Comic Book Artist (Vol. 2) #1 Preview

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

Comic Book Artist ™&© 2003 Jon B. Cooke

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

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Young GODS/Bagge Breaks a Sweat

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High Five: Todd Klein’s Top Letterers

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

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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.

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FEATURES

50

“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

56

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

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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.

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

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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.

TOP: Opening panel of Barry Windsor-Smith’s The Monster, originally intended as a Hulk story. ©2003 BWS. ABOVE: Detail of The Avengers #100 cover by BWS. ©2003 Marvel.

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,”

ABOVE: The current Hollywood blockbuster release, The Hulk, features an abusive father theme not dissimilar to BWS’s 1984 Incredible Hulk proposal. ©2003 Sony.

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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

Excerpt from Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book by Jordan Raphael & Tom Spurgeon, coming in September from Chicago Review Press. ©2003 by Jordan Raphael & Tom Spurgeon.

RIGHT: Stan Lee drawn by Don Heck from Chamber of Darkness #2 (Dec. ’69) ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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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

ABOVE: Marvel ad from the ’73 New York Comic Art Con souvenir book, trumpeting their top sales position. ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

41 “The rooftops of Marseille, France, as drawn one blustery day from my friend Lucia’s apartment.” All sketches ©2003 Craig Thompson.

CBA V.2 #1

“MELISSA.”

“This top drawing is a personal favorite.”

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All sketches ©2003 Craig Thompson.

LEFT: Using marker as an art form, Neal created this poster almost as proof that markers are a valid medium. Printed in ’77. The Battler ©2003 Neal Adams.

BELOW: Neal’s wash style is quite evident in “The Curse of the Vampire,” Creepy #14 (April ’67). Art ©2003 Neal Adams.

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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Greg Preston portrait of Alex Ross ©2003 the photographer.

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

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke



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!

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?

ABOVE: Bill Everett and his greatest creation, the Sub-Mariner, originally graced the second edition of Jerry Weist’s Original Comic Art Price Guide. ©2003 Marvel.

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.

59 CBA V.2 #1

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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lifeboat: a n d

a r c a d e ,

Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm on February 15, 1948, and grew up in Rego Park, New York.

t h e

c o m i c s

r e v u e

Art received National Book Critics Circle 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 from 1979-87. For his acclaimed graphic novel Maus,

children, Nadja & Dashiell. Interviewed by 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 TOP: The Arcade icon, used as an end-story bullet in the magazine. ABOVE: Art Spiegelman at the 1987 United Kingdom Comic Art Convention. ©2003 Frank Plowright.

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68 CBA V.2 #1

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

TOP: Art Spiegelman strip from his teenage years. ©2003 the artist. ABOVE: One of the last issues of Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! magazine (July ’65). ©1965 Central Pubs.

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

f r o m

a n

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a m e

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.

t o

z i p p y :

r i c a n

l i f e

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 TOP: Detail from Griffith’s Observatory #1 (1979). ABOVE: Zippy the Pinhead, the syndicated newspaper strip, is Bill Griffith’s most famed creation. ©2003 Bill Griffith.

79 CBA V.2 #1

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.

80 CBA V.2 #1

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.

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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THIS PAGE: Bill Griffith’s self-portraits, featured on the table of contents, from Arcade #1-7. (Top tier (l to r) #1-3; center #4; bottom tier #5-7.) ©2003 Bill Griffith.

a r t x E c i s s a l C A CB e v i t c e p s ical Per

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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.

ke o o C .

B

by Jon

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.

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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LEFT: Walter Simonson delineates the author as story character in Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse #1 (Nov. ’97). ©2003 Michael Moorcock.

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

95 CENTER: Michael Gilbert and P. Craig Russell’s striking cover art for Elric #1 (April ’83). Elric ©2003 Michael Moorcock.

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TOP: The Eagle, the British boys comics weekly, starred futuristic pilot Dan Dare. ©2003 the respective copyright holder.

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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

ABOVE: J. Allen St. John illustration for Edgar Rice Burrough’s novel Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1923). ©2003 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.