CBA Interview
Simonson Says
The Man of Two Gods Recalls His 25+ Years in Comics Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson
Below: Fuzzy photo by Ye Ed of Walter Simonson, taken at the artist’s cozy home, nestled in the woods off the Hudson River in New York. Still enamored with archosaurs, Walter is wearing a T-shirt riddled with dino images.
Though Walter Simonson had planned to be a paleontologist— that’s a person who studies dinosaurs, folks—as a college student in the 1960s, the Marvel comics of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko changed the would-be scientist’s mind and led him to pursue a career as a comic book artist. Frankly—and, no doubt, inconsequentially—Walter is my favorite comics personality, friendly, approachable, generous, funny, and smart. The artist-writer, though facing crunching deadlines with his hellish monthly schedule writing, penciling, and inking Orion for DC (never mind coordinating back-up strips for the title), allowed Ye Ed into his home for two four-hour interview sessions (on July 12th and August 17th), suffered my rummaging through his enormous personal art collection, and even took me out to lunch on both occasions. Gracias, Mr. S., and also many thanks to that other cool cat, Walter’s missus, Weezie. The artist copyedited this transcript. Comic Book Artist: Where are you from, Walter? Walter Simonson: I grew up in College Park, Maryland. It’s inside the Beltway, just a couple of miles from the Washington, D.C. line, maybe eight blocks from the University of Maryland. I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but my parents moved to College Park when I was two-anda-half, so I don’t remember a lot about Tennessee. CBA: What did your father do? Walter: He was a scientist, worked in soils. He was with the Soil Conservation Service in the Department of Agriculture. In his last job before he retired, he was the Director of Soil Classification and Correlation for the U.S. His work involved studying soils, gathering and assessing information on them that could be used in a variety of ways, from establishing the suitability of land for crop production to deciding what kind of soap the Army might use in the field somewhere. CBA: You obviously wanted to be a paleontologist for a while. Did you pick up an interest of the academic side? Walter: Sure. Dad taught college for five years in Iowa after grad school, and then he moved more directly into soil science. But I never thought about being an artist when I was a kid. I discovered dinosaurs in third grade, as a result of seeing Fantasia, and decided I wanted to be a paleontologist and study fossils—dinosaurs in particular. That desire stayed with me all
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through college. I majored in geology with the idea of going to graduate school for paleontology. However, I reached a point at the end of my senior year when I ended up deciding, after a long night, that paleo was not the direction I wanted to go in. I had no ideas about what else to do, really. I’d always drawn, but I didn’t have any concept of making a living at drawing. I ended up going to art school because art was the only real interest I’d had growing up outside of dinosaurs. As it happened, besides studying geology when I was in college, I got into Marvel comics. I discovered Thor in Journey into Mystery #120 and had my personal epiphany. [laughs] CBA: What made you pick up comics then? How old were you? Walter: I was a sophomore in college when I found that issue. I’d read comics when I was a kid; we had had a subscription to Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. I was a big Carl Barks fan, without having any idea who Barks was, or what his name was, or even that one guy did that stuff. But I knew the “Good Duck Artist,” I could recognize his work when I was ten. We had all kinds of comics… just off the cuff: Little Iodine, Cheyenne, some of the Western titles, the Warner stuff, some of the TV adaptations, 77 Sunset Strip with some Russ Manning jobs, I liked Jesse Marsh’s Tarzan work (without knowing who Marsh was either), and I liked the Manning “Brothers of the Spear” back-ups in Tarzan, too. I also had a subscription to Turok, Son of Stone. CBA: A subscription? Walter: Well, hey, dinosaurs! [laughter] The two comics we had subscriptions to when I was young were Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories for a while, and Turok. Actually, my brother gave me a subscription to Thor when I was in college, and I quit getting it after the year, because I discovered they sent the comics folded in half. When I was a kid, I didn’t care about it so much, but as a young adult, I didn’t like the crease down the middle—it broke the cover color with a white line down the center of the cover where it was folded—so I gave up on the subscription idea. But I read a lot of comics as a kid: Anthology stories, Westerns, detectives, super-heroes, Strange Adventures I think… I remember reading a DC comic where praying mantises take over the world, and they raise humans as racing animals or something. [laughs] Comics was my first introduction to Burroughs—before I knew who Burroughs was. One of my friends had a copy of Princess of Mars (the first John Carter book) in an adaptation by Jesse Marsh. I was fascinated by that comic; I thought it was really alien looking! It took me a long time to find out what the heck it was about, and who Jesse Marsh was, or Burroughs for that matter. But I read a lot of comics as a kid. My parents encouraged us, because they felt it helped develop the habit of reading, period. CBA: They didn’t look down upon it? Walter: Oh, no, not at all. CBA: Did they see the content of the stories? Walter: No idea. I’m young enough to be post-EC (I was probably three or four when that stuff was coming out), so the comics that we got were fairly sedate. My parents may very well have checked the contents. I didn’t think so then but when you’re a kid, you’re not paying attention. CBA: They didn’t object. Walter: We probably bought most of ’em with our allowance, rather than having our parents buy them for us. No, it was just that they thought we should be reading, and they didn’t care what we read, my brother and I, as long as we read. I have a younger brother named Bruce, and he is now a Professor of Geology at Oberlin College in Ohio. He got into geology and stayed with it. [laughs] COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10
Oct. 2000