Back Issue #47

THRILLING DAYS OF YESTERYEAR: Dominic Fortune • Justice, Inc. • Man-God • Miracle Squad • The Phantom • with Aparo, Chaykin, DeZuniga, Kirby, Verheiden, and more!

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FEATURING Dave StevenS’ FINAL INTERVIEW Also: BILSON and DeMEO discuss the RocketeeR movie

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

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Edited by MICHAEL EURY, BACK ISSUE magazine celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through recurring (and rotating) departments like “Pro2Pro” (dialogue between professionals), “BackStage Pass” (behind-the-scenes of comicsbased media), “Greatest Stories Never Told” (spotlighting unrealized comics series or stories), and more!

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“New World Order!” Adam Warlock examined with JIM STARLIN and ROY THOMAS, the history of Miracleman with ALAN DAVIS & GARRY LEACH, JIM SHOOTER interview, Marvel’s post-STAN LEE editors-in-chief on New Universe, Logan’s Run, Star Hunters, BOB WIACEK on Star Wars and Star-Lord, DICK GIORDANO revisits Crisis on Infinite Earths and “The Post-Crisis DC Universe You Didn’t See,” new cover by JIM STARLIN!

“Villains!” MIKE ZECK and J.M. DeMATTEIS discuss “Kraven’s Last Hunt”, history of the Hobgoblin is exposed, the Joker’s short-lived series, Secret Society of Super-Villains and Kobra, a Magneto biography, Luthor and Brainiac’s malevolent makeovers, interview with Secret Society artist MIKE VOSBURG, plus contributions from BYRNE, CONWAY, FRENZ, NOVICK, ROMITA JR., STERN, WOLFMAN, and a cover by MIKE ZECK!

“Monsters!” Frankenstein in Comics timeline and a look at BERNIE WRIGHTSON’s and Marvel’s versions, histories of Vampirella and Morbius, ISABELLA and AYERS discuss It the Living Colossus, REDONDO’s Swamp Thing, Man-Bat, monster art gallery, interview with TONY DeZUNIGA, art and commentary from ARTHUR ADAMS, COLÓN, KALUTA, NEBRES, PLOOG, SUTTON, VEITCH, and a painted cover by EARL NOREM!

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“Comics Go to War!” KUBERT/KANIGHER’s Sgt. Rock, EVANIER and SPIEGLE’s Blackhawk, GEORGE PRATT’s Enemy Ace, plus Unknown Soldier, Wonder Woman’s return to WWII, the Invaders, Combat Kelly, Vietnam Journal, Sad Sack, the Joe Kubert School, art and commentary from AYERS, HEATH, KIRBY, ROBBINS, ROMITA SR., SINNOTT, and the return of GERRY TALAOC! JOE KUBERT cover!

“Family!” JOHN BYRNE’s Fantastic Four, SIMONSON, BRIGMAN, and BOGDANOVE on Power Pack, LEVITZ and STATON on the Huntress, Henry Pym’s “son” Ultron, Wonder Twins, Commissioner Gordon & Batgirl’s relationship, and Return of the New Gods.

With art and commentary from BUCKLER, BUSIEK, FRADON, HECK, INFANTINO, NEWTON, and WOLFMAN, and a Norman Rockwell-inspired BYRNE cover!

“April Fools”! GIFFEN and LOREN FLEMING on Ambush Bug, BYRNE’s She-Hulk, interviews with HEMBECK, ALAN KUPPERBERG, Flaming Carrot’s BOB BURDEN, and DAVID CHELSEA, Spider-Ham, Forbush-Man, Reid Fleming, MAD in the 1970s, art and commentary from DICK DeBARTOLO, TOM DeFALCO, AL FELDSTEIN, AL JAFFEE, STAN LEE, DAVE SIM, and a Spider-Ham cover by MIKE WIERINGO, inked by KARL KESEL!

(NOW 8x/YEAR, WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Cat People!” Catwoman, Black Cat, Hellcat, Vixen, Atlas’ Tiger-Man and Cougar, White Tiger and the Sons of the Tiger, Wildcat, Thundercats, Josie and the Pussycats, and the Badger! With art and commentary from BOLLAND, BRENNERT, COLON, CONWAY, DITKO, GOLDBERG, LEVITZ, MILGROM, MST3000’s MIKE NELSON, and more. Cover

by JOE STATON and FREDDY LOPEZ, JR.!

(NOW 8x/YEAR, WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Red, White, and Blue” issue! Captain America and the Red Skull, CHAYKIN’s American Flagg, THOMAS and COLAN’s Wonder Woman, Freedom Fighters, and Team America! With art and commentary from JOHN BYRNE, STEVE ENGLEHART, ROGER STERN, CURT SWAN, MARK WAID, LEN WEIN, MIKE ZECK, and more.

Cover by HOWARD CHAYKIN!

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(NOW 8x/YEAR, WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Wild West” issue! Jonah Hex examined with FLEISHER, DeZUNIGA, DOMINGUEZ, GARCIA-LOPEZ, GIFFEN, HANNIGAN, plus TRUMAN’s Scout, TRIMPE’s Rawhide Kid, AYERS’ Ghost Rider, DC’s Weird Westerns, the Vigilante’s 1970s revival, and more! Art and commentary by ADAMS, APARO, DIXON, EVANS, KUNKEL, MORROW, NICIEZA, and more. Cover by DeZUNIGA!

(NOW 8x/YEAR, WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Jungle and barbarian” issue! Shanna the She-Devil feature and gallery, JONES and ANDERSON on Ka-Zar, LARRY HAMA interview, Beowulf, Claw the Unconquered, Korg 70,000 B.C., Red Sonja, Rima the Jungle Girl, art and commentary by AZZARELLO, BOYETTE, CHAN, GULACY, KUBERT, MICHELINIE, REDONDO, ROY THOMAS, WINDSOR-SMITH, cover by FRANK CHO!

(NOW 8x/YEAR, WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Spider-Man in the Bronze Age!” Drug issues, resurrection of Green Goblin and Gwen Stacy, Marvel Team-Up, Spectacular Spider-Man, Spidey Super Stories, CBS and Japanese TV shows, Clone Saga, CONWAY, ANDRU, BAGLEY, SAL BUSCEMA, DeFALCO, FINGEROTH, GIL KANE, STAN LEE, LEIBER, MOONEY, ROMITA SR., SALICRUP, SAVIUK, STERN, cover by BOB LARKIN!

(NOW 8x/YEAR, WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Odd Couples!” O’NEIL and ADAMS’ Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Englehart’s Justice League of America, Daredevil and Black Widow, Power Man and Iron Fist, Vision and Scarlet Witch, Cloak and Dagger, and… Aquaman and Deadman (?!). With AUSTIN, COLAN, CONWAY, COWAN, DILLIN, HOWELL, LEONARDI, SKEATES, and more. New cover by NEAL ADAMS!

(NOW 8x/YEAR, WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Greatest Stories Never Told!” How Savage Empire became The Warlord, the aborted FF graphic novel “Fathers and Sons,” BYRNE’s Last Galactus Story, Star*Reach’s Batman, Aquaman II, 1984 Black Canary miniseries, Captain America: The Musical, Miracleman: Triumphant, unpublished issues of The Cat and Warlock, BLEVINS, DEODATO, FRADON, SEKOWSKY, WEISS, MIKE GRELL cover!

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Volume 1, Number 47 April 2011 Celebrating the Best Comics of the '70s, '80s, and Beyond!

The Retro Comics Experience!

EDITOR Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow DESIGNER Rich J. Fowlks COVER ARTIST Dave Stevens COVER COLORIST Laura Martin COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS Jack Abramowitz Michael Ambrose Dave Ballard Mike W. Barr Danny Bilson Jerry Boyd Mike Burkey Mike Carlin Howard Chaykin Nicola Cuti Peter David Paul DeMeo John S. Eury Ron Frantz Mike Gold Golden Apple Comics Grand Comic-Book Database Robert Greenberger Heritage Auction Galleries Douglas R. Kelly Joseph F. Lenius Ryan Liebowitz Jim Main David Mandel Andy Mangels Kelvin Mao Luke McDonnell

Michael Mikulovsky John Morrow Dennis O’Neil Bill Pearson Greg Preston John Roche Cliff Secord Lloyd Smith Terry Tidwell Mark Verheiden John Wooley

BACK SEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 FLASHBACK: The Phantom at Charlton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 All-star artists Jim Aparo, Pat Boyette, and Don Newton made this licensed title a winner FLASHBACK: DC’s Ghost Who Walks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 Peter David, Mike Gold, Luke McDonnell, and Mark Verheiden discuss The Phantom BEYOND CAPES: Justice, Inc.? Not So Much . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 The lonely life of a perennial second-stringer BEYOND CAPES: Outrageous Fortune . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 Howard Chaykin looks back at his pulp-inspired Marvel hero, Dominic Fortune INTERVIEW: Dave Stevens: One Last Conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30 An in-depth, art-packed interview with the late, great creator of the Rocketeer PRO2PRO: Rocketeer-ing Its Way to a Theater Near You! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58 Screenwriters Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo chat about the Rocketeer movie BEYOND CAPES: Quiet on the Set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65 The Miracle Squad and the World of the B-Movie OFF MY CHEST: Before Superman! Even Before Doc Savage! There Was… Man-God! . . .73 A collector’s dream is to see the completion of this Roy Thomas/Tony DeZuniga adaptation BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 Reader feedback BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor, 118 Edgewood Avenue NE, Concord, NC 28025. E-mail: euryman@gmail.com.

Eight-issue subscriptions: $60 Standard US, $85 Canada, $107 Surface International. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Dave Stevens and Laura Martin. The Rocketeer TM & © The Rocketeer Trust. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2011 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing. BACK ISSUE is a TM of TwoMorrows Publishing. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING. Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

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by

Michael Eury

It seems as if obituaries have become a regular feature of this magazine. Saying farewell to the comics creators that shaped the reading experiences of our youth is to be expected as most of BACK ISSUE’s readers, who witnessed the Bronze Age firsthand, journey into Middle Age. Yet, it’s always with a twinge of sadness that we must accept the passing of a writer, artist, or editor whose work imprinted our lives. And with this issue we pay our respects to artist Mike Esposito, who died on October 24, 2010.

Esposito was an inker and artist who at times simultaneously worked at multiple publishers using pseudonyms including Mickey Demeo and Joe Gaudioso. “Mighty Mike” was a Silver and Bronze Age mainstay most famous for his longtime collaboration with penciler Ross Andru. The Andru/Esposito team was best known for stints on Wonder Woman, Metal Men, late-Silver Age issues of Superman and World’s Finest Comics, and Amazing Spider-Man. A 2005 inductee into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, Esposito remained active drawing commissions and recreations up until the time of his death. Featured on this page, courtesy of Jerry Boyd and Mike Burkey, is Esposito’s recreation of a splash page that he and Andru originally produced for Giant-Size Spider-Man #5 (July 1975).

We invite you to visit www.mightymikeespo.net to learn more about this beloved artist.

BACK ISSUE extends its condolences to the Esposito family, and to Mighty Mike’s many fans.

© 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MIKE ESPOSITO 1927–2010

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®

by

Michael Ambrose

Unlike most comic-book heroes, the Phantom began his life in the newspaper funny pages. The Phantom daily strip launched February 17, 1936, created and written by Lee Falk, following his successful Mandrake the Magician for King Features Syndicate. Phantom proved even more popular. A color Sunday page debuted in 1939, and the character soon graduated to other media: Columbia Pictures released a 15-part movie serial starring Tom Tyler in 1943 and Whitman published a Phantom novel the following year. Comic books reprinted the strips beginning with Ace Comics (David McKay Publications) in the 1940s and Harvey in the ’50s. Comics with original continuity came later: Gold Key produced 17 issues of The Phantom from 1962 to 1966, and King Comics had another 11 from 1966 to 1967 (a twelfth King issue, #29, was released only overseas). In 1967, the Phantom license went to the Charlton Comics Group of Derby, Connecticut.

Comics historian and ACE Comics publisher Ron Frantz recently recalled a 1983 conversation with the late Dick Giordano, the Charlton comics editor when the King Features deal was brokered. “If it hadn’t been for Dick, Charlton would never have had the contract,” Frantz says. “The negotiations between Charlton and King were long and slow and very delicate. Dick did all the work from beginning to end. The contracts arrived when he was out of the office for a few days. One of the big shots at Charlton moved in and took all the credit, staging a news conference and contract-signing ceremony. Dick’s hard work was not even mentioned.

Naturally, this was a slap in his face and it left a very bad taste in his mouth. It certainly influenced his decision to

Aparo Makes a Splash Fans started to notice future Batman artist Jim Aparo on Charlton’s The Phantom. Original art to page 1 of issue #38 (June 1970), courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com).

TM & © 2011 King Features Syndicate, Inc. (KFS).

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The Ghost with the Most Aparo’s eye-catching covers to (left) Charlton’s Phantom #31 (Apr. 1969) and 33 (Aug. 1969).

TM & © 2011 KFS.

leave Charlton for DC.” Since Giordano passed away not long ago, in early 2010, it’s appropriate that he receive some long-overdue credit.

Charlton was no stranger to adapting licensed properties. From 1948 on, Charlton published comics featuring B-movie Western stars like Tim McCoy and Sunset Carson, but its licensed line expanded after 1955, with strip reprints of Bo, Brenda Starr, Terry and the Pirates, and from TV and film, My Little Margie, Gorgo, and Konga.

But none of these offerings was remotely in the top tier until the company inked its deal with King.

New adaptations of Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Popeye, The Phantom, Flash Gordon, and Jungle Jim started with issues cover-dated February 1969. Hi and Lois, Ponytail, Tiger, and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith followed.

Lucrative distribution and merchandising doors suddenly opened for Charlton. Further deals from 1970 on, chiefly with Hanna-Barbera, put the company at the top of American publishers of licensed comics properties.

The Phantom has a richly detailed backstory. The current Phantom is Kit Walker, 21st in a line from 1536, when half-dead British sailor Christopher Walker washed ashore on the coast of the African country Bengalla (or Bengali) after pirates attacked his ship and murdered his father. Walker was rescued and nursed to health by the gentle Bandar pygmies. Later, he found the corpse of the pirate who killed his father and vowed vengeance on the pirate’s vulture-picked skull: “I swear

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to devote my life to the destruction of piracy, greed, cruelty, and injustice, in all their forms! My sons and their sons shall follow me.” This is the Oath of the Skull, which every succeeding male Walker swears before assuming the Phantom’s costume and mission.

Because of this generational continuity, the Phantom is considered to be immortal and is known as “the Ghost Who Walks” and “the Man Who Cannot Die.” The Phantom lives in the Skull Cave, deep in the jungle, with a fabulous treasure horde. All previous Phantoms are buried there. Along with brains and brawn and a fearsome reputation, he totes a pair of .45 caliber pistols. A ring on his right hand bears a skull insignia to permanently mark his enemies, and one on his left has a design of crossed sabers to confer protection on friends. The Phantom’s skin-tight purple suit and eyeless mask anticipate the colorful costumes of 20th-century superheroes.

Aiding him are his white stallion Hero and trained wolf Devil. The Phantom has an American girlfriend, Diana Palmer; Bandar chief Guran is his best friend and confidant. Going abroad, Walker dons dark glasses, trench coat, and fedora. No one has ever seen him unmasked and lived to tell of it.

The Phantom came to Charlton firmly established.

Creative teams had only to stay on model. The Charlton Phantom era is marked by three distinct lead artists: Jim Aparo, Pat Boyette, and Don Newton.

Jungle Action Angled-panel composition and fluid movement made Jim Aparo’s storytelling flow smoothly from image to image.

Original art to page 8 of The Phantom #33 (Aug. 1969).

Scan courtesy of Michael Ambrose.

TM & © 2011 KFS.

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Falk’s Fighting Man (below) Jim Aparo Phantom sketch, courtesy of Jim Main.

Previously published in Charlton Spotlight #5 (Fall 2006). (bottom right) Aparo cover to Phantom #35 (Dec. 1969).

APARO ARRIVES

Jim Aparo broke into comics in 1966 with sexyteen feature “Miss Bikini Luv” in Charlton’s Go-Go, but soon distinguished himself in backup series “Wander” in Cheyenne Kid, “Nightshade” in Captain Atom, and “Thane of Bagarth” in Hercules.

Aparo was a prolific triple-threat penciler/inker/ letterer. Regrettably for Charlton, he was too good to stay in the bush leagues. When Giordano left Charlton for DC in 1968, Aparo went with him. But to Charlton’s good fortune, Aparo’s initial DC workload was light enough to let him continue freelancing for his alma mater. He alternated between DC assignments and Phantom for just over a year, from #31 (Apr. 1969) to 38 (June 1970).

“The books were bimonthly,” Aparo told comics artist/historian Jim Amash in Comic Book Artist #9 (Aug. 2000), “so one month I was doing Phantom and the next month I did Aquaman.” jim aparo Aparo’s 13 stories and eight covers for Phantom are in tune with the bold, dramatic look of superhero comics of the period.

His modern, fast-moving style sweeps away all previous versions of the character. The book-length “Phantom of Shang-Ri-La” in #31 takes place in the Bengali Mountains, where a gang of thieves posing as ageless denizens of a paradisiacal lost city plot to swindle the vain rich. “The Pharaoh Phantom” in #32 (June 1969) has the Phantom traveling to Egypt’s Valley of Kings to answer the challenge of a rival Phantom resurrected from 2580 B.C. Scripts for both issues are by Golden Age veteran Dick Wood, whose career began in 1938 at Centaur and Funnies Inc. and continued with Lev Gleason, DC, and eventually Gold Key, where he had scripted Phantom in 1963 and ’64.

The first Charlton Phantom, #30 (Feb. 1969), was not an auspicious beginning, despite the presence of journeyman artists. Behind an oddly static Frank McLaughlin cover are four stories, only two of which star the Phantom. The lead story is set 100 years in the past, featuring then-Phantom’s twin sister Julie Walker as Girl Phantom in an encounter with pirates. Pencils and inks are by Don Perlin and Sal Trapani. A rushed-looking six-page McLaughlin story rounds out the issue, which feels like a placeholder while Charlton revs its creative engines. Indeed, the series jumps from zero to 60 with the very next issue.

TM & © 2011 KFS.

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Perhaps because of scheduling conflicts, Aparo took a backseat in #33 (Aug. 1969) with only the cover and a nine-pager, while the lead feature is penciled by Pat Boyette and inked by Charlton workhorse Vince Alascia. The script by Wood was his last outing on the character and possibly his last work in comics. Aparo’s contribution was a Steve Skeates–scripted tale of the Phantom’s supposed death, from which he mysteriously returns to defeat his would-be killers.

Issue #34 (Oct. 1969) marked the end of Aparo’s booklength Phantom stories; from there on his contributions would be limited to a series of miscellaneous shorts to be mixed and matched as necessary. The script for the first story in #34 is credited to Norm DiPluhm, a pseudonym most often ascribed Steve Skeates, who has denied the connection. DiPluhm probably also wrote all the uncredited remaining scripts for Aparo’s run with the exception of #35 (Dec. 1969). Whether again because of scheduling problems or using up inventory material, Aparo had only the cover for #35. “The Ghost Tribe” is scripted by Bill Harris and drawn by Bill Lignante, the primary team on the Gold Key and King runs. Standout Aparo stories for the remainder of his stint include “Skyjack” in #37 (Apr. 1970), with several panels printed in black and white; “The Dying Ground” (#38, June 1970), with a double-page splash opener; and “The Trap” (also in #38), which recaps the Phantom’s origin and gives Diana the lead. Aparo’s last issue is solid, and it’s a pity there would be no more.

His favorite Charlton work, as he told Amash, was on Phantom: “I grew at that company.”

BOYETTE’S BAROQUE BENGALI Like Aparo, Pat Boyette was a multitalented creator, delivering complete pencils, inks, and letters, and often scripts. Boyette was 43 years old when he got into comics, with a long career in radio-TV broadcasting behind him, although he’d tried his hand at comic strips before. Also like Aparo he got started at Charlton, submitting samples in 1965 to theneditor Pat Masulli, who shelved them until Giordano found the file and hired Boyette. From a slew of miscellaneous mystery stories, he expanded to the “Action Hero” line, making his mark with the Peacemaker and three issues of Pete Morisi’s Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt. After the Action Heroes’ demise, Boyette did Western, war, SF, and even romance for Charlton, including significant work on King properties Jungle Jim and Flash Gordon.

Following Giordano to DC, he missed the creative freedom of Charlton and soon returned. His tenure on Phantom proved to be the longest of any artist at Charlton and perhaps of any Phantom artist outside the newspaper strip. Not counting his fill-in for #33, Boyette contributed no fewer than 59 stories and 21 covers, from #39 (Aug. 1970) to #59 (Dec. 1973).

Nearly all his stories average seven pages, making the book more of an adventure anthology than one with ongoing continuity. Charlton chief scripter Joe Gill probably wrote them all.

On Boyette’s watch, the Phantom encounters pirates, phony Phantoms, aliens from outer space, Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

High-Sea Adventure A double-page spread (pages 6–7) by artist Pat Boyette, from the Joe Gillscripted “The Phantom and John Paul Jones,” featuring the Phantom of 1777.

Published in issue #45 (Aug. 1971).

Courtesy of Michael Ambrose.

TM & © KFS.

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Close Encounters Pat Boyette’s cover to The Phantom #49 (Apr. 1972) abducts the Man Who Cannot Die into a sci-fi adventure, while his #51 cover (Aug. 1972) returns him to more familiar terrain.

TM & © 2011 KFS.

denizens of lost cities, jewel thieves, false priests, and King Features, who didn’t like his work,” and assorted other malefactors. The historical Frantz recalls. “Granted, Pat’s style was quite Phantom isn’t neglected. In #45 (Aug. 1971), the different from that of Bill Lignante. It was much the Phantom of 1777 helps young Captain John Paul same when Pat drew Flash Gordon for Charlton.

Jones battle the pirates of Tripoli. In #56 (June 1973), King hated it.” How did Boyette feel about working “The Nazi Phantom” joins forces with a on this iconic character? “My impression German U-boat crew long enough to is that Pat didn’t have any strong expose their sub to Allied attack. feelings about the Phantom one way Stories frequently guest-star Diana or the other,” Frantz says. “Given and Chief Guran. the choice, he preferred drawing As with all his Charlton work, anything besides superheroes.

Boyette made regular use of his He got burned out on The Phantom trademark diagonal panels and (and superheroes in general) after double-page spreads to advance drawing so many issues. Pat hated the story, with clear, uncluttered repetition in his work. Drawing frames focusing on main figures, the same thing over and over mood, and action. Boyette had bored him to tears. It’s not easy a professional knowledge of to turn out quality work issue after printing technology and issue. Pat, I think, did this pat boyette experimented with a grayline admirably.” wash technique for several After Boyette’s final Phantom covers (issues #51–54), rendering an unusual (#59, Dec. 1973), there followed a half-year painterly effect. hiatus during which virtually no Charlton comics Fan reaction to Boyette’s Phantom was mixed. appeared because of paper shortages from strikes Ron Frantz knew Boyette in the 1980s and in Canadian paper mills. Perhaps it was this employed him on several of his ACE Comics enforced pause that compelled Charlton to take titles. “He took quite a bit of flack from both Falk Phantom in a new direction.

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A Title in Transition (left) The first of artist Frank Bolle’s two Phantom issues, #64 (Mar. 1975). (right) Don Sherwood’s cover to issue #66 (Aug. 1975).

Sherwood was perhaps best known at Charlton for its Partridge Family and David Cassidy series. On the Sherwood-produced page below, from Partridge Family #5 (Summer 1975), Reuben Kincaid reminisces about the good old days—prompting this cameo by the Lone Ranger and Tonto! (You didn’t think we could do a “Thrilling Days of Yesteryear” issue without the Dynamic Duo of the Wild West, did you?)

RETURN TO ROOTS: THE “NEW” PHANTOM Phantom’s return to the newsstands looked promising, with brand-new Aparo covers on #60 (June 1974) and 61 (Sept. 1974) heralding “the New Phantom,” but the contents belied that promise. Issues #60–63 (June 1974–Jan. 1975) offered translated Italian Phantom stories reprinted from Avventure AmericaneL’Uomo Mascherato; issues #62 and 63 had new covers

by Frank Bolle. Why Charlton ran translations to kick off the “New” Phantom remains a mystery. The stories (by Giovanni Fiorentini) are well drawn (issues #60, 62, and 63 by Mario Pedrazzi; #61 by Sante D’Amico) and action-filled, but are obviously reprints. Perhaps they gave Charlton breathing room while developing truly new Phantom stories.

Issue #61 has the first-ever installment of a Phantom letters page, “Monkey Mail,” which gives some insight into the new direction. “Here at Charlton,” it states, “we’ve tried to revive all the original Phantom lore which has entranced comic readers for so many years.

The originator, Lee Falk, has from time to time pointed out discrepancies in Charlton’s version of Phantom and we gratefully accepted and complied with each of Mr. Falk’s suggestions. Now, however, we’re going even further. We’ll be using new art and different writers, returning to the Phantom as Lee Falk conceived him…

We at Charlton hereby pledge a return to The Phantom millions of people knew and loved.”

That pledge would not be realized immediately, but the next three issues are originals, featuring booklength Joe Gill stories. Frank Bolle, an artist better known for comic strips, drew covers and interiors for issues #64 and 65 (Mar. and June 1975). Don Sherwood, creator of the Dan Flagg syndicated strip and artist for Charlton’s Partridge Family titles, had #66 (Aug. 1975).

As all-new issues, none is particularly inspired. But big changes were on the way.

Phantom TM & © 2011 KFS. Partridge Family TM & © Screen Gems Television.

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New(ton) Blood on The Phantom (left) Don Newton self-portrait with the Phantom, published originally in the fanzine The Charlton Bullseye v.2 #5 (July–Sept. 1976). (right) Original art to Joe Gill’s story “Triumph of Evil,” page 17, from Phantom #67 (Oct. 1975).

Newton’s artwork would mature with each Phantom issue.

TM & © 2011 KFS.

murdered by renegade Nazis and what lies ahead for THE NEWTON RENAISSANCE Nicola Cuti, editor George Wildman’s then- them when, someday, their own son will become the assistant, remembers this fluid period: “One day I Phantom. Joe Gill’s script powerfully demonstrates received a phone call from Lee Falk. I immediately why he was Charlton’s top writer.

Nick Cuti’s script for #68 (Dec. 1975) veered into turned the phone over to George. Later he told me Falk was unhappy with the stories we were doing. fantasy with “The Beasts of Madame Kahn,” a story of werebeasts and the legend of a lost tribe that Either George or I got the idea of producing practiced lycanthropy to terrorize enemies. new stories using Don Newton as artist.

Newton’s Frazetta-like cover crackles on His style was perfect for the Phantom. the edge of explosive action.

Don was very excited about the After issue #69 (Feb. 1976), idea and I think we produced which has a Newton cover fronting some of the finest Phantom comics a story drawn by Spanish artist in the business.”

Demetrio Sánchez Gómez (better Newton, an Arizona schoolknown as “Demetrio”), we meet teacher, got his professional break at the Phantom of 1938 in “The Charlton in 1974 delivering ghost, Mystery of the Mali Ibex” (#70, Apr. war, and romance stories before 1976). Bill Pearson’s script features landing The Phantom. Like Aparo a cast of shady characters based on and Boyette, Newton penciled, Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, inked, and lettered his pages. His don newton Peter Lorre, Lauren Bacall, Elisha first issue (#67, Oct. 1975) is a Cook, Jr., and Claude Rains in a renaissance effort in the long Phantom saga. Charlton was then printing painted delightful adventure story full of twists and turns covers, and Newton took full advantage of the blending scenes from The Maltese Falcon, opportunity with a dramatic depiction of the Phantom Casablanca, The African Queen, and The Treasure of and Devil, with a flaming jungle background dominated the Sierra Madre. Newton, interviewed in the fanzine by an iconic skull. “Triumph of Evil” recaps both the Charlton Bullseye #5 (July–Sept. 1976), told how it first and the current Phantom’s origin. Kit Walker tells happened: “Bill Pearson... wrote some Phantom Diana how he assumed the role after his father was summaries for me, and at the end of one decided to

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be funny and penned in ‘and in the end the Phantom stops in Casablanca where he meets Bogart, Lorre, Greenstreet, etc.’ When I read this I thought he was nuts, but then I began to see a possible story. I called him and he then thought that I was nuts! Nevertheless, the story developed and after redoing it several times, [we] submitted it to Charlton. They called it ‘a classic.’ I hope so. It could start a trend. It could also spoil me because it was so enjoyable to collaborate on.” Pearson recently recalled the collaboration: “Don did some excellent caricatures. In addition to writing and lettering the story, I colored the whole thing, too. Believe me,” he adds wryly, “neither of us were paid an extra cent for the extra work.” Pearson lettered and colored all of Newton’s Phantom stories at the time.

Newton’s style grew more sophisticated with each issue: #71 (July 1976) has the Phantom fighting a giant spider in “The Monster of Zanadar.” After a Gill/Sherwood fill-in issue, the Phantom battles Master Raven and his sub-men underlings in “The Torch” (#73, Oct. 1976), another Pearson script (as by “Ben S. Parillo”). The final Charlton issue (#74, Jan. 1977) rises to a pinnacle. In “The Phantom of 1776,” written and drawn by Newton, the Phantom of that signal year sails to the American colonies to rescue a chief’s son taken by slavers. Visiting his old friend Benjamin Franklin, he silently witnesses the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Newton’s cover is surely the most powerful of all Charlton Phantom covers. His Charlton work was never stronger than in this final issue.

Wistfully, we can only guess where Newton’s Phantom might have gone thereafter. Charlton suddenly ceased publishing original comics in late 1976, going allreprint with the exception of the last issues of its licensed titles. Pearson, speculating about the loss of

Wereman Dares Tread

the Phantom license, notes that “Charlton probably forfeited the right to proceed with their contract when they ceased publishing all the King comics.”

Charlton’s run of 45 Phantom issues was the longest of any American comics publisher, longer than all succeeding publishers combined. Limited series appeared later from DC, Marvel, Wolf Publishing, and Moonstone; Dynamite Entertainment acquired the King license in 2010. The comic strip still runs in newspapers around the world.

Though Charlton’s series is but a memory, the Phantom lives on—truly “the Man Who Cannot Die.”

(above) Courtesy of Heritage, Don Newton’s cover painting to The Phantom #68 (Dec. 1975), pitting our hero against one of “The Beasts of Madame Kahn.” (right) Newton’s patriotic cover to Charlton’s last issue, #74 (Jan. 1977).

MICHAEL AMBROSE publishes Charlton Spotlight, an occasional fanzine devoted to the history of the Derby, CT comic-book publisher.

For more information, visit www.charltonspotlight.com.

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TM & © 2011 KFS.

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DON NEWTON PHANTOM COVER GALLERY

A fabulous four-shot of Newton’s cover paintings: (top row) The Phantom #67 (Oct. 1975) and 69 (Feb. 1976); and (bottom row) issues #70 (Apr. 1976) and 71 (July 1976).

TM & © 2011 KFS.

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TM

by

Robert Greenberger

While considered the first costumed adventure hero, Lee Falk’s jungle hero the Phantom has had a checkered comic-book existence. Although the comic strip has run daily since 1935, there was a long gap in comic-book tales after Charlton ceased its Phantom run in 1977.

That all changed in 1987, not long after Mike Gold arrived at DC Comics as a senior editor. “I was approached by a friend of mine who worked at King Features Syndicate (KFS) at the time,” he explains to BACK ISSUE. “He says the syndicate was interested in ‘keeping their adventure strips alive’ in a declining newspaper market—read ‘for merchandising value’—and they thought we could do a good job. I took the idea to our boss, Mr. [Dick] Giordano, and his eyes lit up that cherubic face.” mike gold KFS was hoping DC Comics could freshen its major properties— the Phantom, Flash Gordon, and Prince Valiant— but DC opted to license only the first two with Gold set to develop them.

“We started our development work on Flash Gordon, and it turned into one of my worst nightmares in comics,” Gold reveals. “We did a lot of negotiations, and then Dan Jurgens courageously stepped into the breech as storyteller.” The problem stemmed from changing KFS representatives, none knowing exactly how the modernization process should work.

As Jurgens struggled to work within KFS’s everchanging guidelines for the nine issue miniseries he would write and pencil, work also began on The Phantom. “I knew Phantom fans were zealots—and I was one of them,” Gold says. “So I walked onto that project determined to have more flexibility and more creative control than we had with the musical-chairs version of Flash Gordon.”

The Force is with Luke The Ghost Who Walks is about to become the Ghost Who Punches in the Face in this dynamite commission by and courtesy of Luke McDonnell.

The Phantom TM & © 2011 King Features Syndicate, Inc. (KFS).

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Orlando’s Phantom (below) DC house ad announcing the David/Orlando/Janke Phantom miniseries.

Dave Gibbons, however, inked Joe Orlando’s covers on the series, including (right) issue #2 (June 1988).

TM & © 2011 KFS.

THE WRITER WHO WALKS (FROM MARVEL TO DC)

“After that lunch, we had a number of ideas as to projects for Peter. When The Phantom popped up, I thought he’d be perfect: He understood Making his DC Comics debut as the miniseries’ the character and was well versed in its writer was Peter David, best known then background. I think he even read a for his imaginative work on The bunch of the Phantom novels that had Incredible Hulk. Gold recalls, “Denny been published the decade before, O’Neil and I wanted to bring Peter over a couple of which were quite good. from Marvel. So we put together a So he was a natural.” meeting at a beautiful Chinese David, at that point, was considerrestaurant that was a favorite of ing the leap into a full-time writing Denny’s. It was about a half-mile career and needed to hear from DC northwest of DC’s offices and a long that there’d be work from them. way from Marvel, where Peter still “Mike said yes,” David recalls. “The first held a day job in the marketing thing DC would steer my way would department, working for Carol be a Phantom limited series. It was one Kalish. Peter, to his vast credit, peter david of the things that served to help me was extremely sensitive of Carol’s to decide to leave my day job behind feelings and when the time was and become a full-time writer.” right, he wanted to tell Carol himself [about working Both David and I grew up on Long Island and read for DC] before word got out. the Phantom’s adventures in the Long Island Press, growing to become fans of the feature. When he accepted the assignment work began in earnest, starting with his borrowing my copy of Lee Falk’s first Phantom novel from the 1970s, where the entire backstory was laid out.

“I read as many of the novels as I could get my hands on, and also consulted with Lee Falk on which earlier incarnation of the Phantom I could utilize for the purpose of the story,” David adds. [Editor’s note: Cartoonist Lee Falk’s Phantom is a legacy hero, with generations of sons following their fathers’ footsteps, creating the myth of the hero’s immortality.]

When one of the previous 20 Phantoms was selected, an artist was needed and Gold knew exactly where to turn, considering that Joe Orlando worked just down the hall and “because he begged for the gig,”

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Gold recalls. “Literally. Joe was one of the most fun people in the history of comics. His sense of humor just barely stayed on the polite side of malicious. And he actually followed me in the halls for days asking for the job. I kept on making excuses to delay him because I was unsure of his deadline performance. At that time, he didn’t have a great track record. But I quickly realized how much this assignment meant to him and, after he brought in unsolicited audition sketches that were gorgeous, I thought, ‘How the hell can I turn down Joe Orlando?’ So he got the gig, and by and large did a wonderful job—certainly artistically, but even on his deadlines. Well, almost on his deadlines.”

As for his legendary artist, David says, “I think we may have talked once in a while, in an ‘It’s great to meet you, my God, I can’t believe I get to work with you’ manner.” (Me either, but I enjoyed the experience enough to work with him once more in Secret Origins.)

Gold’s deal with Giordano led him to developing and launching books, then handing most of them off to other editors, so I lobbied to work on The Phantom given my affection for the character. Gold, focused tremendously on the Mike Baron-written relaunch of Flash, agreed and named me co-editor. At first, Gold dealt solely with KFS and says, “If Flash Gordon was the bane of my existence, then The Phantom was Chunga’s Revenge. And I’m Chunga.

Now and Then

“When it came time to meet with KFS,” Gold continues, “I was determined to do things differently and not allow any of their rotating madmen control our Bengali sandbox. So we arranged for the meeting on the Friday two days hence.

“I immediately called Lee at home. I told him how happy we were to do The Phantom, how I was looking forward to seeing him again the following Friday, and how honored I was to actually work with him.

All of which was 100% true—working with guys like Joe Orlando and Lee Falk are among the fanboy perks.

“Lee responded, ‘Meeting? What meeting?’ I immediately apologized and said, ‘Oh, we just agreed to it. I guess my call beat the one you’ll get from the syndicate.’ We then kicked around some ideas, with my pledging we would be faithful to his creation.

And I meant every word of that.

“Friday comes along and we’re at KFS for the big meeting,” Gold continues. “Lee Falk arrives.

He’s dressing in his Mandrake the Magician cape and top hat, wearing the Phantom’s rings—both of them— and a Phantom-symbol bolo tie clasp. Oh, and a walking stick. You know, the kind magicians use. He sat next to me, at the very head of the conference table.

“All the people from KFS looked as if they had just swallowed their breakfast for the second time.

“I wasn’t quite through with KFS. One of the things I asked for in the contract was that we have a

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

Orlando/Gibbons covers to The Phantom #3 (left) and 4. Parallel tales of Phantoms number 13 and 21 were interwoven in this miniseries.

TM & © 2011 KFS.

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A MONTHLY PHANTOM

Back in Action Writer Mark Verheiden had recently made a name for himself at Dark Horse when recruited to write DC’s Phantom monthly. Joining him was artist Luke McDonnell, who illustrated these covers.

TM & © 2011 KFS.

When it was clear a monthly series was going to happen, David wasn’t offered the assignment. He believes it has to do with Falk being less than overwhelmed with his effort, while Gold believes it was a scheduling problem. Being handed the reins as editor, I needed to pick a new writer and decided to reach out to Verheiden, whose The American at Dark Horse really impressed me. At the time, Mark was being approached by several DC editors to do work for the company.

“To be totally honest, The Phantom wouldn’t have been my first (or 50th) choice for my first regular series at DC, but the promise of a monthly check plus health insurance allowed me to quit my day job and dive into writing full-time,” Verheiden admits, echoing David.

Verheiden reveals, “I’ll be honest, when I started, 13-issue deal for the first year of the ongoing series, [I was] not so much [a fan] of the newspaper strip. But I and that 13th issue would be the wedding of the very much enjoyed some of the Charlton series, with art Phantom and Diana Palmer. I stipulated that

by Jim Aparo, Pat Boyette, and Don Newton. we would follow the storyline ‘exactly All three artists did great (and in Boyette’s the way Lee wrote it in the newspaper case, idiosyncratic!) work, but Newton’s strip.’ Lee, of course, said, ‘Well, of stories were exceptional, especially a course!’ So, we had a free-of-charge Casablanca-esque piece by Bill Pearson crossover with Mandrake the that appeared in Phantom #70.

Magician and Lothar, who had “That said, once I actually attended the wedding in the original immersed myself in the character, strip version.”

I found a lot of ‘there’ there. Fifty years David’s recollection is sketchier, but of character history, plus a chance to he doesn’t recall any direct problems explore some real-world issues set on the with his storyline. “The major thing African continent. And since we were I remember was I had the Phantom an off-shoot licensed series and not using his guns and Lee Falk wasn’t part of the DC Universe, editorially I mark verheiden happy about that,” David says. think we had a freer hand.”

“I couldn’t understand it. He was Whereas David steeped himself in the one who gave him the guns in the first place,” jungle lore, Verheiden turned to the press, finding modernforeshadowing a situation that succeeding writer day African issues to address through Phantom adventures.

Mark Verheiden would soon experience.

“My goal was to tell interesting, timely, and socially

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Rough and Tough The Phantom means business in this Luke McDonnell sketch. Courtesy of the artist.

The Phantom TM & © 2011 KFS.

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relevant stories involving the Phantom,” Verheiden says.

While best remembered today for his work on the “Out of that research I worked up stories around real- Suicide Squad, McDonnell did superb work on his world issues like off-shore toxic-waste dumping, the childhood hero. “The Phantom was in the local paper bizarre suicidal ‘sport’ of train surfing, high-seas piracy, etc. when I was growing up, so I was a fan from very early By coincidence I had bought a series of Lee Falk’s Phantom on,” says McDonnell. “From around age six, probably. paperback novels back in the day, and those were great I remember my brother and me lying on the floor with resources in terms of delineating Kit Walker’s history.” the newspaper, devouring it. He was the best thing The ripped-from-the-headlines approach certainly out there, in terms of continuity strips. kept the comic book a complement to the more fanciful “It was one of the few story strips in the strip. “I suppose my biggest fear going in was newspaper, and the only one that had a quasiallowing the stories to lapse into some ‘great superhero protagonist, which appealed to white hunter’ stereotype, where the me since I was also reading comics at the Phantom was saving the day while the time. His look was cool (very important to locals stood back in awe,” the writer a young, budding artist), his backstory says. “I tried to make sure the local was cool, his style was cool. I mean, law-enforcement characters were well he hit you and literally left a mark! represented, with mutual respect It all added up to supercool!” between them and the Phantom.”

To Verheiden, “I thought Luke KFS had fewer concerns as the was amazing. Perfect for the book. issues got produced and Falk only felt He did a pulpy, gritty version of the a need to come in once to discuss Phantom that was totally in sync the gunplay in the scripts. In addition with the stories. Luke’s also a great to toning down the violence, he guy, and it’s a shame he’s not doing luke mcdonnell asked for more humor. more comics these days. I have one “He specifically asked for a scene of his original covers framed in my showing the Phantom water-skiing on top of two dolphins, office—it’s really great work. which I guess was a staple in the newspaper strip,” “I don’t recall a lot of conversation, but we did talk Verheiden says. “I was totally against it at the time, about the stories from time to time,” Verheiden says. since it seemed wildly out of character with the stories “He nailed the look so well right off the bat we really I was telling. But looking back, the Phantom wasn’t my didn’t need to work much out. And I wrote full script (too character, and that silly little moment was actually kind full, some say!), so things were pretty well explained.” of sweet. So what do I know?”

“Of course, I was very pleased to be offered the There was no way Orlando, with his staff position at DC, book,” McDonnell says. “It seemed to me at the time, could pencil a monthly comic, so as editor I knew exactly ‘Who else?’ (humble, I was). I thought I'd do a good where to turn. By then, Luke McDonnell had doodled job. Here I am, drawing [the Phantom] on the back of action shots of the Ghost Who Walks on the backs of count- my pages—time to move to the front! But it was less artboards, so couldn’t see anyone else getting the gig. important to me to try to bring something fresh to it,

Torn from Today’s Headlines Verheiden employed real-world crises such as toxic-waste dumping (as shown on the cover to Phantom #6, Aug. 1989, at left) in his stories. (right) The Phantom #8 (Oct. 1989). Covers

by McDonnell.

TM & © 2011 KFS.

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so people who thought, ‘Oh, old-fashioned newspaper hero’ would give it a second chance.”

McDonnell also was comfortable with the timely stories, noting, “I was happy to be along for the ride in the sense that he was all secure at the writer helm.

Mainstream comics are a collaborative medium, unlike a prose piece. I felt both you [editor Greenberger] and Mark seemed open to all ideas that I had. I remember recommending The Coup, by John Updike, a novel about, oddly enough, a coup, set in Africa. I thought something might be gleaned from it.”

The collaboration worked despite the two being on different coasts and speaking infrequently by phone.

Looking back, McDonnell remains pleased with the stories he was given to draw.

“I think Mark captured it perfectly—plenty of action for newer readers, enough Phantom lore for the older fans, but with a fresh, contemporary feel to it all,” McDonnell contends. “It’s also tough to write dialogue for a character like that without sounding stilted, but he pulled it off.

“Everything Mark wrote was a rewarding experience to draw. He changed the venues quite a bit, so there was always something different, whether it was modern-day pirates, rednecks in pickups, or gorillas in the mist!

Just having the Phantom around in nearly every scene pretty much guarantees an interesting picture. The hardest thing for me to draw is people sitting around in suits, talking. There was none of that, so I was happy.”

McDonnell also had to scale back the Squad-level violence to please Falk and KFS, but he recognized there was a place for that sort of storytelling, too. “Let’s face it— anyone can shoot to kill,” the artist says. “But to shoot with the intention of not killing and still rectifying the situation takes some fast thinking, and fast writing! But it kind of makes you wonder what the point of lugging those .45s around was—besides the fact that they look cool!”

PHANTOM BENEFITS

Phantom and Wife

For McDonnell, the dream assignment paid off in interesting ways, including getting to meet Falk and regularly spend time with his favorite Phantom artist, Sy Barry, after Barry retired from the feature.

“Falk was very nice and said, ‘I think you're doing a very good job!’ That made my day,” McDonnell recalls. “I also hooked up with Friends of the Phantom, a fan group around the world. They have an annual lunch at Sardi's in New York City that I've been to numerous times with Barry. Phantom fans are very dedicated. Some have flown in from Australia (which boasts a rabid Phantom fan base) just to be at the luncheon! I usually do a special drawing for everyone who comes. They all have had nice things to say about the work we did on the character.”

After six issues, I moved into editorial administration and handed the book off to my officemate, Brian Augustyn. Verheiden notes, “I was lucky to have two exceptional editors on this book. Both you and Brian were supportive of the political direction of the book and very Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

Despite the trouble the Phantom found himself in on the cover to his penultimate DC issue (#12, Feb. 1990, at left), his 13th and final issue ended on a happy note (above).

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smart with story. When the book was canceled, what I missed most were the lengthy story conversations with Brian. We were always able to make the book better, which doesn’t always happen in this racket.”

Unfortunately, despite positive critical reaction and reasonable sales, the license was canceled. KFS demanded more money for year two than DC paid Paramount for the more commercially successful Star Trek. “Even so, we were willing to pick it up for another six months with a six-month option—a safe bet with a nice back door,” Mike Gold says. “But King wasn’t interested and, for a while at least, they didn’t make anything from anybody. Their loss.”

The Dark (Continent) Knight The Phantom on the prowl against smugglers, in a 2010 sketch by Luke McDonnell.

TM & © 2011 KFS.

DC’s PHANTOM, IN HINDSIGHT In looking back over the two years DC briefly held the license, everyone involved remains pleased with the finished issues. Gold proclaims, “I think it was one of the best comic-book adaptations of the Phantom, and that includes a lot of the foreign stuff published that I had read (which, admittedly, was a mere fraction of the total— it’s been published weekly for about a millennium).”

Verheiden adds, “I’m proud of the book. Sales weren’t that great, but we did 13 solid issues. Lengthy continuing story arcs were the rage at the time, so it’s

possible [The Phantom’s] closed-ended stories worked against us, but I liked working in that traditional sort of structure. And I’m especially happy that Lee Falk, in the end, wound up being pleased with what we did.

I got a very nice card from him at the end of the run expressing his appreciation for the work.”

The creative team both point to issue #6 (Aug. 1989), “Waste,” as an exceptional blend of theme, character, and storytelling.

The Phantom remains an enduring global phenomenon despite the overall decline in comic strips. His domestic move in 2010 from Moonstone to Dynamite Entertainment is a sign of his strength.

His appeal is summed up by Gold: “As the mystery of the so-called Dark Continent vanished from our culture, Lee Falk adapted with the times. He was well known for his liberal views, and he told stories set in the modern post-colonial Africa. There was still a lot of jungle, but there were real cities. We had petty dictators and genuine statesmen. Volunteer efforts from the United Nations and organizations like Doctors Without Borders were well represented in the strip. It has kept up with the times.

“The second reason is that they’ve got a really good team on the strip today. Paul Ryan is a terrific artist, and Tony DePaul is not only a good writer but he’s very well versed in the character. He has written quite a few of the foreign comic books and really knows the mammoth backstory. Right now they’re in the middle of a story that runs for, I think, a year—something unheard of in this day and age. So the bottom line is, the Phantom lives on because the property was well thought out and intriguing and it’s been kept up to date by talented storytellers.”

David acknowledges, “Because it’s unique. You’ve got a character that can literally work in any time ranging from centuries back all the way through to the future (as the more science-fictiony versions have shown us).

With a character who has that kind of range, and with the marvelous backstory that’s firmly rooted in the sort of father/son dynamics that influences so much of American literature, how can he not continue to be popular?”

Verheiden says, “I guess it must tap into some primal wish-fulfillment. I’ve heard that people were weeping after seeing Avatar because they so wanted to stay in that pretty tropical world. The Phantom (like Tarzan) gets to live the same sort of fantasy. And while I haven’t read the strip itself in years (none of the papers I get carry it), back in the ’80s there was a real sense of fun to the stories. The Phantom smiled a lot in the strip, and you sensed he was deeply in love with Diana. In a way, for a guy carrying on the legacy of dressing in purple tights and fighting crime, he was remarkably centered.”

For McDonnell, the series “succeeds, like any good character, because of a solid premise and a flexibility that adapts to changing times. He can work in a modern setting and in a historical context. I also think the quality of the work has been pretty consistent.”

ROBERT GREENBERGER is a longtime comics historian and former staffer at DC Comics and Marvel Comics. A full-time freelance writer and editor, his recent works have included The Essential Superman Encyclopedia (with Martin Pasko) and The Spider-Man Vault (with Peter David). He continues to write reviews for ComicMix.com and more about Bob can be found at BobGreenberger.com.

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®

by

Jack Abramowitz

In 1975, the “DC Explosion” was in full swing, featuring a greatly expanded line at DC Comics. Full-page house ads introduced readers to DC’s “all-new adventure line,” including such diverse characters as Claw, Stalker, Beowulf, and the Warlord. One character didn’t fit in among these bare-chested, swordwielding barbarians: the pale-skinned, gray jump-suited, gun-toting Avenger.

Justice, Inc. #1 sported a May–June 1975 cover date, along with banners proclaiming it to be the “1st Sensational Issue!” and “by the creator of Doc Savage … Kenneth Robeson.” That latter claim is only partially accurate. “Kenneth Robeson” was, in fact, a pseudonym. This house pen name was used

by Street & Smith Publications for stories featuring both Doc Savage and the Avenger. In reality, Lester Dent was the principal writer of Doc Savage, while Paul Ernst penned The Avenger.

The Avenger never achieved the popularity enjoyed by Doc Savage or The Shadow. Compare the Avenger’s fewer than 30 published adventures to Doc Savage’s nearly 200 or The Shadow’s over 300 tales. In terms of radio, film, and comics adaptations, the Avenger again fell short. In his occasional forays into comics, under the banner Justice, Inc., the Avenger has likewise failed to take the world by storm.

NO NEED FOR CONTINUITY—THE 1970s Presumably, the comics series was called Justice, Inc. rather than “The Avenger” to avoid conflict or confusion with Marvel’s The Avengers. Says series writer Denny O’Neil, “It could have been just a marketing decision— ‘We don’t want to look like we’re ripping off Marvel’— or there could have been a copyright issue. Things were often confused in those days about stuff like that.”

No one was worried, however, about any potential confusion with DC’s own Justice League.

O’Neil was not especially a fan of the Avenger prior to writing the series: “I became aware of the Avenger after the success of The Shadow. One of the paperback houses was reprinting the Avenger’s stories then, so it was a natural place to go. I liked dealing with those kind of stories and those kind of characters.”

The first issue of Justice, Inc. featured a passable reworking of the first Avenger story, “Justice, Inc.,” albeit severely abridged to fit into a singleissue telling. In this tale, we are introduced to the Avenger, Ike and Mike (his knife and gun, respectively), and Algernon Heathcote Smith, a.k.a.

“Smitty.” The inaugural issue was written by O’Neil, with art by Al McWilliams. The cover, by Joe Kubert, is about as iconic an Avenger image as would be produced by DC. (Kubert would return

The Avenger Drops In Detail from Joe Kubert’s cover to DC Comics’ Justice, Inc. #1 (May–June 1975).

TM & © 2011 Condé Nast.

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TM & © 2011 Condé Nast.

to do the cover of the fourth and final issue of the series.) The issue also boasted a text piece introducing readers to the Avenger and his crew.

The second issue (July–Aug. 1975) likewise retold a story from the pulps, this time the third Avenger tale, “The Sky Walker.” (The original pulp was penned decades before Star Wars, which this comic likewise beat by two years. Nevertheless, “sky walker” was rendered “skywalker” throughout the issue.) This story introduced aides Josh and Rosabel Newton, an African-American couple who frequently feigned ignorant or submissive demeanors to conceal their great intelligence and competence.

Jack Kirby took over the art with this issue, providing both the cover and the interior, with inks

by Mike Royer. O’Neil was thrilled with the artists assigned to the series. “Obviously, Kubert and Kirby— that was very lucky for me for a whole lot of reasons.

They were probably two of the best artists the field has ever produced and, on top of that, they were pros. There was never any worry about deadlines or temperament or anything like that.”

The text piece was more unusual than that in the first issue: Allan Asherman cast a speculative

Justice, Inc. movie. Charles Bronson as the Avenger?

Peter Boyle as Smitty? Bill Cosby and Diana Ross as Josh and Rosabel? This was one unlikely film!

The Justice, Inc. series took a departure with its third issue (Sept–Oct. 1975), which featured an original story by O’Neil rather than an adaptation of a classic Avenger pulp. Why the switch? “I have no idea,” O’Neil laughs. “It may be that I couldn’t find stuff from the original pulp material that was suitable, [or] it may have been that I had some ideas for stories of my own and decided to write those instead.”

“The Monster Bug” introduced to the series Fergus MacMurdie, an associate of the Avenger squeezed out of the first issue’s adaptation of the Justice, Inc. origin.

In this story, the Avenger pursued a villain named Colonel Sodom (yes, “Colonel Sodom”), who escaped at the end of DC’s The Shadow #5.

The final issue of the series (Nov–Dec. 1975) was another original story by O’Neil, with an assist

by Paul Levitz. “Slay Ride in the Sky” is a fairly unremarkable tale. Kirby and Royer continued to provide the art, though, as previously noted, Kubert returned to supply the cover.

The Avenger made one additional appearance during his initial stay at DC, in The Shadow #11 (June–July 1975). This issue appeared between the first two installments of Justice, Inc., but when it occurs is nebulous. On the one hand, Fergus MacMurdie did not appear until the third issue of

In The Shadow’s Shadow (left) George Gross’ painted cover art to the paperback, The Avenger, courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). (below) Promo art by Al McWilliams, taken from the splash page to DC’s Justice, Inc. #1.

TM & © 2011 Condé Nast.

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Justice, Inc., but he’s present in The Shadow #11, implying that it occurs later. (Further muddying the waters is the Avenger’s aide Nellie. This character, who first appeared in the second Avenger pulp, The Yellow Hoard, was ignored by the Justice, Inc. series, but not by The Shadow.)

On the other hand, in Justice, Inc. #3, the Avenger already knows The Shadow as a crimefighter, while in The Shadow #11, he’s not familiar with that cloaked vigilante, suggesting that it takes place earlier. (A similar continuity glitch occurred on the 1960s Batman television show. In one episode, the Green Hornet made a cameo and the Caped Crusader identified him as a crimefighter; in a subsequent episode, he mistook the Hornet for a criminal.)

O’Neil was not concerned. “People weren’t thinking about continuity very much,” he explains, because of “the old ’40s paradigm of comics’ audience changing every three years and people basically not caring about things like inconsistencies in the backstory. People were just beginning to be aware of [continuity], but I don’t think it was very high on anybody’s radar yet.”

When asked if crossing two pulp icons presented any challenges, O’Neil says, “No, the same way that we crossed The Shadow into Batman—I just did it assuming it would be okay and nobody said otherwise.

It was a logical thing to do. They were both pulp characters, they were strongly similar.”

Since The Shadow had crossed into Batman— twice [Batman #253 and 259]—were there any plans to introduce the Avenger to the DC Universe? “We had no plans of any kind,” O’Neil explains. “It was really a month-to-month thing.” (The 1989 Justice, Inc. miniseries did feature the country of Qurac, a fictional nation in the DC Universe.)

According to O’Neil, the Justice, Inc. series was received “not awfully well, but I did not ever see sales figures in those days. When we brought out The Shadow, I was aware of some positive reaction; Justice, Inc., not so much. It wasn’t negatively received, but I don’t know that anybody was setting off fireworks.”

As for the series’ cancellation after a mere four issues, he says, “Sometimes things were canceled when I was reasonably certain they couldn’t have accurate figures yet. They would have accurate numbers on the first issue and probably a reasonable guess on the second issue. That was still in the days where newsstands were the most prominent venue and the paperwork involving newsstands was very slow.”

On the subject of writing the Avenger, O’Neil says the character was “not as interesting as The Shadow. I don’t know that the original stories were quite as well thought-out as the stuff that Gibson did for The Shadow.” Nevertheless, “it was not a bad assignment to have. I would have been happy to continuing writing and editing Justice, Inc. had I been permitted to do so.”

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Master of Disguise (above) Roll your cursor over the art to see uninked Jack Kirby pencils for page 7 of Justice, Inc. #3 (Sept.–Oct. 1975).

Courtesy of The Jack Kirby Collector. (left) Al Milgrom inked Kirby’s cover for that issue.

TM & © 2011 Condé Nast.

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The Avenger Drops Out Kubert returned for the cover of DC’s final Justice, Inc. issue, #4 (Nov.–Dec. 1975).

TM & © 2011 Condé Nast.

the Avenger’s appearance in The Shadow was followed by a two-issue, prestige-format miniseries once again entitled Justice, Inc., also by Helfer and Baker but very different in style and tone. Was the Shadow appearance intended to prime readers for the miniseries?

Carlin says yes: “We certainly wanted to steer fans of The Shadow toward the other project. And even though the execution was very different—the series were different, merely owned by one company—we certainly wanted pulp fans to try both shows.”

Reaction to the Justice, Inc. was again mixed.

“Don’t recall sales,” Carlin says, “[but I] believe the miniseries was well-received critically. My main memory is that the mini cost more as a prestige series so it may have sold less than The Shadow, but DC may have actually made more money on it, in the end. But worse was that both Baker and Helfer kind of burned out on the schedule on Justice, Inc., leaving The Shadow unfinished.”

The Justice, Inc. miniseries was always intended as a one-off, with no plans for an ongoing title.

“Having the same team do both series was kind of a nail in The Shadow series’ coffin,” Carlin explains. “They simply couldn't do that much work on a monthly basis.

And Andy Helfer and Kyle Baker’s ‘voice’ on the pulp material was what readers and DC was interested in back then. It was great to see Kyle Baker stretch, but I was disappointed that we all let The Shadow kind of peter out instead of wrapping both series properly.”

ROBESON’S SONS REUNITED— JUSTICE, INC. TODAY

THE AVENGER KILLS THE SHADOW— THE 1980s

TM & © 2011 Condé Nast.

Justice, Inc. briefly returned to DC in the late 1980s, starting in The Shadow #17 (Dec. 1988) and 18 (undated, but presumably Jan. 1989). Surprisingly, this story appears to be in continuity with the earlier series, as one of The Shadow’s operatives recalled their adventure together. However, the Avenger did not actually reunite with The Shadow in this two-parter, as the latter was dead at the time. (He briefly got better in the next issue, before the series was abruptly canceled and the plot thread left unresolved.)

Mike Carlin was editor of both The Shadow and Justice, Inc. in the 1980s. Was the Avenger’s return to The Shadow in fact inspired by the characters’ previous DC interaction? “I assume the fact that Conde Naste controlled both franchises influenced the ideas both times,” he says. “The early ’70s showed it could be done. I also assume writer Andy Helfer and artist Kyle Baker were either fans of both series and the ’70s comics … or they just liked the Avenger himself.”

In this revival, the Avenger worked solo, Justice, Inc. having come to an “ugly end.” That notwithstanding,

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A logical question: The Avenger crossed over with The Shadow twice, in 1975 and 1988, but not with Doc Savage, ostensibly a more logical match, given that they shared the same pseudonymous author, “Kenneth Robeson.” A Doc Savage/Avenger crossover was a nonstarter in 1975, as Doc Savage was being published by Marvel at that time. In 1988, however, Doc’s adventures were being published by DC. Was there any talk of bringing Justice, Inc. into Doc Savage? In an interview conducted via e-mail, writer Mike W. Barr addresses this question: “While I was writing Doc Savage, which was for issues #7–24 and Annual #1, I don’t recall any talk, positive or negative, about crossing him over with the Avenger, nor did I ever propose such a story,” Barr says.

“I’m not overly familiar with the Avenger and, though I would have written such a tale if asked, I don’t believe the subject ever came up. Though, as you point out, thematically, the subject seems like a natural. Of course, I co-wrote the Doc/Shadow crossover, with my colleague Gerry Jones.”

In 2010, the Avenger returned to DC as part of the “First Wave” imprint, alongside such pulp icons as Doc Savage, Batman, and the Spirit. Furthermore, DC’s latest “Justice, Inc.” series appears as a “second feature” in the pages of Doc Savage. The Avenger may never set the world on fire, but he’s a classic character and has proven himself a tenacious second-stringer.

JACK ABRAMOWITZ thanks Dennis O’Neil, Mike Carlin, and Mike W. Barr for their help in researching this article. He is also happy to have had occasion to reread DC’s entire Justice, Inc. oeuvre.

by

Philip Schweier

When Marvel Comics published Marvel Preview Presents Bizarre Adventures #20 (Winter 1980) in 1979, readers were (re-)introduced to its lead feature, “Dominic Fortune, Brigand for Hire,” a new character Howard Chaykin created with the help of Len Wein.

New character? Well, perhaps not.

The two stories presented in Marvel Preview #20 were actually reprints from Marvel Preview #2 (1975) and Marvel Super Action #1 (Jan. 1976), a one-shot magazine. But let us go even further back, to February 1975, when the first issue of The Scorpion was published

by Atlas Comics.

What’s that, you say? What does another character published by an altogether different company have to do with Marvel’s Dominic Fortune? Well, quite a bit, actually.

In 1968, owner/publisher Martin Goodman sold Marvel Comics to Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation, which later renamed itself Cadence Industries. Goodman stayed on as publisher at first, but in 1974, he launched his own publishing company, today commonly referred to as Atlas/Seaboard. At this time, most comics creators worked under a “work-forhire” environment. That is, they were hired to provide stories or art, and such creative work, including original characters, became the property of the publisher.

Goodman was able to recruit top names such as Neal Adams, Mike Grell, and Howard Chaykin with promises of returned artwork, shared royalties, and other creators’ rights. Chaykin’s contribution to the new line of heroes was Moro Frost, a.k.a. the Scorpion.

“As I recall,” says Chaykin, “they were looking to do a 1930s pulp character along the lines of The Shadow.

They had the title; they wanted something called the Scorpion. I came in with my franchise and they liked it, they embraced it, and that’s where my troubles began.”

“The Death’s Gemini Commission,” (Scorpion #1, Feb. 1975), in which the Scorpion faces off against corrupt tycoons in the fledgling airways business, was written and drawn by Chaykin. It is explained that the Scorpion is a mysterious, seemingly immortal figure whose history dates back as far as the Civil War. Currently known as Moro Frost, he is a 1930s-era adventurer-forhire, aided and abetted by his lovely girl Friday, Ruby.

“The Devil Doll Commission” (Scorpion #2, May 1975), a tale of zombified gangsters, was written and penciled by Chaykin, with inks by Ed Davis, Michael Kaluta, Walt Simonson, and Bernie Wrightson.

But something funny happened on the way to the newsstand.

According to Chaykin, “I did an issue, we were running late, and they [Atlas] didn’t quite know how to convey deadlines and ultimately I was dumped off the book with the third issue.”

Fortune Favors the Bold Howard Chaykin’s painted cover to Marvel Preview Presents Bizarre Adventures #20 (Winter 1980), featuring his Brigand for Hire, Dominic Fortune. © 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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© 1975 Atlas/Seaboard.

With Chaykin’s departure, the third and final story, “Night of the Golden Fuhrer,” (Scorpion #3, July 1975) was written by Gabriel Levy and drawn by Jim Craig.

In a three-panel sequence, the story details how Moro Frost was “killed” by the German Luftwaffe during World War II. Now, 30 years later, the immortal Scorpion is known as David Harper, a newspaper publisher who battles crime as a more traditional masked superhero in blue and orange tights.

According to the introduction in Marvel Preview #20, a disgusted and angry Chaykin headed over to the offices of Marvel Comics. Atlas was near the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, and Marvel was about three blocks away on Madison, around 59th Street.

Taking a seat with then-editor Marv Wolfman and writer Len Wein, Chaykin offered his talents to Marvel.

Wolfman asked him what he might like to do.

Mentioning his pulpish effort of the past few months, Chaykin suggested, “How about the other side of that character? The light side. The Spirit, Plastic Man-type side. The TA-DA!! California side?”

Wolfman and Wein were intrigued, and Chaykin continued to shovel, offering this new character’s backstory as an overextended gambler who took on dangerous trouble-shooting jobs to meet his debts.

Wolfman instructed Chaykin to go home, write up a pitch, and bring it back to submit to then editor-in-chief Archie

Goodwin. Overnight, the best name Chaykin could invent was Dominic Fortune. Wolfman liked it and Wein contributed the elements of Sabbath Raven, Fortune’s landlady, with whom he lives aboard the Mississippi Queen, a gambling ship off the coast of Los Angeles.

According to Chaykin, he took the grim seriousness of the Scorpion and replaced it with the same sort of sensibility Woody van Dyke used in the Thin Man movies: “A jazzy, funny, glib sort of character, as opposed to a grim, earnest one. I lost the supernatural element of it and made it a laughing, cavalier crimefighter along the lines of, ‘What would happen if Gene Kelly had been a costumed hero?’”

The idea was perhaps inspired by an incident when Chaykin was working with Gil Kane in the late 1960s and early ’70s. One day they took an afternoon off to watch Cover Girl, a 1944 film starring Gene Kelly, Rita Hayworth, and Phil Silvers. “Most of the picture was taken up with Gil’s running commentary on Gene Kelly as an urban version of Errol Flynn, that sort a laughing cavalier,” Chaykin relates. “Then, years later, I saw Kelly in The Three Musketeers (1948), and it confirmed everything.”

Dominic Fortune owes a lot to the Scorpion— his costume (double-breasted tunic over a black turtleneck, jodhpurs tucked into boots) and his look, which fits the archetypal Howard Chaykin hero. “I love this guy,” Chaykin said in Marvel Preview #20.

“Fortune is everything a good comic book character is—tough, heroic, good looking—and a bit of a butthead. It is the butthead part I like best.”

Which may very well have set the mold for many of Chaykin’s creations that followed, such as Cody Starbuck and Reuben Flagg. “Common decency with a sidewinder’s sensibility” is how he once described it, citing James Garner as Bret Maverick being one of the ingredients in a common Chaykin formula of what heroes should look and act like: “Think Yiddish, go British.”

According to Chaykin, Neil Simon and Carl Reiner had the idea that they could write Jewish characters as long as they were played by Gentile actors. “The fact that Robert Redford is the lead in Barefoot in the Park and Dick van Dyke ended up being successful playing a character created by Carl Reiner for himself to play is the perfect expression of that idea. So to a great extent, my characters are the classic example, in comics at least, of thinking Yiddish and going British.”

Wein scripted Fortune’s debut adventure, “The Power Broker Resolution.” Its follow-up, “The Messiah in the Saddle Resolution,” was written and drawn by Chaykin.

“I abhor talking about myself as if I was unworthy of doing it, which is nonsense. I recognize in later years that I was responsible for this, that I didn’t feel I was up to the job. I consider myself a better writer than most of the guys writing comics back then because for

The Silhouette Knows… (opposite) Unlettered splash to the O’Neil/ Chaykin “Slay Bells,” from Hulk magazine #25 (Feb. 1981), featuring the Silhouette, a Shadow homage. (left) Chaykin original art from Marvel Super Action #1 (Jan. 1976); this story was republished in Marvel Preview #20. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Fortune Seekers (left) A Hulk/Dominic Fortune editorial session with (left to right) Denny O’Neil, Howard Chaykin, Lynn Graeme, and Jim Shooter.

Photo courtesy of Philip Schweier. (below) A return shot in Marvel Premiere #56 (Oct. 1980). Cover by Chaykin and Terry Austin. © 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

the most part, the guys who were writing comics in the late ’60s/early ’70s, with a couple of exceptions, obviously, were failed artists who became writers by default. I consider myself a better writer than that.

They also believe that much of the writing done in comics is done by the artist, then why not?”

Lynn Graeme, editor of The Hulk magazine, was one Marvel staffer who sat up and took notice of Dominic Fortune’s appearance in Bizarre Adventures #20. In the editorial for The Hulk #21 (June 1980), Graeme wrote, “As soon as I saw him, I wanted him in this magazine, where Chaykin’s unusual and dynamic art could be seen to best effect.” It can only be presumed Graeme was referring to the fact that The Hulk, formerly The Rampaging Hulk, was printed in full color and Bizarre Adventures was in black and white.

While Dominic Fortune’s pulp-style adventures seemed out of place in the pages of The Hulk, Chaykin has no argument. “I couldn’t tell you why that was, but things happen,” says Chaykin. “I never got it, but they were willing to pay me to do it, so I did.”

Now paired with writer Denny O’Neil, Chaykin illustrated “All in Color for a Crime,” a tale in which the burgeoning comic-book industry is used unwittingly to spread Nazi propaganda. “Ghoul of My Dreams” and “Moo Over Manhattan” were O’Neil and Chaykin’s next entries, in The Hulk #22 (Aug. 1980) and #23 (Oct. 1980), respectively. The Hulk #24 (Dec. 1980) featured “The Tiny Terror Tumble,” in which a diminutive star masquerades as a child actress, and Fortune is caught in the middle of her manipulations when he agrees to protect her from a stalker who is in fact her ex-husband.

The Hulk #25 (Feb. 1981) was a radical departure from the magazine’s earlier format. The lead Hulk feature was printed in black and white, while the Dominic Fortune backup story, “Slay Bells,” was in color. It was Denny O’Neil’s final contribution to the Dominic Fortune tales.

Judging by the consensus of the letters pages, Dominic Fortune was an overwhelming success.

Despite promotion for The Hulk #26 (Apr. 1981), Fortune’s adventures in The Hulk had come to an end, perhaps due to the switch back to black-and-white format.

During his run in the Hulk magazine, Fortune also was featured in “The Big Top Barter Resolution,” by Wein and Chaykin, published in Marvel Premiere #56 (Oct. 1980), part of Marvel’s standard comic-book line.

Dominic Fortune was just one of many projects for which Chaykin is recognized that is immersed in the 1930s. “You have to understand,” he explains, “all of us of a certain generation, ten years younger, ten years older in either direction, all came out with an affection for movie serials and 1930s adventure and pulp stuff, so it was an actual progression for somebody or everybody to do something in that regard. It was a world in which we all lived.

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Spider-Man and Old Man Elderly Dominic Fortune co-starred with Spidey in Marvel Team-Up #120 (Aug. 1982). Cover by Kerry Gammill and Bob Layton. © 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

“George Lucas was clearly a guy who grew up reading comic books and pulps. I’m not sure about Spielberg, but Joe Dante—all of us were reading the same stuff. Some became comic-book guys, others became movie guys, some of us became TV guys.” Chaykin also cites Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, with whom he worked on the Flash TV series in 1990 and who co-wrote the Rocketeer film in 1991. “We’re all of the same general generation, and we all speak and read the same language.”

However, he is quick to point out that he also has an affinity for the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. “I tend to approach that stuff as if it were science fiction, because I’m dealing with an audience that doesn’t really acknowledge the existence of a world before they were born.

One of the reasons why Frank Herbert’s Dune was as successful as it was is because he used historical novel sensibilities to create a sciencefiction novel, which had been suggested and alluded to by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but Herbert really perfected it.”

Chaykin took Dominic Fortune in the opposite direction. “I took a period piece and did it as if I were inventing a brand new world,” he explains. “To a great extent I was, because I faked a lot, but these days I actually do pretty serious research. I come out of a real researchbased background. It’s a real interest of mine and I think you can achieve a greater degree of verisimilitude with just a little bit of research.

“It’s also more fun to draw period material.”

Chaykin also mentions that while working on Dominic Fortune, he was going through a transitional phase in his choice of reading material, thanks to editor Archie Goodwin. “Archie was a guy who took me and Walt Simonson—Simonson more than me—and beat the science fiction out of us and got us into reading crime fiction and detective stuff. Archie was the one who got us into Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

To this day, most of the work I read for entertainment is crime fiction.”

Chaykin, moving on to other work, left the character at Marvel where Dominic Fortune languished in obscurity until being dragged out of retirement in Marvel Team-Up #120 (Aug. 1982). Unlike his ancestor, the Scorpion, Dominic Fortune had no secret to perpetual youth, appearing next alongside Spider-Man as an elderly man.

This marked the first of a handful of appearances in Marvel’s mainstream titles throughout the 1980s, none of which feature the involvement of any of the creative collaborators Chaykin, Wein, or O’Neil.

Within the context of the Marvel Universe, at the outbreak of World War II, Fortune had a falling-out with his longtime companion Sabbath Raven. Fearing her lost with the Nazi invasion of Rotterdam, he volunteered for Project: Rebirth, which would lead to the creation of the Super-Soldier formula and Captain America. Rejected, Fortune instead was assigned to protect Steve Rogers, who would later become Captain America. When the war ended, Fortune took up his quest to locate Sabbath, but failed. He returned to the United States, where he took to selling cars on Long Island.

At the risk of editorializing, hawking Pontiacs seems a rather sedate resolution to a reluctant hero with a gambling addiction.

Dust-ups with the mob in the Rat Pack era of Las Vegas would seem a more likely scenario.

In 2006, a new version of Dominic Fortune co-starred in the four-issue miniseries, Sable and Fortune. Though clearly not the Dominic Fortune of the 1930s, the relationship between the two versions is intentionally vague. In the first issue, editor John Barber is quoted as saying, “Where Dominic has been … and what relationship, if any, the man in this magazine has to him—remains to be revealed. I know their relationship, but my lips are sealed.”

A son? Unlikely. In Iron Man #212 (Nov. 1986), Dominic Fortune’s son Jerry had assumed his father’s mantle, believing the elder Fortune to have been killed. In the following issue, Jerry sacrifices himself to save his father, whom he discovers alive.

Howard Chaykin revisited Dominic Fortune once more in 2009 in a four-issue series for Marvel’s MAX line, once again writing and drawing an adventure set in the 1930s. “Dominic Fortune is one of those characters that I can jump onto in a heartbeat. Within an hour of [editor] Axel [Alonso] suggesting we do a Fortune mini for the MAX line, I had a plot—and again, we were off and running,” Chaykin said in an interview with Newsarama.com.

“To a large extent, a lot of the material that ended up in the four-parter is stuff that has been in my play book for years. It’s just been sitting and waiting, dormant,” says Chaykin. “I actually talked to Axel a couple of weeks back, and I’d love to do another one. I’d love to do a Dominic Fortune Spanish Civil War story. I wouldn’t mind doing an earlier story that took place in New York before he became Dominic Fortune.”

Regardless, it was never Chaykin’s intent to capitalize on the potential romantic tension between the two characters. Sabbath was created to be nothing more than a foil for Fortune. Just as not every story requires a sequel, not every relationship between a man and a woman evolves into romance of some sort. “You’ll notice she doesn’t show up in the four-parter,” he says. “It just is what is.

“In a perfect world, I’d love to be able to do a Dominic Fortune fourparter each year. That would be a treat. That would be really swell. I’d be thrilled to do that. Is it gonna happen? Not likely, but I’ll keep pushing.”

Chaykin says, “Given a choice between being very successful and popular or who I am, there are days when I’d rather have the money, but I have a good life. And I got here by doing whatever I felt like it at any given time.

“I’ve chosen paths that are not particularly guaranteed a success, but I’ve also had a really good time.”

PHILIP SCHWEIER is a graphic designer and freelance writer living in Savannah, Georgia.

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by

Kelvin Mao

conducted on January 8, 2007

Stevens in His Studio A photo of Dave in his North Hollywood studio taken by Greg Preston. From the book The Artist Within (Dark Horse Books, 2007). Unless otherwise noted, all images in this article are courtesy of Kelvin Mao and the Rocketeer Trust. © 2007 Dark Horse Comics.

Editor’s note: Dave Stevens (1955–2008), creator of the Rocketeer, died from hairy cell leukemia complications on March 11, 2008 at the age of 52. While his loss is still felt three years later, fortunately for BACK ISSUE readers, Stevens’ friend, Kelvin Mao—who, with David Mandel, helped produce the books The Rocketeer: Artist’s Edition and The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures (both from IDW Publishing)—conducted this marvelously in-depth discussion with Dave just over a year before his death. It is our great privilege to share this interview and its accompanying imagery with you.

DEALING WITH EARLY ARTISTIC INFLUENCES KELVIN MAO: All right, Dave. Who were your earliest influences, artistically?

DAVE STEVENS: Let’s see. From about age five or thereabouts, it was almost entirely cartoon images. TV cartoons and reading comics as well.

MAO: What kind of stuff were you watching at that point?

STEVENS: Anything that was on Saturday morning at 7:00 a.m.

Mostly old cartoons, because that’s what they had plenty of.

MAO: We’re talking, like, Popeye at this point?

STEVENS: Yeah, we’re talking Popeye, Betty Boop, all the early, early sound cartoons, and some of them were actually silent—they would still play those. This was like 1959, 1960. Just anything that was— that had any kind of style to it. Tom Terrific, all the UPA stuff that was sort of cutting edge at that time, and all the early Fleischer stuff that

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used rotoscope. You know, with humans underneath these dancing skeletons and whatever it was. It was a great sort of treasure trove of images to overdose on, and then it would sort of flow out of you onto paper or the walls.

MAO: I can’t remember what else was on TV back then. Does Harvey go back that far?

STEVENS: Yeah, the early ones. They were made in probably the late ’40s to—I think Casper was around 1950. I loved the early ones, hated the later ones. Whenever they would dumb down the style and turn it into absolute formula, it was just—ugh! It was terrible.

MAO: Any particular favorite, or just whatever was on?

STEVENS: I liked Popeye a lot, but I preferred the really old ones.

They just felt more “wiggly,” you know? And I loved Colonel Bleep.

That was probably the most stylized cartoon of the 1950s. It was just a bizarre, ultra-modern-styled character, and it was one guy. One guy did everything. He animated it, did the backgrounds, and styled all the characters. And it was very basic in terms of—the stories were nothing, but the graphics were just astounding. And that was one of my most profound stylistic discoveries, because it looked like no other cartoon on TV. Also Space Angel.

MAO: Wow, Space Angel. Talking lips and stuff. [Editor’s note: The cartoon series Space Angel (1962– 1964) featured stilted animation and a lip-movement technique called “Synchro-Vox.”] STEVENS: Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t my favorite, but I remember it because it

The Young Artist A photo of Dave Stevens at age five, and two 1967 Spider-Man drawings by the budding artist, at age 12.

Spider-Man © 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

looked so strange with the talking—just limited animation and really heavily rendered scenes.

MAO: That was Alex Toth [as character designer], right?

STEVENS: Yeah. And also Clutch Cargo, which I didn’t care for as much, because they would use human mouths that they put lipstick on, even for the dog.

It was just—really kind of queasy.

MAO: Is this the one that they were showing in Pulp Fiction? The kid’s watching and Christopher Walken comes in with the watch. It’s like the same thing that they do on Conan O’Brien. The writers just sort of stole that bit. Whenever I see that I always think of Space Angel.

STEVENS: Yeah, yeah.

Probably two or three years after that I started clipping and saving Prince Valiant Sunday pages.

MAO: So comic-strip art before comics?

STEVENS: Oh, yeah. I mean, the comics came along probably when I was about seven. That was my earliest memory of actively going after comics, but it was standard kid stuff. I think I had a couple of Gorgos and maybe a smattering of other [80-Page Giant] Superman or Batman and things like that, but nothing that really had a lasting impression on me.

MAO: Were you aware enough at the time to tell the different art styles, that one was better than the other or one seemed prettier?

STEVENS: Definitely. I could tell styles. That was never a problem. I liked Al Capp, but what I was actually liking was Frazetta doing Al Capp, because he ghosted for him in that ten-year period.

MAO: Did you find yourself at a certain point where you learned who was doing what? You know, going back and looking at some of the things that you read back then?

STEVENS: Yeah. And realizing why it affected me so much, because it was so lively and so well done. Also a big influence in terms of just art by itself, separate from any genre, was Lawson Wood, the guy that did all the monkey calendars in the 1940s and ’50s for Brown and Bigelow. He had this brilliant watercolor Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

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Kingly Collaboration (left) Photo of Stevens from 1973, at age 18. Look closely at the drawing board to see Dave’s aping of Jack “King” Kirby. (right) Some of Dave’s earliest published work was inking Kirby, like Comic-Con’s “Friend of Fandom” award art. style and ability to take these jungle animals—all kinds of them but primarily—primates, and turn them into people. And to me, that was just the most amazing gift to see an artist have. To be able to take a real chimpanzee or orangutan—and you know what they look like; they don’t look like people. I mean, they don’t emote like people.

They have facial expressions, but they don’t have abstract thought behind it. It’s all instinct. But what he would do is he would humanize them to the degree that they were just hilarious and totally rendered out in really delicate watercolor style and endlessly entertaining—there was a whole line of books featuring his merry monkeys and all the rest of them and storylines and entire illustrations.

It was just great, great stuff. So he was a big influence in terms of just all-around illustration.

MAO: What age would you say that was?

STEVENS: Five or six.

MAO: Wow. STEVENS: Pretty early, yeah. Well, because one of his calendars used to hang in my grandma’s kitchen, and the one image that I remember distinctly more than any other was the one of “Grandpop” cautiously greeting a little Martian in a rolling tin suit who had just landed up on the hill, and the little tiny monkeys peering around Grandpop’s legs looking at this creature in a tin suit. That was an image I just never forgot. A friend of mine sent me a copy of it a few years ago. That was a real touch point for me—to see it again and realize that I’d remembered it exactly, that it wasn’t any different from the way it looked when I was five.

MAO: Getting into your early teen years, who were you looking at, at that point?

STEVENS: By the time I was about 12, I had finally discovered Marvel comics and characters, so I was really into that period of sort of discovering really great, talented artists and funky, sarcastic dialogue and all the earmarks of the early Stan Lee age of Marvel.

MAO: So what year…?

STEVENS: ’65.

MAO: You were reading Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Thor, and all that stuff?

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STEVENS: Yeah. And just basically sampling each book to gauge what that artist brought to it. I ended up with my handful of favorite guys, and those were the only ones that I really would buy consistently … of course for the stories, but the main thing was the art.

MAO: Did you know these guys by name at that point?

STEVENS: Oh, yeah, because they ran a big box: “Drawn by Jazzy Johnny Romita” and all that. But the personality of those comics was really unique. I never got that from any other comic-book company, in terms of contents that basically just embraced the reader and told you that, “Jeez, these guys are having so much fun doing this stuff, that must be why it’s better.” They all sound like a bunch of grown teenagers just having a ball. That was primarily Stan Lee. He was a real good salesman with those books and would just speak to the reader on a one-on-one basis.

MAO: That was the dawning of the more relatable stories, relatable characters.

STEVENS: Yeah. And [Stan Lee] would put everything in very common terms, a lot of slang, a lot of joking around. None of it was serious. I think it was the complete lack of stuffiness that made the stuff so appealing. There was no formality observed.

MAO: Obviously your favorites. But were you aware of other comic books?

STEVENS: Sure. I read MAD magazine, and it was even more irreverent than Marvel and could incite you to really bad behavior if you allowed yourself. And I’d occasionally pick up DC and Gold Key books.

MAO: Did you find yourself reading comics just for the art, or did you need a compelling story as well?

STEVENS: Yeah. If the story wasn’t there, the art probably wasn’t going to be any good. How could an artist get excited about a horrible, horrible script? But some of them could. Kirby could turn an awful script into something really breathtaking; same with Ditko. The really premiere stylists—they can dance all around a bad script.

MAO: Who were some of your closest artist friends?

STEVENS: When I was in Portland [Oregon] in high school, I think by the time I reached 15 or so, there was an antique store in Portland called Old Weird Harold’s, and it was run by a couple of sisters and their mother and their last name was Harold. But it was a play on— MAO: Old Weird Harold’s … is that the old Bill Cosby routine?

STEVENS: Yeah, yeah. And that’s what they did intentionally. They started out as antique dealers in a very kind of hobbyist way, but then decided to open up their own store, so I kind of helped them paint and carpet. Me and one of the other guys that used to hang around— because the elder of the daughters had this enormous comic collection, and she would kind of buy and sell and barter with other collectors.

One or two friends of mine and I were invited over to check out the

collection whenever, and so there was a friendship there that by the time they opened their store—and it was, I guess, a good success. It had a lot of great stuff, basically old Americana of all kinds, including paper.

MAO: When would you say this was?

STEVENS: 1969, I think…

MAO: Okay. I was just wondering in terms of collecting, which only became really popular later on.

STEVENS: Yeah. This was a little ahead of the curve.

You know, nostalgia really didn’t come into its own as a sort of reason for people to collect things until four years later or five years later.

Anyway, that store became a meeting place for fandom in general in the Portland and Seattle areas.

So they finally decided, “You know, all these straggling kids that keep coming in here wanting to talk about funnybooks, why don’t we just set a day aside, a Saturday or Sunday of each month, and have coffee and donuts and see who shows up?” And it was mobbed.

MAO: So actually it was somewhat sponsored.

STEVENS: Yeah, it was. They sponsored a pretty large group of high-school kids and some older, and then some of the older rare-book collectors, antiquarianbook collectors would also come.

MAO: Kind of like a little con.

STEVENS: It was like a mini, mini-convention. No dealers allowed. They were the only dealers.

But the funny thing is, the kids that I met at that place on those Sundays, almost to a man, ended up in the industry, in comics.

MAO: People you still know.

STEVENS: Oh, yeah, yeah. Randy Emberlin, Chris Warner.

I believe Randy Stradley was there. Mike Richardson says he was there a few times, but I don’t remember meeting him.

MAO: It seems like he’d be hard to miss, though.

STEVENS: Yeah, yeah. But I’m thinking he might have come in maybe as I was moving. You know, because my family left for San Diego in, I think, February or March of ’72.

MAO: So you were only doing this for a couple of years.

STEVENS: A couple of years, yeah.

I think Paul Chadwick came later. There was a whole bunch of guys that not only continued on drawing and sort of experimenting with the medium, but some of them—well, Richardson formed a company [Dark Horse Comics]. There were a handful of other guys involved that I forget right now, but the amazing thing is how many of us actually took it to a career. What are the odds?

MAO: That’s awesome. Clearly, a very encouraging experience.

STEVENS: Yeah. Before I was involved with that gang there was nothing. I knew one or two other collectors but nobody that was into art, nobody that knew artists.

MAO: Was it strictly about collecting, or did you talk to some of these guys about art?

STEVENS: Oh, yeah. In fact, the guys who ended up in the industry as artists were all drawing then. Randy Emberlin—I remember he, Chris Warner, another friend, Mark, and myself would have these all-night pizza binges at his mom’s house on Friday night and just stay up all night though the next day just drawing, just jamming and putting on Aqualung or Who’s Next, you know, whatever it was and just whip ourselves up into a frenzy. We’d all bring our latest acquisitions of Creepy or Eerie or whatever latest thing we’d gotten our hands on—a fanzine with Wrightson art in it or something like that, because we were all following Kaluta, Wrightson, Jeff Jones, and the rest of the up-and-comers that were right on the cusp of

Merry Monkeys (below) The Lawson Wood “Grandpop” illo that inspired young Dave Stevens.

Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). (left) Kirby is reviewing some of Dave’s samples in this 1973 photo.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

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San Diego ComicCon Memories (below) Silver Surfer pinup by Kirby, inked

by Stevens over Kirby’s pencils, for the 1975 SDCC program book. (bottom left) Shadow drawing by Dave for a 1970s convention badge (special thanks to Jerry Boyd). (bottom right) Dave with Famous Monsters of Filmland’s Forrest “Forry” J. Ackerman, 1973.

Silver Surfer © 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc. The Shadow © 2011 Condé Nast.

becoming professionals. In fact, I think within a year, two or three of them were doing stories for Joe Orlando at DC. But our little core of art guys, we did that on a regular basis—these all-night jam sessions, getting each other all worked up about what we were going to do.

MAO: So you were planning it out as a career at that point. I mean, you were serious about aspiring.

STEVENS: Oh, we definitely aspired. I don’t think any of us really had a plan, per se, but I know that Chris Warner was doing sort of a “Savage Earth” kind of adventure strip in his high-school paper, and I was occasionally doing these little gag strips in my high school paper but nothing at all ambitious. Randy Emberlin, I think he was the first of us who actually attended San Diego [Comic-Con]. I think it was the year before I moved down to California. He took a bus all the way from Portland to San Diego with this giant painting he’d done. It was like, five feet by five feet— it was huge. And he dragged this thing all the way down there on the bus with him and attended the show. I don’t know where he slept. He was the only one of us to make the trek, all by himself, on whatever tiny budget he had. But the following year, or two years later when I moved down there, it became like a lightning rod for all of these guys to come down from Portland.

MAO: The floodgates opened.

STEVENS: Oh, brother! And my folks weren’t really thrilled about it because we would literally take over their house.

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These guys would drive down, all of them, in a VW van that barely got them there, and they would show up at my folks’ house. The doors would open and … AHHGG! You know, all these hairy, hairy guys. Because this was ’69, ’70, or thereabouts, and everybody had hair for miles.

MAO: It sounds like you were a popular guy.

STEVENS: Well, it was mainly the logistics. My folks would endure it for the three days that they were at the show, but they would be so glad when everybody would leave to go home. They would be pretty good hosts for my idiot friends. I think it just a case of one of us finally moving down there so that the rest of us could experience the show.

MAO: And have a staging area.

STEVENS: Yeah, and then I think one of my parents would load us up and either drop us off at the show, or, if the van was operable, we would drive down to the El Cortez and just park it for a day or two. There was— I’m thinking—well, it was the very first convention at the El Cortez, 1972. Before that it had been at a junior college.

MAO: When did San Diego start?

STEVENS: I think they put on a mini-con in 1970, and then ’71 was the first sort of official one—and it was held at a junior-college rec center or something like that.

The first one held at an actual hotel was the El Cortez, and that was in ’72; so that was basically the first official show. I remember Forry Ackerman, Jack Kirby, and Mike Royer were guests. And it was huge for those of us that had only been to these little Portland mini-cons.

For most of us, this was our first official comics exhibition.

It was pretty amazing because it took over the whole hotel, the ballrooms, and the exhibit hall on the other side of the hotel across the street. It was literally a who’s who of fandom. Everybody came to that show, so you’d meet guys from back east like Phil Seuling.

Guys like [William] Stout would come and set up.

During the time I was living in San Diego, Scott Shaw, John Pound, Richard Alf, Barry Alfonso, and the rest of the Five-String Mob and the other kids that were forming an association with Kirby via the Con—I kind of fell into that bunch. I think my first visit to Jack’s was the following year, ’73. I think I got involved with the convention as a committee member. I don’t remember what I did. I think I ran the art show one year, but I was more or less involved with the show from that point on.

MAO: It sounds like the show facilitated a lot of lasting friendships and acquaintances.

STEVENS: And beyond that it was great for me to show my portfolio. I mean, I got access to everybody from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Chuck Jones. You name it.

MAO: At this point, were the publishers there, or was it all just fans?

STEVENS: There were no publishers [in attendance] in those days.

MAO: So you were meeting all of these professionals who were there because they loved it.

STEVENS: Yeah. And it was one-on-one, which was unheard of in those days. You didn’t have access to any of these people. But on behalf of the Con, if two or three of you were representing a show, they would make time to sit down and talk. Then I would figure out some innocuous way of showing my samples in the course of it. And boy!

I got a lot of feedback from a lot of people over probably a three-year period before actually getting professional work. Kirby was very candid with me the first time he looked at my stuff, but he liked us and, you know, Jack was never going to say anything that would sort of take you down a peg. He was always very positive with us. The first time we went up to Jack’s for the afternoon I had my portfolio with me and asked him if he could take a look at some of my samples. Most of it was illustration-oriented.

MAO: Non-comic.

STEVENS: Yeah, there were a lot of samples that I had lightboxed from other artists and then inked in my own sort of faux style. It was really dreadful stuff, but functional. Jack, after he looked through everything— I mean, he took his time. He didn’t just zip through it— he held up a colored illustration of a sports car, a real sleek kind of Jaguar thing, and he said, “You know, you should be doing work for the NFL or Time or Newsweek.

Comics, it’s just not for you.” He said, “You’re an illustrator. You’re not cut out for [comics]. What I see here is full-blown illustration. You’re not doing comics.”

MAO: Clearly, you took that advice to heart.

STEVENS: You would think I would have, because that was the career I’d sort of unconsciously thrown together, and that was the only kind of work that I could have gotten, being on the west coast, because comics were all back east.

Everything was in New York. There was nothing out here other than, I think, Whitman or Western, and their rates were awful. Plus it was kind of a locked—a closed shop.

MAO: But you were undeterred.

STEVENS: Well, I just figured there was some way that at some point I could get some work out here or God forbid, I would have to move to New York, which I really didn’t want to do.

But [Kirby] really was adamant about saying, “Don’t get into comics, you don’t need to.” And I said I wanted to at least try it. He said, “If you think you have to, if you feel like you’re never going to be satisfied until you try it, then go ahead. Maybe you got something that I don’t

In the Beginning…

see here.” He said that’s the only reason to get into it— if you just can’t stand the thought of not trying.

The funny thing is, that same year at the ’73 Con, Neal Adams was one of the guests and he was doing these informal portfolio reviews in a suite apart from the Con. It was real loosey-goosey, mostly just a bunch of us sitting around listening to Neal tell stories about other artists—and the air in the room was just blue. It was really fun, but I was so cowed by being in the room with this guy, because I’d followed his work in Green Lantern/ Green Arrow and all the other cutting-edge things that he was doing at the time. He was trying to whittle free of the [Comics] Code, the restrictions on subject matter.

Plus he rendered the most realistic representation of humanity I’d ever seen on a comics page.

MAO: Obviously a departure from the early DC stuff— and just his perspective.

STEVENS: Yeah. Total drama, big faces and body language. It was something completely different than we’d seen before, and here he was just kicking back with a Coke and talking to a bunch of snot-noses that didn’t know anything. We were all around 18 or older and one guy after another would show him a few samples and then hang around. I think we had been there for like an hour or more and it was kind of winding down.

I got up to leave, and he stopped me. He said, “What you got there?” And I had this big, gigantic paper portfolio; it was like bigger than me. And I said, “Oh, it’s nothing.”

I was kind of embarrassed. I just—I didn’t want to have to open it in front of all these guys.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

(left) Photo of Dave taken at the 1977 Comic-Con. He’s holding a color guide for a page from the Aurora story, his first published comic-book work that he wrote/penciled/inked. (above) Very early Stevens art on the feature Teran!, written

by Dave Chamberlain.

From the 1972 fanzine Nuff Said? #2.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Teran! © 1972 Dave Chamberlain and Dave Stevens.

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Look What Johnny Brought Home The Wally Wood/ Dave Stevens cover for issue #2 of Eclipse Comics’ 1986 miniseries World of Wood. © 1986 Eclipse Comics.

Because the pressure was really pungent in that room, you could tell. Guys were sweating bullets when he was looking through their stuff, and everybody else was looking at it at the same time and going, “Oh, that’s not so good,” and “I’m much better than that.”

I didn’t want to go through that. It was just really intimidating. But he said, “Are those your samples?” and I said, “Yeah, but you’re getting ready to leave.

You don’t have time.” And he said, “Well, will you take the time I give you?” I mean, I can remember it wordfor-word because it was the first time I actually had a professional at a show, at a venue, say, “Show me what you’ve got” without me kind of having to beg for time.

So I opened it up and showed him what I had brought. It was a hodgepodge of inking samples and some penciling samples, and he flipped through it, looking and commenting on each piece. At the end of it he said, “You can ink for Marvel”—just like that!

He motioned to Mike Friedrich, who was standing at the corner, and he said, “Give your stuff to Mike, and he’ll send it back east and Roy Thomas will look at it and

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decide if they think you’ve got the stuff to start right now, but I think you can ink for them right now.”

MAO: Wow! STEVENS: And this was 1973.

MAO: That’s about as good an outcome as you could imagine with all those people standing around.

STEVENS: Yeah. One of my Portland buddies was in the room and he was just shaking, he was so excited. And Friedrich, that was the first time I’d met Mike as well … basically he wasn’t going to volunteer. Neal volunteered him to do this. I shook hands with him and Neal had other things to say to me, but that was the basis of what happened. I think it took maybe at least a couple of months before I got the samples back, maybe longer. There was no letter or anything in it but a little hastily scrawled note on the outside saying, “Roy and I both agree, not ready,” underlined. But at least I knew the stuff got looked at by the Marvel art director [John Romita, Sr.] at the time.

MAO: Who you were a fan of.

STEVENS: Yeah.

MAO: That’s obviously a big step above everybody else trying to figure out how to get into the business back then.

STEVENS: I think a lot of it had to be recommendations from other professionals, because I’m thinking the stuff that would just walk in off the streets may not have ever been seen. I know [Marvel staffer] Flo Steinberg used to deal with the fans and people wanting to submit stuff, but I do not remember if she would actually take somebody’s portfolio off the street and show it to Romita.

MAO: Do you know if anything good ever came off the street?

STEVENS: You never know. I think Steranko walked in off the street. So it did happen, but I’d be curious to know how they actually conducted that kind of thing back then.

Anyway, after that I had the audacity to call Romita at Marvel—I think Friedrich or somebody might have given me the number—and just kind of kept in touch and said, “I’m willing to do anything you got lying around.” He was very nice about it, but he said, “Look, at this point we’re having trouble just keeping our own staff in work.

We’re having a real shortage.” He said, “I’ll try to get you a Western cover to ink, something.” It would have been a really minor thing of no consequence, but to me it was a job—to at least demonstrate what I could do.

But I’m kind of glad I didn’t get any work back then, because I needed at least two or three more years to hone my chops with the brush. I was just starting and it would have been kind of a nonevent if I started working then. I don’t think I would have gotten repeat work.

I just didn’t have it. Between having Neal look at the stuff, and then two or three other people over the next year, then came [Russ] Manning. We stopped at Russ’ place and he gave me a quick critique. It was mostly inked versions of Kirby pencils at that point. He said, “Well, I’ll tell you, I’m not a big fan of the Marvel style, and this is just too slick for me.” But the funny thing was, Russ was just as slick, if not more so.

He just didn’t see the similarity. But even though he told me that he didn’t care for that style, a year later he hired me as an anchor and assistant, so obviously he saw something there that he could make use of.

MAO: Out of curiosity, have you ever talked to Neal Adams after this period? Do you think he remembers this?

STEVENS: Oh, no, no. I’ve talked to him many times over the years, and no. I think I mentioned it once maybe back in the mid ’70s or late ’70s, but he wouldn’t know. I mean, he looked at hundreds and hundreds of kids over the years, probably thousands of kids’ portfolios.

DEALING WITH DIFFICULT PEOPLE AND SITUATIONS MAO: My next question is: Who is your worst nemesis?

If you can, name them and the circumstances that made them a pain in your side.

STEVENS: Boy, that’d be tough. Nobody comes to mind other than one particular publisher, an independent that I worked at for a couple of years with The Rocketeer, who was basically an extortionist. The guy just had no moral core whatsoever and ended up, unbeknownst to me, licensing foreign editions of The Rocketeer, which he absolutely did not have the right to do because I was already tied in to a French publisher, Albin Michel, and later Glenot in France. They handled all the foreign-language rights, so if some other company, in Sweden or Germany, wanted to republish it in their language, they would provide the film and the other country would just strip in their copy.

But this guy just did as much as he could on his own without bothering to let me know that he trumped all over the contract in every way you possibly could and issued several reprints of the graphic novel as well as an English version through Grafton Publisher, all of it around the time of the film, or leading up to it so that he got the maximum profit. By the time I found out about most of it, the guy had already left the business and was sort of un-prosecutable at that point. That would qualify as a nemesis.

MAO: Anybody that you had a healthy competition with?

STEVENS: Not really. You know, the good thing about comic books as a field of endeavor is that most people in it, they’re too busy trying to better their own game to throw stones at the other guy. The only time I ever encountered any kind of negativity or backbiting or just snippy behavior was probably around the time that things started to blow up for me.

MAO: What was that?

STEVENS: I got nominated for this or that industry thing for The Rocketeer and right afterwards we’d optioned the rights and were trying to work on a film treatment. It seemed like around that time, whatever sort of negative side of the industry started to evidence itself, but it was really pretty minor.

MAO: Well, there are always some people who are going to envy.

STEVENS: Yeah. And that’s all it was and there was nothing you could do about it. You couldn’t really even have a conversation. They were going to hate you no matter what, so there were a few instances of that kind of thing.

The only really malicious behavior toward me came from Marvel in the early ’80s, and it was contesting my right to use the name “Rocketeer.” They were saying it was causing confusion in the marketplace, that I should not be allowed to us the name. And they were citing it on some technicality. Several years prior, Marv Wolfman had written an issue of Daredevil in which they had used

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

Dave Stevens Visits Madison Avenue (left) Detail from Stevens’ advertising art for the 1984 movie comedy Up the Creek, which reunited Animal House alums Tim Matheson and Stephen Furst. (right) Wheaties ad art done in 1987 featuring Michael Jordan.

Up the Creek © 1984 Orion Pictures.

Wheaties © 2010 General Mills, Inc.

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this team of green-garbed spacemen called Rocketeers, or something like that. But that was also previously in a comic Jack Kirby had drawn in the 1950s, which somebody had sent me a copy of with a kind of a “ha-ha,” you know—Jack did it before anybody else. [Editor’s note: Marvel’s Rocketeers appeared in Daredevil #131, March 1976. Kirby’s “3 Rocketeers” starred in Harvey Comics’ Blast-Off #1 in 1965.]

MAO: But that’s a play on the word “musketeer.”

STEVENS: Exactly. The problem with Marvel was that they kept at me for several years, and it cost me a lot of money fighting them off.

I had talked to both Jim Shooter and Mike Hobson, and neither one of them would lift a finger to stop it. To me, that hurt more than the actual sort of stone throwing by the lawyers, the fact that neither one of these guys would do anything to help me.

MAO: I guess Marvel does have a history of doing this, especially to small independents.

STEVENS: Yeah. And I had at least two other friends who were trying to launch independent books on their own, and both of them got chased and intimidated by Marvel. It’s bullying and just the luck of the draw. Either you will attract their attention or you won’t, and I think I attracted their attention because in ’83 or ’84 Archie Goodwin, who was a good pal, he was editing the Epic line at the time, and he and I had some very loose conversations about the possibility of taking The Rocketeer to Epic. But I wanted to see a copy of the contract first and see exactly what was going to be involved, because I told him I didn’t want to give up any of the rights that I already had, which was everything including merchandising. I knew that I could trust Archie no matter what. He was one of those guys that whatever he said, you could take it to the bank. You knew that he was being straight with you.

MAO: Decent.

STEVENS: Yeah, a very decent guy, very affable, and I would trust him with my last five bucks.

So he sent me a copy of the legal document, and it was like a phone book. Right up front it had what I feared, and that was them insisting on owning this percentage of this, this percentage of that, to where

Raising a Stink(or) He-Man/Masters of the Universe “Stinkor” action-figure blister-pack art done for Mattel by Stevens in 1994. © 2011 Mattel.

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basically they would own more of it than I would collectively. So I called him and said that the contract was unworkable as is, and asked if there is any room for wiggling. He said probably not, so we just regrettably had to call it a day—even though it would have been great to work together.

What I didn’t know then and what he told me later is that somebody at Marvel had posted it on some kind of upcoming projects thing in the inner office and written down Rocketeer.

MAO: So they had thought it was already a done deal.

STEVENS: I guess they thought it was in the bag and once they figured out that it wasn’t coming, that may have been the reason not to help me out when their lawyers came calling and the harassment started.

That was one of those industry problems that shouldn’t happen to anybody, ever. It just shouldn’t. Clearly when you’re using a title or a name that is not in use, that hasn’t ever been in use, at least not as a series or the title of a series, you use it, and I did it in good faith.

I thought that I’d come up with it and thought nobody had ever used the term because with me it was a play on “racketeer.”

MAO: Right.

STEVENS: You know, the polar opposite.

I’m trying to remember what else was involved, but it’s so long ago I think I probably blotted out most of it because it was so unpleasant.

MAO: How did it actually end?

STEVENS: Well, as soon as Disney became attached [Marvel] went away immediately. They were just squeezing me because they felt that they could hopefully bleed me out of existence financially. It was just a nuisance suit. Harlan Ellison had called and tried to intercede for me, and two or three other people too. By the time I had talked to the powers-in-place at that time, they were really pretty testy with me over the phone, I could tell the line had been drawn in the sand.

I was just going to have to take it and try to outlast them.

Unfortunately, that caused me to have to take more freelance work—and right at a crucial time when Pacific was about to go under. This is in ’84. Between the time that Pacific crashed and I ended up at Eclipse, there was this period where I was just taking jobs for money, and it really hurt my ability to get back into the series and get cranking for the next seven issues.

MAO: What were some of the things that you worked on in that period?

STEVENS: A lot film art, some stuff for Mattel, toy packaging.

MAO: So not necessarily comic books.

STEVENS: No, no. It was really varied. It was just, like I said, things to pay the legal bills.

But during that time I was also still doing covers, and I did a whole bundle of them for Eclipse—all within about a year’s time.

THE OPTIONING OF THE ROCKETEER FILM MAO: At what point was The Rocketeer optioned?

STEVENS: It was optioned first by director Steve Miner at the end of ’83, I think.

MAO: So pretty early on.

STEVENS: Yeah. But it was kind of a friendly option, and I think he renewed it for another year, but by ’85 we hadn’t come up with a story either one of us liked. In fact, Doug Wildey went in and helped me pitch one to Steve, which actually I wish I could remember it because it was really good. And even though I don’t know how good a movie it would have made, it would have made a great little twopart or three-part miniseries, because it had elements of what we wanted for the film as well as elements from the comic and things that I hadn’t gotten to yet.

MAO: It’s not written down anywhere? Just sort of pitched off the comic?

STEVENS: We had notes, just a legal pad with a few notes on it, but it was all just sheer enthusiasm because Doug was really into it and if it was going to be turned into a film, he wanted to take an active part in either producing or writing or whatever. I think the next incarnation— like an entity producing or a production house entity optioning it really didn’t happen. What did happen was, I met up with Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo in ’85, I believe through Jessie Horsting, and just immediately hit it off because we were trying to come up with the same type of material just with different scenarios, different characters, but it all had the same sort of retro-tone to it.

MAO: I didn’t realize your association with them went so far back.

STEVENS: Yeah, back as far as Trancers or Zone Troopers.

Zone Troopers was—I think they had just finished that, and it was actually the first thing Danny had directed. It was pure 1940s jargon and really funny and smartly done.

So we started compiling together a plot, a pitch, and then I was contacted by a director named William Dear, who was just getting started doing a film called Harry and the Hendersons for Amblin. Bill wanted to throw in, but I told him I already had two writers that I was really happy with, and I wanted to bring them in rather than just go with him. So we kind of formed a little team between the four of us. Bill would direct, and he wanted to help co-write. I think we started actively pitching it while he was still shooting Harry, so I think ’86 would have been when we started making the rounds to every studio.

Within a matter of a few months, we’d gone everywhere, every place that was still in existence at the time.

MAO: Was Doug Wildey still with you at this point?

STEVENS: No. Doug was only involved as far as it was with Steve Miner, and because we didn’t really make any headway, I think he just kind of figured it was kind of a useless effort.

I just went with gut instinct and the fact that the stuff felt like we were on the right track. Story elements that I hadn’t gotten to yet got thrown in, and partial plots from issues that I had discarded, as well as new stuff from the other guys.

MAO: So it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that any kind of movie story would follow— STEVENS: —Straight from the comic? No, because from the get-go there was never any great villain. All there was was the rivalry between Cliff and this—what do you call it?—a Svengali photographer, and that doesn’t make for a big adventure, you know? So we had to come up with a really suitable villain, and that was where Neville Sinclair came from. We just took the old speculation that somebody had put out there years ago that Errol Flynn was possibly involved with secret support of the Nazis,

Fastest Man Alive (left) Stevens’ final costume design for CBS-TV’s The Flash (1990–1991).

John Wesley Shipp (interviewed in BACK ISSUE #23 and seen in the border background) wore the suit. (above) Left to right: Dave Stevens, unidentified (in background), and Stevens’ mentor Doug Wildey in 1978.

The Flash TM & © DC Comics.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

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BACK ISSUE • 39

Doug Wildey (above) Jonny Quest creator Wildey drew this pinup of the Rocketeer cast in 1984 for Eclipse Comics’ The Rocketeer Special Edition #1. (right) A photo of Stevens and Wildey taken in 1982.

The Rocketeer © 2011 The Rocketeer Trust.

which is completely bogus, but it was an idea that could be worked. By the end of ’86, we had a pretty good pitch going, but everybody in the business at the time just roundly declined. Everybody passed on it. They knew what it was the minute we started talking it through, but it was just too risky a proposition in those days.

MAO: It was pre-Tim Burton Batman.

STEVENS: Oh, yeah. There was just nothing for anybody to hang anything on. It just smelled like it would be too costly and would not perform for them. And everybody was tied up in other thing, rather than juvenile pulp material. We saved Disney for the last because, you know, we wouldn’t make any money there. It would be sort of, “Okay, well if we go to Disney, we’re just going to have to all bite the bullet if we want to get the thing made.” There just wouldn’t be any take-home.

The Disney austerity program kind of ruled that out.

At least going in, they got it right away and were enthusiastic. But mainly because of the name, Rocketeer—“Mouseketeer,” and the fact that they looked at it and said, “Toys!”

MAO: Unfortunately, there weren’t any great toys.

STEVENS: Yeah.

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There we were. There were several points when we had just gotten into talks with them that I just said, “No, absolutely no; this is just never going to work.”

It’s just an intolerable way to do business, and I just walked away a couple of different times.

In the interim, Steven Spielberg contacted somebody.

I don’t know if it was Danny and Paul’s agent. Somehow, word got back to us that Steven said, “Look, I’ll take it.

If Disney doesn’t want the thing or they’re not going to give you a good deal, I’ll take it. I’ll take it right now.”

We had been to Universal, but Universal wouldn’t commit to anything unless it went by Steven first because it was action/adventure. In those days with anything of that ilk, they had an agreement with Steven and Amblin that he got first look as it came in. The only reason we didn’t opt for that was because Bill was already knee-deep in Harry and the Hendersons with Amblin, and he wanted to do the next film somewhere else. It was just a personal thing, a favor to Bill, that we didn’t end up at Amblin right on top of Harry and the Hendersons.

In retrospect, I kind of wished we had, but the minute word got back to Disney that Spielberg had tossed his hat in the ring, things got kind of nasty for a split-second.

MAO: Nasty in terms of what?

STEVENS: [Disney studio chairman Jeffrey] Katzenberg.

He got on the horn and said, “I will sue you, I will sue Steven, I will sue everybody collectively, individually.”

MAO: But you guys were still working it out.

STEVENS: He cited “implied contract” or whatever.

It never would have stuck if we’d had to arbitrate, but Tom Pollock, who at the time was the head of Universal, said, “In spite of Steven’s enthusiasm about it, we’re going to have to pass on this thing because we already have a coproduction with Disney that we do not want to go wrong,” and that was Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I don’t know how far along they were on it, but it was a major piece of business for both studios.

So we lost the whole Spielberg umbrella of protection right then and there.

MAO: I’m sure that sort of spurred Disney to act a little bit quicker. You know, if someone else wants something…

STEVENS: Not really. Once they knew that we had been cowed and backed off, the negotiation went on for the next year.

MAO: Wow. STEVENS: It was awful. It was just a long, drawn-out, adversarial thing. I hated dealing with those people, but that was our only shot at that point because everybody else had passed; and there were no other entities at the time that would have gotten it.

The funny thing—just in passing—is, we went to Orion, at the time headed by Mike Medavoy, who formerly was with United Artists. When I was four to six years old we lived in Norwalk, California, and our next-door neighbors were an old Russian Jewish couple named Medavoy. We used to go over there and watch their color TV. They had the only color TV in the neighborhood. It was 1960 or thereabouts. And they would make popcorn, he and his wife, and we’d all gather around what to me seemed like a giant color TV set and watch Moby Dick or whatever it was, spectacle movies.

Not every day—it was a real treat, it was seldom.

Their daughter—they had a daughter and a son— the son was off at college, so I didn’t see him much, but the daughter babysat us regularly. So while we lived there we were very friendly with them. I don’t know what possessed me, but when we walked into the meeting at Orion—here’s Mike Medavoy sitting there and the guys, Bilson and DeMeo. I said, “I’m going to ask him.” And they said, “Don’t, Dave. Don’t. Don’t ask him.

Knock it off! Calm down and just shut up!” And I said, “I have to. I have to know.” And I, you know, respectfully— before everybody sat down and got settled, I said, “Do you have a sister named Veronica?” And he looked at me and said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Did your folks live on Rexton Street in Norwalk, California, in 1960?” And he looked at me like, “Who is this guy? Where did he come from?” It was him—he was the older son.

MAO: The one that was off at school.

STEVENS: Yeah.

So he and I talked for just a couple of minutes about his sister. She had just gotten married a few months earlier, and I asked him about his folks. And, you know, “I tried to get them to move out of that awful neighborhood for years.” It was just funny because Danny and Paul, they were watching me and sweating, thinking, “Oh, he’s going to blow this pitch completely.” But when they saw him smile and us talking, they chimed in once he came over and sat down, and they told him that, “Oh, we were in film class with you at USC,” or whatever.

MAO: Was that true?

STEVENS: Yeah.

MAO: That’s funny. It’s a small—well, a much bigger small-world deal with the babysitting sister.

STEVENS: Yeah. I mean, that’s really random, that he would go on from being a kid from Norwalk to head major studios.

It was a funny pitch. He stopped us halfway through and said, “Guys, I know what this is. It’s just not the kind of animal we could do right now. Just too expensive for us.” But it was a fun pitch. It was one of the ones that we all really kind of had fun doing. The sort of serendipitous things that happened along the way—they come at you from left and right and behind you, and you just kind of have to roll with them when it happens.

MAO: It’s one of those things where it could have gone either way. If he had been in a better position, that might have actually— STEVENS: —Broken some ice.

MAO: Yeah.

STEVENS: Well, it did, anyway. It broke the ice in that it might have been a stiff, barely cordial meeting.

Instead it was a lot more fun than that.

High-Flying Hero (below) Stevens’ cover art The Rocketeer Movie Adaptation, published in 1991

by Disney. (left) Dave on the set of the Rocketeer film, circa 1990.

The Rocketeer © 2011 The Rocketeer Trust.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

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BACK ISSUE • 41

Influences from Yesteryear (right) Dave’s 1997 Blue Café CD album cover for the band Hot Rod Lincoln. (below) Fay Wray looks a-okay on Stevens’ 1991 cover Fantagraphics’/ Monster Comics’ King Kong #1 (Feb. 1991). (bottom right) Dave’s mom Carolyn, circa 1952, with her brother’s 1940 Ford.

King Kong © 2011 Universal Pictures.

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DAVE’S PENCHANT FOR OLD HOLLYWOOD AND 1930s/1940s DESIGN MAO: You’re known for being interested in old Hollywood and a lot of things that are considered retro now. Where does your interest in the 1930s and 1940s time period come from, since you were born after that?

STEVENS: Nostalgia from my parents’ childhood.

I think it’s just having that 20-year period blanket of pre-war to post-war wrapped around me in both my grandparents’ as well as my folks’ homes, and all my other relatives. Basically, from the late ’30s until the end of the ’50s, most of that stuff had remained pretty intact.

People didn’t redo their homes the way they do today.

They kept the same furniture, other than replacing one armchair or something. The same stuff hanging on the walls, same light fixtures. Nothing changed, you know? And they all pretty much still played the same music or very similar music. It was all standards, ballads, torch songs, and big bands. That was it until rock and roll came in—and it took rock and roll a good ten years to get a real foothold on the music scene.

It wasn’t until probably the Beatles before it really took over the airwaves. Up until then, rock and roll was still kind of considered a novelty act, and the mainstay of music was the older stuff.

So that permeated everything—it was in the air, everywhere you went. Everybody still did business the way they had done since before the war. Barber shops still had a shoeshine set up outside, and there was always a big, smiling black man out there to shine your shoes.

To me, that was the way world looked and smelled and sounded. It was very friendly. I remember as a kid that people were for the most part pretty cognizant of manners and respectful toward women and that kind of thing. Occasionally you’d get some guy that had had one or two beers and would say something off-color, but you never heard public swearing. People behaved themselves and it wasn’t an effort. We hadn’t entered that age of protest yet, which didn’t come along until, what, ’63 or ’64, to where you were seeing it on the tube all the time. And it was probably just the influence of the world that I experienced on a daily basis from birth because all the old architecture was still there.

Almost none of it had been bulldozed yet.

MAO: You’re obviously a big art deco fan.

STEVENS: Yeah, and Spanish style and craftsman style—from the homes, the bungalows to the commercial edifices on Main Streets. It was really beautifully thought out and executed in every way, even the cheap houses. And the cars were beautiful, gorgeous, gigantic hunks of metal. It was just something that I’ve always kind of held on to because it was so aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Once cars started getting boxy, they started losing their character. To me that was really the end of any kind of imaginative sculptural and aerodynamic work being done. The minute the cars started to lose that, then the buildings started to lose it, and everything else that had that sort of teardrop style—streamline locomotives, all that stuff—started disappearing pretty much some time during the ’60s.

MAO: Your artwork also portrays that sort of architecture and design setting that doesn’t reflect I guess what we’d call— STEVENS: —Modern-day.

MAO: Yeah.

STEVENS: But again, it’s only because I have such a lack of respect for modern architecture.

MAO: [laughs] STEVENS: Well, I’m just being honest. I have no respect for most modern architecture. It’s just badly thought through, and it’s planned for cheap rather than— “Let’s build a really beautiful building.” It’s just empty with no personality, no flair, no mark of excellence to any of it. The little—like Rococo on the outside of a building—little touches, sculptural or relief, it’s basically all gone and it’s too bad because that was what made buildings a treat to go into. Their lobbies were just gorgeous bits of art deco splendor, whether it was the stonework or the woodwork or a great mural from the WPA. You know, L.A.’s library is filled with murals by Dean Cornwell. It’s stuff that you can’t duplicate because there are no artists doing that kind of work anymore. None of it was handed down. People didn’t train under people like that for very long.

MAO: It’s difficult to find any information on it now from the point of view of trying to study it or just seeing examples.

STEVENS: At one time, it was commonplace—it was everywhere. So that’s the reason that I don’t draw anything of the here and now, whether it’s cars or fashions or anything, because to me it just holds nothing of interest. It’s got a real lack of substance.

It’s tough to explain. Either you get a good feeling from it or you don’t, and mostly I don’t. I see a lot of just quick and dirty stuff that really just doesn’t work.

MAO: No exceptions at all?

Hello, Norma Jeane

STEVENS: There are, sure. Occasionally I will find a jacket that’s just beautiful, or a painting done by somebody contemporary that’s breathtaking. There are examples in everything that cut against the norm in any movement or any decade. But by and large, the really tasty, elegant stuff is long gone, and my stylings, personally, are to preserve that look and feel just for myself, for my own enjoyment. It really doesn’t matter to me if anybody else even notices it. I notice it, so I put it in there. And plus, I think it does kind of help in an overall statement artistically, because I think it segregates me from other people who are totally contemporary in what they do. I just have nothing contemporary to say about the here and now that would be of any interest to anybody. I just would much rather examine history and news stories of the past and characters that are long since forgotten, as well as accomplishments in all the arts, things, and people that unfortunately are not in the history books.

For the current generation, they’re never going to know about it unless somebody like me puts it on paper and at least plants the seed so that they will go online and do a search, if it strikes a chord at all. If it doesn’t, that’s okay, because I had fun doing it. And if a few people get it, I did my job.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

(left) Following his mother’s footsteps, Stevens with his own 1940 Ford in a mid-1980s photo. (above) Dave drew this Marilyn Monroe portrait in Kelvin Mao’s sketchbook in 2003.

•

BACK ISSUE • 43

Jezebel Jade (below) Stevens’ striking cover to Comico’s Jonny Quest #5 (Oct. 1986), featuring the lovely femme fatale Jezebel Jade (who later got her own miniseries). (right) Two cover prelims.

Jonny Quest © 2011 Hanna-Barbera Productions.

DEALING WITH POSTERITY MAO: What do you see as your biggest accomplishment?

Something you hope you’ll be remembered for?

STEVENS: Haven’t done it yet.

MAO: Is there something that’s the best to date?

Anything you want to talk about?

STEVENS: It would probably be something obscure like taking satisfaction in some of the compliments people have come up with. One time a guy gave me a compliment about one of the Jonny Quest covers, the “Jade” cover. He said, “And it’s real Chinese writing.”

Things like that where you put the work in and do the research, get the signage right or the flavor. You don’t want to just scrawl a bunch of stuff that’s meaningless.

MAO: Authenticity.

STEVENS: Yeah, because to me there’s no other way to do it. It’s like the rivets on a piece of aeronautic body work. You want to get it at least close to where most people would say, “Yup, that’s an airplane.”

It’s mostly just that people are paying attention when you do go after details that seemingly mean nothing to anybody else, and that other people would criticize you for, because it takes time to do and they’d rather see you draw another great leg or whatever it is.

But for me, there’s always a really good payoff in terms of satisfaction of a job well done when people cite— whether it’s the cut of the coat or wrinkles in fabric, something as minor as that, that shows weight or volume or texture or the way you draw hair. It’s a lot of little things that I enjoy doing. I like to test myself. I like to make sure that I’m up to the task, that I can perform in the way that I see myself performing. And most of the time if I don’t get it right, I at least come close to giving it the kind of flair that I need to, with the brush or whatever.

So it’s probably just that the jobs are appreciated by— even if it’s only six people that notice what exactly you’re really doing, getting lighting right or body attitude or an expression on a face—even if it’s really subtle. If it connects with somebody, that’s what you want to have happen.

You don’t want the image, after all your sweat and toil, to have no effect and to have somebody just glance at it and say, “Eh, not bad.” You’re working for other artists, basically, even though you’re happy if anybody notices.

It’s mostly for your peers and the guys you’re in friendly competition with, to be able to say, “Hey, look what I did. What did you do? Show me this week’s.”

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MAO: Conversely, what would you say your biggest regret is? Something you wish you hadn’t done or that you had a do-over for.

STEVENS: You can kind of torture yourself about that kind of stuff. I do wish that I’d had somebody sit me down maybe in senior year of high school and really nail my butt to the chair and say, “Look, you need a plan ’cause you’re going to hit the streets, and you won’t be employable for the next two years, three years, whatever it is.” I wish some career counselor had put me wise to how tough it was going to be, to get out in the real world and find employment, and support myself trying to do artwork as a living.

MAO: Is that because you wish you were more mentally prepared, or that you had more of a plan?

STEVENS: Everything, everything.

I wasn’t mentally prepared. I didn’t know it was going to be as tough, with as much starving as I did for the first couple of years. But more than that, it was the practicality of lining things up in terms of having specific goals to shoot for right out of the gate, to know, “Okay, I have one project I want to do, and then I have this project I want to do; and if this one fails, then I’ll switch over to this one.”

Just something as simple as time budgeting and financial budgeting and things that would have made it a lot easier for me to figure out quicker. It took me way, way too long to get a handle on a balanced existence.

I still have problems with it. There are days when I just cannot focus on any one thing. I just have too many unfinished things. And I think that’s always

been my problem with career stuff. In between the deadline jobs, there are always personal things that I could be working on, and settling on the one that makes the most sense to tackle first, that’s always been sort of that gray, wiggly area that I just have never been any good at.

MAO: Being more efficient with your time.

STEVENS: Yeah, absolutely, and instead of just frittering it away, drawing a little on this, inking a little on that, doing a little painting. There are too many ways to distract yourself, if you’re an artist, that ultimately don’t amount to anything that’s going to matter to anybody. That’s probably what you would consider a regret, because what jumps out are projects that you were really hot on, 30 years ago or 25 years ago, that lasted for maybe a week, and then you burn out on them and never touched them again. I had at least probably half a dozen like that, and there are still one or two that are potentially worth a second look.

MAO: This sounds like a very general thing that you feel has had a very specific effect on your life.

STEVENS: Oh, yeah. Some people are really good right out of school with being focused, driven, well organized, and able to shuffle everything to where they are very efficient about all aspects of their career and life.

Those are the people that really excel career-wise.

People like me, we probably hit a high note every ten years or whatever it is. That’s just not enough, you know? You’re not really accomplishing anything.

You’re just having little blips every now and then.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

Mimi Rodin (below) Mimi Rodin pinup by Stevens, published as the back cover to Dark Horse Presents #100-1 (Aug. 1995). (left) Dave’s cover rough. © 1995 Dave Stevens.

Dark Horse Presents TM & © Dark Horse Comics.

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BACK ISSUE • 45

THE ORIGINS OF THE ROCKETEER COMIC BOOK AND A DIGRESSION INTO TAKING ART CLASSES

Cover Queens (below) Dave’s original cover art for Dark Horse’s Cheval Noir #7 (May 1990). (right) Princess Pam, on the cover rough for Pacific’s Alien Worlds #4 (Sept. 1983).

Art © 1983 and 1990 Dave Stevens.

Cheval Noir TM & © Dark Horse Comics.

Alien Worlds TM & © Pacific Comics.

MAO: Let’s talk a little bit about The Rocketeer.

Tell me a little about how it started, the genesis of the idea. How did you decide that you wanted to do that particular project?

STEVENS: I had done several stints in the ’70s on various books with different people just as extra hands, either penciling or inking or both, but it was always somebody else’s job. And then I’d done a year and a half with Russ Manning as his assistant, and I pretty much knew after working with Russ how intense it is, and how much of a total commitment you’ve got to have, whether it’s a daily strip, a Sunday strip, or a comic-book series. At that point, I was so just completely dried out and exhausted after a year-and-a-half of deadline, deadline, deadline every couple of days, that I just knew I didn’t have the temperament for it. I didn’t have the lasting power or whatever it took to sustain myself for a long, drawn-out siege on any kind of book or series. So I figured by ’76 or ’77 that my aptitude lay elsewhere. I didn’t know what it was going to be. I just completely decided to turn to film work—a lot of storyboard gigs, advertising, pitch art, and things like that for other people. That’s why I moved to L.A. in the late ’70s, primarily because that was the only kind of work that I could get other than spot illustrations for kids’ magazines and odd random things

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like that. It was the kind of work that I could get with my skills, and it was interesting enough and varied enough that I didn’t suffer burnout. The enthusiasm of each job was enough to kind of carry me through.

MAO: The jobs weren’t so long that you’d get tired of them.

STEVENS: Yeah, because you’d only be on it for a week or two, maybe a month.

Between Russ Manning and going into animation, there was probably about a two-year period there where I just tried a lot of things to see, what if any of it appealed to me more. It was probably painted illustration, but for the fact that I couldn’t really paint—I just had no concept of color theory, edges, none of the stuff. I was terrible, but people used the work because they didn’t know the difference. Comic books, I only got into when people would run into deadlines and call me up to say, “Hey, can you take four pages of this story?” I would do things like fill in on [Master of] Kung Fu or Star Wars or whatever it was.

MAO: This is interesting. You were feeling then that you hadn’t been educated in art the way that maybe other people had.

STEVENS: Yeah. I wish I’d had an art education right out of high school, but my grades weren’t that good.

I wasn’t a great student. I just wasn’t interested in most of it, except art classes. And I didn’t know that you could get any kind of a partial scholarship without straight A’s. In those days, there were no counselors to tell me, and my folks had no clue about what to do with me in terms of further schooling.

MAO: But you were cognizant of this?

STEVENS: Well, I knew that I needed to get better. I just didn’t have the gray matter to figure it out on my own that, “Look, you need more schooling. You need to learn about composition and design and everything from the ground up,” because all I could do was ape other people’s art. I was fairly good with a brush, but that was about it. I

had no real drawing skills. I could fake it but I couldn’t really do anatomy. I couldn’t really draw a freehand animal without having something to look at, and I knew nothing about perspective. I just was completely helpless.

MAO: Did this come into play when you were working with other artists, when you were working animation jobs? Obviously, some of these other people went through more of a traditional art education.

STEVENS: In animation, it didn’t matter where you came from as long as you could draw funny, cute characters and mimic the style on whatever model sheet you were looking at. That’s all they cared about, and most people there really didn’t draw very well. The old-timers did, they drew very well. I was 22 at the time when I started at HannaBarbera, and a lot of the guys from my age to, say, mid-40s basically had the same skills. Only a couple, two or three, had better drawing skills and better chops overall.

Mostly the slack was taken up by the older guys like Moe Gollub and Tony Sgroi. And later, Mike Sekowsky came in.

Russ Heath came in. There were a handful of maybe eight or ten really brilliant draftsmen working there, and my stuff was just fakery, enough that it fooled people, but I really didn’t have any drawing chops at that point.

When I first was on my own in Hollywood, I was all enthusiasm and gung-ho. If somebody asked, “Can you do this?” I would say, “Absolutely. I can start today.”

Half of it I didn’t know how to do, but I would just go to the art-supply store and figure out what kind of paint I needed. The only thing that I really had any kind of aptitude for at the time was acrylic, but it dried so fast there was no real blending. I just had to work as fast as possible.

MAO: Enthusiasm and a little bit of ingenuity?

STEVENS: Just shear brass, you know? But it got me gigs and it got repeat gigs—all low-budget stuff, never anything of note. Some of the stuff was in Variety, but it was always black and white; none of it was ever color. It was just straight ads. Nobody pays attention to that stuff, but it was food to live on.

I didn’t really start to smarten up about growing as an artist until about ’79. I think it may have been around the time I was doing storyboards on Raiders of the Lost Ark. Right before or right after, I started going in and signing up for night classes by Vilppu or whoever was available to teach in these little storefronts throughout the Valley. They would take a dozen students or less. You’d work in either figure or perspective or anatomy or construction or mixed media, whatever it was. Sitting and working from the model, it was really that and the repetition of it that helped.

MAO: Was there anything that you learned from going to these classes, something that surprised you or that you were really struck by?

STEVENS: Probably. It was just so long ago. I can’t remember much of it except that I took the classes and it was all on my own rather than somebody telling me.

But I only did it for, I think, ’79 and one or two classes in 1980. These were weekly classes for a term or longer.

Studio Work (top) Stevens at his drawing table at the Hanna-Barbera Studio in 1979. Also from 1979, a presentation board (center) and storyboard frame (bottom) by Dave for the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Raiders of the Lost Art TM & © Lucasfilm.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

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BACK ISSUE • 47

I didn’t really repeat it again until after I’d joined Stout and Hescox at the La Brea studio. Then I went down to Otis Parsons and took Burne Hogarth’s anatomy class.

MAO: What year would that be?

STEVENS: ’82, I think. The fall of ’82.

The Hogarth thing was mainly because I just was into the third installment of The Rocketeer, and I felt like maybe it would be a good idea to sit under Burne and try his brand of anatomy. I had no idea if it would work for me or not because it was so specific and sort of exaggerated. It was his own brand of distortion of the figure, and for what he did, it worked fine, but I wasn’t sure how much of it I could use. I think I made it to half a dozen classes before I just kind of fell off.

He and I were already friends for several years and got along fine. There was never any problem between us, but I was kind of correct in that his style of constructing the figure and moving musculature was just too complicated for me. I needed something simpler and more basic.

But the good side of going down there and sitting under his tutelage was the fact that he would get off on these tears. In fact, we called him “Give ’Em Hell Hogarth” because he would just get up there and start railing against this and that, modern art and blah-blah-blah. He’d get beet red in the face and be screaming. You’d look around after a while, and it was only a dozen or 15 students in the class, but all of a sudden the whole back of the room was filled with people that drifted in the minute they started hearing him yelling. Everybody got such a kick out of listening to him. He’d just get on these rants, and it was just solid entertainment for 45 minutes.

Plus, I met my first model that I ever hired in his class. She came in one night and had the total Bettie Page haircut, jet black, the bangs, the whole thing, even looked like her in a general way. There were two other illustrators in the class—David Mattingly, who did paperback covers, and Will Meugniot, who did DNAgents. The minute she walked in, Will turned around and looked at me, and he said, “Here comes Bettie.” It was funny.

So the benefits of biting the bullet, even though I didn’t get any construction benefits— MAO: —You got to see another way, another method.

STEVENS: Yeah, and what it did for Burne. He would do these massive demo drawings in class with charcoal, just of a head, and they were beautiful, brilliant. People would be vying to see who was going to grab that drawing at the end of class.

But I did end up hiring that model, and her name was Gayle Caldwell, a really nice gal. She was probably about 35 or 36 at the time. For some reason, she decided to work with me. And a lot of guys—it’s just common in art classes that there are three or four guys, that will inevitably—if the model is any good at all, they’ll make a beeline for her some time on the break or at the end of class and try to see if she does outside work. I didn’t know anything about this kind of stuff because I hadn’t hired anybody before. I’d only ever worked with friends. I think she was walking around,

Squeaky Clean (left) “Betty’s Bath” poster, published by Graphitti Designs in 1983. Courtesy of Heritage. (inset) The cover to Dark Horse’s Bettie Page Comics #1 (Mar. 1996).

Betty’s Bath © 1983 Dave Stevens.

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checking out what everybody was drawing. I don’t remember how, but we got into a conversation during which I said, “Listen, I’m doing this little series in a comicbook format. You look so much like the character that I’m going to have to draw in the next issue, I’d like to hire you to sort of stand in for the character because you’ve got the haircut and you’re the same size and everything.” And she thought it was, I guess, nutty enough to do. We ended up working together for probably two years, from late ’82 through ’84. But the bizarre thing about working with her was that the very first or second session that we had— I always have music on. Whether I’m drawing or whether I’m shooting, it’s always on. And it was standards and, you know, the usual old music that you hear here.

MAO: That you don’t have on right now.

STEVENS: Yeah, exactly.

But a Sinatra song came on, and I said, “Oh, that’s my favorite Sinatra song that he did from the ’70s.”

It was a well-written song called “Cycles” and it was just kind of a “so I’m down and so I’m out” kind of thing. Lyrically, it was just really nicely done and had a good tune. She goes, “Oh, that’s my song.” And I said, “What do you mean, ‘It’s your song?’” I thought she meant favorite, but she said, “I wrote it.” And I just …

I think I must have fallen over. What are the odds?

MAO: You are in Hollywood.

STEVENS: Yeah. But I hadn’t encountered that before, commenting on a tune and your model says, “Oh, I wrote it.” It turns out she was a well-published songwriter and had sung with the New Christy Minstrels in the early ’60s. I forget what other bands she was with, but she was a legit musician. Every now and then on the radio after that, I would hear one of the deejays say, “Another one written by the lovely Gayle Caldwell.”

MAO: So you were paying attention.

STEVENS: Well, yeah. I mean, I didn’t know from songwriters, at least not contemporary ones.

Other than Hogarth, I didn’t take another class after that, other than just random groups getting together and hiring a model, the kind of stuff people do all the time. But it’s instructor-less, and I needed structure and teaching. I needed somebody to tell me, to give me the secrets, to impart this stuff because I didn’t have it and I needed to have things explained to me.

Unfortunately, I just never got into any kind of a class that would have any definable recipe for drawing better, let alone painting or composition or anything else. So I

always felt really outgunned by Stout and all of my other fellow artists that could compose a scene like that.

I really had to struggle with it. Again, with perspective and everything else, I had to just make things simple and emblematic and just do what I did best and stay away from the areas that I was completely lost in.

As a result, I kind of struggled throughout the rest of the ’80s. I only learned by observing published works by other people, and getting down with a magnifier and studying it, trying to figure out what made it good and incorporate that into whatever I was doing.

It was mostly just observing life, trying to study people, the way light fell, where shadows were and bounced light, and all that stuff. I really didn’t get a good handle on it until ’98 or so when I finally found a school that had gone back to representational artwork, more of a romantic school.

MAO: So you could sort of see it from scratch?

“Mars Wants Bettie” (below) The splash to Bettie Page Comics #1, penciled by Russ Heath with inking assists by Dave Stevens. The top half-splash panel was entirely re-penciled by Dave before he inked it. (left) Bettie poses/ prelims by Dave. © 1996 Dark Horse Comics.

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Aurora’s Return (below) Splash page from the unfinished/ unpublished Aurora’s Return, 1983. (right) 1982’s Pacific Presents #1 featured cover art

by Dave (top half) and Steve Ditko (bottom half).

Aurora’s Return and Rocketeer © The Rocketeer Trust.

Missing Man © Steve Ditko.

STEVENS: Yeah, and did. I started at the ground and just went class after class. Whatever money I still had from jobs throughout the early ’90s, I squandered all of it on classes.

MAO: Well, it’s not really squandering.

STEVENS: Well, no, no. But it was kind of a tough nut.

Each class was about 400 bucks, and I took a bundle of them, just one right after another every term. Then I tried to keep the money coming in so I could to take more classes, because at that point, that was really all I was after, just trying to bring my game up. I’d completely stopped doing comics. I think the last thing I had done were a few covers for [Glenn] Danzig. I just felt so stale and useless, and I just didn’t care to put out bad or stale work anymore. So I just stopped until I felt like I’d learned something and could compete again.

MAO: I’ve digressed quite a bit here from the original question, so I’ll get back to 1979. We were talking about the genesis of The Rocketeer and how you decided to make that decision.

STEVENS: The comics I had done after working for Russ was Aurora for Sanrio. They were putting together a book for Japanese audiences. It was geared toward young girls, and they were very sort of organized in what they wanted from each artist. Wildey did one, like graphicnovel length. Several local animators did stories, and they were all very kid-friendly. And mine, they wanted a Moebius-style of all things, because they wanted to feel like they were either competing or being current with Humanoids Magazine and things like that, that were out at the time, and very successful throughout Europe.

That’s why that story looks like that, because that was

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the directive from the editor. That story was really my only venture into comics and it was only 13 or 14 pages.

Between animation, storyboarding, and advertising, the question of comics didn’t come up again until the Schaneses [brothers Steve and Bill Schanes, co-founders of Pacific Comics] gave me their pitch at San Diego Con in ’81. They had just started publishing with Jack Kirby doing Captain Victory, and they were just about to launch a book with Mike Grell called Starslayer. [Grell had] handed in the first issue, but I think it was short by six pages.

MAO: This was Pacific Comics?

STEVENS: Yeah, but they were brand new. I think they’d only been in business for that calendar year.

I had known the guys from when I lived in San Diego because I used to shop at their comic shops. They had two stores and were known guys in San Diego fandom.

We all kind of knew each other and that’s why they asked me. They remembered me from when I was a customer there and from the Cons, and they remembered that I drew. I think it was Steve that asked me, “We’ve got this new deal and we’re trying to offer artists a fair shake, and we have a contract that allows you to…”

MAO: Sounds like a familiar pitch.

STEVENS: Yeah. But I knew who it was and he was my age, so I just figured—well, maybe. He said, “Well, you sign this deal with us, it’s only two installments of half a dozen pages. How tough could it be? And you’d own it. We won’t ask you for any of the ownership on it.”

And that was the only reason I did it, the fact that I wouldn’t have to surrender up, in perpetuity, all rights forever after. I went back home, and I was in the La Brea studio at that point with Stout and [sci-fi illustrator Richard] Hescox and just did some noodling around until I figured out a character with an outfit and a helmet.

It didn’t take very long, and it was pretty much there.

Then I drew up sort of a pitch drawing, a cover image.

I think I sent it down to them and asked, “What do you

think of this?” And they liked it, so we went right into it.

And I had no misgivings because I knew going in that it was only those two installments of six pages each or whatever, and I knew that that was it. I wouldn’t be committed to anything that I would burn out on.

So I did them and it was all done really fast.

MAO: In terms of the costume design, did you make a conscious effort to go back and draw on some of the things you liked from childhood?

STEVENS: Oh, yeah, yeah.

MAO: Was it an attempt to make something that looked unlike what other publishers had at the time?

Obviously in comparison, it was very different from most comics of the time.

STEVENS: It was both. It was mostly trying to do something that I would like. I put myself in the position of somebody at the news rack, and was just asking myself right up front, “Okay, if I was looking for my perfect comic book that I would immediately buy regardless of what it was about, what would the imagery be?”

And that’s where the image came from, just me pleasing myself visually, putting all the little doodads in it. It had jodhpurs and whole hero aspect to it. Plus, it was kind of an homage to the old … what do you call it?

MAO: Movie serials?

STEVENS: Yeah, specifically Commando Cody. You know: “Sky Marshal of the Universe.” But I wanted to approach the thing as a little more realistically to where it wasn’t Martians and monsters and stuff in outer space and rocket ships, even though I liked that stuff as a kid.

I wanted to base it in more of a real world.

MAO: Add some contemporary sensibilities to the design of the idea.

STEVENS: Yeah. The costume had to be all me, but I remember thinking that I wanted it to come off like just normal people with this one gadget thrown into the mix. How would these people respond and deal with it? And how could I tell it in 11 pages and leave it with a cliffhanger? That’s what I was doing, kind of my own little serial on paper. I did it for myself and guys like Kaluta who would get it, and it was just a pleasant kind of throwaway. It just felt like a nice little hobby thing to put out there in case anybody notices.

One of the first fan letters I got was actually from Kaluta, who I met at cons previously because we’d both been tapped back in ’77 for Star Wars art along with Jeff Jones and Bernie Wrightson. Half a dozen or more guys from comics had auditioned to do advertising art for the film before it came out. We had compared notes on a few things in years previous, but he had no idea that I was that guy that he’d met at cons. He just knew that he liked this little backup strip in this comic book.

MAO: Oh, so he didn’t know who was writing it?

STEVENS: Had no idea. He wrote a handwritten note and mailed it in to the publisher. Dave Scroggy was the editor for Pacific, and he actually printed Kaluta’s letter in the letters page. Of course, any kind of endorsement from a

Kaluta and Luke (top) A 1988 photo of Dave Stevens and Michael Kaluta, both of whom were tapped to produce Star Wars art back in ’77. (bottom) A Luke Skywalker drawing by Dave done for The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

Star Wars TM & © Lucasfilm.

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Rocketeer and Thriller (right) The back cover to Pacific Presents #1 (Oct. 1982). (below and opposite bottom) Four storyboard frames by Stevens done in 1983 for Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video, directed by John Landis.

Rocketeer © The Rocketeer Trust. Thriller © Sony.

professional from back East was—that was the real thing, because they were brand new and didn’t really have a clue how any of this worked. It was just like, “My dad’s got a barn. Let’s put on a show. Let’s be publishers.”

MAO: At what point did you realize that you might have to do more than two installments?

STEVENS: When Steve Schanes called me and said, “We have a lot of mail here.” Apparently, he got, after the second one appeared, a whole bunch of fan mail. I saw a lot of it, and it was nice to see that somebody noticed that there was something out of the norm being done. But when he told me that these people are all assuming that there’s going to be follow-up, and they’re telling us, “Give it its own title right now on a monthly basis.” I wasn’t prepared to do that, even for one more. I’d written it off as just an experiment and wanted to leave it that way.

MAO: So it wasn’t something you enjoyed well enough on its own to prompt you to continue to do it for yourself.

STEVENS: Not on a regular basis. The only way I would have done it would have been occasionally as a sort of a fill-in thing, not by any stretch as a regular feature.

MAO: So truly, the fans had spoken at this point.

STEVENS: Well, to the Schaneses. I mean, they smelled profit. If they could convince me to do it they figured they had a flagship title, and it took a while to get me to commit because I knew I just wouldn’t be up for it. I did my best to suck it up and draw that first issue, chapter three of The Rocketeer, but it was the first issue of Pacific Presents. It wasn’t that many pages, probably only about 12 or 14 pages, and it was just hellish work because I hadn’t any direction planned out. I hadn’t pre-written anything.

I was writing it, literally, a page at a time. There was no plot, just a bunch of strung-together sequences and a lot of it didn’t make any sense. It was a hell of a way to write, but I wasn’t a writer. I did not write comic books. I had never really written anything. And Pacific, they didn’t have any kind of a staff. They didn’t have anything in place to sort of take part of the load off of me in terms of, “Well,

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so-and-so can help pencil; so-and-so can help ink. This guy can draw one chapter to help you get caught up.”

Nothing like that existed because they were such a small shop and had no staff. They had a camera guy, a production guy, a couple editors, and that was basically it.

There was no in-house art staff. So it was basically on my shoulders and all my friends were busy. They had real jobs, or they were doing, like Stout, full-time gigs constantly.

I had nobody to help me produce this thing, and for somebody that didn’t have any real expertise in a practical day-to-day production sense, it just was a complete nightmare. I just did not know how I was going to do a regular book like that. And I was telling them from that first issue of Pacific Presents, “Guys, this is going to take a long time if I’m just doing this by myself,” writing it, lettering it, coloring it, drawing it, inking it, the whole thing, one right after another. I said, “I’m not up to this.” I tried to get it to them as quickly as I could, but I still had advertising gigs coming in every week or two, and I was still doing some character designs and storyboards. There were just other things that paid the bills, and the comics never did. I think for everything it was $150 a page—or all that the writing, the penciling, the inking, the coloring, all of it.

MAO: So what was the final thing that ended up pushing you over the edge to make the attempt?

STEVENS: Well, just the fact that they had all these people writing in constantly with these expectations of this series.

MAO: The fans.

STEVENS: I don’t think it was that so much as feeling some sense of responsibility. I’d put this out there not realizing that it was setting people up with a appetite that— they wouldn’t understand if I just said, “No, I’d rather not.” I know how Kaluta would have felt. I know how I would have felt if some guy displayed something of interest and then just went away and said, “No, I don’t want to play.” None of us would have understood that. So I just felt like I had some kind of obligation to at least do my best to deliver something, even if it was only sporadically put out, which it was. I kept begging Schanes not to solicit for the book until it was in, or at least mostly in, but I didn’t understand about distribution and direct sales. I had no clue that they had to prime the pump and take solicitations to know what their print run was going to be.

So they were on the hook no matter what and wanted it to be a monthly book. I kept telling them, “Look, at best it’s going to be bimonthly and maybe not even that. It may be every three or four months; because I have regular jobs to do as well.” They didn’t understand why I didn’t just quit all my other freelance gigs and do nothing but this strip, and I kept thinking

it’s simple economics. I would starve.

Basically, whenever I would have to put everything aside and go for like a week or two to finish up, there would be bills that would go unpaid. It was just something that I could not let go of. I had to keep commercial accounts, at least a handful each month, or I wouldn’t have been able to pay my rent. Plus, even after you did the job, comics—they took a long time to pay. Whatever the pittance was, it was usually two months before you got your check. Sometimes not that long, but it was never enough when it finally showed up to really make a whole lot of difference.

But I did the first issue of Pacific Presents, then another, and finally a third issue. And I was trying to up the ante on each one. I was trying to force myself to take more time and to do more research and make the art as— MAO: —To top yourself each time.

STEVENS: Well, just to make sure that I was doing my best, each one. And from the simple act of doing it, I did get better by leaps each chapter. I could notice that there was a real difference from issue one to issue three, a big difference, stylistically and just dynamically in everything.

So I was enjoying seeing, “Well, how much further can I go on this? How much better can I make this?”

In the interim, Pacific had taken on a bunch of new

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

A Meeting of Masters Dave with Will Eisner, 1987, at the Lucca Comics and Games Festival in Lucca, Italy.

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Queen of the Jungle (below) The cover to Sheena 3-D Special #1, published by Blackthorne in 1985, plus a prelim (right). Note the issue number (#4), probably the result of the fact that it was originally intended to be published by Pacific Comics. © 1985 Blackthorne Publishing.

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titles. This is only over a two-year period, and they were also distributing as well. Everything kind of got away from them. They ended up trying to funnel money from one to support the other and eventually it all caught up with them. They just imploded, bankruptcy. None of us knew what was happening other than the fact that checks were getting slower, and there was just kind of a general vibe down there that things felt kind of odd.

I think right after I handed in that third issue, they asked me to do this Sheena 3D cover, and I think either the day that I handed it in or within days, somebody told me, “Oh, did you hear? The Schaneses are liquidating everything.”

MAO: This is the famous Sheena 3-D cover, the stolen one.

STEVENS: Yeah. It appeared not under the Pacific logo, but under Blackthorne’s, which was Steve on his own taking the stat camera and moving it into his house so it wouldn’t get seized as assets. He was trying to continue on in a really parceled-down state, kind of just mom-and-pop, very cheapo reprint comics from the ’40s or whatever publicdomain stuff they had their hands on. Everything kind of just fell apart at that point, and it took me a while to get the originals back—not the original black-and-white pages, but the color, graylines from that issue of The Rocketeer. And I never did get the Sheena 3-D original back.

The next time I saw the Schaneses was somewhere up in East L.A., and they were just blowing out all of their product for pennies on the dollar, box loads of product and books, fixtures, everything. I don’t know how they got it all up to L.A., but Schanes just looked completely devastated, just shell-shocked. And that was the end of them, and I thought, “Well, that’s the end of the series.”

I’m even going to have trouble finding somebody to publish this last one, not knowing that several guys, including Sergio [Aragonés, who was producing Groo the Wanderer for Pacific at the time], had already made phone calls up to Eclipse, or Eclipse contacted them. I think within a matter of several months, they contacted me as well. So they ended up publishing the last issue as a one-off, and then the graphic album the following year.

MAO: How do you feel about how the series was as a whole? Did you get to do everything you wanted to do with the series?

STEVENS: No. If the thing had paid for itself, if there had been a better budget for it, page rates to where I could have put aside advertising and freelance work to just concentrate on that. Even if it had been a quarterly book, let’s say, it would have been probably another couple of years before I would have finally just said, “Hey, I got to take a break.” I had enough enthusiasm going for me, and had two or three more issues outlined or mapped out that I wanted to do, different scenarios and what not, that I was ready to go right into. But once Pacific fell apart and I realized how tenuous the life of an independent publisher was, I didn’t really feel safe in that I could count on somebody to be there to publish this stuff. And then there were all those months of no money from that issue, and that was a full 22-pager or whatever it was. That was the whole book. So it was something that sort of evaporated or collapsed on its own weight, the fact that I had all these other things planned and because of economics and then the sort of lack of security with these young publishers, it just didn’t happen. And Eclipse, they published the graphic album and that was it after that. I didn’t want to do any more for them as an entity.

So I did a smattering of covers and left as soon as I could.

And then Comico came along in, what, ’87 or ’88?

Somewhere around there.

Anyway, Bob Schreck was the editor, and he had contacted me because we had known each other.

And he said, “Look, these guys will publish it, and they seem solid.” And they were for a year or two. I think they folded up in early ’89. I’m not sure.

But I told them, “Look, I’ve got at least half a dozen stories to do.” Again, it was something that could have gone in a much different direction than it did, and the only reason it went the way it did was because of complete lack of financing. Eclipse weren’t paying anything, Pacific couldn’t pay anything, and Comico paid okay for those days, but there was never any backend in terms of royalties or anything like that. It was just too meager, and I had too many bills to pay. You know, it’s expensive to live here, and it just never financially would work. Had it been a healthy, long-established publishing entity, like a book publisher or somebody like that rather than a comic-book publisher, I’d have probably stayed with it and continued on sporadically with miniseries through the rest of the ’80s rather than only do another two chapters with Comico and then one with Dark Horse.

MAO: You still have some story ideas left then?

STEVENS: Oh, yeah. I’ve still got file folders full of plots and characters and all that.

But after Comico went bust, this guy came in and seized their assets or purchased them and started advertising and soliciting for additional Rocketeer books that he hadn’t even talked to me about. The last issue I was working on was just about finished and went in a drawer until this guy went away. Unfortunately, he was out there for at least two years, maybe three, pounding the pavement to get people to pay attention to him, saying, “I have many more issues of The Rocketeer coming out.” It was just a clueless guy. He had no idea what he was doing and the fact that he had no rights to the character at all.

The whole experience of jumping from one, two, three, four publishers in a span of a handful of years, it just drummed all the enthusiasm out of me. I love the character and I loved creating scenarios in which the cast

Eclipse Covers

could play and grow, but it just wasn’t meant to be.

If not for the disastrous financial end of it, it might have been a good gig to have for ten years or whatever.

MAO: Do you think that your enthusiasm will ever come back enough to the point where you might want to pursue some of those things that you left unfinished?

STEVENS: After we did the one issue at Dark Horse, it was in the middle of the comic-book glut, the marketplace glut, and afterwards Mike Richardson and I had a short talk. He said, “You know, Dave, we’d love to do more Rocketeer, but at this point they’d have to be in black and white.” Color books were killing them. They were too expensive. It was just a bad time to be publishing anything that had any kind of a high production cost, and The Rocketeer did because it was hand-colored and all that.

I just didn’t ever see it as a black-and-white strip, so I just begged off. We did one more collection and that was it.

In the years since, I’ve suggested a couple of miniseries or two-issue things, and they weren’t met with any kind of enthusiasm. I can’t to this day tell you if it was poor writing on my part, or just a different generation of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

(left) The cover to The Rocketeer Special Edition #1 (1985), from Eclipse Comics. (above) Dave’s cover for Crossfire #12 (June 1985).

Rocketeer © The Rocketeer Trust.

Crossfire TM & © Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle.

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Close Encounters (top) Stevens may be alone in his studio in this 1981 photo, but he frequently worked or met with other creators, including: (center) studio mates Richard Hescox and William Stout in their studio on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, year unknown; and (bottom) a Golden Apple Comics signing from 1984, featuring (front row) Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez and Matt Groening, and (back row) Carol (Mrs. Gilbert) Hernandez and Dave.

people in place that had no affection for the thing.

Because in order to get ’30s and ’40s jargon and all the accouterment of that time period, you have to have had some of that in your life, or some kind of a sense for it, in order to appreciate it on any level. I’m wondering if the editors that have been in place for the last six or seven years just are too young to have any sort of a liking for it beyond just thinking, “Oh, this is odd.”

MAO: Certainly, if you ever went back, you would want— STEVENS: —Somebody who gets it.

MAO: And a much better publishing backing, certainly a more stable backing than you’ve had in the past.

STEVENS: It would have to be. Otherwise, for me it would just be starvation, and I can’t live on saltine crackers and ketchup.

I did make a three-issue pitch at DC for a The Rocketeer/Superman crossover in 1998 that was met with complete resistance, mostly because of, I guess, policy choices and things.

MAO: There had been a lot of changes in comics in general.

STEVENS: Yeah. But, I’ve since given the scripts to two or three other editors there and never heard from them. So I’m thinking, “Is it really that bad? Did I write really crappy stories, or is it just a thing of bad timing?” I have no idea. Maybe it’s just that DC is not the place to do that. In the last year or so, there have been several in-the-works projects that people have called me about and suggested having the Rocketeer make a cameo in it or something. It’s flattering to have somebody ask you, but ultimately you kind of have to ask yourself, to what end? And is it going to really benefit the character or the audience to have him in this particular title doing whatever. So, I’m still kind of on the fence about things like that.

MAO: But with DC and Marvel, it seems like it would have to be a battle to come up with equitable terms for a crossover.

STEVENS: It would be a complete nosebleed for me, but it would provide a venue to sort of reintroduce the character.

That’s the only reason for doing something like that. And then at that point, find a team to actually do it. I would supervise and put my touches on it and make sure it had the consistent look that it needed. But, yeah, it’s one of those things that’s kind of like sand. You’re just trying to grab sand. It may happen and it may not. In the meantime, if nothing else, we’ll do the Omnibus and collect all the material that has been done so far and just put it between two covers so that— MAO: —Maybe it can spur something.

STEVENS: Yeah. I mean, you never know.

THE BENEFITS OF EARLY ASSOCIATION WITH THE WORLD OF COMICS FANDOM MAO: You were involved with comics fans and collectors from early in your career and pre-career. Would you say it was beneficial or a hindrance?

STEVENS: Oh, absolutely beneficial. Because how else are you going to know if you have anything of interest to bring into the mix unless you get some kind of feedback, good or bad, from your peers?

MAO: Do you feel like your experiences as a fan were beneficial to your life as a professional?

STEVENS: Oh, yeah. I’m sure they were. I guess mostly because it helped sort of inform me about a lot of things that I missed in terms of books that had come out that I never even saw in my city, or paperbacks I

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hadn’t read, or films I hadn’t seen.

It helped round me out, especially being around older collectors, guys ten or 20 years older than me.

They would take the time to explain things to me about illustrators, showing me work in an old book from 80 years prior, that I might never have heard of otherwise. That was a really great thing, to bit by bit start discovering and writing down the names of old illustrators. In high school, I never would have discovered these guys. You know—just forgotten people.

Also, it helped get my head out of purely looking at comic books, Frazetta, [Roy] Krenkel, and [Al] Williamson— all the typical guys that most fans looked at as the top of the bunch in terms of great art from back then.

MAO: Did you get any sense of what to expect trying to break into the business?

STEVENS: And at that point, nobody had any expectations. We were all struggling equally just to get a few lines down on paper that made any sense to anybody, just trying to do a good drawing.

I think fandom in loosely knit groups, or corresponding with fans, or being in APAs was the first step.

[Editor’s note: APAs—or Amateur Press Associations— are networks of fans that produce printed fanzines that are collated and distributed by a central mailer.]

It was the tip of the iceberg before going to a major venue like San Diego for the first time and being exposed to all other aspects of creative storytelling, publishing and every little peculiar offshoot thereof.

It was just such a great all-encompassing exposure to things that I hadn’t even considered in terms of endeavor. That was really terrific, especially getting a dose of it when you’re still in your teens.

MAO: How would you say that the world of fandom and conventions today differs from when you were first getting into it?

STEVENS: Oh, amazingly different. In a lot of respects, it’s

Con Men

very much more corporate and based on profiteering and big business and marketing toys. I’d say in the last decade, toys have kind of come to the fore more than anything else just because—I don’t know enough about it to cite where it comes from, exactly, but it’s the limited-edition designer’s toys, little sculptural things, whether it’s from McFarlane or “Middle Earth” stuff, whatever it is, and then all the little Japanese figures that are always coming out. Well, they’re cute, but every one of these things seem to have this sort of attached instant-collectable label, and it kind of— it doesn’t scare me, but it causes me to stop because it kind of mimics what we were first starting to see in the comic-book market when they started slapping everything with silver and gold foil covers and labeling everything an instant collector’s item.

MAO: Thereby causing the great crash in comics around 1994.

STEVENS: Yeah.

MAO: Any thoughts about today’s convention world other than the pervasiveness of toys?

STEVENS: A lot of it’s pretty much the same, particularly the regional shows, because they’re still of a smaller size and manageable. You can navigate them within a day and see everything that’s there.

MAO: Some of these shows are still being run by the same people.

STEVENS: Yeah, and I tend to like those because they have a folksier atmosphere. You can actually sit and visit with people, not be interrupted every five minutes and miss everybody that you’d intended to talk to at the show.

The big shows in the larger cities had just gotten too big for my liking. It’s too impersonal, and just too deafening. The din in those places is awful. You can’t hear anything, and it’s just sensory overload for everybody there. It makes for nothing but high anxiety for the entire four days or whatever it is.

But shows that are of a modest size still have the vibe of the shows in the early ’70s.

MAO: Are there any sort of “comic booky” or “nerdy” kids that you knew when you were younger who later became successful or well-known personalities in the field?

STEVENS: J. J. Abrams. [laughs] Probably quite a few if I stop to think about it…

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

(left) A Rocketeer head sketch done

by Dave in 1983 for Bill Liebowitz of L.A.’s Golden Apple Comics. Courtesy of Jerry Boyd. (right) Scott Shaw! and Dave Stevens at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1976. (below) Pacific Presents #2.

Rocketeer © The Rocketeer Trust.

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It only makes sense that some of the early San Diego Comic-Con volunteers or talented attendees would make a big name for themselves in our beloved industry. After all, those youngsters who made the trek to the old El Cortez Hotel and the other sites met and shared unforgettable experiences with Kirk Alyn (the first live-action Superman), Jock Mahoney (Tarzan), Buster Crabbe (Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon), and other “thrill-makers of yesteryear” when they converged in the special-guest areas and their wonderful films were shown as part of the overall program.

Dave Stevens was one of those talented volunteers.

He was there and he met some, if not all, of those gents, and took that wonder and awe with him and incorporated them into his 1980s hero, Cliff Secord, the high-flying Rocketeer, whose adventures were set in Los Angeles during the late 1930s. Stevens also got in a nod to George Wallace, the actor who brought Commando Cody, a Rocketeer-like precursor from the 1952 serial Radar Men from the Moon, into his creative spectrum.

Paul DeMeo and Danny Bilson were bringing the Flash to the small screen in admirable fashion in the early ’90s through their collective imagination and work— and here they talk about the days of when the late-’30sera Rocketeer came into the ’90s, and what it was like when the comic’s characters and concepts met on film.

– Jerry Boyd JERRY BOYD: While you gentlemen were pursuing your filmmaking dreams, a small company called Pacific Comics put out something called Pacific Comics Presents #1 (July 1982) that introduced Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer.

Did either of you discover that title at the time it was causing a sensation in comicdom? And if not, when did you discover the works of Stevens or the Rocketeer?

PAUL DeMEO: We were buying a lot of comic books at the time, particularly the new indie comics that were being published. We saw one of the Rocketeer issues on the racks at Golden Apple [Comics], a well-known shop on Melrose in L.A., looked at the cover, and inside art.

We’re big fans of period-adventure pulp, and Dave got it just right. Right away we thought, “This is a movie.”

DANNY BILSON: That’s true. We were both raised watching movies from the ’30s on TV, loved the period, and were blown away by the art.

BOYD: To your knowledge, how did the project get green-lighted? Who was it at the Disney offices that got interested first? Did you, as the writers, come up with the screenplay on your own first?

BILSON: Actually, Lloyd Levin, the young development exec for Larry Gordon, was interested in the project when we pitched it to him. We then took it all over town until David Hoberman, who was at Disney at the

Blast from the Past The advance one-sheet teasing audiences for the 1991 theatrical release, The Rocketeer. Courtesy of Heritage Hollywood Auctions (www.ha.com). © 1991 Walt Disney Productions. The Rocketeer TM & © The Rocketeer Trust.

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by

Jerry Boyd

conducted by e-mail in May and

August 2010

time, took interest. We had the story worked out in advance and Disney paid us to write the screenplay.

DeMEO: I can’t recall everyone who was in the room the first time we pitched it at Disney, but it was developed by their Touchstone division. Since David Hoberman was the executive in charge, I imagine he was present.

We had a story pitch that we had developed with Dave that we presented to a number of studios before Disney bought it. Dave would bring copies of the comic and some of his original art, which was always impressive. But we didn’t write the script until we had a deal. Then there were several years of revisions and new drafts before the film was finally green-lighted.

BOYD: When and where did you meet Dave Stevens? After seeing his comics, did you make acquaintances at a convention or was it when the movie pre-production work began?

DeMEO: We made up our minds to contact him and see if he’d give us an option on his comic—for free, because we had no money—and then let us pitch it as a film.

We got help from the guys at Golden Apple.

[Interviewer’s note: Stevens was friendly with the Liebowitz family that owned the store and frequented their establishments during the ’80s and ’90s, getting his comics there and signing/appearing on special occasions.]

Dave met with us and saw we were “kindred souls.” The low-budget film we did for Empire, Zone Troopers, about GIs stuck behind German lines who find an alien spacecraft, sealed the deal. It was done in the style of a ’40s B-movie—Dave knew that we understood and respected the pulp genre. So we really met at the beginning of the road that led to the film— years before pre-production would begin.

Before the Rocketeer Movie… (top left) Paul DeMeo (left) and Danny Bilson cameo, from the last episode of The Flash, “Trial of the Trickster” (original airdate 5-18-91). Courtesy of DeMeo and Bilson. (top right) Dave Stevens at a Golden Apple store appearance, circa 1990. Courtesy of the Liebowitz family and Jerry Boyd. (left) One-sheet from Zone Troopers.

The Flash © 1991 Warner Bros.

Television. Zone Troopers © 1986 Empire Pictures.

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Beware “the Creeper” From Dave Stevens’ sketchbook, a climactic zeppelin confrontation between the Rocketeer and bad guy Lothar. (right) That villain was inspired by acromegalic actor Rondo Hatton (1894–1946), whose condition cast him as “the Creeper” in spooky flicks such as House of Horrors (1946). Courtesy of the Rocketeer Trust.

The Rocketeer TM & © The Rocketeer Trust.

BILSON: We contacted Dave back in 1985 as another filmmaker’s rights had expired. Having no money to option it at the time, it went as Paul just stated. But it was our early idea of using Rondo Hatton, “the Creeper,” in Rocketeer that sealed the deal as [Dave] was a huge fan.

BOYD: What do you remember Dave saying about the movie as things started up in earnest? Was this the thrill of his lifetime or was he taking it all in stride?

How did the film affect you both? Was this a dream project or just a good gig to have?

BILSON: I think Dave kind of took it in stride. His concerns were about helping the film get to a high level of quality and he worked hard with Joe Johnston, the director, to get it there. He spent much more time on the production than Paul and I since our first series, The Flash, was in production at the same time. Yes, the film was a dream project; we worked weekends on rewrites and I know that both Paul and I wished we could have spent more time on the set.

DeMEO: What I remember was Dave’s enthusiasm.

He was into it, really enjoyed seeing his creation come to life as a film. He also did some production design work, particularly on the helmet, which turned out to be a difficult prop when you actually had to put the thing on someone’s head.

For us, it was great to have a “major production picture” made from our script, but the writing process was very drawn-out and often frustrating. The notes were unending and often contradictory. The first director on the project, William Dear, changed a lot of the structure we had originally outlined. When he left the project and Joe

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Johnston came on, we went back to our first structure, but enough of Dear’s work remained that, after WGA arbitration, he was granted story credit with us (we have sole screenplay credit). We were fired three times, but rehired after each time a new writer came in to do another draft. The film’s producers, Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin, fought very hard to bring us back, and ultimately we were there for the production drafts. To be honest, there were a couple of casting choices we weren’t thrilled about, and scenes were rewritten on the set that didn’t thrill us. But overall, I’m proud of the film.

Miraculously, some scenes are exactly as we wrote them, and some are almost literal translations from Dave’s comic, like the first time the Rocketeer flies at the air show.

BOYD: Sometimes you have to fight to make a movie a “period piece.” The first Godfather film comes quickly to mind. The book was set after the end of WWII, but Paramount execs wanted to update it to the ’70s. [Director Francis Ford] Coppola fought for a period piece, and luckily won. Was anyone at the executive level saying that the Rocketeer movie needed to be set in the present time?

DeMEO: If there were any notions to do that, they went away quickly. What made The Rocketeer possible was Raiders of the Lost Ark. A costly period adventure film with pulp roots didn’t scare the studio then— in fact, Disney hoped that Cliff Secord would be their Indiana Jones. The studio had options with all of us for sequels … but as we know, that never happened.

BILSON: That’s correct. I agree that the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark made The Rocketeer possible.

BOYD: Dave did a silent cameo as the German pilot who first wore the rocket pack before it came to America. Was he on the set any other times? Sometimes they just get creators as creative consultants, and then more or less just push them into the background. Did Dave add any ideas to your impressive and comic-faithful (and thanks for keeping it faithful) screenplay?

BILSON: Dave spent a lot of time on the set. I think most of his energy was in the art of the film. I don’t remember a lot of script notes from Dave. He was a truly trusting partner.

Stevens on the Set (clockwise from top) Dave Stevens (left) and Nazis; Butch salivates at the Bull Dog Café’s menu; Dave and a Gee Bee plane; Dave and his longtime friend Kent Melton of Disney, with the prototype of the Rocketeer helmet prop (which Melton sculpted); Dave and Butch; and Dave, as a German, with Adolf Hitler.

Courtesy of the Rocketeer Trust.

The Rocketeer TM & © The Rocketeer Trust.

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From Zero to Hero (left) A Rocketeer movie one-sheet, courtesy of Heritage, will Bill Campbell as Cliff Secord/the Rocketeer.

(Rocketeer movie trivia: According to Internet Movie Database, Johnny Depp was almost cast in the lead.) (right) Dave Stevens inside the Bull Dog Café set. Courtesy of the Rocketeer Trust. © 1991 Walt Disney Productions.

DeMEO: Dave was on the set a lot more than we were, and involved in preproduction as well. We were busy writing and producing our Flash TV series. The only time we could easily visit the set was when they were filming on the Disney lot, or at nearby locations.

Joe Johnston wanted us to be more available during production, and although we all got along very well, this led to some moments of mutual frustration when quick revisions were needed on the set.

As I said, we developed the screen adaptation with Dave, so many of the changes from the comic came from those discussions. We also co-wrote two issues of the last Rocketeer graphic novel with Dave, so it was satisfying to bring the partnership full circle—comic-to-film-to-comic.

BOYD: Actress Jennifer Connelly was a gorgeous “Jenny.” Knowing how much Stevens revered Bettie Page, did he demand any say over the selection of the young lady to play that role? And why was the character renamed “Jenny” for the movie?

DeMEO: Dave had his opinions, and I know that Joe at the least would have valued Dave’s casting input, but I doubt that he contractually had the right to approve the cast. But Dave thought Jennifer Connelly was a great choice. She played the part with a combination of beauty, brains, and humor. She was a ’30s-style

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heroine—a knockout in an evening gown, loves her man but wishes he’d wise up, and can throw a punch when she has to. Her scenes with Timothy Dalton are some of the best in the movie. And Dalton threatens to hijack every scene he’s in—he’s fantastic as Sinclair.

The Bettie/Jenny part became tamer in terms of any overt sexuality as the drafts went on, and when it was decided that this was going to be a Disney, rather than a Touchstone, release, there was no way she was going to be a cheesecake model. We came up with the idea of making her a film extra, as that worked out really well with the Neville Sinclair “bad guy” plot. Character adjustments aside, changing the name was really about avoiding any legal issues with the real Bettie Page.

BILSON: Dave consulted with Joe on the casting much more than Paul or I. We had to change the name for legal reasons, as Paul said.

BOYD: Dave drew Cliff Secord (a.k.a. the Rocketeer) to look just like he himself looked. Did anyone ever say, “Hey, Dave, do you think you can act well enough to pull this off?” Did Stevens ever joke or seriously state that he could or should play the character?

BILSON: No, Dave knew he was an artist, not an actor, and movies usually need big stars to justify big budgets. Many name actors turned it down because they didn’t want to put the helmet on.

BOYD: Dave did play that German soldier in the black-and-white footage that I mentioned earlier. So I thought maybe— DeMEO: —Maybe [we] joked about it. I don’t think anyone at Disney, or Dave himself, ever seriously considered this. Dave thought Bill Campbell was an ideal Rocketeer. Bill really understood the part and embodied that ’30s-style hero. I thought he had kind of a classic Jimmy Stewart quality—two-fisted, reckless, but not afraid to be vulnerable and even foolish.

BOYD: Being the two chief writers, it seems from your comments that you were pleased with the interpretation of your screenplay. Can you recall which paper-to-celluloid scenes thrilled you the most?

What were your impressions of the finished movie overall, and do you think anything could’ve been improved?

DeMEO: I answered this earlier, I think. But I’ve always thought the movie was 75% of what I envisioned. And as a lowly screenwriter on a big studio film—that’s a really satisfying percentage. The action scenes, in particular, were outstanding.

But we were all disappointed that the South Seas Club action sequence was reduced in scale. Joe had a big battle about this with the studio, which asserted that the film was over-budget and over-schedule. But, all the big pieces are there. And what I’ve come to love about the movie is that it’s not cynical.

BILSON: At the time I think Danny and I were frustrated with anything that wasn’t exactly like the script. We loved ’30s movies and wanted the film to be paced like a Howard Hawks movie.

The nightclub scene at the South Seas Club was reduced in scope during the production as Disney didn’t want to spend more money on The Rocketeer—as Paul said before. I know that Joe, as well as Paul and I, were disappointed by those cuts. The scene in the original script had more inventive action when the Rocketeer flies. We wrote Eddie Valentine with the energy of a Joe Pesci and Peevey with the pace of a William Demarest-type character from the ’30s and wanted that energy. I must say, however, that attending a sold-out screening last night in Hollywood, and having not seen the film in many years, all of those concerns were gone and I loved [Alan] Arkin and loved the movie—liked it more than ever before.

BOYD: You men did a nice script. You included a smile-inducing take on Rondo Hatton, one of Dave’s villains from The Rocketeer Adventure Magazine: “Cliff’s New York Adventure” (fully compiled in 1995), an Errol Flynn-like double agent (Timothy Dalton), and memories and cameos of stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, among other things. You told us Disney/Touchstone might have been interested in sequels. Were there things you held back on in case a sequel had been given the go-ahead?

BILSON: No, we held nothing back, and weren’t thinking about a sequel except for the fact that the plans appear in Peevy’s hands at the end, making a sequel possible. We also co-wrote the New York Adventure, so Rondo being in that was based on what we planned for the film.

DeMEO: Thanks. Actually, Rondo [being] in the movie was our idea—we were thinking of him in his part as “the Creeper” in those old movies. And Dave couldn’t believe we knew who Rondo Hatton was, and he loved that concept. Putting Rondo in the comic came after the film. And I love the sound stage sequence, where Sinclair’s doing a swashbuckler part— it’s visually a direct steal from Flynn’s duel with Basil Rathbone at the end of Robin Hood.

BOYD: That was a nice scene. Everyone’s seen The Adventures of Robin Hood, a classic by anyone’s standards, and that was a clever riff on it. How would you sum up your relationship with Dave Stevens and the overall experience of working on The Rocketeer?

DeMEO: A high point of my life and career. And the movie is pretty damned good! The fact that Dave’s gone makes me sad.

It’s hard to believe. But he left behind some beautiful and inspired work and I’m happy to have been a part of it.

BILSON: Dave was a creatively generous man, a perfectionist, and a kind soul. I miss him. The Rocketeer may be the highlight of my long career. I only wish it had more initial success for all the creative people involved— in particular, Dave Stevens.

JERRY BOYD has written numerous articles for fanzines The Jack Kirby Collector, BACK ISSUE, Alter Ego, The Harveyville Fun Times!, and the Spooky Fearbook. He's proud to have interviewed numerous professionals in the industry, as well, for those publications. Jerry is a professional schoolteacher and an aspiring screenwriter living in Southern California.

As often as he can, he sends copies of rare art to BI for other readers/fans to enjoy.

Rocketeer Print Dave Stevens signed (at bottom right) this Rocketeer movie print, featuring his remarkably on-model likenesses of Jennifer Connelly and Rondo Hatton. © 1991 Walt Disney Productions. The Rocketeer TM & © The Rocketeer Trust.

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RUSS HEATH REMEMBERS…

The Rocketeer TM & © The Rocketeer Trust.

Russ Heath did the art chores for the Rocketeer movie high school—we ran up and down the hall screaming adaptation in ’91. An artist’s artist, Heath recalled, over and making trouble. [laughs] a phone call on Aug. 15, 2010, the days of “Why was I chosen to do the comic? [Disney working with Dave Stevens and the factors editor] Bob Foster was a good friend of mine. that led up to his getting the job: He edited the Rocketeer comic magazine, and “I did the comic book [of the when you’re good buddies with the character’s Rocketeer film] that came out when creator and the project’s editor, you’re in. the movie came out. Dave could be “We were similar in style so it made very slow, as most people know, and it sense for Dave to pick me. I helped him on might’ve taken him three years to the first Pacific Comics run early on a few do it! [laughs] times. I sometimes look over the art and I “I went to the set some … and saw can see some of my background figures russ heath the goings-on. Dave was part producer, and pick out my inks.

Photo by Luigi Novi, from the Nov. 2008 “But for this project, I did the regular I believe, and he invited me to see the Big Apple Convention. one; Neal Adams did the 3-D movie movie while it was being made. Dave adaptation. I enjoyed it a lot.” and I were very friendly. He was a good guy. We worked —Jerry Boyd at Hanna-Barbera early on in his career. It was kind of like

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by

Douglas R. Kelly

Long before he won the Academy Award® for Best Actor in the film Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges was taking on roles that were a little off the beaten path. In 1975’s Hearts of the West, he played Lewis Tater, an Iowa farm boy and aspiring Western writer who heads for California in the late 1930s in search of the cowboy dream. As a result of meeting the right people, along with some dumb luck, Tater becomes a successful actor in B-Westerns in Hollywood.

The world portrayed in the film, that of the lowbudget, second-billing kind of movie studio so prevalent before World War II, has intrigued writer John Wooley for a long time. Pulp magazines have, too. “I was a big fan of the pulps, and of the B-movie studios … the little studios like PRC and Monogram and that bunch,” says Wooley. “I had written a story while in the Navy in the early 1970s called The Return of Mr. Mystery, about a dying pulp writer who starts to ‘see’ his pulp characters—his creations—standing around his bed as he’s in and out of consciousness. As he draws his last breath, he and his characters agree to become a crimefighting team, and they start the journey to the next plane.”

Several of the characters—Sandra Castle, Tito, and Johnny Rice—simmered on the back burner until the early 1980s, when Wooley placed them in a B-movie studio setting and sold the idea to Fantagraphics, which agreed to publish what was now called The Miracle Squad under its Upshot Graphics imprint.

Set in 1937 Hollywood, the story centered on the adventures of the owner and employees of Miracle Studios, a “poverty row” movie-making company specializing in Westerns. But before issue #1 hit the streets, the folks at Upshot gave the series an introductory plug in the pages of another book.

HELP FROM ANOTHER SQUAD The November 1986 issue (#4) of John Byrne’s The Doomsday Squad featured a six-page teaser story on The Miracle Squad, written by John Wooley, penciled by Terry Tidwell, and inked by Butch Burcham. Tidwell, now a successful commercial illustrator based in Claremore, Oklahoma, recalls getting to know Wooley’s comic-book collection before getting to know Wooley himself: “I knew John through his younger brother. When I was a kid, his brother would let me into John’s room where he kept his comic-book collection. I don’t know if John really wanted me in there or not, going through his comics! Later on, John and I teamed up and I think we created the Twilight Avenger first, and then the Miracle Squad came after that.”

The teaser story focuses on Billy Caserta, a giant of a man standing eight feet, four inches tall. Visiting the Miracle Studios lot with his mother, Billy saves the life of an actress during the filming of a botched action scene,

Winging It Actress Sandra Castle does a little wing walking on the cover of The Miracle Squad #4 (first series). © 2011 Terry Tidwell and John Wooley.

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and is given a job by Felix Barron, the head of the studio. The story was just long enough to give the reader a taste of the Miracle Studios environment, and it served its purpose well. Wooley, however, wasn’t completely happy with the way the story was introduced.

“William Messner-Loebs wrote an incredibly condescending intro for it,” Wooley says. “It made Terry and I look like a pair of apple-cheeked fanboys. By that time, I’d been writing professionally for six years and I’d been a newspaper entertainment writer for several years— it wasn’t like we’d just fallen off the truck.”

Despite the less-than-stellar lead-in from MessnerLoebs, The Miracle Squad was on its way to its own title, the first issue of which hit stores starting in late 1986–early 1987. Using the same creative team as the teaser story, along with Jan Strnad as editor, Wooley and Tidwell produced a 27-page adventure that introduced the group that would become the Miracle Squad. The story opens in a small, southwestern town in 1937 with a young woman, Sandra Castle, headed for Los Angeles to search for her twin sister, Eileen, who disappeared after traveling to Hollywood.

The sisters had won a local talent contest, and first prize was a screen test at Miracle Studios.

The screen test and the talent contest turn out to be part of a scam, and Eileen apparently has moved on. But Sandra hits it off with the owner of Miracle, Felix Barron, who offers to screen test her anyway.

Sandra does the screen test, but shortly after, Barron is killed by thugs working for Sweets O’Hanlon, a gangster who has been trying to buy into the studio against Barron’s wishes. After Barron is gunned down, his son, Mark, gathers the Miracle employees and tells them there’s no way O’Hanlon will ever get hold of Miracle Studios. Mark offers the Miracle players an ownership stake in the studio if they’ll stay on and help him stand up to O’Hanlon.

After helping Mark scare off a couple of O’Hanlon’s torpedoes, Sandra realizes she’s needed at Miracle.

Also, her screen test showed that she has talent as an actress, so she decides to stay on. She calls her mother and tells her that she has met some nice people at the studio, and that they may be able to help her find Eileen.

The book was promoted from the start as a four-issue series, and Wooley wrote a text section in each issue, with photos and poster reproductions, that focused on the history of the B-movie studios.

Names like Philo Vance, Edward Cline, and the B-Hive gave readers insight into the people and companies that made B-pictures an enduring art form.

Issue #2 delves into Sandra’s first movie role, acting in a Western with Miracle’s star, Dake Bennett.

Double Feature (top) The first-ever panel of the Miracle Squad, part of the six-page teaser story in The Doomsday Squad #4. (bottom) Miracle Studios owner Felix Barron is gunned down by gangsters in the first issue of The Miracle Squad (first series).

Butch Burcham inked Terry Tidwell’s pencils for the first two issues of the first series. © 2011 Terry Tidwell and John Wooley.

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MIracle Moments (top left) Mark Barron gathers the troops for a strategy session following the murder of his father by Sweets O’Hanlon, in the first issue of the first series. (left) The Miracle Squad sets out in pairs to look for the missing Sandra Castle in issue #2 of the first series. (top right) Along with a change from fourcolor to black and white, issue #3 of the first series featured the inking of Gary Dumm, who replaced Butch Burcham for the remaining issues (including the second series published by Apple Press). © 2011 Terry Tidwell and John Wooley.

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Cruising for a Bruising (left) The fourth and last issue of the first series brought the Eileen Castle plot line to a close, as the Miracle Squad battled it out with O’Hanlon’s gorillas aboard a cruise ship. (right) The second series (published by Apple Press) kicked off with a bang in January 1989 as magician Johnny Rice executed a daring escape on the cover of issue #1.

Pencils by Terry Tidwell, inks by Gary Dumm. © 2011 Terry Tidwell and John Wooley.

Sandra is later kidnapped by more of O’Hanlon’s gang and then rescued by the Miracle Squad, which by now includes Tito Guzman, the studio valet, and Johnny Rice, a Miracle actor and magician. But Robert Leslie, the studio detective, tells the team that O’Hanlon, along with a mystery blonde that Leslie saw in the hotel, got away, and that the mystery blonde was a dead-ringer for Sandra.

“The Robert Leslie character was a tip of the cap to Robert Leslie Bellem, the writer of the ‘Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective’ stories in the 1930s and ’40s,” says Wooley. “The second book I sold was a collection of Bellem short stories that I had edited. Robert Leslie was supposed to be Dan Turner, essentially.”

Tidwell and Wooley worked “Marvel style” on The Miracle Squad, a process both can appreciate, looking back. “John would give me two or three pages, sort of a synopsis of the story, and then would turn me loose on it,” says Tidwell. “He let me do just about anything I wanted to in interpreting his story, particularly the fight scenes. He would just go, ‘Okay, they get into a brawl here,’ and so I would have to work out all the logistics and the camera angles on each fight. It was fun to work on because of that latitude John allowed me.”

When he saw the pencils, Wooley would take the next step. “John would take my art and kind riff off of it,” offers Tidwell, “look at the expressions on the faces, and write the dialogue based on that.”

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Wooley says, “That was fine with me. It showed me how many words I could put in a panel, which was helpful.”

The tone of the series also was established in those first couple of issues. The characters that Wooley and Tidwell brought to life had some depth, which most often manifested itself by way of the respect with which they treated one another. Of course, there were plenty of tough words and punches thrown at the bad guys, but the members of the Miracle Squad obviously cared for each other. “I think that comes from John’s core,” says Tidwell. “John’s a very nice guy.

He respects everyone. Our characters always treated each other with empathy and respect.” This made for a refreshing change from the often dark, edgy approach taken in many comic books during the later 1980s.

Issues #3 and 4 of the series continue the “Sandra searching for Eileen” story arc, with plenty of car chases, gun battles, and a nail biter of a sequence in which Johnny Rice escapes from a straitjacket while hanging upside down from an airship during a thunderstorm. After Sandra kills Sweets O’Hanlon in self-defense, the Miracle Squad corners what’s left of O’Hanlon’s gang on board a cruise ship, and Sandra finally comes face-to-face with her sister Eileen, who holds a gun on the group.

Eileen has changed, and tells the Miracle Squad all about how she was duped into falling in with O’Hanlon

and his crew, and how they forced her to do things she would never have considered doing before. Just as Sandra begins to get through to Eileen, there’s another scuffle on the deck of the ship and Robert Leslie is forced to shoot Eileen, who dies in Sandra’s arms.

Following more fisticuffs, the Miracle Squad escapes, boards another ship, and heads for home.

On the last page of issue #4, Sandra tells Mark Barron through her tears, “I can’t help thinking. If things had been different … she could have been me.”

EVOLVING AND IMPROVING The look of The Miracle Squad changed in two major ways starting with issue #3. The first change was that inker Butch Burcham was replaced by Gary Dumm.

“I think Terry and I disagreed on the effectiveness of Butch’s inks, but it became moot because Butch wasn’t making enough money doing comics so he had to get out of the business,” says Wooley. “That’s when I contacted Gary. Also, in my view, Terry got tighter as a penciler—because at the time we were also doing the Twilight Avenger book, so we were really knocking stuff out—and then Gary’s heavier inking line helped a lot. I really liked what Gary did on “Blood and Dust.“ And I liked what Terry did, too, of course.”

For his part, Terry Tidwell enjoyed working with both Burcham and Dumm. “They’re totally different inkers, almost on opposite ends of the spectrum,” Tidwell says. “Butch has a very lush, very sublime approach. Gary has that—his line weight rarely varies.

I remember Gary as very meticulous in following my pencils. At the same time, I think I was putting more detail into the penciling as I went along.”

The combination of Tidwell’s increasingly detailed penciling and Dumm’s inking produced excellent results, with the stories taking on an authentic 1930s movie serial kind of look.

The other major change was that the book went from four-color to black and white beginning with issue #3 (although the covers remained four-color).

Wooley says this, not surprisingly, was a cost-cutting move on the part of the publisher. “Gary Groth at Fantagraphics told me they couldn’t make money with it being a color book, which is why it went to black and white.”

During the production of the four-issue series, Wooley and Tidwell wanted to see The Miracle Squad become a regular publication. But it wasn’t to be.

“After the first series, I knew there wouldn’t be a longer series from Fantagraphics,” says Wooley. “I had the idea for what later became [the second series], as the idea to start a bimonthly series. When that didn’t happen, Hilary Hughes at Apple Press expressed interest in the characters, and one thing led to another and the second series was published by Apple.”

When Dake Bennett and Mark Barron go looking for her, they discover Mrs. Walton in the cabin, and are puzzled by something that appears to be moving on her as she lies on the bed. It turns out she’s covered with bedbugs, and the little critters immediately make a beeline for Bennett and Barron, who vacate the premises with great rapidity. “Those scenes were based on a true account from an entomology professor of mine at Oklahoma State University,” says Wooley. “He said that somebody had busted into a house where another person had been too weak to get out, and the bedbugs had killed the person. And the eerie thing was, when they opened the door, the bedbugs turned as one and started for them, because the bedbugs sensed the warm blood.” Charming, as Leslie says while the body of Mrs. Walton is carried away.

While Dake Bennett and Robert Leslie head back to California, Mark Barron stays behind in Oklahoma, saying he wants to look into something he’s seen there. What he’s seen is the westward migration of the

Breathless Anticipation The Amazing Miralco, Johnny Rice, makes good his escape from the ties that bind him as the crew films Mr. Magic, which will be one of Miracle Studios’ big releases of 1938. Second series, issue #1. © 2011 Terry Tidwell and John Wooley.

BLOOD AND DUST Bethel, Connecticut-based Apple Press published issue #1 of the second series of The Miracle Squad in January 1989, and the book was put on a bimonthly schedule.

The first couple of issues focused on actor Dake Bennett’s efforts to find out what had happened to his father, whom he discovered was missing during a promotional tour through Oklahoma for Miracle Studios. It turned out a local business, Walton Oil, had had Dake’s father killed, and then took his land.

In the climactic fight and running gun battle between the Miracle Squad and Walton Oil’s henchmen, the owner of Walton Oil, Mrs. Walton, is wounded and staggers off to lie down in a deserted cabin.

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Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite Pretty rank: Miz Walton meets a grisly end as she’s overcome by bedbugs after being wounded in a shootout in issue #2 of the second series. © 2011 Terry Tidwell and John Wooley.

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Cliff and Betty Drop By Look closely at the two people at the bottom right side of this page from issue #4 of the second series, and you’ll see Terry Tidwell’s salute to Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer. John Wooley says he and Stevens kicked around the idea of a Miracle Squad/Rocketeer crossover, but it never got beyond the idea stage. © 2011 Terry Tidwell and John Wooley.

DOUGLAS R. KELLY is editor of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers’ Marine Technology magazine and is hooked on Silver and Bronze Age DC comics. E-mail: streamlux@yahoo.com.

COMING ATTRACTION

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y.

The Miracle Squad is set to make a return, of sorts, in 2011. John Wooley and Terry Tidwell are working with Pulp 2.0 Press to re-release the first four issues in both deluxe graphic-novel and electronicdownload formats. Look for them in the first quarter of 2011.

© 2011 Terry Tidwell and John Woole

“Okies,” Oklahomans who are headed for California seeking jobs and relief from the Dust Bowl conditions in which they’ve been suffering. Barron returns to California and starts work on a “message” picture that he calls Blood and Dust, which he envisions as a vehicle for telling the world about the plight of the Okies.

Issues #3 and 4 of this second series focus on the progress, and setbacks, of the movie as the Miracle Squad deals with a group of Californians who resent the Okies and want the movie company to stop location shooting and to pack up and leave. A KKKtype of hate group, complete with robes and hoods, even descends on the movie set and the Miracle Squad has its hands full standing its ground in the brawl that ensues. The picture, however, gets finished, and it bombs at the box office. Barron is hugely disappointed, but Sandra tells him he did what he thought was right, and for that, she’s proud of him.

And that was the end of the road for The Miracle Squad, as lackluster sales caused Apple Press to cancel the series after four issues. “I was really disappointed because I wanted to see it continue,” says Terry Tidwell. “It was just a really bad time for the market back then. Everything was crashing.”

John Wooley was disappointed as well, as he had planned out the next story arc for the book. “I had planned a third series, where the Miracle Squad travels to the Sea of Cortez, on a cruise, where they find this incredibly striking woman. They bring her back to Hollywood, planning to turn her into kind of a povertyrow Dorothy Lamour, because South Sea pictures were really big in the ’30s. But they would be blackmailed by someone claiming the woman was black … bear in mind, this is 1930s Hollywood. That would have been the starting point for the next adventure. And there was even talk of a Rocketeer/Miracle Squad crossover— it would have made sense give that the characters all were based in Los Angeles in the late 1930s.

Dave Stevens and I discussed it, but nothing came of it, probably due to our book’s cancellation.”

Well-written stories and a refreshingly realistic approach—along with a sharp, clean style of illustration— made Miracle Squad a great read, allowing the reader a look at the B-movie industry as it existed before World War II. “I think as a storyteller, my strength has always been character,” says Wooley. “It was important for me to avoid cliché. I wanted to make these people three-dimensional. I wanted them to grow and I wanted to take them places where maybe people didn’t think they would go.”

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by

Michael Mikulovsky

[Editor’s note: Occasional BACK ISSUE contributor Mike Mikulovsky considers Roy Thomas and Tony DeZuniga’s “Man-God”—Marvel Comics’ 1976 adaptation of Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator—to be an unfinished “symphony” and hopes, with this article, to pique interest in having the writer and artist finish the adaptation in a complete edition of Man-God.]

Okay, technically speaking, Man-God’s name is Hugo Danner. Thanks (yet again) to writer extraordinaire Roy Thomas, the man who gave my generation exposure to heroes like Conan the Barbarian and Kull the Conqueror, in 1976 Marvel Comics readers were introduced to another long-forgotten hero, Hugo Danner, who debuted in the novel Gladiator by Philip Wylie (1902–1971).

Gladiator was written in 1926 but first published in 1930, due to Wylie’s request to his agent/ philip wylie publisher that some other books he wrote be released first. Wylie was concerned that Gladiator might be a little too shocking for readers to accept at the time due to its subject matter: Danner’s father, a scientist, created strength-enhancing chemicals that he first injected into a cat, and then into the fetus of his own son after drugging his pregnant wife. Hugo Danner grew up with super-strength and became the first published “superman.”

I suspect that writer Jerry Siegel got the idea of Superman from reading Gladiator. Siegel even reviewed the book in the second issue of a self-published fanzine in 1932. Siegel’s Superman was also influenced by Doc Savage, first published in 1933.

There are simply too many similarities between those early supermen and the Golden Age Superman to believe otherwise, such as explanations of Hugo’s and Superman’s power by using a grasshopper’s jumping ability, and their abilities to leap great distances in a single bound. All three characters have “Fortresses of Solitude.” Hugo Danner was born in a small town (Colorado Springs, Colorado; think: Smallville, Kansas, adopted home of Clark Kent—whose name was borrowed from Clark “Doc” Savage). During Superman’s first year or so of adventures, his feats of strength were almost identical to Hugo’s, and Siegel even paraphrased some of Gladiator’s dialogue. Wylie started to file a lawsuit in 1940 against Superman creators Siegel

Ab-solutely Amazing Earl Norem’s cover painting for the Man-God premiere in Marvel Preview #9. Courtesy of Heritage. (inset) Gladiator’s author. © 1976 Marvel Comics. Photo © 2007 Princeton University Library.

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A Man-God Sampler Images from Marvel Preview #9, written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Tony DeZuniga: (top left) a father takes drastic steps to enhance his unborn child; (top right) young Hugo leaps, which provided inspiration to Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel; and (bottom) Danner’s not the guy you want to face in the ring. © 1976 Marvel Comics.

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and artist Joe Shuster and later, against National (DC) Comics. (There were some differences between Gladiator and Superman, however; Superman was and still is a much more lighter and brighter character. The novel is a melancholic tale of a boy set apart because of his unique gifts, and his lifelong struggle to come to terms with it.

Unlike Superman, he hides his great abilities. Also, Hugo was a womanizer.)

[A Philip Wylie aside: Wylie was also the author of When Worlds Collide (1933), its sequel, After Worlds Collide (1934), and The Murder Invisible (1931).

When Universal Studios was preparing to film the Invisible Man movie, based upon H. G. Wells’ book, the studio had several famous writers attempt to write a screenplay. (R. C. Sheriff is the credited screenwriter, with Preston Sturges being an uncredited contributing writer.) Wylie was hired to write the final screenplay (uncredited). Wylie based much of the Invisible Man screenplay on his own book, The Murder Invisible, so what we saw in the 1933 film was a merging of Wells’ and Wylie’s books.]

If not for Roy Thomas, I am quite sure I would have never learned of Wylie’s Gladiator. On a cold, brutal winter evening in November 1976, in a time before local comic-book stores, I visited a small book/ magazine store in my area, looking for a new Marvel black-and-white magazine to engulf. All the Marvel monster mags and Deadly Hands of Kung Fu had all been canceled the year before. So I was kind of depressed—all that was left was Savage Sword of Conan and Planet of the Apes. I actually had the latest issue of Apes in hand that night when I noticed another Marvel mag hidden behind some car magazine. I immediately pulled it off the rack and was blown away by its beautiful cover, painted by one of my favorite cover artists, Earl Norem. The magazine was Marvel Preview #9 (Winter 1976), starring “Man-God.”

Man-God, Smash!

I immediately bought it and read it right there.

I was equally stunned by the beautiful interior artwork

by Tony DeZuniga. I went into sensory overload!

Tony’s gritty artwork fit this story perfectly. I had never been a fan of his previously, and didn’t care for his heavy inks over penciler John Buscema on Thor.

But “Man-God” really opened up my eyes and made me a DeZuniga fan for life. (Originally, Rich Buckler was the assigned artist for “Man-God,” but he only drew the roughs for the first three pages before dropping out of the assignment. The inker, Tony DeZuniga, took over as artist.)

My only disappointment with this adaptation was that it only adapted the first half of the novel. I hope we get to see Roy and Tony finish it one day soon!

They’re both interested in doing it, so I am attempting to raise the funds to make it happen. I’m hoping Dark Horse Comics will publish “Man-God” complete one day, like they did with the Marvel Comics’ ’70s/early ’80s Conan comics and Savage Sword of Conan in its Chronicles of Conan trades.

Being an art collector, around seven years ago I had looked for some “Man-God” original art and never found any pages. But about three years ago, while Web searching, it seemed my luck had changed.

I found several pages within months. So I decided to try and rebuild this book. I’m still looking for pages of the original comic art from Marvel Preview #9, Man-God. I’d greatly appreciate in any help locating any more of these pages by Tony DeZuniga.

A Man-God Marvel teaser ad by Dan Adkins. Courtesy of Mike Mikulovsky. © 1976 Marvel Comics.

Special thanks to Lloyd Smith and his great Diversions of the Groovy Kind website, and to Joseph Lenius for his help with art scans and for selling me those two “Man-God” boxing pages.

This article is dedicated to Roy Thomas.

© 1949 Avon.

MICHAEL MIKULOVSKY lives in Plymouth, Wisconsin, with his 20-pound Maine Coon cat Zeus. He is presently writing a fantasy/adventure book titled The Adventures of Mike and Zeus. E-mail: michaelwzeus@aol.com.

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seem to be scarce these days? The dwindling brick-and-mortar experience [of comics shops] has meant a reduced opportunity for stumbling across hidden gems in long boxes, and I wonder if BI has any thoughts on the subject.

Till Gwendy gets her own reality show, make mine BI! – James Proctor E-mail: euryman@gmail.com (subject: BACK ISSUE) Postal mail: Michael Eury, Editor • BACK ISSUE 118 Edgewood Ave. NE • Concord, NC 28025

Find BACK ISSUE on

ARE BACK ISSUES A THING OF THE PAST?

Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

I love Bob Larkin’s Spidey—both inside and on the cover [of BACK ISSUE #44]! It fits perfectly with the content, a real journey back through the heyday of our favorite friendly neighborhood Wall-Crawler.

Stan Lee’s drug story in Amazing Spider-Man is one I’ve long admired, representing a bold step for all the right reasons. The story behind the story by Jim Manner gives proper due to such a milestone, and was very illuminating, with details I’d never been aware of.

The Gerry Conway interview is a great glimpse at his historic run, revealing (to this tender reader, at least) why the Gwen clone was created. Was her story ever picked up or did she exit stage left, never to be heard from again? I haven’t read Spider-Man in many years, since Roger Stern left the book, but would be curious to know if this version of Gwen created her own separate existence.

Conway’s subsequent insights about Marvel Team-Up and Spectacular were also welcome. I love reading about the backgrounds of series and what went into their production.

The sidebar into Sal Buscema’s artistic evolution is just the kind of thing it would be terrific to see more of in BI! We don’t hear enough about the talent responsible for great comics and what their art means to them personally. More of this, please!

And let’s hear it for Spidey Super Stories! That was my favorite childhood show (besides the 1960s cartoon), and I always found it eerie and cool at the same time that he only spoke with word balloons. Nice way to avoid getting the voice wrong!

To be honest, I’d completely forgotten about the primetime live-action Amazing Spider-Man series, but the color photos brought it all back. It was so infrequently broadcast that I couldn’t have seen more than a couple episodes.

All in all, another fine issue.

One question I have before signing off may not fall under your mag’s purview, Michael, but I wonder how long we’ll have back issues. The artifacts themselves, I mean. Is it just me, or do they

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James, the idea of trying to explain the Spider-Clone Saga in a few lettercol words makes our editorial temples throb, so we suggest Googling Gwen Stacy—there are a few sites that explain her history, and her clone’s.

Re Sal Buscema and hearing more from artists: Originally, ye editor wished to differentiate this magazine from its TwoMorrows predecessor, Comic Book Artist, by focusing more upon the comics themselves than the creators. However, we’ve forged our own identity since our November 2003 launch and you’ll be hearing/reading more from/about comics artists in these pages—as examples, this issue’s Dave Stevens interview, and next issue’s in-depth chat with Jim Starlin.

Wow, I’d never given the back-issue market much thought until your comment, but you’re right, they are becoming hard to find in traditional shops. I’d like to open the floor for commentary on this topic—and feel free to dialogue about this on BI’s Facebook page as well.

A WORLD WITHOUT MARVEL? Hi, Michael. Awhile back I had talked to you about an idea that I had based on the AA/DC articles that Bob Rozakis did for BACK ISSUE (and Alter Ego). Just a refresher, my idea was a world where DC/National had bought Timely Comics, so essentially Marvel never existed and the characters were a part of DC. Are you still thinking about posting my e-mail on the letters page to see if there is any interest in seeing this happen?

Also, is there a possibility of reprinting or updating the article(s) regarding Atlas/Seaboard in light of its rebirth? Just curious.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

– Thomas Chick Thanks for the reminder, Thomas, and I’ve shared your intriguing idea here. While it’s unlikely that BI will run another serial due to space considerations, a single fantasy article on this topic might be a fun diversion. Readers, what do you think?

This reminds me of a fantasy history written for CarolinAPA back in the mid-1980s by my buddy Tony Wike, in which, if I recall correctly, DC acquired Marvel during its distribution of Marvel’s titles in the early 1960s. The article had the newly created (or reintroduced, in the cases of the Golden Age heroes) Marvel characters being absorbed into DC’s line, with Marvel artists similarly coming on board. I did a Spidey-esque Batman sketch “by” Steve Ditko to accompany the piece.

And re Atlas/Seaboard, we’ve covered several series from that line off and on (including The Scorpion in this very issue’s Dominic Fortune article), but we’ve yet to give the line as a whole a thorough examination. Anyone else want to see this?

THE SAINT PLAYS CATCH-UP I’ve gotten way behind on my letter writing to BI, so I will try to get caught up with this letter. It covers issues that have already been talked about in the letters columns, but I’d like you to know what I’ve thought of past issues.

BI #35: Pro2Pro Roundtable: When Hobby Met Spidey: What I love about these roundtables is the brutal honesty that comes out of them. Great stuff!

Mike Vosburg: I was, and still am, a big fan of his. Loved his She-Hulk, loved his Wonder Woman two-parter in World’s Finest Comics, tracked down the whole run of Starfire because of him, and bought Sisterhood of Steel. Was disappointed he didn’t do

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Spinning the Story of The Amazing Spider-Man: Andy Mangels does his usual excellent job. I was really disappointed when this series was canceled. I still don’t understand why this series hasn’t been released on DVD since it’s not subject to the legal morass that is keeping the 1966 Batman off the shelves. I also think Nicholas Hammond should’ve been invited to do a cameo in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films. Maybe they’ll invite him to film one for the reboot.

The Beginnings of the Clone Saga: What a stupid idea. Once Ben Reilly took over, I dropped all Spider-Man titles. Luckily I was able to get all the issues I missed for 50 cents an issue afterwards.

Shame Dan Jurgens wasn’t interviewed. I hear he left Sensational Spider-Man because, when hired, he was told he would be writing/ drawing Peter Parker/Spider-Man, not Ben Reilly/Spider-Man. All caught up!

– Delmo (The Saint) Walters, Jr. Delmo, the BI/AE duplication of the Claw and Wonder Woman material was a double fluke, since Alter Ego’s publication of those articles was a result of their originally being commissioned for books that were shelved. And since all of TwoMorrows’ editors work in their respective offices instead of under one roof, editorial meetings don’t occur as they would at, say, Marvel or DC. But we’ve discussed the matter you bring up and it’s unlikely you’ll see that type of thing happen again.

THE OTHER BLUE BEETLE While I’m not the world’s biggest Spider-Man fan (although I have always certainly gotten a royal kick out of his adventures over the years), I enjoyed his featured role in BACK ISSUE #44 immensely.

The look back at Spider-Man on The Electric Company and in its spin-off comic Spidey Super Stories was fascinating. I remember watching that classic kids’ show as a teenager just to catch Spider-Man’s appearances. The villain I remember the most is the Wall, who was—you guessed it—a brick wall that just got up one day and started walking around. I remember the time Spidey teamed up with the show’s other resident superhero, the Blue Beetle [below]—not the classic comic-book character now owned by DC Comics, but a bumbling boob played by series regular Jim Boyd in a cheap, homemade outfit consisting of tennis shoes, boxer shorts, a T-shirt with his full name written on the front, and incredibly fake-looking wings and antennas. (Oddly, there seems to be no mention of this comedic and perhaps wider-known-by-the-general-public version in Christopher Irving’s otherwise excellent Blue Beetle Companion.)

© Children’s Television Workshop.

TM & © DC Comics.

the graphic novel that continued that series. If I had known you were doing a Vosburg interview, I would’ve sent you a scan of the sketch he did for me of Boronwe from SOS. Kobra: DC Special Series #1 is one of my favorite Mike Nasser stories.

Time Out with Otis: Otisburg?

Flashback: Luthor and Brainiac: What wasn’t mentioned is that Gary Martin inked the backgrounds for the Swanderson story.

BI #37: Wonder Woman’s Return to WWII: I thought it was a good idea to have the book concentrate on her WWII adventures during the first season of the TV show. Besides, it wasn’t the first time the book returned to the Golden Age. That happened in WW #159, with Ross Andru drawing WW like H. G. Peters.

The Invaders: Loved that series, loved Frank Robbins’ work.

Alan Kupperberg wasn’t a great follow-up artist.

Glad you were able to use the Dial H for Hero T-shirt photo.

BI #38: The Huntress: She was one of my favorite characters until DC decided to kill her off and create a new Huntress. I think they should’ve done to her what they did with Power Girl— keep her as-is and contrive some new backstory.

BI #41: Contest of Champions: I never knew this was supposed to be the Marvel heroes at the Summer Olympics.

Nice save by Marvel.

The Twelve Trials of Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman #212 was the first issue of WW I bought, so this article really took me back! I thought the “Twelve Trials” thing was a great idea when I reread the series years later (I was six at the time I got the issues originally).

The Sensational New Wonder Woman: Sorry to hear that Roy Thomas and Gene Colan didn’t enjoy working on WW. While I liked Jose Delbo’s work on WW, Gene Colan was definitely an upgrade.

Whatever Happened to the Sentinel of Liberty?: The Roger Stern/John Byrne run is one of my favorite runs on Cap. Shame it didn’t last longer.

They Red, White, and Blew It!: I’m probably one of the few who actually liked the Team America series. This article was the highlight of the issue due to the brutal behind-the-scenes honesty.

Nice tribute to Mr. Giordano.

BI #42: The Failed Comeback Cowboy: Love the Vigilante and really enjoyed those Gray Morrow stories. Stuff’s death saddened me at the time.

The All-Star Weird Western Heroes of DC Comics: I didn’t know there were other Neal Adams-drawn El Diablo stories. I just have Weird Western Tales #15. Thanks for the head’s up!

Rough Stuff: Loved the page of Lois Lane art by Bob Oksner.

I regret not getting the chance to meet him at a con, maybe getting a sketch from him. Great artist!

BI #43: Shanna: I picked up all five issues at a con years ago.

Good stuff. The miniseries by Frank Cho, though great art, was a waste.

Rima the Jungle Girl: I never knew that she was a character from a novel. Always thought she was a new creation.

Claw/Demon with a Gloved Hand: The only complaint I have with BI as of late is the repeating of material from Alter Ego and vice versa. The Claw and Earth-Two Wonder Woman articles come to mind. Maybe some kind of editorial meeting where you make sure both mags aren’t covering the same subject.

BI #44: Great cover!

Spider-Man Power Records: I still have my Man-Wolf, Dragon Man, and Return of the Conquistador records. I thought they did a great job on the Man-Wolf story. It would be years before I finally got the original issues the Man-Wolf story was pulled from.

As for the Spidey Super Stories comic—well, I admit that while I much preferred DC’s better-drawn Super Friends comic, which didn’t oversimplify the dialogue and plots for the kiddies like Spidey did (the DC book was way superior to the original Super

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where else can you see Spider-Man battle a punch-drunk boxer who has been turned by his armor-clad arch-enemy Prof. Monster and the evil Amazoness into a monster that looks very much like the Thing from Fantastic Four wearing a Star of David belt buckle!

Great stuff, although if you want to see a really obscure liveaction Spidey appearance check out the Don Glut DVD I Was a Teenage Movie Maker, a collection of the amateur films he made as a kid that features an incredibly cool and well-made Spider-Man short as well as a backyard battle between Captain America and the Red Skull and a B&W serial starring Will Eisner’s The Spirit, which co-starred Superman and a vast variety of other heroes— plus Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein Monster!

All and all, another great issue. Look forward, as always, to the next one.

– Jeff Taylor Jeff, I’d never heard of The Electric Company’s Blue Beetle until your letter! (We’ve shared a photo of TV’s first Blue Beetle above, in case you’re like me and have never seen this so-called superhero before.)

Don Glut’s comicsbased films have a cult following among fandom.

Here’s a pic of Don himself as the WallCrawler from his 1969 Spider-Man film…

COLOR AND COLLOQUIALISMS I’ve been reading BI since the beginning, but I have some complaints that I really need to voice.

I am underwhelmed by the color section. Especially in BI #44. TWO pages of the color section devoted to a checklist?

Another page that’s all text? Really? That is wasteful. Why not have the color pages be art only? Number the color section differently (C1, C2, etc.). Then, in an article, you could just say, “Turn to page C4 to see the image.”

My other gripe has been sticking in my craw for a long time.

Let’s have the writers write like journalists. I absolutely cannot stand to see articles written in vernacular. (You know?, Izzat so?, etc.) They are articles, not conversations. (The exception, of course, being the interviews, since they are indeed conversations.)

The biggest offender is Michael Aushenker. In BI #44’s Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man article, he wrote two “ums.” It’s bad enough that people rely on that crutch when speaking, but to actually write it? He should also stop his practice of saying that the art “looks rushed.” Explain to me how a person can look at an image and determine how long it took the artist to create it? There is no need for that type of denigration. But if BI insists on not being an actual magazine, with unprofessional writing and opinions presented as facts, I may stop reading. Sorry to be a downer, but it’s just the way I feel.

– Christopher D. Hutton Chris, before I address your complaints, let me stress that I appreciate your caring enough about the magazine to voice them. Often, readers who are dissatisfied with a publication will either simply stop buying it, or in extreme cases go into attack mode in online forums. So thank you for this feedback—we’ve fine-tuned BACK ISSUE’s format from time to time, and I will always listen to readers’ constructive criticism in an effort to make this the best magazine we possibly can.

But, alas, we can’t please everyone…

Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Company © CTW. Spider-Man and Moondragon © Marvel. Electric

Friends cartoon show in that regard, too), the Marvel comic could be great fun.

I especially liked their gloriously goofy Star Wars spoof in Spidey Super Stories #31. Where else could you see the wisecracking Wall-Crawler rescue the bald and beautiful Moondragon with the help of the ’50s-era flying-saucer-piloting Marvel Boy (recently revived in Agents of ATLAS); the show’s own resident ape Paul the Gorilla; the always-malfunctioning S.A.M. the Robot from Sesame Street (I would love to know how they got the rights to him. I know that Electric Company and Sesame Street were made by the same company, but still it must have been a heck of a meeting when Marvel came asking for permission to use him!); and the evil Dr. Doom playing the Darth Vader part (as if there were any doubt), who wants to conquer the world using what can best be described as a combination of the Death Star and Pac-Man that he calls… (wait for it…) “Star Jaws”!

After that, well, just about any other live-action version of Spider-Man might seem rather dull, and unfortunately the 1970s primetime series tended to drift in that direction more often than not.

Oh, TV’s Amazing Spider-Man had its moments…

The stunts were great, although you usually had to wait through 45 minutes of show before you saw them (and frankly, even back then I couldn’t really see how effective Spidey could be in Los Angeles as compared to New York—what with all the earthquakes, how many buildings there were actually tall enough for him to swing from?!), and despite the blandness of the scripts, Nicholas Hammond certainly tried to bring an ever-so-slight neurotic edge to his characterization of Peter Parker, most noticeably in “The Chinese Web,” when he has a comics-style guilt-stricken voiceover moment after getting yelled at by the episode’s heroine because he’d run out on her weak-hearted father when he was getting beaten up by the bad guys. It was cool, too, to see a costumed comic book character on in primetime. I wasn’t the only one who thought so, because a woman wrote in to our local Canadian TV-listings magazine to gush about how much she loved Spider-Man’s outfit, and it was rather obvious from her letter that she was completely unaware of the Web-Slinger’s original comics appearances.

As for the Japanese version, you have to admit that the absolutely last word to describe it is “dull,” even though in many ways he seemed to be more inspired by DC Comics heroes like Green Lantern (the power-source bracelet given to him by an alien) and the Flash (his shrunken costume stored in a convenient piece of jewelry) than Stan Lee’s signature creation.

As for the article’s statement that the Japanese Spider-Man show just followed the usual Japanese trend of having a Shogun Warriors-style giant robot (and Leopardon was actually included in the American toy line of that name, although only in the smaller, palm-sized form), I really have to correct that misconception because Spidey was actually the first Japanese live-action hero to pilot his own giant robot, and it was actually the next year’s Battle Fever J (itself originally another co-production with Marvel, where Captain America would have led a team of international superheroes before the network demanded that the show should center around a Japanese character) that started the trend of Power Rangers-style shows being built around big ’bot battles.

What makes the Japanese Spider-Man’s climactic battles against the villain’s giant monster even more interesting is the fact that the expensive Leopardon costume got stolen quite early on and the low-budget show didn’t have the money to replace it, so they were forced to use the same stock footage over and over again, which is why you never see the robot and the various monsters Spider-Man is fighting in the same shot.

Despite this and the differences between it and the original version, I have a great deal of affection for the Japanese show. I mean,

As noted in a previous “Back Talk,” choosing content for the color pages poses an editorial challenge since many of the images we deal with—old photographs, line art, pencil sketches, and script/plot pages—are in black and white. Respectfully, the last thing I want to do is separate art from articles and have readers flipping back and forth to view an accompanying image. That’s like channel surfing between two programs by watching TVs in two separate rooms.

We’re considering making BACK ISSUE a full-color publication, and if we do, that might alleviate your concerns. BI #50, our forthcoming “Batman in the Bronze Age” issue, will be a full-color issue, and a test for a color BI. Re your second complaint: Colloquialisms have been part of the comics language since Stan Lee started the Marvel Age, and as editor I’ve allowed BI’s writers to employ their own voices, to keep the magazine fresh and personable. Also, modern communication, particularly social media, is a lot looser than traditional journalism, and we try to reflect that without veering too far away from being an “actual magazine.” I do try to enforce that writers’ opinions are clearly stated as opinions, but with the volume of material produced for the magazine there may be occasional violations of that dictum.

Michael Aushenker adds: “Dry and academic dissertations on funnybooks are of no personal interest to me. As I’ve written hundreds of articles for newspapers over the past decade, I try to subscribe to our magazine’s sense of fun and mirth (mixed in with the scholarship) when covering your favorite comics. I strive to write articles that I would like to read, and capture the fun of my topics and the conversational tone of my interviews. Overall, I appreciate the opportunity to loosen up my tie journalistically within the pages of BACK ISSUE that our esteemed ed-in-chief Michael Eury encourages. That said, Chris, I hear ya, and, in future pieces, I’ll try not to get too drunk on colloquialisms and wear the proverbial lampshade. ’Nuff said!”

© 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

ROSS ANDRU, “MR. BRONZE AGE SPIDER-MAN” “Spring time in Manhattan! Perhaps the city’s best season … one during which its people come alive, and find joy in simple pursuits … bicycle riding, stickball, wandering in Central Park…”

Those were the first words from the very first comic book I bought: [Amazing] Spider-Man #134 (July 1974). In fact, the first three issues I bought were #134, 135, and 136.

I called them the “Holy Trio” at the time.

I was thrilled to see an issue on the Bronze Age of Spider-Man. There were two things that really affected me from that era: Ross Andru’s pencils and Gerry Conway’s writing. I will admit I didn’t realize until years later who the writer even was or how important he had been to me, but I was immediately taken by Ross Andru’s pencils. His take on Spider-Man knocked me out, really put the hook in me. Nice to hear Gerry Conway in the article say that Andru was “the gold standard.” He was then and still is to me.

Again, a great issue, but with the title “The Bronze Age of Spider-Man,” I wish there had been more of a feature on Ross Andru. I’ve always thought he was under-appreciated and a bit maligned, something I’ve never understood. As an artist, he was so cinematic. He was a director-and-cinematographer-in-one.

There’s a whole two- or three-page scene in Amazing Spider-Man #135 with Harry coming in and finding Pete’s Spidey costume in the drawer while Parker’s in the shower, and then watching Spider-Man swing out the window into the night sky. Some of the action is shown through the window of the apartment. So clever.

If you’re viewing a digital version of this publication, PLEASE read this plea from the publisher! his is COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, which is NOT INTENDED FOR FREE T DOWNLOADING ANYWHERE. If you’re a print subscriber, or you paid the modest fee we charge to download it at our website, you have our sincere thanks—your support allows us to keep producing publications like this one.

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3) Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR COMPUTER and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. 4) Finally, DON’T KEEP DOWNLOADING OUR MATERIAL ILLEGALLY, for free. We offer one complete issue of all our magazines for free downloading at our website, which should be sufficient for you to decide if you want to purchase others. If you enjoy our publications enough to keep downloading them, support our company by paying for the material we produce.

We’re not some giant corporation with deep pockets, and can absorb these losses. We’re a small company—literally a “mom and pop” shop—with dozens of hard-working freelance creators, slaving away day and night and on weekends, to make a pretty minimal amount of income for all this work. We love what we do, but our editors, authors, and your local comic shop owner, rely on income from this publication to stay in business. Please don’t rob us of the small amount of compensation we receive. Doing so will ensure there won’t be any future products like this to download.

TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

www.twomorrows.com So cinematic. (Couldn’t help but think of this when that scene showed up in the second movie.) Also, right after that there’s a fantastically rendered scene of Spider-Man meeting the Punisher at a museum in the Cloisters in the dark of night. I would have liked a retrospective of some his great work from this period. I’ve always said John Romita, Sr. brought Spider-Man into the 20th century (or brought it up to speed—having not grown up with Steve Ditko’s work, Ditko’s Spider-Man always seemed dated to me), but I think of Ross Andru as “Mr. Bronze Age Spider-Man.” On a side note, my young sons have just discovered Spider-Man and I got some satisfaction just recently when I discovered, in a modern encyclopedia of Spidey foes, that the Jackal model sheet, among all these more modern drawings of other characters, is still Ross Andru’s maniacal take on Jackal from those days. Nice to know some “old school” stuff is still appreciated.

And on a personal note, and as a teacher, I’ve always wanted to thank Gerry Conway for expanding my mind. Just between those three issues, #134–136, I learned the words pyrotechnic (#136 as Peter’s contemplating who blew up his apartment) and, at the end of #135, where Spider-Man monologues to Tarantula as he’s wrapping him up, I learned the definition, and more importantly the concept, of being idealistic, as Punisher asks the Wall-Crawler “if he really was that idealistic.” Powerful stuff for a seven- or eight-year-old kid.

Again, I must admit I didn’t realize who’d written the most beloved issues of my childhood until years later. I didn’t know from writers then. I know Gerry doesn’t like a lot of contact with the fans, but I always wanted to let him know he made a big impression on me. I asked Roy Thomas once to forward my thoughts to him. He jokingly told Gerry, “This youngster wanted to thank you.” After reading the article, it’s interesting to know that Conway was only 12 years older than me at the time.

Also, interesting that his last issue was #149. I didn’t know that was his last issue back then but I always kind of instinctively felt that was the end of an era even back then—the end of the great age of Spider-Man to me… maybe even the end of the Bronze Age

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 79

to me. I stayed with Spider-Man another 30 or so issues after that (and there were some good ones), but it never felt the same. And frankly, I felt Andru’s art was a little different after that point. Seems Conway and Andru made a good match for each other.

Spidey Super Stories: Very interesting. Have very fond memories of that.

The Marvel Team-Up article was nice. Marvel Team-Up issue #16, with Captain Marvel—a huge favorite of mine! Introduced me to three things: Marvel’s version of Captain Marvel, the art of Gil Kane (there’s another subject for a whole other letter—I don’t know why that issue isn’t put in the “best of” editions when highlighting Kane’s work), and the writing of Len Wein. (Check out that issue for Len’s reference to Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat: As Peter is lost in thought, thinking about all his problems, mulling over going to a movie that night or not, he muses, “Been so long since I’ve been to a movie I wouldn’t know the difference between Linda Lovelace or Clint Eastwood!” Crazy!) As an older, more-worldly person than the boy who first read that book, I’ve always wondered how that made it past the censors of the day.

Anyway, despite my quibbles about Ross Andru, I enjoy the mag and what you guys do … as always.

– Andy Patterson

Superman TM & © DC Comics. Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

You’re right, Andy, we should have given Ross Andru more of a spotlight in our Spidey issue. While it may be a small consolation, here’s a panel of his original art—inked by Dick Giordano, with backgrounds by Terry Austin—from the Conway-written classic, Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man!

S U B M IS S IO N G U ID E L IN E S BACK ISSUE is on the lookout for the following comics-related material from the 1970s and 1980s: Unpublished artwork and covers Original artwork and covers Penciled artwork Character designs, model sheets, etc.

Original sketches and/or convention sketches Original scripts Photos Little-seen fanzine material Other rarities Creators and collectors of 1970s/1980s comics artwork are invited to share your goodies with other fans! Contributors will be acknowledged in print and receive complimentary copies (and the editor’s gratitude).

Submit artwork as (listed in order of preference): Scanned images: 300dpi TIF (preferred) or JPEG (e-mailed or on CD, or to our FTP site; please inquire) Clear color or black-and-white photocopies BACK ISSUE is also open to pitches from writers for article ideas appropriate for our recurring and/or rotating departments.

Request a copy of the BACK ISSUE Writers’ Bible by e-mailing euryman@gmail.com or by sending a SASE to the address below.

Please allow 6–8 weeks for a response to your proposals.

Next issue: “Dead Heroes”!

The Death of Captain Marvel’s JIM STARLIN discusses his remarkable career in a lavishly illustrated exclusive interview.

Also: Deadman after Neal Adams, Jason Todd Robin, the death and resurrection of the Flash, Elektra, and the many deaths of Aunt May. With art by and/or commentary from JIM APARO, CARY BATES, GERRY CONWAY, JOSÉ LUIS GARCIA-LOPEZ, KELLEY JONES, FRANK MILLER, BILL SIENKIEWICZ, MARV WOLFMAN, and more. With a cosmically cool Captain Marvel and Thanos cover by Jim Starlin! Don’t ask, just BI it!

See you in sixty!

Michael Eury, editor Captain Marvel and Thanos TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. BACK ISSUE TM & © TwoMorrows.

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(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “1970s Time Capsule”! Examines relevance in comics, Planet of the Apes, DC Salutes the Bicentennial, Richard Dragon–Kung-Fu Fighter, FOOM, Amazing World of DC, Fast Willie Jackson, Marvel Comics calendars, art and commentary from ADAMS, BRUNNER, GIORDANO, LARKIN, LEVITZ, MAGGIN, MOENCH, O’NEIL, PLOOG, STERANKO, cover by BUCKLER and BEATTY!

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