JOHNSON: How about you, Butch? By the time you came onto Micronauts, the toy line may have already been history. GUICE: Yeah, the toys had probably already bombed by the time I started on the book. I can’t recall ever having heard anything from the toy company itself, and by that time there wasn’t really any thought process towards connecting the comic to the toys. When I started on Micronauts, Bill was essentially wrapping up his run on it. We spent the next ten or eleven issues wrapping up his stories and then the title was cancelled. We were one of the first three Marvel direct sales books and after it was cancelled, it was relaunched a year later with Peter Gillis writing it and Kelley Jones, who had inked my pencils on the book, was penciling it then. I know that Bill was pulling his whole storyline together, and he wanted the heroes to have a final showdown with Baron Karza, the main villain, and sort of pull the cast back together.
A killer Butch Guice splash page (inked by Danny Bulanadi) from his first Micronauts issue, #50. Courtesy of Mike Blanchard. Micronauts TM & © Mego Corporation.
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JOHNSON: Speaking of Bill Mantlo, you each had the chance to work with him while on these books. What can you tell us about him? BUSCEMA: Bill and I worked together fine. I thought Bill was a very talented writer. We did have a bit of a falling out at the end of my run on Rom. That was simply because of a misunderstanding between us. I think Bill wanted to exercise more control over the illustration part of the book, and if I prided myself on anything, it was that I was a good storyteller. I didn’t consider myself the greatest draftsman in the industry by any stretch of the imagination, and I felt I was competent, but my greatest strength was storytelling and we were butting heads too much. Bill was asking me to do things that I knew, in my experience, would not work. We were on the book for a long time, and I worked with Bill on other books, and I thought we had a very successful and amiable relationship. It was just at that particular time, for some unknown reason, that happened. I was getting tired of doing the book anyway, and I wanted to go on to other things, so it worked out well. GUICE: My own experience [with Bill], just getting into the industry, it was the first time I had worked with a writer for any period of time. I had a great time working with Bill. In fact, after Micronauts was cancelled, we went on to do Swords of the Swashbucklers for Epic. Gradually, I left that title and then I don’t think Bill and I ever had the chance to work together again. At one time, while I was at DC, he contacted me and he was briefly talking about wanting to get back into comics. That was after he had left the industry for a little while. BUSCEMA: He studied law, didn’t he? GUICE: Yeah, he went to law school and he became an attorney. He just called me up out of the blue one day and said that he missed comics and he was thinking about getting back into the business. We talked about some possible projects and it never really came together. We didn’t get our heads together fast enough and I believe it was just a couple of months later that he had his accident. [Editor’s note: See Tony Isabella’s sidebar.] BUSCEMA: Was it really? GUICE: It was fairly close, right prior to his accident. As far as working with Bill, I do remember giving him a hard time about [some of the plots I was] getting, via the Marvel method of plotting which was still popular at the time. As a new artist, I was somewhat taken aback the first time I got a plot that said, “Pages 5 through 15, the Micronauts fight.”