Comic Book Artist (Vol. 2) #1 by TwoMorrows Publishing

F.P.O.

This issue dedicated in beloved memory of:

“For the Celebration of Comics”

Ms. Jean Hogan Ye Ed’s High School Art Teacher

SERVING READERS SINCE 1998

Jon B. Cooke EDITOR/CREATOR/DESIGNER

“Turn it upside-down and step back, knucklehead”

DEPARTMENTS 4 6

Chris Staros & Brett Warnock Top Shelf Productions PUBLISHERS George Khoury SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR Christopher Irving ASSOCIATE EDITOR/CHIEF CORRESPONDENT Chris Knowles ASSOCIATE EDITOR Steven Tice TRANSCRIBER Greg Preston CBA PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER Hlep Wanted PROOFREADER

MASTHEAD AND COVER DESIGN Bissel & Titus www.bisseltitus.com CONTRIBUTING EDITORS David A. Roach Fred Hembeck Michelle Nolan Joe McCabe TITLE ORIGINATOR/CBA CLASSIC LOGO Arlen Schumer CBA MASCOT Woody J.D. King ISSUE THEME SONG “Just Because” Jane’s Addiction COVER ARTISTS

Neal Adams Alex Ross Pencils Paint

www.cbanow.com www.topshelfcomix.com Editor: JonBCooke@aol.com Publisher: staros@bellsouth.net

Ye Ed’s Rant People vs. Things Knowles Knows New Golden Ages Comic Book Chit-Chat Kirby’s Back! Jimmy O. Reprinted!

Young GODS/Bagge Breaks a Sweat

High Five: Todd Klein’s Top Letterers

Hot Stuff: Tripwire x 10, Blankets, Terry Austin, and Eric Powell’s Goon

Backstory Barry Windsor-Smith, The Incredible Hulk & Marvel Comics 25 Queries ’n’ Quandaries Readers, kin ya help out an ol’ mag? 26 Irving on the Inside Catching Up with Michael Lark 30 Khoury’s Corner Gen13/Batman 128 To Be Continued… Coming in CBA

About Our Cover Those in the know recognize this issue’s superb collaboration between penciler NEAL ADAMS and painter ALEX ROSS — the superstar artists’ first-ever team-up! — as an homage to Neal’s great cover for Superman #233 (Jan. ’71), one of the most popular images in the history of DC Comics. For Ye Ed, who started collecting funnybooks as a young pup when first snatching up that seminal ish upon being blown away by this superb image, this new Adams/Ross masterpiece is a dream come true, catering to the fanboy in Y.E. by representing a treasured image but also acknowledging the abilities of two of the field’s greatest talents are simply better than ever. Back in 1998, COMIC BOOK ARTIST Vol. 1, #1 sported a new Adams cover featuring Batman, so what other super-duper character could top that beauty? Howz'bout the first — and greatest — spandex-hero of all time? And just to cap it off, delineated by the two top illustrators of super-heroes in the world! Our deepest gratitude to both Neal and Alex for granting CBA this indulgence and we certainly hope you enjoy the results of their supreme efforts, if only a fraction as much as we.—Ye Ed.

18 41 10 32

FEATURES

“With Great Power…” Stan Lee in the ’70s 32

Excerpt from the book, Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book by Jordan Raphael & Tom Spurgeon

A Craig Thompson Sketchbook 41

The award-winning author of Good-Bye, Chunky Rice and Blankets, shares personal sketches from a European vacation

The Art of Dynamic Realism 49 Neal Adams: An Illustrator and His Tools 50

The masterful comic book artist discusses Alex Ross, his early work, realism, and painting (plus a color section!)

Alex Ross: True Colors 56 The field’s hottest talent talks about his upbringing, the “reality” of super-heroes, & the future (plus a color section!)

Comic Book Artist Classic 63 Arcade color cover gallery 64 The Story of Arcade, The Comics Revue 65 Ye Ed sets the stage for the arrival of the seminal comix mag

Art Spiegelman: Lifeboat 66 The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist on his early years and midwiving the quarterly mag devoted to the best of comix

Bill Griffith: An American Life 78 The creator of Zippy the Pinhead on his formative times, and days as co-editor of Arcade, The Comics Revue

1 7/03

Arcade Index & “Where To Find” Suggestions 91 CBA Classic Extra: Tod Holton, Super Green Beret 92 Ye Ed’s blatantly opinionated essay on the worst comic book of all

No.

Michael Moorcock: Verse and Multiverse 94

The great science-fiction author on his comics work, part one

COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published 10 times a year by Top Shelf Productions, P.O. Box 1282, Marietta, GA 30061-1282 USA. Jon B. Cooke, Editor. Chris Staros & Brett Warnock, Publishers. Editorial Office: P.O. Box 204, 3706 Kingstown Road, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 USA • 401-783-1669 • Fax: (401) 783-1287. E-mail: JonBCooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to Top Shelf, NOT the editorial office. Single issues: $10 postpaid ($12 Canada, $13 elsewhere). Six-issue subscriptions: $39.50 US Media Rate/$59.50 US Priority Rate; $69.50 Canada Air Mail; $89.50 Air Mail elsewhere. All characters © their respective copyright holders. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © their respective authors. ©2003 Jon B. Cooke. Cover acknowledgement: Superman ©2003 DC Comics. Used with permission. First Printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Ye Ed’s Rant People v. Things Your crusading editor on just what makes Comic Book Artist different

4 CBA V.2 #1

Look, I’ll be honest and tell you that, like any divorce, Comic Book Artist’s break-up with our former publisher, TwoMorrows, wasn’t a totally seamless, amiable affair. While the production of last month’s final “volume one” ish (#25’s ABC Comics/Alan Moore” special) turned out to be a surprisingly exhilarating — and exhausting — replay of the trials Mr. Morrow and I endured through putting CBA Vol. 1, #1 to bed back in 1998, Ye Ed was bound to take exception at a few cracks — however unintentional or passive/ aggressive — lobbed in the departing mag’s direction. While stopping nary for breath upon making the elliptic “S’long CBA,” announcement, the TwoMorrows News Today section bid welcome to the new mag intended to “appeal to the same audience as CBA” [sic], after pondering what were they “going to do with that empty slot in its schedule once CBA is gone?” So much for a fare-thee-well, eh? The next installment of that hype section trumpeted the arrival of the newest Twomorrows mag (parenthetically “taking CBA’s spot on our schedule”!), the forthcoming Back Issue, sporting the understated subtitle, “The Ultimate Comics Experience!” Nice logo. I have no interest in picking on Back Issue editor Michael Eury’s endeavors, and honestly, I wish him good luck with the ’zine, which will no doubt be a handsome and informative effort. But I will pounce on the choice of name given to something created to replicate my efforts or fill any former “slot” or appeal to CBA’s audience. En garde, mon ami, because Ye Ed begs to differ. Y’see, it’s fundamental in the philosophy of Comic Book Artist that it is NOT about things; it’s about people. While we may have been using hyperbolic subtitle, “Celebrating the Lives and Work of the Great Cartoonists, Writers & Editors,” I always preferred the feistier — and more correct — banner “Price Guide NEVER Included,” but only used it once or twice. What me, a wuss? But no, I’ve always been adamant — and hardly shy about expressing my contempt — about the things I hate in this business. I hate the coveting, selfishness, greed, speculation and slabbing coming hand-in-hand with the collecting bug. I despise the adoration of the hero (i.e., the “property”) above respect for the creator of said character. I loathe the lying and cheating and swindling and thievery done to artists over their undeniable property, the original art (and, if said art is said to have been “rescued” from company destruction, then the good deed must be completed by giving the art to the rightful owners or their estates post haste, Boy Scouts!). I’m disgusted at

the damage caused by speculators and by those publishers who catered to that insatiable lust I hate that adherence to some convoluted continuity too often takes precedence over good storytelling. I’m incensed at the blatant “ageism”

so rampant in the business, where perfectly capable veteran artists are ignored in favor of searching for the latest “hot” talent (I mean, hey, can’t we do both?). I’m pissed about the ascension of the anti-hero, the adoration of death, and the lack of meaning in too many comics — not to mention the outright rape and mutilation of too many characters who once embodied virtues worthy of celebration and respect. Much as I truly like the guy and profoundly appreciate his incalculable efforts in service to this industry — and I’m only nudging The Man to be vigilant in correcting those idiot journalists continuing to spread half-truths — I really can’t stand to see Stan Lee listed as the sole originator of too many characters co-created by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Bill Everett, and other architects of the House of Ideas. Please. The prefix “co-” doesn’t take up too much space now, does it? I recall amusing one of my favorite comics creator couples, Walter and Louise Simonson, when, during a visit to their lovely home nestled in the New York woods, I ripped into a diatribe expressing my outright hatred for comic book characters, as I raged on about someday devoting an issue to the theme “Character Assassination.” But, Walt and Weezie? I was wrong. In fact, there’s some comic book heroes I

do love, like Plas, Ant-Man (don’t ask), Spacehawk, Adam Strange, and, yep, the Big Red Cheese himself. But I am contemptuous of his treatment during most of the years since Captain Marvel’s revival in 1972, as every few years or so, writers have tried to shoehorn the World’s Mightiest Mortal into some dark, cynical, evil “real world.” Yikes! Whatever happened to children’s comics? …Come to think of it, whatever happened to children who read comics, eh? Much as I am reliant on the reference within and admire the work of the compilers of the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and CBG’s nifty Standard Catalog, I loathe what those tomes have come to represent for me. Stop the slabbing! Give me a “reading” copy” any day. Back to the point, I see this conflict between loving the artifact versus loving the artist as but a small indication of the Great Struggle for our very souls in today’s world. People versus Things. Humanism versus Materialism. Charity versus Greed. Mercy versus Vengeance. Us versus Them. Okay, I’m getting a bit deep here, but this is a passionate issue with me, and I suspect a good part of the reason so many CBA readers keep coming back, quite often regardless of the announced theme, is because here we’re adamant that, above all, it’s the people who contribute to comic books who are important to understanding the work, not the comic, not the genre, not the original art page, not the character. Anyway, the artists, writers and editors are damned interesting to read about as they share with us their memories and love of the form. Time and time again, the creators remind us, through their hearts and intelligence, that this strange and wonderful medium is a valid and vital one, unique and vibrant, so new and untapped in its potential as to make even the oldest participant sound positively giddy in his enthusiasm for sequential art. If I may be immodest, try to imagine a magazine about baseball cards or Matchbox toys having the same kind of resonance as CBA… (now, non-sports cards are a different matter as you’ll see in our forthcoming “Jay Lynch and Topps Bubble Gum Card Company” segment in CBA Classic). I love the artists who have given so much to me since boyhood, as well as the newest savants cruisin’ down the pike, and I insist that this magazine express that affection. I am unabashedly surrounding myself with friends and supporters, people who adore the form, and unashamed to declare this magazine will mostly be about stuff we like and love. (Sure, I’ll regularly launch into diatribes, like this one, coz what’s life

if you can’t be angry sometimes? But mostly this is about cool shit… and, yes, no asterisks replacing vowels here in the more colorful language; this is my magazine now, so fuck censorship!) I was initially attracted to John Morrow’s outfit back in late 1995 because of the publisher/ editor’s obvious devotion to an artist, Jack Kirby. The Jack Kirby Collector positively glowed with the very much the same energy the King emanated through his work from his personal being. TJKC emanated a deep sense of humanity I very much wanted to be a part of, and I’m very glad I did join in the fun, because that’s led to a career out of advertising (a vocation which can soaks the joy and passion out of any hapless soul) and into this weird, wacky world of comics. I will also confess to embracing an exhilarating feeling of emancipation. My arrangement with two of the finest cats I know in the comics field, Chris Staros and Brett Warnock (the very cool owners of Top Shelf Productions), is the understanding that, short of any copyrighted material (including that work by every contributor to the mag), Comic Book Artist is mine completely… lock, stock and two smoking barrels. It’s as it should be, because more than comics — and aside, of course from the superb contributors to this mag — CBA is about a love for the form, and

it’s paramount intention is try to give back to those who have given us so much, at least by expressing that appreciation and respect. No, I didn’t feel indentured at my former imprint, but censorship issues were becoming a growing concern (as the nipple-masking black boxes were tiresome), as was the quaint and unnecessary abbreviating of slang (especially given the average 30-something age of CBA’s readers). So any newfound sense of freedom really does come from within, and for better or worse, I’m going to simply follow my instincts and hopefully produce a wildly eclectic, intense magazine. Do tell me if I succeed or not. Gone are the full-issue themes (efforts to be saved for with our RetroHouse book projects, starting in 2004!), though smaller, more concise histories will abound in our mag-within-the-mag section, CBA Classic, and you’ll find the “up front” departments expanded significantly to include a ton of unrelated (but hopefully equally fascinating) material. With this new incarnation, we now sport a color section and perfect binding. If this is your first time with CBA, welcome! My philosophy with magazines in general is to produce a mag that comes across very much like an entertaining friend who stops in to visit maybe once every six-weeks or so (coincidentally, our

initial schedule!). A pal who stops by and regales you with innumerable anecdotes and outlandish fish stories every so often — some funny, some poignant — teaching a lesson here and there, sharing a wee bit of advice and departs cheerfully out the door before outlasting any welcome, a visit brief enough to leave folks hoping the acquaintance will come back someday soon. Old friends and new readers: Please write and tell us what you think of the revamp; much as I might spout that this mag is me, me, me, I know full well I need to please you, you, and you, if CBA is to be invited back for a return visit. Thanks for letting us stop in. Mind if I take off my shoes? —Jon B. Cooke, Ye Crusading Ed. SPECIAL THANKS: To Neal and Alex for their participation and spectacular cover, their first-ever collaboration; to George Khoury, Chris Irving, David Roach, and Chris Knowles for their unwavering support; to Jim Titus and Dave Bissel for their cover design; and to Chris Staros and Brett Warnock for their faith in me and their unwavering belief in the mission of CBA. PLEASE NOTE: Next issue will reintroduce two of our most loyal and talented contributors, FRED HEMBECK and MICHELLE NOLAN, into the second generation of Comic Book Artist!

5 CBA V.2 #1

Knowles Knows Golden Ages to Come Chris Knowles ponders the potential and future of “comic art” BY CHRIS KNOWLES, ASSOCIATE EDITOR

“Comic Book Artist is going to be kind of like the Kirby Collector, but each issue will focus on a different artist. So, you’ll have a Neal Adams issue, a Frank Miller issue, a Curt Swan issue… something like that.”

6 CBA V.2 #1

Those words (or ones to that effect — I recently won the Stan Lee Award for Excellence in Memory) were spoken to me by Ye Ed in a hotel room in one of San Diego’s less elegant neighborhoods in the summer of 1997. Jon and I had just met, having been paired up as con bunk-mates through the miracle of e-mail. Little did I suspect that this amiable, chain-smoking ball of energy would create something like Comic Book Artist. Little did I suspect that what he had planned was the definitive chronicle of a criminally underappreciated craft, albeit one served in a periodic (give or take) format. Jon and I have spent countless hours on the phone since that day (being one of Jon’s sounding boards is my principal duty ’round these parts) but I am still in awe of what he, more or less alone, has accomplished. CBA had a reputation of being “The ’70s DC Fanzine” in its early days, which is kind of amusing in retrospect. That certainly was Jon’s passion, but he has shown himself to have many more rabbits in his hat. And as you may have noticed, the scope of this magazine has expanded to cover more contemporary artists (and writers), not just those from Jon’s personal “Golden Age,” and it will continue to check out the new folks. Which brings me (sort of) to the thesis of this circular rant — that Jon’s or mine or your Golden Age is not that mythical age of seven or 11; it is the era yet to come. “Comic Book Artist” seems, on the face of it, to be a flagrant oxymoron. “Comic Book” is America’s shorthand for melodramatic juvenalia (Clint Eastwood recently said he wouldn’t do another Dirty Harry movie because he is “too old for comic books”), and “Artist” is the rarified epithet we bestow on those who show a particular mastery of their chosen profession (“Kurosawa was a true Artist of cinema” ). Or maybe most simply see “comic book artist” the

same way we see “make-up artist” or “Foley artist.” After all, the proper term — cartoonist — doesn’t seem appropriate for the content of most comics, and “comic book illustrator” has too many damn syllables, Buster. But I’m sorry, someone like Mike Mignola is an Artist artist, and just because his Art is about a seven-foot tall chappie with sawed-off horns, well, how do you account

for Krazy Kat, Mr. Smarty Pants? It also could be argued that, oh say, 95% of the “Comic Book Art” out there falls hopelessly short of being any kind of art at all, in fact most of it fails even at kitsch value. But the same can be said of 95% of anything, and what is apparent to all but the snootiest Journalistà is that the level of competency of all comics has risen dramatically in the past five years. I’m not sure what other media can lay claim to that. Certainly not popular music and most certainly not Big Budget movies. But, if grand slam triumphs like Watchmen, or Dark Knight or Kingdom Come have been thin on the ground recently, there has been no shortage of solid, well-crafted material out there. And the fact that the funnybook racket has not only risen

from its death-bed, but is making for lost ground and gaining a toehold in the book chains is nothing short of remarkable to this writer, who still hasn’t shaken off that late ’90s impending-doom feeling. And just to show things have been put to right, we have a situation where the X-Men, Spider-man and the Justice League are once again inspiring America’s kids (albeit not in comics form). But is it Art, you may ask? Well, just because that literature professor you’ve spent your whole damn life seeking the approval of looks down on heroic fantasy or mutant mythology, that doesn’t mean they aren’t valid forms of expression. In fact, I’d argue that in many ways they are, or rather can be, more valid that the some of the rarified, cerebral indulgences of the self-appointed elite. The reason that archetypes like the X-Men, or Spider-man or the Hulk persist is that they speak to people’s deepseated need to resolve their feelings of powerlessness and frustration, as well as to many of the other issues and aspirations of real people. But comics are, and should be, so much more than escapist fantasy and I believe they will continue to grow in new directions. And the potential of the form is the major issue the entire industry must confront. I believe that we are in a transitional phase now, between comics’ junk culture roots and a future more in line with the medium’s status in the rest of the world. Part of the stigma attached to comics is the fact that the medium has been relentlessly exploited and raped, not only by the schlock merchants who saw it purely as a quick money machine, but by the swindlers who had manipulated comics purely as a collectibles racket. So, like the rest of the industry/subculture, Comic Book Artist is moving forward. Remember the roots of this magazine lie in the ’90s, certainly the darkest times this writer has even seen the medium endure, from a creative standpoint. Don’t forget just how insanely bad nearly all mainstream comics were for most of that decade. If your memory is hazy, take a look through the quarter box at a convention or your local store. I’m not alone in believing the work Jon did in the tail end of the Chromium Age helped influential people remember that it wasn’t always that way.

So if CBA’s mission has been primarily historical up until recently, it has done so to remind discriminating enthusiasts that there is much of value in the medium’s past, buried beneath all the schlock and bilge. And also to remind people that through the years of exploitation and disrepute, the artists have soldiered on and struggled to redeem the medium. And CBA has shone a light on some folks whose work has been unjustly forgotten, and it will continue to do so. I believe that anyone who draws comics or wants to should be reading this magazine, because there is far more potential in the art form than is displayed by the latest fan favorite artist. This is a unique time in the history of the medium in this country — everything is up for grabs. I prefer to be optimistic, and there are encouraging augers everywhere, but I have seen the industry shoot itself in the foot one too many times to throw all caution to the wind. But we are at the point where there is no margin in pure schlock, and in order to get any audience there has to be at least a level of craft in the work. The book trade has tamed overheated speculation on back issues, and has also disciplined the structure of the material. We don't see the rambling, multi-issue sagas in the mainstream books any more, because the economic incentive exists to keep the stories to about four or five parts for the trades. So the medium has passed, almost imperceptibly, from an overheated collectibles racket, to a readers market. This is but the first stage in the realization of American

comics’ potential. And what will help comics reach their potential is the unparalleled level of raw talent the medium is lousy with these days. I mean, Adam Hughes, Alex Ross and Bill Sienkiewicz alone are embarrassments of riches. These are individuals who, in another time, would be scaring the pants off of Flagg, Gibson or Leyendecker, their talent is so prodigious. And the fact they and many, many others like them chose to toil in comics rather than cash in out in Tinseltown is a monumental tribute to the power of this form. And this form; this bastard, unloved, outcast (which we wonder why we care so much about) is elementally powerful. Comics may not be the mass media it once was, but maybe something more important. It is the Dream Lab of modern culture. It is one of the only places where a creator can reach people unimpinged by the Corporate Committee, where a talent like Joe Linsner can put his fever dreams out there in glorious technicolor, untouched by lesser hands. And this type of vision bleeds into the mass culture through other channels. Most importantly, comics’ relative obscurity helps it to fly underneath the corporate radar (for the most part). When a creator complains about Marvel and DC’s corporate culture in the fan press, I chuckle. They are so insulated from real corporate culture, where 40 people have to sign off on a cookie box design or a Winnie the Pooh T-shirt, never mind a big-budget movie where investment bankers can arbitrarily put the kibosh

on the creative decisions of a Coppola or a Scorcese. Okay, so maybe your editor won’t let you have Wonder Girl gang-raped and disemboweled by a gang of transsexual biker nuns (I’m talking to you, Johnny Brit!), but I think it’s safe to say that most comics creators operate with a enviable degree of creative freedom, in comparison to other media. And what’s more, the relative status you reach in the eyes of editors and fans is unseen in practically every other field of the commercial art. And the ability of any creator to put his most personal visions in screaming RGB color on the Web is limited only by his imagination (and Web host obscenity guidelines). So like Ràs Àl Ghùl, comics are threatening to rise again. The future uncertain, and a lot can go wrong, but this medium has never seen the level of artistry we have now. You have a young generation of whiz kids whose craft is astonishing, even if their artistic impulses are still playing catch-up. And then you have the people who this magazine has focused — and will focus on — the people who transcend mere craft and take the work to another level altogether. And more and more people like them are emerging every year. It seems almost inevitable that there must be some moment where critical mass is reached, when both the market and the creative potential of what is after all America’s native art form explodes and expands. The “Technological Revolution” that was supposed to sweep comics into the dustbin of history has largely come and gone, and paradoxically left the medium in a far stronger position for real growth than it has ever before seen.

After You, Alphonse…

No, You First, Gaston!

Most comics cognoscenti are well aware that we here at Top Shelf Productions are dedicated to providing a voice for new talent to display their chops — to flex their muscle, as Dino Haspiel might say — and our reputation, such as it is, is based on a focus these past few years on publishing new and cuttin’-edge comics, with a dedication to championing the “original graphic novel,” as our preferred format. What some may not realize, is that I, co-publisher of TSP, am a certified unabashed fanboy as well. A former Marvel Zombie and mainstream geek — the Holy Trinity that got me hooked were the usual suspects: Byrne & Claremont’s X-Men; Pérez & Wolfman’s Teen Titans; and Frank Miller’s epic Daredevil — and I’ve become a devout student of the history of comics, as both a medium and as an industry. Coupled with my fondness for the comics past, is a real appreciation for so much of the current scene, both in the “mainstream” and “alternative” worlds. Oh my! I LOVE COMICS!

Now for those of you perhaps a tad unfamiliar with my new publisher, as this is their first magazine in their stable (unless you count Eddie Campbell’s lamented yet superb Egomania, which Top Shelf distributed), lemme tell you that, indeed, Chris Staros and Brett Warnock’s imprint publishes some outstanding work by many of the finest creators in the field, including Craig Thompson, James Kolchalka, Renée French, Alex Robinson, Doug TenNapel, and others. Plus TSP is coming out with some Alan Moore projects in the near future, including the first U.S. edition of his novel, Voice of the Fire, and the Lost Girls three-vol. set. Put simply, Chris and Brett love comics, and their reputation in the industry is one very highlyregarded. I’m proud to be a part of the Top Shelf team. Whether the plan is for CBA to help TSP make forays into the mainstream or the publisher to introduce CBA to a wider readership in the alternative world, it’s all good! And I feel damned privileged to sport the Staros/Warnock imprint. It’s good to be here, Brett and Chris!— Jonnie B.

Which brings me to Jon B. Cooke’s Comic Book Artist. From the first issue of this classy rag (under John Morrow’s fabulous TwoMorrows imprint), I became a total devotee. Many were the e-mails with which I cursed Jon because, after finishing an issue, I’d invariably be forced to sift through back issue bins looking for lost gems due to CBA’s exhaustive coverage (damn him!). Needless to say, after meeting on the con circuit, Jon and I have become great pals. His enthusiasm for comics is boundless and work as the editor of CBA nothing less than invaluable. Not only is the opportunity to bring this excellent and important magazine into the Top Shelf fold an absolute honor, but seeing what Jon has in store, as CBA continues to evolve, makes this fanboy giddy with excitement. As the medium enjoys a new renaissance, the business is taking great strides reaching out to a growing audience. CBA will be there not in-step, but setting the pace. The future looks very bright indeed. Welcome aboard, Jonnie!! — Brett Warnock

fin

7 CBA V.2 #1

™

A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n

Edited by JON B. COOKE, COMIC BOOK CREATOR is the new voice of the comics medium, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics—focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. It’s the follow-up to Jon’s multi-Eisner Award winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST magazine.

Subscribe at www.twomorrows.com 4 issues: $40 US, $54 Canada, $60 elsewhere Includes the DOUBLE-SIZE SUMMER SPECIAL!

No. 3, Fall 2013

82658 97073

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #1 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #3

Former COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor JON B. COOKE returns to TwoMorrows with his new magazine! #1 features: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY endured throughout his career, ALEX ROSS and KURT BUSIEK interviews, FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, remembering LES DANIELS, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his beloved, a talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL, new ALEX ROSS cover, and more!

JOE KUBERT double-size Summer Special tribute issue! Comprehensive examinations of each facet of Joe’s career, from Golden Age artist and 3-D comics pioneer, to top Tarzan artist, editor, and founder of the Kubert School. Kubert interviews, rare art and artifacts, testimonials, remembrances, portraits, anecdotes, pin-ups and miniinterviews by faculty, students, fans, friends and family! Edited by JON B. COOKE.

NEAL ADAMS vigorously responds to critics of his BATMAN: ODYSSEY mini-series in an in-depth interview, with plenty of amazing artwork! Plus: SEAN HOWE on his hit book MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY; MARK WAID interview, part one; Harbinger writer JOSHUA DYSART; Part Two of our LES DANIELS remembrance; classic cover painter EARL NOREM interviewed, a new ADAMS cover, and more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(164-page FULL-COLOR mag) $17.95 (Digital Edition) $7.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #4 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #5 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #6 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #7 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #8

RUSS HEATH career-spanning interview, essay on Heath’s work by S.C. RINGGENBERG (and Heath art gallery), MORT TODD on working with STEVE DITKO, a profile of alt cartoonist DAN GOLDMAN, part two of our MARK WAID interview, DENYS COWAN on his DJANGO series, VIC BLOOM and THE SECRET ORIGIN OF ARCHIE ANDREWS, HEMBECK, new KEVIN NOWLAN cover!

DENIS KITCHEN close-up—from cartoonist, publisher, author, and art agent, to his friendships with HARVEY KURTZMAN, R. CRUMB, WILL EISNER, and many others! Plus we examine the supreme artistry of JOHN ROMITA, JR., BILL EVERETT’s final splash, the nefarious backroom dealings of STOLEN COMIC BOOK ART, and ascend THE GODS OF MT. OLYMPUS (a ‘70s gem by ACHZIGER, STATON and WORKMAN)!

SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS dredges up Swamp Thing, ManThing, Heap, and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou! Features interviews with WRIGHTSON, MOORE, PLOOG, WEIN, BRUNNER, GERBER, BISSETTE, VEITCH, CONWAY, MAYERIK, ORLANDO, PASKO, MOONEY, TOTLEBEN, YEATES, BERGER, SANTOS, USLAN, KALUTA, THOMAS, and others. FRANK CHO cover!

BERNIE WRIGHTSON interview on Swamp Thing, Warren, The Studio, Frankenstein, Stephen King, and designs for movies like Heavy Metal and Ghostbusters, and a gallery of Wrightson artwork! Plus writer/editor BRUCE JONES; 20th anniversary of Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror with BILL MORRISON; and interview Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre's BATTON LASH, and more!

MIKE ALLRED and BOB BURDEN cover and interviews, "Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman" cartoonist DAVID BOSWELL interviewed, a chat with RICH BUCKLER, SR. about everything from Deathlok to a new career as surrealistic painter; Tales of the Zombie artist PABLO MARCOS speaks; Israeli cartoonist RUTU MODAN; plus an extensive essay on European Humor Comics!

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TwoMorrows now offers Digital Editions of Jon B. Cooke’s COMIC BOOK ARTIST Vol. 2 (the “Top Shelf” issues)

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NEAL ADAMS/ALEX ROSS cover and interviews with both, history of “Arcade, The Comics Revue” with underground legends CRUMB, SPIEGELMAN, and GRIFFITH, MICHAEL MOORCOCK on comic book adaptations of his work, CRAIG THOMPSON sketchbook, and more!

Exhaustive FRANK CHO interview and sketchbook gallery, ALEX ROSS sketchbook section of never-beforeseen pencils, MIKE FRIEDRICH on the history of Star*Reach, plus animator J.J. SEDELMAIER on his Ambiguously Gay Duo and The XPresidents cartoons for Saturday Night Live.

Interview with DARWYN COOKE and a gallery of rarely-seen and unpublished artwork, a chat with DC Comics art director MARK CHIARELLO, an exploration of The Adventures of Little Archie with creator BOB BOLLING and artist DEXTER TAYLOR, new JAY STEPHENS sketchbook section, and more!

ALEX NIÑO’s first ever full-length interview and huge gallery of his artwork, interview with BYRON PREISS on his career in publishing, plus the most comprehensive look ever at the great Filipino comic book artists (NESTOR REDONDO, ALFREDO ALCALA, and others), a STEVE RUDE sketchbook, and more!

HOWARD CHAYKIN interview and gallery of unpublished artwork, a look at the ’70s black-&-white mags published by Skywald, tribute to Psycho and Nightmare writer/editor ALAN HEWETSON, LEAH MOORE & JOHN REPPION on Wild Girl, a SONNY LIEW sketchbook section, and more!

Double-sized tribute to WILL EISNER! Over 200 comics luminaries celebrate his career and impact: SPIEGELMAN, FEIFFER & McCLOUD on their friendships with Eisner, testimonials by ALAN MOORE, NEIL GAIMAN, STAN LEE, RICHARD CORBEN, JOE KUBERT, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, JOE SIMON, and others!

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Comic Book Artist’s shameless hype, capsule reviews, news briefs, mini-interviews & other ephemeral of note

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July 2003

Don’t Ask! Just Buy It! Our fave ’70s DC work — with Flippa-Dippa! — by Kirby is (finally!) reprinted! Kirby’s coming! Don’t be chicken! Kirby’s here! Kirby’s now! And he’s comin’ atcha this month with Jimmy Olsen: Adventures by Jack Kirby, a full-color 192-page trade paperback ($19.95), “the first DC archive offered at a new smaller size,” or so chirps the publisher’s hype. (Hmmm… Kirby’s meant to be seen bigger, but considering this is the first time these great comics — Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #133-139, 141 (Oct. ’70-Sept. ’71) — have ever been reprinted, we’ll reserve judgment ’til they’re in our greedy mitts.) The “new” cover is an unused Kirby pencil sketch newly inked by Steve “The

Dude” Rude, and the volume (one of two, we hope, as Jack’s run continued for seven more issues) includes an introduction by Mark Evanier. This was the comic book series that immediately hooked Ye Ed into collecting way back in the day and made Kirby his favorite creator. Concept after concept — the DNAliens, Boom Tube, Whiz Wagon, the Hairies, Dubbilex, the Mountain of Judgment, Zoomway, Habitat, the Outsiders — were thrown at the reader in such a rapid clip, it was an incredible experience to try and keep up with the King’s awesome imagination. Never mind the fact that these comics were the first to introduce Jack’s magnum

opus, The Fourth World, and perhaps DC’s most enduring villain, Darkseid (a name my brother and I still insist on mispronouncing “Dark-SEED”!). These comics are the most underappreciated of Jack’s DC run— perhaps as readers tend to focus on some of the series’ sillier moments, such as the notorious Goody Rickels issues — but the sheer exuberance of this work, featuring the reformation of the Golden Age kids team, The Newsboy Legion, and reintroduction of the Guardian (albeit a cloned version), is a wonder to behold and one highly recommended by Ye Ed and Comic Book Artist! —Ye Ed

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Comic Book Chit-Chat The Return of BWS & his Young GODS Fantagraphics set to release BWS: Storyteller collection in September creative work to date. Some of the new story material in the collection will address the untimely demise of the series, but there will not be an expedient wrap-up of the storylines. We hope that readers will understand that, given the turn of events that led to BWS’ having to suspend publication of STORYTELLER in 1997, the material to be presented in the Young GODS & Friends collection is the most appropriate denouement that can be achieved under the circumstances. This collected edition of Young GODS & Friends will be followed by collections of The Paradoxman and The Freebooters in 2004 and 2005 respectively. Young GODS & Friends is a full-color, 192-page hardcover, priced at $29.95. Check out <http://www.barrywindsorsmith.com/studio/ygnews.html> for more info and order online at <www.fantagraphics.com>.

Windsor-Smith Studio is pleased to announce that Young GODS & Friends, the first of the BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH: STORYTELLER Collected Editions, will be published by Fantagraphics Books in September 2003. This book presents all of the “Young GODS” material that appeared in #1-9 of BWS: STORYTELLER, plus all the “Young GODS” pages completed for the never published issues #10-12, and many pages of new story and editorial content created specially for this edition. BWS is aware that the loyal readers who supported STORYTELLER would like to see a resolution, in the collected edition, of the story line begun in the first nine issues, but unfortunately, it is not possible. To artificially accelerate a story intended to play out in the pages of the magazine over many years to a contrived conclusion would contradict everything BWS was striving to achieve in STORYTELLER, his most evolved

Bagge Breaks a Sweat The celebrated Hate! creator talks about his new series, Sweatshop

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BY JON B. COOKE/TRANSCRIBED BY STEVEN TICE Comic Book Artist: How come your new comic book, Sweatshop, isn’t a Vertigo book? Why’s it under the DC imprint? Peter Bagge: Well, from what I understand, Vertigo is very much “of a type.” It’s gritty, gothic… more adult, but also action, adventure, violence. You know, violence and swear words is what qualifies as “adult,” I guess. To me it seems it fits in much more with… DC is so general. I know it’s a super-hero line, but if anything, Sweatshop doesn’t fit in anywhere. It fits in with the Cartoon Network comics, I guess. CBA: It’s hard to classify. There’s obviously some adult elements in it, right? Peter: Well, it’s not Code-approved, and just thematically, what it’s about, it’s adult content. There might be some of the more mild swear words, like “damn.” Although I was told to avoid “God damn.” [laughter] CBA: You have a reputation in independent comics as having made some audacious moves. First, with Hate, you went to color. Then, heaven forbid, you actually hired an inker, Jim Blanchard, perhaps pulling closer to the assembly-line production of the mainstream than the auteur cartoonist do-it-alone approach. Sweatshop is even a step further as you’re doing layouts with other artists finishing. Just what the hell are you doing, Pete? Are you the new Eisner & Iger? The

new Bob Kane? You have artists slavishly copying your style…. Peter: Geez! I guess you’re right. I’m the new Walt Disney! [laughter] Of course, I want to have a certain consistency, so as a result, I’m providing all the various pencilers with rough layouts

they follow. Some are used to working from a script, and they say they like having a rough to work from. They say the biggest hurdle is guessing, because then they have to decide where the close-ups should be and such. Sometimes that

will be spelled out in the script, but it’s a relief for them not to guess wrong, if you know what I mean. Other than that, I want them to stay reasonably on-model with the characters, but I also want each artist’s style to come through somewhat. For example, right now Stephanie Gladden has been drawing some of the stories. In fact, from #3 or 4 on, she will hopefully be in every issue, because she’s doing a really good job. She was an artist on The Simpsons comics. She comes from an animation background, has a day job at the Cartoon Network. Stephanie did her own comic briefly that I think Bongo published, and it was drawn very much in a traditional, almost Warner Brothers-y, kind of ’40s or ’50s cartooning style. If you’re going to compare Sweatshop to other humor titles, you’re going to see a lot more leeway and variation than you would in them. CBA: Going over the original art, you don’t necessarily ask for a lot of changes? Peter: Actually, I get a chance to thoroughly go over everybody else’s pencils because I’m lettering it, so while I’m lettering, I’ll make changes, but it’s all pragmatic stuff. They might have forgotten to draw something, or have got a facial expression wrong. A character might look blank when they’re supposed to look really angry. Just things like that. Then occasionally, to make sure they stay “on model,” mainly with height.

One thing for artists especially new to drawing these characters might get wrong is to draw somebody a little bit too tall. Height contributes a lot to the dynamics between different characters. You wouldn’t think so, but it does once you actually draw the thing. CBA: Now you work remotely, right? You’re in Seattle? Peter: Uh-huh, yeah. CBA: So you’re doing all this through fax and through the computer and… ? Peter: Yeah, it’s all e-mail and Airborne Express. [laughs] CBA: Are you a Mel Bowling? [laughter] Peter: This is a funny story: At one point, to serve as a selling angle or get people a better grasp of the title, originally on the cover, it was going to say up on top, Pete Bagge’s Sweatshop, just like Hate used to say, Pete Bagge’s Hate. At first I wanted to nix that, where I said, “I wonder if it will sound funny and people will say [sarcastically], ‘Oh yeah, it’s ‘Pete Bagge’s Sweatshop,’ all right!’” [laughter] Then I thought, “Well, they’re going to say that anyway,” but for some reason I’ll never understand, in one of those bizarre, corporate flip-flopping, that couldn’t happen. It’s almost like, don’t even bother asking, because you’ll never hear a reasonable or sensible answer. Needless to say, at the last minute, DC told me, “No, we don’t want to put your name in the cover’s title.” CBA: You do share in the copyright? Peter: Yes, it’s creator-owned, although, that’s another thing, too: I whined bitterly about the contract, because there were quite a few restrictions. When I did Yeah!, there were restrictions I didn’t have to put up with from [Hate’s publisher] Fantagraphics. But now with Sweatshop, the conditions are even stricter. I was told it was because of America Online buying the Time/ Warner empire, and that AOL insisted on tighter, stricter contracts. I complained bitterly, but they said, “Take it or leave it.” But, man, it’s just like a glorified work-forhire contract. [laughs] I mean, it’s better than that,

but it’s still, like, “Holy smokes! What am I signing on to here?” CBA: Now, I know you do a Todd Klein Hate Annual every year, but picks his five why don’t you continue Hate fave letterers instead of launching a new title? I would assume there The multiple award-winning letterer (America’s continues to be a market Best Comics, etc.) gives us his list of the for it…? Top Five Letterers in the comic book biz: Peter: Yes, but it doesn’t sell 1. GASPAR SALADINO. From the early 1950s to nearly as well as it once did. the present, Gaspar has set the bar for creativity, You know, I was able, with energy and style in comics lettering. During his Hate, through the ’90s — prime period from 1967 to 1987, Gaspar’s logos © DC Comics when it was coming out and cover lettering for DC regularly — to maintain were particularly inspiring to decent sales. But towards the a whole generation of end, sales were starting to dip, which wasn’t a letterers, including myself. great trend. I was at my wit’s end trying to figure 2. IRA SCHNAPP. Before out how to make sales go up, which, considering Gaspar, Ira was THE lettering how labor-intensive it is and how it took up stylist for DC, with his logos and cover lettering almost all of my time getting Hate out on a regular gracing nearly every DC cover from the late 1940s basis (I was very focused to his death in the late in on that one title), and for 1960s. He also created me it wasn’t really viable to many of the memorable DC keep doing it if the sales house ads. Reportedly were going to continue to trained as a stone-carver, go down. So I was at a Ira’s letters had a classic point where I could either style redolent of the art stay on this sinking ship or deco era. © DC Comics try other things. Because in 3. DAVE SIM. In comics, no one has made letterthe meantime, thanks to the success of Hate, I ing such an important part of his work as Dave was getting a lot of opportunities not just from Sim in Cerebus. He Hollywood, but even from DC Comics saying, “Do continues to experiment you want to try your hand at this or that or the with lettering style in other thing?” delightful ways, evoking a CBA: Now, who was contacting you from DC? wide range of voices, emoWas it a particular editor? tions and moods. Were it not Peter: Yes. Originally, with Yeah!, Shelly overshadowed by his writing Roeberg (now Shelly Bond), who is a Vertigo and art, Dave’s lettering editor, but Yeah! evolved into something so notwould be more celebrated. © Dave Sim Vertigo-like that we wound up on Homage. 4. TOM ORZECHOWSKI. From his early work [laughter] (It’s too long and boring a story to with Jim Starlin, through decades of X-Men explain why I wound up on what imprint.) And books to his ever-creative work on Spawn, Tom then with Sweatshop, it was Joey has continued to put a great Cavalieri, who’s a regular DC deal of thought and craft into editor. Joey would very much love his work, drawing on styles to see from the past, but imbuing them more © McFarlane with his own personal stamp. Tom’s lettering is alternative-y always neat, concise and attractive. type stuff coming out of 5. JOHN WORKMAN. John’s angular and DC. He edited the Bizarro stylized lettering has always appealed to me book, and that did since I first saw it on the Englehart/ Rogers/Austin stories in DC’s Detective Comics in the 1970s. John’s best work has often been when teamed with Walt Simonson, where his style finds the perfect artistic complement. Only five? If I had a few more numbers, I’d certainly add Bill Oakley, John Costanza, Richard Starkings, Dave Gibbons, Dave Lanphear and Robin Spehar to the list, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few other favorites. — TODD KLEIN

CBA V.2 #1

Comic Book Chit-Chat

12 CBA V.2 #1

better than expected, so it seems that gave him a bit of leeway, a little bit of clout with his bosses to sell something like Sweatshop. CBA: How long did Yeah! last? Peter: Nine issues. CBA: What was the premise of that? Peter: It was just a rip-off of Josie and the Pussycats… “only better!” [laughter] It’s about a girl group from [New] Jersey, and on Earth they’re the most unpopular, most hated band there is, but in outer space, they’re like the Spice Girls multiplied by The Beatles. CBA: What is it with you and the Spice Girls? You keep going back to the Spice Girls! Peter: Yeah. [laughter] CBA: And Beto [Gilbert Hernandez] was drawing that book with you writing? Peter: Right. CBA: Did you have a good experience with it? Peter: There are some things I would have done differently or wish I could have, but overall I was happy with it. I still am. I thought it was really funny, and it was a blast to work on, but it wasn’t well-received at all. I naively assumed that people who liked Hate or Love and Rockets would, at least, like this to some degree, but for the most part, they all hated it. Plus, the targeted audience was young girls, and the number of young girl who go into comic shops are… CBA: Four of them, I think! [laughter] Peter: So all four of them liked it, but Yeah! was an orphan from the get-go. CBA: How is it going into corporate climes from Fantagraphics? Peter: Well, of course, I

like the creative freedom you get with Fantagraphics, and that’s why I still maintain a working relationship with them. I like what Fantagraphics does — that’s the stuff, by and large, I vastly prefer to read — and I’m glad I had this experience with Fantagraphics which allowed me to make a name for myself and create my own voice, so to speak. But then I became middle-aged and no longer was a man on a mission. I no longer had these stories in me burning to get out, that I had to tell no matter what. Now, I’m never short of ideas; I’m full of ideas, but not ones that I just absolutely have to get down on paper. It’s no longer this weird life-or-death urge to get these stories out. So, because of this shift in attitude, I suppose, it makes it possible for me to work within the relative restraints of DC Comics. Although, you know, the things that DC tells me, like not to say “God damn,” is no big deal to me anymore. In fact, when they say, “Don’t use swear words,” they’re often doing me a favor. Because using a swear word is also the lazy way out, so when forced to come up with an alternative, you end up with something more colorful and original, and it winds up being a lot funnier. I knew what the ground rules were, by and large, when I went into it, so the fact it’s DC and a corporation is really not that big a problem for me. CBA: Are you also settling for their control because you’re pragmatic and practical about having to maintain a certain income coming into the house? Peter: Oh yeah! The other thing is: Like all small, independently-owned, non-corporate companies, Fantagraphics’ cash flow is just crazy. CBA: “Kim [Thompson]? Did you mail that check out yet?” [laughter] Peter: Don’t joke! With me, it’s been 20 years, you know? I recently had a long conversation with [Fantagraphics co-owner] Gary Groth about all this, saying, “Will this ever end? Or is this simply the price we artists pay for our ‘freedom’?”

[laughter] He felt really bad about it. He’s like, “Yeah, I know. I wish this wasn’t the case. We’re always hoping one day we’ll be a bit ahead, but for now, it’s still cash flow wackiness.” So, yeah, getting a check when you expect it is fantastic, especially when you have a wife, a kid, and a mortgage! It becomes vital. If I don’t get a check when I reasonably expect it, it ruins my cash flow. CBA: That can ruin a whole day! [laughter] Peter: Ruin a month! It’s not worth the stress. CBA: Is there any linear connection between [Dan Clowe’s satirical poke at the comic book industry] Dan Pussey and Sweatshop? Peter: No, not deliberately, except there is a similarity in that they both satirize aspects of the comic strip and comic book industries. Just simply making fun of comic strips and comic books is part of the appeal, but it’s not going to be the main thrust of Sweatshop. Really, it’s still going to be character-driven. As the issues progress, you’ll get to know all the characters better, and the comic books, and the dynamics between all of them. It’s a very sit-com format, just like a show like NewsRadio, as it’s about an office family. There still is very much a family dynamic, where Mel’s the dad, the assistants are the kids. CBA: You can have this domestic, mundane veneer, about much of your work. You know, with Buddy Bradley, Studs Kirby, etc., and I don’t know how you can make the banal so interesting. If I may gush for a minute and tell you that I think you’re one of the best writers in the business, never mind your great cartooning. Whether it’s Junior or Stinky, you really do have affection for even the most pathetic characters. How did this idea of showing what comics the characters drew in their spare time come about in Sweatshop #1? Peter: From the moment we conceived of doing Sweatshop — “we” meaning Joey Cavalieri and I — one of the first things we had in mind, was to have a setting with this wide variety of cartoonists with different aspirations who, left to their own devices, would each be drawing in completely different styles. So we just thought it

would be both really funny and only natural to occasionally show what strips they’d create on their own. It’s appealing because, instead of listening to their thought balloons, you can just have them draw the way they interpreted what happened in the main story, but through their own writing and drawing. It tells you that much more about those characters and the way they perceive things. CBA: Are there real antecedents to these characters? Is Mel Bowling a conglomerate of different personalities you’ve either read about or knew? Peter: He’s the quintessential cranky old man. There was a Web site called <icebox.com> which featured a bunch of Web cartoons. It was one of the many dotcoms to go out of business in the Big Crash. A comedian friend of mine, Dana Gould, and I did four episodes of a cartoon for them about Murray Wilson, who is [Beach Boys’] Brian Wilson’s father. A TV movie about the Wilson family had been recently telecast and the actor playing Brian Wilson’s dad was completely insane, chewing up all the furniture, just going nuts. And we both just loved it! There’s nothing funnier than a cranky old man just totally terrorizing anybody. [laughs] So we made a Web cartoon show about him, but the dotcom went out of business. I loved working with that type of character, so Mel Bowling is very much Murray Wilson. He’s Brian Wilson’s father all over again, only now he’s a hack cartoonist. That’s how Sweatshop came to being: Joey and I were having lunch, sharing anecdotes about crazy, cranky old cartoonists, just laughing about these egomaniacal tyrants and stories we’ve heard. So we said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we had a guy like that in a comic strip?” Millie, in many ways is modeled after my own Aunt Millie. In fact, physically, Mel and Millie look like my Uncle Lloyd and Aunt Millie. In my minds eye, I modeled Mel after my uncle. That’s why Mel still dresses in those ’70s styles, because my Uncle Lloyd died in the ’70s, so I still think of him in safari jumpsuits and with muttonchop sideburns and stuff like that. [laughter] CBA: Would you say that the character Nick Calamari is the closest to you? Peter: Not really in personality, but in the way he draws? The type of cartoons he likes and the way he draws. Personality-wise, I’d like to think I’m a bit more mature than he is. He’s the type of guy who’s full of wisecracks and says all this stuff behind people’s backs, but if they confront him, he just folds like a house of cards. Whereas, I’d like to think I make fun of people behind their

backs and to their faces! [laughter] But there’s aspects of my own personality in all the characters, to an equal degree, I’d have to say. CBA: Even the guy who draws super-heroes?

Peter: Sure, to some degree. CBA: Sweatshop is really a quintessential look at different types of personalities in the comics industry itself. Nick perhaps loves the form, Alfred loves the characters, Mel loves the money, Carrie loves self-expression… In real life, there’s a constant conflict taking place in the field about the art form and about the characters. I guess I’m just rambling. [laughter] But I think Sweatshop is a really good setup. In the first issue, you’re obviously poking fun at a specific strip with Word Up? What’s the reference? Peter: More than anything else, the strip I’m satirizing is Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks, because the strip is in the news a lot. I’m also making fun of Doonesbury, as well, as

Boondocks is very much the “black Doonesbury.” Right now, he’s the cartoonist always getting in the news, what with Boondocks being dropped from papers for making fun of George Bush and stuff like that. CBA: With Neat Stuff and Hate, you very often made fun of the demographic who was your most devoted audience. Hate really was THE comic book for Gen X and grunge in the ’90s, but your politics always seemed a bit right of the Seattle scene, y’know? Sure you made fun of right-wing radio commentators with Studs Kirby, but you also made fun of the PC leftwing attitude. Isn’t that biting the hand that feeds you? Peter: No, because they love it. [laughter] Most people with a good sense of humor are also able to laugh at themselves. CBA: Do you find it amusing to be in the belly of the beast, so to speak, living in Seattle? Of this political attitude that’s perhaps extreme? Peter: It is a very politicized city, but I think in a good way. What I like about the politics of Seattle, in a real practical, nuts-and-bolts sense, is it’s relatively… To be quite blunt, it’s much less corrupt than the East Coast. I grew up in New York, where there’s so little accountability. My parents and my in-laws just paid a fortune in property taxes, and who knows where that money went? It’s in some gangster’s pocket. Whereas here, people are much more politically involved, regardless of what their ideology is. I like that, because they try to keep track of every penny. In the city of Seattle itself, it’s pretty liberal, like San Francisco or any other coastal city. It’s very overwhelmingly Democratic. The Republicans don’t even field candidates. But, of course, once you step into the suburbs, it’s a complete flip-flop, that’s where all the Republicans live. The suburbs are very politically conservative, backing George

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Comic Book Chit-Chat

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W. Bush, and all that. But you know, it’s fine. I agree and disagree with right-wingers and leftwingers pretty much equally depending on the issue, so I’m a freak wherever I go. [laughter] CBA: What’s in the future for you? Are you in Sweatshop for the long haul? How do the numbers look? Peter: Oh, I don’t know, and I’m not going to ask. I made the mistake of constantly bugging and asking what the sales were on Yeah!, and they were dropping like a rock with every issue, and it was silly, too, because there’s nothing I can do about it. So with this title, my policy is I’m not going to ask. I just assume it’s going to get cancelled sooner or later. [laughter] Meanwhile, I’m just writing it to entertain myself, to come up with what I think is a good book, and not worry about sales and try to guess at what the audience out there likes, because I don’t have a clue what anybody wants out there. CBA: Do you have other projects? Peter: Once a month I do a comic for Reason, a political magazine. Go to <www.reason.com> and you can find an archive of everything I’ve done for them. Occasionally I do features, four-page stories. Probably, sooner or later, those will all be collected into a book. And also, I am going to do a one-shot Hulk comic, just like the one-shot Spider-Man I did. CBA: Now, how did The Megalomanical SpiderMan come about? Did Marvel editor Axel Alonso get in touch with you? Peter: Yes, it is Axel. That was a call I sure wasn’t expecting! When he asked me, “Would you consider doing a one-shot Spider-Man comic?” I had the basic idea almost immediately. So, it was just a matter of fleshing it out and making it sound acceptable. There were plenty of times where I thought, “This isn’t going to work; this is going to be impossible; they’re not going to accept this,” but what’s great about Axel is… Any editor will say you can’t do this and you can’t do that, but Axel will immediately come up with possible alternatives… Thus doing my job for me! [laughs] CBA: The sign of a good editor? Peter: Yeah! The book sold well. Of course, it was riding the back of a successful movie, but it sold well enough so there was no reason why they wouldn’t let me do another one. So now I’m going to do a Hulk comic, but it’s not going to be out in time for the movie. Instead it’s going to be out in time for the DVD. [laughter] CBA: What was the concept for the Spider-Man

one-shot, “Peter Parker is Steve Ditko”? Peter: Yeah. It’s pretty much a “What If…?” scenario, where Peter Parker has a crisis which causes him to reevaluate what he’s doing, so he becomes much more business-oriented, make-abuck-oriented, and is turned into a hyper-version of Stan Lee (or at least I used Stan Lee references). Then he has another crisis, which makes him reevaluate what’s happened to him all over again, so he winds up turning into an exaggerated version of Steve Ditko. [laughter] CBA: Is there something similar coming around with the Hulk one-shot, maybe dealing with Kirby’s rage? Peter: Oh no. There the duality already exists within the character himself. So, in a nutshell, the idea behind the Hulk is modern science created the Hulk, causing this huge split in Bruce Banner’s personality, where he turns into this completely different being. So, in my story, he’s trying to devise a way to cure himself from turning into the Hulk and/or taking control when he is the Hulk. Yet, these days, everyone is taking drugs to alter our personality or behavior, drugs that can turn us into lion or sheep, depending on what the situation calls for, so I tie Banner’s producement to that as well, thus pointing out that his situation isn’t all that unique. [laughter] So it just becomes this escalating insanity of reinventing your personality through science. CBA: Are these “mainstream” projects going to be a continual foray for you? Peter: Boy, the Spider-Man comic I did sold like 50,000 copies, so you’d think Marvel wouldn’t sneeze at that, and they’d be like, “Oh yeah! Sure, let’s have him do another one. Why not?” But they suddenly had a lot of problems with the Hulk book. First it was green-lit and then it wasn’t. They pulled back and, for a long time, it looked as if I wasn’t going to do it, but Axel kept bugging and bugging them to let me do it. But it looked like it wasn’t going to happen for the longest time. Now — finally! — the Hulk thing is green-lit, but unless it sells at least 50,000, I get the feeling that… Well, you never know. Who knows what’s going to happen? CBA: Were you a Marvel fan in the ’60s? Peter: I liked the concept of super-heroes as a kid, just because — like all little boys — I would tie towels around my neck and zoom around the yard. I loved the old Superman TV show and especially the ’60s Batman series, just completely addicted to that show and I just loved it to death. But when I would go and buy DC’s Superman and Batman comics, I would be really disappointed. I

thought they were so dry. Now I like some of the old Mort Weisinger comics… Jimmy Olsen, “Bizarro,” I like that stuff now, but the Weisinger books totally gave me the creeps when I was a kid. I just thought it was really dry and… CBA: …death-obsessed? [laughs] Peter: No, just dull! While the Marvel stuff… I had some older neighbor kids who went Marvelcrazy back in the mid-’60s, and I would read them when I was at their house. I didn’t get into them much either, mainly because I found the “to be continued” business to be extremely annoying. But I definitely found them a better product than DC, mainly the art. I loved Jack Kirby’s work, especially the way he drew bad guys; I loved the way he drew monsters and bad guys and ugly faces, but I would just get so annoyed when I’d reach the end and it wasn’t the end; you had to buy the next issue. Even as a kid, I was like, “What a scam!” One title that I did love was Not Brand Ecch. I thought that was hilarious. I thought the art by Marie Severin in it was great, too. I loved that comic book. CBA: Did you read the late ’60s run of SpiderMan before you did Megalomanical? It seems learned, like you studied them… Peter: I did lots of research, as I was determined to make it a really good comic. So yeah, I did my homework. [Fantagraphics marketing director] Eric Reynolds has all the old, classic Spider-Man issues in his collection. So I read the first 10 or 20 issues of Spider-Man, the old Steve Ditko ones. Since the story starts out in 1968, then Marvel sent me some of those John Romita comics, so I could see what Gwen looked like and the way Peter Parker was dressing in ’68, when he had the turtleneck and sideburns, y’know. [laughter]

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Hot Stuff Ten Years Trippin’ Celebrating the first decade of that Brit mag about comics, Tripwire If there’s one thing the American comics scene certainly doesn’t get enough of, it’s a steady dose of the British writers. I don’t mean those who script the funnybooks; certainly there’s more than enough of those fellers around! Rather, it’s the peculiar and unique-to-the-U.K. attitude permeating from their fandom press. While I confess I haven’t seen enough to pass as an expert exactly, much of what has caught my gaze has been quite impressionable. As editor of Comic Book Artist, I feel kindred to any number of Brits as their outlook on the art form and the industry is fascinatingly irreverent and yet simultaneously affectionate. In CBA’s initial run, I was known to ruminate just how valuable and insightful editor Frank Plowright’s exhaustive Slings & Arrows Guide — an encyclopedia of reviews covering virtually every American comic book title of the last 40 years — was (and should add how excited I am that a second edition is forthcoming). I also haven’t been shy about declaring that one of this magazine’s most valuable assets is the consultation of David A. Roach, the Welsh comics artist and former editor of the excellent ’zine, Hellfire, whose appreciation and keen knowledge of even the most minute aspects of comics history leaves me floored every time we engage in our bi-monthly marathon phone chats. (Those conversations alone have helped me formulate years worth of planning for this mag, whether inspired by talk of the use of South American artists in Battle Picture Library or Jay Scott Pike’s great DC romance comics work or the under-appreciation of José Luis Garcia-Lopez.) Hell, I like the Brits, I really do! Honest! Some of my best friends are Limeys… Another bloke living across the pond I love to hear from every so often is the ever-ambitious and mile-a-minute talker Joel Meadows, editor of Tripwire. Quite an animated chap, Joel’s enthusiasm for comics and for producing magazines about comics is infectious, and with Ye Ed not having a

boatload of peers in that department, we can talk it up for quite a spell. But, as with Plowright and Roach, the proof of Meadows’ commitment to the art form is what he has produce: One damned fine publication. At an astonishing 10 years of age, Tripwire has had its struggles in firmly establishing a proper identity, but it’s always been remarkably enthusiastic and sincere. Sure, some of the early issues spewed a bit too much venomous criticism for my tastes (and some contributors’ often incomprehensible blatherings were increasingly tiresome), but Tripwire’s fully matured and is now courageously embarking on a bold new course, covering gaming, trading cards, movies, etc. (a direction CBA finds easier, perhaps, to resist, but then financial success is rarely a priority at Casa Cooke!). But to mark their first decade, Joel — with deputy editor Gary Marshall — has produced a handsome, 158-page celebration, Tripwire x 10, pretty much a best-of collection combined with a healthy mix of recycled articles and new art. The latter is perhaps the most immediately impressive, as creators as diverse and notable as Will Eisner, Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, Paul Grist, Tim Bradstreet, Brian Bolland, Kevin Nowlan, Darwyn Cooke, and innumerable others contribute full-page pin-ups. But, as Ye Ed doubts there’s too many U.S. readers with a complete Tripwire collection out there, the reprinted material is pretty “cherce,” as they say. Hardly a significant mainstream comics creator has been left out and while much is of the “current-project” type discussion, there’s more than enough brain food here to last a few sit-downs. Brian Bendis, Alan Moore, Todd McFarlane, Alex Ross, Joe Quesada, Kevin Smith, Eisner, Miller, Mignola… the list is impressive. Hell, forget the name-dropping as Ashley Wood’s bee-yoo-tiful cover is easily worth the $14.95 price tag. Overall though, I suspect these Brits like American comics more than we do, given the affection and attention displayed to U.S. titles in this collection. Unlike CBA, Tripwire has pretty much just covered the contemporary scene (though some of the interviews do wander to more dusty subjects) but the much of the reprinted stuff is relatively timeless. So it’s worth the looksee, kind reader, and I’m definitely interested in checking the results of the magazine’s recent revamping. No doubt, it’ll be a trip.

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More Hot Stuff Warm “Blankets” Ye Ed sez Craig Thompson’s instant classic makes for comforting reading It’s funny how, if you were an avid comics fan as a kid (and I’m betting at least 90% of CBA’s readers were), to this day you vividly remember where you were when reading certain comics. More often than not, I was out back of Healey’s News Store (the best magazine shop in the entire state of Rhode Island — then and now — luckily just a few blocks from our apartment), lying in the grassy field, sipping a Coke and chewing Caramel Cremes, my nose stuck in Conan the Barbarian or Batman or Doctor Spektor or E-Man… sigh. Sometimes the memory is tied to reading an exceptional funnybook, very often not, but such crystal-clear recollections can be nonetheless comforting, bathing Ye Ed in sentimental feelings of nostalgia, reaffirming that, yeah, I did have a pretty cool adolescence, as I relive the sensation of reading “Metamorphosis” by Jim Starlin for the first time… Oh, it still happens as a grown-up, though my adult comic-book memories become seared into the brain more vividly because they are encounters with excellence, not only ambiance. That is, I can tell you exactly where I was when first encountering the talents of Chris Ware, or finally picking up a copy of Love and Rockets, or stumbling onto David Mazzuchelli’s Rubber Blankets. Becoming acquainted with those works somehow changed me, opened my eyes a little more, and that sense of wonder and awe, which had enveloped me 24/7 as an teenager, would make a return visit, reaffirming my love with comics all over again. As clear as yesterday, I think back to the 1999 WizardWorld convention, when this guy I had just met, Chris Staros (famed as the editor/writer of The Staros Report, the lamented annual survey of American alternative comics) pressed a complimentary copy of Good-Bye, Chunky Rice into my hands at the Top Shelf booth, telling me in his cozy Southern, sing-song drawl, “Review Chunky in CBA, if you can, Jon. But even if you won’t, just read it. It’s as good as it gets…” This was my first show in Chicago and, uninvited to any parties that first night, hoo-hum, I look through my pile of swag and the green cover of Craig Thompson’s tome cries out to me… Chunky Rice was definitely the best graphic novel I read in 1999 and really, encountering it the way I did — through the generosity of a publisher actually (gulp!) promoting his publications! — it changed my life, eventually prompting me to join Top Shelf as I began to realize that Staros and Brett Warnock were partners committed to publishing comics that were not only good, but mattered. Anyway, for a playah in the biz to recognize Mr. Thompson’s genius goes a long, long way with Ye Ed. So you can imagine that I wasn’t going to wait for a convention when Staros mentioned he had an advance copy of Craig’s long-awaited follow-up to Chunky, the 592-page opus, Blankets. Just days before this

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issue was due on press the package arrived and another exquisite moment of discovery was branded into memory… First, a disclaimer: Obviously Comic Book Artist now shares the same publisher as Craig Thompson, but believe it when I say that this review — as well as the inclusion of a Thompson sketchbook in this same ish — has much more to do with my sincere affection for the man’s work, and it is less any attempt to be a practical marketing guy (’coz practical I ain’t!). The cartoonist is, quite simply, a world-class creator and one of the most important participants in sequential art to come along since the aforementioned genius cartoonist behind Jimmy Corrigan, Mr. Ware of Chicago, Illinois. Blankets is a graphic memoir (if based on autobiographical experiences, can we still call it a graphic “novel”?), detailing the poignant moments of joy and sorrow and terror and love in the 28 year old cartoonist’s early years, spotlighting first his life with younger brother Phil, and quickly moving on to the tome’s main theme, his relationship with Raina, a precious, compassionate girlfriend, the singular focus of Craig’s late teenage years. While uncommonly sensitive in projecting the sheer intensity of an emotional adolescence so filled with angst and doubt, Blankets is not overtly sentimental or nostalgic, but rather unblanched in depicting some of life’s more hellacious events, be it child abuse or divorce or the crushing of youth’s independent spirit (even by those with the best of intentions). Plainly, this is one of sequential art’s most authentic and sincere depictions of those sometimes sublime, usually gawd-awful years and Craig remains as perceptive and insightful now as he was as a teen, though today instilled with an extraordinary ability to draw the hell out of anything, with an enchanting design sense, and his pacing and dialogue is expert. But as self-absorbed and woe-is-me the teenagers of Craig’s generation — or any other’s — have been, the cartoonist’s empathetic eye is also unusually keen when focused on, well, people of any age, as this reader was most moved by the realization of Raina’s 30-something father that his daughter wasn’t his little girl any more. Kleenex, anyone? (A word on the packaging of the trade paperback: Because of the beauty of the book’s size and format, it’s easy to imagine Craig intends for those sensitive high school students and arty types lucky enough to find this manifesto of hope, might carry Blankets around, as would a country preacher grasp his gospel text, ’til dog-eared and smudged and creased and dented from beloved repeat readings, indoors and out, through fair weather and foul, and it’s substantial enough at nearly 600 pages to carry real weight. It’s a book made to cherish and it shows.) Quite simply, Blankets is a true masterpiece, each page a stunning example of the uniqueness of this art form which melds words and pictures to create something more. Blankets is comics at its very best.

ABOVE: This page by Craig Thompson, from his excellent new graphic memoir, Blankets, is not indicative of his somewhat more realistic approach for the book (at least compared to Good-Bye, Chunky Rice and his Nickelodeon magazine work), but it clearly shows his masterful drawing ability. ©2003 Craig Thompson.

The Art of Austin Terry Austin, one of the most beloved inkers of all, has a new sketchbook!

Inky Fingers Press, P.O. Box 894, Woodstock, NY 12498-0894

The Goon Powell’s book makes Dark Horse debut POW! Boy, is Eric Powell quickly making a name for himself in the comics biz or wot? After the writer/artist produced four issues of The Goon (and one special) under the Avatar and Albatross Exploding Funnybooks imprints, as the folks in Milwaukie, Oregon — who just happened to be putting together their new horror genre line-up — sat up and took notice. Dark Horse Comics has invited the very talented creator to take his wild property over Mike Richardson’s way, so look for ish #1 now on stands! DH calls it, “a hilarious blend of pulpy horror and slapstick comedy following the ongoing misadventures of the man they call the Goon and his spastic sidekick, Franky, as they battle the legions of the undead!”

Terry Austin, a longtime CBA friend and contributor, can certainly be categorized as one of the most highly-regarded inkers in the business, as his renowned work on the fabled Claremont/Byrne X-Men of the late ’70s/early ’80s can attest. He’s also no slouch when it comes to penciling and inking his own work, and no place are his talents more evident than in his recently selfpublished sketchbook, Austin Art: 60 Pages of Drawings by Terry Austin. Featuring a bounty of work by our pal (including a nifty section devoted to bodacious babes and another to the artist’s apparent obsession with Popeye, the Sailor Man!), what’s especially cool about T.A.’s effort — beyond the images, natch — is the inclusion of (ye ghads!) footnotes to the art presented, only verifying the great comics historian/geek that dwells in that big heart of the guy. Y’see, Terry is a fellah (who’s been toiling in the field since the late 1970s, and not enough in recent years… get the hint, pro editors?) who really loves comics, and Ye Ed can’t recommend this very first collection of the artist’s work enough. You got your super-heroine pin-ups (woof!), some Austin Christmas cards illustrations, faux comic book covers, rarely seen illos, and, yep, a few pages devoted to a certain group of marvelous mutants!You can order this goodie directly by making out check to Terry Austin for $21.95 (postpaid U.S. First Class) or $29.95 (International Air Mail, U.S. funds only, please) and send to:

A Matter of Abuse Barry Windsor-Smith, The Incredible Hulk, and Marvel Comics in the ’80s

BY JON B. COOKE, CBA EDITOR The conversation started casually enough. During an online correspondence with Alex Bialy, studio assistant to the eminent comic-book creator Barry Windsor-Smith, while requesting information on the upcoming Young GODS book [see this issue’s “Comic Book Chit-Chat” section], this editor made an off-hand reference about the use of parental abuse as a major theme in Ang Lee’s Hulk movie, which, to CBA, sounded strikingly similar to a proposed story the artist/writer had pitched to Marvel in the mid-1980s (but has since been developing on his own as the massive graphic novel, The Monster), about which BWS had mentioned to CBA a few years ago. Would CBA like the exclusive story behind “Thanksgiving” — the proposed story title — and what transpired with Marvel? (Of course!) And, in quick measure, a copy of BWS’s original 1984 proposal, along with pages and pages of original art Xeroxes arrived, and questions and answers

were quickly exchanged via e-mail. Comic Book Artist: How did The Hulk story, “Thanksgiving,” come to you? What did you hope to accomplish?

Barry Windsor-Smith: I have to be very brief about this, as a thorough answer would run the full length of your magazine. It’s a one, two, three, voilà thing: One: In the mid-’80s, a new crop of Marvel pencilers turned the pleasant simplicity of Lee and Kirby’s heroic action principle into an ugly violence principle. Two: I wrote an extremely lengthy — unfinished to this date — thesis about American super-hero comics’ descent into vulgarism due to the new pencilers seemingly complete lack of perspective and/or historical knowledge of the American super-hero comic book. This may sound tedious, trite and decidedly old news; but in 1984 I felt like I was the only observer half-awake enough to see what was happening. Three: The voilà bit relates solely to my desire to bring a hitherto unconsidered significance to Lee and Kirby’s characters. That in itself was prompted by the graceless interpretations of those characters at the hands of the newer artists and writers — probably editors, too.

Not to say that Kirby’s Hulk had depth beyond a metaphor or two, but whatever weight it did have was being utterly lost to the portrayal of excessive violence for its own sake — which is no sake whatsoever, in my opinion. So, I went beyond Hulk’s pseudo-science Lee/Kirby origin. It’s one thing to say that he gets big when aroused, if you get my drift, but why the rage? That’s what I wanted to address. It was a direct result of his physical abuse during childhood; that and the murder of his mother at the hands of his father. CBA: How can such a real-life situation as child abuse work in a comic-book fantasy realm? BWS: It depends how you do it. Lee and Kirby never even thought to explain why Bruce Banner became a rampaging monster when his ire was up. The simple fact is, Banner became the Hulk because the Hulk was created by Jack Kirby, and Kirby’s characters were based upon action heroes with several exclamation marks. My story intended to underpin the rampaging monster with a credible, real-world causation for Banner’s muscular inner demons. CBA: Can you detail the pitch and what happened? BWS: In 1984, I presented Marvel with a three-

or four-page proposal outlining the plot [see next page sidebar]. I warned them that it would be controversial.

I offered the written proposal to Jim Shooter only — as he was the editor-in-chief at the time — but as I had done before and since (with Weapon X and “Lifedeath 3” (the latter, which eventually became Adastra In Africa) coming to mind as examples), I brought penciled pages from the story along with the proposal. (I’ve never

submitted a story/plot/concept without pages of continuity, script, etc., to back it up.) In the mid-’80s, child abuse was not a widely known or understood phenomenon. By and large, this period was pre-Oprah (if you understand what I’m saying), and the generationsspanning effects of child-abuse was not widely recognized in the United States at that time. I wanted this story to be published as a fill-in during the run of The Incredible Hulk 65¢ comic. I felt that such a venue would give the story its maximum impact; a theme and a story that nobody whatsoever could have expected. Once the editors started getting fiddly with me, I figured they wanted to turn the piece into some inane shit like that Spider-Man drugs story where Gil Kane drew some kid walking a building ledge with psycho-bubbles floating about his head, going “Oooh, th’ colors, man,” or whatever the hell it was. (I’m not an abused child myself, but I did have specifically personal reasons for wanting to attach this syndrome to Jack Kirby’s Hulk.) I also warned Marvel that certain adult language had to be used, though mild by today’s standards. But that was the problem. Although I was allowed to employ “god” and “damn,”

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Backstory THE HULK A SPECIAL STORY Barry Windsor-Smith July 4, 1984

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camera as we are watching The Hulk, confined to his room (as was the child he is representing) wailing in agony of the lived and relived experience now as the past dissolves into the present and the sound of gunfire becomes real and the army close in on the abandoned house The Hulk is occupying. Throughout the entire story, The Hulk is a meek background figure (despite his seven-foot green bulk) who cowers in corners and sits, pathetic and awkward, at the dinner table. He is a mark for both parents and, as tensions mount, he is either glowered at, railed at, and in several instances, struck by his aggravated parents.

BASIC CONTENT OF STORY: Plot centers around Bruce Banner’s childhood. The Hulk relives a particularly harrowing day in his past. This is the story of Banner’s working-class, middle American childhood. In a mannered fantasy — Twilight Zone — tradition, The Hulk, when entering an abandoned house in refuge from a pressing military attack, relives the last days in his childhood home. Thanksgiving Day 1950 was the day when his father, Tom Banner, a recent and embittered W.W. II veteran, turned on his family for the final irrevocable time. Employing a battered and disconsolate childhood as the springboard for the modern-day Bruce Banner’s anti-social and violent attitudes, the story explores the damage caused by mis-matched parenthood and effects of the Second World War on the heart and mind of the veteran Tom Banner. Bruce Banner, an 11 year old in 1950, is represented as the full grown, seven foot Hulk throughout this fantasy. The story is called Thanksgiving and details the tensions the Banner household suffers when it becomes apparent that the family dinner, planned with eight relatives in mind, falls apart as one by one, brothers, sisters and in-laws cancel the visit with feeble excuses. The truth is that Tom Banner has alienated his family with his explosive, argumentative temper. During the solemn dinner with only Tom, wife Janet and son Bobby (Bruce) present at the lavish setting, Tom gets inebriated. Janet’s brother, Phil, and his French wife, Nicolette, turn up suddenly (they never cancelled; Tom forgot about them although Janet didn’t) and they, unfortunately, become the targets for Tom’s drunken, paranoid hostility. Phil was a correspondent in the war: Did no fighting; Tom hates him for that (and also hates him simply because he’s Janet’s brother) and Nicolette is French (Phil married her in France and brought her back to the U.S.) and that’s all she has to be, for in the eyes of Tom Banner, she’s a slut who must have fraternized with the Germans. The domestic madness reaches an awful climax when Tom goes for his service revolver. Shots are fired and the police come. The final argument and shooting take place off-

It is of considerable importance to point out that this somewhat extraordinary story requires the use of what the comic book publishing world might consider profanity. The terms I need to use in the script (all spouting from the paranoiac and drunken Tom Banner) are actually mild when paralleled to other — perhaps more sophisticated — media such as film, print and (at this date) television. To cut to the quick I need to employ the following terms: Damn Goddam Bitch Hell (as in “Like Hell you will”) Slut These are comparitively mild terms, in my opinion. I’ve edited it down from stronger, more believable coinage. The upshot is that for this story to have IMPACT, it must be published in the standard format (The Incredible Hulk) and without any special fanfare (I brought what could have been a 30-odd page story down to 22 for this very reason). Approval — within Marvel and to the satisfaction of the Comics Code Authority — is paramount and I’m prepared to offer any raison d’etre if it isn’t apparent. This story is about parent abuse and childhood trauma, which is an important issue. I believe that by sliding the topic into a regular comic book involving an established Marvel Comics character, a greater, more significant understanding of the idea can be achieved. This as opposed to (I feel inclined to suggest) the SpiderMan/Drugs issues of a decade ago that, due to their pre-publicity and etc., were ultimately regarded as hype for a medium that needed attention and was asking for recognition as a relevant form of art.

“THE MONSTER, the major graphic story by Barry Windsor-Smith [beginning life as the above 1984 Incredible Hulk story proposal], is a work in progress. This ground-breaking novel explores the disastrous effects of a Nazi program of genetic engineering, discovered at the close of World War II, upon two American families. Told through intimate, naturalistic dialogue and drawings, this tale of the cascading legacy of profound evil blazes new trails in revealing the capacity of comics to be a powerful storytelling

medium. The Monster is being created as a black-&-white book of nearly 300 pages, a monumental narrative that is meant to be a compelling first read, subsequently revealing layer upon layer of nuance each time it is revisited. (The completion date for this project, slated to be published by DC Comics through their Vertigo Imprint, is not yet known.)” —Quoted from www.barrywindsor-smith.com [See a sneak preview of The Monster at the above Web site]

Shooter would not accept the use of the term “god-damn,” but there was no way I was going to write “gosh darn!” for a drunken psychopath about to murder his wife. I wouldn’t concede to Marvel’s outdated policies. They wouldn’t rise to the occasion by accepting the necessities of natural dialogue in and on such important issues as spousal abuse, child abuse, and the U.S. military’s indifference to the mental and emotional health of their veterans of foreign wars. Since 1984, these issues have come to blinding light, of course. Sometime after I’d presented my “Hulk-asa-battered-child” concept to Shooter and before my refusal to concede, several professionals around the Marvel offices remarked upon the originality of the idea. I forget who but I recall being stopped in a hallway by somebody who said “Why didn’t anybody think of that before?” Many years later — in 1994, I think— I showed copies of the original pages to somebody visiting my studio. The guy said, “Oh, just like Bill Mantlo’s story, eh?” I had no idea what he was talking about. But I found out. After getting ahold of a copy of The Incredible Hulk #312, I was astonished that writer Bill Mantlo had plagiarized my story. Sickened, too. He’d taken everything: The story, the characters, even the setting. Although, because he was working from bad Xerox copies of copies, he’d either misinterpreted my Thanksgiving set — turkey on the table and everything — as a Christmas scenario, or perhaps he was just being “creative.” From what I’ve been told, my pencils and script for the first half of the book that was Xeroxed many times over and a set of

these pages ended up in Mantlo’s possession. It was from these copies where he plagiarized my story. Beforehand someone entirely unknown to me sent a copy of Peter David’s prose novel about the Hulk [What Savage Beast, 1995, Putnam], which the author had dedicated to Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and… Bill Mantlo. I didn’t comprehend the meaning of that until it came to light that Mantlo had stolen my story. I guess Peter David also used my story in the novel. Now they’re using it in the film. The pages of pencil art which had originally accompanied my proposal had script notes in the borders. On some, I had handlettered the dialogue with balloons, in pencil. The title, “Thanksgiving,” was also lettered. Below that was my dedication to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. This added to my rancor once I realized the connection between Peter David’s Hulk novel — wherein he dedicated the book to Lee, Kirby and Mantlo — and my own work. I think it’s beyond any reasonable doubt that Mantlo came up with this story independently, as Tom suggests. The graphic staging (by a young and inexperienced Mike Mignola) includes variations on my own artwork: The physical likeness between my Tom Banner and Mike’s drawings of the father; my specific use of a symbolic staircase was apparent in

Mike’s drawings (although without any purpose or rationale); my Thanksgiving dinner tableau compared to Mantlo’s Christmas dinner tableau. Most of all, though, the pallid ghost image of the Hulk in green color-hold in Mantlo’s story is a poor relation to my concept of actually showing the monstrous Hulk sitting at the Thanksgiving table as he relived the events of 1950 when his father murdered his mother (and the child’s aunt and uncle, as it happens). In his column, “But I Digress…” for The Comic Buyer’s Guide (#1321, March 12, 1999) longtime Hulk scripter and novelist Peter David said he was aware of the BWS/Mantlo controversy, “and [since] my inquiries into the matter with Marvel editorial months ago yielded nothing concrete, I can’t say for sure, although WindsorSmith certainly makes a convincing case.” When asked by CBA why he gave Mantlo a dedication, David said, “Because The Incredible Hulk #312 was very influential in much of my subsequent handling of the Hulk. It lay the foundation that I built the entire concept of Bruce's Multiple Personality Disorder upon. The Hulk/Banner relationship had, until then, been treated mostly as one man fighting his inner rage. The revelation of Bruce's childhood abuse suggested a totally different angle: The notion that Bruce suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder due to the abuse That rather than the Gamma Bomb creating the Hulk, it simply exacerbated a condition that already existed.

TOP LEFT: The Incredible Hulk #312 cover. ABOVE: Panels from The Monster and Hulk #312 respectively showing similar settings. Hulk ©’03 Marvel; The Monster ©’03 BWS.

21 CBA V.2 #1

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22 CBA V.2 #1

And it further suggested the ‘cure’ storyline that led to the merged Hulk. So since that issue served as a springboard for so much, I felt it appropriate to mention Bill. This was before I'd ever heard anything of Barry's claims.” CBA contacted Shooter’s second-in-command, Tom DeFalco, for his memories of the WindsorSmith proposal and subsequent Mantlo story. DeFalco said, “I’m afraid I’m not going to be very much help because, while I remember hearing that BWS had submitted some kind of Hulk proposal — and I assume that I heard it from Shooter — I never saw the actual proposal. But the aspect of linking Bruce’s abuse as a child to his rage as the Hulk is a good idea… and I remember hearing a few idle discussions about it. “In those days, groups of creators often sat around and had idle discussions about this or that. Linking the Hulk’s rage to earlier child abuse was often brought up because it was a very natural idea. However, while assorted creators often discussed the idea, this was idle chit-chat and I don’t think any of those creators actually planned to do a story about it. Those aren’t the kinds of stories we wrote in those days.” After DeFalco scripted the 1984-85 Machine Man mini-series (which the British artist inked, co-plotted and partially drew), BWS “started doing more work for Marvel,” the former Marvel editor-in-chief explained. “[Barry] often stopped in to visit me… but he never gave me a copy of his Hulk proposal. Why would he? While I was Shooter’s second-in-command at that time, I was mainly concentrating on Star Comics and our licensed properties.” “I don’t know if Mantlo received a copy,” DeFalco continued. “I also don’t know why anyone would give him a copy… or who would give him a copy. I worked with Bill when I was editing the Spider-Man titles — long before I ever met BWS — and I can tell you that the guy was an idea factory. Bill would come up with springboard after springboard… and never seemed to be at a loss for ideas. “I had to reread The Incredible Hulk #312 last year

when I was writing my book [Hulk: The Incredible Guide, Dorling Kindersley, June 2003]. If memory serves, there are three points of similarity: 1.) Bruce’s father is guilty of domestic abuse. (In Barry’s story, I’m not sure who the abuse is aimed at.; in Bill’s story, it was directed at Bruce because his father thought he would grow up to become a monster.) 2.) Holidays are featured in both stories. (In Barry’s, the story is centered on a Thanksgiving Day dinner. In Bill’s, there is an early one or two page scene dealing with an incident on one Christmas morning.) 3) The Hulk is a background presence/observer in both tales. However,

having just read Barry’s proposal and having reread Bill’s story about a year ago, I’d have to say that these are two different stories. Barry’s goes in one direction; Bill’s goes in another… but that’s just my opinion!” Asked to comment, BWS replied, “Whilst he never saw the written proposal, he did see the pages in both their original form and copies. I recall Tom and I in his office discussing the ‘Thanksgiving’ story. He seemed very impressed with it (as did Shooter), and never mentioned that such an idea had been previously considered. It might have been Tom actually who wondered

According to numerous sources, Bill Mantlo suffered permanent brain damage after being struck by a car while roller-blading in San Francisco in the early 1990s and is unable to respond to questions. Jim Shooter did not respond to CBA at presstime.

aloud why nobody had thought of this before. “He mentioned that perhaps I should changed the father’s name from Tom Banner to Robert Banner (i.e., Bob or Bobby), as he believed that sons sometimes resent being named after their fathers. Although I kept Tom as the name, I appreciated this insightful suggestion whilst pointing out that Tom was his own name. Tom blushed slightly and said, ‘Oh yeah! I didn’t think of that.’ We both laughed.” Regarding DeFalco’s characterization of Mantlo as an “idea factory,” BWS said, “Oddly, this almost entirely contradicts what I have heard

about Mantlo from other Marvel people from the time. It’s not that he didn’t have ideas; just that they weren’t necessarily his own. Regarding ‘Thanksgiving,’ somebody actually tried to mollify me by saying, ‘Oh, it’s no big deal; Mantlo stole from everybody!’ “It therefore seems to be somewhat credulous to suggest that [Mantlo] was ‘never at a loss for ideas.’ From what I’ve read of his work (which isn’t much, I admit), there was not much to suggest that Bill Mantlo was, in any respect, an original thinker.”

Ultimately, perhaps the real issue here lies in Hollywood’s appropriation — without credit — of the wealth of ideas generated by comic book writers and artists. As elements from Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X Wolverine graphic novel were used in the two Bryan Singer X-Men movies, it begs the question, how does it make a comics creator feel to see his ideas up on the screen without receiving any acknowledgment by the filmmakers or studios reaping millions in box office receipts? “How do I feel about it?” BWS asked. “Regarding The Hulk and Weapon-X, I wasn’t hired by Marvel to produce the work; I created both stories independently of any original work-made-for-hire premise, yet they robbed me of both of them. I haven’t followed mainstream comics at all for some time, but I get second-hand info leading me to believe both Weapon-X and my concept of the Hulk as an abused child have been embedded into the respective origins and back stories of both characters. For which, of course, I receive no credit or compensation. So, how do you think I feel about that?” When asked if he thought Hollywood had an obligation to properly acknowledge comic creators whose ideas have led to multi-million dollar box office success, Peter David said, “Obligation in what sense? Legal? No. Moral? Sure, but we're talking about a place where a movie can cost $100 million to make, earn $350 million, and still be considered deep in the red. So morality doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with anything. “As for the Ang Lee film, everything I've read in terms of interviews with both Ang Lee and James Schamus would seem to indicate a total lack of familiarity with anything past the early Lee/Kirby material and the TV series. They repeatedly say they ‘came up’ with the concept of Bruce having an abusive father for the movie, and display no awareness that much of this psychologically oriented material had already been deeply explored in the comics. I don't think they have any idea who Barry WindsorSmith is, who Bill

PREVIOUS PAGE LEFT AND RIGHT: Mantlo/Mignola’s Tom Banner and BWS’s Brian Banner. Hulk ©Marvel Characters, Inc. The Monster © Barry Windsor-Smith.

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Mantlo is, or who I am. I think they reinvented the wheel. “Which is why, although it may have played out exactly the way BWS says it did and he was ripped off, it's also possible that Bill Mantlo came up with the story entirely on his own. Because the movie is evocative of much of what's been done before, but I don't think the screenwriters or director are at all familiar with it. “To my mind, a far stronger case is to be made for credit and — let's face it — money to be paid to writers whose plot lines are irrefutably used for films. It is indisputable, for instance, that Frank Miller material was cribbed for the Daredevil film, right down to actual dialogue. Events in Amazing Spider-Man #121-122 were used for the entire last half hour of the movie Spider-Man. I don't see Gerry Conway getting screen credit or a nice five-figure check.” When asked, DeFalco said,”On the one hand, I wish that Hollywood had an obligation to acknowledge the significant contributions of comic book artists and writers — then I would have been acknowledged for Mary Jane’s relationship with her family in the Spider-Man film and a few other story points. And Gerry Conway would have gotten credit for the movie’s climax. HOWEVER, I do not think Hollywood has such an obligation. “In this particular case, I would guess that Ang Lee’s film would owe more to Bill Mantlo than BWS… because Bill’s story actually saw print and became part of the official canon… but BWS’s did not. “ BWS replied, “I thoroughly agree with Tom’s evaluations only with more purpose and passion: The character’s originators should be credited and paid when their creations are adapted to film or other media. I’m talking about Kirby, Ditko, Lee,

It’s the comics industry itself that has dis-enfranchised the creators. This is the real point: Not only does the managerial side of commercial comics, with its knotty complex of executives and lawyers, rape the creators without whom they’d have nothing to steal, but the creators themselves are not above callow opportunism. “That Mantlo’s version of my story got into print while ‘Thanksgiving’ suffered delay after delay, is just such a case. While I continued to debate the value of hardline realism in such an important theme, Mantlo pilfered it and turned it into a pallid imitation. “I think it shows the power of the concept that, even in Mantlo’s less than stellar hands, my story captured an important — perhaps even necessary — aspect of why, whether big and green or small and pink, a man can become a monster. “

Wood, and others. That ‘Hollywood’ has no obligation to do this is not necessarily because of some arcane rules devised on the Left Coast.

Postscript: In the comic book review section of the latest Entertainment Weekly (June 27), critic Jeff Jensen writes: “There have, of course, been tweaks to the [Hulk] template, none more provocative than Peter David's influential 1996 story ‘Honey, I Shrunk The Hulk’… which rooted Banner's simmering rage in his father's physical abuse. (Ang Lee's serious-minded flick, by the way, borrows from and evolves David's innovations.)” In the recent two-hour History Channel special, Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked, the Hulk’s origin is discussed and reference made to the character being an abused child in the past. The visual presented was a Mike Mignola/Gerry Talaoc panel from The Incredible Hulk #312… Sigh.

fin

• CBA requests for contributions and other help on future issue themes and subjects (and maybe feed Ye Ed’s collecting mania!) • Comic Book Artist is committed to establish and maintain close, productive relations with the comics community and we’d like to offer various ways to help. REVIEWERS First up, we’d like to launch a capsule review section and are seeking writers willing to work for comp copies to put together 150-200 word reviews of current comic book work. Each section will headline one longer piece, approx. 500-750 words. Please query first. Be sure to include mailing address and phone number with each review submitted.

REVIEW COPIES Of course, our reviewers need something to review, so here’s a shout-out to all creators and publishers to send copies of your comics and related material to CBA for possible review. While there’s no guarantee we’ll choose every submission, we do vow to include a “Duly Noted” section each issue which, at the very least, will give a brief description and ordering info.

BOOK EXCERPTS As you can see with the Stan Lee article this ish, CBA is dedicated to frequently including chapters of upcoming nonfiction books devoted to comics. Please query Ye Ed directly well in advance of book’s final publication date.

COMMISSIONERS OF COMMISSIONS CBA is very eager to establish a closer relationship with artists, especially comic book veterans, and we’re offering free listings to those creators currently selling commission artwork. Just e-mail CBA and include “Commission Listing” as the subject header, or drop us a postcard. Include name, address, preferable contact (phone/e-mail, etc.), breakdown of prices (i.e., head shot, full body) and general turnaround time.

IT’S NO SECRET ORIGINS

In an effort to assist in promoting creator-owned properties, CBA is anxious to establish a double-page section each ish which will introduce characters and concepts to our readers, hopefully reaching folks unfamiliar with the material (as well as giving us the prestige of featuring custom-produced comics material, exclusive to CBA). We ask

that it be produced specifically for us and request that the work not be reprinted for six-months. We’re looking for either a comic story or pin-up outlining (hopefully with wit and verve!) just who these characters are and where they come from. Query. Color may be available…

SKETCHBOOKS Check out the beautiful Craig “Blankets” Thompson sketchbook section this ish and you’ll see we’re featuring pages to showcase the more candid work of this field’s best artists. Any ideas? Drop us a line!

SUGGESTIONS Natch, we’re always open to suggestions on themes and subjects for CBA, so feel free to drop us a line with any ideas. Even if you can’t necessarily help with pursuing ’em, we welcome any thoughts.

QUERIES Anybody in search of industry pros or their families, feel free to drop CBA a line and we’ll work to include such requests in this department. Be sure to include proper response contact info.

KEEPIN’ IN TOUCH PROS: Be sure to keep CBA informed as to current and future projects, whether in or out of the comics field, so your aficionados will know where to look for your work. Sending us samples of any new stuff wouldn’t hurt either.

OLD SCHOOL We’ve got some VERY cool retro material coming up devoted to the masters of illustration and comic strip art, including articles/interviews/galleries on Milton Caniff, Noel Sickles, Roy Crane, and many more, so if you’ve got material or suggestions, please clue us in.

TO “THE COMPS”: To all who receive complimentary copies of CBA — and that’s one BIG list — please consider sharing any rarities and other goodies with the mag. While we certainly not asking for quid pro quo — hell, it’s our pleasure to give back to pros who made this field such a pleasure to begin with — we do humbly suggest that maybe you give us a thought should you uncover any cool stuff, whether unpublished art or hitherto unknown material. ALSO: If any compers move, PLEASE send us any change of address, lest we continue sending CBAs to a post office who’s just throwing ’em out.

There’s no way CBA could continue featuring so much cool and diverse material without the help of our kind readers. So, thanks! Here’s some subjects we need help with in the future: TREASURE CHEST CBA is determined to feature as definitive a history of this wonderful and odd Catholic comic that was distributed in parochial schools between 1945-72. We’ve already lined up artists Joe Sinnott, Frank Borth, and Fran Matera for big interviews, but any info on the company — George A. Pflaum, Publisher, Inc., of Dayton Ohio — and other contributors would be great. (One CBA reader wrote sometime ago to say he had bound collections of much of TC’s run but, alas, we’ve lost his number… are you listening…?) We’re also looking to buy a number of issues of TC, so drop us a line if you have reading copies for sale at reasonable prices.

TOPPS BUBBLE GUM While we know the home of Bazooka Joe did produce a fun line of comics in the early to mid-’90s, we also can’t resist taking a good look at the awesome trading cards that company produced over the years, especially the stuff produced by those great comic book artists, from Jack Davis to Wally Wood to Art Spiegelman to Drew Friedman and many others. We’ve lined up Jay Lynch and Bhob Stewart for talks but any and all ideas are welcome as to who else to feature! (Plus, any help in the visual department would be most bodacious.)

P.S. MAGAZINE Did you know there’s a comic-type publication that has included tons of art by Will Eisner, Murphy Anderson, Joe Kubert, and many others, that has been published every month for over 50 years? This delightful U.S. Army maintenance periodical is getting the full-court CBA treatment, so if you’ve got issues to spare of this oddity, please drop us a line.

CRACKED Mort Todd’s history of this longrunning satirical mag headlines this special section, and we’re looking for contributions and suggestions.

HIGH TIMES, ETC. We’d like to cover some of the more obscure publications of the last 40

or 50 years which have featured significant amounts of comics material, including High Times, Apple Pie, Cavalier, Pussycat, the “men’s sweat” mags, and other strange venues.

COMICS WITH AN “X” The revamped CBA is committed to extensive coverage of the underground comix field, and we hope to include “cherce” interviews and art from its 40+ year history. Natch, we want to look at the undie cartoonists’ work in such periodicals as The East Village Other, L.A. Free Press, Gothic Blimp Works, even the college humor mag precursors, and others. Can ya help?

ARCHIE COMICS Look for the Little Archie extravaganza very soon in the pages of CBA Classic, as well as another section devoted to the regular titles. Suggestions always welcome.

INDEPENDENTS Next ish’s CBA Classic features our Star*Reach special, and we hope to look at WaRP, Jack Katz, Eclipse, Pacific, Dark Horse, Aardvark, and others. What’s your thinkin’?

WEIRDO, BLAB! ET AL. An examination of Crumb/Bagge/ Kominsky’s Weirdo is in the works, as well as a look at Monte Beauchamp’s superb mag, and lots more alt-type stuff. Ideas, people?

FANTAGRAPHICS Why leave Gary and Kim off the hook? This one’ll cover the controversy and the quality behind the 25-year+ history of the “bad boy” publishers of the best comics in the world. What say, effendi?

SECRET CELEBRATIONS As the first volume of CBA surprised Marvel’s Gal Friday, Fabulous Flo Steinberg, with a special Valentine’s Day ish (albeit a tad late!), we’re planning celebrations in the near future, so drop a line and — if you promise not to tell — we’ll let you in on our secret plans! Nuff sed?

CONTACT INFO:

JON B. COOKE e-mail: JonBCooke@aol.com

COMIC BOOK ARTIST P. O. Box 204 3706 Kingstown Road West Kingston RI 02892 Phone: (401) 783-1669 Fax: (401) 783-1287 www.cbanow.com

25 CBA V.2 #1

Irving on the Inside Lark Night Detectives A chat with superb artist Michael Lark on Gotham Central and Michael Chabon BY CHRIS IRVING, ASSOCIATE EDITOR Michael Lark’s artwork, reputed for its slick line and solid composition, gained notice through such projects as the two Terminal City mini-series for Vertigo, Scene of the Crime, and the one-shot Superman: War of the Worlds. Recently, Lark has put his talents to the surprise DC hit, Gotham Central, a look at the trials and tribulations of cops working the beat on Batman’s mean streets. Aside from the book’s putting a new spin on Gotham’s finest, Lark has given his exceptional work an even rougher, grittier look for the heavily realistic title. Michael was interviewed on March 28, 2003, and the transcript was copy-edited by the artist —C.I.

Chris Irving: How would you describe your work on Gotham Central, as opposed to any of your other work you’ve done? Michael Lark: I didn’t make any conscious stylistic changes just for this book, although I was making stylistic changes that would have applied to anything I’ve done. Those changes really started happening towards the end of the Hawkman series, and throughout Batman: Nine Lives, and it was more of me artistically

26 CBA V.2 #1

challenging myself and starting to work more with brush and giving it a looser feel. It was something I’ve always liked and wanted to try. Chris: It looks like you’ve done quite a bit of dry brushing. It has an almost textured feel. Michael:: There’s definitely an attempt to get a texture in there, and it’s not so much drybrush as it is looser brush work. I’ve never been able to handle a brush like Frank Frazetta; I just don t have that skill. I’ve been consciously trying to turn my weakness in that area into part of my style by going for a looser feel, to get a sketchiness in my work. Part of that is also coming from having to work faster on a monthly. So far, I m ahead of that challenge and trying to solve that problem, and it really allowed me to experiment with ways to show character. That’s really where my biggest interest is any time I’m drawing. Chris: How did you land this project? Michael:: I’m friends with Ed Brubaker, and he told me he and Greg [Rucka] were developing the idea. I immediately knew that if I were going to work on a monthly, this would be the one. I knew if it was a straight

super-hero book, I’d get really bored really fast, and that if it were a Vertigo book, I’d probably get bored real fast, too. This seemed to be the both of best worlds: I was getting to draw Mr. Freeze in the first issue, but I was also able to draw cops going around and investigating a crime. Chris: Do you feel any difference on working on Rucka’s scripts, as opposed to Brubaker’s? Michael:: They’re different writers. I’d worked with Ed before [on Scene of the Crime], so it took me an issue or so to get used to Greg s style of writing. Right now, I’ve done a combo story, one of Ed’s, and one of Greg’s, and I’ve read Ed’s single-issue story. They’ve all been different, both in style and in content, so I have a feeling that the guys will continue to keep me on my toes. Chris: What do you have cooking up that you can talk about? Michael:: There’s not a lot that I can talk about. The guys, first of all, keep me in the dark. The story that Greg wrote, which I’m working on now, I had no idea what was going to happen until I was working on it. There is a hidden element in the story that wasn’t revealed to me until I got the last script. It was about a character I’d been drawing throughout the story, and I’d suddenly found out something about them that I hadn’t known. It was nice to do it that way, because I didn’t telegraph anything. The story is about Renee Montoya, a detective who’s been in the Batman books for awhile. Something happens to her that turns her world upside-down, in a really bad way. This is really good, because I get to reveal a lot about this character who has been a mainstay for a while. One or two villains show up throughout the course of this, and wreak extra havoc. I do get to draw some action scenes that involve Batman. After that is another redball case, when both shifts have to come in to solve a crime. This is going to be an extremely vicious string of crimes that will involve one of the classic Batman villains. I’m looking forward to it a great deal, since I’m looking forward to dealing with this particular villain. Chris: This is one of the few books I look forward to picking up every month. Michael:: I hear that from a lot of people. It seems like the people who have discovered the book feel the same way: that they want to really want to see what Greg and Ed have up their sleeve each month. Chris: You have a JSA: All -Stars story coming up, as well? Michael:: It’s written by [The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay author] Michael Chabon, of course. I was so swamped with work but when

RIGHT: Detail of JSA Secret Files cover. TOP: Cover from Gotham Central #9. ©’03 DC.

they called me and said, “We want you to illustrate a story that Michael Chabon wrote,” how could I say no? How often do you get to collaborate with a Pulitzer Prize-winner? It’s a Golden Age “Mr. Terrific” story, however, it’s really about Mr. Terrific’s not-so-terrific brother, and explores what it s like to be the brother of the world s most competent human. Chris: Is this Michael’s first comic-book work? Michael:: Yes. Chris: Does he write really tight, descriptive full scripts? Michael:: It’s a full script, but I was given a lot of freedom with it. He was very generous with me. He put a lot of dialogue in there, so we ended up taking his panel-by-panel descriptions and I added some smaller panels and broke many panels up. It ended up going from an eight-page to a 16-page story. Chris: Any other projects on the back-burner? Michael:: Not anything definite, yet. Time-wise, Gotham Central is my focus, because it has to be. I m hoping to get a web site up and running in the next six months to a year. When I do that, something I’ve been planning to do for a while is my own semi-daily strip. I’m really influenced by many of the Golden Age strip artists. It’s such a lost art. Comic strips are a really neat form, and there are a lot of constraints as to how to tell a story. I’d like to experiment with that and I have some ideas of my own. If I do the strip, I’ll write it myself. Depending on the state of my exclusive contract with DC, when I get a story arc finished, I’d like to see about collecting all of it and printing it myself. It’s not the type of thing that will take a huge amount of time, I hope. I want the challenge of doing it quickly. I read somewhere that Noel Sickles used to give himself 45 minutes to do a Scorchy Smith daily [newspaper comic strip]: 15 minutes to pencil, 15 to letter, and 15 to ink. I would love to rise to that challenge. Chris: You’ve mentioned that you were into some European artists. What comics are you reading, and what artists are you digging? Michael:: I don’t read that many comics. I tend to be pretty choosy about the stuff I read. I don’t want so many comic influences coming at me all the time. I’m spending eight to 10 hours a day looking at comics pages, the last thing I want to do is read a comic book. [laughter] I read 100 Bullets religiously. I love that book and think [artist] Eduardo Risso is phenomenal. If I could capture half of his characterization, I’d be so proud of myself. His characters are so real, even the little ones in the background are real and alive. I’ve really been getting into Alberto Breccia s stuff, lately, especially his Mort Cinder series. I’ve recently gotten a hold of some Spanish reprints of other stuff he’s done. My favorite thing I’ve picked up lately is a French book called McKay, which is a fictional biography of [Little Nemo creator] Winsor McKay, with phenomenal

art by Jean-Phillipe Bramanti. I read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, of course, and anything that Mike Mignola comes out with. I enjoy Alias — I think Michael Gaydos is really good. I’m also a huge fan of Duncan Fegredo — I’ll pick up anything he draws. And Sean Philips is a big influence on my work. Other than that, I go back and find old stuff. I’m trying to expand my Alex Toth collection; I’m really into Milt Caniff, Frank Robbins, and Noel Sickles. I’m really, really into Alex Raymond’s [newspaper comic strip] Rip Kirby, which has been a big influence of mine for a long time. I first picked it up 12 years ago, and I wasn’t confident enough with the brush, so I used pens to create the same effects, which created twice as much work for

me. Now, I’ve rediscovered that strip and the wonderful use of blacks.

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27 CBA V.2 #1

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The forerunner to COMIC BOOK CREATOR, CBA is the 2000-2004 Eisner Award winner for BEST COMICS-RELATED MAG! Edited by CBC’s JON B. COOKE, it features in-depth articles, interviews, and unseen art, celebrating the lives and careers of the great comics artists from the 1970s to today. ALL BACK ISSUES NOW AVAILABLE AS DIGITAL EDITIONS FOR $3.95 FROM www.twomorrows.com!

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Order online at www.twomorrows.com COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOLUME 3 Reprinting the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #7-8 (spotlighting 1970s Marvel and 1980s indies), plus over 30 NEW PAGES of features and art! New PAUL GULACY portfolio, MR. MONSTER scrapbook, the story behind MARVEL VALUE STAMPS, and more! New MICHAEL T. GILBERT cover! (224-page trade paperback) $24.95 • ISBN: 9781893905429

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#2: MARVEL 1970-77

Era of “Artist as Editor” at National: New NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews, art, and articles with JOE KUBERT, JACK KIRBY, CARMINE INFANTINO, DICK GIORDANO, JOE ORLANDO, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ALEX TOTH, JULIE SCHWARTZ, and many more! Plus ADAMS thumbnails for a forgotten Batman story, unseen NICK CARDY pages from a controversial Teen Titans story, unpublished TOTH covers, and more!

STAN LEE AND ROY THOMAS discussion about Marvel in the 1970s, ROY THOMAS interview, BILL EVERETT’s daughter WENDY and MIKE FRIEDRICH on Everett, interviews with GIL KANE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, JIM STARLIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, MIKE PLOOG, STERANKO’s Unknown Marvels, the real origin of the New X-Men, Everett tribute cover by GIL KANE, and more!

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#6: MORE MARVEL ’70s #7: ’70s MARVELMANIA

NEAL ADAMS interview about his work at Marvel Comics in the 1960s from AVENGERS to X-MEN, unpublished Adams covers, thumbnail layouts for classic stories, published pages BEFORE they were inked, and unused pages from his NEVER-COMPLETED X-MEN GRAPHIC NOVEL! Plus TOM PALMER on the art of inking Neal Adams, ADAMS’ MARVEL WORK CHECKLIST, & ADAMS wraparound cover!

Definitive JIM WARREN interview about publishing EERIE, CREEPY, VAMPIRELLA, and other fan favorites, in-depth interview with BERNIE WRIGHTSON with unpublished Warren art, plus unseen art, features and interviews with FRANK FRAZETTA, RICHARD CORBEN, AL WILLIAMSON, JACK DAVIS, ARCHIE GOODWIN, HARVEY KURTZMAN, ALEX NINO, and more! BERNIE WRIGHTSON cover!

More on DC COMICS 1967-74, with art by and interviews with NICK CARDY, JOE SIMON, NEAL ADAMS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MIKE KALUTA, SAM GLANZMAN, MARV WOLFMAN, IRWIN DONENFELD, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GIL KANE, DENNY O’NEIL, HOWARD POST, ALEX TOTH on FRANK ROBBINS, DC Writer’s Purge of 1968 by MIKE BARR, JOHN BROOME’s final interview, and more! CARDY cover!

Unpublished and rarely-seen art by, features on, and interviews with 1970s Bullpenners PAUL GULACY, FRANK BRUNNER, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, MARIE and JOHN SEVERIN, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE COCKRUM, DON MCGREGOR, DOUG MOENCH, and others! Plus never-beforeseen pencil pages to an unpublished Master of Kung-Fu graphic novel by PAUL GULACY! Cover by FRANK BRUNNER!

Featuring ’70s Marvel greats PAUL GULACY, JOHN BYRNE, RICH BUCKLER, DOUG MOENCH, DAN ADKINS, JIM MOONEY, STEVE GERBER, FRANK SPRINGER, and DENIS KITCHEN! Plus: a rarely-seen Stan Lee P.R. chat promoting the ’60s Marvel cartoon shows, the real trials and tribulations of Comics Distribution, the true story behind the ’70s Kung Fu Craze, and a new cover by PAUL GULACY!

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#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

Major independent creators and their fabulous books from the early days of the Direct Sales Market! Featured interviews include STEVE RUDE, HOWARD CHAYKIN, DAVE STEVENS, JAIME HERNANDEZ, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, DON SIMPSON, SCOTT McCLOUD, MIKE BARON, MIKE GRELL, and more! Plus plenty of rare and unpublished art, and a new STEVE RUDE cover!

Interviews with Charlton alumni JOE GILL, DICK GIORDANO, STEVE SKEATES, DENNIS O’NEIL, ROY THOMAS, PETE MORISI, JIM APARO, PAT BOYETTE, FRANK MCLAUGHLIN, SAM GLANZMAN, plus ALAN MOORE on the Charlton/ Watchmen Connection, DC’s planned ALLCHARLTON WEEKLY, and more! DICK GIORDANO cover!

Career-spanning SIMONSON INTERVIEW, covering his work from “Manhunter” to Thor to Orion, JOHN WORKMAN interview, TRINA ROBBINS interview, also Trina, MARIE SEVERIN and RAMONA FRADON talk shop about their days in the comics business, MARIE SEVERIN interview, plus other great women cartoonists. New SIMONSON cover!

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(112-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

Interviews with ALEX TOTH, Toth tributes by KUBERT, SIMONSON, JIM LEE, BOLLAND, GIBBONS and others, TOTH on continuity art, TOTH checklist, plus SHELDON MAYER SECTION with a look at SCRIBBLY, interviews with Mayer’s kids (real-life inspiration for SUGAR & SPIKE), and more! Covers by TOTH and MAYER!

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#12: CHARLTON PART 2

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983! Interviews with Charlton alumni GEORGE WILDMAN, NICOLA CUTI, JOE STATON, JOHN BYRNE, TOM SUTTON, MIKE ZECK, JACK KELLER, PETE MORISI, WARREN SATTLER, BOB LAYTON, ROGER STERN, and others, ALEX TOTH, a NEW E-MAN STRIP by CUTI AND STATON, and the art of DON NEWTON! STATON cover!

(112-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

1970s Marvel Horror focus, from Son of Satan to Ghost Rider! Interviews with ROY THOMAS, MARV WOLFMAN, GENE COLAN, TOM PALMER, HERB TRIMPE, GARY FRIEDRICH, DON PERLIN, TONY ISABELLA, and PABLOS MARCOS, plus a Portfolio Section featuring RUSS HEATH, MIKE PLOOG, DON PERLIN, PABLO MARCOS, FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE, and more! New GENE COLAN cover!

Interviews with Tower and THUNDER AGENTS alumni WALLACE WOOD, LOU MOUGIN, SAMM SCHWARTZ, DAN ADKINS, LEN BROWN, BILL PEARSON, LARRY IVIE, GEORGE TUSKA, STEVE SKEATES, and RUSS JONES, TOWER COMICS CHECKLIST, history of TIPPY TEEN, 1980s THUNDER AGENTS REVIVAL, and more! WOOD cover!

Interviews with ’80s independent creators DAVE STEVENS, JAIME, MARIO, AND GILBERT HERNANDEZ, MATT WAGNER, DEAN MOTTER, PAUL RIVOCHE, and SANDY PLUNKETT, plus lots of rare and unseen art from The Rocketeer, Love & Rockets, Mr. X, Grendel, other ’80s strips, and more! New cover by STEVENS and the HERNANDEZ BROS.!

’70s ATLAS COMICS HISTORY! Interviews with JEFF ROVIN, ROY THOMAS, ERNIE COLÓN, STEVE MITCHELL, LARRY HAMA, HOWARD CHAYKIN, SAL AMENDOLA, JIM CRAIG, RIC MEYERS, and ALAN KUPPERBERG, Atlas Checklist, HEATH, WRIGHTSON, SIMONSON, MILGROM, AUSTIN, WEISS, and STATON discuss their Atlas work, and more! COLÓN cover!

Discussion with ARTHUR ADAMS about his career (with an extensive CHECKLIST, and gobs of rare art), plus GRAY MORROW tributes from friends and acquaintances and a MORROW interview, Red Circle Comics Checklist, interviews with & remembrances of GEORGE ROUSSOS & GEORGE EVANS, Gallery of Morrow, Evans, and Roussos art, EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER interview, and more! New ARTHUR ADAMS cover!

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(128-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

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#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

#20: ROMITAs & KUBERTs #21: ADAM HUGHES, ALEX #22: GOLD KEY COMICS & examinations: RUSS MANNING ROSS, & JOHN BUSCEMA &Interviews Magnus Robot Fighter, WALLY WOOD &

Roundtable with JIM STARLIN, ALAN WEISS and AL MILGROM, interviews with STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE LEIALOHA, and FRANK BRUNNER, art from the lost WARLOCK #16, plus a FLO STEINBERG CELEBRATION, with a Flo interview, tributes by HERB TRIMPE, LINDA FITE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, and others! STARLIN/ MILGROM/WEISS cover!

History of Harvey Comics, from Hot Stuf’, Casper, and Richie Rich, to Joe Simon’s “Harvey Thriller” line! Interviews with, art by, and tributes to JACK KIRBY, STERANKO, WILL EISNER, AL WILLIAMSON, GIL KANE, WALLY WOOD, REED CRANDALL, JOE SIMON, WARREN KREMER, ERNIE COLÓN, SID JACOBSON, FRED RHOADES, and more! New wraparound MITCH O’CONNELL cover!

Joint interview between Marvel veteran and superb Spider-Man artist JOHN ROMITA, SR. and fan favorite Thor/Hulk renderer JOHN ROMITA, JR.! On the flipside, JOE, ADAM & ANDY KUBERT share their histories and influences in a special roundtable conversation! Plus unpublished and rarely seen artwork, and a visit by the ladies VIRGINIA and MURIEL! Flip-covers by the KUBERTs and the ROMITAs!

(104-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

Exhaustive MIGNOLA interview, huge art gallery (with never-seen art), and comprehensive checklist! On the flip-side, a careerspanning JILL THOMPSON interview, plus tons of art, and studies of Jill by ALEX ROSS, STEVE RUDE, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and more! Also, interview with JOSÉ DELBO, and a talk with author HARLAN ELLISON on his various forays into comics! New MIGNOLA HELLBOY cover!

GAHAN WILSON and NatLamp art director MICHAEL GROSS speak, interviews with and art by NEAL ADAMS, FRANK SPRINGER, SEAN KELLY, SHARY FLENNEKIN, ED SUBITSKY, M.K. BROWN, B.K. TAYLOR, BOBBY LONDON, MICHEL CHOQUETTE, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and more! Features new covers by GAHAN WILSON and MARK BODÉ!

Focus on AMERICA’S BEST COMICS! ALAN MOORE interview on everything from SWAMP THING to WATCHMEN to ABC and beyond! Interviews with KEVIN O’NEILL, CHRIS SPROUSE, JIM BAIKIE, HILARY BARTA, SCOTT DUNBIER, TODD KLEIN, JOSE VILLARRUBIA, and more! Flip-side spotlight on the amazing KEVIN NOWLAN! Covers by J.H. WILLIAMS III & NOWLAN!

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(122-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(122-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

ADAM HUGHES ART ISSUE, with a comprehensive interview, unpublished art, & CHECKLIST! Also, a “Day in the Life” of ALEX ROSS (with plenty of Ross art)! Plus a tribute to the life and career of one of Marvel’s greatest artists, JOHN BUSCEMA, with testimonials from his friends and peers, art section, and biographical essay. HUGHES and TOM PALMER flip-covers!

Total War M.A.R.S. Patrol, Tarzan by JESSE MARSH, JESSE SANTOS and DON GLUT’S Dagar and Dr. Spektor, Turok, Son of Stone’s ALBERTO GIOLITTI and PAUL S. NEWMAN, plus Doctor Solar, Boris Karloff, The Twilight Zone, and more, including MARK EVANIER on cartoon comics, and a definitive company history! New BRUCE TIMM cover!

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

Previously available only to CBA subscribers! Spotlights great DC Comics of the ’70s: Interviews with MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN on JACK KIRBY’s Fourth World, ALEX TOTH on his mystery work, NEAL ADAMS on Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, RUSS HEATH on Sgt. Rock, BRUCE JONES discussing BERNIE WRIGHTSON (plus a WRIGHTSON portfolio), and a BRUCE TIMM interview, art gallery, and cover!

Compiles the new “extras” from CBA COLLECTION VOL. 1-3: unpublished JACK KIRBY story, unpublished BERNIE WRIGHTSON art, unused JEFF JONES story, ALAN WEISS interview, examination of STEVE ENGLEHART and MARSHALL ROGERS’ 1970s Batman work, a look at DC’s rare Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, PAUL GULACY art gallery, Marvel Value Stamp history, Mr. Monster’s scrapbook, and more!

(76-page Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $4.95

Khoury’s Corner The Lost Gen13/Batman A talk with artist whiz J. Scott Campbell on the aborted mini-series Now, I don’t recall if Jim was aware of my tremendous affection for Batman before this suggestion, but it was definitely apparent to him after this conversation. I also remember how funny both the comic book media and even the other talent around our own studio reacted to the idea. I guess some people thought that Gen13 and Batman were just way too different to ever have a successful crossover. I couldn’t have disagreed more! On the contrary, I’ve never much seen the point in pairing up characters in crossovers that are too much alike. Take for instance the Batman/Spawn thing. Sure, the two of them look cool standing together on a poster or on the cover of Wizard, but I don’t think that there is a lot of chemistry between the two. They’re moody, dark and brooding and they don’t react to each other in an interesting way. However, if you put Grunge and Roxy into the Batmobile with Batman driving, you know interesting things are going to happen. Put Fairchild in the Batcave, people were going to say, “Oh, I have to see this!” That’s my opinion, anyway! George: Why was it going to be two issues? J. Scott: Because we knew that would be the minimum amount of issues needed to tell an interesting story. It might have even been planned to have two 48-pagers as I recall. I suppose that we really wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. And we didn’t want to cram the thing with 12-panel pages. We wanted to have, as they say in the biz, “Some BIG SHOTS.” George: What did the story that writer Brandon Choi and yourself involve? How would you describe it? J. Scott: This might be harder to recall. I remember that it started out with us catching Batman at the end of a previous adventure, you know, kind of a James Bond/Indiana Jones movie device, to get you into the action right away. He was going to be fighting Mr. Freeze (by request, since he is one of my favorite Bat villains). Immediately following the end of that sequence,

we were to cut to Fairchild winning some kind of science fair which would allow her to advance to the state championships to be held in… you guessed it… Gotham City. Now, the main villain of the two issues was to be the Joker, of course. We came up with some kind of mystical device that he was going to steal from somewhere that he would threaten all of Gotham City with. I was at the same time as this, developing Danger Girl, so the idea of incorporating mystic objects really appealed to me. However, the fact that I can’t even remember the artifact’s gimmick, probably gives you an indication of how senseless it probably was. At the time though, it didn’t seem to matter, because it was just a “MacGuffin,” a pointless device to move the story along. After all, we just wanted to see these characters interact to each other, right? Anyways, the idea was to have the Gen13 team and Batman, bump into each other and eventually work together to stop the Joker, “When fun and wacky high-jinx ensue!” (In my best “wacky announcer” voice!). George: Who from the Batman and Wildstorm universe would have been involved? J. Scott: Well, besides of course, Batman, The Joker and Mr. Freeze, and I think Oracle. I was also trying to work in Harley Quinn, because I was a pretty huge fan of the Bruce Timm Batman cartoon at the time. However, this was before Harley was worked into the DC universe, so I was told that this wasn’t possible. I suggested the idea of adding a Harley-ish type sidekick for the Joker, as seen in my sketches, because I really felt that the Joker needed somebody to bounce off of, and, I liked to draw cute looking girls in tight outfits (heh heh). But this was an even bigger “nono” in DC’s eyes I think because I was inventing a new DC character and that’s an entirely different and much more complicated can of worms. George: You’ve handled a lot of comedic strips, how were you going to handle a character with the deep overtones of Batman? What version of the Dark Knight did you base your look on? (Looks a little Neal Adams-ish to me) What was your attraction to the character? J. Scott: I had planned to play Batman very straight. It certainly wasn’t going to be my intent to somehow turn him into the more comedic ‘Adam West’ Batman or something because of Gen13’s level of humor. Instead, I thought that there could still be occasion for funny moments between the

CBA

BY GEORGE KHOURY, SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR I remember being ecstatic upon seeing J. Scott Campbell’s terrific pin-up promoting a two-part Batman/Gen13 crossover back in 1996. It seemed like such an odd pairing that I was really intrigued to see how this was gonna be pulled off, because Batman had basically been portrayed as an obnoxious conservative tightwad since Miller’s Dark Knight in 1986. Meanwhile, the Gen13 characters were a free-spirited bunch of Generation-Xers who were hip, breezy and sexy with Campbell’s gorgeous and infectious artwork at the helm. The release date came and went, and this crossover was never realized nor was any explanation given whatsoever. It became obvious that this project was dead. After 1996 (with the passing of the grunge lifestyle), the Gen13 characters have basically, more or less, faded from the spotlight while J. Scott Campbell invested his time and talents into his successful Danger Girl series. Being the champion of lost causes, I caught up recently with the extremely busy Mr. Campbell and conducted a short interview regarding this lost tale.

George Khoury: How did this project come about? J. Scott Campbell: Well, as I remember it, Jim [Lee] approached me and casually mentioned that he had been speaking regularly to some of the “higherups” at DC and mentioned that there seemed to be a lot of possibilities for Wildstorm/DC crossovers. Remember, this was at least a couple of years before Jim ended up selling to DC, so the idea of our characters being allowed to crossover with the DC universe was really a pretty impressive notion for us. I believe that it was in this initial conversation that Jim probed my interest in a possible Gen13/Batman crossover. I immediately jumped at the idea.

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DC about the story for I think a year or something. And over that period of time a lot of things in the story were changed. Several of my favorite scenes in the books were eventually removed entirely, such as a really great scene in which Fairchild was in the Batcave and that really funny car chase scene I mentioned earlier in which Grunge and Roxy ride along with Batman in the Batmobile. We kept being told the “Batman wouldn’t do that” or “No, they can’t be there.” It became more and more difficult to put Batman and the Gen13 in the same places at all. I remember joking that I wasn’t going to do a crossover but instead two totally separate stories in the same book. There was also this whole issue of Batman’s comic book continuity. I’ll be honest, at the time I wasn’t up on the activities of the “comic book” Batman. And when I was presented with his current comic book look — I’ll be honest with you — I wanted to barf! At the time they had him looking more like the “Movie Batman” I guess, where he was dressed all in shinny black rubber or

leather. He wasn’t wearing his classic briefs anymore either. I had always envisioned drawing the classic grey Batman with the leathery briefs and cowl only! I hated this new one. I really fought them about this. I also really hated his stupid looking Batmobile that they had. I wanted to do my own. I guess I just couldn’t see why this couldn’t just be like an Elseworlds kind of a thing, as in the Dark Knight or another favorite of mine, the Simon Bisley Batman/Judge Dread crossover. After all, those guys had been allowed the opportunity to really put their stamp on Batman. When I finally looked over the approved script, I just wasn’t excited about it anymore. I told them that I’d much rather get on with my new Danger Girl series. That was now where my heart was. I fully expected them to go on with the story with somebody else drawing it, but that never happened. In the end, I can’t help but wonder if Wildstorm also thought that the resulting plot was just too uninteresting to pursue. George: Looking back, do you miss drawing Gen13? Do you still have a lot of affection for them? J. Scott: I haven’t really looked back at it until this conversation. I suppose, thinking about it now, I am a bit sad that it didn’t happen. And Gen13 certainly isn’t what it once was, so it’s not like I can do it now. I kind of now compare Gen13 to some kind of huge ’80s band like Duran Duran or Def Leppard, both huge in their day but lacking the ability to age well. Like fashion. In the end, Gen13 ’s trendiness was probably also its downfall. I’ll always have a warm spot in my heart for Gen13. It was kind of like my professional childhood. I have very fond memories about it, but at the same time, I really don’t want to return to it. As far as Batman is concerned, he continues to live on regardless of us individual artists. I imagine that I’ll get another chance to work on a really great story with him someday. Something that I can really leave my mark on. Looking back, I just don’t think that I was really ready for Batman back in ’96. George: Thank you, Mr. Campbell.

fin

INSET: The one piece of promotional art drawn for the aborted Gen13/Batman project is this J. Scott Campbell full-pager, courtesy of JSC. Batman & related characters ©’03 DC. Gen13 ©’03 Aegis Ent., Inc., dba Wildstorm Prod.

Gen kids and Batman because a serious Batman loosing his cool exterior because Grunge is randomly pushing “Awesome” looking buttons in the Batmobile and causing rockets and other gadgets to fire off is funny without having to re-invent the individual characteristics of these very different people. I suppose I was imagining a kind of “Dennis the Menace/Mr. Wilson” vibe to the whole thing in which Batman would play the sort of grumpy parental father figure and the Gen13 the bratty next-doorneighbor kids, with the both of them eventually giving the other respect by the end of the story. I’ve always loved Batman, as most kids do, from when I was very little. It’s very hard for me to pin down the exact reason for the attraction. I suppose at the end of the day he’s just “cool!” But even more than Batman himself, I love everything else that goes with him. I love his gadgets, the Batmobile, the Batcave. I love Gotham City. But probably most of all, I love his rogues’ gallery of villains! Batman has to have the all-time best villains, hands down! The concept is just awesome all around. And even better than that, Batman is timeless. He’s a legend. I’m not quite sure exactly where my version of Batman would have gone. As much as I love the Dark Knight, I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t going to take it that direction. I envisioned a leaner looking Batman, not quite so bulky. Perhaps a bit more along the lines of Neal’s, since that was the version I most remember growing up with. And maybe a bit more stylized and cartoony, without making him look silly or goofy. Not surprisingly, I really liked Art Adams’ take on Batman in both Batman #400 and in his Superman/ Batman team-up in Action Comics Annual #1. And as I mentioned, I was a big fan of the Batman animated adventures. When I look at the one or two drawings of Batman I did do around that time, I really don’t care for them. My Batman wasn’t there yet in those. It hadn’t had a chance to emerge yet. George: Why didn’t this project happen? At the time Gen13 was a huge book — did something go wrong? How much art were you able to accomplish before the project was stopped? J. Scott: Well, these sketches and the finished promo piece are all that I ever ended up drawing. We went back and forth with

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ne day in the early 1970s, among his piles of fan mail and business correspondence, Marvel

Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee received a letter from the Middle East. The sender was Walid Jaafar, an executive with the Arabian Construction Company in Kuwait. Jaafar had heard about a possible TV project involving Captain America, Spider-Man, the Silver Surfer, and other Marvel characters. “As Kuwait is an expanding state, I think that it is time that the circle of expanding should be completed by showing your serials on our local TV station,” Jaafar wrote. Although the rumored TV show never materialized, the missive demonstrated how far the Marvel Comics brand had traveled and how big the once-struggling company had become. By 1972, Marvel and its foreign licensees were selling an estimated 90 million comics worldwide each year. Marvel titles were available everywhere from Rio de Janeiro to Osaka, Japan, with bootleg editions turning up in copyright-unfriendly zones like Yugoslavia. In France, “L’Homme Araignée” battled “le Bouffon Vert,” while in Italy “I Fantastici Quattro” took on “Dottor Destino.” Stan Lee’s super-heroes marched, swung and flew across the globe, carrying with them the name of their co-creator and establishing him as a postmodern Walt Disney to an international readership of knowing high schoolers and college students. Marvel’s popularity continued to soar at home as well, with SpiderMan still the company’s most visible and profitable character. In the fall of 1972, Spidey sparked a near-riot in a New York City department store during a promotional event for the release of Amazing Spider-Man: From Beyond the Grave, a rock album masterminded by Steve Lemberg, the producer of Lee’s disastrous Carnegie Hall show. With an actor dressed as Spider-Man in tow, Lemberg arrived at the store to find a mob scene reminiscent of a

mid-1960s Beatles record signing. Thousands of kids had shown up with their parents, packing the surrounding streets tight with bodies. The police were forced to close off several blocks from traffic. Spidey, clad in red-&-blue Lycra, had to “literally climb the walls” to make it inside to the autograph area. “I’d done a lot of rock ’n’ roll concerts and events, and I’d never been to anything like this,” Lemberg recalls. “Kids were falling down. The elevators were shut down. They trampled the department store. It was the scariest thing I’d ever encountered with any kind of celebrities.” The Spider-Man record, which featured the cuts “Stronger The Man” and “Such A Groove To Be Free,” performed by The Webspinners, went on to sell 84,000 copies in its first week. Around this time, major changes were rattling the hallowed halls of Marvel. Stan’s initial contract with Marvel’s then owner, Cadence Industries, was close to expiring, leaving his future with the company

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an open question. Lee was still smarting from having been left out of the $15 million bonanza that Martin Goodman had raked in when he sold his publishing empire— consisting of Marvel and several non-comics magazines — to Cadence in 1968. (Goodman had continued managing his former properties after the sale.) The bad blood between the men was aggravated by the fact that Goodman was vying to have his youngest son, Chip, installed as the head of Marvel. Chip had been helping run his father’s business operations for several years. Although he had a good head for financial matters, Chip, like Robbie Solomon at 1940s-era Timely, had become a figure of universal disdain among the artistic types in the bullpen. “You didn’t want Chip to come around when Stan was not there,” says Gerry Conway, who wrote The Amazing Spider-Man and other titles at the time. Even though Chip had limited comics experience, he would request editorial changes that were odd and sometimes bewildering. One of the more absurd examples concerned the cover to an issue of Kid Colt Outlaw, a long-running western title. The artwork depicted a typical cowboy action scene: a horse-mounted hero, “the Bellows Mob” out to bushwhack him, and a thrilling shootout with bodies crouching, leaping, tilting to form a concise loop of visual excitement. On a visit to the bullpen, Chip spied the cover and found it wanting. “We’ve got to make it more interesting. Put animal masks on them,” he ordered, referring to the outlaws. On the wrapping of the issue that shipped, one hombre, inexplicably, is wearing a gorilla mask and another is disguised as a lion. “Chip was Martin’s son,” Conway says. “He was humored for many years.” Stan was Martin’s relative, too, but as a cousin-in-law, he couldn’t beat Chip in a nepotistic tug-of-war. Not that Lee needed to. Cadence’s executives were in charge now. They, not Goodman, made the big decisions. As the public face of Marvel and the perceived architect of the company’s creative triumphs, Lee found himself in an enviable negotiating position. The Cadence brass, stingy though they were, surely knew that letting Stan slip away would have been tantamount to commercial suicide. Nevertheless, as the negotiations dragged on, rumors abounded. Stan’s quitting Marvel. DC’s courting Stan. Stan’s going to Hollywood. For a while, it seemed possible, even likely, that Lee would leave the company where he had made his career and his name. Lemberg, who then owned the movie and TV rights for the majority of Marvel’s characters, including Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, says he contacted Lee and offered to make him a partner in pitching big-budget movies to studios. Lemberg figured that since Lee had never been granted any ownership rights in his co-creations, he might be willing to move on. And besides, who was better qualified to sell Marvel characters to movie executives than Stan the Man, the original Marvel salesman, himself? In the end, Cadence trumped all other offers with a hefty raise and a promotion. Stan became Marvel’s publisher in March 1972, shedding his regular writing and editing duties. While no longer responsible for the dayto-day production schedule, Lee would guide the company’s line expansion and ventures into other media, such as television and movies. Stan had, in effect, supplanted Martin, and in doing so, he left Chip in the lurch. Pater Goodman was furious. As Lee recalled in his autobiography, “Martin actually had the gall to accuse me of disloyalty, of betraying him after all he had done for me. By then, I was beginning to realize that the fantasy tales I wrote might be more credible than some of the things that seemed to happen in my real life.” Although Lee would be reluctant to admit it, the reality is that the situation had deteriorated into a power play between him and the man who had taken him in as a gangly teenager 30 years earlier. Over the course of their long relationship, Goodman had been many things to Stan: an employer, a mentor, a close friend. Their families had hosted each other for dinner parties. In the 1940s and ‘50s, whenever Goodman had scaled down his comics division, laying off dozens of employees, he had always kept a job open for Stan, thereby protecting his cousin-in-law from the vicissitudes of the freelance life. In light of all this, Goodman’s sense of betrayal was understandable. Under the circumstances, though, Cadence’s executives made the smart choice. Martin Goodman may have been the brains behind the company’s financial success, but Stan Lee was Marvel’s soul. The tag line

“Stan Lee Presents” was a much more precious commodity than even the sagest advice about paper supplies or newsstand distribution. Cadence had no shortage of business-minded individuals. They were less well-stocked with pop-culture icons whose outsize personalities could assemble a loyal fan following and sell out Carnegie Hall. Soon after Lee’s promotion, Goodman departed the firm that he had founded in 1932 and had built up over the course of a lifetime. Chip left the following year. The Goodmans would return to comics publishing for a brief period in 1974 before leaving the field for good. With Lee firmly in control, accountable only to the Cadence money people, Marvel embarked on a tumultuous path that would see an explosion of new titles and the arrival and departure of five editors in chief within six years. Roy Thomas, Stan’s former assistant, took the first turn as editor in chief. Lee and Thomas faced a tough road. The comic book market was weakening due to rising production costs, paper shortages, and escalating competition from television and other media. And, despite their popularity, Marvel’s super-heroes were not selling as well as they had only a few years before. The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel’s number one title, sold 290,000 copies per month in 1972, compared with 370,000 monthly copies in 1968. Of the dozens of publishers who had tried to mine the comic-book business since the late 1930s, only six remained in operation. Marvel and DC, the leaders, were slugging it out for industry dominance. In a bid for the upper hand, Stan resorted to one of Martin Goodman’s classic ploys: he flooded the market. DC responded in kind. From 1975 to 1978, the two companies would release 100 new titles, more than two-thirds of which were axed within two years. They lobbed genre after genre at their ever-shrinking readership, hoping something would stick. The first wave brought horror. After the 1971 Spider-Man anti-drug issues, the Comics Code Authority had relaxed its rules about scary subject matter, such as werewolves and vampires, so fright-inducing titles were acceptable again. Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula, drawn by veteran artist Gene Colan, appeared in 1972. It was soon joined by Man-Thing, Werewolf by Night, The Monster of Frankenstein, and Ghost Rider, which featured a motorcycle-riding wraith with a flaming head. Books like Chamber of Chills and Dead of Night reprinted stories from Marvel’s 1950s horror heyday, when it was still known as Atlas. Next came a succession of short-lived attempts to broaden the industry’s audience, which by then had staked out a (mostly male) middle ground between a high-school Dungeons and Dragons club and a college fraternity. For a while, Lee had been trying to incorporate more minorities and female characters into Marvel’s line-up, and now he saw an opportunity to give them leading roles. The Black Panther, who had originally appeared in the pages of The Fantastic Four, leapt into his own series, Jungle Action, in 1973. Luke Cage, Hero for Hire featured another African American super-champion, while the short-lived Red Wolf delved into American Indian

culture. Meanwhile, The Cat, Night Nurse, and Shanna the She-Devil tried to carve out a crime-fighting niche for the fairer sex, but without much success. When Bruce Lee brought martial arts to the masses, Marvel came out with Master of Kung Fu and Iron Fist. “There was never a trend we wouldn’t jump on,” says Len Wein, a writer who also served a brief tenure as editor in chief. The Warren Publishing Company had enjoyed success with black-&white magazine-format comics, such as Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella. Stan hired Marv Wolfman, a former Warren editor, to create a line of similar titles for Marvel. Because they were published as magazines, the books were exempt from Comics Code regulations on sex and violence. Although they never descended into outright nudity, titles like The Savage Sword of Conan and Dracula Lives boasted titillation and bloodshed that far exceeded what would have been acceptable in the company’s four-color offerings. “We were experimenting with comics and the so-called Marvel formula that Stan had created in the early 1960s, and we were trying to take it to the next step,” says Wolfman. “The new fans coming in wanted something stronger and better. This was a new generation and they needed their own approach while maintaining the things that worked at Marvel.” Without a doubt, Stan’s oddest — and perhaps most significant — experiment in those days was Comix Book, a Marvel-financed black-&-white title that sought to capitalize on the trendiness of underground comix. By 1973, the undergrounds had lost economic steam due to a glut of product and declining interest from head shops, their primary market. Many of the artists who helped found the movement in the mid-1960s, such as Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez, were still active, but they were in danger of being buried under an avalanche of imitators. Editors of alternative newspapers and hip magazines still loved underground comics, though, particularly their radical politics and frank, unadulterated treatment of sex. If ever a comics-related article was published that didn’t feature Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics, chances are it was about the undergrounds. Stan and his potty-mouthed confreres were siblings in media adoration, even if they took fundamentally different views of their shared art form. Lee had seen some underground comics and he knew of their popularity. Thinking they might yield a profitable franchise for Marvel, he contacted Denis Kitchen, the Wisconsin-based publisher of Crumb’s Home Grown Funnies and several other titles. Lee and Kitchen had been pen pals for a number of years, and the possibility of a job with Marvel had been floated before. Kitchen had sent Stan his books, to which the older man had typically responded with mocking shock at the vulgarity of the material. Soon enough, Lee came back with a question: How can I tap in to this? “Stan wanted to be a part of anything that was exciting,” Kitchen says. “He didn’t quite understand what was going on, but he saw me as a conduit to it.” Until 1973, Kitchen had shown no interest in so-called corporate Conan ©2003 Conan Properties, Inc.

comics. Now, though, he was newly married, he had a baby daughter, and his own company was on the ropes. “Suddenly, Marvel sounded a lot more attractive to me,” Kitchen says. Lee suggested the creation of a national magazine aimed at adult readers, featuring comics that mixed the aesthetics of the undergrounds and Marvel. The magazine’s print run would be in the neighborhood of 200,000 copies, 10 times the circulation of the average underground. With Marvel’s backing, the book would reach a mass market, bypassing the sketchy network of bong dealers and record peddlers that Kitchen normally relied on. Sweetening the deal, Lee offered Kitchen an annual salary of $15,000 to edit the title. Kitchen accepted. Almost immediately, there were problems. Some cartoonists, including Crumb and Jay Lynch, refused to work for Marvel. Crumb hated superheroes and the very notion of producing comics for a big company. Like many of the underground artists, Crumb looked to Harvey Kurtzman, the inventive visual stylist and creator of Mad magazine, as a role model. He wasn’t particularly impressed by Stan Lee. On the other hand, many more artists found Marvel’s unconscionably high page rate — $100 compared with the standard $25 per page for undergrounds— to be an effective palliative for whatever pangs of guilt they felt for selling out. Stan made it clear early on that as much as he appreciated the unabashed approach of the underground artists, Marvel’s book was going to be a comparatively tame enterprise. “It was constantly a battle over which swear words we could or couldn’t use,” Kitchen recalls. “Stan said no frontal nudity, and we broke that. At the same time, we understood if we pushed too far, we’d get slapped down for good.” Kitchen found himself in the difficult position of having to negotiate between cartoonists accustomed to complete artistic freedom and a publisher who didn’t want to alienate his distributor or offend his readership. To his credit, Lee tried to bend as far as he could, Kitchen adds. “Stan wanted it to be outrageous to a point, and yet not to be outrageous. It was never anything he was able to articulate.” When it came time to assemble the credits page for the first issue of Comix Book, the question arose of how to list Lee. Stan was concerned that such explicit material could be a source of embarrassment for him and his company. As it was, Marvel’s name appeared nowhere in the magazine; the only clue to the company’s association was a tiny cover logo for its distributor, Curtis Circulation Co. At the same time, Stan wanted his share of the kudos if the title turned out to be successful. His vacillation persisted until nearly the final moment. As Kitchen was finishing the paste-up for issue #1, he called his publisher and pressed him for a decision. “Here’s what I’ll do,” Stan told him. “Call me instigator, so if you get me in trouble, I can say, ‘I’m not responsible, all I did was instigate it.’ But if it’s a big hit, then I can say, ‘Hey, I instigated it!’” Here was a typical Stan Lee maneuver — politically safe with a winking nod that preserved his hipster cachet. “It was a quick way to escape and a quick way to get credit,” Kitchen says. Comix Book #1 appeared in 1974, with Instigator Stan Lee leading the masthead. The title of Skip Williamson’s contribution alone — ”Super Sammy Smoot Battles to the Death with the Irrational Shithead” — announced that this was not typical Marvel fare. But it wasn’t quite underground enough, either. Despite work by underground luminaries Art Spiegelman, Kim Deitch and Justin Green, and a host of lesser lights, the Marvel-meets-the-underground comics came off as watered-down, lacking bite. Sure, there were sexual situations and dirty words, but they seemed as authentic as a middle-aged man wearing bell-bottoms. The major appeal of the undergrounds was their rawness, the impression they gave of having been written, drawn, printed, and packed by a band of misfit virtuosos in a run-down warehouse somewhere. Comix Book, by contrast, smacked of corporate co-optation. In addition, Lee’s estimate of the audience for underground comics had been overly optimistic. As it turned out, there weren’t 200,000 hippies around who had the wherewithal or the interest to seek out Comix Book on newsstands. Stan shut down the experiment after the third issue, citing poor sales figures. Kitchen, who says he never saw any sales reports for Comix Book, acknowledges that the title was probably selling poorly. But, he suggests, there might have been another reason for the book’s cancellation. During

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Kitchen’s initial negotiations with Marvel, one of the major sticking points centered on the issue of ownership of original art and copyrights. Kitchen’s cartoonists had always retained control of their work. Indeed, the notion of artists’ rights was an integral part of the underground-comics stance. They used it to define themselves in opposition to the work-for-hire hacks in corporate comics. On the other hand, Lee and Marvel operated under longestablished rules that gave them ownership of everything, including the drawn pages. Stan’s first reaction was that these young upstarts would have to compromise. After much haggling, though, Lee began to yield. He gave back the original art. He agreed to let the cartoonists continue to own the trademarks on any pre-existing characters they published in Comix Book. Finally, after the title was already on stands, the artists won full copyright to their work, with Marvel retaining limited reprint rights. This last concession came shortly before Stan terminated the book. The timing made Kitchen suspect that Lee, in ceding so many rights, had probably fomented a near-rebellion among Marvel’s regular creators. The sentiment that filtered back to Kitchen from the bullpen was, Why are these goddamn hippies getting all these breaks? “Stan was in a difficult position,” Kitchen says. “He was courting rebellion. I don’t think he realized that there was this seething resentment among the creators about the way they were being treated.” In the coming years mainstream artists like Neal Adams would continue to push for expanded rights, eventually winning the return of original art from both companies. DC and Marvel would also institute bonus and royalty plans that rewarded creators when their books sold well. In Stan’s day as a young writer and editor — when, incidentally, comic-book sales were booming — concepts like creators’ rights and royalties were rarely, if ever, discussed. Even when Lee, as a seasoned pro, co-created Marvel’s most popular characters, including Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, neither he nor Kirby nor Ditko received an ounce of ownership. By and large, the old-school comics creators accepted their page-rate serfdom. In the role of publisher, Stan became a company man with a vested interest in maintaining the ancient ways. After all, relegating the talent to work-for-hire status kept costs down and improved the company’s bottom line. Unwittingly, with Comix Book, Lee tossed a wrench into the machine. The title didn’t necessarily throw open the floodgates, but after its publication, fissures started to appear in the dam. What Stan viewed as a quaint side-project — a short, strange trip through the counterculture — in the end helped bring about substantial changes in the way comic book companies dealt with their creators. Ironically, Lee admits that he never really cared for underground comics. “I don’t like dirty stuff, I don’t like ugly things, I don’t like things that insult people,” he says. “It’s just not my taste.” For all the creative experimentation and artistic enthusiasm that

convulsed Marvel in the 1970s, the biggest catalyst for the company’s rapid expansion was the competitive desire to trounce its main rival, DC Comics. In 1970, Marvel was publishing a dozen or so titles per month. By the mid-1970s, the line-up had swelled to 50 monthly titles, plus the black-&white comics. For an extended period, Marvel was adding one new book a month. The company’s logic in all this was simple: If Marvel could overwhelm DC on stands with a glut of product, it would capture a larger piece of the comic-book market. “We were always running to catch up,” Wein notes. “It was really seat-of-thepants cowboy publishing.” One morning, an edict came down from Marvel’s corporate bosses that four new titles needed to be added right away. The editorial staff went to lunch, hashed out the books, then returned to the office and assigned the creative teams. “The four first issues were in the works by the end of the day,” Wein says. The result of so much furious activity was chaos. Books shipped late. Some had to be filled in with reprint material at the last minute. Editors carved out their own fiefdoms and feuded for control of creative talent and titles. The staff was demoralized. No one seemed to be in charge of the overall production schedule. As the line expanded, more writers were brought in, and that made top-down supervision increasingly difficult. “There were people working for the company who shouldn’t have been writing anything,” Conway says. Although Marvel’s overall business was growing slowly, individual title sales were slipping, meaning that the profit margin on any given book was getting slimmer. That led to cost-cutting measures, such as slashing page counts and reducing the physical size of pages commissioned from artists. At one point, Marvel instructed its artists to draw one of their story pages as a two-page spread, thus lightening their paychecks of a page’s worth of compensation. When the company was still a family-run operation, with a sibling in charge of the coloring department and a cousin-in-law heading the comic book line, these kinds of indignities would have been unthinkable. But now Marvel was part of Cadence, a publicly traded firm with fixed budgets and earnings targets. The interests of Spider-Man and the Avengers, and all their writers, artists and readers, were subordinate to the greater corporate good. In the mid-1970s, there was even talk that Marvel, a profitable but relatively marginal holding in its parent company’s portfolio, would either be shuttered or sold off to maintain Cadence’s good standing on Wall Street. Not surprisingly, the bean counters at Cadence were for many years viewed with contempt by the creative-minded souls in the Marvel bullpen. “Cadence was trying to get the most out of Marvel, and I don’t think they were concerned with quality,” Wolfman says. As the war between Marvel and DC intensified, Martin Goodman resurfaced with a new comic-book venture. Still bitter about his parting imbroglio with Cadence, Goodman and his son Chip formed a company

called Seaboard Publications to publish magazines and a line of comic books. In a stab at his former business associates, Goodman named the comics division Atlas Comics, in reference to the pre-Marvel firm that he operated with Lee in the 1950s. Goodman’s strategy was to tackle his old firm head-on with a flood of titles that mimicked Marvel’s visual look and style. He began by hiring Larry Lieber, Lee’s brother and former collaborator. At the time, Lieber, who was also Goodman’s relative by marriage, was having trouble getting steady work from Marvel. The Atlas job offered a measure of security, and by all accounts, Stan didn’t mind that his brother was working for a competitor. Goodman put Lieber in charge of several anthology titles and brought in a former Warren and DC editor, Jeff Rovin, to head up the main comics line. Rovin began by trying to fashion a distinctive identity for the Atlas books, with characters that were more experimental and extreme than the super-heroes being pumped out by the Big Two. That effort didn’t last long. As Rovin later related in The Comics Journal, “Martin became more and more disgruntled as he read more and more of my comics. And what he decided, without having received a single sales report, was that they didn’t look and read enough like Marvel Comics.” Rovin protested, but his boss was insistent. Goodman had always been a follower of trends, and at the time, Marvel was the industry trendsetter. What’s more, Goodman was determined to prove that he could re-create his prior success at Marvel without Stan Lee. Backed by Goodman’s significant cash reserves, Atlas mounted a raid on the talent pools of its competitors. Goodman offered creators higher page rates than were being paid by Marvel and DC, as well as a number of previously unheard-of incentives, such as the return of original artwork and an ownership share in the characters they invented. Several high-profile artists took the bait, including old-timers Wally Wood, Alex Toth, and SpiderMan co-creator Steve Ditko. A stream of younger freelance artists — Neal Adams, Howard Chaykin, and Walt Simonson, among them — signed on as well. Carmine Infantino, the publisher of DC, countered Goodman’s tactics with an offensive of his own — a compensation system that included rate increases, bonuses, reprint fees and the return of artwork. Infantino’s generosity, of course, extended only to those creators who agreed to work exclusively for DC. Defectors were frozen out. At Marvel, the reaction was a bit more subdued. Stan was still on bad terms with Goodman, but he didn’t view Atlas as a serious threat to Marvel. Nevertheless, Goodman’s attempted incursion on the Marvel bullpen had struck a nerve. In response, Stan drafted a letter for his staff. “A situation has arisen in the comic-book field which I’d like to discuss with you,” the letter began. “Recently, a number of smaller companies — some already established, some in the process of attempting a launch — have decided that the only way to match Marvel’s success is to lure away as many of our people as possible.

“Unfortunately, the fact that we’re big, the fact that we’re solidly financed, and the fact that we’re ethically responsible actually acts against us. It’s like Nazi Germany and the Allies in World War Two. Hitler, being a dictator and having no one to answer to, could do as he wished whenever the mood struck him, and could make the most extravagant promises to his captive people, while being completely heedless to the consequences. The U.S. however had to move slowly, following firmly established principles of law and government. Marvel, like the Allies, simply cannot counter-react with impetuous pie-in-the-sky offers and promises.” Having so elegantly drawn a distinction between the nobility of his cause and the fascistic disposition of his esteemed competitor, Lee went on to remind his freelancers about Marvel’s medical and life insurance program for those artisans “who do most or all of their work for us.” In addition, Lee said, the current pay scale was under review and a number of bonus plans were in the works. As for original artwork, Marvel would look into helping artists sell their pages through in-house ads and galleries. “I might add,” Lee sniped, “that years ago when I wanted to return original artwork to all artists, one of the very people in the field who is now making such extravagant offers was the very one who refused to allow me to do so!” He closed with assurances about the “great and growing future here” and urged his staffers not to squander their own prospects by giving in to outside temptations. “Marvel has never lied to you. Marvel never will. Stay with us. You won’t regret it.” Beyond a shake-up of DC’s employment policies and some rumblings at Marvel, Goodman’s upstart company didn’t accomplish much of anything. Despite a few standouts, Atlas’ line was made up largely of shoddy-looking imitations. Titles like Wulf the Barbarian, Tiger-Man, and The Brute, a blatant knockoff of The Incredible Hulk, failed to find an audience among the comicsbuying public. Creative differences between Goodman and his editors, and his resolve to flood newsstands, eliminated any real chance the company may have had to be a contender. “Unfortunately, the demands on our time forced us to push out derivative, uninspired titles about every idiotic character we could invent, from the Son of Dracula to the Bog Beast to ManMonster to Demon Hunter,” Rovin recalled, adding that “the expansion of the line turned us into bonafide [sic] schlockmeisters.” With its exorbitant pay rates, Atlas was soon bleeding money, forcing Goodman to close shop in mid-1975, 10 months into the campaign. Goodman may have been motivated by anger, but he wasn’t blinded by it. The desire for revenge evidently lost some of its appeal once the red ink started to flow. After Atlas folded, Stan showed no apparent ill will toward any of his writers and artists who had gone over. He even hired his brother, Larry, back at Marvel. Lee’s relationship with Goodman, however, disintegrated beyond repair; the Atlas Comics episode had driven a permanent wedge between the former friends and colleagues. In 1978, an interviewer broached the subject with Lee: “Are you and Martin Goodman speaking any more?”

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“No,” Lee responded. “It’s reached that point?” “Yeah,” Lee said. Martin Goodman retired to Palm Beach, Florida, where he died in 1992. Chip Goodman started a new company, which grew to encompass 80 magazines in a variety of genres, including soft-core pornography, fitness and home decoration. He died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1996, at age 55.

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Amid all the turmoil both within and outside Marvel, the editor in chief position, after Stan’s long tenure, entered a period of instability. Thomas quit in 1974. Wein moved in for nine months, and then turned the job over to Wolfman, who stayed on for a year. Next, Conway took a stab, but his reign lasted less than a month due to editorial infighting. Archie Goodwin, another former Warren editor, followed Conway and held on for a year and a half. Finally, in 1978, Jim Shooter, a 26-year-old writer and editor, grabbed the reins and brought some much-needed stability to the company. “It was an insane job,” Wein says. “I was technically responsible for 65 titles a month without any real editorial staff. It was overwhelming, far too much for one person.” Stan’s role in all this was similar to what Martin Goodman had done at the old Atlas and Timely. As publisher, Lee stayed largely out of the daily operations, although he would shepherd in some new titles and look over the monthly output, occasionally marking up an issue with notes. His main concern was that the most popular heroes — Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Thor — were written and drawn by the company’s best talent. “Stan was fairly hands off,” Conway says. “His strong suit has always been conceptualizing, in the sense that he would come up with the big idea and then send you on your way.” Lee became a creative advisor, someone the editors could lean on when their own wells ran dry. His office door was always open. Wein remembers once being faced with a George Pérezdrawn Fantastic Four cover that was so densely packed with figures, there was no room to place a text blurb. He went to see Stan and said, “Here’s the cover. I’m stuck. I know it needs a blurb, but I can’t figure out where to put it.” Stan stared at the artwork briefly, and then pointed, “Make a stat of that man’s raised arm. Bend it at the elbows.” Immediately, the visual space opened up. “Stan was great for that sort of thing,” Wein says. Another time, in the mid-’70s, Conway was struggling with a character that he had created for The Amazing Spider-Man. Frank Castle was an ex-Marine whose family was gunned down by gangsters. His response to the tragedy was to embark on a jihad against crime, taking up arms of all calibers against drug lords, Mafia dons, and others who prey on the weak and the innocent. Castle’s costume, a tight-fitting black suit with a large white skull on the chest, looked fearsome enough, but the character lacked a suitable nom de guerre. Conway and Wein, who was then editor-in-chief, sought Stan’s counsel. “What does this guy do?” Stan asked. “He’s an ex-Army guy whose family was killed by the Mob. He goes out and punishes the underworld,” Wein responded.

Lee thought for a moment. “He’s the Punisher.” Wein says that you could hear the sound of the two men slapping their foreheads — ”Of course!” — at the flawless simplicity of the name. “All of Stan’s characters’ names told you exactly what they were and what they did,” he observes. In the 1980s, the Punisher would become one of Marvel’s most popular characters, spawning several of his own series and graphic novels, as well as a stunningly bad movie starring Dolph Lundgren. Stan’s leadership style, sometimes slack, entailed placing a lot of faith in the abilities of those who worked for him. He was quick to recognize talent in a new writer or artist, and he had no qualms about saddling young staffers with large responsibilities. Conway, for example, was 23 years old when he assumed the mantle of editor in chief. Given the turnover rate for that position, Lee arguably could have put more thought into some of his hires. But his employees respected and revered him, and despite the sometimescrushing workload, they relished the freedom he gave them. “One of the signs of a good leader is the ability to delegate responsibility and step back, and Stan was good at that,” Wein says. On certain occasions, Stan proved especially adept at shifting responsibility, for example, when facing down a crowd of incensed comics fans. Perhaps the most famous such incident involved the death of SpiderMan’s early-’70s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, who was knocked off a bridge by the Green Goblin. Lee has long maintained that he was out of town during the production of the issue that dispensed with Stacy in so callous a manner. He would say later that he was shocked — shocked — upon learning of her demise, and that he would certainly never have approved if he had known of it in advance. But Conway, Spider-Man’s writer at the time, and Thomas, who was then editor-in-chief, remember things differently. In their recollection, John Romita, the title’s artist and lead creator, suggested killing Gwen Stacy as a way to shake up the Spidey universe. Thomas then approached Lee and mentioned the idea, to which Stan responded with great enthusiasm. “Stan said to make sure it’s done in an intense and dramatic way, so the readers will feel it’s well done,” Conway says. The Amazing Spider-Man #121, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died,” was released to near-unanimous fan condemnation. A short time later, Stan was at a public appearance where his audience pummeled him with angry questions about the issue. “He immediately disavowed all knowledge,” Conway says, laughing. “Stan is a guy who likes people to like him, and he doesn’t want to take the heat for things. I’m sure in his mind, after a while, he didn’t approve it. He certainly didn’t approve the reaction he got.” While Stan was clearly a capable creative leader, his business and administrative skills left something to be desired. He attended budget meetings, fretted over threats to his paper supply, and clashed with distributor Curtis Circulation over its inability to market Marvel product. But Stan wasn’t really suited to the role of executive, and Marvel suffered growing pains in the early period of his tenure as publisher. The comic book industry was struggling with flagging sales on newsstands and other mass-market outlets. Meanwhile, the fan culture that had coalesced around the 1960s Marvel canon was growing and establishing alternative venues for distribution, such as conventions and specialty stores. This shift demanded a more nuanced commercial strategy that seemed beyond Lee’s abilities. The problem may

have been with Cadence’s management, who misconstrued Stan’s editorial savvy for an infallible Midas touch. “Just because Stan Lee came up with the super-heroes with angst doesn’t make him a good businessman,” says Joe Brancatelli, a business journalist who wrote a column about the comics industry in the 1970s. In a tacit acknowledgment of that fact, Stan eventually relinquished many of his corporate duties to focus more on his roles as Marvel’s creative director and effervescent pitchman. As a boss, Lee was easygoing and friendly, often taking editors to lunch and regaling them with stories about the bygone days of comics. Stan was corny, but he had enough self-awareness to poke fun at his own selffashioned persona. He wasn’t above a little self-mockery, even about such ostensibly sensitive topics as his male pattern baldness. Wein recalls that one day he was on his way to lunch with Lee and Wolfman when a huge gust of wind blew across the street. The younger men looked on with amusement as Stan grabbed for his toupee. “You think that’s funny now,” Lee snapped. “Not anywhere near as funny as watching a middleaged man chase his hair down the street.” There was, however, a limit to Stan’s social side. Between his hectic speaking schedule, his publishing duties, and his attempts to launch Marvel into other media, he didn’t have much free time to spend, say, loitering in bars. Nor was he really the kind of boss who liked to goof off with his employees after work hours. It was, perhaps, a generational thing. Stan was settling into his 50s, while the bullpen was stocked mainly with 20-somethings. He had a home, a wife, a grown daughter. They lived in dingy New York apartments, produced comics in heady bursts of youthful exertion, and partied late into the night. Stan could seem downright ill at ease in the company of his young charges. Nevertheless, Lee wanted his staff to like him, so he made some half-hearted attempts to round them up. In the early 1970s, DC Publisher Carmine Infantino began taking his workers out for Friday dinners. It was a semi-official gathering, a chance to mingle with the boss, and Infantino usually picked up the bill. A Marvel staffer who asked not to be identified recalls that Lee heard about the DC outings and decided he needed to do the same thing. “Of course, Stan had absolutely no real interest in hanging out with people,” the staffer says, laughing. Regardless, the boss’s order came down: We’re going to the bar and we’re all going to hang out. One evening after work, the staff dutifully followed Lee to a nearby watering hole and grabbed their drinks. “We’re all sitting there looking at Stan,” the staffer recalls, “and he’s like, ‘So, here we are, guys, we’re hanging out.’” A long, awkward pause followed. Finally, after around 10 minutes, Stan looked at his watch and stood up: “Well, gotta go.” He left without paying the bar tab. “Stan was a little more isolated from the rest of us than he would let you believe,” the staffer remarks. Like anyone in a position of authority, Lee was sometimes prone to fits of anger, for example, when an editor mistreated a veteran artist or when a writer defected to DC. But those instances were uncommon. It took a major screw-up to rile Stan, and even then, he rarely held a grudge. “If Stan got angry at something you did that day, it would be gone five minutes later,” Wolfman says. Lee, Wolfman adds, was trying to act as a teacher to his brood of youthful writers and editors. Drawing on his three decades in the industry, Stan had plenty of lessons to impart: Every comic book is somebody’s first. You can’t assume that people have read the previous issue. Don’t use the same background color on two issues in a row; readers will think they’re the same issue. Letter columns and cover copy should be written in the snappy Marvel style; they need that Marvel zip. “Stan really understood the medium, and he had no problem explaining it, because he knew what he wanted,” Wolfman notes. Even if Stan had suddenly vanished from Marvel’s offices in those days,

he would have dominated the company’s 1970s output by dint of his creative style and the lingering impact of his work from a decade earlier. Most of the writers and artists then on staff, including Wein, Wolfman and Conway, represented a fresh wave of creators who had been weaned on Lee’s superhero collaborations with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. They knew how to write and draw Stan Lee’s comic books, because they grew up reading Stan Lee’s comic books. While Lee and his peers from the Golden Age of comics were inspired by literary figures like William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, the new guys claimed as their influences Lee and Kirby and Ditko. The American comic book, barely half a century old, had arced back onto itself. Conway’s career path was typical: He started writing comics for DC at age 15. Eventually, when he developed a more accomplished style, he moved over to Marvel. Despite its smaller size and lower pay rates, Marvel was the place to be. DC was a solid company, an institution, but Stan Lee’s Marvel was hip, happening, cool. Everybody wanted to work for Stan. And those who did came equipped with an ingrained “Stan Lee” sensibility to guide their work. “Stan was the first writer to bring an ironic distance to the material, but he was unconscious of doing that,” Conway says. “His models were the sitcoms and soap operas — their inherent silliness — rather than an intellectual awareness that what he was doing was self-referential.” The next generation of writers, though, got the joke. And when they took over Marvel, self-reference became a standard stylistic trope, rather than a mere by-product of zany storytelling. Conway and his peers filtered their imaginations through Stan’s network of ironic knowingness, yielding a slightly removed, albeit more sophisticated, class of Marvel comics. “When Lee was Marvel’s head writer in the 1960s, he would have an ongoing dialogue with Kirby or Ditko about what a comic book should be, and that’s how it would develop,” Conway observes. “When I wrote Spider-Man, I was trying to do what Stan would have done. His impact was overwhelming. “Everybody who worked at Marvel had Stan on his shoulder.”

fin

Sources: Author interviews: Steve Lemberg, Gerry Conway, Stan Lee, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Denis Kitchen, Joe Brancatelli, Tony Isabella Nicholas von Hoffman, “Marvel Comics: Astounding!!! Fantastic!!!” The Washington Post, December 23, 1971. Stan Lee and George Mair, Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (Fireside, 2002). Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History (Taylor Publishing Company, 1989). Roy Thomas, “Roy Thomas on Stan Lee” (letter), The Comics Journal, February 1978. Les Daniels, Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics (Harry N. Abrams, 1993). Roy Thomas, “A Conversation with Artist-Writer Larry Lieber,” Alter Ego, Fall 1999. Jeff Rovin, “How Not To Run A Comic Book Company,” The Comics Journal, February 1987. Jon B. Cooke, “Vengeance, Incorporated,” Comic Book Artist, December 2001. “‘Hello, Culture Lovers!’ Stan Lee At James Madison University.” (Recorded by Jim Dawson.) The Comics Journal, October 1978. “Charles Goodman, A Publisher, 55,” The New York Times, March 3, 1996.

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“MELISSA.”

“This top drawing is a personal favorite.”

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“Sketches from a trip to France in 2001…”

“Kwaiti… a film student from Cannes I met on a train to Italy.”

“Streetside café in Montpellier.”

“A girl watching from a window in Montpellier.”

“Sketching passersby in Toulouse.”

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“Pierre et Jeanne: These are the children of French comics great Lewis Trondheim (they’re playing Gameboy).”

“My friend Miriam reading comics.”

“Lewis Trondheim’s studio (he was kind enough to let me stay a few days).”

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“Melissa and our cat, Delilah… in the classic tradition of lovely ladies and their cats!”

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“Lilia — daughter of French cartoonist Christopher — drawn in Tours.”

“Samuel, newborn son of my friends Laetitia and Frederic in Strassbourg.”

“Melissa in the morning.”

“Doodle.”

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“My friend Marion drawn in Toulouse.” “Super-hero frustration.”

“Melissa and Delilah and a view of our cramped apartment stacked high with books.”

“More random doodles.”

“For the record, all of these sketches were drawn on the spot, NOT from photo reference.” — C.T.

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Interview Conducted by Jon B. Cooke

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An Illustrator & His Tools

Transcribed by Steven Tice Design by Jason Adams CONTINUITY ASSOCIATES

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Comic Book Artist: We were talking about Alex Ross and now looking at your Warren story, “Curse of the Vampire” [Creepy #14, Apr. ‘67]. Neal Adams: Jumping in the middle, as we are, that vampire story you could very easily say was an Alex Ross story. It’s done as a wash, and Alex Ross uses a watercolor form of wash, for the most part. I like watercolor, and I very rarely do comics in wash, but that particular story was done in washes. Photographs were taken for it. Not used, totally, but a lot of photographs were taken. I could have done more work that way — I enjoyed it — but in those days nobody paid more than $45 or $50 for a page. There was really no chance to sit back and fully illustrate in those days, because the money simply wasn’t there. Doing that one story like that was almost like shooting myself in the foot. I might as well not make any money. It was so much easier to go over to DC Comics and get a Jerry Lewis story to draw. Ten pages a day, even at $35 a page, wasn’t bad. Truth be known, drawing [The Adventures of ]Jerry Lewis and [The Adventures of] Bob Hope was the best money I ever made in comics. The truth is, it’s quite sloppy, but a lot of fun, and it’s fast. To do a printed story, like Alex does, you really do need to be paid reasonably well. Today, thanks to some pioneers who were able to push the companies to pay more money for their pages — I don’t know who those people would be, but some pioneers managed to lean on the companies to actually pay better rates and had moved the rates up to the point you can actually sit down and paint a comic book story. My time for doing that had passed. Not that I necessarily would have done it. At that time, I was raising a family. Still I have a certain affinity to what Alex does simply because there’s a part of me that was headed in that direction and I basically had to turn away. Every once in a while, I did

Tarzan paintings — hardly “paintings”; more like color drawings — and certain commercial stuff and I still drift off into that direction. I have quite a bit of painting experience. Of course, you don’t really need to have a personal reason to like Alex’s stuff, because it’s generally appreciated by everybody. I do have a particular affinity toward his work simply because that direction was part of what I did at one point. You’re looking at me and see behind me a Batman painting. Now, that’s not done in wash, the way Alex works. It’s done in acrylic, and it’s the kind of thing, you look at it and go, “Boy, would I like to see a story done this way, or some covers done this way. That’s pretty nifty.” CBA: When did you do that? Neal: A couple of weeks ago. CBA: Whoa! Neal: So you can see that I’m not unfamiliar with painting, and I do enjoy it. Over there is another style of painting, slightly different than the Batman piece, not quite Frank Frazetta-ish, not quite John Buscema-like. And from my point of view, a quick sketch. People don’t know what I do. On a commercial basis, for the past five or six years, I’ve done the painted covers for the Icecapades. I did a painting of Neil Diamond that he used as a big poster on tour. So painting is part of my background. There seems to be this tendency to say this guy paints, or this guy draws and colors. The truth is there are people who draw thinking about color, and people who draw and let other people think about color. There are people who draw minimally and think about color a lot, and there are people who think about color all the time and draw less. And one of the things, one of the charms of Alex Ross’s stuff is that he thinks about drawing and he thinks about color at the same time. So he’s not a painter as much as he is a storyteller who uses paint as his medium. That’s a different thing than a painter. There are skilled painters all over the place. And there are some skilled painters in comic books that are not good storytellers. For example, to make the comparison, there are people who think that I’m a good artist. I’m actually a good storyteller. I just happen to draw well. Alex… if you look at comic books you will see, there are four or five people who TOP: This classic Batman pose was fully pained in acrylic for Continuity’s conference room. Batman ©2003 DC Comics.

This was originally planned as a Tarzan paperback book cover, but the piece disappeared before Neal could finish it. Those of you who read the series can guess which book this was planned for. Savage ©2003 Neal Adams.

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paint, maybe more, who paint comic books. None of them are as good as Alex at storytelling. So that’s the defining difference. I’m not saying that the other guys aren’t good storytellers; I don’t want to take that away from anybody. But I’m simply saying that he’s risen as high as he has in the eyes of people because he is both and he mixes them both very well. CBA: It’s genuine? Neal: It’s intelligent. He uses his intelligence to tell a story, like a movie director. There’s a part of me that says, “I would like to see a movie directed by Alex Ross.” There’s another part of me that says, “Be true to the form and keep on turning out these comic books.” Unfortunately, you can only do that for a limited amount of time, and then your goals become. I’m not drawing comic books all the time. I’m doing other things. Alex will be drawing comic books for as long as it satisfies him and then he’ll branch out to something else. That doesn’t mean he’ll desert comic books. It simply means that he’s spread his horizons when he chooses, and he will do, hopefully, what he exercises his mind to do and it will make him happy. CBA: Were you impressed when you saw Marvels when it first came out or were you aware of him prior to that? Neal: [Ponders] Hmm… I’m going to take a long way to get to the answer. Not too long. I had a dream… I had been invited to a manga festival, and the reason I was invited was because they basically said I was an American artist, how everybody likes manga, there are some comparisons between manga and American artists, and they would like me there to discuss the differences. What they were really saying was, “You’re old-fashioned and we’re new-fashioned, so would you like to come and be embarrassed by us?” And I thought about it, and I thought, you know, the problem is

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I’ve been through a different times when things come into fashion, things go out of fashion. The next night I had a dream. In this dream, I was at a comic book convention, and someone was asking me, “Mr. Adams, you were so cool at one time. You were the coolest thing going. And now you’re not. How does it feel?” And I remember answering the dream, and as I was waking up, I said, “Just so you understand, I have never been cool. I have never been hip. Whoever you think I am, I am not. I am not cool. I like brown and gray and I have never been cool. It’s your perception that made me cool. And whatever impression you have, it ain’t me. I just do the work. And I have a lot of fun, so you decide if I’m cool. Otherwise, I’m just doing my shit. I’m a worker in the field, that’s all. If you think it’s cool, that’s great. If you don’t think it’s cool, I don’t care. That’s got nothing to do with me.” And that’s how I feel about things, because I’m not cool and hip, and never was, the only way I find out about things is people shove them under my face. “Look at this!” And people are always

shoving stuff under my face. So my son had met Alex Ross, my son, Joel. They had met at a comic book convention and had hung out together for a while. So Joel told me about him, and then my mind blanked on it. Then somebody showed something to me, and after a while I would look at it and would go, “Hmm, this is pretty good!” Then I looked at the technique thinking, “Gee, this was watercolor,” and I thought, Jesus, this is not so different than what I did with Tarzan and other stuff, where you do the drawing and lay down some guidelines, then lay your watercolor down and catch it at the bottom and then maybe you throw color over to tint it. You’re really doing color drawings, not exactly paintings, but they are paintings, only in watercolor. This is really nice. So I got to look at the technique. And then, right after looking at the technique, I got interested in the story. Which is… like I say, I’m not cool. Things happen to me by osmosis, it occurs to me, because I’m kind of dumb. And I just kind of… get it! I always question things, but I give them a break. I didn’t have to give Alex’s stuff much of a break, because it got to be pretty good pretty quick. I thought, “Hmm, he’s telling a story. How many guys do you run into who actually tells the story? They’re all drawing pictures that have nothing to do with the story that’s going on. He’s actually drawing the story, and likes the story and tells the story very well, very professionally.” Then I realized he was very professional. He has the right attitude, a healthy, strong attitude about telling the story and about creating characters who do tell the story, and he was, in fact, talented. So that’s how I discovered it. When it was, what book it was, I don’t know. Honestly. CBA: Marvels in 1994. Neal: Marvels. That was the one with the guy with the glasses? CBA: With the acetate cover? Neal: The guy with the glasses. CBA: Yeah, right. Neal: I thought, “This is too hard to do. Why are you doing this? Why don’t you do regular comics?” And then I realized, okay, I didn’t necessarily like this story because I don’t want to follow this guy around. But I’m being forced to by the storytelling ability of this artist. So then I continued to read it, and I read it and enjoyed it. I thought, “Okay, how many good storytellers are there? I think I can count them on the fingers of my hand those that are worthwhile. Bryan Hitch (who I didn’t think had really discovered himself and now has), Stuart Immonen, Michael Golden, Adam Hughes. Of course, I’ve forgotten many and I’m sorry. Excellent ABOVE: Opaque watercolor and acrylic portrait.

artists and good storytellers… there’s just not a lot. CBA: Are you a fan of new comics? Neal: I never was… and always was a kinda fan, certainly of Kubert, Infantino, Heath, Drucker, Williamson. CBA: Not Wally Wood? Neal: Don’t say it like that. Wally Wood, to me, was like a wonderful mystery. How could somebody like this exist? Where the hell did he come from? And the same thing is true of a lot of those guys at EC. They must have paid more money at EC, or the guys felt there was some respect going

on there and they really pored their hearts into their work. EC was a place to aspire to. I don’t know what the reality of it was, but it just seemed like that was the highest echelon one wanted to get to, and once you got there, then you’d be shown respect. The thing about Wally Wood, I wasn’t so much a fan of his as I was a gleeful respondent. It just made me giggle to look at his stuff. It just was funny and wonderful and the little guy pulling a wagon at the end of the story that says “Wood” on it… it’s just too marvelous for words. And yes, in that way, I was a fan of the guy who did Supersnipe. I was a fan of Jack Davis. I was a fan, certainly of Al Williamson, and a lot of guys. But Joe Kubert was, to me, the ground-level, feet-in-the-dirt, plugging away every day, turning out pages and all of them good, and he was the kind of artist you’d look to and say, “I really admire this. This is really good.” And he had a family, I knew he had a family because when he did the Tor comic book, you got a sense he was a rounded person, he had a home, had a family, and was doing his best to crank out pages in the worst of times. There was a lot of guys who got divorced, who never got married, who bounced around, became alcoholics… As much as I loved Wally Wood’s work, Wally Wood on a personal continued on page 101 Barbarian ©2003 Neal Adams.

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True Colors I first recall seeing the art of Alex Ross through snazzy promotion material used by the House of Ideas to hype their upcoming epic, Marvels, about ten years ago. I distinctly recall experiencing a wave of electricity coursing through me as I immediately realized that this talented guy, whoever he was, “gets it” when it comes to super-heroes. He still does. The artist was interviewed by telephone on April 9, 2003, and Alex and his wife, T.J., copyedited the final transcript. —Ye Crusading Editor

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The Alex

Comic Book Artist: Where are you originally from, Alex? Alex Ross: Portland, Oregon. CBA: What year were you born? Alex: 1970. CBA: When did you start drawing? Alex: At the age of three. CBA: Were you copying or just inspired by comic strips or books? Alex: I have tons of examples from that age, right around there, three, four, of me drawing these little folded over 8" x 11" sheets of paper on the one side, a comic cover of Spidey or whatever. Very crude little drawings. My stuff looked like what a four year old kid would draw. But, because I drew all the time, constantly, there are boxes and boxes full of the stuff I did in my youth, I was obviously training myself much faster, so by the time I’m 14, 15, 16, I’m getting to the point I could potentially be ready for the business. So I was actually lucky enough to get my foot in at the age of 19. CBA: Did you do full stories as a little kid? Alex: Yes, as close as I could, of course. I started to get more ambitious the older I got. Probably about the age of 13, 14, I could actually count on myself to almost finish an entire story. But much of what was in me from an

early age was a sense of wanting to do something epic. Because I was looking at stuff like Superman vs. Spider-Man and Superman vs. Muhammad Ali thinking, “Look at how big these stories are! I want to do something that long! I want to do something you can sit down and immerse yourself in for an entire afternoon of reading.” That’s what I was hoping to accomplish. So I would never have that self-control, that discipline, to make myself do all that work when I was a young kid, because, you know, your attention goes off the thing, and then you’re not into it for a while. I was always worried, like, when am I going to develop discipline? When am I going to get that? And, of course, by discipline being such a thing I was so concerned about, it was the thing I sought to improve in myself by always accomplishing what I set out to do. CBA: So were you always copying the major super-hero characters? Alex: Around the age of six I started to create a lot of my own. Like most kids, that stuff is derivative. I was really just recycling things I had seen in other forms. Like, one of my key super-hero characters I would play with for many, many years to come was initially based upon [The Legion of SuperHeroes character] Shadow Lass, who I just turned into a guy. I don’t know why that was my first instinct. I just loved the color blue and thought, “Wow!

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke  Transcribed by Steven Tice  Portrait by Greg Preston

Ross Interview

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That’s a great-looking character.” She was from the old Dave Cockrum design. CBA: Who was your Superman knock-off? Alex: [Laughs] My overall lead characters included that Shadow Lass knock-off, who eventually became was my ultimate lead, my heroic Romeo, and I had more or less a boy/girl team, a romantic duo. I would eventually throw those characters into Kingdom Come as the daughter and son of Batman and Robin, respectively. A romance developed between those two. But for the most part they didn’t really resemble what they had looked like when I drew them as a kid, aside from just facial features and whatnot. The girl had a costume that looked like what I developed as a kid. CBA: How old were you when you did that?

Alex: Probably I first started when I was nine with those characters, and then I kept drawing them every year thereafter, I kept redesigning them every year. In fact, for a long time I had named my lead hero Dark Knight. This was long before The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. CBA: Curses! [laughs] You gotta get that copyright thing going, Alex. Alex: Well, at the age of 11, it’s just a little bit out of reach. [laughter] CBA: Is it telling that you did a romance at the age of nine? Alex: Well, it was the thing most missing from my life as a kid, so I wanted a romantic association in life, the subject of all my creative longings as a storyteller. I want my lead heroes to be a sort of perfect boy and girl.

CBA: Was one in pursuit of the other, or were they equally in love? Alex: It was your perfect love affair situation, Romeo and Juliet. The girl was actually named Nightstar, just like in Kingdom Come. So in a weird way, it was developing Kingdom Come from real life, where I had these opportunities to squeeze material I had created as a kid. The name Nightstar sounds like a combination of Nightwing and Starfire, which would be perfect in the future when they have a daughter. The only thing I had to get rid of was the blue skin. CBA: Did you have a middle-class upbringing? Alex: Yes, relatively low- to middle-class. CBA: Did you have brothers and sisters? Alex: Yes. I’m the caboose kid, the one they didn’t expect to have. My parents were both in their 40s when they had me, so there’s a nineyear difference with the next oldest. I’ve got two sisters and one brother. CBA: Was it much like being an only child? Alex: Yes, very much so. We also moved across the country a few times, lived in two places in Texas after Oregon, so I never really had a perfect “home” home that I think of as the place I feel as where I belong, so to speak. There was no longtime-friend association coming from kindergarten going all the way up through the rest of my life. So my brother and sisters pretty much all went off to college before I was out of grade school. CBA: Did you find solace in the trappings of childhood with toys, etc.? Alex: Oh, yes, of course. Whether or not it was the moving around the country that began to make me the more insulated kind of personality, I’m not entirely sure. That may have just been me altogether. My brother shares some personality traits as I. But yes, comics and the imagination that comes from fantasy became a comfort zone for me. CBA: Were you a loner in school? Alex: I would say relatively, but mostly because I was fairly obnoxious. I wasn’t necessarily alone because the world was against me, it was just, well, they had a reason to be against me! I wasn’t very good at mixing socially, and I’ve got nobody to blame for that but myself. CBA: How would you characterize yourself? Were you a know-at-all? Alex: No. As a young kid, I was trying to fit in. I was put in school early, starting kindergarten at the age of four (usually kids are at least five when they first start school). It wasn’t as if my parents pushed me, but they figured, hey, I was already reading. I have that much to give thanks to Sesame Street, which I was watching every day. My mom bought me the Spidey Super Stories comics specifically because she wanted me to read and not just look at the pictures. I was reading at the age of three or four, I believe. So I was always a year younger than anybody I was ever around and my entire youth had been being around people who essentially had a leg up on me. CBA: Did comics come into play with Spidey Super Stories?

Alex: I’m going to have to guess that my first encounter with anything to do with comics was probably seeing the guy dressed up as Spider-Man on The Electric Company. That led to the Spidey Super Stories and subsequently other comics. But also around the same early-’70s period, there were the Super Friends cartoons. I also remember watching reruns of the Adam West Batman a bit and probably some of the George Reeves Superman. At different points in my youth, I was being exposed to all these things. I think most kids in my generation, even though we’re a good ten, in some ways 20 years removed from when they originally aired, we were still being reared on them because they were in such heavy recycled circulation in syndication. CBA: Did you see the Superman movie when it came out? Alex: Yes. I did see it when it came out in ‘78. CBA: Did it have an impact on you as well? Alex: You know, I was enough of a comics fan, by that point I was so well-versed in Superman that I could look at it and say, “Well, I like it, but that’s not Krypton… and Chris [Reeve] is a little young.” I could look at him and say, “He needs to be beefier.” Superman, at the time, was the Curt Swan version. I was aware of the Neal Adams version, and even aware of Joe Shuster’s Superman at the time in ‘78, when I was eight, watching that movie. So I had a critical eye, but of course, I loved the film, and I love it more as time goes on, especially when you realize it’s one of the only things Hollywood could ever produce that has the slightest respect for the medium or the character. We have to be thankful now that that’s probably as close as they’ll ever get to capturing the man on film. CBA: Did you have a focus on the comics singularly, or was all mixed up with TV and movies? Alex: Oh, my interest was generally within the comics, because there was only so much media available in my youth. Yes, there was the mixture of seeing the guy dressed up on The Electric Company, seeing the Batman TV show, etc. All that does is it filters in the mind to realize, “Hey, this stuff is viable in all media.” So I never had this opinion that the content of comics should be only left to be these two-dimensional pamphlets, and that’s something I think where there’s somewhat of a generational difference. Because a lot of people I’ve come to know in this business believe the material has to be limited to this flat, artexisting object, and nothing beyond that. CBA: Did seeing Superman in the TV show, on the movie screen, in cartoon shows, as well as in the comics, give the ABOVE: This gorgeous painting of Space Ghost appeared as a very limited edition print for Hanna Barbera in 2000. ©2003 Hanna Barbera.

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character a greater dimension for you? You say you don’t adhere to the pretense of super-heroes being limited to just comics. Alex: Well, the 2-D becomes the rule book to which everything else should try and measure up. I’m respectful — first and foremost — of the comic-book version. To use them in another medium, to faithfully capture the essence of these characters, you have to respect their histories in the comics. I was fascinated at six or seven with the idea that these things had been around for 30 or 40 years already before I was getting into them. Because, in the ’70s, DC would produce these cheap reproductions of old material — Famous First Editions — with the first Justice Society of America meeting in All-Star Comics #3 or Captain Marvel’s first appearance in Whiz Comics #2. These things were artifacts of a bygone age for me and they established that these guys had a cultural base that goes back, almost into the Stone Age. When I looked back at those early drawings of Shuster’s in Action Comics #1, they were certainly much cruder than the illustrations he would later produce in the following years. But that crudeness has an engaging element in discovering them, because — wow! — you could see the thought process being formed. It’s the earliest point of this thing coming into the grips of its own reality. CBA: Did you also read the comic book histories out at the time? Alex: Yes. There was a lot of stuff hitting the bookstores in the ’70s, and luckily libraries were carrying that stuff when I was growing up, so I pretty much was first reared on Comix: A History of Comic Books in America by Les Daniels, which came out in the early ’70s. Subsequently, there were the other volumes, like The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. There was also Crawford’s Encyclopedia of Comic Books. CBA: How was that?

Alex: Wonderful! My God, I learned more about the entire layout of all the companies and all they produced by reading that one book. It covered everything from Fawcett to EC, and it was lush with illustrations. I began to understand where EC fit into the larger picture. Just seeing a few pages of Weird Science and the work of Wally Wood and the stories of Ray Bradbury… I put into context the important touch-points in the history of comics. Of course, the problem is that much of these things really covered the period immediately leading up to my time, so the ’60s were a lot hazier in documentation than the ’40s and ’50s. CBA: Obviously the books being produced were for people perhaps a dozen years older than you, right? Alex: Right. CBA: The late ’70s were perhaps a pretty dismal time for mainstream comic books. A lot of the better artists had left the field — Bernie Wrightson to work on Frankenstein, for instance

— because perhaps there weren’t advances in creator rights fast enough. For whatever reason, except for a few up-and-comers, like John Byrne, George Pérez, Michael Golden, and Marshall Rogers, there really wasn’t much going on. But was that era just as enthusiastic for you? Alex: Of course, because that’s my time. But I wasn’t seeing that comparison of different ages of the form yet, though I did have this feeling early on that I knew something was missing from the Big Picture. I knew comics were not at the heights they were at in the 1940s. But I rationalized that it was World War Two that affected the excitement of publishing at that time, and the fact there was no television, so I understood that. But I was certainly excited about everything I was seeing, and I was certainly becoming aware of the people who made up the field, people like John Romita, Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson. In fact, at the time when Wrightson, as you pointed out, was out of the medium, I was first seeing his work in Swamp Thing from a copy I found of #1 at a garage sale. At the age of eight or nine, I’m seeing his work for the first time, and it’s having an enormous impact upon my subconscious. I remember thinking, “Wow! This is the most realistic comic I’ve ever seen!” Now I realize, of course, it’s not, but his use of shadow suddenly was breaking down my perceptions of what comics were limited to, and I realized you could take it to a greater graphic level that would relate to all different things in reality. Because, for the most part, I was used to the contour artists, people like George Pérez or even John Romita, where essentially shadow was not a major part of their work, it’s really just the contour line of form. CBA: The outline? Alex: The outline. To this day, that remains pretty much the standard for most pencilers to ever get in the medium. CBA: Do you have an attraction for the heavy renderers,

those artists who shaded, as compared to the contour artists? Is that apples and oranges? Alex: Well, not immediately, necessarily. The quality of what Wrightson was doing was individual before others would really follow suit. But he inspired me so greatly that I went through a period in my early teens aping his style as well as Pérez’s, and of course those two things could not be more difficult to combine. But I would do these illustrations which would pretty much mimic line for line the kind of approach they would take. I wasn’t sitting there studying a panel or a cover and just replicating it; I was trying to digest what they did graphically. What I found is neither one of them held the entire world for me in what they did. They both had an element of things I wanted to grasp inside myself, which meant I had to really find me, eventually. I wasn’t thinking of copying somebody like Adams because he was such a big influence that the entire nature of comics was different in my period growing up because of him. So he’s almost such a subconscious influence that you don’t realize he’s within you. CBA: Neal Adams’ presence is so big that it’s a given? Alex: That’s really what it was at that age. When you think about it, I’m first getting comics when I’m probably about four or five years old, and at that point, Neal has left the mainstream. But everybody following after Neal is influenced by him. I’m seeing the Jim Aparos and the Rich Bucklers of the world, and I’m thinking Neal Adams’ spirit is within all comics at that point. He didn’t have to be doing any more consecutive issues of anything because everybody was now “Neal Adams-ified.” CBA: Did you see Superman vs. Muhammad Ali when it came out? Alex: I saw it but didn’t own a copy until I was 12 or so, but it originally come out in the late ’70s. A lot of those things I would see as a kid, I

wouldn’t necessarily have the chance to purchase. My comic book allowance was… well, I didn’t have an allowance until I was probably ten, so anything I got was usually by begging at a grocery store, pleading, “Can I have this thing because you brought me along anyway?” [laughter] My parents did not have a lot of money, so I would possibly get one comic book per visit, but that was about it. So I did not have a great collection, but I was soaking up everything I could with my eyes. CBA: What has Neal Adams’ influence been on you? Alex: Neal’s influence was one that was so subconscious that it was like, in a way I look at myself now and say, “It goes without saying,” but as a kid growing up, Neal was not drawing the comics that were currently coming out when I was five or six years old. But with his influence and the work that he had done, and the fact so much of his material was getting repackaged in the late ’70s (and we can all see how much that took an influence on my life), he changed the dynamics of comics by showing more elaborate, more realistic figure drawing can be made to work and be quite exciting. Before Adams, there

was realistic figure drawing in comics, going back to the ’30s with Hal Foster’s Tarzan and Prince Valiant, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, and in the 1940s with Mac Raboy’s Captain Marvel, Jr., artists who could show just how good-looking a superhero could seem if rendered realistically by somebody genuinely skilled to show the beauty of that realism. Adams took a muchneeded step further, where you can see Adams isn’t drawing from photo-reference on everything he’s done, but has studied a lot of photography, studied the human figure, showing what he knows. The years and years of training and absorption Adams had come through by looking at even the smallest details in his rendering. Of course, having the impact he did, Adams spawned a great number of imitators, but the first thing that happens to anybody who is becoming a replicant of such talent is for one to just pick up on the details, missing the overall approach. You’d get guys looking at the way Neal’s inks would be on an arm or the shadow play on the body, so they would start rendering all these muscles on the body through cloth without understanding what the musculature for the human body is really like. They just picked up on what they saw Adams do, and I would be part of that same lineage, except I was fortunate to at least take a detour through art school, at least trying to separate myself from just purely the comic influence, and luckily, I think, in some ways, by going through the metamorphosis he must have had to go through himself. It’s not that somebody can’t absorb it on the job, so to speak, but so much of that fire comes from within. And obviously, as Adams would attest, he was studying the things I’m referring to. He was studying life, bringing in reality, bringing in the influence of photography. Steranko picks up on photography, but he’s only studying the barest graphic details without having fully absorbed the quality of figure drawing, whereas Adams is filtering through the entirety of all influences. I think the exaggeration

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that exists in Neal’s work, in terms of body shape, musculature, is this very subtle thing that was just enough to make all of the qualities of realism, realistic lighting and rendering, take hold and really have power within his work. If his stuff had been the same as Mac Raboy, it wouldn’t have had the same influence on the field. I love Raboy, but to some degree that’s a dead stop in and of itself. When Neal left the field, he left on top.

beyond all that is his greatest contribution. There’s sort of a one-two punch going from Kirby to Adams. Whereas Adams has a more immediate visual effect upon my work, Kirby’s effect upon the entire industry, upon my life, upon the things I’ve had a chance to work with and continue to work with, it’s infinite. Plus, his legend holds on as one of those things that’s untarnished. To articulate every thing Kirby did is difficult because it is

Nobody could say there was somebody out there who completely replaced Neal as the next best draftsman. CBA: Has Kirby been an influence on your work? Alex: Kirby is more of a contextual influence in terms of the overall impact he made on comics. Kirby paved the way for dynamic illustration in comics altogether, though his sheer creativity

all so major. I give him the credit for so much of what we consider the impact of Marvel Comics and their characters to have. So much of it was not just simply a character name or a concept, but the look, the design, the worlds Jack created for them… he created a new language for the art form. He’s the Picasso of comics. He created a level of reality that left our own reality behind, whereas Adams came in and married the extreme

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dynamics Kirby was bringing to comics with the realistic world. CBA: Did you go to junior high and high school in the same area? Alex: Yes. My moves generally related to the grade school period. From grade four on up through the end of high school, I was in Lubbock, Texas. CBA: How was that? Alex: Terrible, absolutely terrible. CBA: What made that so? Alex: Well, I never sort of lost the liberal, Pacific Northwest kind of background I had in Portland, Oregon, and my parents were very liberal types, which Lubbock was anything but. Even in the late ’70s, Lubbock was pretty contemptuous of changes in the culture. I was called a hippie in fourth grade. In fourth grade! It’s 1978! Didn’t all kids have long hair at that point? Well, not where I was. CBA: The movie Dazed and Confused, which was set in Texas, featured kids being hazed by high school fraternities. Did they have that behavior where you were? Alex: No, by the time I was in high school, in the late ’80s, high school was generally a lot of kids just getting stoned, but not much organization to what they were doing. CBA: So you haven’t gone back to any high school reunions? Alex: No. In fact, I found out in ’97, when it would have happened, that I was actually on the list as MIA, because they didn’t know where to locate me. The thing is, I didn’t go by the same name either, though. Alex is my middle name. I decided when I left Lubbock that I wanted to begin a new life forever [laughs], so I decided to drop my first name, Nelson, and go by my middle name. So everybody from there knows me by a different name. CBA: After leaving, you wanted to create a new identity for yourself? Alex: Yes, very much so. I wanted to find myself, and it took a long time to take hold. But when I first started college, I was trying to dress different (though I still had my long hair, which I kept for, God, I think 14 years), but I was very much trying to create a Bohemian version of what I dreamed I could be. CBA: Did you venture outside of the super-hero genre and buy comics like the Warren mags? Alex: Well, in the ’70s, I shouldn’t have been allowed to have Warrens, really. But, of course, you spend enough time at the grocery store, with nobody watching, sitting there looking through pages and pages of 1984. Then eventually Heavy Metal was everywhere, and it could not have been more corrupting. But the truth is that aside from those things, when I was four or five years old and still had my brother living at home, he had some Zap Comix around. I’m seeing Zap at such an early age that there’s a sense of corruption of the innocence of super-heroes by seeing the stuff that was being drawn by Robert Crumb and the like. So, in a way, I knew there was a more continued on page 110

THE ARCADE STORY  SPIEGELMAN  GRIFFITH ™

NO. 1

“Keepin’ the Faith”

JULY 2003

Plus! SUPER GREEN BERET: The Worst Comic Book Ever!

 The Inside Scoop on the Renowned ’70s Underground Comix Revue 

ARCAdE CovER GAllERy

TOP ROW: (Left) #1, Spring 1975, art by Robert Crumb; (center) # 2, Summer 1975, art by Robert Crumb; (right) #3, Fall 1975, art by Robert Crumb. MIDDLE ROW: (Left) #4, Winter 1975, art by Robert Crumb; (center) #5, Spring 1976, art by Jay Lynch; (right) #6, Summer 1976, art by Robert Crumb. BOTTOM RIGHT: #7, Fall 1976, art by M.K. Brown. BELOW: R. Crumb subscription ad appearing in Arcade #5. All material ©2003 the respective copyright holders.

The Story of

The Comics Revue In the Beginning, there was Mad… Harvey Kurtzman’s satirical comic book, published by EC between 1952-55 (thereafter appearing in the magazine format still being distributed to the mass market today), is perhaps the most significant American funnybook title ever produced. A generation of kids with creative impulses — and lots of adults — were profoundly influenced by editor-slash-cartoonist Kurtzman’s completely irreverent and kinetic approach to parody. Some would even enthusiastically slap together their own crude fanzines devoted to the the 23-issue comic run of Mad, shared with other aficionados, thereby initiating relationships which would have a great impact down the road. (It’s important to note that these comics have rarely been out-of-print over the last half- century, as it was the initial ’50s paperback collections published by Ballantine —The Mad Reader, Inside Mad, Utterly Mad, etc. — which had found their way into the hands of our two interview subjects, not the original four-color editions.) A number of devotees would become fledgling cartoonists, some making the pilgrimage to the creator’s Mount Vernon, New York home, seeking advice or merely to bask in the presence of the genius artist. Even a talented few would contribute to Kurtzman’s early to mid-’60s magazine, Help!, where future underground comix stalwarts Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Skip Williamson, Jay Lynch — even a young Art Spiegelman — and others would make first mainstream appearances in print. Alas, by the middle of that turbulent decade, Kurtzman was virtually sequestered as he devoted all of energy to producing (with longtime partner Will Elder) the insignificant sex farce comic strip, Little Annie Fanny, for Playboy , an editor no more. Still, inspired by Kurtzman’s incredible past work and no doubt invigorated by the tumultuous days of change, the young cartoonist iconoclasts went forward without their hero to revolutionize the form today we call sequential art.

Then there was Zap. While The New Adventures of Jesus by Frank Stack and God Nose by Jack Jackson are often cited as the first bona fide underground comic books, Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix #1, published in 1968, was truly the first of its type to gain both widespread circulation and popular notoriety, making a huge impact on the form and on the counter-culture in general. With head shops — homegrown retail outlets specializing in drug paraphernalia sales and other hippy fare — popping up from coast-to-coast and eager to sell these wildly irreverent and adult funnybooks, traditional magazine and comic distribution channels were circumvented and an early “direct market” was established. In those first few years — 1968 to 1972 — comix proved hugely successful and enlightened cartoonists flocked to the undie Mecca, San Francisco, to draw up their stories, unrestrained by any inhibition. While certainly the work of a good number of exceptionally talented artists was coming off the presses of the newly-formed comix publishers (including the Print Mint, Last Gasp, Apex, and Rip-Off), by the early ’70s, it was evident that virtually any batch of drawings stapled together, regardless of quality, could sell in highly-profitable numbers. So came the glut, when lousy material would crowd the good in the outlets, and everybody wanted in on the “action.” But perhaps the most significant adversity threatening this new media, was the chilling effect of the U.S. Supreme Court passing the buck in its decision to instruct local communities to establish standards for determining obscenity. Combined with the boom-turned-bust, the court ruling, and anti-drug laws shutting down head shops left and right, the underground comix scene was sinking fast, even at so tender an age, as the artists and publishers desperately eyed the horizon for something — a lifeboat — to save them. In 1974, just as oblivion loomed , Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith had this idea… ABOVE: Editorial by Art and Griffy in Arcade #1. © the artists.

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THIS PAGE: Centerspread for Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith’s first joint editorial effort (produced with Joe Schenkman), Short Order Comix #1 (1973), declaring their philosophy behind underground comix, a political approach continued in the pages of Arcade, The Comics Revue. Featuring art by Griffith, Spiegelman, Schenkman, Skeeter Grant, Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Willy Murphy, “Stuart,” and Jay Kinney. ©2003 the respective artists.

lifeboat: a n d

a r c a d e ,

Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm on February

t h e

c o m i c s

r e v u e

Art received National Book Critics Circle

15, 1948, and grew up in Rego Park, New York.

Nominations (1986 and ’91), the Guggenheim

He attended the High School of Art and

Fellowship in ’90, and a Special Pulitzer

Design and Harpur College (SUNY

Prize in ’92. Maus has been translated into

Binghamton). A seminal figure in the devel-

more than 20 languages. He lives in New

opment of underground comix, he was also

York City with his wife, Francoise Mouly, and

an instructor at the School for the Visual Arts

children, Nadja & Dashiell. Interviewed by

from 1979-87. For his acclaimed graphic novel Maus,

phone on May 8, 2003, Art edited the final transcript.

interview conducted by jon b. cooke • transcribed by steven tice p h o t o by f r a n k p l ow r i g h t

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Comic Book Artist: Did you read Mad comics? Art Spiegelman: Absolutely. It formed the Rosetta Stone of my life. When I was preschool age, about five years old, the corner drugstore had a copy of the paperback, Inside Mad, so it must have been about 1956. This was before I saw Mad as a regular magazine, and the paperback reprinted stories from the comic book Mad. There was a one-inch high reproduction of the cover of Mad that had the drawing by Basil Wolverton that was a parody of Life magazine. It was about an inch high. Finding that paperback was a little bit like the girl’s dirty underpants that inspired William Faulkner to write The Sound and the Fury. It was like — boing! — that image did it for me. But I didn’t start reading Mad as a magazine until a couple of years later. I had a steady run from #57 or #58, and my interest in that magazine led to getting involved in fandom with my old friend Jay Lynch (of Bijou Funnies fame). We were working in early fanzines, but essentially, we met over our mutual interest in Mad. CBA: Did you immediately recognize there was something different about the Harvey Kurtzman material from the Al Feldstein era? Art: The paperbacks I accumulated were from the Kurtzman era, and by the time I was 12 or 13, there was a clear demarcation for me between the two, and Kurtzman was definitely the man for me. CBA: Were you able to see Trump and Humbug? Art: Yes. I got those comics and a lot of other garbage spin-offs of Mad, both the Mad comic and magazine form in the back issue magazine outlets that existed in midtown Manhattan when I was in my early teens. Like Crazy, Frenzy, Loco and beyond, as well as Kurtzman’s Trump and Humbug. CBA: You only bought those as back issues? Art: I might have bought Humbug when it was actually coming out. CBA: Kurtzman was in the New York area. Did you seek him out? Art: No, not at all at that time. The first contact I had with Harvey was when he had Help! magazine. I was already in contact with two contributors, Skip Williamson and Jay Lynch, who had both sold some cartoons to the Help! Public Gallery, a gag cartoon section of the magazine, as Harvey was buying work from freelance cartoon-

ists. So I sent a bunch of gags in to him, inspired by their example, and got a personal note back and it was one of those, “I can’t believe I have an actual piece of paper touched by Harvey Kurtzman!” Harvey basically told me my timing sucked because his magazine was folding, but had Hugh Hefner seen my work? So Harvey liked my material, basically, liked what I was doing and was steering me toward Hefner, the same direction he was steering himself back toward. I must have been 16 by then. I did get to meet him in the later ’60s and we became friendly. CBA: Were you in contact with Skip and Jay through the mail? Art: Yes. Skip lived in Canton, Missouri at the start, and Jay was first in Miami and then in Chicago, but passing through New York on

occasion. We got to know each other. We worked on a magazine called Wild, a very lame version of Mad magazine. We also worked on a thing called Smudge, a big Kurtzman-oriented fanzine, a very early purple ink kind of thing. CBA: It was mimeographed? Art: They were rexographed, one step lower than mimeo. Then I started one that was even lower on the printing food chain, a magazine called Blasé, when I was about 15, with a circulation of about 50 copies, done on a hectograph (a piece of gelatin you apply carbon paper to and then pull about 40 or 50 copies off of each page from each master before the gelatin starts com-

ing off on the paper). CBA: How did you sell these things? Art: Little ads in each other’s magazines. Forty copies wasn’t an overwhelming amount to unload once you’ve finished with the contributor copies. [laughter] But, remember, this was in the world before good Xeroxes. CBA: Did you have notable contributors to the magazines? Art: Well, certainly Jay Lynch. When I went up to visit Mad magazine and brought a master with me, I got a drawing out of Sergio Aragonés as a special full-size foldout in my 51/2" x 81/2" magazine. That’s about it for names you would recognize. A number of cartoonists from my high school, the High School of Art and Design, contributed stuff. CBA: Was there pleasure in the actual production of putting a magazine together? Did that also jazz you, independently of creating the content? Art: Yes. The actual making of a magazine was certainly part of the excitement to me. CBA: When you saw Help!, did you note the contributions of Robert Crumb? Art: I liked them. I preferred the godlike figures of the original Mad gang. I was aware of Crumb. I have a vague memory of visiting the Help! offices as they were sweeping them out. The magazine was just about defunct. I don’t remember who the assistant editor was, whether Terry Gilliam or Chuck Alverson, but I did show up at the very tail end. Whoever was in the office treated me very nicely when I came up, but they were literally cleaning out the drawers, and they said, “Oh, do you want this?” It was some drawing of Robert’s. When they asked, I was so eager because I figured it was a cartoon by one of the old Mad guys but when I saw it was by Crumb, I passed. [laughter] I actually met Robert a few years later, but this was before the whole comix thing exploded, because he had worked at Topps Bubble Gum a year or so before I did. Our mutual protector, Woody Gelman, knew I was heading off to San Francisco with a flower in my hair, and gave me Robert’s address who had just moved there a little bit before. So by then I was aware of him through Woody and I looked Robert up when I got to San Francisco, but it was before Zap Comix had come out. CBA: Was Woody a nexus? Art: Yes, Woody was an amazing kind of

talent magnet. CBA: What type of guy was he? Art: That’s one of those hard questions. He was very sweet, enthusiastic, and he genuinely loved old paper, illustrations and cartoons and comic strips. CBA: So you asked Woody questions about the old comics? Art: Oh, better than that! I got my education through him, because he was a major collector of stuff from the early part of the century. Woody’s basement was my first introduction to, say, Little Nemo, because he had basically rescued these strips. All of the original art would have disappeared if it wasn’t for his doing. Certainly those first runs of pages we used for the earlier books of Nemo that came out in the early ’70s were all his doing. So he had that material, and piles and shelves and shelves of turn-of-thecentury comic strips, old Life, the humor magazine, cross-indexed with a second run he’d put aside by artists, so there were T.S. Sullivant files, Harrison Cady, John Held Jr., and whatever. Just going out with him to his Malverne, Long Island home, staying overnight, I would fall asleep in his semi-furnished basement with piles of great newsprint paper around me, and then go back to the bubble gum company the next day. CBA: As a kid growing up in the ’60s, there was something about the Topps bubble gum card that was vaguely reminiscent of the good Mad stuff. Did you feel you were contributing to something that was cool? Art: Yeah! It was cool, and it was fun. And I was with the people I admired most and even getting to work with them, so it was exhilarating. CBA: Topps was working with a number of the original Mad crew, right? Art: Well, pretty much. Wally Wood was working for Woody in one context or another. Jack Davis and Basil Wolverton did some work. Not Will

Elder, as far as I can remember (darn it!). At that time, I couldn’t imagine being associated with these great talents. It wasn’t like, gee, if only I could work with Goya, George Gross, and Daumier. This was my pantheon. CBA: Were you disappointed with Harvey putting so much energy into Little Annie Fanny? Art: After the first few, which were very impressive. That must have been in the early ’60s. But the initial batch was very impressive, because there had never been anything like it in terms of high production values for a comic strip, so it seemed exciting. At first it wasn’t clear to Harvey, as well as any reader, that Annie Fanny was going to be a major step down regarding his satirical, barbed writing. It wasn’t clear how severe the compromise would be — combining tits with satire. So the first few episodes were pretty exciting to see. Comics had never been made with that degree of attention to their physical making, that kind of “slow cartooning” that Harvey talked about. CBA: Obviously, when you look at RAW, you seem to be exploring the limits of the actual production of comics themselves, delving into using different stock and experimenting with different kinds of printing techniques, even diecutting. Have you always had an interest in how comics are actually produced beyond the actual writing and drawing? Art: Well, it came with the territory. I’m producing this hectographed fanzine, with a foldout, some of the fanzines had silkscreen covers, and someone else contributed a three-color offset cover. It wasn’t a matter of indifference, it was a matter of trying to figure out what one could make happen in reproduction, and always, for me, the work had to do with reproduction. An original on a gallery wall wasn’t as cool as a printed page. CBA: So again, looking at Trump or

Little Annie Fanny, you immediately recognized the higher production values, right? Art: Well, that was an aspect, sure. It wasn’t the only thing. Later on in my life, I would buy things like a cookbook (though I have no interest in cooking) because it might have a corrugated cardboard cover, something unusual and interesting. But, at the time, if Tales of Bizarro World had the same production values of Trump, it wouldn’t have been all the same to me. CBA: Comics were generally lame after EC was run out of the industry and with the advent of the Comics Code. There really wasn’t anything lively like Jack Cole, and with the failure of Kurtzman’s post-Mad attempts, was there a longing for something more than Marvel Comics to come out? Art: Well, my specific background is I would have come of age in the Lame (otherwise called “Silver”) Age of comics, but fortunately I had a dad who was too cheap to see me so liberally spending 10¢ on one comic book when he could get two or three for a dime at the local backdate magazine store, near the diamond district where he worked. So he cut this deal with me where I wouldn’t spend dimes on comics, but he would still bring me comics. This was before there was any such thing as a collector’s market for any of this stuff, so it really was just junk. He would bring me back comic books without having any interest or knowledge of what was inside them. So it was like a roulette spin every week, where I would get some romance comics, some really boring funny animal comic, and an issue of Haunt of

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work with his “Wonder Warthog”? Art: Yes, I really liked that a lot, that was funny. CBA: Did you know what was going down with God Nose? Art: Yes, pretty early on, and I had the original edition at some point. I was aware of God Nose because there was a real crossover between the kind of satire fanzines I had been involved in as a kid and the college humor magazine universe, and eventually the very first underground comix. The same clusters of people were involved. CBA: Did you look to the future? Did you want to be a comic book artist or cartoonist? Art: I didn’t know for sure. I knew I wanted to be a cartoonist and knew I didn’t want to be a super-hero comic book artist. Because of the types of comic books around at the time, that field would have been the least plausible occupation for me, but I didn’t care if I was doing gag or political cartoons, newspaper comic strips, or Mad magazine-type work. I just wanted to be a cartoonist of some kind. CBA: Did you look at the New Yorker regularly as a young teen? Art: No, though I’d see it around. It really wasn’t part of my reading habit. I was much more bluecollar than that. The New Yorker was geared for anxious middle-class folks striving for the uppermiddle-class. I think we were one notch lower on the class structure for the New Yorker to have it ever enter our household. So I would see it at doctor’s offices and look for the cartoonists I admired, particularly Charles Addams’ stuff and material like that, but it wasn’t really part of my world. CBA: Would you sneak a look at Playboy whenever you could? Art: Oh yeah! In fact, as Jay Lynch once pointed out, there’s a period where we would take Playboy and hide it below a stack of Mad mags, and as we got slightly older, we began hiding the Mads underneath the Playboys. [laughter] CBA: Did you want to be involved in the production of a mass-market magazine? Art: I don’t know. The word “market” had

nothing do with it, or even the word “mass.” But I was interested in publishing of some kind. Like I said, I went to this art high school, and there was a certain point in my junior year where I had done a week or so of dailies, and an editor from the N.E.A. syndicate, who had been a graduate of the cartooning class, came to look at what we were doing and talk about syndicated comics. It must be about ’64 or ’65 maybe. He took my samples and said, “I’m going to groom you for syndication, kid.” He liked my week of strips and had me working on additional weeks. But after a couple more samples, I realized I had no interest in doing that, it would be a fate worse than death. But up to that moment it was, “Oh boy! My lifelong dream will be realized at the age of 16!” So I wasn’t quite sure. I was submitting gag cartoons, still being done in those days by whipping up 10 gag cartoons and sending them off in the mail, working on these fanzines, doing oddball comic strips that were kind of surreal, undergroundcomix-like things for my high school and college paper, and I think some of that stuff got published in Wally Wood’s witzend magazine after I met Wood through Topps Bubble Gum. That was right before underground comix defined themselves. When I was in high school, I was the editor of the newspaper and would draw cartoons for that. It was the same in college when I got there [Harpur College, today named SUNY Binghamton]. CBA: Was there life to college magazines in the ’60s? Art: There was. It wasn’t what it had been in its heyday in the 1930s, the S.J. Perlman moment, but there were some really exciting things going on, and as a freshman in college, I was offered the chance to take over the incipient humor magazine

Fear. We’re talking about probably 1958, when I was 10. Then I’d say, “I want more like this,” and sometimes it would happen and sometimes not, but nevertheless I got an interesting random sampling of some really great comics. Of the stuff I was buying for myself, I got the Carl Barks comics, Little Lulu, and even the super-hero stuff (which didn’t get quite as strong a grip on me). Then I found out where these stores were, myself, and I was going there and getting my own old comic books. I picked up some of the early Mad comics, Panic, whatever. I did get interested in the first days of Marvel. Ordinarily I would have been just of the age to stop reading four-color comic books like my peers when the very early Ditko/Kirby thing happened, so it extended that kind of adolescent comic book life for me by a couple of years, because I stayed interested for a while. CBA: Were those the monster stories or the actual super-hero stories? Art: That shifting moment, around the time Amazing Adult Fantasy turned into Spider-Man, I was sort of interested. It wasn’t the center of my interest, which had more to do with humor, but at a certain point, I just was interested in anything about cartoons, anything. Which even included super-heroes. CBA: Did you admire Gilbert Shelton’s Help!

CBA

TOP: A major outlet for the East Coast underground cartoonists was the New York City weekly, The East Village Other (this Feb. 11, 1970 cover sporting art by Robert Crumb. Art ©2003 R. Crumb. ABOVE RIGHT: Art Spiegelman’s extraordinarily candid “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” was featured in Short Order Comix #1 (’73). ©2003 A.S.

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about to start called Toady. I went to a meeting and was made the editor. Everybody else bailed, but somehow I now had this office as a freshman in college and had to put out this magazine. I changed the title to Mother and then tried to get it printed but the printer confiscated the original art because it sounded blasphemous, creating a scandal in Binghamton, with the result being the college withdrew funding for the magazine. [laughter] Another important magazine in the midst of all this was Paul Krassner’s The Realist, which seems to me a very important part of that proto-underground movement. CBA: Were there a lot of illustrations or cartoons in it? Art: Not a lot; there were some, but really, the sensibility of The Realist was the next evolutionary step after Mad (which had become a little bit jerky and adolescent). CBA: Were your political sensibilities growing with the ’60s, pretty much? Art: Well, yes… The way I understand the ’60s, there were the people more involved in drugs, and others more involved with setting up protest strikes in solidarity with grape pickers. I was definitely of the psychedelic persuasion. But these factions were from all one subculture, and I got pulled into all of it. CBA: When were you in college? Art: 1967 to 2003. [laughter] I never graduated, so it’s open-ended. I did eventually go back to the school, which had kicked me out to receive an honorary doctorate. CBA: Hah-ha! [laughs] The last laugh. Art: Yeah, I couldn’t resist. CBA: When do you first remember encountering Zap Comix? Art: Well, I saw bits of it when Crumb was working on something that would become Zap, when I went to San Francisco in… my dates get a little blurry because of the aforementioned psyche-

delics… either ’66 or ’67. But it was before the comic was published and I didn’t quite know what it was all going to be, but it was pretty exciting. We’d already been working a bit in an underground newspaper, so it must be ’67. CBA: What underground paper? Art: The East Village Other. CBA: Was Vaughn Bodé there at the time? Art: Bodé came in at a certain point, yeah. He took over the Gothic Blimp Works, I remember this applecheeked fellow coming in from upstate New York, very clean-cut. CBA: Trina Robbins remembers meeting you early on. Art: Yeah, she was one of the first cartoonists I met. Again, printing technology enters the story. There were these shops opening up called instant printing places, where you could get 100, 500, or1,000 sheets of paper printed very cheap with a paper master offset technology. So when that came into being, I started a career as a mad leafleteer. I would draw comic strips, print up a bunch, and then just pass them out on the streets. But they weren’t for anything, they were just, “Here. Here’s a comic strip drawing for you.” [laughter] CBA: So it wasn’t “Castro Out of Cuba” or anything. [laughter] Art: No. It didn’t have any kind of message; it wasn’t selling anything except it was a comic strip or a drawing. It seemed like a means of distribution that was effective. At least it was at the time. Looking back on it, it was very intelligent, because making comics is such a lonely business. I think I met Trina in passing out some of my leaflets. CBA: Did hallucinogenics come in early for you? Art: 1966, I guess. CBA: Did you combine those experiences with art? Art: Yes. I definitely had no choice. CBA: [Laughs] When you saw the printed Zap Comix #1, were you impressed? Art: Oh, yeah! It seemed like that was It! I was at least aware of Bijou Funnies, which was much more familiar because I’d known Jay Lynch for so

TOP: Covers for Short Order Comix #1 (’73) and 2 (’74). RIGHT: Art’s Ace Hole, Midget Detective.

many years. It all happened in one burst of activity, where it seemed like a logical outgrowth of the underground newspapers. Hearing that this was actually cooking, that this was a format able to find its way in the world, was very exciting. But around that same time, there were the things like the Gothic Blimp Works and weekly comics appearing in the underground newspapers. Material I had done as weeklies were being printed throughout the national underground press syndicate newspapers. It all seemed like part and parcel of one thing, even though eventually, looking back, it’s obvious that Zap was a format that was really significant in the development of comix. CBA: So it really is a microcosm of what had happened in the general history of comics? First there were comic strips, then they were collected and put into comic books, and then original work was done for comics…? Art: In some instances, although most of the material was original done for the first underground comix was original — but the strips and comix had the same personnel. So I’m not sure if the analogy holds. What’s more to the point, once again printing technology altered the course of the medium’s history. In other words, the comic books were born because some printing

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salesman had extra time on his presses. That was the Max Gaines story. The underground comix — and the underground newspapers, as well — were born because there was a printing technology that allowed for fast web offset short-run printing, replacing the letterpress and other more expensive methods. So producing an underground newspaper or underground comic book in runs of just a few thousand wasn’t a big deal. CBA: Jay Lynch was putting together Bijou Funnies and Crumb started Zap and comix grew and grew. Did you immediately look to do your own thing? Or were you happy contributing to Bijou? Art: Early on, I was doing something from college that was eventually published called Phucked-Up Phunnies. Then, when I got out to San Francisco, I was willing to do comix any which way. (I’m sorry if I seem incoherent… we’re talking about a period of my life where a lot of things overlap.) When I finally moved out to San Francisco in ’72, it became important to have my own place to work as well. Because I’m not very fast or prolific, and at that time not even very good, it became more useful to work with others. So by 1973, Short Order Comix was my first expe-

rience as a comix editor. It was a very short-lived thing, but it was Bill Griffith, Joe Schenkman, and I for the first issue. There were two issues, and they were actually the seed from which Bill and I would get together to do Arcade. On the other hand, even before that, Bill Griffith and I moved to San Francisco separately at almost the same time and became friends and were talking about editing some kind of comic magazine together, even before Short Order. What I remember is, it was for an outfit called Company & Sons that published the first Young Lust, proposing a tabloid comics magazine called Banana Oil we were messing around with. Then Bill found himself with a fairly successful underground comic on his hands with Young Lust. Somewhere in there, I started Short Order and after, because we’d already flirted with the idea of genuinely editing something together, Arcade grew out of that mulch. CBA: Now, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision on communities setting the standard for obscenity. Didn’t that cause a monumental chilling effect on underground comix? Art: It was part of a moment, but there had been a period where any underground could find an audience for 20,000 copies, even if it really

sucked. All of a sudden that changed. Part of that was tied to the fact there was a glut of too many uninteresting titles, and part was the shrinking of outlets to sell the comix. So with these combined forces against us, one was forced to mutate or die. CBA: So you guys mutated into Arcade? Art: Yeah, we mutated into Arcade! [laughter] At some point, when it really seemed like this comix thing was withering, the notion of a life raft, a magazine that would publish the best underground cartoonists, was raised and we decided it was an important way to move ahead. CBA: You obviously contributed to Comix Book, the Denis Kitchen-edited Marvel magazine. Wasn’t that a similar notion? Art: Well, Comix Book was clearly an attempt to co-opt the energies running rampant through the underground comix world, but what made it so problematic was specifically the issue of creator’s rights. In other words, I couldn’t give him anything new, even though I was interested in seeing what they did. The idea of a mass-circulation magazine of underground comix sounded good. But what didn’t sound good was then Marvel Comics gets to own your comic strip. That had nothing to do with what we’d been doing up ©2003 Art Spiegelman.

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TOP: Extreme enlargement of Spiegelman and Griffith’s jam self-caricature drawing from the Arcade masthead. ABOVE: Spiegelman self-portraits for Arcade #1-3.

until then. The whole point was you got to put your own little “c” in a circle next to your name [©] and it meant something. CBA: So was Arcade in any way a reaction to Comix Book? Art: It probably was, but I don’t remember the chronology that well. What year was Comix Book? CBA: That was 1974. Art: And Arcade was ‘75? CBA: Yeah, the spring of ‘75. Art: So it definitely was a reaction. [laughs] But I am speaking now only through logic rather than memory. I do remember being interested in Comix Book and being very disappointed in the results, that the material inside was incredibly spotty, and was aware that a lot had to do with the fact the best artists around wouldn’t have anything to do with a magazine that involved (a) the kind of self-censorship of one’s id that would allow it to be newsstand-worthy and (b) that would involve giving away one’s copyright for a pittance. CBA: Were you close with Denis at all during those times? Art: I knew him for quite a long time, but we’d never really spent large chunks of time together as part of that subculture. CBA: So you didn’t necessarily sense his frustration with the magazine, per se? Art: I’m sure he said something about it. Denis’s impulses always seemed to be to take a half step back toward a mainstream that wasn’t worth taking a step toward. That seemed even true with many of his underground ventures before Comix Book. So that frustration was built into this irreconcilable set of impulses. CBA: What was your experience? When did you first meet Bill? I read that it took place in Gary Arlington’s comic book store. Art: It might well have, but I can’t remember. Very early in our respective transplant into San Francisco… well, actually I had visited a number of times before moving out there in ’71 or ’72… But after bouncing back and forth between the coasts (which is partly why I never did get that

college degree), I settled down in a hotel when Bill and his then-girlfriend had just moved out and we counted ourselves kindred spirits at a similar cusp in our lives. CBA: Your planned to use Arcade as a lifeboat? Art: At that point, it seemed necessary to do something to have comix break out of the diminishing world of head shops in something that could appear on newsstands, thereby accepting the limitations that maybe we’ll do the hardcore sex stuff in some other context, but not for this project, and let’s see what we can make. Then through was seemed Bill’s rather close relationship with Bob Rita of the Print Mint (who then published Young Lust),

we were able to pitch the notion of doing a quarterly magazine. I didn’t realize just how precarious the Print Mint’s situation was, but they signed on for it. So we, all of a sudden, were at the helm of some magazine project that didn’t really have any distribution beside the head shop distribution, which was withering. CBA: You two hadn’t initially considered distribution? Art: Well, we just figured, “Okay, it’s the Print Mint, they’re the publisher, and they’ll figure that out.” But we did make forays and talked to various distributors. A few years later, I met one of those distributors who actually told me, “Yeah, we had our eyes on that Arcade thing, looking to

see if it could last up to eight issues.” We, of course, stopped with #7. So we were desperately looking for somebody who would put us on the newsstands, but what we kept meeting up with was, nobody knew where to place such a thing on the stand. In fact, I learned something from that: It’s what made RAW the size and format that it was. In other words, Arcade really didn’t have a place on the newsstand. One could put it next to Mad, but it really wasn’t like Mad, and it wasn’t aimed at the same audience. Nor was it like Creepy, Eerie, or Vampirella. Nor was it like other comic books. There just wasn’t any obvious location. Today, you put out Maxim next to the other men’s magazines. You put out Arcade, there’s nothing like it. Several years later, when RAW started finding its way into the world, one way or another, there were a number of other large-format magazines. They had nothing in common with each other except that they were “new wave” oversized magazines. One was devoted to architecture, another to fashion, etc. So by making one devoted to comics a similar size, the vendors knew they should just put it with that avant-garde stuff. There was a category. Arcade didn’t have a category, so we kept trying but never quite found anything effective. The problem with the distribution we did use was… Zap #3 would come out and be put next to Zap #1 and #2, though it would come out a year or so later. Here we were doing a quarterly magazine but, because it was a nonreturnable market, the issues were just piling up on top of each other until finally the head shops were begging for mercy, saying “Send us anything but not another Arcade! We’re still selling the first one fine, thank you.” [laughter] CBA: Did you intentionally try and get Robert Crumb as the cover artist for every issue, acknowledging that he was probably the underground’s biggest draw? Art: We knew that was important, and it was an appropriate act as properly functioning editors

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rather than be motivated by our own egomania. It was important to acknowledge his impact and we were grateful for Robert’s cooperation. At first, what I would have really liked to see but was not in any position to make happen was, it seems to me comix history would have changed if Victor Moscoso and S. Clay Wilson had been more open about who could be in Zap Comix. But the smartest way to bring comix onto a

wider stage in the world would have been under the aegis of Zap, the most recognized brand we had, and have it come out more regularly. Despite its X-rating, Zap probably could have cut through a lot of noise and been noticed out there, certainly better than a new magazine called Arcade. If there had been a monthly Zap which had all of the Zap original artists plus whatever other underground artists who would be given the chance to earn their stripes and be in it, then comix could have come out into the world outside that shrinking head shop universe, and perhaps could have become a magazine for our generation. CBA: Did you speak to Moscoso and Wilson, at the time? Art: Well, we talked about it, but it seemed hopeless. I mean, it just appeared to be a way of angling our own work into Zap, and we weren’t a part of that aristocracy. Yet that would have been a most useful way to use Crumb’s energies. I think Crumb was amenable to such notions, but there were other people who were much more protective of Zap as it already existed, didn’t want to do it, and that was certainly their prerogative. But were the Crumb covers important? Sure, of course they were. CBA: Was Crumb involved in the genesis of the magazine? Art: Not exactly, although we were friends, so we were telling him what we were planning and asked if he would work with us, and he said “sure.” But originally we didn’t know what we were going to call this magazine. I don’t think I can remember any of the fetal titles that died stillborn before we stumbled upon Arcade. But it wasn’t “let’s call it the same thing Robert called his old sketchbooks.” It was after coming up with Arcade as a possible title, we realized, “Oh, isn’t that what Crumb called his sketchbooks? Let’s run that by him and see how he feels about it.” CBA: So just come up with an innocuous name? Art: Just come up with a title. Maybe Bill’s memory is clearer than mine, so I apologize, but I recall we’d be just tooling around San Francisco and it would be, “‘Wash and Dry, the Comics Quarterly’? No. ‘Seven-Eleven, the Comics Quarterly’? No…” [Jon laughs] And at some point we passed a sign with the word “arcade,” and that was the one that stuck. CBA: How did you guys break down the responsibilities? Did you literally have an office? Art: No. We were mostly working out of our respective studios. Griffy’s a better-organized human than I am so his place was more like the headquarters. CBA: Would you both be in contact with the contributors? Art: Oh yes, absolutely. CBA: Were you intent on introducing any specific artists? Art: I’d have to look them over to see if that was so, but I believe it was more to take advantage of the very strong gene pool which was beginning to need a place to get published. CBA: There was some use of fiction in Arcade, along with text pieces. Was that something you specifically used for pacing the magazine? Art: Yes. Part of it was growing up with comics which would always have a page of prose to maintain their second class mailing status, but it also just seemed like a natural part of a magazine to not just have text only in balloons. But clearly comics were the emphasis. I would say one of the things about Arcade was that we were interested in making a more-edited magazine. So it had various compartments. Probably inspired by Help!’s “Public Gallery,” there was something called “Sideshow” in Arcade that was designed to specifically to find and introduce new cartoonists that weren’t a part of the inner circles of San Francisco comix life at the time. CBA: So did you tell the cartoonists that the strips were going to basically be Sunday comic strip-sized, two column… Art: Right. CBA: Arcade also featured another Help! mainstay: retrospectives on age-old cartoonists. Art: Yes, definitely. Ever since I spent those musty nights in Gelman’s basement, that heritage seemed so rich to me and important to showcase. CBA: The mildew got to you, eh? [laughs] Art: Yeah. CBA: Was advertising ever a thought?

Art: I’m trying to remember if we even had any, as we may have tried. I was never any good at it. CBA: Just a few, and they look like giveaways, basically. Art: I can’t remember. We didn’t really have an advertising manager, and we never were able to get that part of our act together. CBA: How do you look at it now? What was the highlight of the magazine for you? Art: I was very impressed we were able to produce something quarterly with this anarchic bunch and actually come out on time for almost two years. I was proud of the fact it was so articulated. One of the important parts of a magazine is that the whole be greater than the sum of its parts, and being able to juggle and work back and forth between the individual artists’ stories and how to make it feel like a magazine somehow, was somehow successfully done in Arcade in a way that hadn’t been done in that corner of the subculture before. CBA: It has a real magazine feel, not what you would expect from a bunch of cartoonists, y’know? Art: Well, see, usually the way an underground comic book got edited was you grabbed your friends and said, “How many pages do you want?” Then, whatever you got back, you published in whatever order you thought of. There was more thinking and structure to Arcade, and even without specifically saying, “Do a strip about X or Y,” we would try to nudge artists toward one thing or another. CBA: At the same time, there was a natural outlet going on for underground cartoonists, certainly one the Air Pirates took advantage of, National Lampoon. Did you look at that? Art: Yeah, I was aware of it. Some cartoonists besides the old Air Pirates were in there, as well, Justin Green among them, I think. Somewhere in the outside world there were places that were congenial enough so one could try to present work there. If you did stuff for Playboy, it had to have tits. If you did stuff for High Times, it had to have weed. If you did stuff for the National Lampoon, it had to be a

very specific parody or have a big punch-line payoff. And all of those things seemed limited compared to what we were interested in making. These were all possible outlets for me, but I was certainly busy earning my main bread and butter, which kept me from trying very hard to win over a bunch of National Lampoon editors, by toiling for Topps Bubble Gum, my freelance day job through the mail and phone when I was out in San Francisco. CBA: You were still dealing with Woody? Art: Yes. CBA: Did you know Len Brown? Art: Oh, I was very close to Len. He was there when I first showed up, at the age of 18. He’s like a goofy older brother… or a chronologically older younger brother… something like that. [laughter] CBA: Wasn’t Apple Pie a NatLamp knock-off? Art: Yes. The editor there was very interested in using the underground cartoonists, so a lot of people got work from that. Justin definitely appeared there. CBA: There’s an ad for it in Arcade actually, and it lists Griffy, Justin, Ted, Ned Sonntag, Jerry Lane, Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, and you. Art: Yeah, that’s right. Apple Pie was the brainchild of the son of a schlock publishing magnate and he was being groomed to take over his dad’s business. His dad was this absolute caricature of New York grind house publishing.

He was a small guy saying, “That Stan Lee, he ripped me off! I was just about to put out my knockoff of TV Guide when he came out with his!” [laughter] So the father was strictly a businessman. But his son definitely loved this underground comix stuff, and as a result, a number of cartoonists found work there. CBA: The cover of Arcade #3, that’s the one with “This, to me, is sheer poetry”… Art: Oh man, that cover was sheer poetry. CBA: The coloring on it is just stunning… and the design! Art: A couple of the covers were great. The one of the alligator lady swallowing the rabbit boys? CBA: Who did the color? Art: Robert Crumb. CBA: He did the actual color guides? Art: He was very good at Zip-A-Tone separations. CBA: That’s so beautiful. So what happened with Arcade? Art: It lasted seven issues. Someplace right near the get-go, I don’t remember which issue, but the second or third, I exploded out of San Francisco back to the East Coast. I think it must have been after the first two, maybe… And that had more to do with a longtime relationship breaking up than anything else. It resulted in a far heavier portion than was fair falling on Griffith’s shoulders. We had at that time, I think, Diane Noomin, Bill’s wife, picking up some of the slack. I was trying to settle into life again in New York, and working as an editor from 3,000 miles away, where at least I could be the bad cop because

TOP: Spiegelman’s extraordinary strip from Arcade #6. ABOVE: The headline accurately reports Spiegelman’s state of mind while coming back East in Arcade #3. ©’03 A.S.

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Art: Pfft! Like underground comix rates, which is not good at all. CBA: Like $25 a page? Art: Probably $25 or $50. A pittance, but it doesn’t even make sense to say $25, because $25 might be worth $250 now. But it was very low. CBA: Did you have any annual Arcade get-togethers or was it just a regular social scene anyway in San Francisco? Art: While I was out there, certainly part of our lives was spent socializing with each other. It was a kind of incestuous cluster of cartoonists that spent a lot of time with each other insofar as cartoonists spend time with anybody. After I moved back East, less so. I can’t remember if I was out once or twice in the rest of the run, but I definitely felt like I had moved onto another world in New York. CBA: Was there any thought to putting an anthology together, or were there copyright situations? Art: It wasn’t necessarily copyrights. There would be no reason for it. Like I said, we stopped because distributors were begging for mercy because they were buried in back issues. CBA: So they just never really sold out? Art: I think there probably are still a few bundles. Bill might be better at knowing exact print runs, but I think it was 30,000 or 40,000 copies, something like that. I think eventually the first one or two might have sold out, but it’s still not impossible to find relatively inexpensive back issues. CBA: It seemed every issue had some kind of emphasis on something “real.” There was an H.P. Lovecraft biography, plus Spain looked at Stalin… Was that a consideration, to include biographical material within here? Art: It was definitely part of the overall impulse. I encouraged it in the people who were interested in moving in that direction. It seemed like another possible category of interesting places to go with comics. I did this essay on telling jokes, and I saw that as somehow connected. It was “research-based comics.” Bill did something about Henri Rousseau in one. It was the same way autobiography became an arena one could actually enter. I guess you can pretty much track the autobiographical impulse directly to Justin Green. What made research-based comix so overt in the Arcade years, I don’t know. It seemed like a natural outgrowth of comix

I wasn’t there to take the heat. There was always a lot of pressure having to say no to the cartoonists. CBA: Were there a lot of submissions? Art: Well, “a lot”… there was more than would fit, let’s say. And there were always certain kinds of contested strips. Things like, “Well, it’s good, but it could be better” kinds of things. “What do we do about this? Do we publish it as it is, do we force somebody to, as best we can, to change it a bit?” And we were always looking for new things. So I was able to do a certain amount of that from New York, but certainly from a production standpoint, a hellish amount of work ended up falling on Bill. I think there was one time, either for the third issue or the fourth, where I ended up going back to San Francisco to pitch in just because it was a formidable amount of work. All these things look so invisible, but the production, certainly in the universe before computers, was just a major nightmare. But it wasn’t practical for me to fly over for every issue. So I’m sure, had I stayed in San Francisco, it’s possible we would have kept Arcade going longer. On the other hand, the handwriting was on the wall in that nobody was especially interested in having another quarterly installment on his or her already overcrowded underground comics rack. CBA: What were the lessons learned from Arcade, for you? Art: Well, the first one was don’t ever edit a magazine; it’s just ulcers. [Jon laughs] A rule that I held fast to for at least five years… [laughter] And another thing was the excitement of being able to collage together a lot of other people’s work and make an entity out of it. That was genuinely pleasurable aspect as well, which is why it was possible to lure me back into trying again with RAW. Other lessons: Somebody’s got to take care of business. It wasn’t enough just to have interesting material. That it wouldn’t find a way to keep itself afloat, there would always be this thing where you were bailing water just to try to keep something happening. So I think some of those things definitely were lessons I tried to learn when we did RAW. CBA: How were the rates? Were they good?

engaging with the real world rather than the world of Richard Corben-like fantasy figures. CBA: It probably has more to do with my own personal obsession with magazines, but there really seemed a learned ebb and flow to the magazine. It really was a magazine, not a comic book; it had character. Again, it was departmentalized to some degree, you had text pieces, you even had William Burroughs in there, for instance, and you had the short strips in the back. Were you wrestling with the form? Art: Yes. I have always had the same affection that you have with the things that make a magazine a magazine. So, aspects like that masthead with little self-portraits was an important part of the magazine. It wouldn’t have been all the same if it didn’t a title/ contents page. We wanted to have a letters column… Very early on, certain things became institutionalized for us, so we wanted to have a reprint every issue, wanted to have the sideshow section, wanted to feature certain artists with longer pieces. It just was part and parcel of using the grammar of a magazine, and those lessons, as you accurately pointed out in your first questions, were the Harvey Kurtzman injections. CBA: Was there anything you can think of now that you would have liked to have done? Maybe color to play with or different paper stocks? Art: Yes, looking back, it would be great to have had some money. [laughter] CBA: That’s the kind of paper stock you need! Art: That would have allowed things like color and a longer life and all of the assistants who could have made the production less an incursion into our otherwise already booked lives. CBA: Would there have been RAW if there had been no Arcade? Art: God, that’s one of those “who the hell knows?” questions. Probably not, in that I definitely wanted to try things in Arcade that wanted to go further (and I did in RAW), so I think Weirdo and RAW are direct outgrowths of Arcade. CBA: Did you get along with Bill throughout the whole process, or would you have arguments? Art: By the end we were arguing. CBA: Did that more have to do with you being away? Art: I think so. CBA: But as far as the direction of the magazine, you guys were pretty much in sync? Art: We were really in sync, and I think the magazine shows it.

CBA: Bill went off to create an identifiable character that brought him quite a bit of acclaim and success over the years, Zippy the Pinhead. Obviously, with the Maus serial coming out in

That became the title, rather than, “Oh boy! We should get a “Zippy” page in here every issue!” That never occurred to us, I think. CBA: Did you make any money from Arcade? Art: I’m sure that my bank account would have been better served by creating another five bubble gum cards. CBA: After the demise of Arcade, it was five years before you went on to RAW. Did you do have any production or editorial work inbetween there? Art: I functioned as an editor at Topps, so some of the same skills were definitely used in that way. CBA: Is that why you went back East? Art: No, I was working with Topps before and while I was out West, and it seemed natural to do it yet again and more. It was a comfortable situation for me at the time. But other than that, I was functioning at some point in there as a comics consultant to Playboy Funnies through Michelle Urry. I kept trying to work with other people on their magazines. There was some imitation of High Times coming out, the name of which is mercifully eluding me at the moment, where I was trying to get them installed with comix artists. But, no, there’s nothing that I took on that fully until my wife Francois talked me into trying again with RAW. And there I really was scared, because cartoonists can be a ferocious lot.

RAW, you created something that has an identity of its own. Was there ever any thought to Arcade having an anchor, an identifiable character or icon, like Mr. Natural? Art: No. I think, again, that’s probably because the models were those Mad/Humbug/Help! variations of a magazine template, so it never seemed like, “What we’ve really gotta do is get a character like Spider-Man!” It just wasn’t built that way. The notion of the magazine was to build it around the individual features rather than the “ongoing-ness” of a single feature. CBA: So there was no desire to ask Crumb to do “Mr. Natural,” for instance? Art: Oh, probably the opposite, if anything. It became clear as well in RAW, that it was about the artists rather than the fictional creations, per se. Somehow, by the time we were doing RAW, it became important for us to put the artist’s name at the top of the first page of a story.

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ce o o ke • t ra n s c r i b e d by s t eve n t i i n t e r v i e w c o n d u c t e d by j o n b. c 78 CBA V.2 #1

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Along with Art Spiegelman, his longtime friend and fellow editor on Arcade, Bill Griffith is one of the most successful cartoonists to emerge from the American underground comix scene, as his daily comic strip, Zippy the Pinhead, is syndicated in newspapers nationwide. While the following conversation might slight his experiences putting together Arcade between 1975 and ’76, a good deal of time was taken in discussing Bill’s formative years, hopefully giving a solid impression of one of the great creative minds behind that seminal periodical. After the tape recorder had run out, Bill added that he believed the short-lived comix magazine served as a bridge of sorts between the demise of the underground’s heyday in the early ’70s and the advent of the alternative/newave/ independent comics of the 1980s and beyond. Ye Ed urges readers to visit www.zippythepinhead.com and check out the publications offered for sale, many of which are mentioned below. The interview was conducted by phone on May 3, 2003, and the transcript edited by Bill. LEFT: Recent portrait proofs of Bill Griffith.

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Comic Book Artist: Where are you from? Bill Griffith: I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Levittown, Long Island, and all over the country in various places, because my father was in the Army. I spent a couple of years in Germany as a kid, then lived in New York, then in San Francisco for 20-odd years, and now I’m in Connecticut, getting dangerously close back to Long Island, but that will never happen. CBA: [Laughs] Were you introduced to comics or comic strips very young? Bill: I learned to read by looking at the Sunday funnies in the New York Daily News. CBA: Did you have particular favorite strips? Bill: Nancy was my favorite when I was a little kid — and is my favorite now, although I abandoned Nancy for many years in between — but I don’t have one favorite comic strip, though Ernie Bushmiller’s way up there. I didn’t appreciate it as a kid as much as I do now. I read Dick Tracy. I read all the comics; I didn’t discriminate when I was little. The Teenie Weenies was one of my very favorites. Then comic books came along. CBA: Did you particular clue into the art, or was it simply the form that was appealing? Bill: It was the appeal of the combination that grabbed me, at an early age, anyway; the fact that a picture talks. I wanted to know what they were saying. I liked the silent ones, too, though. There was a great silent comic strip in the Daily News called Louie. The guy was a hen-pecked husband, very short, had a huge nose and giant moustache, and was always being one-upped by his children or wife, usually by his kids. I liked the fact that a father figure was being made fun of. I thought it was hilarious, because my father was sort of authoritarian. Then, when comic books came into my awareness, when I was about seven, I became very much a fan of Uncle Scrooge. That was my favorite. I never got into the superheroes much. I didn’t then; I don’t now, although I did like Plastic Man, what little I saw of it, because I sensed it was a parody. CBA: Besides Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman, I would assume there weren’t many super-heroes when you were first getting into comics? It was past their heyday? Bill: Yes, it was not a dominant genre. The dominant form for kids at that point were the Disney comics and funny-animal

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LEFT: Young Bill Griffith (right) with his sister, Nancy, and their uncle in Levittown, New York, 1952.. ABOVE: (From left) Bill, his mother (Barbara), and Nancy in a 1955 portrait. RIGHT: Bill Griffith at 14 years old. BELOW: Bill’s parents, Barbara and Jim Griffith in an undated photograph. All pix courtesy of Bill Griffith.

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comics. And Little Lulu… I loved Little Lulu. Although I was aware, after initially liking it, that it might be a girl’s comic, so I read it under the covers. CBA: [Laughs] Beyond the eyes of peers, so the other boys would not see? Bill: Yeah! I wouldn’t read it in public; it was a guilty pleasure. I loved it, but wouldn’t talk about it with my pals. I talked about Uncle Scrooge or Superboy. CBA: Was the level of sophistication in Carl Barks’ work intriguing? Bill: Oh, absolutely! You couldn’t help but be intrigued. The stories are so involving and the artwork so beautiful! At the time, not only was I not aware Carl Barks was different from the other artists, but I wasn’t even aware that human beings did these stories. I never even thought

about it. If I thought of it at all, I was aware of printing presses, had seen them in newsreels or on TV, so I knew the printing press was involved, but I figured maybe the comics were simply created by the printing press. I never thought of anybody writing or drawing them. Of course, I’m talking at a very early age. [chuckles] I also thought movies were magic. Shortly after that, I became aware of the field of cartooning partly through the fact my next-door neighbor was a commercial artist, so I became aware of the whole field of illustration and comics. CBA: Now, the meeting with your neighbor was an ultimately profound event for you, right? Bill: Well, it was like something had been embedded in me by meeting him that took a while to flower. But, yeah, he was a very successful science-fiction illustrator by the name of Ed

Emshwiller. His stuff was signed “Emsh.” He was a kind of Bohemian out of place, living in Levittown. His wife, still a well-known writer, Carol Emshwiller, is a feminist science-fiction novelist who just had a book come out last year. She must be in her late 70s now. Ed served as a role model, basically, to use a clichéd term, showing me you could work at home, make a decent living, support yourself, and do what you wanted, more or less. (Of course, I had no idea he had editors at the time. I never thought of that.) [laughter] CBA: But you’ve learned, since. Bill: Well, I don’t have many editors, at this point. I don’t really have that kind of hand over me. I did at different points, though. If I ever did any illustration work, there was always an editor involved.

I just thought Emsh had the ideal life. He didn’t have to get dressed up, get on a train and go to work like my father. He worked upstairs and did cool stuff. He didn’t directly introduce me to comics in any way. He had no interest in comics I was ever aware of, but he did show me what the life of an illustrator and a commercial artist was all about, and that very much appealed to me. CBA: Was Emsh in marked contrast to your father? Bill: I’m sure he was. I grew up in a family where my mother was creative, she was a part-time sciencefiction writer. She had occasional stories published. I’m sure she was greatly influenced by the neighbors as well, but she always had writing impulses. From an early age, she wrote poetry, short stories and novels. But she was frustrated. She wasn’t a professional writer. She was a housewife, and had jobs at different points, but she was very much encouraging for me to be an artist of some kind. But my father was the opposite. He was very discouraging. CBA: You know, my father had a military background — he was from West Point — and my siblings and I grew up in Westchester, a very suburban, upper-middle class lifestyle. My mother was also very creative. I always wondered why they were attracted to one another because they, too, seemed such opposites. They ultimately divorced, and reading about your parents, there seem great similarities, for whatever that’s worth. Bill: Yeah, my parents were very ill suited. I once asked my mother much later in life if she was ever happy with my father. She said the first five years were very nice, and that was it. They were suited for five years. A lot of couples break up after five years, or two years, or three years, or whatever it takes for them to be aware that they’re not clicking anymore. Unfortunately, for my parents’ divorce was a shameful thing for both of them. They didn’t do what they should have done for their mental health, and for their children’s mental health, as well. They separated. I liked my father. He had a lot of good qualities, but given the fact my mother and father were always arguing, they were clearly not happy with each other, and we all could have done without that. CBA: When did you first see Mad comics? Bill: Shortly after the first issue. The two issues which make the most impression — I don’t know their numbers — are the one which had a composition notebook cover and then the Basil Wolverton beauty queen, a Life magazine cover parody. Those two were burned into my brain. But, then, every issue burned into my brain. I

remember being very confused when it became a magazine. I knew something was watered down, something was missing. Once again, I was not terribly aware as a kid. I wasn’t aware of Harvey Kurtzman as a guiding hand of Mad. I was just aware of all of the artists and I had my favorites. I tremendously looked forward to the next issue. My father specifically banned Mad

magazine from the house after he saw the Basil Wolverton cover. I don’t know what got him; I guess it just was too gross. My mother was indifferent, and she didn’t care one way or another about comic books. I remember my dad banned Mad and Elvis pretty much in the same week. So I would go down to the candy store on the corner, buy Mad, and read it while listening to Elvis on the jukebox. CBA: [Laughs] Was Adlai Stevenson banned, too? Bill: My father was pretty much a Republican, completely against his own self-interests, I should add. He came from a poor background. I don’t know why he was a Republican. I think he became a Roosevelt hater as a young man and then decided Democrats were the bad guys. I guess the the Republicans’ cultural conservatism appealed to him. But he had nothing but bad things to say about Democrats. CBA: Was it profound to encounter Mad comics? Bill: Oh, it was a life raft in Levittown! Growing

up in the land of conformity and suburbia and artificiality. I desperately wanted to connect to what I thought was the Real World all the time. To me, Levittown was an unreal place. I appreciate, in retrospect, that my parents gave me a safe place to grow up, but they also gave me a sterile place to grow up in. So I sought stimulation wherever I could get it, and Mad was a tremendous buzz. Every time I saw it, it was so full of anarchic energy. It was clearly transgressive, and I loved that. The fact that it was “bad,” and the opposite of Republican and everything else that to me was smothering. So it had a huge effect. I think it has a huge effect on me to this day. When I say “it,” I think I mean Harvey Kurtzman more than I mean any of the cartoonists, any of the drawing styles. The way the humor was delivered, the attitude, all of that. Sometimes I’m writing a Zippy strip and I’m thinking, “Boy, that has the rhythm of Harvey Kurtzman’s writing.” CBA: There was obviously a subversive quality to Mad, right? Bill: Yeah! It was subversive and naughty and bad and rebellious and… adult. That was a big thing. I was 12, 13 years old, and reading something that was clearly aimed over my head. That gave it tremendous appeal, too, in that it was something satirical in an adult, smart way that respected intelligence instead of the lowest common denominator kind of humor that came out of most other magazines or comic strips, to a large degree. It was adventurous, it was out there, and it was weird. There wasn’t much like that going on, at least anything available to me in the corner luncheonette where I would buy my comic books. CBA: I still think “Starchie” is probably one of the most profoundly subversive strips, at least in terms of comic book parodies. [laughs] Bill: Yeah! And that it was parodying the very things I was beginning to think were kind of bland. And it was sexy, too, with a certain sexual charge. Will Elder’s buxom wenches! CBA: It was implied that the characters actually fornicated and they’d actually stab each other as well. “America’s typical teenager,” for sure! [laughter] Bill: Yeah! It was giving my generation something that now is available just by turning on the TV or going to the movie theater. But in those days, you had to search for anything remotely mature a little more. CBA: Did you recognize when Al Feldstein took over and Harvey was booted from the magazine? Bill: I did. It was less fun, it was less… intense. I think it had something to do with the format, too. I

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think the comic book smaller size is a much more subversive format. That always has seemed to me to be a rougher, tougher kind of look, not like all the other publications. It had different size and a different gestalt that was very appealing. CBA: Yet Harvey so wanted to make it a slick magazine, and so did, to a degree. Bill: I know. I never asked him about that. It was not his desire to keep it at comic book size, I know. And then when he went on to Help!, other things, clearly he wanted not only to not do a comic book size, but he wanted to add photographs and have more text. CBA: Was Playboy at all an influence on you in the ’50s, when you were adolescent? Bill: Not in any sense except as titillation. When did Playboy start? CBA: Late ’53. Bill: ’53? I was nine. It was hardly on the edge of my radar. In college, it did a little bit. I would read the occasional interview or fiction, but still, nothing major. CBA: I was reading through your interview in The Comics Journal, and there was a sidebar that was basically a criticism of what Richard Corben and the Last Gasp artists were doing in the guise of undergrounds. I realized there were two factions of EC fanatics: Those who responded to Kurtzman and those to the horror/science-fiction of Gaines and Feldstein, arguably at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. Bill: I never cared about those horror and science-fiction comics. I was always much more interested in humor and satire as it related to the real world, not any fantasy world or alternate universe, or a world to… CBA: To escape? Bill: Yeah. I wasn’t interested in escaping. I was interested in figuring things out for the purpose of making fun of them. [laughs] I mean, there is an escapist

quality to any comic book experience. When you’re a kid, you sort of go off to your little private space and get involved in it. When I got a little older and Mad came along, I think that clinched my interests as being much more into

the satirical humor vein. I don’t remember ever buying an EC comic. I didn’t care anything about them. They didn’t do anything for me. CBA: And yet, they did have a profound effect. I would say Mad certainly had a deeper effect, certainly more substantive in the scheme of things. I realize there’s conflict between the two sides of EC. Maybe it was art versus genre. EC Comics represented as a group, perhaps except for the Carl Barks and John Stanley’s work, the best comics to come out of the 1950s, the best comics of your generation. Bill: In a way, I regret I didn’t check some of it out. CBA: So you liked Wally Wood’s work in Mad comics, but that didn’t necessarily carry over to his Weird Fantasy/Weird Science work? Bill: Right. I just never got that bug. With science-fiction movies I did. I was always ready for the next science-fiction movie, but not the comics. To me, the comics needed to be about

reflecting reality, not ignoring it. That was what I was into. CBA: Forgive me if I’m pushing this too hard, but it just seemed to me that the same demarcation between the Kurtzman and Feldstein EC Comics, eventually existed in underground comix. On one side you had the cartoonists profoundly influenced by Kurtzman, from Crumb on down; on the other, the Last Gasp artists, like Corben and Greg Irons, very strong influenced by the Feldstein books. Its almost like underground comix, in general, were an overall homage to EC specifically in one way or another. On one side there was Zap and Bijou; on the other Slow Death and Skull Comix. Bill: Exactly. The undergrounds like Slow Death and the Corben stuff were a reflection of the EC fanatic’s obsession with the horror and science-fiction titles. That’s so limiting. It’s so fannish, stuck in a worshipful pose towards the thing you admire the most, and you never grow from it and go beyond genre. To me, very few people of that school grew out of that, or they became good at it and the way they went further was just to inject more sex and violence, but still staying very much in an adolescent realm. When I was in my 20s and early 30s and heavily into my underground career, I felt the real dichotomy, a real us-against-them feeling. You could label it an EC-Kurtzman-Mad versus EC Feldstein horror/science-fiction d emarcation, I guess. I was interested in the cartoonists whose impulses were more satirical. I mean, Robert Crumb was — and is — the very definition of what a cartoonist should be, I think. CBA: I guess it could be argued Wally Wood played both sides of the fence, maybe to some degree. At least, he attempted some kind of self-expression with witzend, playing in more alternative playgrounds, even if he couldn’t shake the trappings of genre… but he seemed to at least yearn to see beyond… You can also look at Jack Jackson and say he has done substantial work, as well as cool genre stuff. Bill: Yeah, he’s someone who accomplished quite a bit, even though his orientation never appealed to me, but Jaxon did some great stuff anyway. CBA: Did you follow Kurtzman into Trump and Humbug? Bill: Yes. When Humbug came along, I bought every issue. And Trump I might have been aware

at the time, though certainly I was later. I saw at least one issue of Help!, but the distribution for that was so bad in Levittown. If you were living in New York City, you would see them, but in the suburbs, those were not on my radar. CBA: So you didn’t have any exposure to Help!, really? Besides a couple of issues? Bill: No. Only later, I saw them because people had collected them. I think I might have seen one issue, because I know the photo fumetti stuff sticks in my mind. I must have seen at least one issue, maybe more. CBA: But you saw Crumb and Gilbert Shelton’s work later? Bill: Oh, I never saw Crumb’s work in Help!, the sketchbook stuff, no. I didn’t see his work until 1967. CBA: Did you have aspirations as a teenager to be a cartoonist? Bill: Not specifically. I had aspirations to be an artist. I had a friend who was a genius cartoonist in seventh, eighth grade, and I loved reading whatever he did. He became an auditor for the IRS. [laughter] He completely abandoned everything. But, in his day, he was great. CBA: What was their content? Bill: They were adventure/humor strips and were without specific influences; he wasn’t a fanboy, wasn’t a comics person. He just naturally enjoyed drawing cartoons. Obviously he knew the medium of comics from reading the funnies or Uncle Scrooge, but there was no super-hero or fantasy aspect to the material. It was all just really funny. A lot of making fun of teachers and making fun of things we were learning in school. I thought he was great. He had an influence on me, but I never wanted to be a cartoonist, specifically. That didn’t happen until I had to go through art school and eight years of trying to be a painter in New York City. Kim Deitch and Crumb’s early stuff in underground papers had an impact. CBA: When did you enter Pratt? Bill: I went to Pratt from 1962 to ‘64. CBA: Was it a good experience or did it deteriorate? Bill: The first year was great, the second not so great, and I dropped out after that. At that point, Pratt did not have what I wanted. They had no fine art program. A few years after my leaving, they had an off-campus fine art rebellion thing going on, and that eventual-

ly turned into the New York School of Art. Eventually, Pratt did have a fine arts program, but when I was there, you had to declare in your second year into what area of commercial art you were going, so I said “graphics” because I thought it was the closest thing to try and become Vincent Van Gogh, Junior. Still, the first year of prep was very good for me. I met Kim Deitch, who lived in my dormitory, and he planted another comics time bomb inside me that took a while to detonate. He gave me my first exposure to great early stuff like Winsor McKay, and he had a love for comics that was very infectious. He just showed me stuff that I hadn’t been aware of. I had never seen Krazy Kat, he showed me Krazy Kat. He just had a lot of stuff in his room, and it was all fun to look at. Once again, it didn’t trigger anything automatically, but it was definitely planted in my brain and flourished later. CBA: Was the impact of Mad comics with you validated with Kim?

and interesting as any other art form. CBA: Was there any distinguishing in that attitude about comic books as compared to comic strips? Bill: Up until that point, comic strips were not things I paid attention to, but Kim showed me the old strips. He had whatever anthologies were around, whatever material he had from exposure to his father’s interest in comics. [Kim’s father is animated cartoon director Gene Deitch.] I looked at Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye, and strips like that. I didn’t really sit down and read it the way he would, but he put it under my nose and said, “This stuff was great at one time. Comic strips were really cool once. They were a great literary form. They had great artwork, rich characters, and people really paid attention at one point.” But when I was looking at that stuff, it didn’t make me run out and study comics in any big way. It was pretty much something that slowly happened while I was hanging out with Kim. CBA: Did you see a distinction in the different forms at all? You’ve obviously had a career in underground comix, and are currently drawing a daily comic strip… Bill: Oh, there’s a huge difference. I’m glad I’ve been able to do both. Little by little, something’s building up inside of me, to go back and do more longer narrative work that’s not in the one-row format, which I will eventually get to. But they do have such different rhythms. The comic strip rhythm is very suited to the way I work and way I think and it’s the kind of routine I like. I like to have a steady flow coming out of me. Doing individual stories and graphic novels and things like that is such a huge amount of attention and pressure on any one particular thing you’re doing that it either makes it or fails. I like it better to have this kind of

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Bill: Oh, yes. That was a nice way to bridge the kid and the adult in me, I thought. We were both 19 years old, still kids, really. But Kim’s appreciation was so scholarly, even at that age, and I began to rethink what Mad was, and what comics were. Though it didn’t yet do anything to me that made me want to do comics, it prompted me to think that comics were rich and as worthy

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rhythm where, over the period of a year, 365 strips, they’re not all of the same quality, not all the highest achievement I could make, but taken over a period of time, they have a rhythm that goes up and down. They have a kind of diary-like quality, and that’s what’s appealing… Obviously, it must connect deeply inside me, because the way I feel most comfortable is sitting down to do my three to four panels a day. CBA: There are two different kind of people: Those who thrive on order and those who thrive on chaos. Some like the steady pace of the tried-and-true; some like whatever tomorrow throws at you. It seems that Art is one of those who needs to work project by project, if for the sheer variety of the work, and others, perhaps like yourself who are into the steady routine. Bill: Yeah. It’s a metabolistic attitude or a temperamental consideration. Whatever feels right to you. If you can have the luxury of choosing the form of comics in which you work, as opposed to having something thrust on you, it’s nice to be able to choose, and to make that choice according to the way you feel most comfortable. I didn’t so much choose it as it happened to me, but once it did, after the initial first year of getting adjusted — which was not easy — it just felt natural. CBA: This is doing Zippy? Bill: Right. When I first started doing it as a daily in 1985, that was a rough year, because I went from doing it as a weekly to doing it as a daily, and in some ways that was all I could do. I didn’t have the luxury of having time to do other stuff. I didn’t want to do it every day, but I had to. That was something I needed to get used to, and I wasn’t sure I could keep it up, but I did. Now it just feels as natural as breathing. CBA: I guess I’m surprised it’s been that long! 1985? Did the Boston Globe pick that up immediately? Bill: The Globe was my first daily after the San

Francisco Examiner. The Examiner approached me in ’85, when Will Hearst III took it over. He approached me, Crumb and Hunter Thompson. Crumb actually — at [his wife] Aline [Kominsky]’s insistence — did a Dirty Laundry-type strip about their life together, but Crumb’s heart was not in it. When they showed it to Hearst, he said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” I think they might have had sexual

content or something that made them uncomfortable. (Then again, Crumb might have made sure it wasn’t going to work.) When Hearst asked me to do Zippy, I assumed he meant a weekly strip, and I thought, “This is great! I’ll have a daily paper that prints Zippy once a week, and I’ll be able to charge them a lot more than the alternative weeklies, and

it’ll be no more work!” But then when I was told he meant a daily, I was in shock. Still, it seemed like such a great opportunity I thought I’d give it a try. I signed up for only one year, and I asked if I could use some backlog material to start, so I could get used to it, and Hearst said that was fine. So that’s how it happened. A year later, King Features came by and they put a contract in front of me, and while I did my best to make so many demands that it wouldn’t work, they acceded to every one and suddenly I had a nationally syndicated strip. CBA: How many strips have you done so far? Bill: Over 5,000. CBA: Wow! Did you work on any publications in the early ’60s? You didn’t do any fanzine work, right? Bill: No, I didn’t even know they existed. CBA: Were there any publications at Pratt to work on? Bill: Not at Pratt. I don’t think I did anything in print. In high school, I worked on a literary magazine, illustrated short stories that came out in my junior or senior year. My first printed work was in Screw in New York in 1968. CBA: Did you get a rush when you saw the work in that literary magazine? Bill: Yes, but then there came a long period between that and my first comic strip. The big rush was from seeing my work in Screw… because it was being seen by so many people and it was on newsstands all around New York City. That was a huge rush. CBA: Is it important to distinguish that this was right at the beginning of Screw, when it had more of a counter-culture bent? Bill: I believe so. I was in #2-20. CBA: Now, how was the Screw of 1968 different from the Screw of ‘75? Bill: It was much cruder and more raw and freewheeling in the beginning, and Al Goldstein’s… I don’t know what to call it!… his refined vulgarity had not quite been formulated. You know, any publication starts off with a very chaotic first year or so, and that was when I was involved with it. The fact the content was primarily sexual or daringly pornographic was appealing to people in the counterculture. It seemed a sexier East Village Other, and at the time, it didn’t seem aimed at an audience just to try and titillate, and supply people with erotic stimulation — that was just a plus — but rather give the readers a dose of counter-culture energy and rebellion. CBA: Were you left-wing as teen? Bill: No. Not left-wing. I didn’t grow up in a political atmosphere. I adopted my mother’s liberal attitude toward things, but had no strong political leanings. I didn’t examine socialism or anything like that; I was a peacenik. I went on peace demonstrations, wore a peace button to my high school graduation, which got me kicked

off the stage and my diploma not handed to me. CBA: [Laughs] And this was in peacetime? Bill: This was in 1962, when I graduated high school. I channeled my rebellion, at the age of 16, into folk music and peace demonstrations. “Ban the Bomb!” and everything. I crusaded against fallout shelters. Another time I got myself on the cover of the Levittown Tribune was when I fomented rebellion against, or non-participation, passive resistance to air raid drills in my high school. CBA: So no “Duck and cover?” [laughs] Bill: No, we would not duck and cover. When the bell sounded and everybody filed out of their rooms, myself and about four other kids sat there with our arms folded. CBA: I wouldn’t stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance during Vietnam, in junior high, so I was forced to stand outside in the hall. But at least you went along with two or three other guys! [laughter] Bill: Yeah, it was two guys and two girls. One became my girlfriend. So I wouldn’t say left-wing; I wasn’t aware of any political aspect to what I was doing. I was interested in the right and wrong going on, and I had to crusade for the right against the wrong. CBA: So you were ambivalent towards Eisenhower? Bill: No, I was anti-Eisenhower. [laughter] CBA: Well, isn’t that left-wing? Bill: My mother and father would fight about it.

She voted for Stevenson, he voted for Eisenhower. That was my politic environment. CBA: Did you go through a prolonged political education during the ’60s? Bill: Well, kind of, without making a serious effort at it. I was very grateful for the counterculture experience and the fact I was at least, in some ways, enmeshed within it. In any organized

sense, I never felt strongly identified with any one group or particular hippie philosophy or anything like that. I smoked pot, went to the first Earth Day in 1970 in New York, before I left for California… Tales of Toad #1 had just come out, and I went to the Earth Day demonstrations to sell my first comic book. I had a bunch of copies under my arm, trying desperately to interest people in it.

Getting to San Francisco, I wasn’t a hippy with flowers in my hair — nothing remotely like that — but I thought, as a group of people, here was a place in which I could do my work. I could reach an audience like this, get my stuff out there, and get published. CBA: You left Pratt in 1964? What happened between Pratt and Screw? Bill: Well, I went to Europe. CBA: For how long? Bill: A little less than a year. I bummed around until I ran out of money, made a couple of friends — American friends, not European — who I’d met traveling in Europe, and one wound up having an influence on me. Unknown to me at the time, he had a cartooning bent. He never really became a cartoonist, but a kid’s book illustrator and writer. Still, he was a large part of my tentative stab at being a cartoonist, when I did my very first work for Screw. He basically dared me to do it. He was a very provocative, trouble-making kind of a guy, and would make jokes about my paintings. My paintings at that point had word balloons occasionally, and he would say, “Y’know, you’re one step away from doing comic strips.” CBA: What was his name? Bill: Jon Buller. We stayed friends. It’s funny how you meet someone who becomes a friend and that person can exert a subtle but very powerful influence upon things that happen over the course of your life. You can have maybe two or three people over a lifetime, usually, one or

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two are from back in your childhood or college days who, without meaning to, can set you on a certain path and direction. My friend Jon Buller was one of those people. CBA: So you’re still friends? Bill: Oh yes. CBA: Where did you go in Europe? Bill: Mostly London, Paris, Barcelona, a little bit of southern France. CBA: Was it just to soak in the atmosphere? Bill: No. I still had this romantic notion of what an artist was, so I did a lot of painting and sketching. I dropped in on some figure drawing classes at the Beaux-Artes Academy in Paris. I had a little garret overlooking the rooftops of Paris. It was all very much of an almost 19th-century kind of attitude towards what an artist was (which I guess you could still indulge, at that time). When I came back to the states, I had a girlfriend and we lived on the Lower East Side. Then, with another girl, I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I painted, had day jobs in bookstores, and I painted and painted until suddenly the paintings started getting comicky, and my friend Buller said, “You can do a comic strip and take it to Screw,” this raunchy newspaper that had just started. The editor there was Steve Heller (now the art director of the New York Times Book Review, and compiler, author and packager of dozens and dozens of books on the graphic arts). When I brought my strip to him, I would say at least half the reason he accepted it was because it was drawn to the correct proportions, and he was thrilled I had actually measured

the half-size dimensions of a tabloid newspaper page. CBA: What was the strip? Bill: I forget the title, but it was about genitals running around on another planet (I think it might have been Uranus). I made the references as gross as I could. They were bodies with just legs and genitals. Where the waist would be would be

an enormous penis or a vagina and they would be running around. It was just dirty, filthy, anarchist… [laughter] CBA: So those strips you did for those 20 issues of Screw, were they all stand-alone things? Bill: Sort of. After that first strip was out of my system (which actually wasn’t entirely my idea), I faced this challenge thrown to me by my friend so I reached into myself and asked, “What do I want to do? Who’s my character? What do I want to

say and who’s the voice I want to say it with?” And that’s how I came up with Mr. Toad. So I started to do strips starring this early, proto-Mr. Toad character, this angry, dark figure. When I was kicked out of Screw, Mr. Toad was cited as the reason, because he was too angry and Al Goldstein said he was “anti-sexual”. CBA: Well, was he? [laughs] Bill: Well, yeah! In the sense he wasn’t all about indulging and hedonism. He was about anger and malevolence. CBA: He was anti-everything, right? Bill: Right, he was too malevolent for Screw. Goldstein wanted things to be sexy or funny or pornographic, whatever, but he didn’t want them to be malevolent. CBA: When did you first see Zap Comix? Bill: Well, I guess it was 1967 or ’68. Whenever it first appeared. There was a sort of newsstand/ bookstore right around Times Square, which was the only place I knew of where you could see the first underground comics. I guess they were being sold somewhere in the Village, too, but I just didn’t see them there. It must have been ’67 because, by ’68, I was doing comics. Then at the same time, literally within a week of seeing Zap, I started to notice the East Village Other. There I first saw Kim Deitch’s early stuff, Sunshine Girl. I recognized his name, so I went down to the paper to see him, and that was pretty much around the time I did my first thing for Screw. So Kim ushered me into the world of the East Village Other. Once again, they were so thrilled I was aware of the correct proportions, so it apparently

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was a big deal at that time! [laughter] Everybody was just handing in stuff that had done on shirt cardboard at whatever size they felt like. Everyone was too stoned to know how to use a ruler. The editors… CBA: [Laughs] They weren’t sober either? Bill: Yeah, this was not a time of sobriety. I remember the East Village Other’s art director (whose name I’m struggling to remember… I know his first name was Don) and his take on my work was that it was, “Fuckin’ surreal, man! This is fuckin’ surreal.” I thought, “Well, okay, if that’s what they want, I’ll do more surreal stuff. I don’t have to make any sense, so that’s really great!” CBA: Even easier! Who needs a plot! [laughter] Bill: You just do whatever the hell you feel like drawing, one panel leads to next, and they think it’s “Fuckin’ surreal”? I was just flabbergasted that anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people were exposed to my scribblings every month or so. It was just a big rush. CBA: Was Zap an influence on you at all? Bill: Yeah, sure! I remember when I first read Crumb, I hadn’t laughed that hard over a comic in years. I couldn’t decide whether he was my age and a part of the world around me — the counter-culture — or if he might be some guy in his 60s. CBA: [Laughs] That’s exactly the same feeling I had when I was a kid. Bill: Yeah, I recognized his style as looking very old-fashioned, like something out of the 1920s and ’30s. CBA: Someone from then using drugs! [laughs] Bill: Yeah, right! A real cool old guy, y’know? A guy who just popped up from nowhere at the age of 63, took acid, and did these great strips. CBA: A Disney animator gone horribly wrong! [laughs] Bill: Yeah! Something like that. Also, I was convinced he was Jewish, for some reason. I don’t know why. I think maybe it was a certain Jewish energy in the work, y’know? That sort of Kurtzman thing. To me, a lot of Kurtzman’s humor had a Yiddish/ethnic flavor to it. CBA: Vaguely Eastern European. Bill: It really did! It was in there, and I thought Crumb had some of that, too, so I figured… first of all, his name had to have been made up. No one has the name Crumb. So he’s an old, Jewish guy who took acid, drawing in a 1930s style. So, needless to say, I was very, very surprised… CBA: …to be completely wrong. [laughs] I first saw Crumb when I was maybe 11 or 12 and later realized how truly subversive his work is. It’s wrapped in this Disney-like veneer, very accessible, with fuzzy, cute bunnies and cheerful, apple-cheeked people, but then the content smacks you right in the kisser! Looking at Crumb for the

first time was exactly like seeing Kurtzman in that they really did blow your mind! Bill: Looking back on it now, I’m amazed at what age he was when doing that work. Now, of course, I’m aware of his development from the age of five on; that he already gone through something like six periods of drawing styles and

so they obviously had an informed graphic sensibility. Bill: Yes, but the East Village Other was run by people very much business-oriented. They were trying to make a profit out of it, and quickly understood the audience, and the only way to make money was to increase the number of back

influences before he hit his 20s. But yeah, he was tremendously disciplined and controlled, enough so to able to inject this anarchic, insane, pothead kind of sensibility into a very comprehensible, grounded cartoon style that was so familiar. Even though it was intensely felt, it was still very familiar. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It had a really iconic feeling to it. It was rooted in comics. CBA: Is the EVO more related to the tradition of the Village Voice and neighborhood newspapers in New York? Did it influence the development of underground comix? I don’t know when the EVO started… Bill: I don’t know exactly what year, probably ’66. What are you asking? CBA: Well, the EVO is renowned for putting a lot of fledgling underground cartoonists to work,

pages for the sex ads, personals, massage ads, and the audience supporting the EVO was largely a straight, non-counter-culture audience buying the newspaper for those ads and the pictures of naked girls in the back. It wasn’t like Screw. Sex wasn’t the dominant subject, but the sex ads were what paid the rent for the East Village Other. The EVO cartoonists were becoming unhappy because they were losing space to those sex ads and getting less respect over a period of a few years. That’s how Gothic Blimp Works came about; it was an outgrowth of the EVO, their comic tabloid. And when that came out, I was in a couple of those issues, those were very heady times because I thought I was participating in something that was to New York as Zap was to California, and here we had our own version. But that was very short-lived because, once again, economically it couldn’t sustain itself. Without the personal sex ads — the Blimp Works had no ads — the audience was down to just the hardcore aficionados of early underground comix, and that was not enough to sustain anything economically. Not in New York, anyway, where distribution was pretty much a Mafia undertaking. CBA: The Blimp Works was owned, lock, stock, and barrel by the EVO?

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Bill: As far as I know. Vaughn Bodé was the first editor, then Kim Deitch. CBA: How long did it last? Bill: I believe seven issues. CBA: Were they monthly? Bill: It was supposed to be monthly, but it came out pretty much just whenever they could get it all together. CBA: So you did go over to the EVO? Bill: Well, once I did my first Screw work, then I had a little bit of an entrée into other places. I didn’t think “I’m in Screw; this is all I need.” I thought, “I’m in Screw. Now, what else can I do? They’re not going to print me every week.” So, I went down to talk to Kim and got involved with the East Village Other people and then the Blimp Works, once again through Kim. Then, when that died, I went out to San Francisco to check it out, met various cartoonists out there, just a few at the beginning. I met Art very early, and Gilbert Shelton, then went down to Rip-Off Press and visited the publishers. I brought my first comic book, which was a compilation of work that had been in the East Village Other, Screw, and some new Mr. Toad stuff and various other things. I brought that to Print Mint, because they had that kind of environment where, you know, anything goes, and anybody that walks in with a produced comic book, they’d publish it. There was very little editorial judgment going on. I remember I didn’t have the right number of pages, and had to go back to my little hotel room and do four more pages to fill it out to 32. Then I went back to New York, and one day, in April 1970, I got a little package of 20 Tales of Toad #1’s in the mail from Print Mint. I was once again

swept away with delusions of grandeur, and thought, “The Blimp Works is dead and there is nothing else happening here.” I had just met Jay Kinney (still in New York) and Justin Green (living in New Jersey). I think Jay Kinney was going to Pratt at the time, and we had concocted the idea of Young Lust, Jay Kinney and I, because of some strips I had done for the EVO that were parodies of girls romance comics. Jay, independently of me, had done one page on the same subject. So we got together and hatched the idea for Young Lust. So I took that out to Print Mint with me in July of 1970, and that was it. I was relocated. CBA: You were quoted as saying that you met Art at Gary Arlington’s. Is that true? Bill: Yes. CBA: Did you two immediately hit it off? Bill: Yes, very much so. I don’t think I’m distorting this memory, I’m pretty sure it’s true that in the same day we met, Art and I went from the comic book store to a restaurant around the corner, and by the end of the day we had basically hatched Arcade, though it was years before we came out with it. We were immediately in sync and both of us went about putting together the concept, in our minds and our little note pads, this idea of doing a comic magazine like that, something more than a comic book, but a magazine. CBA: What was to be the name? Bill: Banana Oil, which was Art’s idea. It was the title of an old Milt Gross comic strip. Banana Oil is one of those unique phrases that came out of the comics. “Banana oil” is basically a euphemism for “bullshit.” CBA: How did you get interested about the production side of magazines? Were you in the offices of the EVO and Screw and liked the energy? Bill: Yes, I did, though I didn’t want to be employed there. I wanted to retain a freelance function in the world of newspaper-magazinecomic book publishing. I originally just wanted to do my work, bring it in, and have somebody else do all the work in having it published and printed and everything, but I was immediately fascinated with the production end of things. I remember both at Screw and the EVO, getting what amounted to on-the-job training about the materials, rubber cement and paste-up, what a copy camera does, what blue pencils are for. I had no previous exposure or training for any of that.

For a number of years, when I look upon my early comics career, it’s basically nothing more than an educational experience. I had no idea what I was doing, had very little to say, and I had very few drawing skills. So I’m very grateful for that whole environment where I could be there and learn both the production and language of comics. CBA: Was it a pragmatic decision to come up with Mr. Toad? Did you realize that success often lies in creating continuing characters? Was that a consideration, or did you just need a voice to speak your mind? Bill: As a character, Mr. Toad worked as a voice for my id. It was satisfying for a brief few years, until I needed other voices. That voice was a satisfying voice to me, a wise guy, a transgressive interloper. The character was loosely based on Mr. Toad in the children’s book, Wind in the Willows, who was an obsessive-compulsive, out-of-control kind of a character, and pure id. It just felt right, and it worked for me. I was aware I needed to develop other characters, and figured that it would come along little by little, and luckily it did. But I had no real autobiographical impulse early on. I didn’t calculate, or pragmatically sit down and think about what would work better. I just thought whoever I was, and whatever I had to say, it was either going to be sufficiently interesting to other people, or it wasn’t. I didn’t know. CBA: Did you feel free enough that you didn’t have to have a regular gig, or did you have an ingrained work ethic that demanded that you just do it, or were you afraid to start? Bill: When I brought Young Lust with me to San Francisco in 1970, I made the rounds of the Print Mint and Rip-Off Press, and Last Gasp. All of them turned it down, because they thought it wasn’t “hippy” enough for them, basically, to put it crudely. It didn’t validate the hippy counterculture in any way. It came out of another place. Gilbert Shelton said — and I remember his exact phrase — that it wasn’t “socially redeeming.” He sort of snickered when he said it, but he did mean it. In other words, it would be hard to defend. It didn’t come across as under the counter-culture banner, and though there was hardcore sex going on, it wasn’t hardcore sex with pot-smoking hippies; it was hardcore sex among girls romance characters from the ’50s and ’60s, and just seemed to come out of some strange place. Then I took it to Company & Sons, this fledgling publisher that had come out with, I think, one or two little things. It was run by a guy with a prison record and another guy who was spent a lot of time at the racetrack. They had a slight hippy edge to them, but I don’t know who the hell they were. So they published Young Lust, and suddenly it sold huge numbers. So very early on, I was doing both totally obscure, weird stuff with Mr. Toad, and also this accidentally commercial thing with Young Lust, which was paying the rent. And, with the exception of a year where I had to do Wacky Packages for Topps Bubble Gum, I supported myself doing underground comix and the

TOP: Tippin’ a hat to Help! mag’s “Public Gallery,” where many comix artists got their first exposure, Arcade had the section, “Sideshow,” often spotlighting new talent.

occasional illustration job from 1970 on. CBA: Did Young Lust earn you substantial money? Bill: No, but there was a big check once in a while. Every three to four months, I would get a check for $1000 or more, but it was enough in those days. Rent was about $125 a month, I got food stamps, and my girlfriend had a job. She left within a year or two, so I was supporting myself. I managed to pay the bills with my royalties. CBA: Were you as surprised as anyone that it was a hit? Bill: Initially I was, because it didn’t seem commercial. It wasn’t one more comic you would take into the bathroom and get stoned with. It seemed to be doing something very different. But, for whatever reason, the sexual content being part of it, the satirical aspect being another, the mockery of middle class values being another, all of that clicked enough to make it have really big sales in that head shop world. It was surprising to me. I remember taking exception to people who would say, “Well, of course it’s doing well. It’s pornography!” I would say, “Oh no! It isn’t pornography; it’s social criticism! Social satire!” I remember Simon Deitch, Kim’s brother, was very antagonistic with his opinion about Young Lust being successful entirely because it was pornography. I would get outraged. CBA: Did you immediately start work on Young Lust #2? Bill: Yes, of course. Jay Kinney came out to San Francisco, within a year of my coming out, and Kim was there already. Suddenly everybody who had been on the East Coast, all the cartoonists who had remained in the New York area, and a few who had been other place, in the Midwest, all wound up in San Francisco. So there was suddenly both a world of people who were your colleagues and support system and social world. Comics grew out of that, Young Lust and lots of others. Anthology comics popped up left and right.

CBA: Were there any text pieces in Tales of Toad or was it 100% comics? Bill: No, there was no text. CBA: I’m jumping ahead, but you said in your Comics Journal interview that Company & Sons couldn’t afford to publish Arcade because of cost of setting type, right? Because of the expense of the text pages? Bill: Yes. That sounds right.

CBA: But there were only a few pages that needed to be typeset. The vast majority of Arcade is straight comics. You just shoot the art, make a negative, and make the plate. Bill: Well, in those days, photo type had just started, so this was in that transitional time. The production expense for making a limited-run magazine with no staff, was relatively high compared to doing a comic book. The amount of pages we wanted, and the fact we wanted it to be a larger size, wanted it to come out regularly, wanted whoever published it to get a deal very quickly to get it out of the head shop distribution system and next to the National Lampoon on the stands. It now seems to me, we made a lot of demands on the publisher, and Print Mint was

much more able to do what we wanted, even though they never quite pulled it off, either. But they had the resources much more than Company & Sons did. CBA: You and Art had talked about Banana Oil earlier, but what happened for Arcade to be finally launched? Bill: Well, Arcade was a response to two real and perceived crises: One was when the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that communities would set standards for obscenity. So a crusading district attorney in St. Louis could suddenly have the cops bust a head shop for selling underground comix, and then all the undergrounds would then be shipped back to the publisher. That was an economic blow we all suffered. It took a little while to take effect, but little by little it snowballed. So we were faced with having little security in that royalties coming in from underground comix suddenly turned into a trickle. At the same time, the arc of the audience had peaked. By 1972 and ’73, there was a glut of so many comix, the average counter-culture reader couldn’t afford to buy whatever had come out that week or month, so they were starting to discriminate. They weren’t picking up everything. So some books were selling and some books just sitting there. The print runs, typically, from the late ’60s to ’73 were 20,000, 25,000, 30,000, but then they went down to 10,000, then 5,000. You were paid an advance royalty based on the print run. So market saturation, or the beginning of the audience being more discriminating, combined with the Supreme Court pornography ruling, dealt two major blows economically to the field. CBA: Was the decision to publish Arcade influenced by Comix Book, the anthology magazine Marvel published and Denis Kitchen edited? Bill: That was a big pain in the ass for Art and I, because that was in effect a competitor to Arcade, but a lowbrow version. It had major distribution on the newsstands, briefly, through

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Marvel. We actually had a meeting at one point where we called all of the cartoonists together and we said, “We hope you will not work for Comix Book, because we want to retain a certain exclusivity of artists so that we have something, we can say we have these artists. Please don’t work for Comix Book.” And some cartoonists went along with us, some were half-and-half, because Comix Book was paying $100 a page and we were paying $50 a page. Which was still $25 a page more than most underground comix. $100 a page was just too tempting to too many cartoonists. So Comix Book had a negative impact on Arcade in the sense it diluted a little of the feeling that we were all in this together, that we were all behind this one magazine that was going to gain us more audience, more respect, and ultimately some sort of income. CBA: Then Arcade was formulated, as far as you can remember, slightly after Comix Book came out? Bill: No, Comix Book came out after Arcade. CBA: But Art allowed some of his work to be reprinted, including “Ace Hole, Midget Detective,” and the first “Maus” incarnation. Bill: What year is the first issue of Comix Book? CBA: 1974, though the copyright is ’73. Bill: Okay, so it came out before Arcade? My, the ‘70s were… CBA: Yeah! [laughter] Oddly enough, Comix Book started a real creative rights movement within mainstream comics, because of the double-standard that was set for contributors. Even though Stan Lee wanted to retain all the copyrights to the work, Kitchen persuaded him that the underground cartoonists wouldn’t go along with that. So a special contract for Comix Book was written and then the mainstream caught wind of it and said, “Wait a minute here! What’s with this double-standard?” Bill: Right. That was the beginning of cartoonists demanding eventually to retain their own copyright, and that movement even got it to the level of daily strip cartoons. CBA: So there was never an impulse, as Arcade editors, to follow convention and retain copyright? Or did you guys always make sure everyone retained his or her own copyrights? Was it almost a political point of view? Obviously, the money is typically in appropriating the rights. Bill: Well, we always thought that, having had the luxury of the history underground comix cartoonists have had with their publishers — the same relationship an author would have with a publisher — you retain copyright, are paid an advance and then royalties (a percentage of the

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cover price) based on print runs, which goes on as long as the work is in print. All of that is the relationship of an author to a publisher, not a cartoonist to a publisher like Marvel or DC or any of the major comics publishers, where you did work for hire, didn’t have a copyright, didn’t own the characters, and received no advances or royalties. We were making a lot less money than those guys, but had a lot more artistic control and had more fun. Whenever that arrangement was challenged in any way, we would defend them to the death. CBA: You looked forward to editing a magazine? Bill: It was a great time, a great adventure. It was a fun couple of years, until burnout happened. The reality was that we never had a staff. Any staff we had was the cartoonists, who weren’t always available to us. Art, my wife, Diane Noomin, and a couple of hardcore helpers, like Willy Murphy, Spain, and Jay Kinney, would literally put the whole issue together. We would do paste-up and layout… CBA: Did you have a party for that, generally? Bill: We’d have a party for the final paste-up work and we’d have a party when the issue came out. We were just real proud of what we were doing and happy with it, but always holding our breath and hoping that we would break out, in effect, into a wider world of distribution. First, it was a quarterly, then we were hoping to go bi-monthly. We had all these hopes based on what amounted to commercial success, and that commercial success was a very elusive thing for us, partially because we couldn’t get the right distribution. We almost had a distribution deal with a company called Eastern News (who I think were fairly big). They considered it, but told us, “Come back to us when you have advertising. You need advertising, you need more pages, and you can’t come out quarterly. But we’ll keep an eye on you, come back to us.” So in effect, by not taking us on, that doomed us, because we needed somebody to have faith to baby that whole process along. They just said, “Well, come back to us when you’ve miraculously taken on ad pages and become bi-monthly.” CBA: Was there a feeling, “We’re going to do Arcade because of the crisis over the Supreme Court decision, and we’re going to keep people working”? Was that a thought? Bill: Yes. “We have to save our own asses! We have to save this delicate thing that’s endangered.” All underground comix seemed to have reached a crisis point. We didn’t want it to go away. We wanted it to go the other way, up. We want it to leave the confines of the underground while retaining all of that spirit. CBA: How were undergrounds distributed? Bill: Well, distribution was opened up by the Rolling Stone, and it consisted of basically head shops. Then it was comic book shops, which started to sprout up, and the occasional bookstore. It was a very odd thing to most sellers, because underground publishers didn’t have the economic strength to accept returns, which all publishers generally do. Typically, if you sell a

bookstore 30 copies of something, and they want to return 10 copies they didn’t sell, they can. But it’s really more a magazine thing. And comic books as well, were sold based on you could return what you didn’t sell and get credit. Underground comix publishers working on a shoestring budget couldn’t do that, so whatever you bought, that was it. As a result, a lot of places used to a certain way of dealing with publishers said, “Well, no, we can’t do that. That’s not how we work.” So that was a roadblock in many ways to getting wider distribution, especially after those first four or five years, when suddenly the marketplace got distributing. In effect, it wanted more quality. CBA: If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently with Arcade? Would you have established distribution first? Bill: What I would have done differently would be to partner with some people. We needed, and we tried at various points during the few years that it existed, to find a business partner. Someone who had the business sense that we didn’t have, who had some connections. Briefly we tried getting involved with Justin Green’s brother, Keith Green, who came across as a businessman but was actually just a big hustler. He got us a little better distribution, but nothing much happened. I didn’t have the connections, or the time even, to go out and find whoever this was, but if we had somehow connected ourselves to someone who had experience putting magazines together and getting them distributed, that would have made a big difference. We thought the Print Mint would provide that somehow, but they never did. CBA: Art moved back East at a critical time, right? Bill: Yes, he left. He was doing his editing and planning from New York, but the vast majority of labor was more on my shoulders at that point, and that’s when it just became untenable. It was just too much work. CBA: Did it make any money? Bill: The first few did better than the last issues. I would say #1 and 2 made money, then the rest broke even. The first issues had larger print runs, 30,000-40,000. And then they went down, as it became obvious we weren’t going to break out into the bigger distribution world. CBA: Were you proud of the product? Bill: Absolutely. I think it was a glorious couple of years. Looking back, whenever I pick them up and look through them, I can see the struggle in them to be a real magazine, to be something of a showcase with a variety of sensibilities with a kind of underground feeling, a common bond. I just see everybody at his or her best. Our one editorial exhortation to everybody was, “Do your best work. This is where you will do your most personal, your best work.” As we always told them, “We go with the cartoonist, not with the piece you produce. We’re asking you to do your best work. We’re not going to reject it when you finish it, as long as it is your best work.

Arcade, The Comics Revue Index #1 Spring 1975 Cover: Robert Crumb IFC: They Shall Not Be Forgotten: “Caterina Sforza,” (bio text with illo) Jim Osborne 1 1/2 The Outline (editorial) Editorial: “An Introduction,” comic strip editorial 1/2 by Art Spiegelman & Bill Griffith “Cracking Jokes: A Brief Inquiry into Various Aspects of Humor,” Art Spiegelman 3 Nard N’ Pat, Jay Lynch 3 Zippy: “Plainclothes Detective,” Bill Griffith 3 Arnold Peck: “Once More, With or Without Feeling,” Willy Murphy 2 “The Love Song of Timothy Leary,” biographical vignettes by Paul Krassner; illos by Spain 3 “Miskin’s Folly, or A Moon, A Fool, and A Furlough!” “Fowlton Means,” script; Kim Deitch, art 3 CS: “Big Ass Topics,” Robert Crumb 2 Griffith Observatory, Bill Griffith 1 “Midnight,” Jay Kinney 3 Gilbert Shelton’s Advance Motoring Tips #836 1 Classics Crucified: “Wm. Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,” Justin Green 3 Real Dream: “A Hand Job,” Art Spiegelman 1 Arcade Archives: Harrison Cady 4 “Sounds of the Carnival,” fiction by Will Fowler; illos by S. Clay Wilson 3 Sideshow: “The Yma Sumac Story,” Curt McDowell; “Kelvin, The Human Fly,” Michael McMillan; “The Bunch,” Aline Kominsky; “A Letter for Olga,” George Kuhar; “Didi Glitz,” Diane Noomin; “Looking at the World Thru Rose Colored Glasses,” Aldo Bobbo 4 BC: “Mystic Comics, Part One,” Victor Moscoso 1 Note: Each “Sideshow” entry is one-half page. #2 Summer 1975 Cover: Robert Crumb IFC: They Shall Not Be Forgotten: “Sawney Beane,” (bio text with illo) Jim Osborne 1 The Outline (editorial), letters column 1 “Let’s Talk Sense About This Here Modern America,” Robert Crumb 5 Gilbert Shelton’s Advance Motoring Tips #682 1 “Where Are They Now?” Kim Deitch (story credited to “Fowlton Means, in collaboration with Opal Dendrite”) 4 “A Couch in the Sun: The Henri Rousseau Story,” Bill Griffith (biography) 4 Nard N’ Pat, Jay Lynch 1 “Who Killed Lenny Bruce?” essay by Paul Krassner; illos by Robert Crumb 2 CS: “An Average Day on Mission Street…” Spain 2 Rita Markee, Pilgrim to Paradise: “La Cock-A-Roach,” Michael McMillan 1 Arnold Peck: “Back to Basics,” Willy Murphy 3 Real Dream, Art Spiegelman 1 “The Labor Theory of Love,” fiction by David Cohen; illos by George Kuchar 3 Didi Gliz: “A Bitter Pill,” Diane Noomin 1 Classics Crucified: “Gothe’s Faust,” Justin Green 4 Arcade Archives: W.E. Hill’s Life Sketches 3 Sideshow: “Rick Shaw” Willy Murphy; “Sir Plus of Hollywood,” Jay Kinney; “The Bunch,” Aline Kominsky; “Looking at the World Thru Rose Colored Glasses,” Aldo & Bobbo; “Bleeorp!” Rory Hayes; “Griffith Observatory,” Bill Griffith 4 BC: “Day at the Circuits,” Art Spiegelman 1 KEY: IFC: Inside Front Cover; BC: Back Cover; IBC: Inside Back Cover; CS: Centerspread

#3 Fall 1975 Cover: Robert Crumb The Outline (editorial), letters column 1 “That’s Life,” Robert Crumb 5 “New York Journal,” Art Spiegelman 1 “Xanadu,” poetry by Sam Coleridge; illos by Spain 3 Mickey Rat, Bobbo Armstrong 2 Zippy: “A Fool’s Paradise Revisited,” Bill Griffith 10 CS: “Deranged Doctors,” S. Clay Wilson 2 “Little Dainty Dimples Witnesses a Sacred Visitation,” Robert Williams 1 “Bop Bop Against That Curtain,” essay by Charles Bukowski; illos by R. Crumb 3 Arnold Peck: “A Flaw in the Ointment” Willy Murphy 2 “H.P. Lovecraft,” George Kuchar (bio) 3 They Shall Not Be Forgotten: “Peter Kurten,” (bio text with illo) Jim Osborne 1 The Bunch: “Plays With Herself,” Aline Kominsky 2 Arcade Archives: Count Screwloose by Milt Gross 3 Classics Crucified: “Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment,” Justin Green 3 Sideshow: “Griffith Observatory,” Bill Griffith; “Stranded in Geektown,” Denis Kitchen; “Jungle Jive,” Joe Schenkman; “Magic Clams,” Sally Cruikshank; “Frozen Creeps in Space,” Diane Noomin; “Typhoon Ted,” Michael McMillan 3 BC: Gilbert Shelton’s Advance Motoring Tips #303 1 #4 Winter 1975 Cover: Robert Crumb The Outline (editorial), letters column 1 Frosty the Snow Man and His Friends, R. Crumb 6 “Fun City in Ba’Dan,” fiction by William Burroughs; illos by S. Clay Wilson 3 “Heidi’s Story,” Aldo & Bobbo 1 “As The Mind Reels: A Soap Opera,” A. Spiegelman 4 “Dollboy,” Bill Griffith 5 Arnold Peck: “A Uniquely Complete Experience,” Willy Murphy 2 CS: “An Ugly Incident,” Robert Williams 2 Space Age Confidential: “Coca-Cola: Der Volkseltzer,” essay by Jim Hoberman, illos by Michael McMillan 1 “Stalin”, Spain (bio) 5 Cat and Pup: “…Come To Town,” Michael McMillan 2 “Gospel for Glueheads,” Michael McMillan 1 Famous Frauds: “Don Carlos Balmori,” Kim Deitch 4 Arcade Archives: Nibsy the Newsboy by George McManus 3 “Toadette Paranoia,” Bill Griffith 1 Sideshow: “Rowdy Noody,” Justin Green; Gilbert Shelton’s Advance Motoring Tips #886; “Blabette Yakowitz,” Aline Kominsky; “Household Appliances,” Bill Lynch, “Mommy’s Song,” Curt McDowell; “Freak Circus,” Rory Hayes; “Brillo ’n Burma,” Diane Noomin; “Looking at the World Thru Rose Colored Glasses,” R. Armstrong 4 BC: “Uncle Sol’s Creative Arts Seminars,” Justin Green 1 #5 Spring 1976 Cover: Jay Lynch The Outline (editorial), letters column 1 Crybaby Beanhead: “Crybaby’s Blues,” R. Crumb 4 Zippy: “Commedia dell’ Zippy,” Bill Griffith 6 Famous Frauds: “The Great Ajeeb,” Kim Deitch 4 “The Corpse Gobblin Ogre of Columbite Mountain,” S. Clay Wilson 3 Didi Glitz: “…and The Three Bears,” Diane Noomin 1 “Anthony and the Temptations,” novel excerpt by George Di Caprio; illos by Justin Green 3 CS: “Luminescent Progeny,” Michael McMillan 2 “Terror from the Grave,” Rory Hayes 1 Arnold Peck: “A Modern Mystery,” Willy Murphy 4

“Some Boxes for the Salvation Army: A Sketchbook,” Art Spiegelman 3 Space Age Confidential: “The Calvin Coolidge Story,” essay by Jim Hoberman; illos by Kim Deitch 2 “Self-Portrait,” M.K. Brown (autobio) 2 “Zen Time,” Justin Green 1 “Gotterdammerung,” Spain (history) 5 The Bunch: “Mondo Condo,” Aline Kominsky 1 Arcade Archives: Bughouse Fables by Billy DeBeck 1 Sideshow: “Looking at the World Thru Rose Colored Glasses,” Bobbo Armstrong; “Trexler the Trilobite,” Dirk Burhans, “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” Michele Brand; “Highlights in the Life of Kathi Smith,” Curt A. McDowell BC: “Deceasedland,” Robert Williams 1 #6 Summer 1976 Cover: Robert Crumb The Outline (Willy Murphy obit), letters column 1 Those Cute Little Bearzy Wearzies: “Ain’t It Nice?” Robert Crumb 7 Nervous Rex: “The Malpractice Suit,” A.Spiegelman 2 “Social Problems of the Toadettes,” Bill Griffith 4 “Monster Bride,” S. Clay Wilson 2 Didi Glitz: “A Perfectly Divine Vision,” Diane Noomin 1 Willy Murphy Tribute: “Flamed-Out Funnies”; Henry Henpeck: “King of the Road”; “Automatic Transmission”; Arnold Peck 5 CS: “Teddy Beariana,” Kim Deitch 2 Space Age Confidential: “Big Broadcast of 1952,” essay by Jim Holberman; illos by A. Spiegelman 1 “Dad for a Day,” Justin Green 3 The Bunch: “Mr. Bunch,” Aline Kominsky 2 “Age of Reason,” Rory Hayes 1 “Deadline,” Spain 4 Arcade Archives: H.M. Bateman 4 “They Came From Space,” M.K. Brown 4 Mickey Rat: “High Rollin,’” Bobbo & Aldo 1 Sideshow: “A Fear of Froaks,” Rory Hayes; “Childhood Adventures in South Modesto,” Larry Rippee; “Farmer Kid,” Gerald Jablonski; “Blabette Gets An Afro,” Aline Kominsky; “Pictograms,” Mark Beyer; “Griffith Observatory,” Bill Griffith 3 BC: Various strips by Michael McMillan 1 #7 Fall 1976 Cover: M.K. Brown The Outline (Kim Deitch appreciation), letters col 1 Miles Microft: “Possessed,” “Fowlton Means,” script; Kim Deitch, art 12 “Drawings from My Sketchbook,” Robert Crumb 8 The Bunch: “Arnie’s Air Conditioner,” Aline Kominsky1 “The Gates of Purgatory,” Justin Green (centerspread) 2 Space Age Confidential: “The Mass Psychology of Disney World,” essay by Jim Holberman; illos by Robert Williams 1 “Back Home in Pasadena,” Bob Armstrong 3 T. Cat and Pooch D. Pup: Queezy Riders,” Michael McMillan 2 Arcade Archives: “Sex Comics of the Thirties” 5 The Toad: “…and the Madman,” Bill Griffith 4 “Some of My Best Friends Are,” Diane Noomin 2 “The Inheritance of Rufus Griswold,” Spain (history) 3 Sideshow: “A Dark Night,” Rory Hayes; “Blondo Airstep Punchlines,” Oliver Christianson, “Tony Target,” Mark Beyer; “Jimmy Hoot Owl Says,” Lulu Stanley 2 IBC: “Vampire Lust,” S. Clay Wilson 1 BC: “Chapter I…,” B. Kliban 1 Compiled by Jon B. Cooke Special thanks to Ron Turner and Last Gasp!

Where To Find: Arcade #2, 4-7 are available at very reasonable prices from www.lastgasp.com. The Fantagraphics Web site and catalog sez they have the same issues at comparable prices, but my contacts there say very few are left, so inquire first at www.fantagraphics.com. Bill Griffith’s site, www.zippythepinhead.com, sez they have all the issues (at $25 per in mint condition, signed by Griffy hisself… “Must Have, Double-Baggers!”) but do check for availability. There’s a ton of Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith material in print, and the above sites offer much of it. R. Crumb’s Arcade work was reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 10 (though maybe some is in 11 — check first), but most other artists’ Arcade work has never been reprinted. Still, Arcade should not be too difficult to find via conventions and eBay, as all but #1 are technically in-print, I believe. Obviously, CBA gives its highest recommendations to the mag, so track ’em down, friends! — Ye Ed.

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Early 1967. It was only a few months before the “Summer of Love,” a time when the Baby Boomer generation was coming of age, the counter-culture in full bloom, and the times indeed were a’ changin’. While teenagers and college students chose to “Make Mine Marvel” in the comic book market — preferring the trippy mysticism of “Doctor Strange” and cosmic plights of the Fantastic Four and Thor’s Shakespearean melodrama— younger kids were still in the thrall of Batmania, and Nielsen families across the land were glued to the tube, tuning in twice a week to watch the campy exploits of those unbelievably corny crimefighters, the Dynamic Duo. Because of that hokey television show’s phenomenal success and the carry-over factor making DC’s Batman and Detective Comics the best-selling titles at the time, as well as the media attention given to Stan Lee’s House of Ideas, dozens of other publishers and wanna-be’s were rushing to get their super-heroes on press, to “gimme some of that” for themselves. Tower Comics launches their T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents giant-size imprint. Archie Comics scrambles to steal a little thunder by resurrecting a bunch of Golden Age characters, under the “Radio Comics” banner, starring The Mighty Crusaders. Derby, Connecticut’s Charlton Publications jumps on the spandex bandwagon with their “Action Heroes Line,” led by Blue Beetle and Captain Atom. Believing the fabled moniker was in public domain, schlock publisher Myron Fass cops the Captain Marvel name and premieres the unbelievably bad “Let’s Split!” super-hero. The flush manufacturer of Frisbees chucks caution to the wind by debuting the super-hero filled Wham-O Giant Comics. American Comic Group gets into the fray with Magicman and Nemesis. Harvey departs from its kiddie line to introduce a bunch of forgettable heroes, including Bee-Man and Tiger Boy. Even Gold Key and Dell Comics give it a shot with Nukla and The Owl, respectively. (By the end of ’67, with only two exceptions — Tower and Charlton, both not long for the costumed character world themselves — none of the above would be publishing super-heroes, as every title mentioned is cancelled.) In retrospect, what’s so stunning about this deluge of super-characters and just-assudden dearth, is just how RIGHT: Pin-up from SGB #1.

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atrocious the vast majority of this material is. Outside of the Wood-edited/art-directed Tower line and the Ditko titles at Charlton, most of the books published are utter crap. But the most incredible aspect? How such seasoned professionals — veterans with decades of experience — failed so miserably in attempting to duplicate the Marvel formula or recognize the TV show as a one-note parody of a single archetype. At the Radio Comics imprint, Jerry Siegel, the man half-responsible for INVENTING the genre (the other half-credit going to his former partner, artist Joe Shuster) with their creation Superman, ignored any study of the storytelling abilities of Lee, Kirby, Ditko & Co., focusing instead on giving the book’s creative teams Stan Lee-type nicknames. Carl Burgos, onetime Marvel artist/writer and creator of the Human Torch, ran Myron’s Fass’s creative production but was without a clue as to how make any super-hero remotely hip. Even the clever Richard E. Hughes, editor and main writer of the ACG line, was at a loss to give the Chic Stone- and Kurt Schaffenberger-drawn hero titles any kind of relevancy (nor did he share any of the whimsy he heaped onto the delightful Herbie). Of greatest surprise is that Marvel’s very first editor — Stan Lee’s one-time boss! — and co-creator of dozens of top-selling books and initiator of some formidable genres, the legendary Joe Simon completely missed the boat by not even minutely grasping just what made a character like Stan and Steve’s Spider-Man tick. Let’s imagine for a minute that it’s the mid-’60s and we’ve placed ourselves in the role of an ambitious comic book publisher. Let’s contemplate what one should do given the dual challenge of Marvel Comics and the Batman craze. Day One: Let’s assemble a proven commodity and reunite the most successful creative team in comic book history — at least, when it comes to adventurers sporting long-underwear — and we’ll instruct them to study the template of the most popular character in the genre’s TOP: Milson’s imprint logo.

Perhaps Fatman, however effervescent, was out of step with kids. Maybe Milson’s lack of distribution was crippling, as was the case with a number of publishers who were effectively kept off the newsstands because of DC Comics’ clout with its powerhouse distributing arm, Independent News. But if the publisher’s intention to “get with it” resulted in the creation of Tod Holton, Super Green Beret, something went terribly wrong. Simultaneously working on Fatman, writer Otto Binder, developed this bizarre Captain Marvel twist with longtime veteran comic book artist, Carl Pfeufer (who looks to have drawn every Super Green Beret story), substituting young teen Tod Holton for the WHIZ kid radio reporter (even swiping Billy’s obligatory red sweater), and replacing the World’s Mightiest Mortal with a khaki-clad elite U.S. “super-soldier” stationed in South Vietnam (though both sharing identical facial features, squinty winks and all). Instead of uttering any magic word, Tod salutes his enchanted green beret, and the kid is immediately transported halfway ’round the planet to do give bare-fisted comeuppance to the vile and shifty Viet Cong guerrillas. Even the most superficial survey of ’60s comics reveals that, by the latter part of the decade, the increasinglydistressing conflict in Southeast Asia would rarely be

even mentioned, never mind used as a story setting, clearly reflecting the public’s growing ambivalence over American participation in that nation’s civil war. Even by ’67, dissent over the Vietnamese issue was being openly discussed on Main Street as well as Capitol Hill, so one wonders if Binder and his fellow Milson writers Wendell Crowley and Rod Reed (notable Fawcett alumni) voiced any doubts about the use of such a touchy locale for the series. For variety, as these two issues are “giantsize” 64-pagers, Super Green Beret would also visit other countries and time periods threatened by despots (Bad Guys: dressed in military gear lacking any U.S. insignias, looking Asian or Fidel Castro-like; Good Guys: dressed in North American-style business suits, and CIA-friendly.) Finally, what makes this book reek so, is the offense done to its noble inspiration, Captain Marvel, a character nobody has seemed able to get right since the ’50s, and an archetype who should never — NEVER! — be set in any “real world,” as the storybook environs of the original is an essential component to the hero’s appeal; never mind any pathetic attempt to characterize to ’60s’ kids, an agonizingly complex hot-button issue in such broad, racist, grossly uninformed black/white terms of “good” and “bad.” Super Green Beret is a grotesque curiosity, begging to serve as critical fodder and centerpiece for an expansive over-view of the depiction of the Vietnam War in American comic books. That it comes from the imaginations of some of the finest comics creators is not only flabbergasting but also splatters an unnecessary stain on the fine name of the original Captain Marvel, who stands with Plastic Man, Uncle Scrooge, and very few other comic book characters deserving of any real affection and worthy of defending with honor.

lifespan — a property the team helmed for a dozen years — and consider applying what we find new to the ’60s world and update the archetype. Let’s think about taking the beloved hero’s most endearing qualities and graft them onto someone perhaps more “hip,” more “now.” To put it succinctly, the team’s orders are: Do what you do best. How could such a formula go wrong? In 1966, a small comics publisher, the fledgling Milson Publishing, owned by two former Fawcett Publications editors — Bernard Miller and William Leiberson — threw down the gauntlet and prepared to dominate the industry again. In the 1940s, Fawcett produced the single best-selling comic book title of all time, Captain Marvel Adventures (whose popularity was such that, for a period, it was published at an unprecedented rate — in the U.S., at least — of once every two weeks), adhering to a simple formula of giving young comic book readers exactly what they wanted and giving their parents comfort in knowing their kids were reading the joyful, innocuous, engaging, wholesome and wondrous exploits of a warm, honest, funny, loyal, smart and charismatic good guy, featuring the clever twist of being a boy — ambitious and trustworthy Billy Batson — who could turn into a super-powered adult… with one magic word. The very best of the Big Red Cheese’s stories were written by the imaginative and prolific scribe, Otto Binder, and visualized through the grace of legendary artist C.C. Beck’s enchanting ability. The good captain proved so captivating to boys and girls that he spawned a legion of titles and spin-off characters. Envious of their rival’s success, DC Comics sued the scarlet-garbed hero’s owners and, after many years of litigation, Superman defeated the Marvel Family for good in 1953. The Milson crew’s first release did, in many ways, recapture the charm of the now-fabled and long-lamented Captain Marvel with the debut of Fatman, The Human Flying Saucer, cover-dated April ’67, which presented simple, silly, fantasydrenched tales by the classic creative team of Binder (rhymes with “cinder”) and Beck. But, suffice to say, perhaps the stories were deemed by the increasingly-fickle comics readership as too simple and too silly, as the title lasted a mere three — albeit glorious — issues. (CBA hopes to cover this title in depth soon thus we’ll leave it at that, as space is running out and we ain’t even mentioned the “Great Offender” yet!) Curiously, Milson had perhaps an even bigger pretender to the Fawcett throne, as house ads declared that the “Cool, Boss, Tuff, and Fab” character, one Captain Shazam, “a turned-on super swinger,” was due to “make the scene” on newsstands. Alas, such a cat never appeared.

fin

ABOVE: Binder & Beck’s delightful Fatman, the Human Flying Saucer. TOP: Covers for the two issues of Super Green Beret. ABOVE RIGHT: SGB #2 cover detail.

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Interview Conducted by Michael Moorcock is one of the finest science-fiction and fantasy authors of our time, and a considerable influence on comic books since his most renowned creation, Elric of Melniboné, first wielded his accursed sword — Stormbringer — in the pages of Conan the Barbarian #14, March 1971. Innumerable adaptations of Michael’s novels and short stories have been penned by others in the four-color realm, but in 1997, the author Comic Book Artist: Where are you from originally? Michael Moorcock: I was born in South London, just after World War II broke out. I thought I had false memories of the Battle of Britain, but my mother said ‘No’, she remembered holding me up to the window to watch! My family was unusual in that it comprised lower middle class people and people who rose to high positions. One uncle raised dogs, his nearest brother became Churchill’s secretary. So I had a very wide experience of life as I grew up. While I went for a while to a Steiner school (Steiner Waldorf, it’s called here) which is based on Christian mysticism, my guardian was Jewish and had gone in and out of Nazi Germany and Austria “buying” Jews. He also helped two friends of mine (he was black, she was Jewish, trapped in France as the Germans advanced) get back to England. He never told me any of this, but they did! I had some good models, I feel. My father left my mother as soon as VE (Victory over Europe) Day was announced. He’d been a draughtsman in an office full of women and succumbed… I think it was probably the best thing that happened to me. My mother was inclined to think the

same. She never spoke ill of him, but she never seemed to regret his leaving. CBA: What was your childhood like? Michael: I had a tremendous freedom — South London got the worst of the V-weapons, but we kids never felt especially scared. Ruined London was wonderful for us. It was years before it was rebuilt. Now I recognize nothing! I had a great childhood, but after I was expelled from the Steiner school (mostly for running away), I lost interest in education. Read a great deal. Left school at 15. I was writing professionally by 16 and was editor of Tarzan Adventures by 17. CBA: Can you give me you family’s background? Michael: Father’s family had been Primitive Methodists who came down to the Oxford area in the late 18th century. Rachel Moorcock published a lot of epic poetry in the 1850s. They were, until my father, who got an engineering degree, seedsmen, gardeners for great houses and market gardeners. Only Rachel seemed to have literary inspiration. But I am proud of my greatgreat-grandfather’s gnarled hands and still have his pocket pruning knife. As a follower of Luther, Rachel was anti-Semitic. Unmarried, she wanted a nephew who would be a writer but believed all Jews would go to hell for not accepting Jesus. Mother’s family, according to legend, came from Disraeli, the Jewish British prime minister. I, her great-nephew, became a writer. She got her wish — but he was Jewish… True or not re: Disraeli, it gave me a model. I’m a proud mongrel Londoner. Mainly Anglo-Saxon and Jewish. CBA: Did you like comics as a child? Michael: I was rather disdainful of most comics until The Eagle

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Jon B. Cooke • Part One joined with famed artist Walter Simonson to produce the 12-issue series, Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse. For the award-winning scribe, it was a return to comics, the form where he got his first paying job as an editor and writer, with the British comic weekly Tarzan Adventures in the 1950s. Michael was interviewed via e-mail and we hope to feature the conclusion of our discussion in the next issue of Comic Book Artist. came along. I loved that. Frank Hampson, Frank Bellamy and Company were brilliant. Before that I only really liked Mickey Mouse Weekly, another wonderful gravure weekly which published some of the best of the Disney stable. The only American super-hero I liked was Captain Marvel, because he was somehow more human than the others. And the stories were probably a bit more science-fiction, at the time. E & O. Binder… Loved the drawing of Captain Marvel Jr. and Hogarth’s Tarzan stuff. By the time I was working for Fleetway and writing the stuff, I had no real interest in comics as such. I had taken out graphic work from Tarzan and added text pages. Kept reprinting Hogarth and Foster because I didn’t much like the other artists. I collected the old boys magazines of the ’20s and ’30s and was much more interested in them — thrillers and Charles Hamilton school stories. CBA: You worked in the British comics industry in your teens? Michael: My main job at Fleetway was on a text thriller series Sexton Blake Library, which issued four titles a month. I helped out on the comic magazines and wrote a lot for them (Lion, Tiger and their “Annuals”). Worked with most of the best artists with the exception of Bellamy. Don Lawrence, the

Embletons and so on. Not much room for ambition, but we did our best. Mostly, of course, black-&-white. Lawrence’s color work in the Annuals inspired me. Beautiful water-color work. U.K. artists did their own color. I worked with him on “Karl the Viking” and the lives of various real people, like Alexander and Constantine. CBA: Did you have aspirations to be an artist? Michael: I’ve always drawn pictures and still plan my most literary novels in graphic form. I was a lively artist but a very bad one. Still am. However, I also insisted on putting pictures back into literary novels and my Jerry Cornelius books all have illustrations, mostly by Mal Dean, who died young, was a good friend and a brilliant artist, influenced by Dudley Watkins and others. CBA: Did you enjoy the typical trappings of youth culture? Michael: I loved the Saturday matinees. Enjoyed everything but The Three Stooges, whom I still can’t stand. Went to the pictures a lot. In my 20s, I got into a run of visiting at least three movies a day. I loved the American pulps, especially Weird, Startling, Thrilling Wonder and Planet. Hated Astounding, F&SF and the other posher sf magazines (not enough pix!), though the first “real” s-f I read (it was science-fantasy I liked) was in Galaxy, which I came to admire later. CBA: Did you have a particular affection for the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs? Do any other favorite writers come to mind? Michael: Edgar Rice Burroughs

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was my first hero — I did a Burroughs fanzine for some years. That led to editing Tarzan Adventures. I liked Hammett and Chandler, but not much else in that area. I’m not very familiar with The Shadow, Doc Savage and so on, though I enjoyed those I read. Tend to prefer a kind of thriller I call London Gothick. Lots of fog and dark Thames, rotting wharves, sinister Orientals and so forth. The Americans maintained this genre long after London lost her fog (Clean Air Act of the 50s). I still have a weakness for it. I like Tod Browning horror movies, and others from that period. Love ’40s and ’50s noir, especially Kiss Me Deadly, one of my favorites, a superb exercise in visual narrative. But Little Women was one of my great favorite novels and I fell in love with June Allyson rather than Marilyn Monroe. I’ve always enjoyed chick-fic and chick movies. Still have a tendency to indulge myself for long periods in Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor and Rose Macaulay, for instance. I suppose you could say I loved most of popular and literary fiction, in different periods of enthusiasm! I don’t much like modern s-f or thrillers and tend to get easily bored by spaceships. It’s the Gothic and Baroque aspects of the genres I prefer. I’m mostly irritated by the likes of The Matrix, since I’ve known some of the writers who first came up with those ideas 50 years ago and they, of course, never got a million dollars a story! I felt very strongly that Star Wars had stolen from everyone, including the graphic artists who were then ironically forced to draw versions of their own originals for the Star Wars comics. That aspect of modern popular culture still upsets me, as does a public taste for flashy artists who can’t draw figures. I tend to have strong passions and loyalties. I still feel upset that [artist] Michael Whelan, for instance, doesn’t credit his Elric pictures, presumably because he thinks he’d have to pay me if he did. I’ve always been sympathetic to artists, who generally have a harder time than writers. Bob Gould, on the other hand, always credits and, though I don’t ask him to, pays me a royalty on his posters and so forth. I have a lot of respect for Gould, therefore, and very little for Whelan, good as he is. I tend only to work with artists I respect. These days I only work with Walter Simonson, because Walter is a great story-teller and can always improve on what I do! His work for Multiverse was tremendous, as was the O rion series. Both have been under-valued, I think, by the comics fraternity. I think I over-estimated the audience with Multiverse — having met so many smart comics readers, I thought they were all like that! I don’t buy any comics these days, because I can’t get to a store, but I intend to buy the current series of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the “Mars series,” I suppose

you’d call it) and have tremendous respect for Alan Moore. …Grant Morrison… ripped me off, whereas Moore and Gaiman, say, were only inspired and developed their work out of that inspiration. Of the fashionable comic writers, however, Moore is the only one I find really interesting, with a genuine set of ambitions and obsessions. CBA: Had you always been aware of your Jewish heritage and do you think it gave you any more insight than your WASP peers as a child and teen? Michael: I’ve always been aware that I had Jewish ancestors, but I grew up in a secular environment with a fundamentally Anglican culture, like most people in London. Like most Londoners, even those more consciously Jewish, in fact. You only have to read the work of most writers of Jewish origin to find that there is little consciousness of “alienation.” This was partly due to a strong, often unexamined, movement towards assimilation I suspect. But that would take a whole study of its own. Working class Jewish life, as described by the likes of Alexander Baron, say, might have been different. Middle class life, as described by Kersh, for instance, in Jews Without Jehovah, tended towards more or less effortless assimilation. Reading middle-class Jewish writers of the inter-war years, few addressed this situation. “Being Jewish” wasn’t a common subject until after the Holocaust and Israel and the rise of an aggressive Jewish identity, when Jews stopped trying to adapt so radically to the WASP-dominated culture. Betty Miller was one of the few middle class writers who tackled the subject and her novel, Farewell, Leicester Square, was actually rejected by Victor Gollancz, a Jewish publisher! London was probably more of a melting pot than most of America, from that point of view, and while we were aware of our Jewish ancestry, it didn’t mean any more to us than my Anglo-Saxon ancestry or Irish ancestry, or whatever. Yiddish slang was completely mixed up with Cockney as I grew up. We were pretty happy mongrels, I suppose! I write about this in King of the City, Mother London and, to some degree, in short stories such as those published in London Bone. I deal with the subject of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Colonel Pyat novels, the account of an anti-Semitic Jew. This deals with the common understanding of self-hatred which certainly existed before the Holocaust and the founding of Israel. But my childhood was culturally Anglican, in common with pretty much all the kids I grew up with. It’s given me something to think about re. the benefits of combining Church and State and having a constitutional monarchy. Before I came to live in the U.S.A., I was for separation and was a complete republican. Now I can see the virtues of social institutions I had previously regarded as redundant and unjust! Complex subject, as I say! I haven’t become more conservative, but I have started to re-examine a lot of my ideas. I felt a much stronger sense of liberty in the U.K. than I have ever done in the U.S., where authority is given far too much reverence, in my view. The difference between the false gentility of Congress (hiding the savagery beneath) and the antagonistic battling of the House of Commons offers some clue about what I mean. CBA: When did you become aware of “The Final Solution”? Michael: I was a kid. Little was said in front of me, obviously. Even when the full horror of the camps and so on was shown in magazines and newspapers, I wouldn’t have been aware of it. I WAS aware of papers and so on being kept from me, but not with any sense of conspiracy. I didn’t feel any separation. As an adult I did become obsessed with discovering the roots of the Holocaust and the Pyat books show that. Until I was older I had no specific racial identity. Few I knew

did. London mongrels… Don’t forget, we had institutionalized classism in the U.K., not institutionalized racism (which works the same way and is in many ways the same thing) as in the U.S. There were very snobbish Jews as well as very snobbish Gentiles. The levels of public racism weren’t so high, I suppose, though I’ve since been shocked by the anti-Semitism in Edgar Wallace, John Buchan and other thriller writers (whom I didn’t read as a kid — I read magazine fiction which was largely free of such crap, maybe because the editors were often Jewish). I was also shocked and disgusted by the unselfconscious anti-Semitism in, for instance, Hemingway, whom I despise. (I love Faulkner and the likes of Sinclair Lewis, however). Class was much more the discussed issue in the U.K. and therefore our political ideas revolved around such issues, though, of course, we had the issues of Empire to deal with, as well. You’ll find that kind of examination in many of the fantasies and specifically in stories like The Warlord of the Air. Nowadays, this is becoming an American problem, too, in my view. Later, I definitely had a sense, however, of “but for the grace of God” and had familiar “Holocaust guilt” as a survivor, but this wasn’t as I was growing up. It was as a youth, as I read more and heard more. I didn’t know about my guardian’s activities, for instance, because he never spoke of them. I only learned of them gradually from others. A funny story: My grandmother had the bizarre notion that if Hitler won the war all the Jews, like her, would be rounded up and killed, but if Britain won, all the Anglo-Saxons would be rounded up and killed. As the bombs fell, she used to sit in the air-raid shelter across from him smiling and saying, “Better hope Hitler wins the war, Arthur. Better hope Hitler wins the war…” CBA: Your writing has always expressed an empathy for the “outsider,” at least in my opinion. How is your humanism— your humanitié, so to speak— influenced by being Jewish? Michael: Nothing conscious. I think my alienation was the kind common to most imaginative, smart, reading kids anywhere! But I didn’t feel much alienation, maybe because, while I am a sociable person, I enjoy my own company. I’ve never needed much social approval. I had a happy childhood because I had enormous support from my mother, who instinctively opposed unearned authority, be it from teachers or police! My grandmother had an enormous sense of liberty and justice and it informed her whole family. I didn’t have much to do with my father’s family, whom I mostly dislike in retrospect… My mother inherited that same sense. I always had a sense of my own worth, a sense of outrage when I encountered any form of injustice, especially in the 1950s as we began to get black immigration (don’t forget we had no real black population in Britain until then, except in certain specific port city communities). I became involved with anti-racism very early in my life and was politically active against it. My mother’s family, for whatever reasons, was totally devoid of racial prejudice and I’ve always taken people on their own, individual terms. Therefore I’ve been shocked by examples of prejudice. CBA: You say your were rather disdainful of British comics before The Eagle; can you give us an idea what the field was like and why you didn’t enjoy it? As per The Eagle, besides Bellamy and the other artists, what did

Michael Moorcock

you enjoy about the weekly? “Dan Dare”? Michael: The comics were like Knockout and The Beano. Predominantly funny, I suppose. Even dramatic stories were often drawn in a more cartoony way. The Eagle brought much stronger story values, stronger graphic values. “Dan Dare,” in its first few years, was extraordinarily gripping. Beautiful splash pages, unusual angles and so on. That was why The Eagle had a circulation of over a million, even though sales of 100,000 used to be fairly usual when I first worked in comics (Tarzan never got about 50,000, however). These were sales often higher than mass-circulation newspapers. Adults began to buy The Eagle, when they would never buy, for instance, Rover or any of the others. CBA: Was there anything about the aspect that most British titles were weekly that made the experience as a reader unique from Americans? Michael: Well, I discovered from Multiverse, that modern U.S. readers aren’t used to serials, the way we were. Maybe if there were still Saturday matinees, that method of storytelling would be better known here, still. Of course the dramatic daily and Sunday strips were serials here, too, but most of those have disappeared. We would get maybe ten serial stories a week, with even “Dan Dare” only getting two (bedsheet size) pages and “Luck of the Legion,” for instance, only getting about a third of a page, while “Riders of the Range” got a page! Serial writing, done well, provides very good narrative values. Each “chapter” has a cliffhanger. I could have learned from this method when I came to write stuff like Hawkmoon. Even the U.S. pulps tended to be individual episodes featuring the same hero. Not so much unique, I suspect, as diverted — we probably had more in common when I was a boy. If not through magazines, certainly through newspapers and matinees. CBA: You say you liked Captain Marvel. Did you follow the exploits of Marvelman and Co.? Did you enjoy Alan Moore’s revision of the character in Warrior and do you have any opinion on the after-effects— jump-starting the trend to make super-heroes “real” and “gritty”? Michael: I didn’t like Marvelman anything like so much as Captain Marvel. I went on buying the Mick Anglo comics for a while and even knew some of the writers and artists by the time I joined Tarzan (distributed by L. Miller, who published Marvelman) but I lost interest, since he became more like Superman than the Big Red Cheese. I like the existential attitudes Alan Moore brings to super-hero comics, but I didn’t really follow his “Marvelman” any more than I followed Watchmen when it came out. I’m much more interested in Alan’s riffs on British and American mythology since the 19th century, though, of course, this is included in what he was doing then. I just prefer his later work. CBA: Can you specifically tell us how you got into Fleetway and give us an idea what the offices were like, your specific responsibilities, and the personalities you encountered? Michael: I got onto Tarzan because I originally did an ERB fanzine. The offices were small, shabby, mostly warehouse. Fleetway was a series of huge concrete modern buildings. I got into Fleetway because the editor of Sexton Blake liked what I wrote about him in another fanzine I produced. He changed the formula quite a bit. I liked the change, when most fans didn’t.

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So he was predisposed to employ me when I left Tarzan. I think they hired me on Tarzan because they thought I was in tune with the readership. Our circulation rose considerably, so I must have been the right choice! I was also cheap. At Fleetway you tended to work on various papers, if you weren’t an editor in chief, as it were. So while I mostly worked on Sexton Blake, editing manuscripts, dealing with cover artists, doing blurbs and so on, I also helped on Cowboy Picture Library, Thriller Picture Library and so on, but because of my text experience I tended to be employed on the Annuals, which had much more text, of course. I mostly wrote for the comics, rather than editing them, though I did edit, for instance, “Dogfight Dixon, RFC.” I did a lot of text features, mostly for the Annuals. I got on well with most of my fellow editors — we were all somewhat underemployed in those days — and only had problems with group editors who tried to impose authority on me. Again, that sense of unearned authority was always strong. I had respect for people’s experience, but never felt (the same was true at school) that I had to buy their ideas about how I behaved. So I tended, broadly, to make my own hours (coming in early to get most of my work done before anyone else turned up) and this annoyed some of the group editors. Ultimately, after I’d joined the union and become active in it, I had some problems. I left to travel and to freelance after too much conflict with editors whose attitudes changed after IPC bought Fleetway. The group editor believed I was a communist (I hated communism) presumably because I wore sandals to work (which he objected to). However, because he expected the Red Army to come marching up Fleet Street at any moment, he tended to want to keep on my good side. A happy comedy of errors from my point of view. My politics were closer to Kropotkinist pacifist anarchism and Chestertonian anarcho-syndicalism. But I think that was too complicated for him… Nowadays I am a simple populist egalitarian and have no political affinities, except where the politics are in sync with my ideas. CBA: Can you please tell us your initial encounter with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels, their impact on you, and how you got to do this fanzine? Michael: My father, when he left my mother, left about six books behind. One by G.B.Shaw (The Apple Cart), one by Wells (Island of Doctor Moreau),

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one by Edwin Lester Arnold (Constable of St Nicholas) and two by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I was an early reader, long before I went to infant’s school, and so read The Son of Tarzan and The Warlord of Mars when I was very young. Later, when I could visit the commercial circulating libraries which then still existed, I could borrow the other Burroughs titles for tuppence a week. That’s where I got much of my popular fiction, including Clarence E. Mulford (Hopalong Cassidy), Sax Rohmer, P.G.Wodehouse and various fantastic writers. I didn’t know about other fanzines when I started my earliest fanzines (my first amateur magazine was called Outlaws Own, which I did when I was 10, typing copies on multiple carbons…) and by publishing them I came in contact with the other fanzines. I did Book Collectors News (devoted to old boys’ magazines) and various other titles, as well as Burroughsania. Through that, I was eventually contacted by people doing s-f fanzines. I didn’t actually read much s-f then. I never have read most of the “classics” of the field. I liked Wells but I really disliked Heinlein, for instance. Different mindsets, I suspect. So I was soon at odds, within the fanzine culture, with many of the s-f readers, just as I’d come to be at odds with the old boys’ book collectors. I suppose I tended to take a radical approach to everything I became involved in — wanting to make it “better” rather than “comforting” — that is, I wanted stuff that was more socially engaged. That’s what I’ve enjoyed about modern comics, which so frequently maintain that engagement. That was what I’d enjoyed about the Sexton Blake revamp. I couldn’t leave anything alone. I have always demanded that popular culture go for the highest common denominator, rather than the lowest. I love popular culture, of course, and have never turned my back on it, though it might have done my career good to have done so, but I like it at its very best (say the first season of The Sopranos compared to the third). I prefer to respect the public, just as I expect to be respected! I was thrown out of the Old Boys Book Club, I remember, but was part of a wave (the “New Wave” label was originally given to fanzines demanding improved standards in sf) by the time I came to s-f. CBA: What is it about Tarzan that you found appealing? Did you enjoy all of ERB’s work? Michael: I preferred his science-fantasy stories, especially the Martian

stories, but I did enjoy the Tarzan books, certainly those written before 1940. That was why I did the Kane of Old Mars homage. Loved that stuff. I used to try to dress up as I imagined John Carter dressed (not the naked version!). I liked his Apache stories and so on, too. Burroughs was a great influence on me. Don’t forget he wrote The Eternal Lover… CBA: What did you think of Phillip José Farmer’s Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage “histories” and that approach of “making real” fictional characters, and rationalizing their backgrounds, etc.? (You did it yourself, in a way, with Behold the Man, though I’d be loathe to go “on record” calling J.C. a “fictional character”!) Michael: I thought Phil Farmer did a great job with those (I recently found a copy of the Ace Double, to my great delight) and I enjoyed that particular movement when it started, but it’s become a little “old” for me now, though I’m enjoying Alan Moore’s current riffs, as noted. I tend to have a purpose in invoking nostalgia. I look for what people sometimes revile as “an agenda.” Rather than making fictional characters real, I’m curious about what they mean in social terms. What they represent, if you like, as modern myths. There’s a piece by Brian Baker on the New Worlds site (off the Multiverse site <multiverse.org>) which talks about Warlord of the Air and what I was attempting there. It is the best piece about that method I’ve read, and very true to what I was trying to do. Inhabiting the worlds of imperial apologists like Kipling, Conrad, even Wells, to question their presumptions. I get quickly tired of simple nostalgia, however. I published Farmer’s “Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod,” which was ERB as written by William Burroughs. That’s the sort of thing I prefer. I must admit to having been a little disappointed by Farmer’s failure to develop the ideas much (as in Riverworld) but I could well have been missing something. Much of my own work is a kind of confrontation with the social assumptions reflected in popular fiction. Sounds stuffy — but

Michael Moorcock

that was true of Dancers at the End of Time and other stories which people seem to have enjoyed. I need a “purpose” in other words. I do very little just for the fun of it, but, of course, the fun of it is important, or I wouldn’t have many readers! Also I don’t demand the readers see those “points.” My first job is to entertain. But I can only get up steam for an idea by having some other purpose behind it. I think this could be true of a number of comics writers, which might be why I get on so well with the likes of Warren Ellis. (Sorry if this is a bit heavy and low on anecdote. I have a poor memory for anecdote unless something triggers a story — usually someone else’s story. Then it’s hard to stop me…) CBA: In a biographical sketch by Paul Cashman, he mentions that, while a student at Michael Hall School in Sussex, you would, to the chagrin of school administrators, regale fellow students with stories late into the night, reinventing yourself as a present day Mowgli to your audience, leading them through secret passages to raid the staff pantry. Was the response from your audience, the thrill in telling tales, important to your decision to become a professional storyteller? Why create a fantasy life to tell your peers? Michael: Well, comics were banned at Michael Hall! You couldn’t even have Rainbow or Tip Top. So I suppose I had to do something. I suppose I took pleasure and consolation in telling stories. I wasn’t happy to be away from home. The fantasy life aspect might have come from my mother, who was a great embellisher of her own life. Later I reacted against that and have been since rather careful about “getting it right,” even checking with others to make sure I’m not exaggerating or elaborating! It’s, of course, easier, too, when you’re getting paid to lie. You don’t have to do it for free, then. CBA: What was Outlaws Own? How many copies were produced and how long did your fledgling magazine last?

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Michael: Outlaws Own was my first magazine, done by typing as many carbons as would print. About 10 copies were made per issue. It probably lasted until I started doing Burroughsiana, the first issue of which was distributed at school. CBA: What was Jazz Fan? How did it originate and what happened? It was later renamed The Rambler? Michael: I was a jazz fan, then a folk fan. It started celebrating my enjoyment of mostly Dixieland jazz (at the time) and began to reflect my enthusiasm for the likes of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. I corresponded with Woody at this period, as well as knowing a lot of the people on the blues and folk scene. Many of those, of course, became stars of the ’60s. Blues lead to the Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, and so on; folk to Rod Stewart and many others. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon were in the U.K. in those days, along with the likes of Muddy Waters, playing to bigger audiences, for awhile, in the U.K. It meant I got to see and meet a lot of these people. CBA: What did you discuss with Woody Guthrie? Michael: Woody was sick. My letters were longer than his. We discussed McCarthyism and the like. The same with Pete Seeger. Both were effectively under house arrest. Woody’s notes were written on half-sheets of legal paper in a rather shaky hand, and he wrote just some encouraging stuff. (Pete would always draw a little picture of a banjo at the end of his letters.) CBA: Was music important to you as a youth and did the surgence of British rock ’n’ roll have any influence on you and your writing? Michael: I was part of that movement; they went together. I was in bands as much as I was writing. Gradually I started writing more because it paid better at the time and you didn’t have to travel about in vans and share a dressing room with 12 other people! CBA: Can you describe your experience with the s-f magazine New Worlds and your efforts and philosophy while an editor at the magazine? Michael: It was a reaction against modernism, which we felt was at the end of its run, so it looked forward with experimentation, such as my Jerry Cornelius stories and J.G. Ballard’s “concentrated novels,” and it looked back to Victorian story values. It didn’t necessarily “reject” the best modernism — whether James Joyce or Virginia Woolf — but it didn’t find that method particularly useful for dealing with the times we lived in. I still think that’s true. The immediacy of our methods is probably what helped inspire the comics revolution that followed. CBA: Was New Worlds important to the 1960s’ science-fiction and fantasy scene? Who was Ted Carnell and why was he important to British SF? Michael: Carnell was editor of New Worlds before I took over. He was a sort of midwife figure, not exactly part of that New Wave scene but helping its early practitioners. He was a very nice guy. New Worlds, in the view of most, completely changed the s-f scene. So, I guess, it was important, but our audience was as much the general reader as the s-f reader. Many s-f readers hated us. CBA: How did Elric come about and what were the character’s influences? Michael: I’ve told this story a lot:

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Carnell wanted a heroic fantasy series for Science Fantasy magazine. I provided him with as different a hero as was possible, rejecting both J.R.R. Tolkien’s comforts and Robert E. Howard’s crudeness. The character was more influenced by Leigh Brackett than anyone, but other influences came from British pulp sources, especially the stories of Zenith, the Albino, which had appeared pre-war in Sexton Blake Library and Union Jack magazine. CBA: How do you feel about the character today? Michael: I’m still writing about him. Elric c’est moi. CBA: While at Sexton Blake Library, it is said you began writing copiously, including innumerable comic book stories. Can you please describe your experience, its effect on your writing development, and which material you particularly liked and didn’t? Michael: Learning to write comics was important. Philip Pullman, I note, says the same thing about a comic: You’ve got three elements of storytelling — picture, dialogue, and continuity — and those elements can all tell different elements of a story. They can even contradict one another. I still plan my most literary fiction in terms of a comic strip. In the Cornelius stories, for instance, I learned to make the scene often contradict the dialogue, or at least question what is being said. This could be why readers like Alan Moore liked the stories so much. CBA: What were your experiences vagabonding throughout Europe and how did your experience lead to your maturing as a person? Michael: I experienced climbing mountains in Lappland, as well. Hitchhiking in Europe helped me learn self-reliance and that self-reliance helped me mature. CBA: During the difficult times, was writing the Elric stories a source of any comfort? Did you relate to the character’s haunting despondence? Michael: Not very much. I tend to read for comfort rather than write for comfort. Writing has always been a job — with demands. Because of those demands, I don’t really find much comfort in doing it. I find a great deal of other satisfaction though! CBA: Was New Worlds, under your hand, a product of its time or more your philosophies or both? Michael: Both. We came out of our times. It was a huge cultural explosion later reflected in what happened in Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury… politics, science, everything. CBA: Can you detail the development of Corum? Michael: “Development”? A wet holiday in Cornwall made me interested in Celtic subjects. That’s about it. CBA: Who is the Eternal Champion and what is his relationship to many of your other series’ characters? Michael: He’s most of my central characters. CBA: What is a multiverse and your thoughts behind its development? Michael: Blimey. A huge prism? Multi-faceted? Time as a field? Space as a quality of time? That’s a bit much to encapsulate, since I write whole novels and comic series to describe it! CBA: How did the use of Elric in Conan the Barbarian come about? Were you involved in that story? What did you think of the results and did you have an prior or subsequent relationship with Barry Windsor-Smith? Michael: I was asked to do it, so I did it. Actually, Jim Cawthorn did most of it. I haven’t had a relationship with Barry, other than he and I would like to work together again sometime, but that’s about it. The results were okay, though Barry took his reference from illustrator Jack Gaughan who’d given Elric that ridiculous pointy hat! Barry apologized. He’d done it thinking that was how I wanted the character shown. CBA: What did you think of the “Marvel Age of Comics” and the influx of young, ambitious talent into comics? Did you enjoy underground comix? Michael: I liked some of the comics, especially the further-out ones like The New Gods and stuff. I didn’t see that many undergrounds, except for The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, which I loved. CBA: Were you approached in the 1970s to either regularly contribute to comics? Did publishers request to develop your characters into ongoing comic book titles during those years? Michael: Yes, but I’d burned-out on doing the Fleetway comics years before. End of Part One

Neal Adams continued from page 55

level had a great deal of difficulty. I wouldn’t aspire to be Wally Wood. CBA: I think it’s important to consider the public work over the private life. Neal: The more you learn about work you like, the more you find out about the person, the more you find about their career, how they conducted it, how they lived their lives…and there aren’t too many people I can say I’m a fan of, on that level. I never loved Will Eisner’s artwork when I was a kid. I never thought that much of it. I learned to like Will Eisner as an adult, because then I looked back on his stuff and I realized everything about this was admirable, and in particular, the man is. That’s why he became Will Eisner, that’s why this guy who signs his name “Will Eisner” is a worthwhile person, and Joe Kubert is a worthwhile person because he progressively moved forward and became Joe Kubert, the guy who signs that name. And I’d like to see more of that. I think we have a business where it chews you up and spits you out an awful lot and we don’t watch our asses. We really have to do that. You have to grow up, get married, and have children to understand that responsibility, you have to have a mortgage on your home, you have to learn to pay it…. CBA: Take care of business. Neal: Take care of business. You have to be a citizen, because you are writing and drawing about citizens. How can you really do a good job unless you’re in the thick of it? I think there’s people who defeat their own work because they don’t learn to become citizens. I can name them. I not gonna! It’s really easy for me to tick off people who have taken what they were

given and blown their lives on it. They’re just not taking care of business. CBA: You named two people who really do take care of business in almost every single aspect of their lives, Will Eisner and Joe Kubert. In charge and in control, which is in a business where there

aren’t too many other people in charge of their lives. Alex Ross, too, I think, has that eye on the Prize. I admire his sense of professionalism and he has a strong sense of self-worth, as I feel that you do, too. My vision of you is that you do take care of business, putting a lot of people to work — including your family — you’re an asset not only to the field, but also to the community. Neal: I am an asset to the community and I know it; nobody has to tell me. And I’m hoping that… everything I hear about Alex makes me think he is, as well. I have not heard any downside. I’ve met Alex, and he’s reasonable,

sensitive, intelligent, and he does his work. There’s very few things that you need to say about a person other than that. I’m a very simple person! I’m not complicated, and I don’t get involved in the esoteric descriptions of how things should be. You take care of business, take care of yourself… health, family, work… health, family, work. You ignore your health, it’ll get to your family and work. You ignore your family, it’ll get to your work and health. If you ignore work, it’ll get to your family and health. Those are the three most important things, and you have to take care of all three, because if you don’t, then you slide down the razor blade of life. CBA: Your first professional jobs were at Archie. When did you start developing a realistic style? Neal: I did a realistic style before Archie. I took samples to DC Comics when I got out of high school. If I, as a professional now, saw those samples, I would give me work. CBA: An “Adam Strange” sample page? Neal: You’ve seen it. There was also a war page. I didn’t have a need to recognize the samples as me; I just had a need to recognize them as professional, working pages: professional lettering, professional inking, professional penciling. I was very careful about my samples. If I was worthy of getting work and didn’t get work, it meant there was something wrong with the world, not me. It takes a lot to recognize your work was that good, because you really have to pay attention. Most young artists “think” their work is good when it’s not. Clearly there was something wrong with the world, and what was wrong was nobody had been hired in comic books in seven years, and they weren’t going to start with me. So I had to do something else; I had to get work, had to make a living. So I went over to Archie comics, which was publishing Jaguar, The Fly, The Shield, and a few other hero titles. I did samples for them. I took the samples in, they liked them, and the Archie folks said, “We’re not in charge of the hero books” This was being handled by… [pauses]

101 CENTER: Who is that freckled-faced kid? Archie preliminary by Neal. Characters ©2003 Archie Publications. ABOVE: Bat Masterson. Penciled and sometimes laid-out by Neal in 1959. He was a baby at the time. ©2003 the respective copyright holder.

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CBA: Joe Simon? Neal: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (who wasn’t there). “We’ll show them your samples,” I was told. And I came in a week later with some more samples. And Joe Simon wasn’t there. They promised me he was going to be, and he wasn’t there. But they got him on the phone for me, because they were a little bit embarrassed that they had promised to have him talk to me. And he got on the phone and said, “Young man, I’m going to do you a big favor. You’re probably not going to recognize this as a favor now, but you will later on. I’m turning you down. You’re good enough to work for us. But you need to have a career, and it shouldn’t be in comics. So you go off and do something else. And I know this isn’t sounding good coming from me, but let me tell you, it’s the biggest favor anyone could ever do for you.” “Thank you, Mr. Simon. Goodbye.” And I must have looked as if my face had fallen off the skull and slid onto the floor. So they said, “Would you like to try out for doing some Archie pages?” I said, “Yes! I’d love to do anything!” The next time I talked to Joe Simon, many, many years later, after we had been through many, many things, Joe Simon stopped me in the halls of DC Comics and invited me to the lunch room. And he asked me my advice on retaining rights to his properties that he had let slip through his fingers, and could I give him any advice who to see and what to do, since I had done all this fighting for other creators, maybe I could help him out. So I gave him whatever advice I could. I told him who to see and under what conditions. Whether he followed my advice, I don’t know. He certainly has done a little bit of fighting. And at the end of the conversation, I said to him, “Mr. Simon, you probably don’t remember this conversation and you probably think of me as this crusader, but you talked to me when I was eighteen years old on the phone at Archie Comics.” And I told him about his advice to me.

We had a good laugh. CBA: After Archie, you soon were in the thick of it, right? Neal: I did a comic strip, and I did advertising comics. I made more of doing advertising comics than people made doing comics. I got $200 a page and people in comics were getting $30 a page. CBA: This was Johnstone and Cushing? Neal: Yeah. CBA: How did you get hooked up with them? Neal: Begging and pleading. I worked in an art studio with Howard Nostrand, Elmer Wexler, and Red Sudick. I worked on the Bat Masterson comic strip with Howard Nostrand and didn’t make any darn money at all. I made more money doing Archie pages. But I knew that Elmer Wexler worked for Johnstone and Cushing. Wexler was my kind of artist, on the smart side of my head, while on the dumb side was Howard Nostrand. Nostrand was a dumb artist, and Elmer actually was a smart artist. I don’t mean Howard was dumb in intelligence; I mean he handled his life very badly. He raced sports cars, stayed up all night working, smoke, drank, though he wasn’t a drunk. I guess he was in his 50s when he got a pacemaker put in his chest, and he essentially ran out his life like you use up a candle, unwisely. CBA: His battery ran out? Neal: No, he used his life up. He was interested in many things, and he was a great guy. He knew all about jazz, he kept on playing jazz for me all the time. He knew about art, he understood art. He was, in some ways, a better artist than Wex (who was a bit boring, y’know). But Howard did drink and he did smoke. He did all the things that are bad for him. He didn’t get enough exercise in time. Very unhappy. He was unhappy part of the time, but very happy the other parts of the time. Elmer Wexler, who thought all the world of Howard, came in at 8:30 in the morning and left at 4:30 at night no matter what and went home to his family. I don’t think he took work home with him. He came in and he sat down and he started to work. If you would come in and interrupt him, it would be as though you took money away from him. He did his work, he handed it in, he got paid. He had an organized life. I can’t say that I became Elmer Wexler. But I certainly learned from Elmer Wexler that there’s this side to your life that you have to organize, and you cannot do what Howard Nostrand did… You must be organized, healthy, sensitive, and careful. CBA: Is that the way that you look at yourself, as being careful? Most people view you as a maverick. Neal: I don’t really take chances. I make sure of my ground before I step forward. I stay strong. CBA: “Strong”? Neal: I can leg press 1,000 lbs. CBA: Physically strong?

TOP LEFT: Neal’s first job at Johnstone and Cushing (for Boy’s Life magazine). ©2003 Neal Adams. TOP RIGHT: The singular Bible page by Neal for Boy’s Life. ©2003 Neal Adams. ABOVE LEFT: Neal’s work appeared in a number of advertising comic books produced by Johnstone Cushing. ©2003 Neal Adams.

Neal: No, healthy. And healthy and strong is part of daily life. It’s part of being healthy. Part of not smoking and not drinking. I don’t smoke and don’t drink. Of course, I’m a maverick who doesn’t smoke and drink and goes to the gym. People have a perception of — CBA: But you have a side that gives a certain impression…. Neal: I am not special. I’m just a worker in the field, and I can be boring to people who are not interested in what I’m interested in, because I am interested in dinosaurs and the universe and other cultures, and I’m easily bored, but I don’t really have a lot of patience with the crap of life. I have my interests, and would rather talk to somebody with similar interests, or at least I can convince them to have the same interests. How many people want to talk about comic books? Not that many, proportionally. Imagine what it’s like for somebody married to an artist. You work 15 hours a day. What’s the sense of it? When do you get off? Anyway, I did a sample for Johnstone and Cushing, I really worked hard on it, and showed Wexler my sample, and I can almost quote him verbatim. He said, “This is not good enough for me to comment on.” He said, “If I started now, it would take me all day to tell you what’s wrong with it. I would be glad to comment on a sample that has sufficiently little wrong with it that I think it’s worthwhile to talk about.” I was crushed but I understood exactly what he meant. So I dug in and did another sample. I used reference on a big panel, took photographs where I could, found reference where I could, traced it where I could, and I made a better story, a better thing. If you look at the two samples, the first is bad and the other is very good for my age, than it was terrific. I took it in to Wex, showed it to him and he said, “Take it into Johnstone and Cushing. I asked, “Are you going to tell me anything about it?” and he turned to me and said, “Why? You did the work. I said you were talented.” That was it, so I took it to Johnstone and Cushing. I showed them the samples and they said, “Can you wait in the other room?” They called Wexler and said, “Is this kid really this good?” Wexler said, “Maybe you oughtta use him.” So the first thing they gave me was a page for Boy’s Life magazine. It was a page on making “Fish Prints,” and they described it: “Okay, what this is, is a page on how kids — scouts — make fish prints as decorations. It was an activity page and what you do is put ink on a fish and press it on paper. Then you take it off real quick and do it again. They said, “We need you to draw this page.” It’s a bitch to draw fish prints. So I went out and got some fish. I put ink on them and pressed them on the paper. CBA: So you actually just did what was described! Neal: Made sense to me. I did the fish prints and used them as the art. That was my first piece for Johnstone and Cushing, and it went on from there. Everything was done from reference. If they didn’t supply the reference for me, I supplied the reference for myself. If they didn’t have a countryside to look at, I would get a countryside. Everything is referenced. Then I took photographs of myself in various positions and I traced the

photographs. And of course I had to change them, because I didn’t look like everybody on the page. CBA: Where did your the style come from? I can trace elements of Stan Drake… Neal: I studied everyone. I studied anybody. I studied illustrators. I studied… anybody who was good, anything that was good, whether it was a comic book artist— And I didn’t think of comic book artists as being different than illustrators. Illustrators I studied at length. And then I got in the studio with these guys, they showed me a whole bunch of new illustrators, Albert Dorne, Bernie Fuchs, and Bob Peaks. Then they showed me the Western illustrators like Noel Sickles and all those guys. Everything I saw, I absorbed like a sponge, because I didn’t think I had a personality. All I was doing was absorbing, because there really isn’t enough room, in a way, in the soul of a person who has to learn, for a lot of other stuff. You’re really soaking it up and then living. And the living very often tramples on the soaking it up. So when you live enough, you deal with what other things you have to deal with. And when you come back, you’re so relieved to get back, to soak more stuff up, that you just soak more stuff up. It’s the process of learning. If you really want to learn, that’s what happens. It happens to everybody who studies this hard. I mean, I could not be… that good at that age without having gone through a tremendous amount of learning from a tremendous amount of artists. You can’t learn this from one guy. So, yes, there was Stan Drake, and yes, there was Wood, Kubert, Heath, Dorne, Peak and all those guys. They were all teaching me. People say you don’t teach; a person learns. So you can’t take somebody and teach them if they have no intention of learning, But a person can learn, and as a teacher, you can teach them if they’re open and want to learn. You can make it available. What they make of it, you never know, because you’re teaching everybody the same thing. How come Marvin learns all this shit and all these other guys learn nothing? It’s because he’s learning, not because you’re teaching. A person who’s teaching is a book of information, and the person who learns is the one who reads the book. That’s the relationship. The reason that I don’t teach is that I feel that my work is a lesson, and if people don’t get it, I can’t explain it.

TOP: Neal Adams began drawing Chip Martin at 19, though the strip was first drawn by Tom Scheuer. These are called institutional ads because they sell nothing but the company’s good name. ©2003 Neal Adams. ABOVE RIGHT: Atlas Redstone rocket drawn by Neal at Johnstone Cushing. ©2003 Neal Adams.

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CBA: There were some amazing artists who worked for Johnstone and Cushing. Did you encounter them? Were you there in the offices? Neal: Yeah, they gave me a desk. Kris Adams: [Kris is Neal’s daughter and manager of Continuity.] Just like Continuity. I put it together: Dad used to work at Johnstone and Cushing, and even though I had gone there as a kid, and I’d worked at Continuity forever, I never put the two together until we were talking about Johnson and Cushing and then in dawned on me that Continuity is Johnstone and Cushing, that’s where it came from. Everything you talk about that place is exactly what Continuity is, except Continuity is more. CBA: Was Al Stenzel running the show over there as production manager? Neal: Stenzel was out of Johnstone and Cushing when I got there. He was in his own place. He had broken away. He made his own business, and then Johnstone and Cushing went down the tubes, mostly because… Well, you know why. CBA: Were you exclusive to them? Obviously, you were not. Neal: Not! Kris: But that was the key for when Continuity first started. [To Neal] You were still in comic books? Neal: You remember the first job ad that we did for Continuity? It was a comic strip in six different styles. When you saw that, that represented comic books for everything. Kris: And that was the connecting dot for me, because I realized Johnstone and Cushing was comic books for advertising. CBA: Were you friends with Lou Fine? Neal: Lou Fine came into Johnstone and Cushing at a time when I had been there for a time, and they sat him down at a desk and had him draw. Lou Fine was a very quiet, sensitive guy, and he drew like God. I looked over his shoulder, watched him draw and couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing. It didn’t seem as though he needed to rough out pictures, he would just do them. He did some stuff on Colonial American history and Benjamin Franklin’s seated at a big oaken desk, historical stuff, and it just pored out of his hand. I was stunned. I had to work so hard at everything I did, I couldn’t imagine. It was magic. So I talked to him as much as he would allow me to talk to him, and he was a very quiet person. What I discovered about Lou was that his family couldn’t leave him alone, and somehow his life had become a twist. It was as though he couldn’t do enough to please them. And here he was, Lou Fine! His wife calls and harangues him, and out of his hand is coming magic. For a 19 year old guy, I couldn’t deal with it, I didn’t understand it. I understood a lot about life, but I didn’t understand that. Lou Fine was awesome to me, and it was a lesson on how not to live my life, because he became Lou Fine, and that’s how he spent his. CBA: Did he ask you to help out with his strip, Peter Scratch (which you ghosted for a time)?

Neal: I helped him at a particular time, when Lou wasn’t doing very well. CBA: Did you spend any time with the Westport crowd of cartoonists? Neal: The National Cartoonists Society? I went for two meetings, and there were a lot of older guys smoking cigars, a bunch of them wore tuxedos, and they sat back and they had ghosts doing their work for them. I was… I had a syndicated strip. And they talked to me about joining, certain of the members talked to me about joining. Gil Kane, who did comic books, they let him in. And he was a comic book guy. And at a certain point I looked at it and I thought, “I don’t think I can get that old that fast.” I’ll be damned if I’m going to join this old man’s club, it’s mostly guys wearing tuxedos who come to meetings and pat themselves on the back and give themselves awards. That’s not for me. I don’t do it now. I don’t mind going to places because people feel I have some kind of obligation to go and give an award or get an award or do something, but I really feel uncomfortable about it, and don’t really, really like it. I have a very rich life. I have a very good family, I have a very good business. I work hard and I don’t need the perks. I’m not that kinda guy. And I’ll tell you what: one of the reasons that, I guess, in the comic book business, I fought so hard was because it just seemed to me that there was such a wide gap between comic strips and comic books. And that somehow comic books are looked down upon, and comic strips were like the end-all, be-all nirvana, you’d do a comic strip and you’d go to heaven. And it seemed wrong to me. So I got back into comic books from comic strips. At first I was allowed by the other professionals to be convinced that maybe comic books weren’t that important. Then at a certain point, having absolutely no nobility or righteousness, I fell in love with comic books. And I realized this was what I wanted to do for as long as I found it interesting. And then I realized that if that’s what I wanted to do, then something had to change. Either I had to do something else and not comic books, or the comic book business was going to have to change to suit me. So I decided the comic book business was going to have to change to suit me and for my sake. It turned out to be a

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little easier than I thought. I didn’t have to do it every day. I just did it as I went along. CBA: How did you get the Ben Casey strip, how did that come about? Neal: Elliot Caplin, Jerry Capp’s brother-which means that Jerry Capp’s “Kaplan.” It’s that “let’s call ourselves Protestant names and not Jewish names.” Elliot Kaplan, who didn’t change his name… the two of them, Al and Elliot, had a younger brother named Jerry Capp, who took care of a lot of his brothers’ business. Elliot became a writer. Elliot was the smart one, so he wrote The Heart of Juliet Jones, Big Ben Bolt, and something else. He got the rights to do Dr. Kildare. So he got in touch with Ken Bald and brought him on to do a Dr. Kildare comic strip. Jerry, who had an office right next to his, looked upon his brother with jealousy. “How are you able to put that together so easily? Turns out there’s another doctor show on television, why don’t I go and try do the other guy’s show?” So he went to the people who produced that show and said, I guess, “Dr. Kildare’s got a comic strip; I can do a comic strip with Ben Casey.” So I guess they said okay. So now he just had to search around for an artist. “Who are you gonna call, where are you gonna find an artist?” “Johnstone and Cushing.” “Who do you have there?” “We got Tom Sheuer” — who is now known as Tom Sawyer, a really terrific artist and a guy who I was influenced by at that time. He was working to do a strip himself. He would have been the logical choice. But he wanted to do a comic

strip on his own, and he wanted to do it before he was 30. I was, I guess, second choice, so Jerry got in touch with me. We talked, we sat, I did a week of samples or two weeks of samples, he showed them to the syndicate and, within a heartbeat, they said, “Sure.” So they drew up a contract, and by the time I signed the contract, I had just turned 21. And I think it probably pissed off Tom. So at 21, I got a syndicated comic. That’s way too young. So I told the syndicate guy I was 25, because I knew they wouldn’t believe me if I told them I was 21. So when I quit the strip — because it was just becoming too much of a burden between arguments between the writers and the syndicate and it just became too much. I had to quit. So I quit, I was at the syndicate and they said, “Well, gee, you’re still young, you can go on and do anything. What are you, 28, 29?” I said, “I’m 25.” And they went, “You can’t be 25!” “Ah, I lied to you about that, sorry.” CBA: Ben Casey was very obviously an ongoing TV show back then? Neal: Oh yeah,

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yeah. The strip was a copy of the show. It was about a brain surgeon. CBA: I love seeing how you took the mundane — maybe two people talking — and used it with such dynamic drama. That’s the essence of visual storytelling, really, isn’t it? Taking the most you can get out of it. Neal: Well, it became actually quite a popular strip. They had it in 162, 165 papers for almost all the time that I did it and never lost a paper.

CBA: Wow! Did you get a piece of that action? Neal: I was paid a salary. Kris: But it was an excellent contract? Neal: No! I didn’t get too much, but I had better than the local factory worker. So I did pretty good. Kris: But you got a contract. Neal: I got a contract. Big deal. CBA: You did a little experimenting in Ben Casey, huh? Neal: The thing about doing a strip like this that’s very important is there are times when you’re entertained by a story, and there are times when the story just becomes too dull, as with these soap opera things. So you have to find things to entertain yourself, either by entertaining the audience or by entertaining yourself. I like to do both. In this particular case, I just made this big drawing of Ben Casey and to resolve it, I would somehow make this work, by drawing the strip in such a way that it would make that head. And that was my problem for that week. And I entertained myself. Very self-indulgent, but that’s what I do. Kris: Did they have a problem with it when you submitted it? Neal: They didn’t bat an eyelash. The people who worked at the syndicate found me to be a source of entertainment, and because I was brash and young and an asshole, I was something to deal with. And periodically, we would do things like that Sunday page. Maybe you’d spot it, maybe not. One terrible day. On a Sunday page, the newspaper syndicate changed my art. I had drawn a driver of an ambulance sitting next to a doctor. I made the doctor black, and made the driver of the car white. They were both in profile, so they cut out the head of the black guy and put it on the driver, and they cut out the head of the white guy and put it on the doctor. They switched heads. I called them up and said, “Why did you guys do this?” They said, “Well, Neal, we don’t think the audience is going to easily believe that the doctor would be a black person and the driver of the truck would be white.” Now, we’re talking about 1962, I guess. And you have to remember, in 1962 things were not the way they are today. In 1962, this was common. This was something you wouldn’t have done. In other words, I never would have presented the problem if I was like everybody else. It never would have existed. So it became a problem for them. So they switched the heads. And I was so stunned by the response, that I didn’t really give a good answer. But I did in a letter. I wrote them a letter and I think the way it started out, I don’t remember exactly, but it was something like, “Somebody in your offices has been masturbating on my work and accidentally switched the head of a black man with a white man.” And to give the short part, “If anybody ever does this again, I will never do the strip again and I will tell as many people as possible.” And I’m just giving you the very, very short version. The long version was much more colorful. It was like two and a half pages. I think they were stunned and somehow they read through my rage and tuned into my righteous wrath and lack of humor. And they called me. They said, “Neal, we don’t disagree with you, we think you are right.” Because they lived in Cleveland, Ohio, they were liberals. And they were newspaper guys. Newspaper enterprise associates were ex-newspaper writers. “We don’t disagree with you. Don’t get us wrong. We agree with you totally. You shouldn’t be asked to do this thing. But, Neal, we have to be practical. If we leave it like that, then we’ll lose newspapers;

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you’ll lose papers. ” And I said, “If we lose papers because of that, isn’t that a good reason to lose papers? Come right down to it, the best reason, pretty much, because you’re telling me that you believe what I’m saying is true. So if all of you guys there in the office agree with me, then wouldn’t you also agree that that’s the very best reason to lose papers?” It got quiet on the other end of the phone. “Because if we lose papers, let us just lose the papers. Because I have a feeling that somebody else out there might pick it up if it becomes a news story. Otherwise, I’m not going to do the strip anymore. I can’t do this.” “All right, all right, we’ll never do this again. Promise. You’re right.” And you could tell that they were embarrassed. It was one of these, like, how do you send embarrassment shooting through a place? By catching them with their pants down. And none of these people were bad people. I have to tell you, these people were intelligent, well-read, good writers. People in this place were columnists. We’re talking about a newspaper syndicate. This wasn’t just some hired guys. These guys were— What you get at the end of a good career is you get to work in the syndication office and maybe you get to write a column. Good guys! But totally embarrassed. So now I get the daily strip, and I’ve got two guys talking about the symphony conductor, who’s got some brain tumor problem. This guy’s got a brain tumor, maybe, and he gets operated on and he’s okay. There’s two guys from the orchestra just sitting in the balcony, in this open balcony, and one of them says, “Geez, he’s a whole lot better than he was!” And the other guy says, “Yeah, he’s a lot more human.” Now, that was the black guy. Right now, at this time, when you and I are talking, at this date, we would make nothing of that exchange of dialogue. Then? For the black guy to say, “He’s more human” was shocking. Because many white people didn’t necessarily think black people were human, a lot of white people. CBA: I was struck looking through Ben Casey by how increasingly relevant they came for the time. This anecdote you related right now, I think, is telling. The strip’s last major episode, story arc you did, was about Vietnam. It looks like 1966. We’re talking about a year after Tonkin Gulf, a year-and-a-half before the Tet Offensive. There wasn’t many protesting the war at that juncture. Neal: Well, I actually did a little bit more than that. I did a story that I never actually sold until after the war, called, “Greetings.” And I had written that story long before it got published. And part of the reason I did the story is that I had spoken to a number of people who went to Vietnam, and the stories that they told me about Vietnam chilled me… and remember, all this time there were people that were going,

people had to go. I realized that you couldn’t easily tell the truth. So I did the story, and the truth of the matter is that I never submitted the story to anybody because I was afraid. Because I was afraid that… [pauses] Kris: It was too heavy? Neal: It was too heavy, and I did this before the Tet Offensive. I did this before the stories all came out. And I still didn’t submit it. And it’s one of the shameful things in my life that I didn’t. But I could see my family being attacked for this story, at that time. After it all came out, then it got printed in a magazine, and then it was old news. But before that time-the timing was quite an issue, because… CBA: I’ve never seen it. Neal: I’ll tell you a story about that story. I gave a copy of that to Archie Goodwin, and I said, “You might want to read this. It’s one of the things I’ve written.” He took it home, and called me. I said, “Hi, Archie.” He said, “Do you know where I am?” I said, “No.” He said, “I’m on the subway platform.” He says, “It’s not my subway platform. I had to get off the subway because I read your story and there was a big lump in my throat so I couldn’t stay on the subway. I just thought I’d call you and tell you.” It’s not exactly the kind of story you can read easily.”

To me, that story is an example of why comic books can be important. Because a photographer will go to a place and take a photograph sometime, at the time it’s happening or sometime after it’s happening, but he saw a different story than he took pictures of. He can only show you the pictures he’d gotten, he can’t show you the story. If it’s a tragic one, he can’t really show it to you. He can make a movie about it. But it’s very hard to tape reality, and I’ve seen some reality. In the case of drawing a comic book, which is a fairly realistic art, if you can make your pictures real and you can tell that story step-bystep, then it’s like looking at photographs or a film or a documentary, as something that really happened. And if you do it right… in that story, I reached out of those pages and I caught people by the throat. And there’s no doubt in my mind that I did grab people by the throat. I know people have had that lump in their throat reading that story and I made that happen. Not because I am me,

107 ABOVE: Neal is always telling artists to use reference whenever possible. In “The Private Life of Clark Kent” story, “The Baby Who Walked Through Walls,” the artist used his adorable youngest daughter, Zeea, as a model (see photo). The story, written by Len Wein, appeared in Action Comics #425 (July ’73). ©2003 DC Comics.

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but because I told that story. And that’s real. And it was real. How does that happen? That somebody can draw a story and it becomes real? CBA: One of my favorite stories of yours which I think Kris modeled for was that House of Mystery about the Pan statue. You also did a Clark Kent story about that crawling baby who could go through walls. Neal: That little kid is my youngest daughter, Zeea. CBA: It was special. Neal: That’s the thing about comics. This project that I’m working on, people are asking me all the time, “Why are you doing it as a comic book?” And my answer almost always is, “It’s the best medium to tell any story,” and people will pay attention to a story if you tell the story well. How better to express that thing that happened to all of us when we were kids in school, and some teacher told us that light was a particle and a wave, and we scratched our heads and thought, “Does that mean we can collect bits of light in a laboratory beaker? Yet, we couldn’t or didn’t question it. “It’ll be on the test Friday” was the usual answer. My adventure began when they started to tell us all that all the continents had once been connected on one side of the earth into one big, gigantic island they named Pangea. Without want to, my mind tried to visualize this planet Earth with this big mass of land on one side and the other two-thirds of the planet covered with water five miles deep. Well, I couldn’t do it. In my mind, it looked just plain stupid. How could such a thing happen? It’s a visual thing, you know… and, after 33 years of on-and-off study, I figured it all out to my own shock and surprise. How to tell a story? Well, what could be better than a comic book? Maybe a video. Maybe both. (Heh.) I’m reading right now every issue of Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates. I love that book! I just say, “Oh, man!” The fight between Hank Pym and his

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wife? That could have been 10 pages longer! But it worked. It was just fantastic. Then in this recent issue, where Captain America beats the crap out of GiantMan… wow! The Hulk, beautiful. I believe that Bryan Hitch has turned into a masterful storyteller. This is the kind of books to do. My book is about science. Who does a book about science and does it as a comic book? If what I say is true, we can do comic books about anything. There’s no limit. It’s a medium that nobody has really fully exploited. We’re just at the beginning edges of what comic books can do. CBA: This was written by Eric Burden, formally of The Animals? Neal: It was intended to be an Eric Burden record album. A great project. He gave me the lyrics, and basically said, “I need you to illustrate the lyrics.” So I said, “Tell me what they mean, tell me what they’re all about.” And he did. And the record company that he was working with found enough money to pay me a reasonable amount, but not a big amount compared to the amount of work that I did. And I busted my ass on every page. From my point of view, every page is a significant piece of art. There’s a story on each page. I really knocked myself out of this. Then Eric Burden sent me the album on tape, and I played it. He recited the words. He didn’t sing. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, “The world must be different than I think it is.” I guess if this popular singer knows what he’s doing, then this will sell. It was a narrated album. Of course, it did nothing. It never was made. So all the artwork just sat there, and it never did anything. CBA: So was it rewritten? Neal: No, these are the words. I mean, I was in such shock that I couldn’t say anything to him. I just went on and continued my life. “I guess, obviously, I don’t know.” But I know what I would have said to him, had I gotten the chance. I would have said, “Eric, you can sing the Lord’s Prayer. It isn’t a song, but you can sing it. And if these words were any good,

you could have sung them. What the fuck was wrong with you? And get your mind back screwed on right.” But obviously Eric was living in another place. CBA: So this was going to be a comic book that appeared in there? In the record? Neal: Oh, yeah. It was going to be the coolest thing on Earth! CBA: You know, the paintings that you did for Marvel…you did a series for Savage Sword of Conan, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Savage Tales. Was that something new for you? Have you done a lot of color work? Neal: See, you have to pay attention to the interviews that appear in your magazine. [laughter] The story that you may not remember, which is what you should have read, is when I finished Ben Casey, I decided to become an illustrator. For six months, I worked on an illustration portfolio. I got left at an advertising agency, and when I went back to get it, it wasn’t there. So I had to go and do comic books or something to continue to make a living, because I’d just used up six months. I had done acrylics and watercolors and charcoal pencil and different styles and techniques. I learned a lot of techniques, and I did some commercial jobs where I used some of those techniques. So I really became an almost-illustrator. And then I made the portfolio and I became an illustrator and then I died. CBA: Comics? Neal: Comics. CBA: The Tarzan paperback cover paintings: Did you ink those before you applied the color? Neal: No, it was a brown line. I would tend to draw it… Because since I wasn’t intending to make paintings, but they wanted paintings, so I had to do something that was like a painting. So what I did was I’d pencil it and then I would take a brown line of either wash or Dr. Martin’s dyes and I would start to ink it like you would ink a drawing, sometimes with a brush, sometimes with a pen. And when I had enough there, I’d erase all the pencil off and then I’d start to paint over. In some ways it’s sort of like what Alex does. CBA: Would you call it a hybrid? Neal: Well, I think it’s just a lazy man’s painting. At Marvel Comics, they essentially wanted to do higher crafts magazines. And who among the bullpen was there who could paint? John Buscema did one Conan cover, and then that was it. And then they discovered that I could turn out these paintings. So in almost every case of the new magazines they published, I would do the first painted covers of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Savage Sword of Conan, Unknown Worlds of Science-Fiction, Monsters Unleashed, etc. I think it was all unconscious on their part, but somehow it seemed like I did all the covers to introduce all the new concepts for Marvel. They never quite tipped their hat and said thanks. CBA: Didn’t they make the prints out of them? Neal: They didn’t license the prints from me; they just decided since they had them, they could do it. So they made the prints. Look, Marvel and DC are very cold companies when you come right down to it, and it’s only lately have they become a little bit more flexible

and that’s because competition breeds reality and reality breeds competition. Or you get creators you have to approach on a much more sensitive basis, or else you don’t get them to work for you. Then they go off and do things like Alan Moore or the Image guys. At what point did the companies start going, “We better treat these people a little bit better or they’ll all become independents, especially the good ones, and they’ll take their best stuff somewhere else and we’re skeee-rooed.” They’ve got to start thinking a little bit. But I’ve said this for a long time. [laughs]

fin

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Alex Ross continued from page 62

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serious world or a more darker soul to things that could be explored. Not that I so much wanted to do that graphically myself, but I had it in the back of my mind that there may be more than just the prettified world of super-heroes. CBA: Were you compelled or repelled by R. Crumb’s stuff? Alex: I would say probably more repelled. As a kid, sure, you want to look at that, and whenever we would visit this one sister who lived in San Francisco, she had tons of these comix like Young Lust, so I’m seeing sex acts on paper when I’m like eight years old! CBA: Join the club! [laughter] Alex: You want to look at that raunchy stuff, but at the same time, it’s like finding your friend’s dad’s Playboy collection and spending all afternoon looking at every page and soaking up everything, yet you also feel your heart breaking… CBA: [Laughs] “This is very bad to be looking at…“ Alex: Instinctively, you have to look, have to see what it is, but there’s something in it, despite the titillation, it isn’t feeling right… CBA: When I first (separately) encountered Wrightson’s and Crumb’s work, I had this identical sensation that these guys were old and they had to be veterans because they just absolutely knew what they were doing and must have been around forever, as good as they were. Subsequently, I was certainly astonished to find out how young they were, because their styles were so… quintessential. The art was so accessible. Crumb had a Disney vibe to his style, but the content was totally corrupting, which made his work even more subversive. Did you have a similar kind of experience? Looking at the material and being hoodwinked? Or did you immediately know “this is stuff I’m not supposed to be looking at”? [laughter] Alex: Yeah, I did have a feeling I was looking at forbidden material. There was this sense of my soul being taken in a new direction. When I was 11, Pacific Comics started producing their Twisted Tales and all the different lines of reprints, which I know was mainly Warren stuff, but for me they were completely fresh and new, and they would be colored for the first time. I was collecting these things as if they were my EC Comics. No reprints of EC were accessible to me at that age. So now I’m seeing new stories by, like, John Bolton and contemporary artists of the time, including Wrightson, and I was seeing a step into a darker tone and I wanted to go in that direction just so I had that as part of my diet. I was so into super-heroes that I wanted super-heroes to be a part of a very real world, and when I see this other vulgar or vicious stuff, I want to think that the two worlds are compatible, and

not separated by this genre fence. So in the ’80s, as I was getting older, those barriers were breaking down. You were beginning to see the walls between these two worlds becoming torn down to the point that Swamp Thing was becoming this very serious book that could be held up against any other form of independent comic. Or, better than that, quality and original ideas were superceding all other concerns of genre. CBA: Why did you want superheroes to be real? Alex: Because when I was growing up as a kid, super-heroes inspired me so much that I needed them to be more than just fanciful, colorful playthings. Super-heroes weren’t supposed to be Disney in my mind as a kid; the genre is supposed to be bigger than that. It’s supposed to be something very real, because it is so extremely inspiring. CBA: Were your heroes pretty much super when you were a kid, or did you read outside of comics, go to films, etc., and get similar inspiration? Alex: No. Aside from inspirations relative to pop culture, I was not a big reader, so I was not absorbing the classics or reading a lot of pulp novels or anything like that. I generally just stuck with the comics. I’ve never properly gained a love for prose text, and I think that’s held me back in a great way, because I have yet to take my first footsteps to become a possibly more full, well-rounded comics creator where I could both write and draw. I know I have these ideas that burn within me, but I never developed the relevant skills to write any entire project myself. And, as people may know of my career, I’ve been involved in co-creating every project they’ve ever pretty much known me for, but the problem is that I’ve never taken the reins entirely, to say, “Okay, now it’s my word as well as my image, as well as my plot.” I’ve gotten to the point where some of the projects I’ve done were entirely plotted and laid out by me, in thumbnail form, panelfor-panel, and all it needs is the screenwriter of sorts to come in and dialogue. I realize I do need to take that step still, but I think I injured myself by never fully embracing the world of text, because I needed visual stimulation. You could say also that of many in my generation — and, of course, I’m an authority, now that 30 years have gone by [laughter] — we suffered ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder]. A certain amount of attention deficit occurred within me as my mind would wander so much when I was reading that I couldn’t focus on sentence after sentence, but generally I would find it so damn boring. I cannot stand to read descriptions of something which could be shown. When you are reading

the words spoken by a character, there is no other way to explain it, but I felt comic-book language had given me a very direct version of what you were having to read line after line after line about, how flowery writers will describe the sunset and the effect of the sun on your skin and all this bullshit I could not stand to read. Show me the sun setting; that’s it! I only gained an appreciation for prose as I got older, as I got to be a teenager, but it was never the kind of thing that took hold where I would be reading novels. I’ve only read really a handful of things in my life I wasn’t forced to read for school. I still have the same problem. I need that visual marker to bring me in, because as I’m sitting there reading, I’ll often times continue to daydream so much that I’ll be writing my own thing in my head as I’ve been meaning to hold attention to the prose. CBA: I think one of the basic things that attracted me to comics is that I’m a slow reader and I just get bored. If I do read at night (unless it’s nonfiction), I always fall asleep reading. I just can’t hold that attention. One of the great appeal of comics as a kid was that they were generally a quick read and could hold attention because of the visuals. Do you think you’re perhaps too critical on yourself about attempting to write? Alex: Yes, but I want to hold myself to a strong standard. I’m not expecting necessarily to become Alan Moore overnight, but you’ve got to have your goals. You’ve got to think that whatever you do is going to hold up to a certain level of greatness. Then again, my confidence gains with each passing year because of the amount of crap I read. I see the nature of who the hot writers are, and these are guys that are not worth their reputation, generally. The system is not pumping out these new brilliant writers… who would I compare them to? Nobody’s a Neil Simon in this field, exactly. The comics press and fandom gravitate around people who maybe develop a certain schticky style that becomes their mark… maybe they’re funnier to read or whatever, and suddenly they gain this tremendous following and now they’re the Great New Voice of comics. I’ve always thought plot and ideas had to weigh in more, and that’s the thing I always appreciated about what Alan Moore has done, in that there are so many layers to what he’s doing in any given story. There’s nothing I ever read of Alan’s work that was any less than the best job anyone could have done. So in a way, Alan has been one of my greatest inspirations in comics, outside of the artists. CBA: Is he your favorite writer within the field? Alex: Yes. I would say he’s the best writer the business has ever had. CBA: Where’d you go to college? Alex: The American Academy of Art in Chicago. Going there, strangely enough, was one of those things never in question, because my mom went there 40 years before me. She got the same type of degree I did, an associate’s in

illustration. They had an excellent program there at this small school in Chicago, where they had you drawing from a live model every day of the week. So basically, through going through the summers and finishing up credits that way, I had less than two years’ worth invested in that school, but it was one of the most pivotal experiences for me, because I was constantly learning what my boundaries were and how far I could go. I learned by the first week I was in a life drawing class I could approximate fairly quickly the realistic impression of a figure, and I had only spent my time drawing from imagination. So I was learning anatomy. Growing up on comics, you think all drawing is just what comes from your mind’s eye. You don’t ever think you should be looking at something real as a reference point. It doesn’t even occur to you, because that’s not what you see John Buscema or John Romita do, or at least you don’t think they’re doing it. But, in fact, more guys have looked and studied life than is ever generally known. So once I was finally in school drawing from life, I thought, “Eureka!” I was always hoping that I could master realism. It took another year to figure out I could actually render in paint to the same degree. CBA: Was this in the general curriculum, or were there specific instructors you recall who were very important to your development? Alex: Well, yes, absolutely. I’m still friends with those same instructors, people I’ve been friends with for the last 13 years or more. A couple of them even came to my wedding. CBA: Your mother attended this same school as an illustration major? Alex: Yes. CBA: Was she an illustrator? Alex: Yes, she did fashion illustration for a few years and eventually kept it up all through the first year of marriage. Once my father was out of school and able to get a job doing ministry, then she was able to finally quit and be the housewife and homemaker she wanted to be. The difference with my mom is, her training was a burden to her, because she, at this point of being in her late 20s in the late ’40s, early ’50s, her parents treated her like she was an old maid. She had to pay rent to stay in their home. It was that kind of thing, so she just needed to earn money to stay there, and she was not meeting guys who might lead to marriage until, of course, my dad came along. She got married when she was 27, 28, somewhere in there. So it was a different time, when they didn’t encourage women to follow the same kind of goals as men. She had known

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of successful women illustrators, but she also knew they’d been divorced and weren’t able to balance both home life and career, and she wanted to have her home be the perfect place for her. CBA: Did you see her work? Alex: Early on, I didn’t. She wasn’t drawing when I was a kid because she wasn’t working anymore. She was doing a little artwork here and there, but my earliest memories are not of seeing her draw, so I was not replicating what she was doing. I was the only kid who initially showed any kind of real artistic aptitude, although my oldest sister later in life developed more skills in painting and design, and she works as a designer today. CBA: So when you were older, you got to see your mother’s work? Alex: Oh, yes. By the time I was an older kid, probably eight, nine, whatever, I was more aware of everything she had done, and we had pieces by her hanging in my bedroom as I was growing up. But as much as it seemed like it was a cool thing to be able to say that, yeah, I’m going to be an artist just like my mom before me, she really wasn’t the thing that spurred me on. It was more Spider-Man than my mother. CBA: How do you assess her work? Alex: My mom’s work is really excellent, a perfect time bubble capturing the look of the ’50s, and very much of the school of illustrators of the time, where they used gouache paint, and there’s a sleekness to the work that’s very… it’s not that it’s Rockwell-esque, but it’s very in keeping with the influence she passed on to me, which was Andrew Loomis. Loomis’ sketchbooks of how to draw were a big influence on my life because they were always around the house, and I would generally open them up and look at the wonderful realistic drawings he did of naked ladies. So spending enough time looking at the drawings of the nudes, I started to absorb more and take a more realistic approach. But that was an influence in her quality of draftsmanship. There’s people like Haddon Sunbloom, an illustrator who did the Coca-Cola images of Santa you probably recognize. Those paintings, which are quite famous now, were the staple of that guy’s career. He came from my art school, as did Gil Elvgren. ABOVE: Pencils of Alex’s Giger-esque

CBA: Oh, yeah! Oooff… killer stuff! Alex: Elvgren and Sunbloom are the two masters who came out of Chicago who did that form of illustration, and she looked up to both of them. She wanted to be a pin-up artist herself, and again, she was doing fashion illustration, basically just drawing a lot of women-type stuff. CBA: Kevin Eastman had an amazing painting by Gil that was maybe eight feet tall. It was just astonishing. There’s something so effervescent about Elvgren’s faces, just the way he painted eyes and lips. Alex: Right. He did probably the most attractive women ever committed to paint. Going back in that time period, the ’40s and ’50s, Elvgren was the best of all the pin-up artists at capturing the perfect girl of your dreams, whereas Rockwell was the every-man illustrator, who would bring to life so many idealistic representations of our country. Rockwell was the guy who captured our state of being as a nation. He captured our soul, in a sense. Then Sunbloom, more on the periphery, was doing outstanding advertising illustration and the quality of his draftsmanship, his rendering was such… It’s a weird thing to go from “Elvgren did the best women, Rockwell did the best everything else, and then Sunbloom did the best… Santa?” [laughter] In a weird way, I would almost put James Bama with them. Bama comes in at the end of that period, at the end of the ’50s, early ’60s, doing the Doc Savage paperback covers, taking what these gentlemen were doing — especially Rockwell — to the level of dramatic rendering for heroic archetypes. I really would love to think I could get more Bama into the work I do, but I don’t spend enough time studying. And, of course, I’m not about to switch over to doing oil paintings to achieve a similarity of appearance. But yeah, Bama is a huge influence in that way. You know, all the things I say about Neal Adams and his influence on me, Adams is the kind of guy I want to always continue to influence me. It’s like I’ve only scratched the surface of what I want to absorb and I’m not even close to achieving what Adams has already accomplished for himself. CBA: Did you study the classical illustrators? Leyendecker, as well as Norman Rockwell? Alex: Yes. Rockwell held the most interest for me because his stuff was so sharply realistic, and the thing about Leyendecker is he was so heavily impressive, but I couldn’t even imagine how to render in the different styles he used… I mean, some of the stylistic things that he did with his paint… ! CBA: Those little “chit-chitchit” lines? Alex: Yes, that little stuff. What the hell was that? I’ve seen Howard Chaykin replicate it in his painting, but I’ve realized, “I have no idea how to even try!” I’ve seen Chaykin do it, I’ve seen Drew Struzan do it, but I’ve never really had an instinct to say, “Oh, I want to replicate that,” because nobody in my audience would actually get what I was doing. The one time I lifted inspiration

from Leyendecker was specifically for one of my more famous paintings, the illustration of the Joker and Harley Quinn. That was pretty much working from advertising Leyendecker did for Arrow Collar & Shirts. But aside from just the layout, the rendering is in no way similar to what that man would have done. CBA: Do you collect illustration books? Alex: I have a fair amount. Early on, I got into a lot of that just to make sure that I had a good collection of the greats to look upon. CBA: Did you collect the Doc Savage paperbacks for the Bama covers? Alex: More the prints Graphitti did. I had those hanging around my house for years, so those were a greater inspiration. But I honestly haven’t got many of the paperbacks, maybe a dozen, at most. I’ve always wanted to see somebody produce a book collecting those paintings, but I guess there are a lot of complications to surmount to make that happen. CBA: At the time, did you acknowledge to an instructor your interest in comics? Alex: I did, but at the same time I actually took a break. I had been reading steadily all my life up until the age of 17, and then, when I graduated high school, I thought, “You know what? I’m actually gonna stop reading comics for a while. I gotta stop spending money that way.” Plus I was living on an income I knew was from my parents footing the bill, and so felt a constant guilt at the idea that I would be paid for. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, so I thought, “Let me be conservative with the money I have and not spend it on frivolous things. Let me get all the books out of the library I can get, let me read up on other painters, let me try and study more things than comics.” But I really couldn’t remain apart from the field. I would say that I was not buying comic books for maybe a year. CBA: What was your plan getting out of high school? Did you want to become a comic book artist? Alex: Well, that idea seemed to be the eventual goal. Because it’s such a great thing in my mind, I didn’t presume anything would be easy. So I figured to try and become a commercial artist of whatever type to use my skills, and I figured maybe my best bet was to get into animation, because there are a

lot of artists drawing things that are functional to the background, or steps between poses, or studies, or whatever. A teacher at my school actually got hired by the Don Bluth studios in Ireland, and he was shipping off just before I graduated, and he gave me a helping hand by passing on my portfolio to them. They were interested and almost offered me a job before I graduated, but then they turned around and said, “We’ve filled up our layout department and don’t have any more room.” Well, as it turned out, they weren’t brushing me off, because at the end of that year, after I’d graduated and gotten a job at an ad agency, and after I had finally gotten my foot in the door with a comic company, starting my first job in comics, I then get The Call. Suddenly they have room, and they did want me in Ireland. My life could have been very different had they been ready for me at the time I was desperate to leave the country after college just to say, “Screw everybody! I’m so great, I’m getting the hell out of the country!” I couldn’t fulfill that dream, so I lumbered into the task of finding whatever work I could get. It turned out I was very fortunate because the ad agency in Chicago was one of the preeminent places where you could be a draftsman in a studio being paid to draw all day long. CBA: What was the agency’s name? Alex: Leo Burnett, one of the largest ad agencies in the country. They have some of the biggest accounts, like Miller Lite, McDonald’s… just huge accounts to work on. CBA: What were you hired as? Alex: An illustrator, just to do storyboards. CBA: Was it a big art department? Alex: There were ten people working there, pretty large, considering what most agencies have. CBA: What were the hours? Alex: Nine-to-five. It was just normal. Well, it was normal until, of course, they came in at 5:00 with a whole board for me to do and then I’ve got to stay working overtime the next two days, or “Hey, guess what? You don’t get your weekend off; you have to work.” Things like that happened all the time, but for the most part, I had tons of opportunity to work on other things.

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For that period of time, basically five months, I did this project for Now Comics that just about killed me, because I was going home every day at 5:00 and then working close to another seven hours on a 22-page, plus cover, monthly comic book… and it’s “painted.” CBA: Was this Terminator: The Burning Earth? Alex: Yes. I was trained as an oil painter, so the problem is I didn’t really have the skills to use water color paint yet and didn’t trust myself with it. I didn’t know I would ever learn to use it the way I do. I was using colored paper to do both marker and colored pencil on top of, to move it around in such a way that I could mimic the look of painted rendering. I’m so glad I eventually got away from that, because taking a pencil to have to render out every part of the wave of a color change is so hard on your hands. It just breaks your hands down to nothing. This is what I was doing for the better part of that year. So I thought for every day I came home, at the age of 19, if I lived through this experience, I can live through anything. I can do anything, if I just don’t fail at this. CBA: How many issues did you do? Alex: It was a five-issue limited series. Now Comics was a local, Chicago-based company which only used licenses like Speed Racer, Ghostbusters, Terminator, and other movie and TV properties to make comics of, and it was relatively successful for them. They were finishing up their deal with the Terminator people and they were just going to close it out with this one last mini-series. So they realistically could have had anybody draw it. In fact, one of the other guys doing storyboards had done a couple fill-in issues of a Ghostbusters comic for them, and they offered him the gig. But he said, “You know, I’ve got a friend at Burnett who would love to get into comics, and I know he can do this stuff. Let me bring him in and have you look at his material.” This was another interview on top of all the other work I was doing, but here I was given the opportunity, so I did a couple of sample pages. They gave me the job without much of a thought. This was 1989, so comics were beginning to blow up a bit. There was more excitement, more things going on. A lot more people were getting into the industry at that time, although I didn’t realize it just yet. So my opportunity was not so special to me, but it was becoming more a standard of the day. The fact I was going to come in and try some kind of realistic or painted rendering had no real basis on what they wanted. They just needed this damn thing illustrated, whoever did it. CBA: This is obviously a different production process, right? Making fourcolor seps as compared to the spot red/yellow of your traditional, old-time comic book. Alex: Well, they told me they could separate anything, because they were scanning all the artwork anyway. If I turn in a fully-illustrated, colored object,

they can scan it and have it printed. So it’s just as good to them as anything in pen and ink that was being done with color on top of that. So I took the opportunity to make my first comic book more or less a painted object. CBA: How did you view the results? Alex: Very mixed. If you were to see the series you’d see elements of “the man I would become.” But it’s a failed attempt for that time, because I knew how much better my work was coming out of art school, and I was using media that half-heartedly hit what I was more equipped to do. But obviously there was the pressure of time and pressure of just not knowing what the hell I’m doing. I had no time to reference photographed models, like I always hoped to do. So I was feeling like I was missing everything on my ultimate goal. But as it was, it forced me to have to draw from the hip more, and realize how much more illustration I can do of something rendering an object to appear realistic when I don’t really have a model to go by. The results were not entirely disappointing, but in a way I almost feel like the quality of Marvels could have been seen when I was 19, but I just didn’t have the right situation and didn’t take the correct approach yet. Like anything, every experience is meant to teach something new, and I had to learn by that experience what I needed to do for myself. I had to take a step back, not try and do a 22-page monthly comic, for one thing. Especially not having a day job, too. It’s just amazing I did it at all. CBA: Had there been prior painted comics you knew of? Alex: Oh, of course. Just the year before, Moonshadow by Jon Muth was finishing up. You also have to consider all the years’ worth of painted stories that appeared in Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated. There are plenty of examples of painted material that led up to the late ’80s where finally you had the painted Elektra mini-series and the Daredevil: Love and War graphic novel by Bill Sienkiewicz. There weren’t a ton of people doing realistic material. About the most realistic was probably Jon Muth. But, just at the point I would be entering into comics, I had been exposed to Dave McKean’s work on Black Orchid. I was also familiar with his Violent Cases work, so to me, that was the future. It wasn’t the future of all publishing, just the future for where I wanted to be. CBA: You really came into the field at a very good time when new formats were being developed… Alex: Right. Changing technology allowed for the kind of illustration, the level of graphic presentation I wanted to be replicated. CBA: Can you name some other writers besides Alan Moore whose work you admire and generally follow? Alex: Well, let’s see: I used to be a huge fan of Neil Gaiman for the first few years of the start-up of Sandman, and then fell away from that. As soon as it became popular, it started to really not have anything to say to me. [laughs] Should I even be going on the record as saying that?

CBA: [Laughs] You can always edit this out. Alex: Maybe I shouldn’t go off on anybody… CBA: Do you like the work of Brian Michael Bendis, for instance? Alex: I do like Bendis. I never really gave Ultimate Spider-Man a shot, but I do like his Daredevil and Alias. I am intrigued by his style of writing. Although I could not say that, as an illustrator, I’d want to draw that many panels of talking heads, but I enjoy reading his work. Brian’s scripts are just probably not the scripts for me. I need something that moves you along quickly through the graphics and takes you to the next biggest, best graphic scenario to show. I think what we’ve got now are writers influenced by the movie Pulp Fiction, the Quentin Tarantino style of writing that’s scattershot, with all these subconscious ideas thrown out there without any particular form to them and then hope the form begins to develop as the thing goes on. So you have these conversations that seem pointless, but then eventually prove not pointless. People like Kevin Smith and Bendis bring that into their style so much, and have made it work within comics, but to my mind that may not be the greatest point of writing; it’s just something that does work. CBA: Crime comics are big nowadays, with writers like Bendis, Brubaker, Azzarello and David Lapham, as well as others. Is that a genre of interest to you? Alex: I have absolute zero interest in crime fiction. I’ve tried to keep up with things like 100 Bullets for something like 40 issues, where you don’t learn anything after all the pages of intrigue and characters talking about killing one another and how tough everybody is and the “ghetto speak” Brian Azzarello writes so well… but I end up not caring. I mean, to some degree, the super-hero comics I read and love are no better realistically, but in some ways, I’m still keeping up with that soap opera, and that’s why I’m there with the characters, following them. I generally think the majority of super-hero material is pretty inane, and month-to-month, there’s very little reason to keep these things going other than the fact that they’ve been going for so long. Like, for one thing, Wonder Woman has to remain in publication not because she sells, but because that’s how DC keeps the copyright. CBA: For the merchandising? Alex: Well, with the Marston Estate. Because should they cease publication of it, DC would not hold the trademark and copyrights to the character anymore. That’s just an example of the larger picture, which is some comics are made not necessarily for an audience and the reasoning behind that. Why do we need a monthly Aquaman comic, for instance? Aquaman’s this great character who fits very well into the Super Friends show I enjoyed as a kid, and the early JLA. He’s part of this great pantheon of DC heroes, but he doesn’t really support his own narrative that well, because people consider him boring. Thus, because that

character is so famous and is such a marketing tool for the company, they need to keep him in continuous publication, not because people are ready and willing to follow him, but because, well, damn it, he’d better be popular, so let’s keep pushing this thing out there, let’s keep recycling another new Aquaman #1 series… Sometimes they continue to mess with these things to the point where they’re broken and should remain broken. CBA: You come across as an ambitious person, someone with an obvious enthusiasm for the material and a great deal of interest in super-heroes. If you could, with one magic word, suddenly own DC or Marvel, what would you do? Alex: Let’s say I am given that job, I have this belief that absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, yes, I may have designs upon what I would do to the entire nature of publishing, but right away, I think, “Well, shit, we don’t need all these comics that nobody’s reading. We’re not going to kill the characters; we’re just going to not publish them in their own books.” So, okay, here are 50 titles cut. Well, suddenly, that’s over a hundred jobs I just cut for over a hundred different individuals. That’s a hundred different lives I’ve suddenly hurt because of my creative impulse. The decisions that seem guided by concerns beneficial to either creative persons or to other business purposes elsewhere eventually become so you’re going through the business with a wrecking ball. I’ve watched that happen as the first artist turned comic book editor-in-chief, the first in many, many years, recently took over at Marvel, who I’ve watched with enthusiasm at how it took shape, and then I’ve also watched with despair at how it’s turned out. I’ve thought, “God, maybe I should just keep drawing and writing my little projects I want to create, but don’t put me in the position of wrecking an entire universe.” Take the example of, say, CrossGen, where this guy’s got millions of dollars, and he can create his own empire. Well, is empirebuilding the thing to do? I believe in the business and I want it to continue to grow and become greater, but at the same time, I just want to worry about making quality work within the business. The minute I start thinking about how to save the business, how to functionally make a strong line of books… well, a line of books is never something that you can perfectly maintain. You can try and hire all the greatest talent, but more than half of that talent is going to leave you high and dry because they’re all a bunch of flakes. I understand the kind of resistance I go up against with a lot of people who deal with me, because they assume I’m going to screw them like the millions of times they’ve been screwed before by other talent. Of course, we — as the talent

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ABOVE: Ross writing partner/friend Steve Darnall is the model for Alex’s Elongated Man, and Steve’s wife, Meg, stands in as Ralph Digby’s spouse, Sue. Art 2003 Alex Ross.

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come in — feel like we’re going to get screwed immediately, and it’s a back-and-forth negative game, because nobody’s playing honestly. CBA: How do you look at the function of editor in the business? What makes a good editor? Alex: A good editor is someone who’s probably actually reading the material, [laughs] something I can tell you is not happening most of the time. Most editors today are traffickers. They make sure the work is coming in on time, make sure people get their invoices put in, but they’re not really putting in that influence like, say, the Stan Lee of 40 years ago, where he’s not just guiding other people to do great work, but he’s co-writing, co-creating things, giving what we now know historically was phenomenal direction that will always be regarded as some of the greatest thinking in comics. The problem is that what he was generally doing, in good part, was editing. Of course, that’s when “editing” went far beyond its means and he somehow became the “sole creator” of Spider-Man or “sole creator” of The Hulk. CBA: Stan could get away with saying that because he was basically in charge? Alex: Well, certainly Stan was giving good direction to get the best out of talented people, and that’s exactly what happened in his time. He rose to the occasion, of course, of being the best that he could be to work with them. But essentially an artist needs somebody who is really seeing the context of where your work is sitting, certainly for the sake of the company, but also for whatever good qualities they can get out of you as a craftsman. CBA: Who’s your favorite editor you’ve worked with? Alex: [Pauses] Well… Realistically, it’s the guy that I’ve been working with for so long. I have a 10-year relationship now with an editor at DC, the first I ever worked with there, a guy named Charlie Kochman, and I’ve consistently worked with him on the large books with Paul Dini for the last five years. One of the things I get from him is, quite simply, honesty, which is a huge deal. When you’ve dealt with somebody who’s not being honest with you, you never want to deal with an editor who’s dishonest again. And most editors are dishonest. Most editors are being so kicked around by their company heads as to how to rein the talent in or keep things from the

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artists. The fact I can have anybody I work with be pretty much up front with me about a lot of things will affect me… plus having a personal friendship has benefits as well, but not everybody can maintain that. I’ve had plenty of good editor relationships, and I’ve had some nightmarish ones. CBA: So what makes a bad editor? Someone who doesn’t read your stuff? [laughs] Alex: A duplicitous son-of-a-bitch. I can describe him: he’s balding, goatee, dark hair… [laughter] But I don’t need to get too specific here. You know, I’ve been on the end where literally there was favoritism of one talent versus the other, pulling for the writer versus the artist situation. Or keeping me out of the loop. In the case of Marvels, I brought Kurt Busiek into the project and basically got him the gig. Not that I created Marvels all on my own; Kurt and I cocreated that together, but I had a pitch that was basically the substance of what would become Marvels and that happened before Kurt was involved. Then Kurt was brought in by me and we massaged a story out of it that was, in greater part, his contribution at that point. So afterward, Kurt was considered really the touch point for the entire series. When Marvel considered making a sequel (as they’re doing again today, now a difference of almost ten years since the last time they thought of making a sequel to Marvels), they never even consulted me, never considered me part of that fundamental process. I created the damn thing in the first place! Or at least I initiated it. In the case of Kingdom Come, I did much more than initiate; I plotted the thing out, to a great degree, before a writer was handed to me. It still happens to this day where I’m treated as just an artist. “Well, if we can get Alex for covers, or if he could draw the stupid thing and keep his mouth shut… ” And it doesn’t make any sense given how many things I’ve clearly directed into being. In a way, I’ve been the director of all the projects I’ve worked on. You set up your cameras, lighting, make the story come into being by coordinating all these elements, but the screenwriter has typically, in the comics process, always been treated better than the artist, in a weird way. CBA: Now, in the overall scheme of things, there are really only a handful of artists who I consider to have their eye on the prize, so to speak, and seem really in control of their own destiny. I would say there’s Will Eisner, Joe Kubert, Neal Adams, and, well, you. You seem to have a clear sense of your value in this industry, really the opposite of the vast majority of artists who feel lucky enough just to have a job. There’s a certain kind of personality in comics where the artists really don’t take control of their lives. I mean, a comic book career really isn’t reflective of the real world, yet it exists within this industry in a very odd way of the writer being treated better than the artist and yet it’s a visual medium. Alex: Right. Often times, look at the layout of any company. Who are all the editors? Many times they’re former writers or wanna-be writers who never got a leg up. The heads of these companies generally are guys who had been writers, wanted to be writers, but never artists, generally. So there’s almost a skewed thing going on there. DC’s always been much more of a writer-friendly company, much more focused on the benefits of the ideas behind the characters rather than just the surface, and there’s some difficulty of working with that. CBA: Talk about a flip! The general consensus in the ’70s, for instance, was DC was an art-driven company, at least under Infantino, and it was Marvel who was getting ahead not necessarily with good art, but good writing. The writers over at Marvel were, for a period of time, the stars. Steve Englehart, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Don McGregor… Alex: It bounces back and forth. The exact make-up of

these companies changes, and you get everybody who used to be over at Marvel over at DC for a period of time. So it switches with that kind of movement, as well. Ultimately, a balance can be made, and you try and find whatever way you can work with the company, as I have, to feel like they’re giving you enough respect to do what it is you do best. I have difficulty getting that from everybody I work with, because even to this day with Marvels, I know they’re starting up another series, and I was never actually consulted on it once. It’s the kind of thing that, sheesh, despite how famous that work is, despite the impact of the graphics in it, you couldn’t even go out of your way to try and contact the person who is most notable for what it looked like… ? CBA: Would you characterize the point of Marvels was to have a history of Marvel’s super-heroes done in a hyper-realistic style? Alex: I wouldn’t say that it was entirely based on selling visuals. I’d like to think that both of us were at the top of our game in terms of the way we worked together on that. We gave the world about as good of an Alan Moore interpretation of the Marvel Universe as you’re likely to get, with a sense of realism and detached analysis of the comic book universe being made through the eyes of an average guy. It was Kurt who said we needed a human protagonist as a kind of access point for the reader through which we still see this fantastic world from a bit of a removed glance. And that still proved to be successful there, as well. Now I feel, of course, in the last several years, I don’t need that as much, because the entire business has allowed the kind of things I and other painters have done to be seen as just as viable as any other comic book. They’re not going to be as regularly produced as a traditionally rendered comic, but it’s not a visual language that makes you go, “Holy crap! That’s a painted version of Spider-Man? What the—?” But you know, sometimes paintings can cause you to stop and look at them for too long. You need to absorb this visual information with some speed and move on to the next thing. CBA: Now how is that pacing

accomplished? Do you do shorthand with painting? How do you not make the reader stop inappropriately? Alex: It’s a hard thing to say exactly what I’m doing, because so much is a subconscious action. My background is more from comics than illustration. I mean, even though I’ve had my experience within illustration, I worked on storyboards, which are essentially just another form of comics. Anybody doing storyboards can, to some degree, do comics storytelling. Having the influence of comic masters like Neal Adams, and by studying the layouts he used for storytelling, helped me apply that to my work; it made the paintings, I guess, sink in a lot quicker. I was also looking at the master painters in comics at the time, like Dave McKean, for example, who was a huge inspiration for me. The funny thing is that Dave McKean’s first big work for DC came out just a year previous to my first published painted work in comics, when I was 19. So I was right on his heels, but he was light years ahead of me in the game, and I had to learn that much more and master that much more and make what I knew I was capable of as an illustrator come through in panel-to-panel page composition. Obviously, I’ve been using models and photographs for so long that it could stiffen up things to such a great degree — and some people feel that it does — that your eye can’t help but stop and study the fact that, “Wow! That looks like a real person.” I can’t get away from the fact it just feels like somebody who’s been photographed. I’ve received that criticism, and still do to this day. I can’t prevent that from still occurring, but for the majority of people, I’ve at least been able to convert to thinking I was doing the right thing. I guess I’ve kind of been doing a graphic shorthand that’s not necessarily doing less painting than I would do normally, but the way in which the medium I use is… Its appearance, for one thing. It’s a water-based medium and generally translucent that has a quality to it that’s not entirely dissimilar from the way penciling and inking look. There’s something of a rushed, rough quality to it that

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works. If I was doing oil painting on every page of a comic, you’d almost have to stop and look at the artwork for its sake, bringing the storytelling to a screeching halt. For one thing, if I used oils, I’d still be working on Marvels, because it takes that long. To create images that lush and that soft, you would never feel the same immediacy of energy as you can with waterbased paint. I think there’s a roughness to the detail that comes from the weight of the pooling of water on a piece of paper, the way it settles, and no matter how smoothed out I can make my work look, it still has this kind of hurried quality in the detail. CBA: Hurried quality or not, it works. Alex: You can see there’s a movement of the brush pushing through this form, and hopefully you’re not sitting there studying every single stroke, thinking, “Wow! He went from here to there, and look at how this brush just makes a little swirl motion and created this indentation in the muscles…” You don’t have to be thinking about what exactly the artist did, more absorbing it as kind of a living object, something touched by a human hand, the brush strokes show the influence of interpretation, as opposed to if I was just doing Photoshop, which a lot of people can do these days. I have yet to see a perfect Photoshop comic. I think it could be done, but it might be a very different reading experience than something still done by hand. The communication of what’s done by hand relates a certain amount of personality in each and every detail that can’t be equaled by a filtered photograph. And I’m lucky for the fact I haven’t gotten into the habit, as so many illustrators were trained to do, which is to trace photographs. Everything you see me draw is by my own hand. Nothing in my entire career has been traced, not one single image. CBA: No Art-O-Graph machine like Neal would use? Alex: Well, Neal was doing these extremely tight, small layouts, as you know, and then blowing those up on the Art-O-Graph (I assume), then draw them up on the page, then go in and tighten up his own drawings. He’s using photographs as reference. If you’re an artist like Neal or myself, you’re training your eye to remember a lot of these physical details that come by looking at an object. The kind of stark, realistic qualities that come through a photographed object

now will filter in through your work. But Neal was also probably raised, as I was, on a certain amount of cartooning that made an influence through comic books and cartoons like, say, of the type drawn by Al Capp. This influence of exaggeration distorts your impression of how to move the figure. Maybe the way I draw legs is based upon Daisy Mae from Li’l Abner, or the way it’s my instinct to draw the upper body is all coming from somebody like Adams or John Buscema. Buscema is an artist just purely drawing from the head. He’s not sticking around to study more of the life form, though he has training in that, too. But comics don’t really work without a certain amount of cartooning within the draftsman. Even the quality of Norman Rockwell’s work, which could be considered very stiff overall because he created such stoic-type images, but he had a very great sense of cartooning in his draftsmanship. There are pieces where he would paint a number of head shots of young kids going through their daily routines, from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night that, and despite how realistic the draftsmanship, the exaggeration of the faces was his pure cartooning ability coming through. You can see the exaggeration of drawing that obviously didn’t match whatever photo reference he was using. So Rockwell’s a guy who understood you need to make a Jack Davis exaggeration of things. And even though I’m not looking to make figures in my work seem exaggerated, it’s in there. It’s an instilled notion, at the outset, so as much as I’m looking at the details of a photograph, I’m still putting it on the skeleton of a drawing that’s very much from inside my head. If you were to see the layouts, the kind of thumb-nailing I do now, it’s really no different than what Adams has been doing his entire career, where you lay out things so tightly in the smaller form, and then follow that up. Now, I don’t generally blow mine up to trace them off again; I just eyeball it up to a larger shape. But pretty much, as I’m eye-balling, I’m just redrawing it to the exact same degree and definition, get my reference, put it in there, and then follow the outline of what I already laid out. Then I make choices along the way, with the influence of the life reference to say, “Okay, well, seeing what this thing looks like in reality, I don’t like that shape. So I’m going to compromise it to still be more what my internal instincts told me it should be.” CBA: Let’s say you’re working on a panel of Captain Marvel, and you have photo-reference. Do you spend a long time studying the picture, or do you basically glance at it? What’s the process? Alex: Well, for the final piece, the photograph is sitting there and my eyes are darting back and forth from that image to the art. It’s actually a relatively quick process. I would imagine if I used an Art-O-Graph to sit there and contour around every part of the figure, it would be more laborious. My eye is immediately interpreting those details into whatever form of simplified graphic that makes me happy. It’s moving the process along very quickly. My hand moves more furiously fast. In some ways, I actually go through that process really quickly just to get the general contours and details down for my first impressions of the photo reference. And, of course, I’ve got a skeletal framework already there on the page I’ve roughed in. Many times, I may go back around and do another penciling pass where I tighten it up just so that what my final thing will be… I like to work within a very rigid, paint-by-numbers kind of outlining, so that when the painting process starts, I’m just following the exact contours of what I put in. CBA: Do you actually mark out your color choices on paper, your paint-bynumber, as you said? Alex: The coloring? Usually it’s something I just perform immediately, right there on the spot, and for the most part I don’t overplan by doing a lot of marker comps or things like that. I have done that and, in fact, I’ve done that for the Comic Book Artist cover over Neal’s pencils on which I’m working now, as we speak. I did that just to figure out, “Oh, shit! What am I going to turn this thing into?” But for the most part, for every single painting I do, I learn on the page. There is simply no time to basically screw around and test and test and test. If I feel something is so important, “Here’s this epic illustration that — dammit! — better be the best thing I could ever do!” I will take time to do a comp. But for the most part, I can trust myself after so many illustrations that whatever’s going to happen is going to turn out the best it can be on that final piece, so I just go ahead and trust myself. CBA: How long does it take you to do a cover painting?

Alex: A cover painting might take a couple days. I can pencil the whole thing in a day certainly, but with the amount of painting, it could be done in a day to a day-and-a-half, depending upon the complexity, how many figures it contains. The painting I’m doing for you, it’s a single figure, and considering it’s already been drawn by Neal, it’s only going to take a day to paint it. CBA: Is that different than a comic book page? Alex: Oh, by far, because one comic book page could have 12 panels in it and 500 figures, or it could have just one character. So it’s dramatically affected by whatever great or minor amount of stuff you have. It’s hard to give a full reading of how long that process will take. To look at it in broad view, as I’m doing now, I’m doing about 10 pages of illustrated story pages with multiple panels per month in addition to possibly up to four covers. Some of those covers may be as easy as a single figure, so I’m able to go through them in about a day-and-a-half. CBA: Steve Darnall wrote an article for CBA [V1, #21] about a “typical” day in your life. You were described as juggling any number of projects. Was that an accurate description of any given day? Alex: That was an exceptional day. Of course, the humor behind that article was while I was working on so many different projects for his visit on that particular day, the article overall really does hit the mark about what so much of my life has become. I have regrets about my schedule these days. Of course, I’m getting much better paid for any cover I do as compared to interior pages. They’ll never pay me as much per page as they would per cover, and yet a cover takes less than half the time to do compared to a story page. Yet I want to do the story work, but I still have to keep my hand in with all these covers, constantly balancing between the two. I would rather lose myself completely into a project like I did back when I was less known, back in the days of Kingdom Come or Marvels, where I could entirely engross myself with one product, one narrative over an extended period of time, and let that be my artistic triumph. Where everything I’m doing is in there. And I know a lot of fans would like the same. But the problem is, they ain’t going pay me

the money I would get from all those single little illustrations. Plus, the exposure of those illustrations holds me out in the marketplace where people think I’m doing a hell of a lot more work than I probably am. People give me the credit for books I didn’t draw just because I did the covers. It’s actually become a source of contention over time, because I’ve watched as other people have been overshadowed by my contribution, when they do the bulk of the work. And I, being the “famous name” of the moment, get much more than my share of credit. CBA: You’re currently working on an oversize JLA story? Alex: Yes. CBA: And your cover assignments include the G-Force series, Paradise X, and Astro City? Alex: Yes. I only have one more Paradise X, actually. CBA: Was the end of Paradise X planned or did any cancellation come as sudden news to you? Alex: It was planned, but things went very poorly for us as our new leaders at Marvel hate the book. They want to bring Marvel into an age of no continuity. In Paradise X, we’re nothing but continuity. So I’d like to think of our little series, the three parts of it — Earth X, Universe X, and Paradise X — as The Lord of the Rings for Marvel Comics fans who’ve been reading for 30 years in many cases. So, if you want to see how many crazy things we can come up with that tie-in years and years worth of storytelling, this is the series for you. But that’s not the market the current regime is looking to cultivate, or even keep happy, in this New Age of Marvel Comics. We’ve made them a lot of money, but they resent our trade paperback sales being stronger than the rest of their publishing in many cases. CBA: Is that explicit? You know they are resentful? Alex: [Laughs] No, I haven’t been told they resent us in a clear context, but I’ve had conversations with the publisher to know he absolutely hates the series, thinks it’s absolute shit, because it doesn’t measure up to his perception of what a good comic is, or for the audience they want to gain. He would rather Marvel wasn’t publishing this thing. CBA: Is it fair to say you’re not going to be working for Marvel in the near future? Alex: Before anything else, I would say certainly being that Spider-Man was one of the first super-heroes I was ever exposed to and the incredible inspiration I’ve always received from Marvel characters, I’ll always have a deep love for the company’s characters (and my love for DC’s characters is about on equal footing). I would never want to say, “I will never want to work with such-and-such publisher again,” but I can certainly wait until things improve. In the case of Marvel’s publishing, certainly they’ve changed heads more than five times, I want to say, in the last ten years. But as much as I might want one day to stick up my fist like Alan Moore and say, “Dammit! I’m not takin’ it anymore!” I know I can be a little bit of a better politician in some of these things. I just say, “How do I work around this? They presented me this problem. How do I keep from giving in too much to the creator ego of saying “I’m being mistreated, I’m going away now.’” But I may have a future that involves that for all established publishers, for all I know, because the system is not based upon completely courting our egos. We’re usable commodities. Curt Swan, despite the number of years he devoted to Superman, died without any pension going to him, as far as I know. This is a guy who should have been an employee. Consider that Julius Schwartz has a pension because he was there in the offices. But Curt Swan working at home for DC? No pension. So no absolute loyalty should be given. CBA: Because there’s no commensurate reward for loyalty? Alex: Yes. They’re not really taking care of you in the long run, and that’s the bargain made here. So you’re really on your own. The terrible thing in any kind of

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entertainment medium is eventually you’re not the hot commodity, if you’re lucky enough to have become one. I’ve had fortune to be in the cross-hairs of so much attention for so long, and I have fears about when it could possibly just go away and I simply can’t get any work. The last thing I want to do is more advertising. I don’t want to do movies. I don’t want to do storyboards. I don’t want to do film design. Comics is an art form that for me and thousands more like me, we come to as a passion and we enjoy it so much that we want to participate in the art form. Luckily, it’s also a commercial art form… CBA: Thus far. [laughter] Alex: Well, yes. That’s certainly debatable. [Jon laughs] I mean, it’s certainly paid me enough in the last few years, and I hope to maintain that. I hope the business maintains that. I will do everything in my power to stay a comic artist. CBA: How are your diplomatic skills? Are they better? Alex: [Chuckles] If you ask one person, they can tell you I’m the biggest pain in the ass they ever worked with. CBA: I guess from your point of view, do you see yourself as being more patient as you get older? Alex: What you do is learn more over time, of course. I learned about more the difficulties they go through on their end. I know if something might be a printing disaster could come up… like, I just recently learned there’s been a hold-up on development of some of the collectors plates from DC because the process involves heating a decal onto an actual plate, and a lot of times you lose the quality of color, so there are problems that come with this. I was informed how one thing was going to be put on hold for a while. It’s not a huge secret I’m divulging here or anything, and it was just nice I could hear from the person I’m dealing with at DC, that they’re kind enough to bring me into that part of the process, ‘cause they’re used to me in it, at this point. But also, I could say, “Hey, I understand.” I know how horrible it is to try and get any quality out of that particular process. CBA: You said before editors can be duplicitous. Can you give me a general example of what lies you were told? Alex: [Laughs] Deadlines are commonly a duplicitous lie, because, of

course, they’re giving the artist a false deadline that’s much earlier, in many cases, than when they need it, because they want to be able to make sure, in case the guy flakes, they have time to catch up and get some kind of fill-in made, or give more time to the designer, because they’ve got other things that need to be put together, usually after the original art comes in. Luckily, with most of the people I’ve dealt, they don’t need to pad the deadlines terribly for my benefit, and I’m allowed the chance to work pretty much down to the wire. In fact, most of my deadlines relate to solicitation, so in the case of all of the covers I’ve done for Marvel the last four years, they’ve let me turn in the job pretty much as they’re in the last two days of putting together the Diamond soliciting catalog. Of course, that puts us months ahead of when they actually are going to be printing the book, so they have more time to change the cover layout or make color corrections. I understand how important it is for the potential buyer to have something to look at, to offer, to get people excited about the project. There’s a certain level of trust that’s been developed. To answer the question about duplicity… [sighs] I’m a little stumped on that only because where do you begin? It could cover every strata of living as to the lies you’ve been told, and since I’ve dealt with individuals who have been so terrible, the thing that’s really upsetting is you can have people like me and then dozens of other creators come in, have a bad experience with an editor, but nothing ever happens to that editor. It takes the company forever to realize that person is bad news. The only thing being graded against them is, “Are they getting the work in? Are they hitting their marks in publishing?” I’ve worked with very good editors who don’t get any real credit for what they’ve gotten out of me and the people I work with because maybe they’re not pumping out enough top books the company publishes, or as far as they can see, they have to spend too much time massaging the talent, too much time telling me just how wonderful I must be, that kind of crap. CBA: It’s a small community, so doesn’t word of mouth get around about a bad editor? There’s so much conversation between freelancers and company employees, so doesn’t it come to bear after a while? Alex: It takes too damn long. I’ve seen how many years go by here watching bad individuals wreak havoc within the business before finally seeing

them get fired. I’ve seen too many cases of this. I know cases at DC, even Marvel, where they have a guy who’s so bad, so bad for the business, that they leave a wake of destruction behind them. But there’s no murder weapon, no smoking gun to prove anything. So, all you have is an example where people like myself say, “That’s it! I won’t work with that guy anymore.” But what’s upsetting is the companies generally puts the editor first, and will most certainly listen to the editors versus any of the talent. There is somewhat of a war between companies versus talent, to believe that the talent is always considered suspect, because they’re nothing but freaky artist types who work out of their homes and God knows what alchemy creates comic artists and writers anyway. The people who come in and work in an office, well, they have the Real World to deal with and must know so much more about the Truth of Life, so there’s this nasty prejudice. CBA: Look, I’ve got the greatest job in the world, dealing with comic book artists all the time, and I find them to be not predictable. Some are late, some early with the covers, some are candid, some not. I wonder if it’s that predictability with office workers, for instance they gotta be there at 9:00 a.m., generally out by 5:00 p.m., that kind of thing. But that’s the charm of comic book artists. You have artists as diverse as Curt Swan and Alex Toth, really different personalities. Alex: Often there’s one guy who’s real steady, you can rely upon him like a clock and he’s there every time. But then the other guy is completely tied to the whims of fate as to when he’s going to turn in his cover, his story, his whatever. CBA: I confess that, as an editor working with artists, I have been known to lie about deadlines. I do it to buy some time. But that also puts me in a “good guy” position of being able to say, “Sure, take some more time if you need it,” and I rarely ride their backs anyway, because they often see doing a cover as pretty much self-promotion. I’m convinced that some artists need to be lied to, because that’s a part of the game. In the ’80s, with the influx of Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, there was this gritty realism coming to comics. Did you see that approach as in conflict with the idealized heroes of, say, Gil Kane or Curt Swan? Do you see them in conflict with each other? Alex: No, because as a kid, I wanted to believe super-heroes were real, because I needed them to be real. I wanted to embody the very four-color version of ethics realized in these characters. The heroes were little more than just metaphors for ideas, and the brightly-colored comics and look of the characters was something I wanted to translate into a reality because I needed to, I needed something to make sense. The world I was growing up in sucked, and I needed these things to really hold their form for me. So, I guess, that’s what made me work that much more to that point in my own career. Alan Moore was an enormous influence to me… I mean, who’s a bigger fanboy of the material than Alan Moore, realistically? For the amount of work he did to try and make these things seem that much more real? I always thought his as being a movement I wanted to be a part of. It was to fulfill a longtime obsession I had, myself, and some of what comes with that which I didn’t like as much is the cynicism. Like, one thing not often talked about, but very few people know of, is that Alan would have gone on directly

from Watchmen to doing a series for DC called Twilight, which was going to be about the final days in the future of the DC heroes. It was a very sharp, cynical view of how dark the end of their world would come to be. It was very intelligent. (He wrote a 40-page outline.) It would have had elements of exposing subversive sexuality and trying to really put feet of clay on these characters who hadn’t really quite had that before. Now I hadn’t read that outline before I concocted the majority of my plot material for Kingdom Come, but I was exposed to it after I hit up the first writer I talked to about Kingdom Come, James Robinson. He put that outline before me and I was startled at the similarity of intent. But Alan would have continued with this sort of fanboy exploration into how real he can make the childhood characters of his youth that he started in Watchmen. In a way, I was able to fulfill what Alan didn’t go on with because, well, he had an enormous falling out with DC over other matters. If you read the outline Alan wrote and compare it to the final work that is Kingdom Come, you see a completely different approach taken. You see Mark Waid and myself obviously coming from the position of love and respect so much we don’t want you to find fault with the idea of super-heroes or find them contemptuous or find that Plastic Man has become a male prostitute or whatever weird things Alan worked into his project I wouldn’t really have wanted to come to be. In the end of the day, Alan is such a bright guy, but he has a certain amount of cynicism that comes from the age of the hippie redefining old values (which I used to be). CBA: What hath that wrought, though? Was it a positive influence? I saw the movie Chicago because everyone was saying it was great. I had a pleasant enough time watching it, but I realized walking out that the movie had no hero; they were all contemptible anti-heroes, all looking out for themselves, no matter what. This gets Best Picture? Where have the heroes gone? Alex: Alan had much more of a gray valued view of the world. I mean, in his depiction of the heroes in Watchmen, they’re all somewhat compromised. But as a teenager reading that, I came out with a feeling of gravitating towards Rorshach, because that character, despite how messed-up of a person he was, was trying to provide some kind of order to a reality spun out of control. He was trying to provide a morality that, albeit Alan’s way of poking fun at Steve Ditko’s philosophy, was nothing like I had read before in comics. I would read quotes of Rorshach that would inspire me and make me think, “This guy really has it going on!” I could even sympathize with the fact that, like, “Yeah, he’s a messed up character, but God, I love the things he’s saying!” I’ve never followed Ayn Rand, so it’s not like it took me any further into that world of Ditko’s, but I was desperate for a hero to believe in. In Alan’s own personal Kingdom Come storyline, he has Superman become not such a heavily-compromised character, but Alan almost has no moment for Superman to take center stage and repair the terrible fate the world is facing. He doesn’t do anything to better it. Mostly it’s a family soap opera in Superman’s case, where he has two children with Wonder Woman, and they have, I think, a Superboy and a Supergirl, and the Superboy is completely corrupted. I think he was just a little prick. Then it has a lot to do with generations, where you have these different houses of super-heroes: Captain

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ABOVE: Pencil design for Alex’s mini-print that went in the 2000 Chronicle release, Wonder Woman: The Complete History, by Les Daniels. Art ©’03 Ross. WW ©’03 DC.

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Marvel has the House of Thunder and he marries his sister Mary, but she’s having an affair with Captain Marvel, Jr. They have a child who is apparently going to be marrying the Superboy from Superman’s House of Steel, and this will bring two of the great houses of the world together. You also have the House of Titans and the House of Mystery. It’s a very brilliant idea what he came up with, the idea the super-heroes take control of the world from humanity and are now ruling it like kings, with these divided kingdoms, and now they have to pull together their leadership. Well, re-approaching Kingdom Come after having read Alan’s outline, I realized I never would have come up with any of that stuff, because instinctively, in my beliefs — and certainly in Mark Waid’s beliefs — Superman would never have done any of that. He would have never allowed it to happen. So we had much more of a faith-based approach to the ideal superhero, and Alan had a more detached kind of social study he wanted to provide. CBA: Obviously, Alan did realize a super-hero epic I’d argue is unsurpassed. Alex: Miracleman? CBA: Right. Alex: Oh, absolutely. Miracleman is a huge inspiration in Kingdom Come. In fact, while Alan’s Twilight proposal is not an influence, Miracleman is nearly ripped-off. In fact, I had occasion to talk with Alan after he saw Kingdom Come finally, a few years after it had come out. (In fact, I have pride in knowing Alan went to a comics store for the first time in years to purchase a copy with his own money, one of the greatest accomplishments of my career.) So he read it and thought it was okay, I believe. I don’t think he was particularly knocked out. He told me he liked my work on Uncle Sam better. But what he didn’t see was the clear relationship and conflict between Captain Marvel and Superman, especially at the climax of that story, as really being stolen from the conflict between Marvelman and Kid Marvelman. When Marvelman kills that young boy to save the world, it was… I had that in my original proposal long before Mark came along, something I was hoping to give the reader the same kind of “moment” moment, except Superman couldn’t do what Marvelman did, because Superman is the greater hero. He is sort of an ethic personified. He’ll find a different way. CBA: What did he do? Alex: Superman lets Billy Batson go and tries to save

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the world from this bomb that eventually does kill off 99% of the heroes. In my original outline, all that happens is we see the bomb coming. Superman just lets Batson go so that he can stop it, and he says to him, “Say your magic word just to save yourself. If I can only save one life today, let it be yours.” But he had this tense moment when he can either kill this guy to prevent any more harm to everybody else or take his chances. But Mark had a bigger problem with that, because… well, a long debate occurred during that process, but he felt some kind of speech had to be made by Superman to Captain Marvel as he’s holding Marvel’s mouth closed and basically reasoning out the emotional metamorphosis I know Mark Waid needed to make as a fan with Superman in that story. Why did Superman fail at everything? Superman’s perfect! Superman couldn’t do wrong, Superman couldn’t constantly fail as many times as he had in the story! Well, Superman was compromised because he had given up being Clark Kent. And that’s the revelation Mark had to make in the process of writing that series. I wouldn’t have considered it to be such a major issue, but I was happy to concede the point. I just felt like, “Wow, we got this big battle here, a bomb is dropping from the air, and it’s time for Superman to make a speech? It’s starting to feel like a comic book.” So it’s one of those things I look at and wince about still. CBA: I recall corresponding with Alex Toth and he described picking up a copy of that late ’80s revamp, Shazam: The New Beginning. He discussed the rage he felt about one of his favorite characters being reinterpreted for the “real world.” And I understood his anger. Much as I love Miracleman — as certainly Miracleman was originally based on Captain Marvel — the Big Red Cheese has consistently been maligned and grossly misrepresented, without a shred of the wonder and joy originally instilled in him by C.C. Beck and company. Do you think Captain Marvel has been treated fairly? Alex: Well, the strongest aspect Mark brought to our project together was he had to re-imagine things to make the plot work from all the crap I threw at him, and he came up with the idea that Luthor is manipulating Captain Marvel. I thought, “Oh boy. Well, here we go again with tried and true comics storytelling.” But it settled in with me with a certain peace the idea that Billy Batson, the child now grown-up and looking just like Captain Marvel, is being used and abused, and his innocence, being injured in this modern world, was a good metaphor for what had happened to the character. That in a way, the innocence and the purity of the Captain Marvel concept and the Marvel Family had been lost to the ages in the transfer of time and the growth of today’s modern, gritty super-hero. What’s still weird about Captain Marvel’s legend is we’ve seen him reinvented through other publishers, other characters, and his same concepts being used over and over again, with the character Prime and even elements of Ghost Rider owing debts to Captain Marvel. So many characters owe things to the character for him being there first, but yet, because he wasn’t published throughout the ’60s, he didn’t go through that cultural change, that kind of growing-up stage most heroes went through. Obviously Marvel’s heroes grew up the most, because they were created to be a bit more mature. But then you have DC coming in at the 11th hour with Neal and realizing in the late ’60s, “Hey, you know what? We need to actually catch up with Marvel Comics! They’re making us look like buffoons over here.” So Neal was combatant with Kirby’s changes to the pop culture of comics by bringing it a step further, and now we’ve got this incredible illustration that makes you take the stuff that much more seriously. But Captain Marvel would still be yet to come for a few years. The first attempt to recycle him was just to make the comic the same as they did in the ’50s when they last left the character, not the approach that was going to work for today. The television show had greater success by far, but they didn’t find a way peacefully to make that translation between show to comic. Even in the years since, every version that’s come and gone, there’s been some beautiful artwork and some nice little bits done, but nobody’s captured that perfect marriage Beck and company were able to officiate. Does Captain Marvel work as one of today’s modern heroes? Or is he somebody who just should be left alone? Have him show up from time to time, but don’t mess with him? CBA: What’s your opinion? Alex: I don’t want to see things wrecked in another misguided update. CBA: Personally, I agree with you. But why can’t Captain Marvel be done

again properly? At this time, is he just quaint? Outside of Disney, he was quite probably the best-selling comic book character probably in the history of the industry! He was selling millions of bi-weekly copies per issue! Alex: Well, this is why, of course, I went out of my way to do a book on him alone, because I considered him to be essential. Even though he’s not considered part of the big layout of DC’s characters, the fact they own him and had him for 30 years as part of their repertoire, I wanted him esteemed to that level. That’s why when you think of Kingdom Come as a storyline, it really is about how four major super-heroes make the most pivotal contribution to that story, with Marvel being the fourth. Captain Marvel’s creation in 1940 is such a major event because it set the standard for what would be happening over the decades to come. Out of respect for that history, which most people are never going to learn, I wanted to at least put my hand forward to say, “Look, let me at least create an object that doesn’t defy the true spirit of the character in his original conception and try not to do the kind of revisions Jerry Ordway was doing, try not to figure him out for the Modern Age.” I just wanted to do a solid Captain Marvel story that fits with what I perceived him to be. And I do have that faith. Jim Krueger and I have been talking to DC about us doing a Captain Marvel series that would take the entire Marvel Family and put them in a storyline which would work them over in a way, but not redefine or redesign them, but put them in the harsh reality that can be modern comics, yet have them still hold true to their values, not lose their heart, but show that that’s the conflict, show that we are in this uglier world so much more cynical. Here are pure characters who embody so many strong values yet make that juxtaposition the point. Show what happens when you try and actually defile the purity of these kid characters and not lose sight of what would… Just about anything you do with Captain Marvel is going to make C.C. Beck roll around in his grave, so I would

never operate under the idea of “let’s make Beck happy,” but to a certain degree there is a thought that you don’t want to ruin what Captain Marvel has been to so many people. You don’t want to intentionally defile that memory. CBA: Times change but they also remain the same. The focus these days might be on the cynical aspects of life, but brave acts of heroism and dreamy romance and beautiful, sunshiny days still do happen like they did back in the 1930s and ’40s in the Great Age of Adventure, when there was, for better or worse, a true idealism. Is there a responsibility for those writers and artists telling the exploits of these characters called super heroes, these idealized adventurers specifically created to represent good, to have them stay true to that original intent? Traditionally, the stories were always about good against evil, not kind-of evil against really evil. The word “hero” doesn’t mean “villain.” Do you have a responsibility to present an idealized, romantic view of what man could aspire? Alex: Well, think about it this way: You can represent the world in your narrative as being just as shitty as it really is. I don’t know how you feel about the show Smallville, but to some degree I feel the accomplishment of that show is it makes you feel like it is today, it is the world we know, and here is this young teenager who is beginning to realize the reasons why there could and should be a Superman. I’ve watched with delight that they’re slowly, week by week, showing him coming into form with more and more of the ethics that would be the embodiment of this pure hero juxtaposed against a dark world. What people are constantly forgetting, or barely have any sight whatsoever, is that when Superman first showed up in 1938, he was stopping a lynching, protecting a woman from spousal abuse, taking on dictators, and getting involved in real domestic and world problems long before there was a Luthor or fantastic situations that came along to separate him from the world

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we know. He was created as a reaction to a world that was beyond our ability to hold step with. He was this idea of man taking control of his destiny and not doing it in the way they were doing in Nazi Germany, but the opposite: for the sake of pure altruism. I think you can do that in modern comics with all the darkness still intact, but you don’t have destroy the characters to do that. You don’t have to bring them down to the level of being criminals themselves. And that’s a lot of what came out of the ’80s and early ’90s in the sense that maybe some of the things both Alan and Frank presented in their work as compromises of some of the ethics of these great heroes. I mean, obviously Frank has a hard-on against Superman like nobody’s business. He hated that guy, and couldn’t understand that a character could be pure. And to this day, he’s trying to restate that. CBA: Do you have a mission? Alex: I’ve been that way because when you get to be embraced by people to the degree that I’ve been, it’s a bad head-trip to be surrounded by everybody telling you you’re wonderful, because you lose perspective. And, of course, I’ve devoted myself for the last five years to creating these products which go in such the opposite direction of cynical so as to provide a library of works that could be held up as a modern statement of what I believe is the core of what these concepts are about. They were unashamedly positive, and yet trying to put pure heroes in real world situations, real world problems, and have them encounter elements of the human condition that are never going to go away. Trying to deal with that on a timeless level. In a way, I had to moralize and pontificate in these oversize books, not so much to get it out of my system, but because, okay, here are these books which will exist out there because DC keeps these things in print, and for any new readers that might come in, or parents like Jon Cooke who might want to read a comic to his kids BELOW SPREAD: Alex’s next and not worry about how major release is the JLA: horrible it’ll transform them Liberty and Justice tabloid into monsters because of all book, coming this the fighting or whatever, but fall. This image is from the JLA: something actually everySecret Origins body of any age could jump tome. ABOVE: into because the reading Pencils for the part of it would not be too proposed JLA mystifying. cover. OPPOSITE PAGE: Pencils for the JLA collectors plate. ©2003 DC Comics.

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The language of comics isn’t handled in such a hit-you-over-the-head way, like what Chris Ware will do with his comics. That stuff is perfect reading for people who are seasoned readers of comic books, but the average person doesn’t know how to follow that. My goal is to come back and show how I could make a sexy comic book again. In most people’s eyes, what I did in Kingdom Come was much more the apex of where I went. But to another degree, you could say the apex was Uncle Sam, because it actually became even more on the edge, more relevant about the world we live in and the times we’re in. But I need to establish my connection with the audience who wants their sexy superheroes and exciting situations, which I want to draw, too. I want to draw the half-naked members of the Legion having a cookout or something. At this point, I still have that feeling like whatever work I draw, whatever story that is, it just takes the time that it does to illustrate these things, which is months upon months if not, in some cases, years. It’s got to be the best thing I can be spending my time doing. And I want to think that work is worth the investment. Because it takes a certain physical toll on me, as well. In some ways, my life is in a cocoon state until the project ends. CBA: I would think there’s a satisfaction in that you’ve always got, at least down the line, something new to look forward to. Alex: Yes. I’m usually always thinking of whatever the next project is, even two projects ahead in many cases. While I was working on Superman, I was thinking about Captain Marvel and how excited I’d be when I got to that… I knew when I was working on Kingdom Come that I would be going on to do Uncle Sam, and thinking about how excited I would be to do stuff that really related to my feelings about our social culture in America. To some degree, the easiest way to describe everything in comics is that all entertainment is communication. You can use it for whatever purposes you want. Your first priority has to be to be entertaining, of course, and if you fall off the horse on that (which I can definitely be accused of doing), you’ve got to at least keep in mind that you can do both, entertain and relate your heart, your ideas, your position on things. You can put in so much of yourself and your own soul into this. CBA: Last year, you did that Academy Awards™ poster and some TV Guide covers. Do you feel an outside pull, one from the mainstream, out of comics? And could you be successful outside of this field? Alex: There have been hints of that, but nothing like you might be thinking. I clearly don’t believe I would do better outside this field, mostly because the problem being, where would my individuality come

through? If I’m working on the production of a motion picture, say even a movie that’s related to comics, is any part of promotion for that going to show the work I did to help develop it? I know Mike Mignola does tons of movie stuff, but the individuality that is Mike Mignola is made through this business of comics. He may continue to get more and more work in that field, just like other people including Geof Darrow — who’s been working steadily on The Matrix sequels for the last several years — but here we’ve become the artists we always hoped we would someday become and be remembered, and we need to always recognize that reputation comes only from the contributions we make in this medium here. I like to think I’m available for any bridge between media, whether it’s something like a TV Guide or Time magazine cover (I’ve still yet to get called for one of those), the medium of film, and now I’ve done my first CD cover, and I want to show kind of a connection. But, realistically, I don’t want this to all be about how do I make more money for myself or how do I get some more jobs in those fields? I want to be living in comics. This is what I enjoy. Even if I didn’t want to draw super-heroes, I’d still want to be in comics. I could leave superheroes behind and still enjoy the storytelling and graphic nature of this business. Or just the expression of it. The artistic expression in comics is so satisfying to me, because where else are you going to find a place where you can have visual and story work in such a way that it could be all from one voice entirely, where there’s not a hundred different hands put on top of it, like a film? A film is never going to be a personalized product of the same degree that a comic can. CBA: You’ve helmed some personal projects with Earth X, Universe X, Paradise X, and also with G-Force. Have you thought about doing your own comics line? Alex: [Groans] No, because what would that suggest? That I do covers for a whole bunch of things coming from a source I couldn’t possibly co-create and co-edit? It would take me out of what I do best. At this point, I’ve been working on at least two books at a time that I made contribution of story and obviously covers and designs to. There was a time when that was considered. There was a time when the idea that maybe if Earth X really took off — which it did, but we didn’t have the backing of our publisher at that time to really run with it — then maybe we would have had more things created in the line to beef up that side of the Marvel Universe. Or maybe it would have happened with DC, with this original thing that Paul Levitz was very interested to try and get out of Kingdom Come, which would be an ongoing modernday use of the ideas of Kingdom Come influencing the world of DC today. I gave them the concept name of The Kingdom and gave a lot of different ideas to what would help bring this into

being, but the falling apart of that coordination between the editor and the writer and… At that point, I was being seen as nothing more than the guy who would at most do the covers, and “How much can we respect his ideas over everybody else’s?” At the time, we had one of the greatest artists in comics ready and set, waiting for scripts, and that was Gene Ha, but he eventually had to leave the project for his own benefit because no script was ever coming. It took years before they finally put out what they call the fifth-week event series of books to tie into one concept, which is the final use of the name Kingdom that I donated to the project. There are limitations on where you want to let commercialism take hold. You want to make sure the art, the integrity remains. And, in the case of something like Battle of the Planets, realistically I’m just a cog in that machine. I’m not the guy who’s leading that whole process. The publisher is using my participation to promote it, but I’m just a helping hand to try and get these characters back into some kind of regular viewing. When it comes to my collaboration with Jim Krueger on Earth X and other things we’ve intended to do, it’s very much an even-handed cooperation, and there’s greater and greater ambition we have for things we want to do together, and hopefully we’ll actually be able to see some fruition. CBA: What’s your personal favorite work you’ve done? Alex: I would divide it slightly to say I enjoyed working on Kingdom Come best because there was the most personal passion behind that. Going from Marvels, where I felt a deep enjoyment of getting inside the humanity and the life of this protagonist character. I had a model I used for that character, a man good friend who had two daughters just like the character in the story. That was a wonderful, enjoyable experience on an even more personal level, and that’s why I brought in my father as the protagonist in Kingdom Come. By using my dad as the model there, I was able to make a statement that hit on a multitude of levels. I was modeling myself for Spectre, so it’s me hanging out with my dad in a comic book for four issues. My dad is speaking to Superman in this wonderful final speech at the end of Kingdom Come where he calls out to Superman by the name “Clark.” Well, my dad’s name is Clark. So there are all these subtle little things being worked over in my mind, little enjoyable personal touches. And there are so many of my friends and family who made their way into my work. But despite the enjoyment and satisfaction of accomplishing Kingdom Come, Uncle Sam is my proudest work, because in some ways I still can’t believe I did it. Even if it’s a disputed work by anybody thinking politics and comics don’t mix, or that social views and comics don’t mix, the fact I was able to do something that entirely related to the U.S. culture and was not revolving around comic images of any type — you know, it wasn’t featuring other heroes of any established comic universe — it was using only pop culture icons related to something everybody recognizes. Also, being able to include historical stuff in that, going from things in the Civil War to even the American Revolution… I hate doing that kind of thing. I absolutely couldn’t care less. I want to draw half-naked super-heroes beating the hell out of each other, just like in

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Kingdom Come, but I felt I had to earn that. I can’t just always do the superhero panty-fight forever, because I think if I continue to do that, I’ll lose context to where my work could hopefully be relevant, and I would love to think that the communication I make in comics can be relevant beyond just entertaining the kind of readership we already have. CBA: There’s an old Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” Right now, especially here in the United States, in the spring of 2003, these times are very interesting. As an artist, do you see any need to become part of the dialogue that’s taking place in this country? Alex: In the last several years, since I’ve made so many contributions to that dialogue, I don’t feel particularly pressured… CBA: You mean in relation to 9/11? Alex: And a lot of other things that have happened. Not that I’ve made some grandiose statement, but by pure accident, Paul Dini and my work on Wonder Woman ended up making a more poignant statement about the subjugation of women and then the subjugation of all people. We were using the Middle East as a stomping ground in the story, and we clearly show Muslim people — particularly Muslim women — juxtaposed against the most outrageous of American idols, Wonder Woman. As I’m painting the final pages of the story, it was September 11. Paul and I feared absolute censorship out of sensitivity for the time. But luckily — and this is another thing my editor handled very well — he made sure to approach Paul Levitz directly and made sure there was no trying to sneak anything past him, because that doesn’t usually work that well at DC. I’ve gotten away with murder at DC. I’ve been able to redirect just about every super-hero I’ve wanted, tell every story I’ve wanted to tell. We clearly made a commentary in Batman that crime — real crime, not manufactured, outrageous, comical crime, but real crime — generally has more to do with monetary disparity and racism in our nation. Juxtaposing the difference between the world of black and white America. You can’t pitch a project like that at DC, or at any other publisher, generally. But we did it there, and it wasn’t one of those things that became national news. It’s not like we got on CNN because we put a gay cowboy in a comic book or something. But it was something that got accomplished, and I think it said what we wanted it to say, or at least exposed some light on the subject. In the case of Uncle Sam, I was able to draw a lawn jockey representing the subjugation of the black man in America, but that should be the most offensive thing ever seen. But DC let us do it and we never got any hate mail. These are things I did that were never censored. So when I hear of all these other cases where material is censored, I keep thinking, “Geez, when is my time coming up here?” CBA: Where do you see yourself going in the next ten years? You’ve had a fruitful first decade starting with Marvels. Alex: It’s a weird thing for anybody in my position. Obviously, Adams had a

huge impact during his stay at DC between 1967 and ’73, and that wasn’t even 10 years. So maybe hopefully I’m not that much of a comparison to Adams in having a like impact. Neal’s in complete charge of his life, his career, and he’s where he wants to be, but I want to still participate with not just the characters, but particularly the medium I know so well. I would love to be able to sink my teeth into more longer, involved stories, more regular comic books. I hear lots of complaints about trying to just get me back into doing what I became famous for, which were these epic mini-series. If I could be involved in a longer-running thing, that’s what I should be doing. CBA: Would you like to take on any particular Marvel characters? Alex: I would like to do a number of things with them. Even though we finished up Paradise X as we pretty much intended, we did have in mind a couple other little projects that more or less just sewed all that stuff up. Such as, we were going to do a prelude project that would be our Star Wars Episode I, in effect, where you would have been shown the Marvel Universe much more in a classic sense, characters in classic costume watching the world fall apart when the events that would shape Earth X emerged, when people basically gain superpowers like all the mutants had. So it would be, in a way, a new kind of Kingdom Come story. CBA: A bridge between Marvels and Earth X? Alex: Right, and it would be something that reads perfectly well on its own without relating it to all the details that happened later in Earth X. It’s something that would be a nice short graphic novel or mini-series that would be the last final statement we can make with that property. But that’s only one of many things. After I did designs for the X-Men under the hope I was actually going to be able to jump on right as they were looking to change the X-Men completely from what they had been for so long, I was encouraged by Joe Casey to throw my hat into the ring. I liked the designs I did so well for that offering — all inspired by Neal’s Havok design — that I’d like to use them on an X-Men project. I’d never liked the X-Men comic book, never cared about those characters before, but I liked the movies. Whenever people can make room, we can come back there and do hopefully a high-profile X-Men comic series. I’m considering the idea in my career, a next step, just to see if it would work, of making a longer commitment on a project. Which, of course, the best you can do for a company is to be their guy they can rely upon for those sales that come in monthly or bi-monthly. I’d like to have a book that is one of their highest-profile projects that people come into stores for all the time. My difficulty is, how much can I actually paint and draw within a month? How quickly can I move the product out there? With Kingdom Come and Marvels, I was working on those for about a year to a year-and-a-half. When they came out, it’s about four months of work in each 48-page book. And to some degree I can’t make that investment in time again, I can’t disappear for that long. For me, that’s falling down a dark hole that… I can’t have a year go by

without something new coming out from me, because people will not give a something that can’t be replaced with what I’m doing. We’re still in an era shit about me when I return. That’s the entire nature of how popularity that’s telling us, “Computers, computers, computers are replacing everyworks. Well, not to say that I’m as popular as maybe I was at the time the thing!” We’re not done saying that yet. But we also had people once saying, heat was on with some of these earlier projects, but the difference is I’ve “All commerce is going to go through computers!” Well, that blew up in got that certain reliability and respect coming from being present all the everybody’s faces a couple of years ago. Now people have to calm themtime, knowing I’m a stand-by for a fan of comics. I think I could work on a selves down for a little bit and realize, look, it is a tool. project with another illustrator whose talents I respect, say somebody like CBA: Right. But also consider all tools. Doug Braithwaite, who pencils Paradise X, whose realism matches a lot of Alex: Yes. So I’m using a tool that’s very effective for me, and I think could my same aesthetic, and paint over their pencils, still using the same techstill be effective for plenty of people. For anybody who’s still inking anymore, niques of photographing models and making sure that lighting is matchit’s always going to be easier to use a pencil and paper versus a keying a very quasi-realistic type of intent. I think I could pad. That’s not going to become easier. I mean, what, someday accomplish a comic that, if not monthly, is biyou’re going to have this board that feels like paper and that’s monthly. So I could possibly enter the fray of got a plug going into it that’s going directly into your computer being a more regularly seen talent in the and when you draw on that pad it’s going to feel as natural as business. Now, this is entirely reliant upon anything? I don’t see that working. I could be wrong, but the the quality of the draftsmen I work with, tools are there now to do all these things we’re talking about, but I’ve known so many good draftsbut they take a lot more time. men. People like Brent Anderson or CBA: I was astonished when I went to WizardWorld John Paul Leon, even some I’ve in Chicago with the presence of your brand, of your never gotten a chance to work people in their yellow shirts, the dirigible with the with, like Stuart Immonen. If I Flash Gordon logo… were able to collaborate with Alex: [Laughs] Oh, you were there for that? these people, almost being their CBA: That was just a one-shot deal? computer colorist, I can do things with a Alex: No. Basically, a friend of mine who is my brush that still computer color generally never bothers current art dealer… It’s funny: I’ve gone to go as far as doing. It’s not that it’s impossible to through one art dealer who was my model for do, it’s just you need to have an Adam Hughes sitWonder Woman, and now my new art dealer ting there poring over his illustration to the degree is my model for Captain Marvel. He’s an artist he does, to make sure computer coloring comes himself, and he took hold of the situation to off as magnificent and lively as it should. try and turn me into a stronger element CBA: Are you deliberately low-tech? within the business, to really be promoting Alex: Yes. But I’m not doing it to be a purist, I’m the living hell out of me. There’s definitely not doing it out of some sense of, “Oh my God, I some element of shame in having girls hate computers so much I’ll never want to work dressed up with T-shirts with my name with them because I hate the craft.” I love the on them. But then there’s also an elequality of computers in comics. I think that comment of humor to it. The only way I can puter coloring has been a huge boon. live with it is to realize, “Okay, this is In some ways, computers have been a detripretty funny in the larger scheme of ment, because all of the linework now in comics is things, but I’m not that person, whatever this broken-up scan line that, if you look closely, you think that person could be.” I’m just, looks like a stair-stepping line, and it’s in all printing, again, some guy who sits and does his regardless. All comics have that now. There are no clean work, but to help to shove your name down lines like old printing used to have. So inkwork has been forevpeople’s throats, you have to pretty much er destroyed by contemporary coloring, and that’s only because sacrifice a goat to your great gods to do it, they don’t do the right setting on the printing. It’s fucking ridicubecause getting any kind of real notoriety is so lous. But the thing is, I have no desire to work with that tool. My difficult for anybody, and maintaining it is diffifingers work best directly applied to a board. I know I’ve had cult. So the outlandishness of the Flash Gordon hundreds upon hundreds of people telling me, “Oh, it can do all logo with my name is just out there to assault the same thing!” Like, “Guys, do you have any idea how fast I am senses and keep ‘em interested… I don’t think I’m with some of this stuff?” I mean, the speed I can put towards rencrossing over into Rob Liefeld-land exactly, but I dering something with pushing around the paint on a brush I don’t have very little hands-on to do with that. I never believe can be done with a computer. I mean, the look can be replilook at my Web site, although I hear it’s lovely, cated, but the time? I’m still making better time. but I don’t need to know anything more about it. CBA: Maybe it’s the repetition of certain aspects of the task? My friend sells the artwork for me, gets great Alex: What do you mean? money for the stuff, and… CBA: Repetitive tasks a computer could possibly aid with? CBA: You’re happy? Alex: Oh, yeah, absolutely. There are certain things you can mix, Alex: Yes. It’s the kind of thing where, and I’ve taken advantage a couple of times, where I’ve turned in a yeah, I know that’s really dorky, and I prefer painting and told somebody, “We’ll put this graphic on top of there brunettes, but to see a couple of girls with and we’re gonna mix in some of these drawings in the background,” yellow hair wearing yellow shirts at a show Photoshop magic and whatever. I’ve passing out yellow cards and yellow had mixed results. Generally, the stickers with my name on them… nice thing is I can just rely upon my [laughs] Please visit Alex on the Web for the latest news, stuff being as tried and true as it’s original art offerings, and other info: always been. It’s relying upon an old www.alexrossart.com standard form of tools, but there’s

127

ABOVE: Seven year old Alex Ross poses with a certain Man of Steel at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. (1977). From Mythology. ©’03 Alex Ross.

CBA

fin

V.2 #1

What’s comin’ up in Comic Book Artist • Just who do these wild ’n’ crazy CBA people think they are? • Shameless Self-Promotion

“Monkeyboy” Cho Speaks Frankly! Comic Book Artist showcases the artist phenom in ish #2! Ye Ed took a few “liberties” with the back cover of Frank Cho, Illustrator, but dig next ish’s cool all-new Cho cover!

The mag devoted to the celebration of comics really gets into the new format as next issue we headline the incredible talents of Liberty Meadows’ own Frank “Monkeyboy” Cho with a comprehensive interview, art gallery, and new cover! Plus: Comic Book Artist Classic, our new mag-within-the-mag section taking comprehensive looks at the great old stuff, focuses on the amazing “groundlevel” comics of Star*Reach Productions of the 1970s, through an exhaustive interview with the publisher, Mike Friedrich, including unpublished and rare material from that innovative company’s vaults (all behind a neverbefore-seen Howard Chaykin cover featuring Cody Starbuck!) Also: We chat with comrade Chris Goss, creator of The Red Star, one of the hottest and most innovative titles today, who explains how this unique

comic book — one singlehandedly resurrecting the Evil Soviet Empire — is produced by the Archangel Studio team of cutting-edge collaborators. Not only that, we’ll also out the truth from talented animator J.J. Sedelmaier about secrets behind his great Saturday Night Live cartoon series, The Ambiguously Gay Duo and The X-Presidents in a lively interview. Just for good measure, CBA throws in the first of our examinations of current publishers, with a look at the curiosities of CrossGen Entertainment! But wait! There’s more: Dean Haspiel launches our “It’s No Secret Origin” feature with an all-new strip starring his hothead, Billy Dogma! Finally, we’re gonna try like heck to squeeze in the last-half of our Michael Moorcock interview. So be here in six weeks for all the color, the art, the history, and coolest new stuff!

CBA Volume 2 , Number 2 coming your way in late August!

Just Who the Hell Are These CBA People?

128 CBA V.2 #1

In an effort to introduce a number of worthy folks who help put together Comic Book Artist magazine — and to help promote their personal projects, as well — we’re starting this li’l ol’ section featuring brief bios of said contributors. Since Ye Ed is as megalomanical as they come, up first is JON B. COOKE (at left… the one hangin’ with his fave super-dude at Universal’s Island of Adventure theme park this past spring): The diminutive and irritable CBA creator was born in 1959 and the only sustaining mania predating comics is his passion for the concept of print magazines in general. During a year abroad with his mother, Jon and his younger brother, Andy, began collecting comic books (around ’71). Along with their two older brothers, Richie and Chris, the boys produced a fan effort, Omegazine,

during the early ’70s. Though he initially wanted to be a cartoonist, Ye Ed basically chose the pursuit of girls and life of a nare-do-well until helming the University of Rhode Island alternative magazine, The Great Swamp Gazette, between 1980 and ’83. Years after college and long ignoring his passion for print and design, Jon finally achieved a career in graphic design in the late ’80s and worked in advertising until 2000, when he began devoting all of his time to CBA and other comics-related projects. In the early ’90s, he produced the short-lived horror digest, Tekeli-Li! Journal of Terror. In 1995, Jon joined up with TwoMorrows Publishing and, in 1998, created Comic Book Artist magazine (which won two Eisner Awards in its initial 25-issue run), also designing and editing numerous books for that publisher and others, including Streetwise and The Warren Companion. In 1987, Jon married Beth Whaley, and they now have three sons — Ben (14), Josh (11), and Danny (8) — and a home in West Kingston, Rhode Island. While Ye Ed currently plans to devote the rest of this year to the relaunch of CBA, the book Swampmen: Muck Monsters of the Comics is slated for early 2004.

Subscribe to CBA Now & Save! Act now and receive special discount rates: $39.50 U.S. Media Mail Rate (1-2 week delivery) $59.50 Priority Mail Rate (2-3 day delivery) $69.50 Canada Air Mail Rate $89.50 Int’l Air Mail Rate Order online via credit card at www.topshelfcomix.com or mail check or money order (in U.S. funds), along with your name, address, preferred rate, and the issue number to start with, to: CBA SUBSCRIPTIONS Top Shelf Productions P.O. Box 1282 Marietta GA 30061-1282 USA Don’t forget: Issues of CBA sell out quickly, so act now!

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JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby and his contemporaries, feature articles, and rare & unseen Kirby artwork. Now full-color, the magazine showcases Kirby’s art even more dynamically. Edited by JOHN MORROW.

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TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

B AT M A N I L L U S T R AT E D B Y ®

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Featuring new covers by Adams!

September ’0 3 VOLUME TWO

2004

VOLUME THREE

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