into his pitch, armed with comic books and original artwork; his hair was shoulderlength, and he was wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt. The Dean allowed him speak for a couple minutes, then abruptly cut him off: “Look, I loved comics when I was a kid. I read ‘Superman’ all the time. But let’s face it: comic books are simply cheap entertainment, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I don’t accept your premise about them being a modern day mythology and folklore.” Uslan responded, “Can I ask you two questions? Are you familiar with the story of Moses?”

The Dean said, “Sure.” Uslan said, “Could you just summarize for me the story of Moses?” The Dean looked at him and said, “I’m not sure what game you’re playing here, but I’m going to play it with you.” He went over the story ... how the Hebrew people were being persecuted and how their first-born were being slain ... how the couple put their son in a little wicker basket and sent him down the river where he was discovered by an Egyptian family who raised the child as their own ... how he grew to become a hero to his people.

The Dean concluded his summarization.

Say “Shazam!” Otto Writer Otto O. Binder (seen at right in a 1960s photo) didn’t start writing Captain Marvel’s exploits till 1941, more than a year after the World’s Mightiest Mortal was created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck, but he became one of that hero’s major scribes. When they visited his New Jersey home—the famous “House That Captain Marvel Built”—Binder gave Mike Uslan and Bob Klein copies of Captain Marvel Adventures #9 (April 1942), which contained his first “CM” comic book story, “Captain Marvel Saves the King.”

Cover by C.C. Beck and his studio. Previously, Otto had written the Captain Marvel Dime Action Book, Return of The Scorpion, featuring the villain from the 1941 Republic serial. Photo courtesy of Marc Swayze. [Captain Marvel TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

“That’s great,” Uslan told him. “You said you once read ‘Superman’ comics. Do you remember the origin of Superman?”

The Dean recalled the tale, and then Uslan asked him now to summarize the origin of Superman. The Dean began to describe how the planet Krypton was about to explode ...

84

Batman Begins Co-Producer Michael Uslan On Captain Marvel & Other Wonders

Tales From the Krypton Here’s the “Twice-Told Tale” (one definitely fit for Michael T. Gilbert’s Comic Crypt—or should that be “Comic Krypton”?) which Mike Uslan used to sell Indiana U. on letting him teach a course on comic books in the early 1970s!

(Left:) Little Moses is set adrift by his mother on an Egyptian river, with the hope of finding new “parents,” as illustrated by comics artist André Le Blanc in The Picture Bible (1978). [©2005 David C. Cook Publishing Co.] (Right:) Jor-El and Lara follow Moses’ example in a 1973 retelling of Superman’s origin with script by E. Nelson Bridwell, layouts by Carmine Infantino, pencils by Curt Swan and inks by Murphy Anderson. This version appeared, with gray wash tones, in the tabloid-size Amazing World of Superman – Metropolis Edition, in conjunction with the first Superman Day celebration held in Metropolis, Illinois. The story was printed in color in the 1974 tabloid Limited Collectors’ Edition, Vol. 3, #C-31. [©2005 DC Comics.]

how the scientist and his wife put their infant son in a little rocket ship and sent him to Earth, where he was discovered by the Kents, who raised him as their own… then the Dean came to a halt, paused, looked at Uslan and said, “Your course is accredited!”

Uslan couldn’t believe what he had just accomplished. Walking on air and his mind racing, he returned to his apartment and called United Press International in Indianapolis and asked for the reporter in charge of education in the state. “This guy gets on the phone and I start yelling at him,” Uslan remembers. “I said, ‘What the hell is going on? How can you guys do nothing about this ... it’s the worse thing I ever heard of!’ The reporter says, “Calm down, what are you talking about?” I said, “I heard that Indiana University is teaching a course on comic books! This is a nightmare! This has got to be some kind of Communist plot to subvert the youth of our country! How could they be teaching this course? I’m a taxpayer in Indiana! How could they be using my money to teach comic books? This is outrageous!’ And I hung up the phone. It took UPI three days to find out that there indeed now was a comic book course at IU and that I was the person who was teaching it.”

Uslan’s self-marketing had worked. The UPI reporter interviewed him and an article went out through UPI and was picked up by newspapers everywhere. “As a result of that article,” Uslan said, “I never taught a class that wasn’t filled with TV cameras from all the major networks, and with reporters from major magazines from Playboy to Penthouse to Parade magazine.”

The media blitz didn’t stop there. Uslan was invited onto radio and TV talk shows. Then, on the day the article broke, he received a call from Stan Lee at Marvel Comics. Uslan said it felt like God speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai. Lee said, “Mike, everywhere I look I’m reading and hearing about your course. This is great for the comic book industry. How can I help you?” Lee would send Uslan materials—along with writers Steve Englehart and Gerry Conway as lecturers—for his course. Three hours later the phone rang again. On the line was Sol Harrison, VP of DC Comics: “Michael, everywhere we look it’s about this course.

This is very important for the comic book industry ... to be perceived as educational and something that the college students are into. We’d like to fly you to New York and talk about ways you might be able to work with us.” Harrison flew Uslan to New York. “Suddenly I’m at the offices of Sol and Carmine Infantino at DC Comics,” Uslan said. “As a longtime fan, it was an incredible feeling.”

[The conclusion of this article on Michael Uslan will appear in A/E #56, dealing with his days as a Junior Woodchuck at DC, and revelations about DC’s Fawcett Connection, as well as a few hints about his projected big-budget Shazam! film.

The Batman 4-DVD box set and Batman Begins DVD hit stores in October.]

Batman Begins—Again The motion picture Batman Begins, released in June 2005, re-defined the franchise, chronicling the early days of the Caped Crusader. Michael Uslan was its executive producer. [©2005 Time-Warner.]

SPECIAL BRAZILIAN BONUS! Presenting two more pulsating pages from the unique story produced especially for the Brazilian comic Almanaque do O Globo Juvnil in 1964. This tale a crossover between Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and Timely/Marvel’s original Human Torch, at a time when Cap had been defunct in the US for more than a decade, and a new Torch was burning it up in Marvel’s Fantastic Four.

The Cobra, a villain who’d fought Timely’s super-heroes in the early 1940s as The Python, has escaped from prison... [©2005 the respective copyright holders; Captain Marvel TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

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“Captain Marvel Meets The Human Torch” (Continued)

86 “Captain Marvel Meets The Human Torch”

NOTE: The Human Torch doesn’t appear on either of these pages, but remember—Brazillians were reading the entire 20-page story at one sitting! The original tale was scripted in Portuguese, naturally, but these pages have been translated and lettered by Mark Leubker. The 1964 art is by Rodriguez Zelis, while modern-day art restoration and gray tones are by Matt Moring, with special thanks to John G. Pierce, Rodrigo M. Zeidan, and Matt Gore. [©2005 the respective copyright holders; Captain Marvel TM & ©2005 DC Comics.]

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

ALTER EGO #141

ALTER EGO #143

ALTER EGO #144

DRAW! #32

BRICKJOURNAL #41

From Detroit to Deathlok, we cover the career of artist RICH BUCKLER: Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Black Panther, Ka-Zar, Dracula, Morbius, a zillion Marvel covers— Batman, Hawkman, and other DC stars— Creepy and Eerie horror—and that’s just in the first half of the 1970s! Plus Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, FCA, and comics expert HAMES WARE on fabulous Golden Age artist RAFAEL ASTARITA!

DON GLUT discusses his early years as comic book writer for Marvel, Warren, and Gold Key, with art by SANTOS, MAROTO, CHAN, NEBRES, KUPPERBERG, TUSKA, TRIMPE, SAL BUSCEMA, and others! Also, SAL AMENDOLA and ROY THOMAS on the 1970s professional Academy of Comic Book Arts, founded by STAN LEE and CARMINE INFANTINO! Plus Mr. Monster, FCA, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

MARK CARLSON documents 1940s-50s ACE COMICS (with super-heroes Magno & Davey, Lash Lightning, The Raven, Unknown Soldier, Captain Courageous, Vulcan, and others)! Art by KURTZMAN, MOONEY, BERG, L.B. COLE, PALAIS, and more. Plus: RICHARD ARNDT’s interview with BILL HARRIS (1960s-70s editor of Gold Key and King Comics), FCA, Comic Crypt, and Comic Fandom Archive.

Super-star DC penciler HOWARD PORTER demos his creative process, and JAMAL IGLE discusses everything from storyboarding to penciling as he gives a breakdown of his working methods. Plus there’s Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS reviewing art supplies, JERRY ORDWAY showing the Ord-Way of doing comics, and Comic Art Bootcamp lessons with BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

OUT OF THIS WORLD LEGO! Spacethemed LEGO creations of LIA CHAN, 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Orion space plane

by NICK DEAN, and Pre-Classic Space builder CHRIS GIDDENS! Plus: Orbit the LEGO community with JARED K. BURKS’ minifigure customizing, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd DIY Fan Art, MINDSTORMS robotics by DAMIEN KEE, and more!

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BACK ISSUE #89

BACK ISSUE #90

BACK ISSUE #91

BACK ISSUE #92

BACK ISSUE #93

“Bronze Age Adaptations!” The Shadow, Korak: Son of Tarzan, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Worlds Unknown, and Marvel’s 1980s movie adaptations. Plus: PAUL KUPPERBERG surveys prose adaptations of comics! With work by JACK KIRBY, DENNY O’NEIL, FRANK ROBBINS, MICHAEL W. KALUTA, FRANK THORNE, MICHAEL USLAN, and sporting an alternate Kaluta cover produced for DC’s Shadow series!

“Eighties Ladies!” MILLER & SIENKIEWICZ’s Elektra: Assassin, Dazzler, Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau), Lady Quark, DAN MISHKIN’s Wonder Woman, WILLIAM MESSNER-LOEBS and ADAM KUBERT’s Jezebel Jade, Somerset Holmes, and a look back at Marvel’s Dakota North! Featuring the work of BRUCE JONES, JOHN ROMITA JR., ROGER STERN, and many more, plus a previously unpublished cover by SIENKIEWICZ.

“All-Jerks Issue!” Guy Gardner, Namor in the Bronze Age, J. Jonah Jameson, Flash Thompson, DC’s Biggest Blowhards, the Heckler, Obnoxio the Clown, and Archie’s “pal” Reggie Mantle! Featuring the work of (non-jerks) RICH BUCKLER, KURT BUSIEK, JOHN BYRNE, STEVE ENGLEHART, KEITH GIFFEN, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and many more. Cover-featuring KEVIN MAGUIRE’s iconic Batman/Guy Gardner “One Punch”!

“Bronze Age Halloween!” The Swamp Thing revival of 1982, Swamp Thing in Hollywood, Phantom Stranger team-ups, KUPPERBERG & MIGNOLA’s Phantom Stranger miniseries, DC’s The Witching Hour, the Living Mummy, and an index of Marvel’s 1970s’ horror anthologies! Featuring the work of RICH BUCKLER, ANDY MANGELS, VAL MAYERIK, MARTIN PASKO, MICHAEL USLAN, THOMAS YEATES, and more. YEATES cover.

“All-Captains Issue!” Bronze Age histories of Shazam! (Captain Marvel) and Captain MarVell, Captain Carrot, Captain Storm and the Losers, Captain Universe, and Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers. Featuring C. C. BECK, PAT BRODERICK, JACK KIRBY, ELLIOT S. MAGGIN, BILL MANTLO, DON NEWTON, BOB OKSNER, SCOTT SHAW!, JIM STARLIN, ROY THOMAS, and more.

Cover painting by DAVE COCKRUM!

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #13 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #14

KIRBY COLLECTOR #68

KIRBY COLLECTOR #69

MICHAEL W. KALUTA feature interview covering his early fans days THE SHADOW, STARSTRUCK, the STUDIO, and Vertigo cover work! Plus RAMONA FRADON talks about her 65+ years in the comic book business on AQUAMAN, METAMORPHO, SUPER-FRIENDS, and SPONGEBOB! Also JAY LYNCH reveals the WACKY PACK MEN who created the Topps trading cards that influenced an entire generation!

Comprehensive KELLEY JONES interview, from early years as Marvel inker to presentday greatness at DC depicting BATMAN, DEADMAN, and SWAMP THING (chockful of rarely-seen artwork)! Plus WILL MURRAY examines the nefarious legacy of Batman co-creator BOB KANE in an investigation into tragic ghosts and rapacious greed. We also look at RAINA TELGEMEIER and her magnificent army of devotees, and more!

KEY KIRBY CHARACTERS! We go decadeby-decade to examine pivotal characters Jack created throughout his career (including some that might surprise you)! Plus there’s a look at what would’ve happened if Kirby had never left Marvel Comics for DC, how Jack’s work has been repackaged over the decades, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and galleries of unseen Kirby pencil art!

KIRBY’S PARTNERS! Cap/Falcon/Bucky, Sandman & Sandy, Orion & Lightray, Johnny & Ben, Dingbats, Newsboys, plus features on JOE SIMON, MIKE ROYER, CHIC STONE, DICK AYERS, JOE SINNOTT, MIKE THIBODEAUX — even ROZ KIRBY! Also, BATTLE FOR A 3-D WORLD, the 2016 Comic-Con Kirby Tribute Panel, MARK EVANIER, and galleries of Kirby pencil art! Cover inked by JOE SINNOTT!

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