Comic Book Artist #15 by TwoMorrows Publishing

LOVE AND ROCKETEERS! No.15 November November 2001 2001

™

$6.95 In The U.S.

STEVENS • HERNANDEZ BROS. • MOTTER • WAGNER • RIVOCHE • PLUNKETT

NUMBER 15

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CELEBRATING THE LIVES & WORK OF THE GREAT CARTOONISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS

Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher

TWOMORROWS JOHN & PAM MORROW Associate Editors CHRIS KNOWLES DAVID A. ROACH CHRISTOPHER IRVING Contributing Editors ROY THOMAS JOHN MORROW

NOVEMBER 2001

DEPARTMENTS: THE FRONT PAGE: LAST MINUTE BITS ON THE COMMUNITY OF COMIC BOOK ARTISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS “Moby” Dick Giordano, Dirty Danny, Ralph and the Swampmen cometh!..........................................................1 EDITOR’S RANT: WHERE DO COMICS FIT IN NOW? What can American comics do in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks? ................................................4 COCHRAN’S CORNER: THE ART OF STRETCH COMEDY A look at art spiegelman & Chip Kidd’s new book Jack Cole and Plastic Man......................................................5 CBA COMMUNIQUES: LETTERS FROM OUR READERS Alex Toth on 1941, Dave Cockrum on David Singer, and John Lustig gets the last word in on First Kiss ............6 FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE: @!!?* Our Man Fred looks at twenty years of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandezes’ Love and Rockets................................11

COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. Jon B. Cooke, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 USA • 401-783-1669 • Fax: 401-783-1287. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT the editorial office. Single issues: $9 postpaid ($11 Canada, $12 elsewhere). Six-issue subscriptions: $36 US, $66 Canada, $72 elsewhere. All characters © their respective owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © their respective authors. ©2001 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Cover acknowledgements: Rocketeer ©2001 Dave Stevens, Luba ©2001 Gilbert Hernandez, Maggie ©2001 Jaime Hernandez. Mr. X ©2001 Vortex Publishing, Inc. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Proofreader ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON Cover Art DAVE STEVENS, GILBERT HERNANDEZ & JAIME HERNANDEZ Cover Color HOMER REYES Production JON B. COOKE GREAT SWAMP GRAPHICS

LOVE AND ROCKETEERS: THE ’80s VANGUARD DAVE STEVENS INTERVIEW: OF HOLLYWOOD AND HEROES The man behind the Rocketeer on his life in the comics, the movies and the pin-ups ........................................12 MARIO HERNANDEZ INTERVIEW: A LOVE OF COMICS Big brother goes first in our special Hernandez hermanos section ......................................................................34 GILBERT HERNANDEZ INTERVIEW: DOWN PALOMAR WAY Chris Knowles chats with Beto on Heartbreak Soup, Palomar, and a post-punk sensibility ................................44 JAIME HERNANDEZ INTERVIEW: THE MECHANIC OF LOVE Xaime gets the CBA treatment complete with in-depth interview by Chris Knowles and tons o’ rare art............56 MATT WAGNER INTERVIEW: THE ARTIST DEFINED The creator of Mage and Grendel talks to Chris Knowles about a life of independence......................................66 DEAN MOTTER INTERVIEW: MISTER X-MAN The writer/artist/designer on the man behind the City of Dreams, the City of Nightmares ................................76 PAUL RIVOCHE INTERVIEW: THE MISTER X-FILES The renowned designer discusses his involvement in the creation of ’80s icon Mister X ....................................90 SANDY PLUNKETT INTERVIEW: THE BEST ARTIST YOU NEVER HEARD OF Tim Barnes answers the question of who is Sandy Plunkett and how does he do such superb artwork? ..........100 Opposite: Detail of Dave Stevens’ cover art to The Rocketeer: The Official Movie Adaptation. ©2001 Dave Stevens. Top: Four unpublished panels by & ©2001 Jaime Hernandez. Below: Luba at various stages of life by & ©2001 Gilbert Hernandez. All letters of comment, articles and artwork, please mail to: Jon B. Cooke, Editor, Comic Book Artist, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 Phone: (401) 783-1669 • Fax: (401) 783-1287 • E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com

Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS SAM GAFFORD Logo Designer/Title Originator ARLEN SCHUMER Mascot WOODY by J.D. King Issue Theme Song PEACE ON EARTH U2 Visit CBA on our Website at: www.twomorrows.com /comicbookartist/

Contributors Dave Stevens • Gilbert Hernandez Jaime Hernandez • Dean Motter Mario Hernandez • Paul Rivoche Matt Wagner • Sandy Plunkett Alex Toth • Michael T. Gilbert Chris Knowles • Tim Barnes Dean Smith • Jerry K. Boyd Chris Pitzer • Eric Reynolds Kim Thompson & Fantagraphics Arlen Schumer • Fred Hembeck Jon B. Knutson • Brian K. Morris Sam Gafford • Greg Preston J.P. Shannon • Shawna Ervin-Gore Dark Horse • John R. Cochran Scott Saavedra • Bob Beerbohm John Totleben • Larry Ivie dedicated to my sister

Becky Cooke and in memory of

Barbara Knutson Jerry DeFuccio Johnny Craig Chuck Cuidera Barbara Rausch Herbert Block and in celebration of the newborn arrivals of

Lily Morrow and Violet Knowles and to the spirit and everlasting endurance of the birthplace & home of american comic books

The City of

New York N

November 2001

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A T

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CBA Communiques

Toth on 1941, Cockrum on Singer Plus echoes of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. and other sh*tty complaints!

Above: During a recent visit to the offices of Heavy Metal, honcho Howard Jurowsky was kind enough to give Ye Ed a long-desired copy of 1941, Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch’s absolutely wild adaptation of the notorious Steven Spielberg flick. Thanks, Howard! Alex Toth discusses his near-miss illustrating the project at right. 1941 ©2001 Columbia/Universal.

Joe AlexStaton Toth Hollywood, California Re: Conjecture by John Workman [in CBA #14] about my on/off status on the early “Stealberg” epic, 1941. I was tentatively “on” until its adaptation-script (or, maybe, its actual shooting script?) was received and read here, and that, dear children, is when I bailed!!! Like the movie shot from its pages, it was a flipping trainwreck on all levels! I don’t think I read a third of its phone-bookish page count—trying to give it a fair read—but, nope, it wasn’t my cuppa! So I sent it back, “no thanks,” to Julie Simmons or Workman—can’t recall that now or any phone chat about “why”—the Loony Tunes script was “why”! Plus, I believe, the time factor for it, a booklength bomb, to be done to synch with the release of the movie, was much too tight for me. As for my coloring it, I have no memory of such discussions, but John/Julie could be right (?) if/when time allowed and the work itself inspired extras, like coloring my own doodlings for print, yes, I was up for it. But, again, I don’t recall; in fact, I’ve yet to color—directly—my own work!!! I’ve written reams of margin color notes/requests/pleas to in-house colorists—always ignored—so it’s been frustrating. I’ve done simple vellum-flap color guides on a few story sets, or the odd cover, but not the whole nine yards. I’m not sorry I let go of 1941. Whoever drew the book did well enough on it—a thankless job at best—so huzzahs to him/them, whoever! The job was perfect for a foto-fumetti book if enough production stills were available or the film was “in the can” and available to the Heavy Metal team. Armed with a final shooting script, edited to match the release print and to do frame-lifts on the “moviolas” to fill a book of it (squeeze in all that screaming dialogue and endless booming sound effects, junk-noise, too?), that was the way to go! But ol’ Steve may have not finished final edits? Or he would never allow a bit of its “finish,” let out before its debut date, for such foto/frame-up adaptation purposes? Remember all the hush-hush, secret security, closed-set nonsense that he and pal George Lucas were up to then? Milking pre-release hype to the max, teasing all, public/media, to salivating anticipation, promising big boffo success? Wellll, it worked! Big lousy pix. Billion$ of buck$ later, we know so, decade$ of hit$/mi$$e$ later, yup! I never dug their work. So, no loss, 1941 or anything peripheral to it or them. Nuff said? I think so. Hope this settles the 1941 matter once ’n’ for all! Much ado about nuttin’!!! Jon East via the Internet Just had to drop you a line saying how very much I’m enjoying your work on Comic Book Artist. I’ve been subscribing for a couple of years now and it just gets better and better. The latest Tower issue was superb. I’m a big Marvel Silver and Bronze Age collector and although I always loved Wally Wood (early Daredevil, his “Dr. Doom” strip in early Astonishing Tales), I had no knowledge of his Tower work. You inspired me to pick up some back issues of

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and Dynamo… fabulous stuff, thanks. Just one small observation on CBA #14; check out Dan Adkins’ portrayal of Dynamo on page 77. Remind you of anything? If you’ve got it take a look at John Buscema’s Captain America on the cover of Marvel’s Silver Age The Avengers, ish #58. A lovely swipe there from Mr. Adkins, I’m sure you’ll agree. But why? When he’s so able to draw dynamic poses himself? Any answers? [Sure, as an oldtime Avengers fan, I recognized the source of Dan’s Dynamo drawing. As for why, please refer to the Adkins interview in CBA #7 in which the artist states, “I just did it to meet deadlines, it was so hard, without swiping.”—Ye Ed.] Louis Morra via the Internet Manny Stallman was one of the most original and captivating artists to ever work in comics. His art was free and soaring, like his character at Tower, the Raven. Thank you so much for including a special page on Manny in CBA #14. It’s remarkable that Manny got to do the Raven, and it was the perfect meeting of character and style, for him to express himself. You know, it’s the sort of thing you feel when Kirby drew Captain America, or Kane drew Green Lantern—somehow there is the total melding of art, artist and character… into something far greater. The artist’s ideals become expressed. And that will always be one of the remarkable facets of the comic book super-hero, and the real reason why super-heroes, for all their pedantics and stereotypes, captivate us and are far greater than the pulp they’re printed on. They embody ideals. Manny was one of the greats! Even if only through a few Raven stories, he reached the heights. But then again, maybe that’s why he’s one of the greats—in a few brief tales, he scaled Olympus. On a bibliographic note: Your checklist does not mention (to my knowledge) a one-issue Deluxe comic book called Tales of Thunder (listed as March ’85 in Overstreet). Giffen is the only listed artist. Does it exist? [I dunno. Has anybody out there seen it? If so, can ya share a color photocopy of the cover?—Y.E.] Chris Bonham Studio City, California Thank you very much for acknowledging my small contribution to the Warren checklist in your Warren Companion by mentioning me (twice!) on page 4. I picked it up at the San Diego con and it’s the best. I do have one more bit of information for any updates you will make to the Warren checklist: Comix International #4 had two printings which you acknowledged but only listed the contents of one of the printings. The other swaps out two of the stories: “The Power and the Glory” is replaced with “Pure as Snow” by Jack Butterworth/ Felix Mas from Vampirella #35 and the “Hunter” story is replaced with “The Woodlik Inheritance” by Corben from Vampirella #31. All other stories are the same and in the same order. Also there was a typo on the listing of Crandall story for that same issue. The color version of “Tell Tale Heart” first appeared in Creepy #65 (not #77) and the original appeared in Creepy #3 of course. Again great work on a fabulous book. Dan DiDio via the Internet Congratulations on compiling such an entertaining and comprehensive study of Tower Comics and the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. You seemed to cover all the relevant facts about the series, with just one notable exception. In 1996, ABC Children’s Entertainment optioned T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and commissioned Marv Wolfman and Craig Miller to develop the property as a Saturday morning children’s series. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

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The basic premise remained the same with the one major change being that the team leader, NoMan, was controlled by the 13-year-old grandson of Dr. Dunn, Wally Crandall. The team, of course, was unaware that the young boy had assumed the role of his respected grandfather. Remember, this was for Saturday morning. Other changes included an African-American woman assuming the helmet of Menthor and a Native American woman as Raven. In this version, the winged Raven was the only member with natural powers. A full bible, pilot outline and some fine designs, by Tom Grummett, were prepared for the series. But before they could get to script, Disney (the new owners of ABC) passed on the property in favor of projects they were developing in their own studio. It was one of my favorite projects and was developed to compete with cartoons like X-Men that were ruling the ratings at the time. But instead of a television series, we have just one more footnote in the troubled history of such a promising project. Michael T. Gilbert Eugene, Oregon One correction: You said that the cover of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #17 might be by Ralph Reese and Wally Wood. I’m pretty sure it’s Ogden Whitney and Wood (or someone imitating Wood). Brent Cleever via the Internet [Re: CBA #14] Fascinating issue. Pangs of guilt generated by learning the personal conditions Gene Colan was experiencing while producing those exquisite renderings we came to take for granted would arrive over the Atlantic every month. Amused to learn that Tony Isabella was responsible for doctoring the reprints in Mighty World of Marvel and SpiderMan Comics Weekly. The highlight must have been when John F. Kennedy was replaced in “Thor vs. Mad Merlin” by a delightful caricature of Richard Nixon. (Perhaps my memory is playing tricks, but I believe Merlin’s thought balloon was altered to say he perceived an aura of goodness protecting the president.) I well remember the Spider-Man mask/paper bag Tony refers to, although the Spider-Man eye-pieces (plastic two-way mirrors) amused me for years. Also enjoyed reading Gary Friedrich’s interview. Again, I was surprised to discover the personal conditions Gary was laboring under during the 1970s. His Captain Britain scripts, with their sardonic humour (STRIKE, the British arm of SHIELD, and the guest shot from then Prime Minister Jaunty Jim Callahagan) and epic Red Skull/ Captain America storyline was always a personal highpoint for me— the one point where Captain Britain seemed like a proper Marvel comic, rather than a patronizing concession. Gary’s candid recollections were much appreciated. For the future, I’m looking forward to many revelations about Atlas/Seaboard comics. Whatever anyone else says about Atlas, I’ll always remember it for Howard Chaykin’s The Scorpion—one of the best comics of the 1970s. [While it may be a wee bit later than originally planned, I hope you will enjoy our next CBA, devoted to those weird and wonderful Atlas/Seaboards.—Y.E.] Steven Thompson via the Internet In spite of your experts, I would absolutely swear that Ralph Reese had a hand in the Andor story in T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #15. Note the sometimes angular faces and shorter, skinnier bodies. When Reese is involved in a Wood piece, it often looks as though different actors are playing the parts, as it does here. Frank Plowright via the Internet The two pages of Tomb of Dracula art you wanted identified are actually from different issues. The first is page 2 of #23, and the second page 11 of #24. They’re both from the Sheila Whittier story that ran for about three or four issues at that time. Something that has bothered me about CBA for some while is the editorial tendency to censor swear words. This could be your personal preference, it could be pressure applied from elsewhere, or it could be fear of outside indignation. If it’s either of the first two suggestions, then I won’t change your mind. If it’s the third, let me throw in my November 2001

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own preference. You’re very faithful in your interview transcriptions, incorporating elements most magazines would deem superfluous, yet you censor the language. You’re not selling to a young and impressionable audience (possibly an old and impressionable one) and we all know what the censored words mean. They’re just words. Why not quote them as spoken? The one thought that occurs regarding the sorry mess surrounding the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents over the past 20 or so years is “why”? While I enjoy the comics, they feature a relatively obscure bunch of characters to comic fans, never mind to the outside world, and as such their value as anything other than nostalgic tokens is surely negligible. I obviously can’t speak for John Carbonaro, but if the time and energy he’s invested in the characters over the years had been applied to new creations I’d imagine he’d have been a whole lot more satisfied, have more money, and he’d surely have been equally successful. What’s the point in continuing with attempts to use them when it would seem that a case can still be made for their public domain status? Any film studio investing in the characters, for instance, would surely see it as worthwhile to gamble £50,000 initiating legal action for 100% of the profits. Off the top of my head, I can think of only two characters that have been successfully revived for prolonged periods after decades of dormancy: Captain Marvel and his simulacrum Marvelman/Miracleman. In the first instance the character was one of the top-sellers of its era, with a recognition way beyond comics who retained an influential following. For all that, despite the TV series, Captain Marvel has never recaptured his 1940s success. Marvelman succeeded due to a top notch creative team given considerable editorial freedom, but look at the poisoned chalice the character has become. That Larry Ivie is the Zelig of comics, isn’t he? The selfaggrandizing tone of his essay is remarkable, considering he pretty well credits all the important components of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents to other people. Regarding the remainder of his claims, that he failed to make his mark in comics would be a pointer that they’re exaggerated at the very least. One of the (few) frustrating aspects of CBA is that the non-

Above: One of our favorite—and most consistently contributing— contributors, Jerry K. Boyd sent us this 1986 George Tuska rendition of the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, which JKB sez was published in b&-w in a Sal Quartuccio portfolio. Ye Ed had the pleasure of spending time with Sal “Mr. Hot Stuf” Q. in Chicago this year. Characters ©2001 John Carbonaro.

ATLAS/SEABOARD Comic Book Artist is devoting our next issue to those wonderfully wonky comics of Atlas/Seaboard and we need a few more issues to fill out our collection in an effort to bring readers the most concise checklist possible. Can any reader either sell or loan us the following issues? Gothic Romance #1 Police Action (Lomax) #2 Savage Combat Tales #2 & 3 Tiger-Man #3 Vicki #1-4 If you can help, please contact Ye Ed as soon as possible as we hope to have this special issue out very soon after the issue you’re now reading. Call Jon at (401) 783-1669 or e-mail JonBCooke@aol.com. Thanks!—JBC

CBA Interview

Of Hollywood & Heroes Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens on his life as an artist Opposite: Dave Stevens poses in his Studio City studio for photographer Greg Preston in a recent picture. Ye Ed had the pleasure of meeting Greg in San Diego this year and we hope to publish a book of Greg’s outstanding portraits of comic book creators and animators someday soon. Courtesy of and ©2001 Greg Preston.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Sam Gafford The sensual art of Dave Stevens burst forth on the world of comics fandom like a buzz bomb during the Spring of 1982 in, of all places, a back-up strip in Starslayer #2, featuring a new character, The Rocketeer. Stevens’ stylings—and his new comics adventurer—were immediate hits and the artist remains very popular even though he has produced a relatively small number of (albeit high-quality) comics pages over the years. Ye Ed was fortunate to interview Dave at the 2001 International Comic Con: San Diego in July with a follow-up talk via phone in August. Dave copyedited the final transcript. Comic Book Artist: Dave, where are you from? Dave Stevens: Lynwood, California, which is basically part of South-Central Los Angeles. CBA: When did you get interested in comics? Dave: About age four, or five. My dad had a box of Disneys and ECs—though not the horror books, unfortunately! Only the tamer ones. He had Stories from the Bible and a couple of the science-fiction titles. He liked Ray Bradbury and also had a couple of hardcover compilations like The Omnibus of Science Fiction, etc. So, I started out with Bradbury, too, as a youngster, along with Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and a handful of others. CBA: Were you into books that featured continuing characters like Sherlock Holmes? Dave: Oh sure, Tarzan and even Tom Swift and The Hardy Boys for a while. And later, in high school I got bitten by the paperback reprints of The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Conan, along with a lot of my friends. CBA: Did you have an interest in previous eras even as a kid? Dave: Yeah, I guess I did. But, you know, as a ’50s kid, I grew up on a daily diet

of early television, watching Our Gang, Laurel and Hardy, Hoppy, The Lone Ranger, Betty Boop, Popeye, and scads of old movies. Plus, radio was still pretty vital in most homes. Your Hit Parade was still on, as well as regular radio dramas, and much of the music was still predominantly swing; big bands and crooners played in every household. So, a lot of the aspects of the pre-war years were still very much a part of my daily life. Milk was still delivered door-to-door, Helm’s bakery trucks had regular routes through all the neighborhoods… and WWII was still talked about by most adults, since it had only just ended ten years earlier. So, I think I came by a lot of it honestly. It was just a large part of my early consciousness. And very early on I started collecting records, and by the time I got into high school I was haunting the used record stores looking for old 78s—jazz and old vocalists. Who knows why? But obviously it came from early exposure to the best of it. CBA: Were you cognizant of Hollywood being near? Dave: Not really, it seemed like another world from where I lived, and very exotic, like journeying to Mecca. I saw evidence of it around town, public appearances by local TV celebrities: Jeepers Creepers, Chucko the Clown, Engineer Bill, and Tom Hatton. But, my first real brush with the reality of it was probably when my Scout troop got to visit The Munsters set on the old Universal lot, in 1964. That was pretty amazing! I never wanted to go home again. CBA: So was it ‘30 and ‘40s pop culture material? Dave: Yeah, everyday things I’d been surrounded with. I still have specific memories from as early as ’58, when my younger brother was born. I remember my mom dragging me to a John F. Kennedy rally which would have been, what, 1960? I remember events like that; things that left an impression. They were only worm’s eye views but I do remember them. CBA: Was radio an influence when you were young? Dave: Well, that was at the very tail end of the radio era. There were still a few shows on, like Johnny Dollar and X Minus One, but not much. But, luckily, a lot of them had already made the transition to television—Amos ‘n’ Andy, Burns and Allen—a lot of them had made the switch so I got to see the performers behind the voices. The Great Gildersleeve and people like him were on the box all the time. It was all character driven skits, obviously, with loads of personality and shtick. It was great material and a lot of it still holds up, today. It’s milder, of course, but still extremely funny. It’s nice to pop a tape in once and a while, and remember how well-written those shows were. And much of it was really groundbreaking. CBA: Did you enjoy the Superman TV show? Dave: Oh, sure. We all watched it and Zorro, and tied towels around our necks and jumped off the roof! [laughs] CBA: Did you follow the TV anthology shows? The Twilight Zone, Playhouse 90? Dave: The Twilight Zone, sure, but I preferred The Outer Limits because it seemed more visual, more creature-filled. It appealed to kids, more than adults, I think. CBA: Did films like King Kong have any effect on you? Dave: Oh, tremendously! When I was five, my folks let me stay up and watch Kong because I just lived for dinosaurs. And it was just magical, I was transported. I believed every second of it! That big ape charmed me and terrified me. And the theme of the film, the tortured monster and the beautiful girl… hey, it still works for me! So, I got to experience that one very early, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and a few other genre films that they thought I could handle. But the COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

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really scary bogey-men, like Frankenstein, Dracula, etc., that were a bit more horrific, visually, I wasn’t allowed to see for another couple of years. CBA: Who was your local horror host? Dave: Jeepers Creepers, at the time. Vampira had only been on for a short time in ‘55, so I missed her show, but Jeepers Creepers was her successor. And then much later, in the early 1970s, there was Seymour. But, the one I was always enthralled by was Zacherley, the Cool Ghoul. He was the East Coast’s horror icon. Unfortunately, we never got his show out here (but I could read about him in Famous Monsters of Filmland!). He looked like sort of an undead foreign dignitary, who probably liked to dig up bodies at night. CBA: When did you first pick up Famous Monsters? Dave: When I was about seven. My folks wouldn’t have let me buy it, but… there was always Grandma! We’d go to her house and pretty much anything went. They spoil you rotten—anything you want—as long as it’s cheap! She was a short bus ride away, and in those days, parents would put their kids on a bus and just send them off! [laughs] I remember my mom walking us up to Gage Avenue one morning, my little brother and I (he was maybe three!) standing at the bus stop, waiting for it to pick us up and take us to our grandma’s. And she told me which stop to get off on, to sit near the front and what to tell the driver. Ah, young parents! CBA: How many brothers and sisters did you have? Dave: One brother, two sisters. My brother builds kit planes for a company in Idaho. He’s like their engineer, the man in charge of prototypes. My sisters are homemakers. My dad was really the only family member who was artistic. He was a doodler, a cartoonist, though he never did it professionally. I think he would have loved working as an animator. I didn’t really know the extent of his interest until a few years ago at my grandmother’s. She pulled out an old sketchbook of his from when he was about eight or nine years old, and it was just filled with cartoon characters. Every page of it! CBA: Was he any good? Dave: He was terrific, and totally self-taught! He could do Popeye with his eyes closed and that’s a tough character to just pull from your head. He taught me to draw my first cartoon characters when I was about four (and I would draw them all over everything). I remember him sculpting Br’er Rabbit one day, at the breakfast table. He was an oil painter, as well. Very, very imaginative, talented guy. CBA: Did you ever know him to approach a studio for work? Dave: No, he only took one semester out of high school, at a local art college and that was it. Then he joined the Air Force. Basically, my mom kept after him until he married her. Then, I guess he figured that he had to get a real job and cartooning just didn’t seem possible to him. So, instead, he got involved in the early days of computers, back when one computer took up an entire room. CBA: Was he successful? Dave: Yeah. He became a systems analyst, and he did that for a number of years. CBA: Is he still alive? Dave: Oh, yeah. He was just here a few weeks ago. CBA: Are you close? Dave: Very. He still has the soul of an artist. I just wish he’d do something with it. But, he abruptly gave it up, forty years ago! Just stopped drawing. I still find that incredibly sad. Occasionally I could nudge him to draw something and it was always brilliant! CBA: Does he follow what you do? Dave: I keep him up to date. I guess he just figured he’d pass it on to me, watch what I did with it, and that was good enough for him; vicariously, I suppose. CBA: So he was always supportive of you? Dave: Oh, yeah. But, my parents really didn’t know what to do with me, vocationally! I remember religiously, watching John Nagy on TV. And doing the old Famous Artists tryout, you know? “Draw the Lumberjack.” I sent it in, filled out the evaluation test they sent me, then the school’s salesmen started calling our house! [laughs] They wanted to sell me the full course! I remember picking up the phone and this guy was just talking a blue streak about test results and could he speak to my father? So I handed my dad the phone and stood by, watching him trying to get a word in. He finally said, “Well, yes—but you see, he’s only 11.” And that was the end of that conversation! [laughs] No sale! I wish though, that my dad had subscribed to the courses. Boy, I could have gone nuts with those books. CBA: You told me you’re currently going to art school full-time; do you think you’re making up for that missed opportunity now? Dave: Well, that is the hope. I never really got an art education after high school. Most people go on to an art college of some kind, but I just went straight into the job market. CBA: How do you look back at that now? Dave: I did what I did out of blind ignorance, and I struggled for several years. I did what I could, but still feel that if I’d had an education and learned how to better use my tools… paint and mixed media, I’d have been much better equipped and November 2001

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CBA Interview

A Love of Comics Big brother Mario on life with Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez Opposite page: Vootie! Mario Hernandez sent us this recent pic of himself in regal salute.

Right inset: June 1972 photo of The Brothers Hernandez—at least three of them—hanging outside their Oxnard, California home in Mario’s car. In the back seat is Gilbert, in the driver’s seat is Mario, and Jaime rides shotgun in the passenger seat. Courtesy of Mario. Below: Love and Rockets is a sort of music, don’tcha think? Mario renders himself (on drums) with hermanos Jaime (strings) and Gilberto (brass). Courtesy of the artist. ©2001 Mario Hernandez.

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson We’re featuring our interview with Mario Hernandez as the kick-off to our special “Los Bros.” section because, well, Mario is not only the biggest brother of an amazingly talented family, but also the sibling who organized the first issue of Love and Rockets, was the third contributor to the mag (albeit an infrequent one), and today writes the serial, “Me for the Unknown” in the current incarnation of L&R. Many thanks to Mario, an engrossing and delightful guy, for this last-minute interview, which took place via phone on October 4, 2001. Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from? Mario Hernandez: From Oxnard, in Southern California. It's about 60 miles from L.A., right between Santa Barbara and L.A. I was born in 1953. CBA: You're the oldest of five. Are your siblings all boys? Mario: We've got a youngest sister—after Ishmael—named Lucinda. My dad finally got the girl he was waiting for. I've got four kids of my own, one son and three girls. CBA: Was it fun to grow up with so many brothers? Mario: It was fun, though we had kind of a Dickensian type of upbringing. We were pretty dirt-poor. My dad was from Mexico, my mom was from a poor part of Texas, and we grew up in our three-bedroom house, which was very small. My mom still lives there. It seems smaller every time I go and look at it! CBA: Did all of you kids have to share rooms?

Mario: We all had to share. There were always two kids in one room, and three in the other. So Gilbert and I were really close, the ones that were always the closest together in age got to share. I couldn't stand any of my littler brothers! CBA: Gilbert was the one closest to your age. Then came Jaime? Mario: There's one in-between Gilbert and Jaime, his name is Richard. After I got married and moved out of the house, Richard moved into the room with Gilbert, and then they got to know each other, and the rest is of history. CBA: What did your father do? Mario: He worked at General Motors, on the line, assembling cars. He was proof to the motto, "Don't buy a car made on Friday or Monday." [laughter] CBA: He was workingclass? Mario: Oh, yeah. After he married my mother and they had me, he had to go back to Mexico because they didn't allow him to stay here until he got his paperwork fixed. When I was three years old, he came out, and then we had Gilbert. CBA: What kind of school did you attend? Was it mixed? Mario: Oh, yeah, we had a very mixed school. There were a lot of Hispanic, black and white, very mixed. We were right near a Naval base, so there were a lot of kids from all over, many with weird accents. There were a lot of Asians, too—Oxnard has a big Japanese and Chinese population that owns a lot of the land. It was a farm community. CBA: And you had TV? Mario: Our saving grace was TV, comics and crummy movies. CBA: [laughs] So you boys were steeped in American pop culture. Mario: Oh, yeah. I confess that we had no taste, we just got into everything and anything… we collected everything, and our mom threw it all out, and we had to re-buy it all! [laughter] The whole sordid story! I read about these guys that their moms threw out their collections; well, we went through that same thing. The only thing she would let us keep were comics, though, because she was a comics fan. She's the one who inspired us to get into doing our own little comics, because she had done a lot of drawing and grew up with Captain Marvel, Superman and all that stuff. She went through all that Golden Age stuff, and it was in the blood. CBA: Besides the obvious fact that your father was Mexican, were you exposed to Mexican pop culture to any degree? Mario: A lot of music—that's where we got the appreciation for it—records, music, the radio. We had this huge radio, an oldCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

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fashioned one from the ’30s, that stood about four-foot tall, three-foot wide, and had a huge dial on it. It was in the middle of the living room, and whenever he was around, he would play his Mexican music. We got a good appreciation for a lot of Mexican music, mariachis, you name it. When he wasn't home—because he worked nights—during the day, my mom would play all the British invasion music, all the Top 40 stuff all the time. CBA: Your mom sounds pretty hip! Mario: Well, she is. [laughs] She enjoyed a lot of that stuff, still. That was a lot of really good influence we got through that music. CBA: Did she encourage you creatively? Mario: Yes. In fact, we got into the comics and drawing partially because my dad wanted to keep it quiet! My dad told my mom one day, "Hey, why don't you buy some of those books you like so much and give them to the kids so they can shut up?" It was like four little savages running around! He’d say, "Tear up some paper bags, give them some crayons and let them copy the pictures out of the comics." So, we did that, it just kind of snowballed from there, and we got really hooked. CBA: Looking at Jaime and Gilbert's influences—Dennis the Menace, Archie Comics—you guys were pretty nondiscriminating in your tastes, right? Kiddie stuff, monsters, super-heroes… Mario: Well, sure! We read anything that was comics. I was working on a story recently, telling about how when our local grocery store, where we used to by comics at all the time, closed and we had to go search for comics around town at all the newsstands. There was a route we took, taking us to about five different stores, because the distribution was so bad on a lot of the comics that we bought regularly, so we had to go to several different stores. We pretty much had the lay of the land of downtown, and we just bought comics in every different store, anything we could get our hands on, that we could hoard, anyway. CBA: Did you have a job? Did you deliver newspapers? Mario: Oh, no, we were bums. CBA: How did you get money for comics? Mario: Well, to keep us quiet, we would line up, and my dad would dole out money to us. I thought he was the richest man in the world, because he’d pull out a pocket full of quarters in his hand! My dad was game for anything to get us kids out of the house and out of his hair. CBA: What were your favorite comics? Mario: Early on, I read all the DC stuff—”Legion of Super-Heroes,” Superman, stuff like that. Later on, of course, the Marvel stuff came in, and then it was all over. I had to have everything! I still have all my old comics. I bought Fantastic Four #1 off the stands. I was into the super-heroes as well as the Atlas monsters mixed together. CBA: You were eight years old when you bought FF #1? Mario: Yeah. I started collecting comics when I was around six, seven years old, and fortunately, my mom let me keep them because she was reading them, too! She got into them. As long as we didn't make F's in school, we could keep them. CBA: Did she use comics as bargaining chips… "If you do wrong, I'll take your comics away"? Mario: Oh, sometimes, yeah, but she didn't throw them out. The only things she threw out were cards, and we had collections of all the Mars Attacks! cards, all these things, and they just disappeared! She would never say that she was going to do it, but they'd just be gone, and we could never find them. We went and searched all the trash cans in the alley, looking for these things, [laughter] but she would just totally disappear them. CBA: Were you guys into sports at all? Mario: Not too much. My younger brothers, Richard on down, were all in Little League, but as far as me and November 2001

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Gilbert, no, we avoided that stuff like the plague. [laughs] We weren't that bad at it, we just weren't interested. Especially Gilbert, he wasn't very athletic. CBA: When did you start drawing? Mario: You know, it's weird, because we started doing the super-hero drawings with crayons and stuff, then a couple of years passed, and one day I was turned around, and Gilbert and Jaime were still doing them, and they had stacks of these things they'd been doing every day! Like issue #100 of something! [laughter] That's when we graduated to drawing on typing paper, folding it in half and just making little booklets. Usually, they were just folded in half with a cover and three pages. They were mostly like, "Hey you, come here!" Blam! And that would be it. [laughter] But the covers were very elaborate. CBA: Did you like Jack Kirby's work? Mario: Even in the early monster material from Tales to Astonish and those books! They had these little credits written in those stories—”Stan Lee and Jack Kirby”—so we knew who we were looking for when we'd start getting a little picky about what artists we liked. At the same time, I was cutting out all the newspaper strips, the more serious ones like Kerry Drake, Steve Roper, Judge Parker, Pogo, and all those things. I remember one year, my aunt had been keeping all the comics pages because she wanted to catch up with them, and she gave them all to me, saying, "I can't read them all; here, you can have them." She gave me about three years worth of comics, and I still have them! [laughter] I still have all those pages! I wish I could reprint them or something, because they're turning yellow! Brown, actually! [laughter] CBA: So you're quite a pack rat? Mario: Oh, yeah. I managed to hold on to a lot of other stuff. Plus, in the meantime, buying the Pogo collections and anything we could—Mad pocketbooks, all that we could get our hands on which had some kind of drawings and balloons—we just went after that stuff all the time. CBA: Did you guys have a shared collection or did you each have your own individual ones? Mario: There's big fights about this… [laughs] we started writing our names on the books we individually bought. I still have some of the stuff that has Gilbert's name written on it. Being the oldest, I was mostly the one that kind of held sway over the collection, but only when I lived in the house, of course. CBA: Being the oldest— Mario: Of course, only in the house, of course. CBA: Also having the oldest stuff, right? Mario: Oh, yeah. CBA: So you had the "library" they could all go to for reference. Certainly Gilbert’s “BEM” is influenced by the old Kirby and Ditko monster books. Mario: Oh, yeah, sure. We shoved out all of our clothes hanging in the closet and we used a shelf in the closet where we put everything, you name it— Superman, Hot Stuff, Richie Rich, Archie—everything was just piled in there. All the time, my mom would say, "Each of you get your stack of comics and go sit at the dinner table and eat, as long as you're quiet." So there'd be a line of us standing there, picking out our comics we wanted to read for the evening. It was strange, now that I think back on it! [laughter] CBA: It must have been pretty tough keeping all those boys in line. I have three boys myself, and it's like a madhouse here. Mario: There's a lot of energy going on, even if you're not athletic. 35

CBA Interview

Down Palomar Way Gilbert Hernandez on his days with Luba and L&R Opposite page: Another fine portrait by Greg Preston, this one of Gilbert Hernandez, taken in the artist’s studio. Courtesy of and ©2001 Greg Preston. Below: A self-caricature by Gilbert Hernandez detailed from Love and Rockets #40. ©2001 Gilbert Hernandez.

Conducted by Chris Knowles Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Next is our talk with Los Brother Number Two, Gilbert Hernandez, the writer/artist best known for his Palomar stories in Love and Rockets. Beto (as he is also called) has also produced other series such as Birdland, Measles, and New Love, the latter recently collected in the delightful Fantagraphics book, Fear of Comics. Gilbert was interviewed via telephone in January 2000 and he copyedited the final transcript. Chris Knowles: I want to know what you’re reading, drawing, and what you’re listening to in 1975. Gilbert Hernandez: Holy moley! Okay, I was probably just drawing comics for myself. Chris: Were you drawing sci-fi kind of material? I remember from the first Love and Rockets Sketchbook that a lot of the material you guys started out doing was pretty standard fan stuff. Gilbert: Yeah, except when it’s done by us, it’s done good. [laughter] Well, actually, I guess I went through a phase of Flash Gordon-type, romantic science-fiction stories. I was working on an epic at the time… I don’t know what you’d call it… space opera? That type of story. Chris: With female protagonists? Gilbert: It was equal in those days, males and females. It didn’t really have a title. I was sort of feeling it along. I never really got to it, as I matured and lost interest in that sort of material. I kept my notes and stuff. I was doing drawings and writing little parts of stories, but I didn’t have a complete piece. Chris: Just drawing for your own pleasure? Gilbert: Yeah. It was a plan to draw sort of a… to come up with a graphic novel, for lack of a better term in those days. Chris: Did you have visions to work for the big publishers at this point in time? Gilbert: No, not at all, because I didn’t draw their way. [laughs] Chris: Independent from the very start! Gilbert: Not because I was being snotty or anything, it was because I didn’t know how they did it, and I didn’t like the rigid requirements that had to go along with it. Going to conventions and talking to professionals, most of them were… [laughs] A lot of them were sort of snotty and not interested in younger artists who didn’t do what they did. Chris: Were these the fan favorites, or were they the older pros? Gilbert: These were the younger pros, who were just a little bit older than me. I can’t name names, because I really don’t remember who I talked to. Chris: It’s not important… fandom was pretty immature at that point in time.

Gilbert: And that’s okay for them, but I loved comics, but I didn’t really belong with them. But I also didn’t belong with the underground movement, either. Chris: Were you reading undergrounds? Gilbert: Yeah, the ones that came out in the late ’60s: Zap, Freak Brothers, and a few others. Chris: How about Richard Corben? Gilbert: Yeah, I enjoyed Richard Corben, even though I knew it was sort of a limited future to it, as far as emulating it. Chris: So who were you trying to emulate? Were you just drawing in your own style, and just taking it as it comes? Or did you have certain artists in mind that you were trying to model yourself after? Gilbert: At that time, it was mostly Marvel damage in those days, and damage it was. [laughter] It really put a cork up comics’ butt, as far as creativity goes. I’d look at Savage Sword of Conan, [laughs] you know, but I was wanting it to be better, something else. I appreciated they were for older readers, a black-&-white magazine, but even then I just couldn’t relate to it completely. I related to them because they were comics, but not necessarily what they were about. Chris: Did you feel kind of stateless at that time? Did you feel there wasn’t anything out there you could feel any kinship towards? Gilbert: As far as the kind of comics I wanted to do, I enjoyed, I still enjoy Jack Kirby comics and the great cartoonists, but I usually read the comic strips and comic books that were well gone. I’d look at the Kirby comics of the ’60s, I didn’t look to much at the ’70s ones; I didn’t look at comic strips in the paper at the time, I looked at ’30s comic strips. I was just more interested in the quality of that work, which I think for some reason—I blame it on the hippies and the late ’60s, the decline of the mainstream comics. Chris: You blame the hippies for that? Gilbert: [laughs] Well, actually it’s just a joke. It’s that things became self-conscious by then. People became so self-aware of what they were doing. Chris: It was kind of the awkward adolescent phase. Gilbert: If you look at the comics coming out in that time, the mainstream companies and such, they were just trying to keep up with the kids at this stage, and comics became strange and a little embarrassing. Chris: They lost that kind of innocence. Gilbert: Yeah, ’50s and ’60s comic books are pretty goofy and I suppose you can dismiss them, but at the same time, they’re pretty entertaining in a goofy way. They sort of lost that, and now, if anything’s goofy, it’s really self-conscious, like, “Eh, eh? Get it? We’re funny.” Chris: One thing that I always liked to look at was the old ’60s Strange Adventures tales, the guy’s got a planet-head or something, they were just so hemmed in by the Code that they just went totally nuts with the kind of stories they were doing to alleviate the boredom. Gilbert: Actually, my favorite Strange Adventures story is the one where the guy has a computer on his head. It’s similar to the planet on his head guy, but… [laughs] Chris: There was a whole genre of something-head stories. It was like a template or something. Gilbert: I just looked at one of the DC Archives of the Green Lantern, and they had a cover of The Flash where his head grows really big, right? But inside the issue, his head never grows big! So were they thinking they were selling books with the Flash with a big head? That’s really weird! [laughs] COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

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Chris: DC was notorious for having covers that had nothing to do with the stories. Gilbert: Yeah! I was surprised. I mean, if there’s a gorilla on the cover, they’d have a gorilla inside! But the Flash’s head never grew. Maybe I missed a page. [laughs] Chris: So how old are you in ’75? Gilbert: I was around 18. Chris: Okay, so kind of feeling left out of what’s going on in comics, and pretty much delving into the history, people who are familiar with the exhaustive interviews you’ve done, you were into the old EC material, and stuff like Dennis the Menace, and strange things like Herbie and things like that. Gilbert: Everything. We just read every comic we could get our hands on, except for romance comics, and I’ve never figured out that one, why we never read romance comics. Chris: It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? [laughs] Gilbert: Yeah, it is! Maybe that’s it, I’m trying to fill that void now, I don’t know. Chris: Early on, your work seemed to have a lot of that kind of kitschy, ’50s kind of feel to it, that seems directly derived from those kind of romance things. Gilbert: You’d think so, but we really didn’t read those, so I guess we were going more for old movies and TV shows and Archie comics. Chris: So, you and Mario and Jaime are basically just hanging out, drawing comics for yourself and for each other, and doing complete pages, I assume? Gilbert: No, just a white sheet of typing paper folded over, that was a comic. I wasn’t like these really inspired kids who actually had 24-page comics, and it’d take them a year to draw. I didn’t do that. I got bored quickly. Mine were mostly just for myself. Chris: Were you guys kind of the comic geeks? Or did you guys get out and about and do the normal 18-year-old kind of things? Gilbert: Technically we were comics geeks, because we read comics at home, and that was our world, reading comics. But once we stepped out of the house, there were no more comic books. It was the real world, and we dealt with the world that way. None of my friends in high school—or any time—read comic books. Of course, they knew about comics and stuff, but they never read them and devoured them the way we did. Chris: So it’s like The Double Life of Gilbert Hernandez? Gilbert: It was okay to read comic books in our house, our mother made it okay to read them, we never felt any of this… Chris: You never felt that burning shame. [laughs] Gilbert: Yeah, never felt that burning shame that cartoonists have today, which throws me. People are so self-conscious about feeling that they shouldn’t be enjoying themselves doing comics now, and that throws me, because I didn’t have that shame, it was normal. So, when we left the house, it wasn’t, “Well, you must come into my world of comics!” We didn’t even bother! They’re not into comics and that’s it. Chris: So what were you listening to? Gilbert: In 1975? Probably something not very good. Chris: I always had the impression that you and Jaime were listening to glam at the time, or is that something that came later? Slade and Sweet and… Gilbert: That was actually earlier, that was ‘73, ‘74. In ‘75, it would’ve been groups like Kiss. [laughs] Chris: You were listening to Kiss? Really? Gilbert: Oh, yeah. But what’s odd is that people who like Kiss will say, “Oh, were you into the Kiss Army?” and I’d say, “No, that’s when we quit!” [laughter] Once it got turned into a real bubble-gum thing, that’s when we just thought, “That’s enough.” Chris: It’s like ‘78, and that’s when punk rock—. Gilbert: That’s when you saw eight-year-old kids at a Kiss show, it’s time not to go anymore. That’s how bad rock ’n’ roll got, arena rock in the ’70s. But you know, what else could we do? We had no choice. We had to listen to what was out there. It was quite… just in the nick of time, punk came out. [laughter] For me, it was in the nick of time because I was 21 at the time. I was getting to that point where I was really settling in to my ways, and not opening up to new things. So, when punk came around, I was a little suspicious of it. It wasn’t until I started listening to the records that I thought, “Well, this is nice and fun!” Then it grew on us pretty quick. It didn’t take long. Chris: So that’s a couple of years later. You were getting out of high school in ’75, what were your career goals? Gilbert: I had minor, odd jobs here and there, but I didn’t go to college because I couldn’t stand school, and sure the hell wasn’t going to pay to go to school if I couldn’t stand it. I just had no interest in school, I was pretty much a slacker. I just had no interest in anything but comics and music, so I just sort of messed around for a few years, just making a little bit of money with odd jobs, drawing all the time because that was the only thing that satisfied me. Chris: Now, Jaime did take some art classes, right? The thing that’s interesting about the Love and Rockets Sketchbook—there’s a lot of interesting things—is that November 2001

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CBA Interview

The Mechanic of Love Jaime Hernandez talks about life with Maggie & Hopey Opposite page: Greg Preston portrait of Jaime Hernandez. Courtesy of and ©2001 Greg Preston. Center inset: Previously unpublished (and self-rejected) Love and Rockets T-shirt design by Jaime. Courtesy of and ©2001 Jaime Hernandez. Below: Self caricature by Jaime from L&R #40. ©2001 Jaime Hernandez.

Conducted by Chris Knowles Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Jaime (pronounced “high-me”) Hernandez is perhaps the finest cartoonist to emerge from American comic books in the 1980s. Add one part Dan DeCarlo, throw in a batch of Alex Toth, with a pinch of Charles Schutz and Hank Ketcham for flavor, mix in a whole lot of personal insight, garnish with a rare respect for women, and you might get an idea of what the creator of Maggie, Hopey, Penny Century and numerous other females is all about. Jaime was interviewed by phone in Jan. 2000 and he copyedited the transcript. Chris Knowles: When I talked to Gilbert last night, the question I started off with was, what were you doing in 1975? How many years younger are you than Gilbert? Jaime Hernandez: A couple. Chris: Okay, so I’m going to start off with you: What were you doing in 1977? Jaime: In 1977, I was a senior in high school, and I had not discovered punk, but I had heard of it. [laughs] Chris: Were you listening to Kiss at the time, like Gilbert was? [laughs] Jaime: In ’75 and ’76, I was… by ’77, they were disappointing me already. I think the “Destroyer” days are gone. Those “Love Gun” days. I just don’t like them that much any more, but I was the biggest Kiss fan in the world in 1975. Chris: Gilbert said that Star Wars had an amazing impression on him in 1975. Jaime: Yeah, I guess I would say not as big on me, but big enough. I saw it later than most people, but I was bowled over, and Star Wars was the thing, and all that stuff. I’d graduated high school and I was thinking about breaking into fanzines. Comic fanzines, little cheap things or just these real small-time publishing things. Chris: Were you submitting any of your work back then? Jaime: That’s when I started. I would say right after I graduated was when I started concentrating on actually using pen and ink to draw with, because it was usually ball-point pen and stuff like that before. Let’s see… I did my first story, I got my first story published in a fanzine called Fandom Circus. Chris: Was anybody involved in that who went on to do other things? Jaime: I was in the second issue; Jerry Ordway was in the first issue. Chris: No kidding? So that’s quite a pedigree. Jaime: The second issue, I think I was with—do you remember the guy, B.C. Boyer? Chris: Yeah, The Masked Man. Jaime: Yeah. I don’t think he does anything any more, but yeah, he was in the same issue. I still didn’t know anybody, all this was through the mail. Chris: Were you guys kind of isolated? Did you go to cons back then?

Jaime: I would say about that time, I had gone to my first or second con. We would drive to LA from Oxnard, it was about an hour away, we’d drive downtown and go to these cons at the Biltmore. Chris: Were these big cons, or were these kind of little shows where they’d be just mostly for sellers? Jaime: It was small shows, but in those days, professionals went. [laughs] Well, anybody who lived in LA, I guess. Chris: There wasn’t the kind of comics community back then in LA, because it was still mostly based in New York. Jaime: There were a few people here, and also because a lot of guys came here to work in animation, so they lived here and they were really transplanted from New York or the Midwest or something. Chris: Did you meet any real big names at any of these shows? Jaime: Well, I kind of tagged along with Gilbert and Mario, who were also breaking into their comics. They were actually working on a big, long comics story. They didn’t know it was called a graphic novel. I just tagged along, and I said, “Well, I’ll do my little fanzines, and maybe one day, I’ll be like the guys.” Chris: Any chance of that material ever getting reprinted, or is it long gone? Jaime: Parts of them have been reprinted, like in our Sketchbook and things like that. If you go to a con and go through the fanzine box from somebody’s table, you might find something I did, but it was all few and far between. I must say, those old fanzine editors were a lot worse than professional editors! [laughs] Chris: They were like little Hitlers? Jaime: Yeah, they really took themselves very seriously! They really treated us like we didn’t exist, you know? They f*cked with the work, they’d mark on it and all this stuff, so I thought, “This was it? This is comics?” [laughs] Chris: It wasn’t a good introduction. Jaime: No, but you know, I didn’t really expect anything. It wasn’t that big a blow. I didn’t expect to be treated like royalty, but at the same time, I knew there was an artistic integrity in me, you know? Chris: Gilbert told me at this point, I guess you took some drawing classes at a community college? Jaime: Yeah, that was from ’78 to ’79. Chris: And he said your work just really took off at that point. Jaime: I went to college because I was being paid, because when my dad died, we had some kind of Social Security deal where, if I took enough credits in college, they would pay me $300 a month, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

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and that’s better than working! [laughs] Chris: Nothing wrong with that! Jaime: So I said, “Okay, I’ll go to college, I’ll take dumb classes. Gee, what do I like to do? Oh, art! Okay.” So I took art, and I just happened to be there at a time when there was this great art department of these old men who had been there since the ’50s! Chris: Guys wearing the old Bridgeman/Andrew Loomis kind of style? Jaime: Yeah, and they were all established, real artist guys, like real training. Chris: A lot of them working in Hollywood at the time? Jaime: I don’t know about Hollywood, but I knew there was a teacher there who used to draw Daniel Boone or something like that, the comic strip. There were these very distinguished, old-fashioned kind of guys. My life drawing teacher just happened to turn my art upside-down, I don’t know how he did it to this day. I don’t know how teachers teach. Chris: What Gilbert seemed to think was there was something in you that was waiting to come out, and it was just kind of uncorked at school. Jaime: Yeah, I guess so. Also, that was at the time when we just dove into punk, so I was just really excited about my life again. I mean, I came aback to life… I was dead since sixth grade. I was just a whole new human being again. It was just very exciting; I was just having a blast, you know? Chris: The impression seems to be that you went for the punk thing a lot more than any of your brothers did. Jaime: Me? I would say Gilbert and I and my younger brother, but it ended up me and my younger brother went a lot further. Chris: And his name was? Jaime: He’s Emile, he’s in a punk band. He’s in an old band, doing the old comeback routine. Chris: What’s the name? Jaime: Doctor Know Chris: You got a lot of hand bills for them. So, let me ask you this: I was talking to Steve Rude, and he was telling me he’s well-known for being the big Andrew Loomis freak. Was there a particular book or a great old drawing technique book that you latched onto and didn’t let go of? Jaime: No, you know, most of the stuff I learned was hands-on by doing it in class. Chris: Okay, so it was the school that did it. Jaime: I really liked that book… what was the guy? Jack Hamm. Chris: Oh! [laughs] I’ve got that book right here! You know—just as a little aside here—I knew that about you. I didn’t know that until now, but I remember when I was a kid, I was so into the work you were doing, and I remember I bought that book, and somehow it just clicked… I saw the connection there! [laughs] Jaime: It’s not like I would copy drawings from them, but it was like I would just look at them, like a reference book. Like sitting on the toilet, I would need something to read. [laughs] I would look at them, and enjoy them, and somehow that seeped in or something. I still don’t know how, to this day, exactly how I learned to draw, you know? [laughs] Chris: It just happened. Jaime: Other than drawing over and over, keep drawing. Chris: That’s really the only way it happens. And then, feeding your mind at the same time. Jaime: I’ve never looked at things in a research academic way, I just somehow let November 2001

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CBA Interview

Conducted by Chris Knowles Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Writer/artist Matt Wagner first came to prominence in the mid-1980s in the pages of Comico’s first color comic, Mage, a hero Matt created. Soon a back-up strip appeared in the same title featuring a character that would prove to be Matt’s longest-lasting and most profitable franchise, Grendel. This interview took place in January 2001 and was copyedited by Matt. Chris Knowles: Let’s start from the beginning, Matt: Where are you originally from? Matt Wagner: The middle of Pennsylvania, near a very small town. The closest landmark town would probably be State College, where the main campus of Penn State is located. Chris: Up in the north country there, with those beautiful pine trees? Matt: Yep. We usually had to cross a mountain to go to our nearest relative. Chris: Where did you get your comics? Matt: Just off the newsstands. My mom was an English teacher. She quit actively teaching when she became a mom, but that’s how I got my first exposure to comics. She didn’t care that I was reading comics, so long as I was reading. Chris: It seems a lot of people who got into comics had teachers for parents. Matt: She thought I’d grow out of them [laughter]… instead of growing into them! Chris: When did you start reading comics? Matt: I was very, very young. In fact, I remember one of my most traumatic punishments when I was a kid was… oh, I forget why, but my parents took my comics away for one or two months, something like that. They took the comics, stuck them on a shelf in the garage which was excruciating because they were in plain sight. I was allowed to see that they were still there, but wasn’t allowed to have them. Chris: What we do with our kids today is take away their video games.

Matt: Same sort of thing, right? I also found comics in those pack deals. My parents frequented lots of county fairs, farmers’ markets, that sort of thing, and you always found those periodical stands that had the packs of four or five comics in it with the covers half ripped off. Chris: The ones that weren’t supposed to be sold! [laughs] Matt: Right. The ones that were cashed in by newsstands as returnables. But I garnered a lot of comics that way. I didn’t love that the covers were half ripped off, but on another level I didn’t care because I was more interested in what was inside. Chris: What kind of stuff were you reading? Matt: Well, there was only Marvel and DC and some Mickey Mouse comics and stuff like that. I was born in ’61, so this is probably mid-’60s, 1965 to ’70, something like that. I mainly liked DCs, for the reason that the stories had endings, whereas in that period, the Marvel stories went on and on and on. I’ve always found it a great irony that I then grew up to write these long, epic storylines that go on and on and on! [laughs] I didn’t like that as a kid. So I enjoyed DCs. And also, DC at that time started doing a lot of those large-sized reprint stuff… the 100-Page Super-Spectaculars, which had lots of reprints of Golden Age stuff, the period my parents grew up in (they were fairly older when they had me). My dad remembers buying the first Action Comics and the first Detective, though he never kept them, of course. So, through them, I had a nostalgia for that period and those kind of stories, and when DC started reprinting those stories, that just clicked with me Big Time. Chris: When did you start drawing? Matt: When I was very young. I don’t remember when, really, but my mom says that when I was three years old, I’d say, “Mommy, draw me a cow,” and I could already draw a cow better than she could. I wasn’t really athletic as a kid, so I drew a whole lot. As a fledgling artist, you tend to copy other people’s work, copy panels out of comics and stuff like that, and at some point, fairly young, I realized I was going to have to stop doing that and try to draw my own drawings. Chris: Did you make up your own characters? Matt: Let’s see, what was the first one? I can’t remember how old I was… sixth grade, maybe fifth… I called him “Granite Man,” who had magic wristbands that made his fists granite-hard. And he could fly! [laughs] Of course, that only makes sense to a kid: Granite fists… and he can fly! Chris: Were you planning on pursuing a career as an artist pretty early on? Matt: Yeah. Also, my parents have a “school memories” book from when I was young and on the back of each page in grade school, it says, “What I want to be when I grow up.” One year I wrote “astronaut,” and every other year I wrote “comic book writer.” I think I assumed whoever wrote comics also drew them as well. Chris: You weren’t reading the credits then, I guess. [laughs]. Matt: Right. Well, a lot of comics didn’t have noticeable credits. Initially, I think the team of Irv Novick and Dick Giordano were the first two names I started recognizing in comics. Chris: They would’ve been doing Batman about the time DC started actually playing up the credits in the books. Did you have a lot of friends you hung out with that read comics? Matt: I had a few, and had more as I got older, of course. My family moved around a few times, too, due to my dad’s job, so I’d COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

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get to a different environment, and there’d be other kids that I didn’t know who, yes, were into comics, too. And so then I just made connections that way. Chris: At any point in your school days, did you start getting involved with organized fandom? Matt: No, almost not at all. I had always lived in very rural areas to begin with, and then kind of suburbanally, and then rural again, so I didn’t have access to any organized scene. I knew it was out there, and had been to a couple of conventions when I was about 13 or so, but those were absolute larks as far as me getting to go to them; I didn’t have regular access to go to that sort of thing—stores or shows. Chris: When you were younger, you never got the Comic Buyer’s Guide or any fanzines? Matt: I did get CBG for an extremely short time, and I think the reason it was a short period was because I had to pay for it. [laughs] My parents wouldn’t give me money for it, I had to pay for it. After the first subscription or so, I let it run out. That was in the real early days of CBG, when they were still running big, illustrated covers every issue. Then, my family moved to Virginia, and we were really kind of out in the woods there, and I had to drive an hour, hour and a half, to get to any small little comic book store. I just didn’t have much access to the comics world. Chris: How did you go from being an illustration major to getting interested in comics again? Matt: By moving to Philadelphia and meeting some guys who exposed me to a lot of the renaissance that was going on at that time. Byrne had been making some marks on X-Men, and he did a run on Captain America for a while, and I had seen those kind of briefly, but these guys showed me Frank Miller and… at that point, I was within walking distance of a pretty good comic book store, so I suddenly had access to the early Amazing Heroes and Comics Journals, etc… and it just led me into a whole wider branch of what was available. Chris: Did you hang around South Street a lot? Matt: Yeah, down on South Street. But the store I shopped at… you know Fat Jack’s Comic Crypt? That’s the big chain in Philly, and that was the store we shopped at. I want to backtrack for a second and say another huge influence on me was in the mid-’70s when Warren started reprinting The Spirit. Chris: They always had those great airbrushed covers. Matt: The great airbrushed covers, and the stories were so unusual compared to the contemporary comics at the time. They were tidy eight-page segments, far more cinematic than you saw in newsstand comics. They had such pathos and often focused on the mundane aspects of life rather than the bustling, bursting super-hero books, you know? Often, The Spirit himself would only appear in one panel, usually near the end, but his presence was still felt so strongly throughout the entire story. Chris: The thing that strikes you about that is just that allpervasive mood. Matt: The all-pervasive mood, and The Spirit was such a human character. He got the sh*t beat out of him all the time, you know? I’ll never forget a sequence, a really great story about a sniper, a mass murderer/sniper who’s holed up, and The Spirit busts in to save the day and gets shot in his shins with a machine gun! This storyline continued for several weeks—these eight-page stories were originally released every week as a supplement to the Sunday papers—so that continued for several weeks where he was hobbling around in crutches, and he was going to have to undergo surgery, and they November 2001

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didn’t think they were going to be able to save him, and they were going to have to amputate his legs! Oh, it was a tremendous sequence, and I remember being just so struck by the sense or repercussion and consequence, which you didn’t get in a lot of in contemporary comics at the time, you know? Most of the super-heroes that had that sort of element in their “origin,” like Batman losing his parents, only experienced that kind of trauma in the beginning of their story, and Batman doesn’t suffer a lot after that. I suppose Spider-Man counts as having a fairly consistent tragedy in his stories, but really it’s only recently that they’ve started to explore the sort of dimensions. So that had a big, big influence on me. Chris: I assume that you followed that into the Frank Miller Daredevil material. Matt: Yeah, right, I was going to say that Miller… Miller was just kind of coming

Inset left: Detail of Matt Wagner’s cover art for Grendel: Black, White, & Red #4, an anthology miniseries featuring Wagner-scribed tales illustrated by many of today’s best artists. Courtesy of Shawna Ervin-Gore & Dark Horse Comics. ©2001 Matt Wagner.

Below: A photo of Matt Wagner around the time Mage first started; 1983 or ’84. Courtesy of Matt Wagner.

into his big stride there, and it was like nothing else I’d ever seen. You really cared what happened in the next issue! [laughs] My buddies and I were all so damned poor, we could only afford to buy one copy of things, so we’d chip in and buy one communal copy of the big Bullseye/Elektra fight. [laughs] We drew straws to see who got to read it first! [laughter] Then it was passed around. Chris: So that brought you back into the fold. Matt: Yeah. And much stronger than I had before. Much deeper. Chris: Tell me about these gentlemen you met who were going to start Comico. Matt: The initial line-up of partners, I guess you would call it—I don’t know if they actually were drawn up in contract form at that point—were the two guys that I had went to school with: A fellow named Jerry Giovinco and Bill Cucinotta. Giovinco was high school friends with a fellow named Phil Lasorda, and another guy named Vince Argendezzi. Those were the four guys that showed up in the first issue of Comico Primer, it was their gig and it was their four stories. I forget what Argendezzi’s was even called, but Giovinco did Slaughterman, Cucinotta did Skrog, and Lasorda did Az. Those three characters led to the first batch of individual 67

CBA Interview

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris Dean Motter is a triple-threat comic book guy: Writer, artist and— perhaps most prominently—one of the finest graphic designers to ever work in the field. In the mid-1980s, Dean brought a new design sensibility to comics, a medium long in need of a sophisticated graphic approach. Since introducing Mister X, the creator went on to produce a number of memorable comics including The Prisoner, Terminal City and the current Image title, Electropolis. Interviewed by phone on September 6, 2001, Dean copy-edited the final transcript.

Comic Book Artist: Where were you from originally? Dean Motter: I’m from just outside of Cleveland. We moved to Canada when I was in high school. I decided to go to college there in London, Ontario. CBA: Did you have an artistic interest early on? Dean: Oh, yeah. I learned to draw, quite a bit, from comic books. I had a pretty steady diet of comics based from about the third or fourth grade on. My uncle, who lived with us for a while, and grandmother—and my parents—would buy Batman and other comics for me occasionally. It wasn’t long before I was going down to the corner store, picking up stuff myself, putting my candy money towards comics. CBA: Was it mostly super-hero stuff? Dean: Yeah. At that time, that’s all that was let in the house. Horror comics still had a bad reputation. This is still early ’60s, late ’50s. But they still had a leftover reputation even though they had pretty much cleaned up. So I think it was felt that super-hero fare was harmless enough that it was let in. As a child, I read mostly DC. CBA: Did you start recognizing artists’ styles? Were you particularly clued in to certain ones? Dean: At that time, I especially recognized Dick Sprang and Curt Swan and some of the mainstay, stylistic artists over at DC. I would collect what I could of theirs—well, I wasn’t collecting them, just more or less accumulating them—and when I would sporadically see their artwork, I would buy it. CBA: Were you into the Dell or Disney stuff? Dean: The cartoon stuff didn’t really appeal to me, it seemed too childish. The first material I remember getting outside of the superhero genre was, I guess, the Gold Key and Dell TV adaptations. When Gold Key started publishing Magnus, Robot Fighter and Space Family Robinson, those books started to appeal to me because it wasn’t so much costumed heroes but still had a nice, stylistic flair. I’d always been a fan of Tarzan, The Phantom and Dick Tracy Sunday papers so when I came across Tarzan comic books, that was a bit of an epiphany. CBA: Did you actually draw your own comic stories as a child? Dean: Of course. [laughs] I must have created I don’t know how many Justice Leagues. [laughs] Thousands of characters! But later on in high school, when I first moved to Canada, I came across some fans drawing their own books and publishing them. And I realized I might be able to actually have something published if I worked hard at it. This is when I came across the fan press in a big way. CBA: Did you contribute to fanzines? Dean: After I got out of high school, I did. When I first went to college, there was a fanzine, a sort of a tabloid called Media Five. It was coming out of Ontario and I came across it in what they call “smoke shops” which, basically, was just a corner newsstand (the fanzine had managed to secure some kind of distribution. I think the publisher was probably distributing it himself). So I got in touch with him. His name was Bill Paul and one thing led to another and I soon became the art director, designer, and main illustrator for Media Five for several years. CBA: Media Five contained your first published work? Dean: Yeah. I’d made attempts to get published a couple of times, but this was my early college years and one of my elected thesis projects was to write and illustrate a comic book. So I did a 24-page story called “Andromeda” which eventually formed the basis for the Andromeda comic out of Toronto. But it started out originally as a tabloid that I wrote and drew in college for my senior year. CBA: Did you go to comic conventions at all? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 15

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Dean: Yes. I think the first convention I went to was a Star Trek convention in Toronto, during high school. Later on in college, I was really going to Cosmicon, the annual convention held in Toronto at York University. I met a lot of my future colleagues there including Ken Steacy who I continued to work with for several years—and still do occasionally. CBA: Was there quite a creative community in Toronto? Dean: Oh my, yes! One of the earliest comic book shops, the Silver Snail, came out of the backroom of the science-fiction bookstore, Bakka Books. The Silver Snail attracted all kinds of aspiring and working professionals, semi-professionals—people who wanted to break into the business—people who wanted to break into any business—people who had been professional illustrators for years and hadn’t entered the comics realm. It was a focal point for quite a large community. CBA: Did you find yourself hanging out with a lot of these guys? Dean: Oh, yeah and we all had our own peculiar tastes. I was out of college by that time and I had been working in the music industry as a record cover designer for quite a while. First, for CBS Records and then for my own studio, Diagram. I worked for just about every record company that had Canadian records coming out at the time, which was most of them. Comics had become a hobby more than anything else. It was something to do in the afternoon and the evenings and people to hang out with. Occasionally, I would hire some of those comic book artists in Toronto to do album covers. I hired Paul Rivoche a couple times to do jackets and promotions for me. When I was at CBS, he was a fledgling illustrator. I think Paul aspired more to be a paperback illustrator, to do science-fiction covers and he was quite an accomplished airbrush artist at a very early age. A community eventually formed in the city but it had its own cliques. It had a super-hero clique which I wasn’t really part of but it had a science-fiction one of which I was. And we concentrated on that for years. CBA: Were you an avid science-fiction reader? Dean: Not too much as a kid, but in college, I was living on a pretty good diet of a lot of New Wave stuff. J.G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison, and Phillip K. Dick were particular favorites. CBA: What college did you attend? Dean: Fanshawe Community College, an arts and technology college in London, Ontario. I originally took a fine arts course but eventually changed over to electronic media—or new media—course. That curriculum was taught by people who had worked with Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. I studied holography, geodesics, the emerging videotape medium and all kinds of electronic, New Age, forward-thinking philosophy based on McLuhan and Fuller. I eventually wrote and directed two multimedia plays which were both, actually, just disguised comic books. They were very fantasy-oriented, deriving themselves more from the works of Jack Kirby than the theatre like Pinter, Tharp and Brecht, that I was citing at the time. [laughs] But they were quite successful local productions and very ambitious, inspired by the success of Warp [the 1970s Stuart Gordon/Neal Adams play] on Broadway. I was sure we could do the same thing using college resources and we actually did pretty good. CBA: I assume you developed an interest in Jack Kirby’s work? Dean: I did in college, though not much interest in public school. Actually, my brother was more interested in Kirby at that time because I found Jack’s style to be too exaggerated. When I was in high school, my brother was into Marvel and I was into DC, and we had an ongoing feud for a while. [laughs] He recognized Kirby’s expressionistic quality much before I did. At that time, I was much more of a Neal Adams/Al Williamson/Wally Wood fan and I was much more attuned to trying to keep it real, rendering things as realistically as possible. But when I got to college, my appreciation of art actually matured enough that suddenly my eyes were opened to any number of different things, including Kirby. Probably because I was expected to know something about these things and professing to be a bit of an expert. When I arrived there, my reputation was of a Comic Book Guy. I even drew a comic strip for the school newspaper, and things like that. CBA: What was the strip called? Dean: The first year, I did a take-off of Vaughn Bodé called The Great Transatlantic Balloon Race, The second-year sequence was just called The Funny Pages, made up of different things. CBA: Were you exposed to underground comix at a certain point? Dean: As soon as I became aware of them, I assimilated them as quickly as I could. I was in college so I became exposed to R. Crumb, Robert Williams, Trina Robbins, Vaughn Bodé and all those folks at the same time. I would tend to mimic the artists as carefully as I could and I really didn’t develop my own style, really just imitating others at which I became very adept. I could do really good takes on Neal Adams and Crumb, and eventually a decent Moebius. I was copying and aping not so much the content of their work, but their line styles and things like that. But I had to become a bit of a historian as well. The more I became involved with Marshall McLuhan’s son Eric and later, his father’s work, I was sort of coerced and forced into becoming a bit of a historian on comics for the college, providing a resource for their November 2001

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