CBA Interview
Doug Moench’s Memories Chatting with Chicago Son and Prolific Marvel Scripter Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Sam Gafford Yeesh! What Marvel book hasn’t Doug Moench written?
Below: The perpetually young Doug Moench in a recent photo.Courtesy of the writer.
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Comic Book Artist: Where are you from? Doug Moench: Born in Chicago. Lived there until I was 23, when I moved to Manhattan for two years and before buying a house here in Pennsylvania where I’ve been ever since. Although I have lived briefly, off and on, in Hollywood when I’ve been writing TV and movie stuff. CBA: When did you develop an interest in comic books? Doug: As far back as I can remember. The earliest stuff I’d ever read would have been Uncle Scrooge by Carl Barks, which I loved. As a matter of fact, when later I did the Marvel Doc Savage b-&-w magazine, I modeled it on the Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge stuff with Doc as Scrooge and his five back-up guys were like Donald, Huey, Dewey and Louie. CBA: It sets an homage feel to that comic book. Doug: Those stories just stuck with me! I didn’t even know it doing it but they were such great adventure stories. The structure of them was that Scrooge would somehow get mixed up in some big adventure and he’d rope the others into it and they would be his helpers; and one of them would be a screw-up and that would be Donald and the other three (Huey, Dewey and Louie) with their Junior Woodchuck knowledge would be pretty competent fellows. That worked out. I think Monk was the goof-up in the Doc Savage stories and everyone else was pretty competent. The structure seemed to work. I don’t know at what point I realized I was thinking of it in that way but there was a point where I went, “You know, this is Uncle Scrooge!” And it was working. CBA: Did you get into adventure comics or horror comics at all? Doug: Yeah, I think the earliest adventure comics that I remember were Joe Kubert’s
“Viking Prince” stories in The Brave and the Bold. I just loved those. Russ Heath—who later became a very good friend of mine and still is—was doing “The Golden Gladiator.” Those two, Viking Prince and Golden Gladiator, were my favorites. I also liked “The Shining Knight.” The horror comics…I have a dim memory of stumbling across some ECs but I can’t really finger that as well as the memories of Uncle Scrooge and the B&B stuff. Also, I enjoyed war comics; and then eventually, the first super-hero things I got into were Superman and Batman. I actually quit reading comics for a while—I grew up! I was too old for them. For about three months. Then I went into the corner place where they sold Coke and french fries and comic books, and I looked over at the comics rack and I saw Fantastic Four #1 and the logo was so goofy that I just had to pick it up and look through it— and I bought the thing—and then I was more into comics than ever before. Then Spider-Man appeared and the whole Marvel thing took off. CBA: Were you particularly clued into the storytelling or was it the art? Doug: I don’t know. I just liked to read and comics were one of the first things I read and I just loved them! There’s just something about the combination of words and pictures that, as a kid, I enjoyed more than just words. (Although now I love reading just words, of course!) Thing is, comics just couldn’t be beat back then, in the days when there was no Batman or Conan movies and comics were the only place you could get that kind of thing. Would it that were still so! CBA: I talked to Bruce Jones about the influence of television drama on him that was very strong in storytelling. Was TV and film important to you? Doug: Yeah. My father at the time was a TV repairman for RCA (when he retired he was a real big deal in RCA, the head of the Midwest region training centers), we were really big TV people. Yeah, I watched endless amounts of TV as a kid. I went cold turkey when I became a long-hair (this was before hippies!). I remember walking down the street one day and the construction workers yelling, “Hippie!” and I didn’t know what they were talking about. Yesterday it was, “Are you a boy or a girl?” and today it was “Hey, Hippie!” And I didn’t know what was going on. But when I moved out of home at age 18 and started living with a girl, there was no TV so I just stopped watching. I’m one of the few people on Earth who’s never seen a Star Trek all the way through! [laughs] But up until that point, yeah, I was totally immersed in television. All those westerns, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, yeah, sure; and the comedies. I still love George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny. CBA: How about film? Doug: Yeah, oh yeah! This is how old I am. At the time you needed a quarter to get into the movies and I would just go into the alley on Saturday morning and pick up pop bottles. You could take them to the store and get two cents each, right? So, fifteen or twenty bottles and you’ve got enough to get in and buy popcorn and soda. I’d just ride my bike to the movie theater every week. They would show double features, triple features, with a half hour of cartoons in between, it was fantastic! CBA: Any particular genre? Doug: Horror movies were my favorite. CBA: The Universal films? Doug: No, I’m not that old. Those I could only see on Saturday night on Shock Theatre and it was very, very frustrating because I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 7
March 2000