Comic Book Creator #38

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IN THIS ISH:

Errol McCarthy, Aly Fell, and Studio Zero

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Behind a previously unpublished cover, CBC #40 celebrates the life and art of the great DAVE STEVENS in a special double-sized issue completely devoted to the late artist! For this deluxe issue, friends, fans, and family share testimonials, photos, and fascinating artifacts, plus a gallery of amazing artwork by the Rocketeer creator, some never before seen.

There’s also three interviews with Dave conducted by CBC editor JON B. COOKE, two Q+A’s with Dave by guest associate editor STEVEN C. RINGGENBERG, and JEFF GELB’s conversation with the artist recorded during the making of The Rocketeer motion picture. Dave’s sister JENNIFER BAWCUM shares about her brother in an exclusive chat, and we also interview some of Dave’s closest friends, including MICHAEL W. KALUTA, about their memories of the man. Plus: a conversation with KELVIN MAO, the director of the 2022 film documentary, Dave Stevens: Drawn To Perfection, about making the movie and its recent success on streaming services, which has resulted in an entirely new generation of Dave Stevens fans. And, of course, no such tribute would be complete without a heartfelt salute to America’s sweetheart BETTIE PAGE!

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LEN WEIN’s life as writer/editor from creating Swamp Thing and Wolverine, to MOORE and GIBBONS’ Watchmen, and more! Plus the sad demise of WILL EISNER’s P*S Army Preventive Maintenance magazine, interview with romance and pin-up artist JAY SCOTT PIKE, more of STEVE WILLIS, and SHAUN CLANCY reveals the saga of ADRIAN LOPEZ’s Harpoon/Apple Pie humor mags! FRANK CHO cover!

PAT BRODERICK discusses his career, from the Crusty Bunkers to unforgettable work on Firestorm, Micronauts, Captain Marvel, and more! Plus JACK KIRBY’s humiliating return to Marvel in the ’70s, the 1940s KKK-crushing district attorney FIGHTING LAWYER, profile of PAUL BUHLE, SHARY FLENNIKEN interview, 1972 heroes by WRIGHTSON, REESE, WINDSOR-SMITH, and others for Esquire magazine, and more!

Informative conversation with “Big” JOHN BUSCEMA and a biographical essay about the Marvel legend by JON B. COOKE, including an awesome art gallery. Plus we share about the life and tragic fate of BILL MANTLO (co-creator of Rocket Raccoon and Cloak and Dagger), inside comics printer Eastern Color Printing by SHAUN CLANCY, more with SHARY FLENNIKEN, chat with RIC ESTRADA, and more!

CARMINE INFANTINO radio interview by KEN GALE and ED MENJE, JON B. COOKE on Carmine’s stint as DC editorial director/ publisher, ROBERT KANIGHER’s 1989 conversation with STEVE WHITAKER and TIM BATEMAN, World War 3 Illustrated with PETER KUPER and SETH TOBOCMAN, DAVE COCKRUM’s Aurora model kit pamphlets, GLEN CADIGAN’s interview with horror comics writer JOE HILL, and more!

GENE COLAN showcase with TOM FIELD, Gene’s 75th birthday celebration from Comic-Con 2001, MARK WHEATLEY spotlights former boss MYRON FASS’ Heavy Metal rip-off GASM, JON B. COOKE’s visit to defunct comics publisher CROSSGEN, CAROL LAY interview, more with JOE HILL, SHAUN CLANCY’s look at HILLMAN PERIODICALS (publisher of Crime Does Not Pay and Airboy), HEMBECK, and more!

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Ye Ed’s Rant: Your humble editor on his obsessive/compulsive disorder, re: comics!........ 2 COMICS CHATTER The Saga of Studio Zero: Ye Ed reveals the California Collective of Starlin, Brunner, Weiss, Orzechowski, & Englehart, and the time they almost got into Rolling Stone! ..... 3 Once Upon Long Ago: Steve Thompson on his work with a Guy Named Yoe..................... 9 Aly Fell: Ian Millsted talks to the great British artist about The Kissing Gate and more..... 10 Errol McCarthy’s Real World Comix: Part one of our celebration of the under-rated comics artist on his CARtoons work and underground comix, plus a re-presenting of the cartoonist’s classic comic book homage to Quality Comics’ Blackhawk! ................. 12

Cover art © Rick Veitch.

Ten Questions: Darrick Patrick poses a batch of queries to comics writer Kyle Starks....... 26 Incoming: Roy Thomas on his friendship with Denny O’Neil and Ye Ed on WW3!............ 28 Michael Dowers & Starhead: Pat Moriarity’s rare interview with the late publisher...... 32 Above: Roarin’ Rick Veitch had a notion in his noggin to create a pastiche of the Vincent Price movie poster for The Masque of the Red Death [’64], which had the actor’s face made up of images of torture and other hellish torments (and shapely damsels, of course) conjured up in Poe-esque fashion.

Natch, Rick’s version comprises characters he’s worked on!

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Comics in the Library: Richard Arndt on four great books worthy of note....................... 40 Hembeck’s Dateline: The Great Fred talks all about Mutt & Jeff in Dell Comics.............. 44 THE MAIN EVENT Rick Veitch: V is for Veitch!

Straight from the backwoods of Vermont, Roarin’ Rick shares a career-spanning discussion with Ye Ed about his start in the undergrounds, blossoming at the Joe Kubert School, and being unleashed on the commercial comics world in Epic Illustrated, Heavy Metal, graphic novels, and mini-series, including The One. After his Swamp Thing work, Rick reveals how he embarked on a journey into the independent realm, launching his King Hell Heroica — Brat Pack, Maximortal, etc. — and his continuing dedications to “dream work” with Rare Bit Fiends, plus we chat about his collaboration with Alan Moore on Miracleman, 1963, and Supreme… and lots more! ..................... 46 BACK MATTER Creators at the Con: Kendall Whitehouse goes “Beyond the Comics Pages” at NYCC..... 78 Coming Attractions: Kubert School “First Classer” Thomas Yeates saddles up for CBC.... 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Gil Kane’s commuter sketches........................ 80 Right: Rick Veitch appropriated the Tide laundry detergent branding for his “last word on super-heroics,” The One.

Comic Book Creator™ is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344.

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This issue is dedicated to the memories of KC CARLSON, PIERRE CHRISTIN, JULES FEIFFER, BOB FOSTER, GREG HILDEBRANDT, ™

JON B. COOKE

Editor & Designer

JOHN MORROW

Publisher & Consulting Editor

GREG BIGA

Associate Editor

RICK VEITCH

Cover Artist & Colorist

RICHARD J. ARNDT MARC SVENSSON STEVEN THOMPSON TOM ZIUKO Contributing Editors

J.D. KING

CBC Cartoonist Emeritus

TOM ZIUKO

CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON

CBC Illustrator

KEN MEYER, JR.

CBC Color Portrait Artist

ROB SMENTEK CBC Proofreader

GREG PRESTON

CBC Contributing Photographer

RICHARD ARNDT FRED HEMBECK DARRICK PATRICK STEVEN THOMPSON TOM ZIUKO CBC Columnists

Contact CBC: jonbcooke@aol.com Jon B. Cooke, P.O. Box 601 West Kingston, RI 02892 2

We’re now bi-monthly… and here’s to expanding our readership!

There’s a little bit of activity going the “Daring and Different” years of on at TwoMorrows as of late.

1967–76, consisting of extrapolations Some new editors have joined of CBA Vol. 1 #1, #5, and CBA Special up over at sister mags RetroFan Edition #1. and Back Issue (Hi, Ed! Hi, Roger!), But allow me to let you in on a and I’ve embraced some technolittle secret: I’ve been building books, logical advances that enhance my article by article, in the “Comics Chatapproach to producing this mag, ter” section of CBC, such as last issue’s plus a plethora of archival material Jack Miller profile and the Studio has dropped into my lap. So I’m Zero piece that starts opposite. And I’ll smart enough to be gittin’ while continue to do that as the mag hums the gittin’s good and have decided along… but note my books are no to up the frequency of Comic Book copy-and-paste efforts, as one would Creator to six times a year, and I be hard-pressed to say The Charlton sincerely hope you’ll stick with us.

Companion resembles a reprinting More importantly, studying of CBA #9 and #13 in any way. sales numbers, I’ve learned Among the single creators we’ll enough to recognize what sells be focusing on, the list is a murderer’s best and, thus, I’m determined row of talent: Thomas Yeates; our to give my readers what they double-size Dave Stevens tribute ish want. Since launching in 2013, spotlighting the Rocketeer creator’s the magazine has maintained a connection to San Diego Comic-Con steady readership, but I’m hoping (where that ish will be released this to expand our numbers a bit and, year); Len Wein; Pat Broderick; maybe in the process, recapture a John Buscema; Carmine Infantino; sliver of the glory generated by my Gene Colan; and other pros. And, first effort, Comic Book Artist. importantly, we’ll have very specific Y’see, CBA was a hit out of the examinations showcasing two titans box when it arrived in 1998, lasting of the comics world.

25 issues at TwoMorrows, and it While not pegged into the was successful as a Top Shelf mag line-up just yet, I’m working with Kris in the mid-’00s, when I shut it down Adams and family to formulate “Neal (due to domestic and personal issues).

Adams: Fearless,” a comprehensive Rick Veitch by Ronn Sutton tribute with Continuity’s participation I realize much has changed in comics world since the Great Recession and I’m grateful and amazed that for the late, great artist whose courage and fortitude completeTwoMorrows is still publishing mags and books in print, you ly transformed an otherwise moribund industry, invigorated bet! But I trust you can understand if I might go a little more fandom, and changed the course of comics history forever. mainstream in the future, increase the cover-feature focus Another yet to be scheduled narrowly-focused ish will be on legendary stalwarts, and even occasionally return to the “Archie Goodwin: The Epic Legend,” where we’ll celebrate the “carpet-bombing” method of the old CBA every so often. greatest comic book editor of all time, and that powerhouse’s Now, to be frank, that exhaustive approach of covering stretch running the Epic line and Epic Illustrated magazine at many different facets of a given subject has, in recent years, Marvel Comics, in the 1980s, but the issue will also be filled most often been regulated to book projects. My two Eisner with tributes by the good number of comics pros who miss the Award-nominated histories, The Charlton Companion and man so very much. It’ll be… ummm… epic!

Warren Companion, both evolved from CBA cover features, (Huge thanks and shout-out to Shaun Clancy, Steve Ringand my Book of Weirdo; forthcoming Forging Metal history genberg, and Marc Svensson, a trio to whom I’m indebted!) of Heavy Metal, Métal Hurlant, and their many copy-cat mags So there you have it! I’m also finishing up Mind Candy, of the ’70s/80s; and future Treasure Chest retrospective, my history of Last Gasp, the underground comix publisher, these all started with the intention of first appearing in CBA and getting the ball rolling on yet another endeavor: a granubefore its demise. And, like the Companions, there’s a hope lar, book-length look at World War 3 Illustrated, the underto “drill down” further on CBA histories, including — should I appreciated annual comics anthology still publishing live long enough! — a narrative account of DC Comics during in this, their 46th year, with their 54th issue!

cbc contributors

Rick Bradford Bruce Chrislip Steve Englehart Jackie Estrada

Aly Fell Mike Friedrich Clay Geerdes Karen L. Green

Errol McCarthy Ken Meyer, Jr. David Miller Ian Millsted

Pat Moriarity Tom Orzechowski Christine Payne-Towler

— Y e Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com

Cory Sedlmeier Short Run Seattle Kyle Starks Jim Starlin

Marc Svensson Rick Veitch Alan Weiss D. Blake Werts

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Rick Veitch portrait © 2025 Ronn Sutton.

KENDALL WHITEHOUSE

CBC Convention Photographer

What They Want

up front

& JIM SILKE

Countdown to Studio Zero When Starlin, Brunner, Weiss, Englehart, and Orzechowski almost made it into Rolling Stone

Photo © the estate of Clay Geerdes, courtesy of David Miller. Warlock TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Photocopy courtesy of Alan Weiss.

by JON B. COOKE In late 2001, over dinner, in between regaling yours truly about the story behind an unpublished Warlock tale he penciled, Alan Weiss told me about an intriguing moment in the lives of some of the most popular comics creators working at Marvel in the mid-’70s. After explaining that Jim Starlin (who was with us there at the Manhattan restaurant, along with Allen Milgrom) and he wanted to work together upon a move to California, they then collaborated on an inventory issue starring Adam Warlock.

“So that was it; it was very simple,” Weiss said. “Starlin, [Frank] Brunner, and I shared a basement studio at the time called Studio Zero, in Oakland, so that was penciled during that brief period when we were all working together. It was quite a nice thing.

There was a very amiable easy-going atmosphere. It was just fun! That was the idea! Jim had an idea, in the context of the black-&-whites…”

Weiss then turned to Starlin in that Italian eatery — Casa di Meglio, on West 48th Street — and asked, “Do you remember Dark Fantasy? You were going to edit a black-&-white book for Marvel that was more adult-oriented, with creator-owned characters, out of California…? You asked me to create a character for it, because I was going to do ‘Hotspur and the Darklings’ for you. I remember it clearly. It never happened. This was almost the same period, actually a little later than that period when we — the California contingent — went up to do the insert for Rolling Stone.”

Weiss continued, “Jim, [Steve] Englehart, Mike Friedrich, Brunner, and myself, and we went up there, and thought Rolling Stone really wanted to get these new comics from the new guys and, of course, they just wanted glitter rock super-heroes.”

In that Big Apple eatery, I was likely too mesmerized by the fact an issue intended to be Warlock #16 had been drawn by one of my favorite artists (never mind a proposed mag called Dark Fantasy helmed by Jim effin’ Starlin!) to suitably focus on the existence of Studio Zero and the Rolling Stone super-hero saga. But, in a more recent chat with Weiss, where we talked about his ol’ pal, “Screens,” writer Mary Skrenes, he reminded me about the Oakland studio.

WISH THEY ALL COULD BE CALIFORNIA BOYS First of the Marvel Bullpenners to move to the West Coast was Steve Englehart, who was then at the height of his fame scribing The Avengers, Captain America, and (with artist Brunner) Doctor Strange. The writer shared, “I wanted to go and the rest of ’em thought it sounded cool, so I moved out, got a house, Frank and Jan Brunner came out to share it, and then all the rest of those guys came out and just sort of crashed there for a while.”

His pad was in San Anselmo. “I had a girlfriend at the time who had a sister in San Francisco,” he said, “and so we came out, it was COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

my birthday, and I said, ‘Oh, I’ll take you to San Francisco, because I’m making money now doing comics.’ And we went out and I really liked San Francisco. I just thought, ‘This is a cool place.’ And Kirby had already moved to California, so I knew it was possible to do, so I did. And I mean, I was telling people and the Brunners said they wanted to come out, too, and then the other guys came after that. Personally, if I had to choose between living in California and New York, I would have no question about California.”

“In New York,” Frank Brunner recalled, “I was living like

a vampire. I would work all night and sleep during the day, because New York was so noisy, at least for me, and it was so quiet at night, comparatively, so I came out to California for a visit, and really liked what I saw, and I moved out… and I switched to working during the day!”

Brunner emphasized the creators were actually not moving on from the House of Ideas. “Oh, no, we weren’t leaving Marvel,” he professed. “I remember, while I was driving to California, I was trying to get some [Doctor Strange #1, June ’74] layouts done!”

Weiss, who had initially come East from Las Vegas in 1970, but had become disillusioned with the mainstream comics realm, had already returned to Sin City to reevaluate things. “Well, I’d headed back out West to back off

Above: Courtesy of the estate of photographer/comix historian/ mentor Clay Geerdes, a photo of the “Marvel West” gang circa 1974. From left is Alan Weiss, Jim Starlin, Frank and Jan Brunner, Steve Englehart, Mike Friedrich (kneeling), and Tom Orzechowski.

Below: During the days of Studio Zero, Alan Weiss penciled an inventory issue of Warlock that ultimately was never finished.

from the comics for a while, to refresh and re-prioritize, so to speak. You know, there are some elements of the business end of the comics business that can tend to really grind down your original love and youthful enthusiasm for the medium. So, while I was out there, I spent a little less time doing comics and a lot more time exploring, researching, and experiencing…you know, real ‘meaning of life’ stuff.”

As for the artists’ San Francisco nightlife, “Marvel

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[Skrenes]. But Mary wasn’t on the West Coast with what I’ve come to call ‘The Wild Bunch.’ I loved that rowdy little gal. She’s been split from Frank for a long time now, but she’d have some fun stories.”

Englehart, who speculated that Orz may have been at the meeting, believes the pitch was to produce a modest-sized insert into the mag. “Like an eight-page thing, I think… [nothing] longer than that, although that would’ve meant each of our stories was two pages at best or something… Maybe we were offering 16 pages or 32 pages. I’m not real sure at this point, but I know I wanted to do Coyote and Jim had whatever he was doing.”

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GATHERING NO MOSS If Rolling Stone was not distinctly an underground publication when the magazine was launched as a bi-weekly in 1967, it certainly took advantage of the iconoclastic realm from whence it was born, San Francisco. “Despite being founded in the counterculture center of the United States,” Jessica Hyman wrote, “the magazine failed to embrace many of the norms of that community, which is precisely what allowed it to become so successful.”

Still, from Rolling Stone’s logo designed by ZAP Comix collective member Rick Griffin, the periodical strove to at least appear radical, whatever its commitment to mainstream popularity. And, embracing the Baby Boomers’ love of comics, an aspect of that endeavor gave focus to funnybooks. To name but two, in 1971, there was onetime Marvel employee Robin Green’s “exposé” of Stan Lee and the Bullpen in a lengthy piece behind a Herb Trimpe cover, and 1973’s A History of Underground Comics,

by Mark James Estren, an ambitious if terribly flawed survey of the comix scene, published by R.S.’s publishing imprint, Straight Arrow Books.

So, with the crew newly arrived in the Bay Area, Englehart initiated a meeting with the increasingly popular Boomer rock ’n’ roll magazine. “I just thought, ‘Rolling Stone is cool, but they don’t have a comic section. And here we are, we could do a comic section for them, so let’s go ask ’em.’ I think we just called ’em up… It’s just like, ‘It’s Rolling Stone and they’re right over there in San Francisco. Let’s just go talk to ‘em.’ And they talked to us.”

Attending the meeting among the Marvel freelancers was Englehart, Brunner, Weiss, and Starlin. Weiss offered there was the slimmest chance Frank’s then-wife, Jan Brunner, was with them. “I don’t think she was, but she very well could have been.

She was always welcome to hang with the guys, even if she was sometimes/often the only gal. She was always game, like Mary

A WORD OR TWO FROM FONG-TORRES Reached for comment, former Rolling Stone senior editor and writer Ben Fong-Torres said, “Your best bet is to talk with [R.S. founder] Jann Wenner, who would’ve been the person who would have met with the artists.… The art director might have had a hand in the decision, and so might [had] the business department.” * More recently, Starlin shared, “I remember [my proposal] was anti-corporate but, at this point, it was something I never did any work on again, so I don’t recall what it was. It didn’t stick with me. It’s not like a Breed or Dreadstar or any of the things that I did more than a page on. I don’t think it was anything that developed into anything else other than that one-shot [pitch].” #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

A History of Underground Comics © Mark James Estren. Rolling Stone TM & © Rolling Stone, LLC. The Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Coyote TM & © Steve Englehart.

Above: Rolling Stone’s Marvel Bullpen ish [#91, Sept. 16, ’71] (cover: Herb Trimpe), A History of Underground Comics [’74] (cover: Rand Holmes), and the Straight Arrow Books mascot. Below: I Am Coyote [’84] (cover: Marshall Rogers) and Coyote #1 [Apr. ’83] (cover: Steve Leialoha).

West” associate Steve Leialoha said, with a laugh, “Despite rumors you may have heard, there wasn’t that much partying. Except in the case of Alan Weiss, who lived in a house with stewardesses and God knows what went on there. I used to wonder why he did so little work and then I saw where he lived.” Still, the collective was actively looking for outlets to use their talents outside Marvel.

COYOTES ON PEYOTE Born of a psychedelic trip Englehart and Weiss experienced while wandering around the Las Vegas desert, when the writer dropped by to visit the artist for a month in the summer of 1973, Coyote was a character who eventually debuted in a serialized story in Eclipse, The Magazine [#1–7, May ’81–Jan. ’83] — collected in I Am Coyote [Eclipse, Oct. ’84] — and the Epic Comics’ series, Coyote #1–16 [Apr. ’83–Jan. ’86]. In a text page in #1, Englehart wrote, “Al and I envisioned the Hulk leaping over those sands… then turned to a new character, a young guy ‘raised by coyotes on peyote.” In brief, the essence of the story’s overall theme was decidedly anti-corporate.

To the Rolling Stone reps, Englehart explained, “I pitched Coyote and they said, ‘Well, who would the villains be?’ And I said, ‘Well, corporations.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’re a corporation.

Thanks anyway.’ Which was my introduction to, ‘Oh, yeah, Rolling Stone: not what you think it is.’ And then later, at the end of Firestarter, Stephen King had a [scene] where they needed to go to some reliable media place, and they thought about the New York Times, but they said, ‘No, no, no, let’s go to Rolling Stone.’ And I laughed because, you know, corporations were bad guys then and they’re bad guys now in many ways.” In Starlin’s recollection, “All our ideas were anti-corporate, and they said, ‘You can’t do this, because we’re corporate ourselves!’”* Weiss explained their respective concepts were in the spirit of the underground comix ethos of retaining rights to one’s own work. “We got to know a lot of those [comix] guys. We were interested in owning our own creations like they all did. At one point, we were approached by Rolling Stone to produce a comics insert feature, all creator-owned characters. We were really excited about it! Wow! A chance to do something outside of any editorial policy or censorship — but the whole thing turned sour fast. Rolling Stone wasn’t really interested in any innovative concepts. They wanted super-heroes in glitter bands! So that thing never happened — and, of course, there were the many dead-end adventures with various hippie entrepreneurs who were all going to create the newest, most futuristic, hip, creator-friendly comics company… but ended up blowing any capital on announcement party favors.”

Englehart recalled, “I know we didn’t sit around and go, ‘Hey, gang, let’s all do an anti-corporate thing. But that was certainly where I wanted to go and I guess it was where [Starlin] wanted to go, but I don’t think they were all, I don’t think that was the one theme that everybody was playing off of. Other people were offering whatever they wanted to offer.”

Photo © & courtesy of Jackie Estrada. Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Tarzan TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

Fong-Torres, a renowned celebrity interviewer — to the extent he’s the subject of a Netflix documentary — added about whether the magazine considered a comics insert, one that may have espoused an anti-corporate theme: “I have no recollection of such a possibility. But I wouldn’t go along with your theory about R.S. being opposed to ‘anti-corporate’ messaging and only wanted to

feature glittery rock heroes. Just check out the wide range of articles on a wide range of politics and music. Plus, the magazine had Hunter Thompson and his incredible illustrator, Ralph Steadman, neither of them exactly corporate!”

Asked to respond to Fong-Torres’ comments, Weiss said, “There was only one [meeting]. I don’t recall whether the Rolling Stone rep attending was Wenner or not but, if I had to guess, I’d say no. Neither do I recall anything having to do with ‘anti-corporate messaging,’ either in the discussion or the no-go explanation.

“We each made a pitch about our proposed ideas, and the Rolling Stone guy, somewhat surprised that they were neither ZAP or Furry Freak Brothers-type characters, but were instead extended, expanded, far wilder, and much less traditional than the super-heCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

ro/adventure style stuff like Marvel and DC were doing at the time.

“There was a suggestion from the Stone guy of something more like, say, a rock band with super-powers, kinda like what Steve Gerber later did with the KISS book [Marvel Comics Super Special #1, Sept. ’77], which I co-plotted and drew. I recall being disappointed and let down at that suggestion, as I think we all were.

“I don’t recall specifically what Englehart (Coyote?), Starlin, or [Mike] Friedrich pitched, but do remember Frank Brunner proposed a thing called ‘Jupiter Jack,’ which I believe was a supercharged psychedelic take on traditional space opera. I pitched Drastic Action Comics, starring Scuff Ruffin, the Universal Sidekick, which would take a surrealistic run on all the established adventure comics genres, and also, I think, Crackshot Scott’s Sub-Western Adventures, (both later sold to Marvel for their Epic line), as well as a sexy fantasy strip called Hotspur and the Darklings, which I’d developed for Starlin’s proposed uncensored adult fantasy comics magazine to be titled Dark Fantasy. In any case, after that letdown of a meeting, to my recollection, there was no further communication with or from the Stone.”

In reality, Mike Friedrich, who soon go on to include Brunner, Starlin, Englehart, and Orz in his Star*Reach publications (with a minor Alan Weiss co-writing credit in Quack #2 [Jan. ’77]), wasn’t actually at that meeting. “I don’t remember this event,” he told me.

“I probably wasn’t involved. I didn’t start repping artists for another eight years.“ S.F. native Steve Leialoha, who would go on to ink for Marvel from the mid-’70s on, wasn’t a part of Studio Zero or the Rolling Stone meeting.

“This was just before my time (late ’74/early ‘75…?) [prior to becoming acquainted with the artists]. Probably the week before. I officially met them when they had just gone their separate ways (to their own basement studios). These were the days when R.S. had their offices in San Francisco, so I can see the appeal of top-flight, locally done comics. That was a major factor in how I came to work with them in early ‘75.

I can imagine the R.S. guys had envisioned some cheap and quick thing, whereas the lads would have been going

Top: Jackie Estrada photo of the Star*Reach panel at the 1975 San Diego Comic-Con. From left, moderator Tony Isabella, Jim Starlin, Howard Chaykin, Steve Englehart, Frank Brunner, and Mike Friedrich.

Above: Maybe, Alan Weiss (who drew the KISS saga within Marvel Super Special #1 [Sept. ’77]) speculated, Rolling Stone was more interested in a strip starring a rock group as heroes. Insert left: Jam piece for the Bay Con 1 souvenir booklet. Art by Brunner, Starlin, Englehart (who maybe drew the moon), Weiss pal Scott Bell (who drew banana), and Weiss, who inked the piece. Below: While not headliners, the California Contingent is prominently billed in this flyer for the first Bay Con, in 1975.

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full scale cosmic. (I’ll bet R.S. had already been turned down by Gilbert Shelton in S.F., at the time). It could have been really interesting! And, strictly speaking, if the R.S. dudes were snorting substances, it would have been the polite thing to share with their guests. Those were the days…“ BRINGING HOME THE BAY CON Leialoha, then about 20, met the Marvel West Coasters at the first Bay Con comics convention, held at Claremont Hotel, in Berkeley, on Oct. 11–13, 1975. “I showed them my work and Alan Weiss wanted some inking help on the stuff he was doing,” Leialoha said in 2001. “Then Starlin asked me if I wanted to ink ‘Warlock’ [in Strange Tales]. That’s really what got the ball rolling. Marvel was awfully loose in those days. In retrospect, it’s just astounding. I mean, there’s no comparison, really, to the way things are run today. Starlin just wanted to do the whole book out West and send the completed thing in to Marvel and just have them print it. The editor didn’t quite see it that way.”

The tribe Weiss has since called the “California Contingent” of transplanted Easterners Starlin, Brunner, Englehart, and Orz, as well as his own Nevada-bred self, were prominent second-tier guests at Bay Con 1, listed below guests of honor Joe Kubert, Barry Windsor-Smith, and John Romita, Sr., and alongside Jack Kartz and Mike Friedrich. Orz actually was involved in the convention as he was the volunteer in charge of publications. About recruiting the guys for the souvenir book, he told Ken Meyer, Jr.: “There were the Marvel people who moved to the Bay Area at around the same time I

did: Jim Starlin, Steve Englehart, Frank Brunner and Alan Weiss.” Enlisting them, Orz continued, “that was the easiest part, since we were all in fairly close touch right then. Jim Starlin and Steve Leialoha, yeah, I worked with them all the time then.”

Englehart remembered, “There was a show, named by somebody, called ‘Bringing Home the

God & The Man

In the wake of the Marvel Premiere #14 [Mar. ’74] “Doc Strange Meets God” saga, Frank Brunner heard about publisher Stan Lee’s reaction to the Englehart/Brunner deity yarn.

“When the book came out,” the artist told me, “Stan finally got a hold of it, and (I don’t know) somebody pointed it out, or he read it, and he wrote us a letter saying, ‘We can’t do God. You’re going to have to print in the letters column a retraction saying this is not “the” God, this is just “a” god.’ Steve and I said, ‘Oh, come on! This is the whole point of the story! If we did that retraction of God, this is meaningless!’

“So Steve happened to be on his way to Texas for something — this is when we were in California — and we cooked up this plot: we wrote a letter from a Reverend Billingsley in Texas, a fictional person, saying that one of the children in his parish brought him the comic book, and he was astounded and thrilled by it… And we signed it ‘Reverend so-and-so, Austin, Texas’ — and, when Steve was in Texas, he mailed the letter so it had the proper postmark. Then we got a phone call from Roy, and he said, ‘Hey, about that retraction…? I’m going to send you a letter and, instead of the retraction, I want you to print this letter.’ And it was our letter! We printed our letter!

“Hey, it worked! We thought, ‘Wow, this went perfect!’

We later found out that Jim Starlin was in New York at that time, up in the Marvel offices, and he was reading the Doctor Strange fan mail, and he was the one who actually saw the letter, believed it was the real thing, and gave it to Roy, who showed it to Stan!”

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* Shortly before deadline, Tom Orzechowski responded to say he did not attend or recall any meeting at Rolling Stone, and added, “The fact that there was something called ‘Studio Zero’ comes as news to me. Frank, Steve, Jim, and Alan were all a few years older than myself, and worked closely together as collaborators.

I was sorta the kid brother of the group, and worked essentially independently of them, once they were finished with the marquee stuff.” #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Bay Con 1 cover art by Jim Starlin. © the artist.

Above: Faux letter printed in Doctor Strange #3 [Sept. ’74].

Bay Con,’ which I thought was cool.” (As to be described in detail in our next issue, Bay Con 1 was where young amateur artist Thomas Yeates met Joe Kubert and became enticed to enroll at the comic-book great’s school, which was about to open back in Dover, New Jersey.)

In addition to attending Bay Area comics shows, Weiss, in particular, got into the counter-culture scene, in part by contributing to underground newspaper The Berkeley Barb, including the cover for a May 1974 issue that featured a robed Catholic clergyman stomping grapes in a vat. “The Barb writer and I hit all the wineries just north of San Francisco that day, and sampled plenty at all of them,” the artist explained. “We had a great time with the Christian Brothers, who were all pretty hip and did wear robes like the one on that cover. We were very well lubricated by the end of that day but, as I recall, continued partying when we got back down to Berkeley.”

Perhaps the most observant chronicler of the S.F. area comic book community of that era was Clay Geerdes, who had a regular underground newspaper column and one-sheet monthly newsletter sharing the name Comix World, and he became friendly with the “overground” crew. There was Mike Friedrich, who had become fascinated with applying the comix model to what soon manifested into his “ground-level” hybrid, Star*Reach. In Comix World #5 [Feb. 1974], Geerdes reported on a mini-con staged on Dec. 30, 1973, that featured a panel of both underground and mainstream artists, “Most of the questions were directed to Friedrich and Brunner, and this was to be expected since most of those present were the hardcore straight comic fans. There are signs of change, however. Many of the fans are now reading both over[grounds] and [undergrounds]. As far as questions go, they’d as soon watch the stars and get their autographs… after the panel, we checked out the movies and sat around the expresso house talking the evening away. It was an upper. The mood of the younger Marvel artists is optimistic and that’s rare at this point.”

In fact, Geerdes had, months before, taken note of Friedrich’s ambition. In a Berkeley Barb column of the previous August, he wrote of just-held San Diego Comic-Con where “Mike Friedrich, a young writer who works for Marvel, was enthusiastic about writing for undergrounds. He, among others, saw a middle ground coming into view during the next couple of years, a company which would use work by both underground and overground artists and writers.”

Resulting in an undated snapshot, Geerdes photographed the California Contingent, and he would occasionally name-drop the guys in his columns. In Comix World #16 [Sept. ’74], he lauded Englehart’s work in Captain America (with the scripter explaining that, for Steve Rogers, “Captain America lies behind him, buried in the rubble that is politics, 1974,” and describing the debut of Nomad, “a hero free to be his own man.” (That same CW issue plugs Frank Brunner’s Middle Earth portfolio, Flesh and Fantasy, and reports he’s working on a “Howard the Duck” story for Giant-Size Man-Thing #4.)

Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Watcher TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Star*Reach TM & © Mike Friedrich. Cody Starbuck TM & © Howard Chaykin. Berkeley Barb TM & © the respective copyright holder.

DAYS OF GLORY Of course, prior to their West Coast sojourn, the guys had all been buddies and oft creative partners. There was the time, during a hallucinogen-fueled all-nighter when they went to the tip of Manhattan island and envisioned a sequence later used in a 8“Master of Kung Fu” story. And also, Brunner and Englehart, back East, would regularly visit each other’s apartments and spend stoned evenings plotting out the next Doctor Strange stories. Plus Englehart did help out Starlin by dialoguing Captain Marvel installments and, lest we forget, the two created Shang-Chi together.

And that Eastern U.S. camaraderie endured, such as the time the “bedazzled Bay Area Bullpen” jumped in to produce — literally overnight — a framing sequence for Captain Marvel #36 [Jan. ’75] after intended story pages got waylaid in a cross-continental mailing. Diverse hands that pitched in for the all-nighter included Starlin, who had already left the series, Weiss,* Englehart, and Orz.

Except for the last two dudes just mentioned (who would both remain in the Bay Area for many years — the writer to this very day), the others drifted back East after their glorious mid-’70s experience, though Brunner stayed into the following decade, working in animation as presentation artist. Weiss worked briefly in cartoons, as well. “So, after a short stint in animation down in Hollywood,” he said, “I decided to go back to the East Coast. Jim Starlin was down there, working with Ralph Bakshi. ‘Wait for me in Vegas for a week or two and we’ll drive back together.’ Well, that trip turned into a minor odyssey! Lots of adventures. There was this guy I’d done an X-rated Solomon Kane illustration for use in his fanzine. Well, this jerk wouldn’t return the original. I couldn’t reach him by phone or mail, so I was helpless — but, that October, Starlin and I showed up at his house in Missouri. I had all these angry plans… ‘Yeah, if he won’t give it up, we’ll grab him, tie him up, and keep him in a mo-

tel room ’til he…’ ‘Hold it,’ says Starlin. ‘Calm down. We can’t do that. This is not our home state, and, if we go kidnapping people, they may not realize we’re the good guys!’ Instead, Jim pretended to be an art dealer/buyer to case his place and see where the art was. Then he came out to get me, to bring me in as his partner. The guy froze in mid-introduction! I think he peed his pants! So I got that piece back.”

(There were many other exploits from that era — Weiss is a born adventurer, after all — which we can hopefully have detailed in future issues of CBC.) In a wistful moment, Weiss shared, “Brunner and I had a

real simpatico connection for the longest time. Then, when we were in California, there was Studio Zero for a while, in Oakland, a basement studio that Brunner, Starlin, and I shared. ‘Studio Zero,’ because that was the name of the apartment, because it wasn’t on an official floor, it was on the basement, so it was ‘zero,’ it wasn’t even ‘one’!”

After a laugh, the artist added, “So we called the work we produced out of there, ‘work from Studio Zero,’ for a good while. Even that time was very special, that California time was really nice. Really nice, but I had another agenda as well, aside from doing artwork and partying, I was really looking into what it all means, so on and so forth, and of course, there’s no single answer, but you at least find some hooks.”

The most significant result of the California Contingent’s time out West was most likely to support Mike Friedrich when he started his own alternative comics imprint, Star*Reach, for which he launched the series in April of 1974, with significant help from Starlin and Orz, and later, Brunner. Star*Reach proved an independent title that extended the creator-owned comics movement from out of the underground and into the mainstream, spread far and wide by the direct sales market.

Ironically, just as the underground comix scene, the most important development in comics since E.C., was facing catastrophic and irreversible decline, it would prove to be catalyst for the (arguable) start of alternative comics, making way for the next great advancement, the advent of the graphic novel.

Top: Berkeley Barb V. 19, #19 [May 30, ’74]. Cover art by Alan Weiss.

Above: Star*Reach #1 [Apr. ’74].

Art by Howard Chaykin. Inset left: Page from Captain Marvel #36 [Jan. ’75] framing sequence. Art by Weiss. Below: An early depiction of San Diego Comic-Con was in Iron Man #72 [Jan. ’75], where Shellhead attends the show. That’s Star*Reach #1 burning in the tale, with art by George Tuska (pencils) and Vince Colletta (inks).

* About page two of the three-page sequence, Weiss shared, “Looks to me like it was done over Jim’s breakdowns or layouts. Poses and spacing look like his, but I wasn’t inking pencils as I drew the anatomical detail before inking. Same goes for the big Cap Marvel figure. That looks like my drawing and inking. You can tell by some of the musculature and lighting. Nice Kirk Douglas grit-teeth look, eh?”

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

7

The Day Daredevil Visited Rolling Stone

This page: At top is a comic book shared by Lee Hester of Lee’s Comics, Daredevil #100 [June ’73], affixed with a promotional sticker. The story behind this oddity is unknown, but page 10 referenced is directly above. Art by Gene Colan (pencils), John Tartaglione (inks).

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that the journalists have for Daredevil seems appropriate given that a large portion of Marvel’s readership was made up of university students and hippies who were drawn to Stan Lee’s angsty, outsider protagonists. One imagines that many of Rolling Stone’s readers were also readers of comics like Daredevil.”

Asked about the story in 2004, Steve Gerber told a Yahoo! Group online forum devoted to his creation, Howard the Duck, “I did get [Wenner’s] permission, of course, to use him as a guest-star in the story, and he agreed, but I didn’t even have a photo of him to work from.

I just pictured what I thought he should look like, based on what I’d read of his writing, and described that to Gene Colan. Weirdly enough, it turned out to be a pretty good likeness.”

(Well, everything but the hair color, but how was Marvel Bullpen colorist Stan Goldberg supposed to know the publishing wunderkind was a brunette and not blond?)

Though I am grateful for having had the opportunity to interview the renowned writer on occasion, a true regret is not having asked the late writer about this oddity (Steve Gerber passed away suddenly, at 60, in 2008), especially upon having received from Lee Hester, of Lee’s Comics, another mystery related to DD #100: a copy affixed with a dayglo orange sticker emblazoned with the statement, “Rolling Stone meets Daredevil,” in all caps, and the annotation, “See page 10.”

As it incorporates the rock mag’s actual logo and the sticker obliterates the value of the comic, one presumes this was used as a possible giveaway for promotion… but where, when, and how…?

The story’s antagonist — the “living LSD factory” named Angar, the Screamer — puts the city’s populace through a massive acid trip, and he turns out to be pissed-off, embittered, and disillusioned ex-flower child, a villain sporting long-locks and beatnik necklace, with a frilled vest covering his bare torso. We find the motivation for this raging, hate-filled hippie in the following ish, and learn the cause of his fury is — cue eye-rolls at the irony — the end of his generation’s dream for love, peace, and freedom. (Get Peacemaker on the line, stat!)

Needless to say, Daredevil was not one of Steve Gerber’s more celebrated books.

In summation, Alan Stewart at the Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books website opines, “As commemorative issues go, this is probably one of the weaker ones that Marvel had produced up to this time. Still, it’s hardly all bad. As far as I’m concerned, Gerber gets points for the sheer chutzpah of framing the career-flashback material as a Rolling Stone interview, even if the device runs into problems in execution.”

Soon enough — by #109 [May ’74] for Matt Murdock; #120 [Apr. ’75] for Natasha Romanoff — the characters are back in New York City, their adventure over in the City by the Bay. Wenner hasn’t been seen in a Marvel comic since. #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Daredevil TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Stickered comic book courtesy of Lee Hester.

Roughly around the time the Marvel freelancer exodus to California by Starlin, Brunner, and company was commencing, a San Francisco-related Marvel super-hero comic book included a contrived appearance by Rolling Stone founder/publisher Jann Wenner. Writer Gerry Conway had already moved Daredevil and the Black Widow to S.F., in Daredevil #87 [May ’72], in, or what it’s worth, the first time major super-hero characters at the House of Ideas relocated outside the metro New York City area, but the series’ subsequent scribe would take another step and place DD smack-dab into the city’s fabled counter-culture.

A little over a year later after the characters’ big move to the West Coast, newly arrived Daredevil scripter Steve Gerber had the Man without Fear encounter Wenner, one of S.F.’s prominent non-fictional residents, a person tangentially related to a brief episode experienced by the California Contingent. (See the previous Studio Zero article, okay?)

While hardly unusual for such a landmark occasion, Daredevil #100 [June ’73] included a recapping of the character’s origin story, expressed in flashbacks prompted by interview questions, with guest-villains galore. But notably unusual for an anniversary issue is the inclusion of the real-life publisher as fullfledged guest-star throughout, a person utterly unaffiliated with Marvel Comics. The storyline has Wenner questioning a reluctant DD in the comic, with the crime-fighter rhapsodizing about his avocation. True, Rolling Stone was, almost from its 1967 start, a San Francisco institution, but to specifically feature such a minor true-to-life celebrity as Wenner is, well, kinda wacky, albeit a ploy befitting absurdist writer Gerber’s standards!

An entry by “Thomas,” on “A Trout in the Milk” blogsite, neatly summarized the Wenner-related sequences in the DD #100 yarn: “After rescuing Wenner from some attackers, Daredevil is given a guided tour of the Rolling Stone bullpen. As he moves amongst the journalists, he thinks to himself, ‘This is all so different from Matt’s uptight law office!’ Matt’s our hero and the book’s protagonist, but he’s clearly not as cool as these hip young writers.

When Wenner asks Daredevil for an interview, the relationship between counter-culture and mainstream culture becomes all the more pronounced. Daredevil says, ‘You’re kidding! I didn’t think the counter-culture was interested in anybody who works with the police!’ He is genuinely startled that they would be interested in interviewing him. Wenner makes an argument that any comic book fan can understand.

He tells Daredevil, ‘You want the system to work justly, up front, and even people who oppose the system can respect that.’ This admiration

once upon a long ago

And Then There’s Yoe “Flash” Thompson shares about Craig in his second installment of “Comics Pros and Me”

The Great Anti-War Cartoons, The Creativity of Steve Ditko © Yoe Books. Photo is © Luigi Novi/Wikimedia Commons.

by STEVEN THOMPSON I first heard of Craig Yoe back in the late ’80s or early ’90s, when he ran heavily illustrated “articles” in The Comics Buyers’ Guide.

Several of his pieces about cartoonist Boody Rogers made a big impression on me and, in 2009, I would buy his book, Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers.

Craig Yoe, himself, is a fascinating individual. [See CBC #20, Sum. ’19, about Ye Ed’s visit to the Yoe residence.

— Y.E.] An “unreconstructed hippie” from Akron, Ohio, he has been a street preacher, a fanzine creator, a big shot with the Muppets, a designer for publishers and MTV, an author, and a toymaker. He got Jack Kirby to draw Mickey Mouse, Steve Ditko to draw Big Boy Comics, and uncovered the secret, under-the-table past of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster.

In 2009, Craig Yoe also discovered me! Surprisingly, I don’t recall how, but I definitely was in need of being discovered. For the first time in nearly three decades, I found myself out of work, age 50, and suffering from age discrimination when it came to finding another job. I fell into a depression.

All my life I had wanted to be a writer. All I had ever published to that point were six letters to the editor, one 1988 Amazing Heroes article, one 1990 piece in a forgotten fanzine called Comics Arena, some short-story porn in two Canadian magazines in 2006, and a couple of chapters in Bear Manor Media anthologies, in 2008. Several queries to publishers for books I had hoped to write had racked up rejections.

However, when Craig heard about me, he hired me to research and write capsule cartoonist biographies for the back of his latest book, The Great Anti-War Cartoons. Craig and his wife, Clizia Gussoni, had just started their own imprint, Yoe Books, distributed via IDW. They must have liked my work because, before you know it, Craig added me to his core group of proofreaders, which ultimately consisted of Mark Lerer, Peter Sanderson, Randall Cyrenne, and myself, augmented at times by others.

My first writing credit in a Yoe Book came in The Official Barf Book. Sadly. I wrote several of the chapters. I did research and proofing and even, appropriately, sometimes a bit of ghostwriting on the various volumes in Yoe Books’ Chilling Archives of Horror Comics series and even named his horror host character COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

— drawn by Angelo Torres — as Forelock, the Warlock. Later on, I would even get my name on the cover of a couple of volumes for which I wrote Introductions.

Through Craig, I discovered the work of Milt Gross and Lou Cameron. Through him, I also got to work with underground artist Skip Williamson, author/ designer Steven Brower, and the legendary Jack Mendelsohn (Jackys Diary, Yellow Submarine, The Carol Burnett Show, E.C. Comics’ Panic, Three’s Company, etc.). I even got to edit Stan Lee and Julie Newmar!

Thanks to Craig, I was able to work on four books about Archie Comics, which led to my getting several Archie-related writing assignments for Back Issue. It also led to friendships with various Archie creators, including Craig Boldman and Nancy Silberkleit.

Despite the fact that I haven’t toked anything since 1982, I wrote much of the text history for Craig Yoe’s Reefer Madness Comics — some of my best writing, if I do say so myself.

All I did was proofreading for Yoe’s Walt Kelly’s Fairy Tales, but it did win an Eisner Award, so I can say I worked on an Eisner winner! I did a ton of research for Marvel Masterwork Pin-Ups, a Yoe Book in conjunction with Marvel Comics — my only book done in any sense with Marvel.

Some of the Yoe Books I’m proudest to have been involved with are Cartoonists Against the Holocaust and We Spoke Out — Comic Books and the Holocaust, two heavy books, and the two lighter volumes (although not in weight) of Super Weird Heroes. Also, Craig’s several volumes on Steve Ditko. In fact, Yoe Books’ The Creativity of Ditko was dedicated to me by Craig. I was so proud.

In all, I’ve worked with Craig in one capacity or another on more than 68 published books in the past 15 years. He’s even worked with me on three of my own! He’s living in the Philippines these days and still creating exciting new books, letting his own surreal art style run free!

Although we’ve never actually met in person, Craig Yoe has always been there when I needed someone. Both my wife and I consider him to be family. And all because…

COMICS!

This page: Clockwise from above is Luigi Novi’s photo of our man Yoe, lensed at East Coast ComiCon 2016; cover art by the titular artist for The Creativity of Ditko [2012] (a companion book to Yoe’s The Art of Ditko [2010]) and the dedication page in same; and cover of The Great Anti-War Cartoons [2010].

As “Flash” mentions in his column, Yoe had assigned the great Steve Ditko the art chores on Big Boy Comics in the ’90s. Yoe also produced a few books reprinting Ditko monster tales and short stories published by Charlton Comics.

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through eyes of times past

Forays into ‘Novel’ Territory

British comics storyteller Aly Fell on self-publishing, crowdfunding, and the past’s attraction

by IAN MILLSTED [A trend in comics-form storytelling in recent years has been the growing numbers of what we might call “artisan comics creators.” The opportunities offered by technology and crowdfunding have gradually made it possible for people to create comics in a way which is commercially viable, while aiming for high quality work. One such is British writer/artist Aly Fell. Fell may be known to some for The Shadow Glass, which was published by Dark Horse Comics, in 2016 (collected edition in 2017). More recently published are the graphic albums, A Trick of the Light [2021] and The Kissing Gate [2023]. Fell’s artwork has a quality which is photo-realistic and dreamlike, both at the same time.

This email interview was conducted in late 2023. — I.M.]

Above: British comics artist Aly Fell in a selfie. Below: Cover to the trade paperback edition of The Shadow Glass [Jan. ’17] and cover detail of TSG #2 [Apr. ’16], both published by Dark Horse Comics.

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photo courtesy of Aly Fell. The Shadow Glass TM & © Aly Fell.

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Ian Millsted: Who is Aly Fell?

Aly Fell: Who am I? I’m an artist originally from Somerset and who works out of an attic in Manchester, surrounded by invisible cats. I’m interested in magick, old cars, Goth stuff, books, comics, history, literature, pretty much anything! I was born in the ’60s and grew up through the ’70s and ’80s and once drew a cartoon vampire duck for a living.

Ian: So the vampire duck has to be Count Duckula, surely. For the fondly remembered, by many, Cosgrove Hall. Was that fun to do?

Aly: The ‘vampire duck’ was indeed Count Duckula for Cosgrove Hall Animation. Duckula came along after we’d finished the animated version of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, as a spin-off from Danger Mouse. Duckula was great fun: being surrounded by incredibly talented and dedicated creatives is always a fantastic environment in which to learn and experiment.

Myself and friends would watch a lot of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, and attempt to work out how they achieved results, and emulate them ourselves. Exciting times!

Ian: What was your first comic, or comic-style illustration work?

Aly: My first comic was one I drew with my sister when I was a kid. It involved a family of friendly sharks drawn on WHSmith cartridge paper with HB pencil and crayons, and held together with lots of Sellotape and Pritt stick. I did some comic work at college based upon three Ray Bradbury short stories. These were drawn in Rapidograph on CS10 board (how I miss CS10!)

I also discovered Moëbius (Jean Giraud) through the pages of Heavy Metal, and attempted a pastiche of The Airtight Garage, centering on a female character, of course. However, any comic aspirations were put on hold when I left college, as I was presented with a chance to become a traditional animator.

Opportunities arrive when they do, and being able to handle a pencil, that was me for the next 15 years.

Otherwise, apart from a one-off strip for OINK!, my first published comic was The Shadow Glass. I have an interesting relationship with it: there’s so much I could have done better, but I am proud of it as a complete entity. First-books are often written to work through a writer’s demons, intentionally or not — this one just happened to get published. I wrote a sequel

I’m much happier with — it’s tighter, with stronger characters, and romps along like the adventure I wanted it to be. One day I’ll finish it…

Ian: OINK! comic might take some explaining to U.S. readers.

How did that come about?

Aly: Yes, an explanation would involve a lengthy discussion on the history of relatively underground U.K. comics, so I won’t venture there other than to say it was “silly anarchic pig-oriented fun.” It attracted a lot of U.K. comic talent, including a certain Charlie Brooker, now probably best known as the creator of Black Mirror. That gig arose because a friend (Andy Roper) at Cosgrove Hall, was a regular contributor to the comic. He suggested I have a go and I was given a single script involving dogs joining up to the Army.

Ian: You’ve chosen (I assume) to take the independent, creator-owned route with your comics work. Was that always your aim? Have you had contacts with well-known comics publishers at all?

Aly: Yes, it’s a choice. The Shadow Glass was published by Dark Horse, a contact that came about by making the effort to be in the right place at the right time: Amherst in the U.S.A. This was for a week-long art course where an editor for Dark Horse happened to be one of the tutors.

The Shadow Glass was creator-owned, but ended up being cancelled after three (of six) issues. I never got the full details, but, as with most of these things, it seemed to come down to money. Dark Horse continued with publishing the trade paperback collection, but it made me realize putting personal projects in the hands of those who have no investment beyond financial, does the independent creator no favor if the wind changes.

That said, I’m more than happy to work with major publishers, but I ain’t as young as I used to be and I like my independence. It’s taken me a while to get to a position where I can completely concentrate on my own storytelling. So, in response to your question, “Yes!” Now I publish myself. I write, I draw, I letter, and when I color I do that also. My partner, a novelist herself and writer/teacher, edits and provides advice for me.

However, in the end, if no one was publishing, I’d still be doing it anyway. I’ve found my calling and I’m sticking with it.

Ian: Both A Trick of the Light and The Kissing Gate are set in the past. In the case of The Kissing Gate across different time periods in the same story. What is the attraction of the past as a setting? Does it give greater freedom? How much extra research do you have to do to get the clothes and cars right?

Aly: An interesting question and I’ll be honest: I like the past.

The past provides its own limitations; restrictions, if you like, and to some extent tempers and disciplines me. The past is a place of reflection, hindsight, and also of loss, a sentiment that features in my stories. But, yes, the clothes and, yes, the cars, of course! I love old cars and researching models to get a year-appropriate detail is just fun. I recently discovered the Robert Opie books, which are scrapbooks of everyday items from each decade of the 20th century: essential if you just want authentic background objects for any project really.

A Trick of the Light, The Kissing Gate TM & ©Aly Fell.

But when I have a story in my head, it tends to decide era for itself. I suppose the exception might be A Trick of the Light.

The dream that sparked it was set in the present day, but the atmosphere felt older — more 1970s’ TV/comics. So, I ignored the dreamed era and went with my instinct. My mother had just died, so, as is the way, I was looking back at the past, and an early ’70s childhood — the way people, places looked though eyes of the period, yet still seeing them with a kind of blurry distance.

Ian: The thoughtful, and thought-provoking, ghost story has a long tradition in British literature, including E. Nesbit, who you credit as an inspiration. Did you also read the likes of M.R. James, Arthur Machen, etc.? There is also a bit of a feel of some of Michael Powell’s films, like A Canterbury Tale or I Know Where I’m Going… or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Aly: I’ve read both M.R. James and Machen, et al., but as direct influences here, no. However, I try to wear my heart on my sleeve when pointing at inspiration, so Powell/Pressburger could as easily fit in with my inspiration as does E. Nesbit, Antonia Barber, etc. In the same way that Quatermass, Timeslip, etc. were grist to the mill for A Trick of the Light. But seeing as you mention Michael Powell, one of my favorite films, and one I’ve grown to love more over the years is The Red Shoes.

But, in all honesty, inspiration is sometimes an unhelpful word. It can provide a loose template for the reader when coming into a story, a category, or box, so they know what they’re going to get. But maybe they shouldn’t know…? There’s a word I discovered a few years ago, which has taken on a life of its own these days, which I rather like: hauntology. It resonated with me, for a while, and I still like it but, as with folk horror, it becomes easy for rules to evolve around it, and those rules become tropes and patterns and, before you know it, you’ve created a box around you.

Alan Moore said: “It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience; they would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.” I often find myself thinking of Mr. Moore’s comments on writing… But for myself… I like to think people might come across my stories and say, “Oh, I didn’t expect to like that!”

Ian: Both books have same-sex relationships represented quite centrally and in a very matter-of-fact way. Is that the way the stories developed or was that always something you wanted to include?

Aly: Yes, they do, and you’ve answered the question: “a matter-of-fact way,” so thank you. I center women because, why not? It’s not a contrivance, I just start writing my stories from the point of view of women. This isn’t about tokenism; these are the stories I want to tell and these are the characters who tell them. It’d be great if people just saw a relationship.

Ian: Given the style, format and length of your books, have you had any interest from European publishers for translated editions?

Aly: The Kissing Gate has been published in German by Skinless Crow, but that has been the only translation of my two recent books, including A Trick of the Light. Although there have been other tentative inquiries. The Shadow Glass, for Dark Horse, was published in French, Russian, and Dutch. But, yes, the European Bande Dessinée format is my preference, probCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

ably as a result of growing up on Tintin, Lucky Luke, and Asterix. Also, if I’m honest, the format of U.K. comics, as well, which were also larger than your typical Batman or Spider-Man. Ian: Does the crowdfunding model work well for publishing these projects? Have you encountered any surprises, good or bad, in doing it this way?

Aly: My personal experience of crowdfunding has been very positive, certainly for these two (soon to be three) books: A Trick of the Light and The Kissing Gate. I’m incredibly grateful people are prepared to back them. Particularly as I like larger-format comics, more reminiscent of Bande Dessinée, and adore the Tintin format. As a result, the books tend to be heavier to post and more expensive to produce. But it seems folk understand that, and that means a great deal to me!

The intention is for four stories that began with A Trick of the Light, and are loosely based around seasons. They can all be read independently, but thematically will sit together. I hope that those who read the first stay until the last story, and thank you to those who have already got this far.

Ian: Can you give any hints about what and when the next book will be?

Aly: Of course and thank you for asking! It’s the third of “the four” I mentioned earlier and continues the same themes.

There’s no final title as yet and, at the moment, it’s longer than A Trick of the Light and The Kissing Gate, heading more toward graphic “novel”territory. It takes “inspiration” from 1920s girls story-comics and as with A Trick of the Light, the otherworldly supernatural vibe of 1960s/70s girls comics. It’ll be more of a mystery than the others and will be set in Devon just before Christmas 1924. As it’s longer, I’ve taken more of an opportunity to explore character, something I am enjoying enormously! As for a release date: well, it’s almost completely roughed out now, after which begins the process of finishing the line-art, so late 2024 with any luck!

Ian: Thank you, Aly. All the best for future projects.

Above: Aly Fell’s exquisite artistry and storytelling graces his ’70s-based saga, A Trick of the Light [’22], a gorgeous “love letter” to Brit girls’ comics — says critic Frank Plowright. Below: Fell’s follow-up is the lovingly rendered The Kissing Gate [’23], which received even higher praise from Plowright!

IAN MILLSTED is a Bristolbased writer and teacher in the United Kingdom.

11

real world comix

McCarthy’s in Like Errol

The first portion of our profile of the eclectic CARtoons, Mattel, and underground comix artist This page: Clockwise from bottom is Mitzi and Errol McCarthy; He-Man art detail by E.M.; and his self-promotional art.

[Editor’s Note: Ever since encountering his lovingly rendered Blackhawks homage in Slow Death #7 [Winter ’76–77] — reprinted, with his generous permission, in full this issue — I’ve been dying to find out who was the artist of that fantastic, brilliantly drawn, and wordless story. In discovering it was a Los Angelesborn cartoonist named Errol McCarthy, way better recognized in the realm of He-Man, Master of the Universe fandom and by aficionados of CARtoons magazine, I just had to get to know him better, and to share as much as I could of his lushly inked work with readers! I’m happy to boast that the only comics short story I’ve ever scripted was visualized by Errol, in Slow Death Zero, so I’m pleased as punch to focus on the man, a friendly as hell, terrific guy, in this here mag. The following is derived from a phone interview conducted by me, autobiographical sketches, a newspaper article, and other Q+A’s. — Y.E.] Yeah, sure, the guy spent his formative years in the prairie hinterlands of Billings, Montana, from ages 11 to 22, but Errol Dean McCarthy, born in the City of Angels, on April 8, 1937, has always had Southern California coursing through the veins of his creativity (probably of a 20w viscosity!). In high school, we’d have probably called him a Motorhead but, in truth, the gent proves to be way, way more!

Errol’s earliest years were not easy. He never knew his father and, as he told me, “My mother liked to be married a lot, so that we moved around a lot… It was kind of unstable, but I had loving grandparents and loving foster parents. So, overall, it was very

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photo courtesy of Errol McCarthy He-Man TM & © Mattel. Truly Amazing Art © Errol D. McCarthy.

12

good. I also have a very fine sister, who lives now up in the state of Washington.”

Billings, he explained, “It was a very nice place. It’s the largest city in Montana. I think it’s got a population of 90,000 now, and it was 40–45,000 then. And it’s beautifully located… but the winters are like… forget it! Any place that gets to 40 below in the winter — no, thanks!” But, even before arriving in Big Sky Country, Errol was drawing. “When I was about nine or 10, it was just fun inventing my own stories and drawing them instead of doing schoolwork.

And I still have most of the drawings, in fact. It was great.”

And, in the secure care of his “very old-fashioned, very wonderful” grandparents, Errol discovered a lifelong appreciation as a youngster. “I’d always got into comics. I mean, E.C. Comics and all that stuff… I always loved comic books… And it was the art. I mean, E.C. had the best artists and the best writers, I think, to this day. Wally Wood, Jack Davis, John Severin.” And the stories themselves? “Some of them are still shocking. I mean, what would you think if your kid came home with an E.C. comic book…?”

Did his grandparents catch sight of his favored comic books?

“They were not interested in that stuff. In fact, the only negative experience I had was a friend of mine borrowed some of my E.C.s, and they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and his mother took the comics out and burned them. And, looking back, I guess I don’t blame her. I was a little pissed off, but they were just comic books.

They were a dime and I could get another one. So they didn’t really have any value, at that time. But they are still impressive, to this day, to look at that work. Especially Wally Wood… my God, he put a lot into that. And they all did. They really did.”

The fledgling artist enjoyed high school and, like so many males of his generation, he developed a love for things mechani-

The Garden Shed of Fear © Errol D. McCarthy. Hogg Ryder and Tanya TM & © the respective copyright holder.

cal. “As a teen, I developed an interest in anything with an engine.

This included airplanes, sports cars, and motorcycles. My high school buddies had real hot rods, and many, many evenings were spent cruising and occasionally — actually! — picking up girls, American Graffiti-style!

“The closest thing to a real hot rod that I had was a bored-out ’48 Chevy coupe with a very loud muffler. Once, while writing a ticket, a cop said, ‘It was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard!’ Plans to install a ’50 Olds V-8 with a Lincoln Zephyr tranny remained just plans. Drawing was a different thing, since, if I can draw, I reasoned, I can create anything! I became the school cartoonist and study hall was all about drawing cars and airplanes.”

His aspirations during those years? “Young men are going in all directions,” he said. “I also wanted to be a Marine, which is really stupid, and a pilot. So I was an aviation cadet for a very short time and it finally occurred to me… I was in junior college, and one of my art instructor’s former students came in with some of his work, and he had gone to Art Center [College of Design], and this poor guy looked like he had just gotten out of a prison camp. He somehow that inspired me. ‘Oh, I want to do that!’ So I did.”

TO LIVE AND DRAW IN L.A. Until it moved to Pasadena in 1976, the prestigious Art Center was located in downtown Los Angeles. “At the time,” Errol said, “it was the finest commercial art school there was. And I disappointed them because I turned out to be a cartoonist.”

He had, Errol confessed, became a mildly subversive influence at the institution. “There was a funny thing that happened at Art Center, which is kind of a lah-de-dah art school,” said he. “One day, we’re all out in the atrium having lunch, and another classmate and I started talking about comic books, and pretty soon there was a group around us. We felt conspiratorial because this was, like, 1965, and comics were so out of [favor] back then. But it was great, man. And comics stuck around and came back, didn’t they?”

And it was at Art Center where Errol would meet his future bride, Margaret May Hakes — Mitzi — who expressed a tolerance for his passions. “Our first date,” he explained, “was a hot rod show and a trip to a comic book stand. She passed the ‘test’ and we were married.” That “test,” he later elaborated, “Well, that she saw what I was really interested in and accepted me for what it was.” The two were wed on September 23, 1967. He proudly declared, “I married a very fine artist. I mean, she’s really terrific.”

In 1968, Errol graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree, and he shared in a jocular biographical sketch he scribed, “My first art job out of school was as an illustrator at McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft. It was 1969 and the new three-engine DC-10 had just come out. I quickly found out that my real talent was as a cartoonist — not a lah-de-dah illustrator! After that, I did posters and funny stuff. I had failed Art Center School! Boo-hoo-hoo, etc.”

The artist continued, “My first freelance comic-book job came from answering a want ad in the [Los Angeles Times, in 1971]. It was a one-shot [magazine] entitled Car Nuts. It was published by Quentin Miller, who had been a CARtoons regular. That job, plus an underground comic story, led to Petersen Publishing, which had three comic books at the time: CARtoons, Hot Rod Cartoons, and Cycletoons. I soon had work in all three, plus my full-time job as an illustrator at McDonnell-Douglas.”

(Robert Petersen, who had launched Hot Rod magazine in 1948, spun off CARtoons in 1959, a comics/cartoon magazine started by Pete Millar and Carl Kohler, launching a genre. Millar later described CARtoons as dealing “mostly in humor (albeit often politically motivated or peppered with insider jabs).”

CARtoons lasted 182 issues, plus specials, folding in 1991.)

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

CARtoons CARTOONIST Around the end of summer 1973, The Daily Chronicle, of Centralia, Washington, later noted, “Errol McCarty and his artist-wife, Mitzi, retreated from the ‘rat race’ of California to the glory of Pacific Northwest living… They chose Centralia because Centralia College offered them an opportunity for supplemental employment.”

Errol took the position of part-time commercial art instructor, teaching illustration, lettering, and photography, as well as giving a night course in painting. Mitzi taught evening craft instruction, including weaving, and, as if the couple wasn’t busy enough, in between those responsibilities and Errol meeting his freelance obligations for Petersen, husband and wife built a “picturesque home overlooking Offut Lake.”

Errol explained, “We were busy all the time. We were teaching school in a small town in western Washington, near Olympia, and building a house, which is crazy. But we were young and dumb. We were literally doing it ourselves! I still can’t believe how busy we were.”

Amidst all that exhausting labor, the cartoonist was also having a blast with his Petersen comics accounts.

“My favorite work in CARtoons was probably the posters, but I enjoyed it all and wrote nearly everything that I did. It was also wonderful working with the talented editors of the three books — Jack Bonestell, George (Pappy) Lemmons, and especially Dennis Ellefson (who later worked with me at Mattel.)”

The artist also said, “It was great fun and I can hardly believe I got paid for it! They even let me write some of it.”

Above: We’ll show more of Errol’s comic book cover pastiches like this one next ish! Below: Hogg Ryder and Tanya

by Errol McCarthy.

13

14

DRILLING DOWN INTO THE UNDERGROUND It wasn’t until after Errol put together his first underground comix, when he met Harvey Kurtzman, quite possibly at the 1977 All-American Comic Con,* in Portland, Oregon, in 1977. The socalled “father-in-law” of the genre was held in high esteem. “I got to meet him,” Errol explained, “and I’d always been a Harvey Kurtzman fan. In fact, I even liked his drawing, though a lot of people didn’t, as he was the brains behind that whole MAD thing.”

And though he was a few years older than the Baby Boomer generation of hippies, Errol was, overall, drawn to the art in many of the undergrounds. “That was at least half of it with me,” Errol admitted. “I mean, artists like Rand Holmes… my God! That guy was marvelous, he really was. He did ‘Harold Hedd.’ In fact, I put Harold Hedd and his buddy in one of my cartoon stories, in the background. It’s a damn shame Rand died a long time ago. What a loss.” (In the “Full-Dress Farley” strip, “Re-Bopped,” Hedd and his cousin Elmo are seen, hands in pockets, watching Farley, bedecked in a beret and reading a book of Zen, ride his brand-new “Like, reel cool, like” chopper bike past them on the city street.)

*Errol isn’t 100% sure that was the event, but Ye Ed bets it’s probable.

Photos, juvenile art courtesy of Errol McCarthy. CARtoons TM & © the respective copyright holder.

This page: Clockwise from above is tyke on a trike Errol McCarthy on his first set of wheels, 1943; a revamped CARtoons magazine, now edited by pal cartoonist Dennis Ellefson, had Errol produce a cover for #85 [Sept. ’75]; high school art; and his 1953 Billings High School sophomore class portrait.

Errol’s work in CARtoons, Cycletoons, and Hot Rod Cartoons appeared for about a decade, and he worked on not only one-offs but also ongoing features, including his own creation, “Full Dress Farley,” starring a middle-aged motorcyclist, and a one-page gag series headlined, “…And we don’t have to tell you what happened next!” depicting unsuspecting motor enthusiasts mere seconds before some sorry fate. And there was “The Adventures of Hogg Ryder,” co-starring girlfriend Tanya and, on occasion, the grizzled Old Poop. (Hogg Ryder was a creation of editor Dennis Ellefson.)

The cartoonist’s artistry is on full display in his Petersen work, with his bold, lush inkline gracing the page via his expert brush work. And so, too, is the man’s kinetic figure work, with characters virtually leaping off the page with vaudevillian pratfalls and exaggerated gestures a’plenty, not to mention their comedic facial expressions. Foremost, Errol is an entertainer.

But his lack of celebrity status is mostly due to the fact the “funny books,” an apt moniker Pete Millar gave to the CARtoons genre — which, besides CYCLEtoons and Hot Rod Cartoons, included mags such as SKItoons, SURFtoons, Choppertoons, and the Millar Publication, Drag Cartoons — did not share the same readership as super-hero or underground comics, but rather an audience all its own. (It is a fascinating corner of comics history, sad to say, that has been woefully under-studied and sparsely documented.)

Millar called straight hot rod titles (such as those mostly published by Charlton from the ’50s–70s), “adventure” comics, which are “more illustrative than cartooning.” Of the CARtoons “funny books,“ Millar explained, “Like the adventure artists, the cartoonists and writers were true professionals and knew their subject matter, and at the same time, they were funny!” (Among the greats to have excelled in this genre were Alex Toth, Robert Williams, Rick Griffin, William Stout, and, of course, Errol Dean McCarthy.)

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photos courtesy of Errol McCarthy. Real World Comix TM & © Errol McCarthy.

The influence of illustrative comix artists Holmes, Robert Williams, Greg Irons, Richard Corben, etc., combined with a deep appreciation for E.C. stalwarts Wally Wood, Reed Crandall, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, and others, permeate Errol’s work, which is best viewed to full effect in the underground comix one-shot he self-published in 1974, as part of his master’s thesis at California State University-Los Angeles. Real World Comix, was an 8½” x 11”, 36-page, self-cover, perfect-bound edition of 300 copies, printed in his hometown of Centralia, Washington.

“I liked underground comix,” said Errol, “so I just wanted to do my own underground comic the way I wanted to do it, and include all these stories that were right on the edge. In fact, to this day, I’m still surprised that it got through, and I proved it because it’s semi-pornographic. Especially in those days… we were lot more uptight in those days.”

Behind its cover commenting on the struggle endured by college students in striving for “Fort Success” (with a self-caricature call-out of the artist pulling at his neck collar and muttering, “*Choke* M-maybe it’s not too late to get my Ph.D.”), the contents — all drawn in different styles* — included a four-page “Billings, Montana, Comix,” comedic reminiscence about cruising for girls á là American Graffiti in the ’50s; a remarkably pornographic take mixing fairy tales and mythological creatures in a young girl’s sex fantasy nine-pager; centerspread of Betty Boop as dominatrix “Betty Boot”; a talky, four-page farce of heroic “Captain Industry,” millionaire oligarch, versus villainous labor organizer Boris Anarchski, drawn in atypical thick-marker style; “Kreative Katharisis Kut-Ups,” a “do your own comix” feature for reactionaries to work out their violent impulses by clipping Errol’s handy figures, etc., to compose one’s own “fantastic flagellating freakout”; a handful of single-page gags; and, the pièce de résistance of Real World Comix, a seven-page homage to a Quality Comics aviation star.

Errol’s love of comics: “To Reed Crandall, whose artistry brought Blackhawk to life… and to Blackhawk, who deserved a merciful end long ago.” As stated in the editor’s introduction above, the piece is exquisitely rendered, with Errol’s brushwork in top form, as perfect an example of sequential art storytelling as can be imagined.

Curiously, the last issue of Blackhawk prior to Errol’s effort had appeared in the summer of 1968, six years beforehand. But, somewhere along the way, despite being tremendously preoccupied with building a home and instructing college students, “I got a couple of offensive Blackhawk issues, and they were disappointing because [the artists] don’t know how to draw airplanes or any of that stuff.”

He continued, “I kind of kept track of these things. I knew the character of Blackhawk and his buddies, but they had devolved… the publisher kept changing them, ‘modernizing’ them, and bringing them ‘up to date.’ And I thought they had just destroyed the original idea of Blackhawk, and I thought it was time the team should just go away, and that’s what I did. I killed them off in my story because [DC Comics] had ‘modernized’ them.”

As for the dedication, Errol explained, “I remember Reed Crandall from when I was a kid. He was the best. Nobody was better than Reed Crandall. And he remained the best, too, didn’t he?”

When this writer first encountered the wordless story as a 16-year-old, I had interpreted it as an anti-war statement, given the decidedly radical comix title it was reprinted in, with the story being an allusion to the Blackhawks remaining militarized well after World War II, attired as they were in black, fascist-like uniforms.

Errol said my observation was not totally misguided. “Well, it wasn’t all wrong. That was probably in there someplace, but I wanted to see the character remain unchanged and not be modernized.

I wanted it to remain in the ’40s, basically. It was as simple as that.”

As Jim Steranko wrote in his History of Comics 2 [’72], “It was time to retire. The Blackhawks had meted out their brand of justice for 28 years. They outlasted every other Quality hero. In fact, they had outlasted every hero — thousands, perhaps — with the exception of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. It was time to turn out the landing lights on Blackhawk Island — forever.”

This page: Clockwise from inset left is cover art of the comic book component of his Cal State - L.A. master’s thesis; Errol, approximately 20 years old, as an U.S. Air Force cadet posing with his grandparents, in 1957; Errol’s yearbook portrait from his enrollment at Montana State University, in 1959; and “Errol McCool” and his Honda CB 92 motorcycle, in 1965, during his time at the Art Center in L.A.

THE MERCIFUL END Reprinted in the pages following this feature, the tale depicts the final, silent moments in Blackhawk’s life as the wounded pilot crashes his damaged Grumman XF5F Skyrocket plane into the sea. A dedication and comment follow the vignette, confirming * “I did everything [in Real World Comix],” Errol explained, “so I wanted everything in there to look like others besides me did it, not just one person. I wanted as much variety as I could put in it.”

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

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Above: Cover sheet to Errol’s 1975 graduate school thesis. Note the subject! Inset right: First of E.M.’s laff-fest in Apple Pie #5 [Nov. ’75]: Next seven pages: With the gracious permission of Errol McCarthy, we re-present his Blackhawk homage, published in Real World Comix [’74] and reprinted in Slow Death #7 [Winter ’77] (though the page opposite did not appear in SD).

Right: Drake also created the X-Men character, Havok, seen here as redesigned by Neal Adams.

Explaining the reason for pursuing a graduate diploma, Errol said, “I had to get a master’s degree to be a teacher in Washington state, and that’s the reason I went to graduate school. That was a requirement.” It is telling that the cartoonist produced a three-page full-color story that satirized higher learning, using the cover of the comic book he produced for Cal State L.A. as jumping off point.

That item reprinted from Real World Comix was included in a second-rate National Lampoon knock-off humor magazine, which re-purposed the RWC cover as opener for a (decidedly politically incorrect) three-pager the magazine solicited from the artist. Titled “Two Fisted Frontline Racist Recession Graduation,” Errol’s strip was published in Apple Pie #5 [Nov. ’75].

In 1975, CARtoons revamped their format, replacing editor Jack Bonestell with Dennis Ellefson, himself a cartoonist, giving credit to artists on the table of contents, and adding features for the “new direction” edition. Errol, who contributed cover art for the September 1975 issue, stayed on for the ride until 1981.

In the August 9, 1975, edition of The Daily Chronicle, Errol was the subject of a feature article headlined, “Centralia area man successful cartoonist,” with staff reporter Marilee Oliver revealing, “In his spare moments, McCarthy enjoys delving into aviation history and building paper models of airplanes and trains. In the future, he says, he would like to branch out into short story writing because he already develops plots similar to those used in short stories for his longer cartoons.” (Somewhere in all this, as if the dude wasn’t busy enough, Errol also took on the odd Hustler and Road and Track assignments.)

The reporter also described the idyllic setting of the couple’s self-built home. “The McCarthys are now settled in a picturesque home… They fully enjoy lakefront living and spend many evenings on their dock, where they can admire the beauty and peace of their locale. One of their favorite pastimes is to sail, canoe, or row around the lake on moonlit nights.” But, soon enough, Southern California (and a certain “Master of the Universe,” as well as a quartet of terrapin teens) beckoned the sweethearts back to the Golden State…

[Next issue, we will feature part two of our fascinating career retrospective of the cartoonist, plus showcase a generous, groovy, and gorgeous gallery o’ gnarly McCarthy artwork! — Y.E.] TO BE CONCLUDED

16

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

“Two Fisted Frontline Racist Recession Graduation” ©Errol McCarthy. Photo and thesis courtesy of Errol McCarthy.

Below: Mitzi, Errol, and feline Twerble, Christmas 1980.

COMIX ’N’ COLLEGE The back cover of Real World Comix gave a nod to the patience of wife Mitzi and to “the enthusiasm of Carrol Hill, who owns and operates Photo Graphics,” an offset printer. Of the 300 copies, Errol shared, “I gave most of ‘em away. In fact, maybe all of them.” And today the artist is contemplating a print-on-demand edition, with a neat bonus: a 3-D story.

Fortuitously, the artist said, “I was lucky to retain much of my art due to the fact that I had a copy camera and sent in photo stats of the art [to publishers] rather than the originals.”

With that ability in mind, Errol sent copies of Real World Comix to underground comix publishers, including Ron Turner at Last Gasp of San Francisco and Denis Kitchen of Kitchen Sink, both of whom opted to reprint material. As mentioned, Slow Death #7 featured the Blackhawk homage and Kitchen’s Bizarre Sex #4 [Oct. ’75], with its outrageous Empire-State-Building-as-phallus-enteringgiant-vagina cover, included Errol’s randy “Goldenlocks,” a horny parody of the children’s fairy tale, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” which substituted over-sexed centaurs for the bruin trio. (The next ish, Bizarre Sex #5 [Oct. ’76], featured an illustration by Errol for its centerspread, which depicted nude female motorcyclists.)

Real World Comix had actually been produced as partial requirement for a master’s degree in illustration, which he had submitted along with a written thesis for graduate school at the California State University at Los Angeles. His 58-page “Comix — An Analysis and Reason for Being of the ‘Underground’ Comic Book” thesis was submitted in February 1975. Its conclusion? “The underground comic book, or comix, as it stands today, is a recognized art and literary form, possibly to the chagrin of its creators and certainly to its detractors.”

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NOW IN FULL-COLOR WITH BONUS PAGES! In 1978, DC Comics launched a line-wide expansion known as “The DC Explosion,” but pulled the plug weeks later, cancelling titles and leaving dozens of completed comic book stories unpublished. Now, that notorious “DC Implosion” is examined with an exhaustive oral history from JENETTE KAHN, PAUL LEVITZ, LEN WEIN, MIKE GOLD, AL MILGROM, and other DC creators of the time, plus commentary by other top pros, examining how it changed the landscape of comics forever! This new EXPANDED EDITION of the Eisner Award-nominated book explodes in full cover for the first time, with extra coverage of LOST 1970S DC PROJECTS like Ninja the Invisible and an adaptation of “The Wiz,” Jim Starlin’s unaltered cover art for BATMAN FAMILY #21, content meant for cancelled Marvel titles such as Godzilla and Ms. Marvel, and more! NOW SHIPPING! (144-page FULL-COLOR SOFTCOVER) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $10.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-124-0

MARVEL COMICS In The EARLY 1960s

by PIERRE COMTOIS

This new volume in the ongoing “MARVEL COMICS IN THE...” series takes you all the way back to that company’s legendary beginnings, when gunfighters traveled the West and monsters roamed the Earth! Featured here are the best of those stories not covered previously, completing issue-by-issue reviews of EVERY MARVEL COMIC OF NOTE FROM 1961-1965!

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darrick patrick’s ten questions

Gratitude is Kyle’s Attitude

From Rick and Morty to Pine and Merrimac, writer Kyle Starks appreciates the journey thus far

by DARRICK PATRICK [Kyle Starks is professional writer and artist whose work includes Rick and Morty, I Hate This Place, Sexcastle, Marvel Unleashed, Rock Candy Mountain, Assassin Nation, Peacemaker Tries Hard!, Mars Attacks, and more. With three Eisner nominations to his credit, the Indiana-based creator’s project released in 2024 was Pine and Merrimac with artist Fran Galán from BOOM! Studios. — Darrick.]

Above: Official titled From the World of Minor Threats: Barfly, here’s the variant cover of #1 [July ’24] by Ryan Browne, a spin-off series written by Kyle Starks.

Inset right: Rock Candy Mountain [June ’24], which collects the Kyle Starks written-and-drawn Image mini-series about the world’s toughest hobo’s quest. Cover art

by Starks’ best friend, Matt Kindt.

Below: The man of the issue in interrogator Darrick Patrick’s hot seat, writer Kyle Starks!

individuals looking to make a career with their writing abilities?

Kyle: Writing in comics is probably the most challenging path into comics. I was and am very lucky that I can draw my books, for better or worse, so that they can really exist. The advice I give is to always make the thing you wish existed in the world, that way you’ll always love the end product. You’ll work hard to make it that thing — and, because you want it to exist, you will do your best to make sure that comes true. Also, good storytelling advice is that: the difference always, between an amateur and a professional, is that pros finish the story.

Darrick: How do you spend your time on a typical workday?

Kyle: It depends on if I’m writing or drawing. I’m assuming this is geared toward my writing — and the boring answer is a lot of most days is just thinking about the story for me. I am a “measure twice, cut once” guy as much as possible. I like to have my beats, my character moments, all those things in a row before I get to typing. I work from home, which has a lot of built-in distractions. So, generally, my most productive days are when I relocate and really put my head down. A script can usually be written in a couple of days, so most of my time is just considering all options, making decisions, thinking about if the story and the characters are rewarding enough, or if there is a better way. Honestly, it’s a fair amount of just staring at a wall for me and making notes.

Darrick: For new readers not familiar with your work, what are some projects that you would recommend to begin with? #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photo courtesy of Kevin Starks. Barfly TM & © Patton Oswalt. Rock Candy Mountain TM & © Kevin Starks.

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Darrick Patrick: What was the path that led you to working professionally within comic books?

Kyle Starks: I tripped and fell in! Ha! I know no one likes to hear that. I had my first kid when I was 31 and was about to have another. I realized I’d never have time to myself again so, before that second kid, I made a list of things I wanted to do. I made a bucket list. First on that list was to finish a comic. I don’t remember anything else on that list because I did finish a comic, and I found that I really loved the process of telling stories, and I was enjoying the stories I was telling. I posted twice a week on the web to keep myself accountable. I didn’t promote it or tell anyone about it but somehow it got discovered and other people liked it. So I did a Kickstarter and started going to conventions and that led to me doing another book (Sexcastle), which got discovered at a convention by Matt Fraction. He put me in touch with Image and, not soon after that, I got the Rick and Morty series, which I worked on for nearly five years. I went full-time in comics at 40 and never planned for it. I just really like doing it. And, for what it’s worth, we optioned that first never-published book in 2023. Life’s crazy.

Darrick: Who are some of the people that greatly influenced you while growing up?

Kyle: I would say my family, most likely, since they never discouraged me from whatever pursuit I was undertaking or what media I was consuming. Also, in that regard, I started working at 14 at a video rental store that also sold used books, comics, CDs, and baseball cards.

Having free access to all those things was surely formative.

If I wanted to watch a movie, I could. If I wanted to read a book or comic, I could. It was a smorgasbord of stories and that was probably the biggest influence on me.

Darrick: Do you have any words of advice for other

Peacemaker Tries Hard! TM & © DC Comics. Pine and Merrimac TM & © Kevin Starks and Fran Galán.

Kyle: I would say that if you’re a Big Two super-hero-type fan, I’d start with Peacemaker Tries Hard! There’s a reason they asked me to do that book and that’s because that type of story is really in my wheelhouse: a funny, big action spectacle but with heart. If you like Peacemaker, you’ll like all my stuff. Which I think is probably true of any one thing I’ve done. My first two Eisner nominations are probably great litmus tests for if you’d like my work: Sexcastle, the greatest ’80s action movie never made, and Rock Candy Mountain, a Kung Fu Hobo epic that was recently recollected into a new trade paperback. I think I have a pretty distinctive voice in comics. Honestly, if you liked any of my books, I think you’d like another. And I’ve bounced through a ton of genres, so there are a lot of options that are probably taste specific.

Darrick: Who are a few of the people in the comics industry that you hold a high deal of respect for?

Kyle: Geez, a tough one. I mean, it feels like “everyone” is the answer…? To make it at all in this industry, at any level, is a huge achievement and worthy of the highest respect.

I know you want real answers, though, so let’s start with Matt Kindt. He is one of my best friends and I think an incredibly smart storyteller and businessman. I really respect his acumen and resourcefulness.

Matt Fraction is, in many ways, responsible for my career, so I owe a lot to him. I also think he’s had an unbelievable career, is an incredible talent, and I just respect that a lot. And, to be willing to help someone you don’t know because you liked one thing you saw, I really envy that sort of graciousness and unselfishness.

I never skip an Ed Brubaker comic. They’re always top-notch.

I think James Tynion IV is the Stephen King of comics.

Naoki Urasawa is, in my mind, maybe the best to ever do it

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

and doesn’t get enough credit, at least in the direct market.

I just did a book with Fran Galán called Pine and Merrimac from BOOM! and I was just constantly blown away by his skill, what he brought to the story, and his decision-making with storytelling. Really incredible stuff and I hope to work with him again and often.

Darrick: Outside of creating stories, what are your other interests?

Kyle: I honestly spend the majority of my time thinking about stories or actively trying to shut my brain off from constantly working. I probably play too many video games and I do love the NBA. Darrick: What is your oldest memory?

Kyle: I have a vague memory of crawling out of my crib, but I’ve also sort of always been suspicious of that as a false memory. If I think hard enough, I can vaguely recall playing with toys in front of the television as a very small child. Nothing very exciting, I don’t think.

Darrick: Tell us something about you that most people don’t know.

Kyle: I think that I’m pretty open book about my interests and my life. I’ve never been one to keep secrets, so I don’t know what the answer here is that could also be interesting at all. Oh wait, I have one! I wrote a Dr. Pepper comic a few years back that was handed out at SDCC. I always thought it was never handed out, but apparently they handed out 3,500 copies in four hours. I made that with Luca Claretti on art, who was amazing. Most people don’t know that, I don’t think. Also, I think it’s pretty good.

Darrick: If you had super-powers, what would they be?

Kyle: Teleportation, for sure! Traveling is great and necessary, but travel time feels like wasted time.

Above: Cover for Peacemaker Tries Hard! #1 [May ’23].

Below: Cover sans trade dress, Pine and Merrimac #1 [Jan. ’24].

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incoming

Who’s that Guy Behind Zemo?

Our own Miss Miller, Joe Frank, shares thoughts on CBC #36 and A/E’s editor talks Denny O’N Joe Frank

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[Did I hesitate to include the Arnold Drake three-parter prior to the Don McGregor interview, Joe? Actually, no, though I have been making up for lost time as of late, having featured issues devoted to writers Dandy Don, Steve Gerber, and this issue’s Steve Englehart in quick succession. In truth, it was my pal Marc Svensson who encouraged me to publish the in-depth interview with Drake, just as James Romberger had also recently urged me to showcase another unseen conversation, this one with Byron Preiss. In the near future, I’ll be including comprehensive interviews I did back in the ’00s, but left unpublished, including chats with Jay Scott Pike and Sherri Flenniken. I’ll also be devoting space to my 2003 visits to a couple of Florida-based and now-defunct imprints, CrossGen and Future Comics. — Ye Ed.] #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Denny O’Neil photo TM & © the respective copyright holder.

Above: Detail of Tom Palmer’s Captain America painting used as cover for CBC #36. Letter writer Joe Frank wonders who the orange-clad fellow is.

Has any reader a clue?

Left: The “Miss Miller” referenced in our subhead above, refers to an audience member from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, who religiously attended N.Y.C. show tapings, becoming a cultural icon of the TV generation. Below: Denny O’Neil, wearing his politics on his lapel.

CBC #36: another very impressive lineup of coverage. While I certainly had my favorites, all were, at least, interesting. I liked the Dan DiDio history despite being almost totally unfamiliar with his work. Too recent for me. But it was clever how he’d operate; learning at each place and using the position, skills, and associations to move onto something else. He seemed someone willing to try new things and not be confined to a single position or company.

Also amusing: his inclusion in an issue of Famous Monsters as a kid. It’s amusing to see someone get publicity before they get into their field where they, later, become widely known.

It’s like writers and artists appearing in the letters pages years before they go pro. Maybe, to whatever extent, validation and encouragement early on… ?

Lee Marrs? Another I hadn’t followed. Still, of note in that she had needless job hassles with a hint (or more) of unwanted advances at DC. With editors contentious and interfering, that’s the last additional grief anyone should have to deal with. The personnel are there to write and draw stories, not cater to editorial temper tantrums, manipulation, or sexist advances.

Again, as noted in CBC #33, Mary Skrenes’ script appeared under another writer’s name in the example shown here. Hardly, the ideal way to get the best work out of anyone.

In reading the Arnold Drake interview, DC of the previous era was not much better. Editors alienating the talent, cheating the company, etc. Hardly an environment conducive to creativity. I admired Drake’s reaction to the hostile Mort Weisinger: he quickly left. Worked elsewhere or for others. No one’s obligated to be demeaned by a tyrant. Yet, puzzling, several ’50s and ’60s editors, there, were known for that and yet, somehow, they retained their jobs. Maybe civility was of less concern than sales…? Also, there were some editors that Drake actively liked. They weren’t all the same. For him, it was on a case-bycase basis. Even beyond that, he and others had to deal with management. No wonder he eventually jumped ship to Marvel in the late ‘60s.

I laughed when he expressed doubt that Jerry Lewis or Bob Hope had any input or feedback to their comics. I didn’t read them, but would be curious how, if at all, he differentiated the two? And how did Jerry’s book happen to last three years longer? I did smile that he said he worked with the great Mort Drucker for a short while.

As Arnold Drake passed away in 2007, thanks for having the foresight, Jon, to interview him while he was still around. It’s a welcome chunk of history regarding the writer and company that employed him so long. Was the delay in publishing it trepidation about spotlighting a writer rather than an artist prior to the Don McGregor interview? Either side is of interest in exploring comics history. Here, split in thirds, I still have more to look forward to next issue.

The Tom Palmer interview/tribute was a particularly interesting exploration. A lengthy biography and heartfelt sentiments from his co-workers/admirers. I recall his late ’60s inking on

Gene’s Doctor Strange run and, around that same time, Neal’s X-Men artwork. Though short-lived, a radical improvement on both books.

In the article, some people thought he was the best. There really isn’t a way to get everyone aboard with a common consensus. It’s an individual preference. So, when someone is dubbed the best, I interpret it as someone’s personal assessment. That’s fine. It’s just another way of saying, “Such-and-such inker is my personal favorite.” So, with that distinction, I’m sure many who expressed that opinion, here, as well as in the audience, definitely feel that way. I don’t think it does anyone any great favors to dub someone the best. It just invites comparisons to others the reader might prefer. In a sense, it’s like someone being called the fastest gun in the West. It actively involves challenges for the title.

I have no issue with “Peerless,” as a nickname, as it’s alliterative with Palmer. I did like that Tom could easily have stayed in advertising and made considerably more, but loved and had great fun in comics. So it wasn’t just a paycheck; it was a pleasant and creative outlet. Also, in the tributes, it wasn’t just Tom’s artistic style or choices discussed. People noted he was a mentor or caring friend. How many artists, under harsh deadlines, would still choose to be thoughtful and compassionate?

One part of the article made me sad. The photo of him, his children, and the costumed super-heroes was light and jovial until I read that he lost his daughter in recent years. Then it seemed sad; something no parent should have to go through.

Overall, a wonderful exploration and honoring of the man; as an admired artist and a cherished friend of those he worked with. Plus, lots of cool paintings I hadn’t seen. He had a real talent for that.

I almost hesitate to ask being a comic fan for so long: On the cover, behind Baron Zemo, who’s that other masked villain getting scrunched out of the picture? He’s the only one I don’t recognize. I know Cap, Absorbing Man, Tiger Shark, the Fixer, the Wrecker, and Zemo, but who’s the other guy? Or is he simply the stage manager for the group shot, setting up the dramatic back-lighting? If he is an actual criminal, hope he was introduced much later, so I have a decent excuse for not knowing him.

World War 3 Illustrated TM & © World War 3 Illustrated.

Roy Thomas Nice article on Denny O’Neil by Bob Brodsky in CBC #35. Still, I need to correct a few minor points, whether made by Bob himself or in quotes by Denny.

There was a lot more time than “a month,” as Denny puts it, between his interviewing me in St. Louis for the Southeast Missourian, of Cape Girardeau, and his receiving a copy of the Marvel writer’s test (and subsequent job offer). Denny and Ann stopped by my St. Louis County apartment in late spring or so, while school was still going on… while I didn’t send Denny the writer’s test until at least the end of August, perhaps even into September… since there was only a couple of weeks at most between my mailing him the test and his arriving in Manhattan (on a September Jewish holiday) to find much of the city, including Marvel, not open for business.

Denny wasn’t “married and the father of a young son” when he moved to NYC, but he married Ann soon thereafter and their son was born some months afterward.

Denny inherited the dialoguing of the Ditko-plotted-anddrawn “Doctor Strange” 10-pager for Steve’s last two outings, after I had done the previous two. Stan took me off it to write something else… maybe it was Sgt. Fury, but I’m not certain about that without doing a lot of checking. After Ditko left, he finished up a script Stan had started on Bill Everett’s first “Doctor Strange” story, before doing a couple of complete ones on his own.

I was surprised to see Denny indicating that Stan Lee personally fired him. What I do remember is that, whenever it was, production manager Sol Brodsky came to me and told me that Stan had decided Denny had to be let go from the staff job (though he could hang on to a bit of freelance), and that Stan wanted me to do it. I was horrified, not only because I didn’t agree with the decision but because, as I told Sol, “I didn’t hire him, so I shouldn’t be the one to fire him.” Sol sympathized with my point of view, and told me that he would take care of it himself… so I’ve always assumed it was Sol who delivered the bad news to Denny. But perhaps Sol told Stan he was going to do the firing, and Stan elected to do it himself. Actually, that’s what should have been done, in any event. I remember Denny saying on more than one occasion that he was especially upset (angry, really) because the firing even came in the middle of a newspaper strike in N.Y.C.… since that was another profession in which Denny could have sought a job. I sent him to Dick Giordano of Charlton, though, and the rest is history — a history Denny made for himself. I’m not sure, though, if Denny went right away after I suggested it to him, or if he waited a while and tried first for other job opportunities.

Last time I saw Denny was at a con — in England, just before COVID, I think. He was clearly not recovering from the passing of his second wife, Marifran, some months before, and he seemed to have little energy. Somehow I was both surprised and not surprised when he passed away himself, not long afterward. Denny and I had good times together--and we had some issues between us, too — but we were friends of a sort at the end. An end I wish had not come so soon.

[Thank you, Roy! As for any blame for factual inaccuracies, direct them not only to Mr. Brodsky, but also in my direction as I wrote, for better or worse, a good portion of that feature.

Oh, and speaking of Denny: in the piece done last issue on Ken Steinhoff’s Cape Girardeau memories, I mistakenly changed a few instances of Denny friend Arlene’s name to Ann, as I mixed up the two. My apologies, Ken. — Y.E.] COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

Wading Into WW3

Ye Ed’s New York Adventure and His Quixotic Alt Comix Quest This past summer, yours truly was working on the definitive history of Last Gasp of San Francisco — Mind Candy… look for that massive retrospective this year! — and he came across the fact that poster artist Chuck Sperry, who had a book published by the Turners, once co-edited an issue of World War 3 Illustrated, a fascinating title that launched around the same time as RAW and Weirdo, at the start of the Reagan era.

Back during the second incarnation of Comic Book Artist magazine, I was in contact with Peter Kuper, who with childhood pal Seth Tobocman had co-founded the politically radical comics anthology annual, about doing a section of CBA devoted to WW3, which was then still going strong at 35 or so issues. Well, that, along with CBA V.2, fell by the wayside, but that chance encounter with Sperry’s background detail seized upon me an idea. I had already interviewed Tobocman for two hours on my short-lived Subterranean Dispatch podcast, so why not do a Book of Weirdo-type deep dive into the 45-year-old, still-going-strong, still-passionate, Manhattan-based once-a-year publication…?

Now, I have fervently believed that, if just for sheer longevity alone, WW3 is among the most over-looked and deserving-to-be-examined comics anthologies, consistently fearless in its unabashedly progressive outlook, helmed by not just Kuper and Tobocman, but also a dedicated, talented cadre of involved and engaged cartoonists, some who’ve been part of the mag almost as long as those two boyhood pals from Cleveland Heights who started it all.

So it will take a few years to compile an issue-by-issue WW3 account, a book that might be ultimately financed by crowd-sourcing, but I did initiate the project with a September visit with Kuper and Tobocman, which included dinner with Columbia University’s Comics and Cartoon Curator, Karen Green (whose Butler Library includes the most astounding collection of comics-related books — including hardbound compilations of all of my publications! — an effort that started in the mid-’00s, Green tells me, with a pair of books!). The two editors loaded me up with just about every single issue to begin the gargantuan task ahead of me and, in mid-October, I returned to the Lower East Side to attend the WW3 #54 release party, where I hobnobbed with other WW3 contributors, including Tobocman, Sabrina Jones, Fly, Ethan Heitner, Jordan Worley, Larimar Lora, and Nicole Schulman.

Look, I realize my forays into underground and alt comix, like The Book of Weirdo and Mind Candy, might not be for your tastes, but if you enjoy the depth of coverage and are learning hitherto unknown aspects of comics history of conventional work in CBC, maybe give my other tomes a look. I promise the same level of thoroughness and enthusiasm therein! Give me a try, will ya?

Above: Ben Hillman’s devastating cover art adorns World War 3 Illustrated #1 [1980]. Right: Activist cartoonist Sabrina Jones at the WW3 #54 release party, on the Lower East Side, on October 13, 2024.

NOTE: Ye ed is desperate to find the following issues of WW3 #1–4, 10, and 17. Can you help?

If so, please email jonbcooke@aol.com.

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #15

Celebrating 30 years of artist’s artist MARK SCHULTZ, creator of the CADILLACS AND DINOSAURS franchise, with a feature-length, career-spanning interview conducted in Mark’s Pennsylvanian home, examining the early years of struggle, success with Kitchen Sink Press, and hitting it big with a Saturday morning cartoon series. Includes rarely-seen art and fascinating photos from Mark’s amazing and award-winning career.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

6-issue subscriptions: $ 76 US $ 95.70 International

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #21

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #22

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #16 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #18

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #20

A look at 75 years of Archie Comics’ characters and titles, from Archie and his pals ‘n gals to the mighty MLJ heroes of yesteryear and today’s “Dark Circle”! Also: Careerspanning interviews with The Fox’s DEAN HASPIEL and Kevin Keller’s cartoonist DAN PARENT, who both jam on our exclusive cover depicting a face-off between humor and heroes. Plus our usual features, including the hilarious FRED HEMBECK!

Career-spanning discussion with STEVE “THE DUDE” RUDE, as he shares his reallife psychological struggles, the challenges of freelance subsistence, and his creative aspirations. Also: The jungle art of NEAL ADAMS, MARY FLEENER on her forthcoming graphic novel Billie the Bee and her comix career, RICH BUCKLER interview Part Three, Golden Age artist FRANK BORTH, HEMBECK and more!

NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOES! Interview with JOSEPH MICHAEL LINSNER (CRY FOR DAWN, VAMPIRELLA), a chat with JOE SINNOTT about his Marvel years inking Jack Kirby and work at TREASURE CHEST, JOE JUSKO discusses the Marvel Age of Comics and his fabulous “Corner Box Collection,” plus the artists behind the Topps bubble gum BAZOOKA JOE comic strips, CRAIG YOE, and more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #23

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #24 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #25

ERIC POWELL celebrates 20 years of THE GOON! with a career-spanning interview and a gallery of rare artwork. Plus CBC editor and author JON B. COOKE on his new retrospective THE BOOK OF WEIRDO, a new interview with R. CRUMB about his work on that legendary humor comics anthology, JOHN ROMITA SR. on his admiration for the work of MILTON CANIFF, and more!

P. CRAIG RUSSELL career-spanning interview (complete with photos and art gallery), an almost completely unknown work by FRANK QUITELY (artist on All-Star Superman and The Authority), DERF BACKDERF’s forthcoming graphic novel commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, CAROL TYLER shares her prolific career, JOE SINNOTT discusses his Treasure Chest work, CRAIG YOE, and more!

WENDY PINI discusses her days as Red Sonja cosplayer, & 40+ years of ELFQUEST! Plus RICHARD PINI on their 48-year marriage and creative partnership! Plus: We have the final installment of our CRAIG YOE interview! GIL KANE’s business partner LARRY KOSTER talks about their adventures together! PABLO MARCOS on his Marvel horror work, HEMBECK, and more!

Cover by WENDY PINI.

TIMOTHY TRUMAN discusses his start at the Kubert School, Grimjack with writer JOHN OSTRANDER, and current collaborations with son Benjamin. SCOTT SHAW! talks about early San Diego Comic-Cons and friendship with JACK KIRBY, Captain Carrot, and Flintstones work! Also PATRICK McDONNELL’s favorite MUTTS comic book pastiches, letterer JANICE CHIANG profiled, HEMBECK, and more! TIM TRUMAN cover.

BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH discusses his new graphic novel MONSTERS, its origin as a 1980s Hulk story, and its evolution into his 300-page magnum opus (includes a gallery of outtakes). Plus part two of our SCOTT SHAW! interview about HannaBarbera licensing material and work with ROY THOMAS on Captain Carrot, KEN MEYER, JR. looks at the great fanzines of 40 years ago, HEMBECK, and more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #26

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #27

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #28

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #29 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #30

Career-spanning interview with TERRY DODSON, and Terry’s wife (and go-to inker) RACHEL DODSON! Plus 1970s/’80s portfolio producer SAL QUARTUCCIO talks about his achievements with Phase and Hot Stuf’, R. CRUMB and DENIS KITCHEN discuss the history of underground comix character Pro Junior, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his wife, HEMBECK, and more!

Extensive PAUL GULACY retrospective by GREG BIGA that includes Paul himself, VAL MAYERIK, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, TIM TRUMAN, ROY THOMAS, and others. Plus a JOE SINNOTT MEMORIAL; BUD PLANT discusses his career as underground comix retailer, distributor, fledgling publisher of JACK KATZ’s FIRST KINGDOM, and mail-order bookseller; our regular columnists, and the latest from HEMBECK!

STEVE BISSETTE career-spanning interview, from his Joe Kubert School days, Swamp Thing stint, publisher of Taboo and Tyrant, creator rights crusader, and more. Also, Part One of our MIKE GOLD interview on his Chicago youth, start in underground comix, and arrival at DC Comics, right in time for the implosion! Plus BUD PLANT on his publishing days, comic shop owner, and start in mail order—and all the usual fun stuff!

DON McGREGOR retrospective, from early ’70s Warren Publications scripter to his breakout work at Marvel Comics on BLACK PANTHER, KILLRAVEN, SABRE, DETECTIVES INC., RAGAMUFFINS, and others. Plus ROBERT MENZIES looks at HERB TRIMPE’s mid-’70s UK visit to work on Marvel’s British comics weeklies, MIKE GOLD Part Two, plus Don McG. with RICH BUCKLER! SANDY PLUNKETT cover!

Canadian comic book artist, illustrator, and graphic novelist MICHAEL CHO in a career-spanning interview and art gallery, a 1974 look at JACK ADLER and the DC Comics production department’s process of reprinting Golden Age material, Pyramid publisher NORMAN GOLDFIND (of Weird Heroes and A Contract with God graphic novel by WILL EISNER), plus CBC’s usual columns and features, including HEMBECK!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

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the dowers legacy

The Story of Steve Starhead

Pat Moriarity’s super-rare interview with the late mini comics maestro, Michael Dowers

MICHAEL DOWERS

The number is staggering: 47,000 comic books collated and stapled by Michael Dowers [1950–2024] from the time he started his own comics journey, in 1982, until 2013. Bruce Chrislip, onetime Starhead co-publisher, said, “Michael Dowers was a multi-talented individual. He was a wonderful musician, editor, comics publisher, visionary, and friend. It was his dream to revive underground comix and to restore them to their former glory. The real tragedy was that he attempted to do this through the comic book direct market, which proved to be mostly uninterested.”

Conducted by PAT MORIARITY

Pat: What was the very first mini comic you ever published and what were the things that influenced you at the time, that may have led to your decision to start making little comics?

When and where did you get started?

Michael: The first mini comic I printed was Starhead Comix #1, in 1982… a very poorly drawn comic based on a character I invented named Steve Starhead… kind of embarrassing these

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#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Starhead Comix logo by Steve Willis. The Official Underground and Newave Price Guide © the respective copyright holder. Zippy the Pinhead TM & © Bill Griffith.

[I’ve known Michael Dowers since 1991, when I first showed up in Seattle. He was already a known creative, and was also well into publishing mini comics through his own imprint and running the warehouse of Fantagraphics Books. He’s very private, and not the most likely person to show up at an event or party, even if it’s comics-related. It was like pulling teeth to get this guy to even do this interview. When approaching him about this, Michael responded, “I’m really not a fandom type… I forgot getting involved with this is really a fandom kind of thing to do… not much of a fandom person… I have been able to mostly avoid anything that has to do with fandom over the years, so if I have to face it now, I am willing to try and participate… at least just this once.” So we are lucky to get this info out of one of the great influences on the cartooning scene of the Northwest. I love this guy and he published many great artists early in their careers. Let’s talk with Micheal Dowers… — P.M.]

days… I was like 31 and was drawing these stupid silly cartoons… I had started drawing again after many years and that was probably the most rewarding part… the drawing part… I found a small article in Jay Kennedy’s Underground Price Guide about how “you, too, can make your own comix”… I had written and drawn and assembled my first comic within three days after reading that article.

I would have to say I was always influenced by art… fine art… paintings and sculptures, and all that… From a young age, I was very moved by paintings in art galleries… From the ancient classics to contemporary art, I like it all… Always had an interest in drawing and painting, but had limited skills… It has taken a lifetime to bring some of those skills out…

Pat: You said you found a small article in Jay Kennedy’s Underground Price Guide about how “you, too, can make your own comix.” Did you ever get into any of the newsletter circulars, like the Geerdes newsletters, City Limits Gazette or White Buffalo Gazette?

Michael: The newsletters were the only network we had back in the ’80s… One of the best was a magazine-sized ’zine called Factsheet Five, a monthly ’zine that listed and reviewed all the ’zines every month… All you had to do was send a couple of copies of whatever you wanted listed and you would find it listed the next month in Factsheet Five… I made a lot of mini comix connections with Factsheet Five… Geerdes’ and Willis’ newsletters were quintessential… White Buffalo picked up the newsletter thing in the ’90s, when everybody else had died off, one by one…

Pat: Huh, I’ve never seen Starhead Comix #1. Are you suppressing it? Hah! I missed it because I did not show up to Seattle until 1991. When did you start publishing others, how did you meet them, and who were the earliest creators you featured, besides yourself? How many comics did you publish before you started the Seattle Star, the popular Seattle free paper that featured so many cartoonists?

Michael: I started publishing mini comics in 1982… the first two issues of Starhead Comix were basically solo comics by me and, yes, they would deserve suppressing… By #3, I had started including other artists like Wayne Gibson and my brother… Gibson did the cover for #3… After that, I started including many different artists like Brad Foster, Steve Willis, David Miller, Gary Hardman, and many more… even got Peter Bagge, Robert Armstrong, and Lynda Barry into the later issues… The series ran for nine issues, into 1985, and that is when I started in on Seattle Star.

Pat: What method of printing did you first use for these issues of Starhead Comix? Were these mini comics or 24-page, standard-size comic books? What was the early press runs of these

Michael Dowers portrait © Pat Moriarity. Starhead Comix T-shirt design by Dennis Worden.

Portrait by Pat Moriarity

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

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Above and inset right: The nine-issue run of Dowers’ Starhead Comix [1982–84], which includes covers by Dowers,Wayne Gibson, Garry Hardman, Hank Arakelian, and Peter Bagge. This title launched the Starhead Comix line.

Previous spread: Left includes a reproduction of Clay Geerdes’ 1983 “Newave Manifesto,” a call for cartoonists to create a new age of mini comics. This declaration launched his second newsletter, Comix Wave, which lasted until 1995.

Dowers’ reference to a “small article” was actually a portion of Jay Kennedy’s introduction in The Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide [1982], which appears on pages 14–15 and is highlighted here. Book cover art

by Bill Griffith. Illustration is by Pat Moriarity, a caricature of his late friend and sometimes publisher, Michael Dowers. Coloring by Glenn Whitmore. Full-page illustration on right page by Pat Moriarity.

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properly, formed a mini book… I became rapidly addicted to creating books. Still am, I guess… Getting other artists involved was a way that I could keep doing the assembly process I was so addicted to. The people I published were people close to me and people I was meeting through the mini comix network… back in those days everything was done by mail… or sometimes a phone call… mini comix would take weeks or months to produce because creators would be passing drawings around back and forth. A mini comic between two artists could take forever because one person would do a drawing and send it to the other, and he would do a drawing and then he would send it back, and would go back and forth, and back and forth, taking many weeks to complete… it was very different in those days.

Pat: How many years and issues of the Seattle Star were there? That was a popular publication. What led to that comics paper drying up? There were newer papers in Seattle that featured weird comics, like the recently defunct Intruder, and now that it’s gone, others are sprouting up to replace it. With the Intruder, I believe each contributor paid for their share of the printing bill.

Michael: Seattle Star ran 22 issues between 1985 and 1990. Seattle Star was supported by ad sales… getting involved in selling advertising was a huge mistake for me… I am not a salesman… really poor at it… every issue was a major task because of the ad sales and, almost every issue, I would have some kind of major emotional breakdown… It was everything I could do to raise enough money to print… I was not cut out to be that type of person… a contributor-paid publication is a good idea… in the ’80s, there wasn’t enough activity in the cartoon world in Seattle to support that… in those days, most cartoonists were still into super-heroes and crime-fighting…

Though there were some really talented people around, the Seattle underground art scene was very weak in 1985…

Also I have been writing a brief history of my life before #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Starhead Comix TM & © the estate of Michael Dowers. Copy This © D. Blake Werts.

Below: This interview appeared originally in D. Blake Werts’ mini ’zine, Copy This #45 [Nov. 2017], and appears here with his support.

books, and what led to you switching from Starhead Comix to the Seattle Star format? Did the same folks who printed the Starhead Comix print the Seattle Star?

Michael: All nine issues were photocopy ’zines… all, except #1, were 5½” x 8½”… the page-count varied from issue to issue. Mostly, each issue got fatter and fatter. The final issue was a double-sized, 69 [flipbook] issue, I think 64 pages… Most of these were print runs of 100, a few were more, maybe 150…

I had a job working in a local photocopy shop when I met Jan [née Friedman] Dowers. By the time I started printing mini comics, I was working elsewhere and she was working in the photocopy shop… that particular store, with Jan working, supplied the basic foundation of Starhead Comix for a few years…

I had a deep desire to print in ink instead of photocopy… printing was more like real comics… I had done a little offset printing making mini comics and really liked it. Coming up with the Seattle Star idea was a way to print cheaply, being able to use newsprint as the substrate, and being able to use spot colors was, all of a sudden, kind of more like the real thing.

Starhead Comix came from a photocopy shop in the [University] District, in Seattle… Seattle Star came from a small newspaper web press operation out of Poulsbo, more over by your neighborhood [Port Orchard]…

Pat: After creating and publishing some of your own work, you kind of got into the habit of recruiting other artists around the Seattle area to contribute to Starhead Comix and the Seattle Star. How did you come to publishing others? Why were you more interested in publishing others than developing your own art at the time? Related question: what was the local comics or ’zine atmosphere like in 1985?

Michael: I really liked the drawing part, but felt intimidated. There were so many others that were so good at it and I knew my limits… One of my favorite parts was the actual cutting and folding and stapling part, which, when done

Seattle Star TM & © the estate of Michael Dowers. Artwork © Peter Bagge.

comics that I would like to include… I was 32 when I published my first mini comic… I had lived a couple of different lives before I even got to comics… I am trying to keep it as brief as possible… but it is the first half of my life… I also have a couple of photos and a piece of art I would like to include… will send when I get my little piece of old history done…

Pat: Your life before comics… ? Why don’t you use this question as your opportunity to tell us about your early life, the things you did that lead to you eventually getting into comics and mini publishing?

Michael: Here is the answer for that question… a brief history of my life before comics… so much happened during these years it is hard to tell it all in just a few paragraphs: I was born in Borger, Texas, 1950, but I grew up in the north end of Seattle in the 1950s… had my first exposure to comic books in the later ’50s… lots of Superman, Superboy, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, and Krypto… also lots of Harvey Comics, Casper, Little Lotta, Baby Huey, Hot Stuff, plus Archie, and Betty and Veronica… I liked comics when I was a kid, but was not hooked yet… In 1964, I saw the Beatles play on Ed Sullivan… that changed everything … within a year I had my first guitar and, by 15, we had a band that played at school functions and some local parties even a movie theater or two… by 17, we had won a major battle of the bands in Seattle and had a recording contract in our hands… this was 1967… there was a lot going on in 1967…

Our bass player ran off to the military… drummer ran off with girlfriend… LSD was changing everybody’s lives all around me… It sure changed mine… by the time I was 18 and out of school, I was a full-fledged hippie and started hitchhiking for the next 3–4 years… the big comics event at this time for me was the release of R. Crumb’s ZAP #1… Me and my hippie friends were completely blown away by it, but it still was not the moment that connected me to comics…

By 22, I had been everywhere five times from hitchhiking and found myself on an isolated island in the San Juan islands of northwest Washington State with a bunch of other hippies… the closest store was 3½ miles across the Puget Sound to get back to civilization… no running water… no electricity… no cell phones… it was 1972 and I was living a life that most people only dreamed about… it was here on Stuart Island for the next three–four years that I found a passion for comics…

A well-known vaudeville performer, who was a friend of my brother, would come and stay and visit. On one of these visits, he brought two giant stacks of Marvel comics and left them with us… Over the next year or so, I read those two stacks of comics about five times… it was here I gained a real passion for comics…

Also, at this time, I regained my love of music… discovering old-time fiddle music changed my life for the next 30 years…

While living in the San Juans, I had was very fortunate to meet

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

an old cowboy mandolin player who lived on the Kootenai River, right outside of Troy, Montana… He liked hippies because they turned him onto pot and he knew all the hippies living in the woods around him in Montana… We took to each other pretty fast… I was like 24, he was like 54… after a couple of years, I moved to Montana, so we could perform together… he was well-known in his area and, in the past, had his own bar and even a public access TV show up in Canada… we would go into a bar around there and ask if we could play a few tunes and, in an hour, everybody would know that this mandolin cowboy was there and the place would be packed… We called our duo “Old Heads and Young Hearts”… it was an amazing time… very crazy…

I met a woman in Idaho who played the hammered dulcimer, and we starting living and playing music together, and formed the Wild Rose Stringband… the two of us would travel from Idaho to San Diego (Baja, California) and travel up and down the coast playing street music for the next two– three years and had a four-piece

Above: Ever ambitious, Michael started a freebie tabloid in the Emerald City featuring (pretty much) all comics. Here’s the first ish, featuring Peter Bagge’s cover, with Steve Willis cartoons on the interior, among others. Inset left: Among the bands Michael played in was Crystal Forest, which produced surfer music. Pat Moriarity contributed this cassette art.

Below: Seattle public radio station KRAB hosted Michael’s “Irish and Old Timey” Wild Rose String Band, as evidenced by this 1976 listing.

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Pat: You said that you saw ZAP Comix pretty early on,but were ultimately won over by Marvel Comics. What happened that finally made you switch from Marvel Comics to counter-culture comics? Was it these visits to California with your mom? It sounds like it was later, after you were on your own, that your tastes shifted. Do you still like Marvel? What do you think of all these comic book-based Marvel movies now?

Michael: It wasn’t that the comics were Marvel Comics; it was that they were comics… I had discovered what an amazing medium comics really were… for the first time I could see the work and the passion that was used to create a comic book.

I got to love some of the artists… like, Gene Colan’s work really moved me… for about the next three–four years, I read as much Marvel as I could get my hands on… you have to remember this is like 1973 to ’77 and I had been living in the woods all this time… first in the San Juans and then moved over to Montana and Idaho… comics weren’t that easy to find… by ’77, I had really had enough… I had longed realized that these stories were written for 12-year-old boys and I rapidly lost my interest… by ’77, I was back into civilization again and we were living in Seattle, so we could make more money playing music… it was a little easier to find comic books, but good alternative comics were still hard to find… Graphic novels were basically non-existent… The first issue of Heavy Metal had just hit the stands… by ’77, the underground comix had all but died… even in the underground world, the choices were limited… it wasn’t like there were new issues being released every month… at the time, I loved reading comics, but it was hard to find something that was different.

I do watch the Marvel movies… I have a thing about special effects [and] movies that aren’t real, mixed with guy-style action… it is easy to fully entertain me… I like movies in general and can watch just about anything… So it is about movies, not about Marvel.

Pat: Starhead Comix and publishing seems to have taken a backseat to what is now the company you call Brownfield Press.

What is Brownfield Press, why did you change the name, and what is the main difference between the two publishers? Can you talk about your very last Starhead projects and your first few Brownfield projects?

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Morty the Dog TM & © Steve Willis. Rapture © Ashleigh Talbot. Newave! The Underground Comix of the 1980s © the estate of Michael Dowers and Fantagraphics Books.

Above: Michael’s Showcase-type Starhead Presents comic book was solicited in the direct sales market only to be met with indifference by comics fans, though those who sampled it were treated with the brilliant cartooning of the great Steve Willis (who will be profiled in two upcoming issues of CBC.) Inset right: Another notable accomplishment made by Michael were his three mini comics collections edited for Fantagraphics, which included interviews with prominent cartoonists in the genre and their great work, Newave! The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s [’10] and Treasury of Mini Comics, Vol. 1 [’13] and Vol. 2 [’15]. Below: Michael was proud having published Ashleigh “Triangle-Slash” Talbot’s Rapture [’95].

band in Seattle by 1978… My girlfriend hated comics and thought they were childish…

I really loved that girl, but one of the main reasons she left was she never understood my passion for comics… So much happened with music during this time… the band was playing out a lot, 12 to 16 gigs a month, easily… In 1981, I was married, and ’82 was the year of my first mini comic… the rest is history…

Pat: And that first mini comic starred “Steve Starhead”?

So Steve must be the mascot of your publishing empire.

I never knew he had a first name. Were there many comix adventures with Steve before being relegated to just being a logo? I know many artists (myself included) have depicted the character as the Starhead logo, but have any other artists ever drawn or written a Steve Starhead story besides yourself?

Michael: Steve Starhead was my original idea to make my first mini comic… A desperate attempt to come up with something to draw… There has basically been no character development on Steve Starhead… Except for the fact that he became the center focus, name, and face for a small publishing house… my favorite character I made up was Dan the Sad Knife.

Pat: Who knows, perhaps your publishing empire would have been called Sad Knife Comics instead. Ha! Nice ring to it… I’d like to see that character as a logo. So you were not hooked on comics until after sitting on an Island with a stack of Marvel comics, of all things?! I didn’t see that coming. The undergrounds didn’t get under your skin right away, eh? So, when you were in your LSD hitchhiking days, did you ever make it down to San Francisco during the ZAP years? Did you witness any of that comix hippie stuff back in the day?

Michael: Yes, I did get to Haight Ashbury a couple of times… by the time I got there (1968) is was pretty downtrodden… the head shops were all still there, but all the street people looked so pathetic and everyone was selling drugs… not much comic activity, but I did get to go to the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom a couple of times… Got to see Howlin’ Wolf one night… that was a true cultural experience and then Quicksilver blew everybody out of the water… Quicksilver was truly the single best dance band I ever saw…

My mom, of all people, took my brother and I to S.F., when I was 15… 1965, just before the hippies; they were called “fringies”… my mom took us into a fringie bar next to the City Lights bookstore so we could see the “beats”… I really can’t believe my mom did this and what a powerful effect that had on both my brother and I… turns out my mom always had a secret desire to be a beatnik… she followed the hippies pretty closely in the ’60s and even smoked pot with us for a while until, one night, she smoked something that was very strong and freaked and never smoked again.

All TM & © the respective copyright holders.

Michael: By 1999, Starhead Comix had run its course… over $40,000 in debt and, no hope with sales to pull me out of a tailspin, I had to declare a bankruptcy… this was just devastating to go through… it not only ruined the business, but really affected my home life, too… to the point it never really recovered… I believe the very last thing that Starhead published was Ashliegh Talbot’s third book in her trilogy, Rapture… What a great way to go out… I was so in to completing the project at the time, knowing it was going to be the last, but truly one of my proudest moments was to see that project come to fruition… After I knew it was over for Starhead, I got a part-time job with a printer about a block-and-half from Seattle Central Community college… at lunchtime, we would all sit around outside and talk looking directly at the school building… it was here I got the idea to go back to school… I took their computer program that related directly to printing… I figured, at the very worst, I could probably get some free printing done for a couple of new projects… The very first Brownfield project was Eric Reynolds’ Surfin’ mini comic… I was looking for a publishing name that didn’t have the word comix in it… I didn’t want to be limited to just comix anymore.

Pat: I should mention that Starhead was first to publish my comic series Big Mouth, and a few of my mini comics — Little Big Mouth; Devil, Stay Away from Me; Mugs, and Drifting, with Buzzy Linhart. There’s probably a few I’m forgetting. And I helped out with the box design to your Tarot card set, which I believe was an early Brownfield project. You were an early believer in my work when I first showed up in Seattle in 1991. I believe you were already working for Fantagraphics when I showed up, and, at that time, you were publishing a lot, while working in the warehouse, along with Jim Blanchard, and later as an editor for both Fantagraphics and Eros Comics. Can you talk about the Fantagraphics/Starhead connection a little? That’s how I met you.

You were already here publishing when they showed up, so how did you eventually hook up with them?

Michael: Fantagraphics showed up in Seattle in 1989…

Peter Bagge said something to Gary Groth and Kim Thompson to think about moving to Seattle and they did… just before Fantagraphics showed up, Peter Bagge helped them fill a few positions, so that help was in place on the day Fantagraphics showed up with three giant trucks filled with all of their belongings and thousands of boxes of books… that is how I got the manager position at the warehouse…

I was already publishing when they showed up and really got a lot of interest and surprising support from Kim ThompCOMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

son… in the early ’90s they even carried my books in their distribution catalogs… of course, they got a cut for it, but it really helped with sales, for a while, anyway… they were amazingly supportive of Starhead… the work we got to do with you was a major plus and am very proud of those projects.

Pat: Can you talk a little about some of your favorite projects for Fantagraphics and their erotic comic line, Eros? I know Fanta made book collections of mini comics and you were editing those. Also the very first mini comics were Tijuana bibles and you were behind those Eros collections, as well. Softcover and also thick, hardcover books. Plus, what Eros Comics did you edit that you were excited about? When did you start collecting Tijuana bible eight-pagers and how big a collection do you have?

Michael: I very rarely did anything but Eros material… every now and then I got to work on some of the other stuff that Fantagraphics was doing… Getting involved with Tijuana bibles in the early ’90s kind of started the whole thing… I always marveled at the fact that I was actually making money from working with Tijuana bibles… why weren’t other people doing it?… When I started, there was still a major taboo over the Tijuana bibles… a lot of people were scared to reproduce any of it because of heavy duty copyright issues on the comic strip characters they were satirizing… King Features was a major threat…

I remember the day I released the very first issue of The Tijuana Bibles with Starhead Comix, in 1990… I was terrified… I was really the first person ever to actually attach their real name and contact information to the dirty little comic books… I really thought the potential for trouble was huge… but, a few weeks went by, and nothing happened…

To this day, nobody ever said or did anything…

Above: A mere sampling of the innumerable Starhead Comix offerings over the years, which included the work of many of the best alternative cartoonists of not just Seattle, but the entire planet.

Below: Pat Moriarity’s (You and Your) Big Mouth anthology, featuring scripts by a wide array of comix-associated folk and entirely drawn by the talented cartoonist was first published by Starhead.

Here’s the cover of #1 [’92].

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come up with some projects that feature art and illustration over comix… I don’t know what it is, but I just have this gut feeling that I will continue in this direction until my life unwinds to an end… Am working on a couple of really great projects right now… one is a knock-out project by you, Mr. Pat Moriarity, that is guaranteed to make people’s brains swirl… the art process is taking longer than we had estimated, but it is coming, nonetheless… if we are lucky, maybe just before X-mas but, more likely, just after the new year… Will keep everyone posted as people are certainly bound to talk a bit about this project once it is released… also working with Jon Strongbow and producing a series of giant art ’zines to show off his catalog of incredible black-&-white, spiritually surreal drawings of Seattle… Hopefully, there will be even more art ’zine projects to come…

Pat: Your brother goes by the alias “Art Penn.” He did the cover to your tarot card set. I’ve collaborated with him a few times back in the 1990s, but kind of lost track of him. His art is so good! I doubt the local scene is even aware of him today, but I understand he’s still at it, doing better than ever. Is he still in Seattle? What’s he up to?

Michael: Patrick Dowers still lives on Capitol Hill, in Seattle… he recently (within the couple of years) completed a major project for the Canadian weed version of High Times magazine called Cannabis Culture… For years they ran a onepage comic strip illustrated by my brother, written by another on the history of marijuana in Canada… While the subject matter might be a little specialized and, to some, maybe even a bit boring… the cartooning job Patrick did is more than just good… he really knocked it out of the park on this one… great art, great cartooning… right now he is working a major graphic novel for the same people he did the history of cannabis in Canada book with.

Pat: I saw that cannabis book and the art looks fantastic. But I have not read it all yet, still at it, it’s got a ton of small text and a lot of pages. But I’ve studied all the illustrations so far. You must have an artistic family. Well, getting back to your art — Those tarot cards are amazing, and I wanted to pick your brain a little about how you seem to have developed a great talent with digital coloring and collage. You took all these ancient images and designed some crazy-assed, beautiful cards. The things you chose to juxtapose did nothing but increased the impact of the original art and the color was done just right. Do you have any new collage projects brewing? Brownfield should do a Michael Dowers collage book. How did you get into doing that? It’s so different from drawing comics or publishing books. Had you ever done such a thing before designing those cards?

Michael: Well, jeez, I do thank you for the great compliment… to be getting kudos from so many talented people I have worked with over the years really means a lot to me… I have been into art since I was in high school. Always overshadowed by my brother who really had a very natural talent for it, starting when he was a little boy. So I was always exposed to it… I’ve messed around with a few different mediums: woodcarving, making sets for theater, woodcut prints, instrument building, comix… always thought collage was fun and interesting… but, in old school collage, you really only had one shot at it to get it right… paper, scissors, and rubber cement… digital collage, you can move any object any place you want over and over again until you get it perfect… way easier… I was just learning how to collage in Photoshop when the idea for the tarot deck came up… I’ve learned a lot about Photoshop after completing that deck… from working with layers to cutting out objects, coloring, I learned so much about color doing that

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#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Tijuana Bibles TM & ©the respective copyright holder. Photo courtesy of Christine Payne-Towler.

And now, Tijuana bibles are just a big dumb joke…

They are so tame compared to some of the obsessive, aggressive, sex splats of ink and cum comix that are available… housewives love Tijuana bibles… they buy them as gifts for their husbands, so they can get him all excited and into the bedroom… That’s how tame Tijuana bibles have become…

I really have a very small collection compared to some of the collectors out there…

I would just buy one here or there as they would come into my possession… The biggest score ever was, after the first couple of Tijuana bible books came out from Fantagraphics, one of the Tijuana bible fans contacted me and told me he had purchased a box of Tijuana bibles that had been printed by the Mafia in New York in the late 1940s… He Above: Michael worked for Fan- had purchased this box of 500 comics in the late ’40s for $100 tagraphics for an extended period, and put them in his basement and just let them sit there until extensively on the Eros Comix line, 1995… I bought the whole box for $1 a comic… I sold almost and he curated the Tijuana Bible everyone of them for $12–15 dollars apiece and kept a few…

Collections, which featured Pat that was one of my best comic-book scores ever…

I would have to say the most amazing project I did with Moriarity cover art. Here’s the third volume [’97]. Opposite page: Eros Comix was getting Spainard Raulo Caceres’ epic series, Courtesy of Short Run Seattle, Elizabeth Bathory, into print. Raulo is a truly talented artist and here’s a photo of Michael Dowers writer and his Elizabeth Bathory series is an extremely powerful working his table at the 2011 piece of work… not for the faint of heart… he takes the whole show. Below: Michael in 2015 in blood-and-sex allegory to some very extreme situations… a photo taken by his wife, Christine Fantagraphics was very brave to print something like this…

Payne-Towler. Around the turn of the books sold out so fast and back issues go now for like $50 the century, Michael, deep in debt a piece… I keep telling Gary Groth he needs to reprint this as because of Starhead, launched a graphic novel… but nothing yet… Out of everything I did at Noreah Brownfield Press with the Eros, I am most proud of springing this amazing piece of horror help of his spouse, a tarot card onto the American comic book audience. scholar. Together they created the Pat: What are some of the non-comics related material Brownset, The Tarot of the Holy Light. field has been publishing? Are you done with mini comics, for the most part?

Michael: In 2006, I met my current partner who is a tarot card scholar, a writer and reader of tarot cards (tarotuniversity.com)… With her help, I created a deck for us called The Tarot of the Holy Light… after the creation of three different versions of our deck and two books now available on Amazon, I have been very involved with tarot ever since…

My publishing interests have grown to appreciate art… I have been trying to Visit https://noreahbrownfield.com/shop/

Photo © & courtesy of Short Run Seattle. Dowers caricature by & © Pat Moriarity. Colors by Glenn Whitmore.

deck… I had practice coloring, though… I colored a handful of Eros Comix covers when I was at Fantagraphics… cutting my teeth on Anal Intruders from Uranus, and many more…

My very first color jobs was, in the ’80s, coloring R.K. Sloane and Jeff Gaither’s cover drawing for the alt-punk metal band from Seattle called The Accused… that was the very first one and it really shows it… the second one was a full-color educational comic book about AIDS that Leonard Rifas produced… Mark Campos worked on that project, too… I did that whole book with Dr. Martins watercolors on Xerox print outs… so coloring was not new to me… I feel strongly I never really got it until I got about halfway through the deck of tarot cards I made…

I like your idea of making an all-collage book… I have messed around a little with collage since I finished the deck, but just haven’t hit on the right thing yet… who knows… maybe… I am in the process of coloring a different tarot deck though… am almost done with just nine cards to go… Am always open to new things… right now, having a lot of fun and getting a good creative release by playing art director for these new giant art ’zines we are making… coming soon to a PayPal button close to you.

Pat: Well, I think we’re about done here. Thanks for taking time to do this. I know you’re not really into this kind of thing, and, lately, health issues have slowed you down a tad. You are such a cool, smart fellow, but one thing I’ve noticed about you, over the years of our friendship, that people may not be aware of, is that you are very hermit-like and generally solitary. I feel lucky to have you as a friend because, even in Seattle, most folks know about you from your reputation and not from your physical presence. It’s almost like seeing a rare Sasquatch, it’s a shock to see you in public. Ha! Are there any final comments you’d like to make, or announcements before we wrap up? Thanks again.

Michael: I learned about being alone at very early age when I lived on an isolated island in the San Juans for a few years… I spent a lot time alone with my own thoughts and found out that I really liked it… Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels was a huge inspiration for me… Where he lived, for months at a time, alone on a mountain top, in the Washington Cascades… I really identified with his writings at age 22… it is kind of ingrained in my family… my mother was like that and my brother is like that… one of my sisters, too, especially towards the end of her life… all that said, you know, I was thinking about this not too long ago… what a weird time the ’90s were for me… I had been playing in a very serious folk Celtic string band for about 15 years… when you play in a band seriously, it is like being married to all the other members of the band… the commitment has to be very strong or there is no band… During the late ’80s and the through the ’90s, while I was very deep into keeping Starhead Comix alive, I was very involved with this band and I also had just rediscovered playing electric music (rock ’n’ roll!), a lot of the time I had dates and commitments that I had to play… when all the cartoonists were getting together for a night of partying, I would be, say, in Eugene, Oregon, playing some country dance or, over in eastern Washington, for a house concert… there was a time our band was playing like 16 gigs a month, keeping us very busy… I thought about that a lot during those days…

Really nobody in the cartoon world knew I had this other life… I never talked about it because nobody ever understood that this folk music thing was a big deal to me and made for boring conversation to the cartoon world… These days, it is a little easier, especially the younger cartoonists are much more open to stranger situations…

By the year 2000, comic book publishing had ended… I went to school full time (another big time drain) and I was playing and performing rock ’n’ roll again, with nights of having to be somewhere else… with two different bands, if I wasn’t performing, I was probably at a band practice… practicing two and three nights a week, easily, with The Manatees… and then I left Seattle for good and I get to live the quiet, alone-life I always strived for, on the banks of the Columbia River…

A good way to hang out with me is either play music in some professional setting or work out some project and let’s get together and make it happen… otherwise, I just seem to be too self-absorbed to think about much else… Selfish? Probably, but now I am so old, I don’t really give a fuck…

[Dowers, a giant in the alternative comics movement of the 1980s and ’90s, died on May 7, 2024, at age 74. Today, his wife, Christine Payne-Towler, carries on the Dowers legacy at the Noreah Brownfield Press website at https://noreahbrownfield.com/shop/. CBC will continue our foray into alternative comics history with upcoming features on Steve Willis, poised to produce his Morty the Dog #10,000, and Bruce Chrislip, author of The Minicomix Revolution: 1969–1989.]

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

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comics in the library

Of Bi-Planes and Gumshoe Apes

Barnstormers, Static Shock, The Detective Chimp, and Ditko’s 1970s Charlton Comics work

by RICHARD J. ARNDT

This page: From top is Barnstormers [Dark Horse, ’24]; Static: Season One [DC/Milestone, ’22], The Detective Chimp Casebook [DC, ’23], and This is How It Is [SD Publishing, ’22].

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#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Barnstormers TM & © Scott Snyder and Tula Lotay, Static: Season One, The Detective Chimp Casebook TM & © DC Comics, This is How It Is TM & © SD Publishing.

Six new books to consider for either my library — or your personal one — begins with the excellent Barnstormers: A Ballad of Love and Murder, written by Scott Snyder and illustrated

by Tula Lotay. For those not in the know, barnstorming was a popular aviation form of entertainment conducted by pilots between the end of World War I and start of the Great Depression. It consisted of pilots flying their own planes across the rural countryside, landing on crop fields and performing death-defying stunts, all to amaze the public, most of whom had never seen an airplane up close before, and offer rides to the locals.

Set in 1927, the book is more of a crime story centered around a wannabe barnstormer calling himself Hawk E. Baron (real name Bixby Huckett) and poor, stunning, runaway bride Tillie Murphy, who met Hawk when he buzzes her outdoor wedding by mistake, thinking it’s locals who have gathered to see him. Tillie’s rich psychotic husband knocks out and imprisons Hawk in a barn for destroying the wedding, until he’s rescued by Tillie, who has entered an unwanted marriage to try to save her family’s farm from being engulfed by her new husband’s company. Following their escape from both of their respective prisons, Hawk and Tillie are being chased around the countryside not only by the psycho-husband, but also an aging Pinkerton detective named Zeke King, who is clearly modeled after both Dashiell Hammett and his second most famous detective, the never-named Continental Op. King is getting past his prime and he knows it. He’s been an operative for the Pinkertons since the times they solved real crimes instead of busting up union activities and putting the fix in for wealthy family scandals.

Snyder has written a wonderful script here, reminding me of his pre-comics work on the short prose stories that were collected in 2006’s Voodoo Heart. Tula Lotay’s artwork is gorgeous and fleshes out Snyder’s narrative with superb storytelling on every page. Her design for Tillie’s offbeat wedding dress is not only stunning in the modern sense but is entirely appropriate for the time period, and that takes some doing considering that 1920s wedding dresses were generally on the decidedly dowdy side.

The 148-page tale gives us lots of daring-do, a misdirected accusation of murder, great flying sequences, Tillie’s development into a real aerial daredevil, more than decent character development, and a mystery robot called Mr. Baby, which may (or may not) be real. The robot follows Hawk, who is suffering from either a nervous breakdown or PTSD, and is the only one who actually sees it. The robot itself looks like a male version of Fritz Lang’s female robot from the film,

Metropolis, coupled with a streamline 2000s version of same. Hawk has certainly spent time in a mental hospital, but exactly what for is not fully explained, a plotline that’s never resolved, so there may be more Barnstormers volumes to come.

I hope so.

This is a good, well-written book with quite attractive art from Lotay. The language and some pages of Tillie in her underwear preclude my adding it to my middle-school library, but it is a fine and welcome addition to my personal one.

The first volume of the slightly rebooted Static Shock, now called simply Static, Season One, has been added to my school library. Written by Vita Ayala, Reginald Hudlin, and Greg Pak, with pretty decent art by Denys Cowan, Nikolas Draper-Ivey, Chriscross, Bill Sienkiewicz, Ryan Benjamin, Khoi Pham, Jimmy Palmiotti, Don Ho, and Scott Hanna, the story presents a good version of Static’s first days as a super-hero (revamped somewhat from the original comic and TV show).

Despite three authors and a full squadron of artists, the seven-part story holds together quite well. I thought it was nicely crafted and well-conceived, with some thought-provoking meat nestled in all the super-hero bread. Recommended.

Then there’s The Detective Chimp Casebook, reprinting all the 1950s “Detective Chimp” stories by writer John Broome and artist Carmine Infantino, along with the 1981 “Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?” story — which guest-stars Detective Chimp — from DC Comics Presents #35 [July ’81], written by Mike Tiefenbacher and illustrated by Gil Kane.

Despite the Brian Bolland cover image, this isn’t the modern-day chimp who speaks English, runs a magical pub, and wears the garb of Sherlock Holmes. This is the original version with the chimp thinking via thought balloons, but never speaking recognizable languages, while solving crimes by out-thinking a heavy-set Florida sheriff as an unofficial deputy. It’s a charming look at the way comics used to be done. I enjoyed it.

And last, but not least (thanks to a tip from Steve Bissette), we have a comprehensive three-volume set (to date) of Steve Ditko’s Charlton stories, covering all of his stories for the company from 1971–73, published by Famous Comics. These are on the pricey side and are trade paperbacks, so they won’t work for my school library, but as additions to my Ditko shelf of my personal library, they are invaluable research collections. I was expecting black-&-white interiors, but the stories — mostly written by Joe Gill — are in full-color and are nicely bound. The tales look better than they ever have. While I’m a fan of much of the work done at Charlton, it can’t be denied that the paper they used for their comics was of low quality, as well as filthy and their printing process was shoddy. But these reprints look like the current publisher has the actual proofs from back in the day and it was a delight to open the books and see how beautiful they looked. You can order these from either Amazon or from Famous Comics itself. The price is the same. Volume 1 is the cheapest at $29 bucks, so perhaps sample it first. I suspect that you’ll be setting aside cash to buy the next two ASAP.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

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Dateline Hembeck TM & © Fred Hembeck. COLORS BY: GLENN WHITMORE

Illustration by Rick Veitch. Courtesy of & © Rick Veitch. Color assist on “The Wheel of Life” by Ezra Veitch.

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

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V IS FOR VEITCH We know Richard Ian Veitch as RICK VEITCH, one of the wildest, most creative talents in American comics, be the category mainstream, underground, or

to interview the writer/artist/publisher about his life and art. And, at the end of

was first noticed by the world via his collaboration with brother Tom Veitch —

a delicious straight-from-their-garden lunch. Almost two decades prior, yours

alternative. Selected as his native Vermont’s official poet laureate in 2020, Rick Two-Fisted Zombies [1973] — the artist’s first published comic book. From there, the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art was next, where he enrolled

during its inaugural year. Then, unleashed on the comics world, the creator has since maintained a remarkably vast, diverse, eclectic, and rich body of work.

Illustration by Rick Veitch. Courtesy of & © Rick Veitch.

Your humble editor travailed the wilds of forested Vermont last summer

Comic Book Creator: I read something interesting in the interview you did in that newspaper called Arthur. You said that your older brother Tom had a relatively normal childhood or home, but you did not.

Rick Veitch: Yeah, my parents were kind of losing it as I came of age. They had six kids, hardworking, hard-smoking, hard-drinking, and when they hit their 40s, they were exhausted. So, about the time I become aware, like in fourth, fifth grade — when I was 10 or 11 — my parents were disengaging from parenting. They weren’t watching me. I never went to doctor or the dentist… I never got my shots.

CBC: It wasn’t even benign neglect; it was just neglect?

Rick: Yeah, I was smoking in my middle-school years, and drinking in junior high. Basically running wild in a Wild West kind of town, where there was a lot of crazy stuff going on.

CBC: Did teachers take notice or were neighbors concerned?

Rick: My parents were able to put up a good front. They still looked to the community like they were okay. Not upper middle class, but middle class people in a factory town.

CBC: Was there ever any reconciliation or did you come to terms with them?

Rick: I came to terms with it myself. It sounds really negative, but there’s a positive aspect to it, in the sense that I got to think my own thoughts. I wasn’t programmed.

CBC: You mean that was a positive element of that, of being untethered…?

Rick: I was able to think my own thoughts. They might have been wrong thoughts, but they were mine, so I wasn’t being shaped for society in any meaningful way. That’s also a hindrance, because I wasn’t getting guidance, but, fortunately, it all worked out for me in the end somehow. [laughs] When I was in seventh grade, there was this big blow-up. They gave us these intelligence tests at school and, even though I didn’t understand half the stuff in the test, I scored high enough that the teachers talked to my parents and they said, “Ricky’s not

our conversation, we were joined by wife Cindy Veitch, who had prepared for us truly had visited the couple’s hilltop home (and Rick’s trailer-home studio on

the property) in the southern part of the Green Mountain State to chat for the

Swampmen book, and I’ve enlisted the man into a project or two over the years, including Ye Ed.’s Slow Death Zero during the recent pandemic. — Ye Editor.

living up to his abilities.” And so everyone came down on me. That was the last time my parents really tried to structure me. All the comics disappeared, all the art supplies disappeared, my allowance disappeared, and everyone is dictating, “You’ve got to focus on schoolwork, not art.” But fate intervened.

While all this was coming down, I received a package from Big Daddy Roth. I had gotten honorable mention in his “Draw the Monster” contest for CARtoons, and he sent me a copy of the issue with my name in it and a decal of Rat Fink.

And, wow, there was my name in CARtoons! And then I knew I wasn’t going to listen to those parents and teachers anymore. [laughs] I had connected with this magical art thing in far off California that meant so much to me and, somehow I knew, there lay my future.

CBC: Was the iconoclasm, subversiveness of MAD magazine, was that also an element there?

Rick: Absolutely. My brother Tom was addicted to MAD. He wouldn’t let me read his MAD comics, but we had the paperbacks. And so I would just pour over them endlessly, finding new gags in the backgrounds of panels. They were just irresistible. I can remember “The Katchandhammer Kids” [MAD #20, Feb. ’55], I must’ve read it 10 times until, all of a sudden, I realized that the dialogue in the word balloons was written in pidgin English. I had thought it was just gibberish and all of a sudden, I was, like, “Whoa!

There’s even more jokes in here!” [laughter] CBC: A whole another layer.

Rick: Yeah! So MAD was it and, also, Tom was 10 years older, so he’s out of the house by the time I’m 10.

CBC: Did he even acknowledge you?

Rick: Oh, yeah. He was definitely a guiding light.

CBC: He liked you?

Rick: Yeah, he liked me and he was also into all the same stuff I was. So he reinforced the idea of drawing comics and being an artist. He was also hanging

Interview Conducted by Jon B. Cooke COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

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Previous spread: On left page is Rick Veitch’s “Self-Portrait in Six Dimensions,” which appeared as the cover of Arthur Magazine [#33, Jan. ’13], a California based “All Ages Counterculture” tabloid. The right page features 1995 self-portrait of Roarin’ Rick, this one inspired by artist Maurits Cornelis Escher.

This page: Top and inset Ricky the Kid, circa 1955, and a 1958 portrait of the wee laddie by his Scottish-born father, Robert Veitch [1912–1970], below in a 1937 Columbia University class portrait.

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All items courtesy of Rick Veitch.

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meeting my mother and settling. She was from Bellows Falls.

CBC: So he was going to school in Manhattan.

Rick: He was originally from Scotland and immigrated when he was 12. He lived in Queens, and he and his brothers all worked their way through Columbia.

CBC: Veitch is a Scottish name?

Rick: Yes. CBC: Is there any meaning to it?

Rick: I believe it is a Norman word related to cattle herds.

CBC: About your other siblings: what did they end up doing?

Rick: Let’s go back to Tom first, because that’s really a key thing with the family. He was the oldest son, a brilliant guy, really talented. He got a full-boat scholarship to Columbia out of high school and he was born on my father’s birthday. So it was like he was “The Guy”: good-looking, smart, good with his hands, good with schoolwork. He just seemed to do everything well. But he got to New York, took acid, dropped out of Columbia, and started living the poet life, emulating Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and all those guys. And that was part out with beatniks in New York, writing of what knocked the blocks out from under my parents. Then poetry, and they were sending the poetry Kennedy got assassinated. Everything got really hard for them ’zines back home, so they’d be floating and they never really pulled it together again. around our house.

The rest of the kids all had some sort of talent. My sister CBC: He had a poetry ’zine with a title Wendy was an accomplished actress. My brother Michael is a named after him, Tom Veitch Magazine. singer/songwriter. Brother Peter builds houses. Brother Rob Rick: That came later. But in 1961, 1962, became a corporate consultant. We were a wild creative bunch!

I was reading Joe Brainard and Frank My dad, even though he worked at the paper mill, would bring O’Hara and Anne Waldman stuff. I couldn’t home weekend art jobs doing logos and pen-&-ink illustrations make sense of it, but it was just something for the wrapping papers they printed at the mill.

I absorbed. Tom was part of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and The thing is he didn’t even acknowledge that I was an he put us on the comp list, so we got everything they did. They artist. I was making art all the time, and his response was, “You published the first underground comic by Joe Brainard. It was can’t make a living at it.” That was his whole attitude, I guess. called C Comics and it was like scratchy drawings of Henry and He hadn’t been able to make a living at it himself, so he was Nancy f*cking, but it predates ZAP by three or four years. convinced that it was a waste. He had the tools I needed to CBC: So your parents understood the content was beatnik? learn, too — pen-&-ink and brush — but he never showed me Rick: Yeah. They sort of frowned on it and couldn’t relate to it. how to use them.

CBC: But they let the ’zines…

CBC: How do you feel about that now?

Rick: Yeah, they’d float around the house.

Rick: Well, there’s a weird disconnect. What I did get out of CBC: Was there any pride about Tom and what he was doing? it was observing him when he was working on art projects, and Rick: No. He’d dropped out of Columbia and they saw his life sensing that he was really happy doing art. And somehow, I as a poet as a failure. think, that strengthened my resolve to follow through and do CBC: Originally, what’d your father do? what I was born to do.

Rick: My father was the sales manager for the Robertson CBC: With [Rick’s youngest son] Kirby, do you share that with Paper Company, in Bellow Falls, Vermont. It was an office job. him? Has he been witness to that same joy?

CBC: Middle class?

Rick: Yeah, I’ve tried to. I mean, he went to art school. He’s a Rick: Yeah, we were middle class. classically trained water colorist and I brought him into coloring CBC: White collar? comics…but it’s not his thing. He’s good at it, he likes it when Rick: Yes, white collar. He was also he’s doing it, but it’s not something he really wants to pursue. intermediary. He worked with the workers, CBC: What were the first comics you read? but he would go to paper mill conventions Rick: Comics for me begin at three or four with my brothers in New York City and stuff like that. reading Uncle Scrooge and Little Lulu to me. We got the Boston CBC: Could he work with his hands? Was Globe and, on Sunday, they had this big, beautiful comic he handy around the house? section that I’d just pore over. I became really fascinated with Rick: Yeah, he was very handy around any form of graphics. So, at one point, I collected signs. In the house. those days, some guy would silk screen signs like “The Circus CBC: But he couldn’t comprehend the is Coming to Town,” or “Fair Day,” or something, and they’d put creative impulse…? ’em in the shop windows. And so I would go downtown, me and Rick: Well, I think that’s really the core my friend, and we’d watch the dates and, when the sign was of the problem: he was creative, he was a out of date, we’d ask for the sign. So we had this collection of very good artist. He had worked his way silkscreen signs… through Columbia University and took a CBC: Those would actually have value today. lot of graphic art courses, and I think he Rick: I lost them all, but the best one was the Hell Drivers. wanted to be an illustrator for advertising.

CBC: The “Hell Drivers”?

But, somehow, he ended up in Vermont, Rick: There was these guys who would drive cars up and over

‘Last Gasp” © the respective estates of Greg Irons and Tom Veitch.

CARtoons TM & © Marc Methot. Tom Vetch items © Tom Veitch estate.

ramps and through flaming hoops and stuff. And there would be a cool graphic of that. And, as the ’60s progressed, the poster thing happened. So I was buying posters that you could order from the backs of magazines.

CBC: Did you buy any of Rick Griffin’s posters?

Rick: Oh, yeah! I had the eyeball one and was fascinated by the lettering styles the poster artists were using. Tom had gone to San Francisco and was sending me stuff and bringing stuff back when he visited. So that’s how we got the first ZAP Comix. He might’ve bought it off the street from Crumb.

CBC: So he corrupted you.

Rick: It wasn’t corruption, it was just, well…I was totally into it. I loved all cartoons and experimental graphics. For instance, I have this memory of being pre-kindergarten and going into the little neighborhood market and looking up at the comics shelf to see what I know now was The Double Life of Private Strong. It had a film strip around the top and sides. I didn’t know what a film strip was but I was fascinated by the idea that — whoa! — the guy drew a whole action sequence.

CBC: Did you notice the title just vanished after two issues?

Rick: Probably not, because at that age I had no idea how or why publishing worked. But it was something that made me pay attention to comics. I was getting to the age where I could scrape together 10¢ or 12¢, and buy one of my own choice.

CBC: Interesting that it was a Kirby comic book.

Rick: Yeah. Jack has been a constant in my life. At that same time, The Adventures of the Fly was released and I had those comics, as well. The Marvel monster comics were coming out, but they were a little too scary-looking for the parents to allow them in the house. But when I went to the barbershop, I got to see all of them there.

CBC: Did you see Kubert’s war books at all?

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

Rick: Oh yeah. It’s like the spinner rack was designed so, if you’re a little tiny kid, there are Baby Huey and Harvey stuff on the bottom, and then above that there’s Archie, and then you start getting up into the super-hero comics, horror comics, and way on top, the Kubert war comics with screaming haunted faces and swastikas and stuff.

CBC: Wow. I never thought of spinner racks in that way.

Did you read the Kanigher stories? Some of them were crazy…

Rick: Oh, yeah.

CBC: Did you see some of them as almost surreal, like the story about talking guns?

Rick: They were great storytelling devices. They drew you in and I was looking for that, because I was making my own home-brew comics.

So any kind of little trick of storytelling would fascinate me. When those reprints of Eisner’s Spirit came out, they were all the best Spirit stories in a couple of thick comics.

Oh, man! It was like a dream!

A mind orgasm. At home we also had a copy of Feiffer’s The Great Super Heroes and some of his early graphic novels, like Tantrum and Hostileman.

We also had Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo.

And I’d just study it endlessly, drink it in, because it was so beautiful to look at, and his characterizations, and how he did his lettering.

CBC: Right. And touching upon Kanigher again — and Eisner, too — of beating a theme to death: I was always impressed how every third panel always related to the theme, whatever it was.

Kanigher especially…

Rick: Well, Kanigher is an interesting cat. I got to know him just a little bit when he was at Kubert School. He taught the year behind us and, legend has it, he failed everybody in the class.

But Kanigher liked me for some reason. He showed up at my drawing table one day and said, “I hear you’re doing some of my scripts for the back-ups in Sgt. Rock.” And I showed some stuff to him and he didn’t tear me a new asshole. He seemed to like it. But he was a really odd duck. The best way I can describe

This page: An example of a “Hell Drivers” poster; Tom Veitch poetry collection; two issues of his self-titled ’zine; splash panel, Slow Death #5’s “Last Gasp” story, by TV and Irons; and Rick points out his credit in CARtoons #14 [Nov. ’63].

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him is as [Enemy Ace] Von Hammer, this sort of guy who is disassociated from society because he’s a killer. People recognize this dark side and avoided him.

Here’s a story: one morning, Kubert school is starting, and we all sort of congregate in the entryway of the mansion.

Everybody’s hanging out and talking. I’m standing next to Kanigher. Someone comes in and says Mort Weisinger died and, in response, Kanigher’s whole body kind of shook. Then he ascends the steps up to the landing of the stairwell and pretended to swing an invisible cape around his shoulders with a theatrical flourish. Then he gave a Shakespearian speech celebrating his victory because he was alive and Weisinger was dead. They’d been in some long-running struggle that had been horrible.

CBC: Who was the biggest dick…?

Rick: No, I think they were in some interoffice battle and it ended up with Kanigher having a nervous breakdown. I believe that’s what happened.

CBC: That was actually related to his breakdown of ’67 or ’68. It’s interesting

that Kubert and Kanigher flipped roles at that time, with Joe, now editor of the war books, feeding Bob work. That spoke to Joe’s character. That’s a real classy thing to do, especially to a guy who just had a nervous breakdown.

Rick: I had a chance to ask Kanigher one time, in a question-&-answer thing, how he felt doing comics. And he said he was cool with it, though he had a very deep intellect. I think, early in life, he probably was hoping to go much farther into the arts. But he said he was content with doing comics. And, if you look at a lot of the panels Roy Lichtenstein swiped, a lot of ’em are from Kanigher stories. No one ever brings that up. They always say, “Oh, the poor artists.” But Kanigher thought that stuff up first. A lot of those word balloons are pure Kanigher — those sound effects and stylisms.

CBC: That’s an interesting point.

Rick: He’s kind of left out of the discussion, but he had this big impact on pop art.

CBC: The general consensus is Kanigher was disappointed to be in comics, and not become a novelist or playwright.

Rick: I sensed that when he was giving his talk.

So I asked him directly and maybe he was being evasive, I don’t know. Maybe he was debating

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Scans courtesy of Karen L. Green, Curator for Comics and Cartoons, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Portable Jung © the respective copyright holder.

Above: Few children in comics fandom have exhibited the enthusiasm and ambition — never mind raw talent! — of young Ricky Veitch, as evidenced by his dedication to producing his own “home-brewed” comics, many greatly influenced

by Marvel Comics, Jack Kirby, and Wally Wood (by way of MAD and Dynamo!). Below: For a St. Mark’s Poetry Project publication in 1969 that included brother Tom’s work, Rick contributed science-fiction inspired cover art. Inset right: Rick’s intro to the works of Carl Jung in the early ’70s was life-altering.

All TM & © Rick Veitch and the estate of Tom Veitch.

it, but he seemed content with comics. I liked the way his imagination was constantly flowing.

CBC: You’ve bought up Carl Jung before. I had read that you were going through a depression just out of your teenage years, picking up a volume of Jung. Does he remain important to you?

Rick: Oh yeah. I’ve got a complete set of his works and, while I haven’t read every single one, I’ve read a lot of ’em two or three times. What happened was, when I was 20, 21 years old I had been living crazy, and everything fell in on me. I got into this really bad depression, where I could hardly get out of bed. I started having these amazing dreams, really vivid mind-movies, that were just astounding.

CBC: Was this the beginning of them?

Rick: This was the beginning of me really paying attention to

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

dreams, to the point where I was writing them down in detail.

I had these notebooks where I would record them in prose and pictures. And that’s when someone handed me a volume of The Portable Jung. At first read, I didn’t understand it, but, man, it was like, “Yeah! This is it!”

CBC: And what was “it”?

Rick: Well, that there is a meaning to our dreams. That, if we pay attention to them, they’ll guide us into finding who and what we really are. And that’s exactly what happened to me. Dreamwork pulled me right out of the

Above: Two examples of the Brothers Veitch’s underground comix work, scanned from the original art. Below: All New Underground Comix #5 [’73] Bottom: Rick’s Jung library.

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This page: Kirby lives in this page of the undead in this page by Rick Veitch from “Two-Fisted Zombies,” All New Underground Comix #5 [’73]. Below is Rick’s senior portrait in the Bellows Falls Union High School yearbook of 1969.

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“Two-Fisted Zombies” TM & © Rick Veitch and the estate of Tom Veitch.

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depression. It helped me live more true to myself and not lie to people and act like a juvenile asshole. To try to be a decent person with a moral core. Dreams guided me to getting my life back on track.

Later I learned that dreamwork, besides being a good self-organization tool, gets you in touch with the spirit. First it asks you to work through what Jung calls “The Shadow,” which is all the bullsh*t that life dumps on you. It took me 40 years of doing that, especially through my art, before I got hit with the meatball. Jung calls it “Individuation,” a natural process that brings on visionary experiences of what is apparently the source of all our reality. It is this living thing and we don’t usually see it. But it’s there, right in front of our noses.

CBC: How does that manifest? How do you know it to be so?

Rick: Well, I can describe the first experience I had: I was meditating on a candle, watching the flame bounce, kind of hypnotized a little bit. And then my attention fell on the tip of

the wick, which is a small hot burning coal. And suddenly my consciousness profoundly shifted, altered as if I had taken a drug, but no drugs were involved. And the distance I felt between me and the candle was now intergalactic in scale. It felt like there were hundreds of millions of miles between me and the candle. And then the tip of the wick was the size of a star, all molten and roiling, and alive. It was a living thing, clear as a bell. I was able to hold it for about five minutes. It was really difficult to do because your ego wants to just drift off…

CBC: Meditating can be so difficult…

Rick: So that was an amazing vision that left me giddy and gasping. But there was more. The experience created a thought in my mind that was unlike any other thought I’d ever had, in the sense that, when I pulled up the memory of what I had seen, that thought had a tactile, spatial quality. It’s really hard to describe but, normally, when I access a memory, my mind’s eye is looking at a flat screen image. But when I pulled up the memory of this living molten star thing, it had a startling presence. It was within me and always available in this really profound way.

So, okay, what is this? What’s going on? I went back to the literature, especially the three alchemical books that Jung had written. Psychology and Alchemy, Mysterium Coniunctionis, and Aion. And, sure enough, what the alchemists were all about, was getting into trance states and connecting with this spirit, the source of all reality. They were early scientists, but the key was they wanted to see God in everything. And Jung maps this to his modern theories of psychology, calling it Individuation; a natural process that connects us to the deeper aspects of life and the spirit.

CBC: So where was God for you as a child?

Rick: It was being shoved down my throat in Catholic school. And none of it made any sense to me. It all seemed too connected to authority rather than to anything truly spiritual.

I experimented with psychedelics in my late teens, especially the mushroom, which is sort of like hot wiring the Individuation process. When I took the mushroom, everything seemed alive and connected. And that’s what happened to me in these visionary experiences.

CBC: So when was this? This was the journey that you started when you were 20, 21 years old…?

Rick: Yeah. I’ve been doing dreamwork ever since then, which is, basically, paying attention to my dreams. I try to remember them upon waking, make notes, and just think about them during the day. And then, of course, later I turn them into art, and that makes it even more profound.

CBC: Huh. My memory of dreams almost immediately vanish after I wake up.

Rick: It’s hard to hold them. The trick I’ve learned is to keep your eyes closed. Before you open them run through the dreams and transfer them from the dreaming side of the brain to the other hemisphere where the memory cells live.

CBC: Did you go to Catholic school or public school?

Rick: I went to Catholic school up through eighth grade and then had public high school.

CBC: How were you in high school?

Rick: I was coasting. I didn’t do the work.

CBC: Did you do sports?

Rick: I did do sports, but I didn’t do the schoolwork as a kid.

I’d been able to get by without really studying or the minimal of homework. I would rather be drawing comics.

CBC: So you never gave up comics. That’s a through line for you, right? From four years old and on?

Rick: Yes.

All photos courtesy of Rick Veitch.

CBC: How did comics still remain cool to do? Or was it solitary? Was it something you didn’t necessarily share with other people, or you were just fine with it?

Rick: Well, it was something that made me happy doing it. I had lots of friends but not many understood comics. They would dig it if I drew a Roth style T-shirt design, though.

My brother Tom was one of the few people who understood why someone would make their own comic. But I got zero support from all adults, and in fact, quite the opposite.

It wasn’t just my dad saying “You can’t make a living.” It was every teacher, every adult.

That was the thing I heard a zillion times.

CBC: Did you see that as a challenge or…?

Rick: I couldn’t help myself.

I just had to do it. And there weren’t as many things to take my attention away like they are today. So it was, like, you could sit around and watch TV in the evening or do your homework or draw a comic, and, a lot of times, I would pick up the comic stuff and be drawing away, making little stories.

CBC: Were they knock-offs?

Rick: Yeah, of whatever I was in love with at the time.

So, when it’s Fantastic Four, I knocked-off the Fantastic Four.

When it’s Wally Wood…

CBC: Did you do your version of the FF or the actual FF? Rick: No, I’d make my own. I had my own continuing character, but I’d be copying panels of whatever I was really into at the time. So, when Kirby was exploding at Marvel, I was copying his panels and working them into my story somehow.

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CBC: What would you call his peak? The Galactus trilogy?

Rick: There’s different peaks for Kirby. The Marvel peak would be the Galactus/Inhumans era, but the real peak for Jack is New Gods.

CBC: There was a period in the later 1990s, when I wasn’t buying many comics, but I bought Supreme (on the advice of Bissette), and that was, like, you guys just f*cking nailed the Weisinger appeal of Superman comics of the ’60s. Were they important to you as a little kid?

Rick: Yeah. I had all those comics. I loved the weirdness, and when Alan [Moore] and I would get together on the phone and start talking about it, we would just wallow in nostalgia.

And of course Alan was bringing his magical practices into focus through it, mapping the Kabbalah to Silver Age nuttiness.

CBC: Did you bring Jung in there?

Rick: I didn’t. We did have Wilhelm Reich as a character. [laughs] CBC: What was that about Weisinger? I think back to being a kid and when we would go on car trips — I come from a family of six, too — my parents

Above: Photos of Rick at 20 taken by brother Tom, on Stinson Beach, California, in 1972. Tom was “planning to draw his own comix and needed photo reference, so I was drafted as his model.” Inset left: Supreme commission by Rick.

Below: Rick in 1972.

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on the dangers of 20th century fascism. Jack Kirby is a really great model for a man who tapped into the primal imagination.

What he did with it and what he had to go through culturally, politically and then creatively, has had a profound impact on all of us.

CBC: In spite of his being basically oppressed by Stan Lee and those who were exploiting him… Joe Simon and…

Rick: The whole businesses is designed like that and he was caught in it.

CBC: What did you learn from that?

Rick: The business side? I can’t say I learned anything other than to be outraged. And it feeds into that feeling we all shared in the ’80s: that comics needed to be reformed. I still feel that way, but the ’80s everybody, the creators, the readers, the retailers, the distributors, all the new publishers sprouting up understood we had this great art form entangled with a business culture that needed to be reformed. And it kind of happened there for about 10 years. Now, not so much.

Above: Rick Veitch’s student ID would buy recognizable comic books and throw ‘em in the back CBC: The billions of dollars generated… from his days at the Joe Kubert seat to keep us quiet. Dennis the Menace, I remember very Rick: But, with Kirby, he was such a gift to us. Every single School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. well. Harvey Comics… Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen… Jimmy issue of every Kirby comic I saw as a kid fed my head with new and Superman being Flamebird and Nightwing is one of the concepts I hadn’t seen before. greatest comic-book memories I have of those days. How can CBC: Jimmy Olsen #133 completely destroyed me and built a super-hero be the secret identity of a different super-hero…? me back up again at 11 or 12…

The mind boggles! [laughs] What do you think made Weisinger Rick: The same for me with “The Tales of Asgard” in the back so oddly wonderful for a six- or seven-year-old? of Thor. And every two weeks, there’s a new Kirby comic at the Rick: Well, that would be a good question for Alan because, grocery store, if not more. There might be three in a month! like I say, he did intertwine his scripts with his magical practices, So it’s this constant presence, this constant cornucopia of fresh That run of Promethea he did with J.K. Williams, where she stuff. And, when he left Marvel, it was clear that Stan had nothtravels up the Kabbalah, puts a very esoteric way of thinking ing. Marvel Comics instantly became vacuous. on a level a normal person can easily access. For my part, I had CBC: I would offer that, from the very beginning of Captain spent so much of my youth trying to draw Curt Swan panels, I America Comics #1, having, on the cover, a revolutionary was a good fit for his retro vision. political statement of having a character punching out a real-life CBC: You and I definitely share a love of Jack Kirby, and I find political leader (albeit fascist) in the jaw on the cover of a comic him to be utterly transcendent. He appeals to me in a human book is as brave as f*ck to do something like that. way that is separate from comics, on a personal level. Do you Rick: Hear, hear! that same feeling about him?

CBC: And for his Jewish publisher to go along with, it was great. It transcended comics.

Below: The first building to house Rick: Absolutely. The arc of his life, is just amazing. I found Rick: And Captain America is, today, a 21st century film icon. the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon it hard to swallow when Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner came I’d like to see him punching more Nazis though. and Graphic Art was the Baker down on Kirby for being a “fascist artist.” The guy was a patriot CBC: I do see “The Glory Boat” [New Gods #6, Jan. ’72] as Mansion, located at 45 Lehigh who picked up a gun and fought his way across Europe to being important to you. That was one of the concepts for doing Street, in the town of Dover. defeat fascism. The New Gods is a brilliant evolving meditation this cover was initially on that. What is that savagery of Orion and the lightness of Lightray and all that to you?

Rick: Jack caught the Zeitgeist at the time, and part of it is, like a true artist, he’s working on himself. He’s got PTSD from being in the war, and that’s Orion, this violent guy who loses it and turns into a monster who requires a Mother Box to put himself back together. Great, great concept! And impulsive angry Orion partners with Lightray, who’s a sweetheart and a total planner who’s always trying to quiet Orion down. It’s a perfect matching, and Jack holds the whole thing together with the Source, which is his greatest creation, I think. Its the same living spirit that Jung and the alchemists are talking about, but Jack gives it give a name: the Source! And in so doing he describes it not by any human terms, but by its living quality as the source of all reality.

And then he takes you on this sprawling saga in which all the characters have a sustaining relationship with the Source.

No one turns it into a weapon, although, I guess, Darkseid probably was going to be moving in that direction. But then we see [George] Lucas stealing the concept for Star Wars, turning it into a weapon.

CBC: Is the Source the absence of ego? As you said, regarding 52

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

the whole thing. I’m sure that science, at some point, will figure out that consciousness is. They haven’t figured it out yet. And so physics is essentially focused on other things, but I guarantee you, at some point, that my money is on consciousness underpinning all timespace.

CBC: I had this near-death experience at 20 of being in a violent car crash and basically bleeding out before the paramedics found me. I had a very conventional NDE, becoming an astral form rising up and looking down at my body and then being compelled to look at the blinding light above…

It was akin to the best acid trip I ever had, which was educational, because it made me recognize we are connected with all things.

Rick: And that’s what psychedelics do. The problem with psychedelics is after you touch the Source you have to rapidly fall back down through your Shadow side. As we age, I think we naturally clear that detritus out of the way, so we can have these higher end experiences without the hangover.

CBC: What is the Shadow? Is it guilt, remorse, shame…?

Rick: It’s the acreage in our mind where we store all the sh*t of life, everything that’s been put on us, what awfulness we’ve done to others. It’s collective, too. All the stuff our society did, all the crimes that have been committed, all the wars, and all the horror, it’s all in us at some level. The point is to accept it’s there, but not project that crap on other people.

CBC: The introduction of E.C.-type horror came into underground comix with your brother Tom, especially when he worked with Greg Irons. And your first published work was Two-Fisted Zombies [’73], which he wrote. From what we’re talking about now is he came from a normal home and you came from a dysfunctional home. It was mentioned to me that he went in the direction of Trumpism and died during Covid…

Rick: I believe Covid took him at the end. What really got around and stretch, and there’d be the candle and I’d start him was prostate cancer. He refused to test for it as he got into looking at it. And, naturally, I was attracted to the relaxation of his 60s and 70s. And it runs with my family. I’ve had it, watching the flame bounce, which is hypnotic. And that would but I tested early and was able to deal with it. When just sort of center me. And then, one day, it clicked. It took itself it finally caught up with him, he had cancer all to this whole other level. There’s nothing I could have done through his body, and that’s what took him out. other than what I was doing.

His Trumpism seemed to be another aspect of his CBC: It’s interesting that you say it’s the light, when you open participating in a religious cult out in California your eyes, that can dissipate memory of the dream. And you during the 80’s. found that reality through light — the candle — with open eyes.

CBC: That’s really weird because his Rick: It’s movement rather than light, that hypnotic movement. Legion of Charlies was a criticism of a cult, CBC: When did that start? the Manson Family.

Rick: About ten years ago. I’m always hoping that I’ll have Rick: I didn’t quite understand him after that kind of intense experience again, but they’re few and far that. We tried to collaborate on some stuff but between. But I just have this general view of life now that there he’d become too didactic. By that time, I had is this living source and it’s part of me. And that kind of changes experience working creatively with Joe Kubert, how you relate to a lot of things. I don’t know if it’s serenity; it’s Steve Bissette, Archie Goodwin, and others. I felt a more like a reason to live. It makes sense of life. A lot of modern real spark brainstorming stories with those guys. But life is empty, void of meaning. But there really is a meaning to when I tried to collaborate with Tom, we didn’t have that

“The White House Horror” © Rick Veitch. Dr. Wirtham’s Comix & Stories TM & © Clifford Neal. Self-portrait courtesy of Rick Veitch.

meditation, your ego was there to acknowledge what you find, but ego can get in the way.

Rick: Well, you’re not going to get rid of the ego, because it’s how we perceive everything in front of us. But the ego always wants to intrude or is scared when you approach things you don’t understand. So, with meditation, you’re training yourself to relax so things you don’t understand can manifest. For me, it’s like self-hypnosis. Observing the dancing candle flame or water ripples on a pond serves to hypnotizes the ego to observe what’s in our unconscious as it come through the back door of the imagination. Imagination is a key part of it.

CBC: It’s acceptance then…

Rick: Well, the ego’s got to be there to witness it. But it’s got to stop projecting fears and desires, and let the living essence, the Source, come through.

CBC: How did you learn to meditate? Who was your guide?

How did that happen?

Rick: I had no guide at all. My studio is this old mobile home, and it had a musty smell. And I often would have a scented candle going just to sort of improve the atmosphere in there. I’d draw for an hour or two, then get up and just walk

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

Below: From the back cover of Booster Gold: The Big Fall, a hardcover collection of Booster Gold #1–12 [1986–87] , these panels, by penciler Dan Jurgens and inker Mike DeCarlo, originally appeared (with slightly different wordage) in the second issue of Booster Gold [Mar. 1986].

Above: Rick’s nine-pager, “The White House Horror” appeared in Clifford Neal’s Dr. Wirtham Comix & Stories #2 [Jan. ’77], cover by Neal. Inset left: Manticore was a one-shot publication created

by Joe Kubert School students.

Below: A self-portrait by Rick from his first semester at the school.

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Above: Superhero Catalog page by Rick Veitch produced by the Kubert School for entrepreneur Ivan Snyder’s Superhero Enterprises/Heroes World.

Inset right: Ivan Snyder’s catalogs had a multitude of names, including The Heroes World Catalog [#1, ’79].

Cover art by Joe Kubert.

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couple of friends and we drove out West from Vermont.

CBC: When was this?

Rick: In 1970, probably late in the year. I spent the winter out there and I was still drawing comics but, by then, had figured out how Rapidographs worked and to draw on large paper. I did the first six or seven pages of Two-Fisted Zombies, with the axe murder opening, and I left the word balloons empty thinking Tom could write some wacky poetry or something. Tom showed the pages to Ron Turner at Last Gasp. Ron was doing this whole series, All New Underground Comics. He said, “You write it, Tom, and we’ll pay you to do it.” And so that’s how that all happened.

CBC: That must have been a thrill.

Rick: It was great, but I made the mistake of leaving Cali-

fornia and going back to Vermont and moving in with my old hippie buddies, who’re soon to become meth dealers. It was like this insane summer of my life, but I got the book done, and it came out. And then the whole underground comix business collapsed. So I thought I had it and didn’t have it.

It fell from my fingertips.

CBC: Did you go to conventions at all?

Rick: When I was out there, I went to one of the Berkeley Cons.

CBC: And what was Greg Irons like?

Rick: Greg, I didn’t really get to know him that well. He was always traveling when I was out there, but I did get to meet him a few times. He was kind, with a wry sense of humor, and he seemed to really go for the mad sh*t that Tom was spewing out. The crazier, the more violent, the more horror-oriented, he loved it, and he was really quick. He drew his comics small and really fast. He’d whip out a 20-page comic a week or something.

Just unbelievable.

CBC: Nobody could do horror like him.

Rick: His characters, were people you’d seen on the street, #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Star Wars TM & © Lucasfilm, Ltd. Heroes World, Snyderman, all characters TM & © their respective copyright holders.

Below: Rick drew this illo for the inside cover of an Ivan Snyder catalog. It depicts the 60-foot super-hero mural the Kubert School created for the Livingston, N.J., mall store front.

connection.

CBC: This is the second time.

Rick: After he had joined the cult. What was great about working with Joe Kubert on a story is how it felt like creative play. Bissette and I had that, and I had that with Archie, as well. I ended up having it with Alan Moore, too. But Tom, I didn’t. It was like a weird push-pull thing with him. It just didn’t flow.

CBC: And what were you trying to do?

Rick: I had broken into Heavy Metal and was trying to pull a graphic novel together with him as writer. All we had was a title, The Planetary Route. I traveled out to California, where he was living in the town with the cult, and spent two weeks there trying to come up with ideas. But he kept wanting to turn it into a story about his guru. So it just didn’t fly.

CBC: Did you two have an estrangement thereafter?

Rick: We were estranged off and on because he was the type of guy, if he didn’t get his way, he would be really mad and hold grudges and stuff.

CBC: And how did his passing affect you?

Rick: Well, we were able to reconcile. The last year, he reached out and we had a couple of really great meetings and really great talks, and we just agreed not to talk about politics, and then we were fine.

CBC: So Two-Fisted Zombies was before you had the Jungian experience?

Rick: Yes, the TFZ deal happened around 1970. Tom was living on Stinson Beach [in Marin County, California], and Greg Irons lived right down the road. Greg had gone to Mexico. So, Tom said, “If you come out, you can crash in Greg’s barn.” I got a

Sparky © the respective copyright holder. “Roarin’ Rick Ratfink” © Rick Veitch.

and “The Pact” [New Gods #7, Mar. ’72]…

Rick: But then to have the rug pulled out from underneath his feet, that was horrible because he was just like… man, he was killing it.

And then, all of a sudden, it’s cancelled.

CBC: But he didn’t phone it in with The Demon or Kamandi, just like at the end of his Fantastic Four run. His art was still killer. He never gave up, never let his disappointment show in the work, even if he wasn’t adding conceptually…

Rick: But it was almost like he got the stuffing kicked out of him in terms of really reaching. The Demon and Kamandi are great, but they’re not New Gods. He was really bringing something, a part of himself to it with Fourth World. And he’s commenting on 20th century culture by giving us the gods we should have is just brilliant. I mean, I’d love to know what he was reading. Someone posted on Facebook a picture of him sitting in his living room, and there’s a bookshelf on the side, packed with insane books, but you can’t quite see what they are. To know what was feeding his head would be absolutely fascinating.

CBC: I always wondered if he was influenced by The Hellstrom Chronicle with Forager in New Gods. I remember sitting there reading “Bug” [New Gods #9, July ’72] and realizing, ‘Oh my god! He’s equating human beings to social insects!” these totally demented, shuffling degenerates. He really had Rick: And he did it at full speed! He normally penciled two it. What a shame he died so young. What a bullsh*t way to go, or three pages a day. Oftentimes more. I don’t know how huh? Archie Goodwin was a big fan of Tom and Greg’s work and he did it. I have talked to older cartoonists who saw him they were working on something for Epic, then Greg got killed. draw, and they all tell the same story. He starts in the upBut that evolved into Tom and Cam Kennedy doing The Light per left hand and he goes down the whole page to the and Darkness War [#1–6, Oct. ’88–Sept. ’89]. lower right corner. Somehow he sees it all in his head…

CBC: That’s right. Tom did a bunch of stuff for Dark Horse CBC: I know! It’s just hard not to go back to the Comics with a Star Wars series, Dark Empire… People know him Source! less for the underground stuff than they do the Star Wars work. Rick: Yes, the Source is the greatest. And what’s really Rick: He did that at the right time, when interest in Star Wars interesting is that DC has the Source, and Marvel doesn’t. was weak across the whole franchise. I guess Lucas was really They’re like this Godless universe, but DC has the Source. happy with what they did, and it helped shape the direction And they could bring the Source into the Superman Lucas took [in the next trilogy]. movies, but how will they handle it? Will they CBC: Did Tom ever meet George? turn it into another weapon or will they really Rick: He did meet him. understand what Jack was talking about?

CBC: I’ve always been curious about Clifford Neal, who pubCBC: One thing I always say is, why didn’t they give lished Dr. Wirtham’s Comix & Stories. How did you and Bissette come to do work for him?

Rick: Basically it was through networking. I had been in touch with some mini comics guys in Connecticut. They published a mini comic called Worm, and I was sending them stuff, and they were sending me stuff, and I think they knew Cliff Neal and Cliff was doing underground comix, but away from everybody else. He had his own thing going and he was looking for people.

CBC: It was separate from Greg Irons, who was also doing stuff for Clifford…?

Rick: Yes, and separate from Tom. Cliff wrote me out of the blue, saying, “What do you got?” And I was working on “The White House Horror,” and that’s just when I landed at the Kubert School. So I was able to connect him with Bissette.

[After a break, the conversation returns to Jack Kirby.]

CBC: But I know that I’m 65 years old, and I still am in touch with how I felt about the Fourth World, picking up New Gods, and just being in awe… “Himon” [Mister Miracle #9, Aug. ’72] COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

Above: Steve Bissette, Ezra, and Rick Veitch in 1977.

Inset left: Over a weekend, Rick and Steve Bissette knocked this puppy out, a public service comic book created for the National Fire Protection Association.

Below: Rick gives a shout-out to “Big Daddy” Roth in this 1995 self-caricature.

Bottom: Rick, Joe Kubert, and Bissette at the Word & Pictures Museum, circa 1990s.

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Inset right: Rick can’t recall what this was for exactly — a new Kubert School logo or a T-shirt design…? — but knows for sure that Joe Kubert inked the exploding dirigible!

Below: Jam illustration depicting the typical student of their day by Rick and Steve Bissette, rendered for the 10th anniversary of their Joe Kubert School Class of 1978.

Instead he fought super-villains or aliens, and then, pretty much, the thread of him was lost after that. I mean, the only people who’ve gotten him right in the modern age, as far as I can see, are Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. And Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Everything else is just like a corporate mush. And my little bit of working with the character during my Swamp Thing run, I found I was constantly up against this corporate pressure that Superman had to be a certain way. If you tried to explore this little bit of Superman off to the side, it would be like, “Nope, Superman is a symbol of truth, justice, and the American way.” And that was very much the corporate stance when I was doing it.

CBC: So it was an anomaly that Alan was able to do…?

Rick: The beauty of what Alan did is that he did it on their terms, but he gave you a whole new dimension. And you can’t discount Dave either, because Dave brings this classical juice to it that no one else can touch. So, I mean, that’s the team that could have made sense of Superman, I think.

CBC: Is it a lost cause now?

Rick: Yes. CBC: I don’t mean to oversimplify, but we only have so much space, and we obviously have already covered your Swamp Thing years in the Swampmen book [CBC #6, Dec. ’14] with that interview. I understand that you really started coming onto your own as a writer and an artist, correct, by that time…?

Rick: No, when I did Epic, I was writing, drawing, lettering, and coloring, doing everything myself. So I was always… sort of… I dunno if the word “auteur” is too pompous, but that’s how I thought of myself, as someone who makes their own comics. And I was always looking for little slots within the industry where I could do that. Swamp Thing was an anomaly because I wanted to understand what Alan was doing on an organic level. I saw the scripts that he gave to Steve Bissette, right at the beginning, “The Anatomy Lesson” [Saga of Swamp Thing #21, Feb. ’84]. I got to read that just after Steve received it. I was, like, “Ding-ding-ding-ding! This is it. And I need to understand what this guy’s about and what he brings to it.”

CBC: What was “it”?

Rick: Well, part of it was how Alan related to the artist and how he wrote the script, not as a teleplay, like most script writers, but as a love letter to the artist and to the form itself.

So there’d be some artist who would complain, “Oh yeah, he’s got three pages of typewritten description for one panel.” But in those three pages, he would be directly addressing the artist, and he had read and understood all the work the artist had #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Humor illo © Rick Veitch and Stephen R. Bissette. Tri-plane illo © Rick Veitch. Both courtesy of Rick Veitch.

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Superman to Jack? It would’ve been so amazing. John Byrne came kind of close to it of bringing Superman within the Fourth World framework and all that, but what if…?.

Rick: And why didn’t they give Superman to Alan [Moore] and Dave [Gibbons]? I mean, we’d be living in a different universe…

CBC: But they did for one issue, right?

Rick: Yeah. But I mean, it showed what they could do with modern thinking applied to the classic side of it. What if, instead of Watchmen, those guys had taken on Superman when Frank [Miller] was doing Batman. It would have been perfect…

CBC: It makes you wonder if DC understands the gift that they were given. It’s interesting that Superman as a mythological figure… he’s intimidating in a way of being so super-powered, what can you do with him? But if you bring him in as an essence of an archetypal source of light…

Rick: Then you should be reading Maximortal. That’s what it’s about.

CBC: Talk to me about that.

Rick: Well, Maximortal is kind of tied into the Brat Pack universe, but it’s my exploration of the Superman archetype, the dreadnaught super-hero, which I connect back to Nietzsche. His concept of the Übermensch ties in directly to what Siegel and Shuster were doing.

Following that thread, I can see how politics changed Superman from being a populist super-hero to a propaganda tool.

CBC: Did that shift happen post-war, or do you think in the middle of the war?

Rick: Well, beginning in the Second World War and then, through the war on communism, Superman became a Boy Scout.

He stopped busting weapons manufacturers, corrupt politicians and wife beaters.

All TM & © DC Comics.

done. He would talk about various aspects of comics and why we needed to constantly try to improve our lot and the art form itself. It was just so interesting and beautiful to work on. And then the finished product, of course, was amazing to read. “The Anatomy Lesson” is one of those books that just changes your life when you read it.

CBC: I was just thinking of the transformative aspect of those 23 pages, when Alec Holland believes he’s a human who turned into a plant when he’s actually a plant who believes he’s human.

Rick: I’ve met so many people who just had their minds completely French fried by that single issue. I had read “Miracleman,” so I was already in tune with Alan. I knew that he had something special going. I can remember first reading “Miracleman” and thinking, “He must live with the artist because there’s such a tight integration of words and pictures.” But then I read the scripts and I saw that it was this technique of writing the scripts that got you there.

CBC: So you read “Miracleman” originally in Warrior maga-

zine, this amazing treatise on what it is to be a super-hero…?

Rick: Actually, the first connection I had to Alan Moore was in 1981. I went to Lucca, Italy, and met Dave Gibbons and Bryan Talbot at the comics festival there. They gave me a copy of 2000 AD to read. I brought it back to the hotel room, and there was a story in there that was told completely backwards. It was a time-twister story. But it was perfectly constructed, like an Eisner Spirit story. I didn’t check the credits but after reading it. I thought, “I’m going to file this away in the swipe file part of the brain, because someday I’m going to steal it.” And, five years later, I’m on the phone with Alan. He’d called to say he didn’t have an idea for the next issue with Swamp Thing. So I was pulling things out of my memory swipe files and said, “I read this story one time that was told completely backwards.” And he’s like, “You like that? I wrote that one.” [laughter] So he was blowing my mind before I knew his name.

CBC: I don’t understand how he can function. George Khoury COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

and I visited his rowhouse in Northampton, where, I guess, he brings people to interview him. Not his country home.

But he would sit there and he’d sound so sharp, and crystal clear, and sober, and he’s constantly smoking hash mixed with tobacco.

Rick: Sometimes I would get him on the phone very early, before he had a chance to have a spliff, and he would sound slow and off his game.

Then he’d light up a Buddha stick and out it comes; this incredible in-depth articulation.

The last time I was in England, we met in London. We’re sitting in a restaurant and he starts off, “I met a demon,” and he launches into the story about taking acid and talking to a demon at a party, and he’s tying it all into particle physics and the physics of consciousness and what time and space really are, right?

And he goes on for two-and-a-half hours, and we’re all just sitting there and it’s, like, freaking amazing. It’s like one of his CDs that he used to publish where he’d give these talks, but totally articulate, totally perfect. As it’s all happening, he’s got his back to the room, but I can see out, into the room, and everybody in the restaurant is tuning in on him. He’s going on, and on, and on, and he finishes up by tying up all the threads and arguing that time is an illusion. Then this guy gets up and runs across the room and says, “If time is an illusion, what is memory?”

Alan doesn’t miss a beat, he goes into another 15-minute speech about what memory is on the particle physics level!

He’s an extraordinary guy. He really, really changed comics in a profound way. I feel really lucky to have worked with him. As crazy as all got on the business side, the creative side was as good as it gets.

CBC: He’s totally out of comics now.

Rick: Yeah, he doesn’t want anything to do with them. And I got to say: for me it’s been really great to have him leave the stage because people see me in a different light now. When I worked with him so much, people tended to evaluate me as, ‘Alan Moore sideman doing the retro stuff.”

But now people seem to be more open to what I accomplished on my own.

Above: Sgt. Rock #334 [Nov. ’79] included a back-up tale, “Hill,” written by Bill Kelley with Rick’s art.

Inset left: From Sgt. Rock #338 [Mar. ’80]. Below: The Robert Kanigher-scribed “Final Encounter” two-pager illustrated by Rick from Sgt. Rock #339 [Apr. ’80].

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Above: Rick’s illo for High Times appeared in 1980. Inset right: Rick collaboration with Alan Moore for Epic Illustrated #34 [Feb. ’86]..

Below: RV and SRB’s big break came with 1941: The Illustrated Story, a zany adaptation of the 1979 Steven Spielberg film.

game-changer…

Rick: It changed everything, man. Moëbius laid down great, great stuff. That was the ultimate extension of the underground.

This new way of thinking, a completely new way of thinking entering the mainstream.

CBC: Where was the substance of Moëbius? Was there an essence?

Rick: Well, to begin with he’s a top rank classical cartoonist who can draw anything. But then he takes the next step, applying his pen-&-ink style, his storytelling, his staging, to his inner life, allowing his unconscious to come out on the page in works like “The Airtight Garage.” Reading his comics, you feel like you have been inside Jean Giraud’s dream. It’s really extraordinary.

I find it one of the most inspiring art things I’ve ever encountered. I only wish he had spent more time following through on that kind of work rather than The Silver Surfer.

CBC: Do you think that there was a promise of Heavy Metal to have this national acceptance, certainly in the United States, of comics for adults on the newsstand, that maybe there was a lost opportunity to expand the form?

Rick: No. I think it was the first shot fired that made the New York comics publishing business recognize their audience was growing older.

Undergrounds had already proven that to a degree out west, but the East Coast was resisting it. They were looking at S. Clay Wilson and Crumb’s sex fantasies and going, “We can’t do this.” There was a lot of discussion about that during the Kubert School years, and when I broke into the New York mainstream I heard a lot of it. Older comics people were saying “We know we have to do something different, but it can’t be S. Clay Wilson or Crumb,” and that was the only model. But, suddenly, here’s Heavy Metal, and this is obviously aimed not at a 12- to16-year-old, but someone in their early 20s.

And it’s selling. That woke up

the publishers.

I saw it happen at Marvel. First, it started with their black&-white mags. They started to expand that with Rick Marschall as the editor and he was looking for really wacky stuff. It was Marschall who talked them into doing Epic before he got pushed out. Archie came in as editor, with a mandate to mine that target audience that Heavy Metal had found. And I walked right into that. That was my lucky day.

CBC: Did Joe show you Métal Hurlant?

Rick: When I first came to the school to show Joe my portfolio, he looked at Two-Fisted Zombies and he was, like, “You did this?” He was grinning. He was loving it. And then he looked at a few pages and he reached and pulled out an issue of Pilote, which had a Druillet story in it, and that Gir story where he takes his family on a vacation and encounters a giant. Later, I met Bissette and he had a set of Métal Hurlant, and so I got to just drink that stuff in. It was, like, “Yes, yes, yes! I have found my tribe. This is it!”

CBC: And that’s interesting… I mean, the Kubert School itself was a pragmatic endeavor. Joe was a very, very practical guy.

He’s giving you guys instruction how to be commercial artists…

Rick: Joe was the most amazing person I ever met. I was so fortunate to meet him when I did, when he was just starting his school, because he really, really, really wanted to give back. He knew he was lucky, that he was blessed, and he wanted to give the younger generation that same opportunity. I just happened to be there the first year and got the full benefit of that. It was just this unbelievable opportunity to work with the guy, and he was finding gigs that the students could make a little money on, and plus get published in the back of Sgt. Rock. I mean, we’d do these stupid Superhero Catalogs… remember those?

CBC: Of course.

Rick: I’d look over, and here is one of the greatest cartoonists of our age, and he’s sitting there lettering this dumb Superhero Catalog so that we will learn how a comic is actually put together while making a few bucks doing paste-up and mechanicals and illustrations and stuff. That’s the kind of guy he was. #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

High Times TM & © Trans-High Corporation. “Love Doesn’t Last Forever” © Alan Moore and Rick Veitch. 1941 © Universal Studios/Columbia Pictures.

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It’s kind of like Miles Davis making those revolutionary jazz albums with John Coltrane and Chick Corea and John McLaughlin. Even though those guys were essential to the development of the sound, those albums are considered by the public to be Miles Davis albums. It wasn’t until Miles left music that people start giving attention to Coltrane and those other guys.

CBC: Back to the chronology. Joe Kubert introduced you guys to Métal Hurlant and Heavy Metal became a

Heartburst TM & © Rick Veitch. Comicon.com © Rick Veitch and Steve Conley.

CBC: Commercial comic books are cutthroat, chewing people up and spitting them out. And Joe was able to transcend that, not only by talent, but also by power of his personality by saying, “I’m not going to take any sh*t.” And he didn’t even have to say it. His mere physical presence conveyed that. But you could sense to him, this altruistic, “I want to give back”?

Rick: That’s the speech he gave me when I went to show him my portfolio. Before he looked at my work, he spent like 10 minutes saying why he was doing what he was doing. “I want to give back. I used to work in the studios as a 12-year-old kid erasing pages and that’s how I learned how to do this.”

Later, when I would see him 10, 15, 20 years after we graduated, he was kind of tired of it all. I think he was tired of working with young people because young people are idiots. I think he would try to give everyone an opportunity, but if they didn’t take it, he would just move on.

CBC: Well, one has only so much time in their lives, right?

Bissette gave decades of his life to instructing students. Did you ever have that desire?

Rick: I’m a lousy teacher. I don’t have patience for other people. I just want to give people pencils and paper and say, “Do it. It’s great.” But, fortunately, I’ve always had enough freelance work so that I didn’t have to think of teaching, which is really, I think, why Steve got into it, as he didn’t want to deal with the freelance thing any longer.

CBC: How far is White River Junction [home of the Center for Cartoon Studies] from here?

Rick: Maybe an hour-and-a-half. I usually go up every year or two and give a talk.

CBC: What’s your take on the kids?

Rick: It’s fantastic. The community of cartoonists in Vermont is mushrooming, and there are these little conventions going on with people doing homemade craft comics and weird little self-publishing things. And it’s starting to happen up here.

I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but Steve Conley and I started a company called Eureka Comics, and we’ve been doing educational comics for about 10 years. We’ve done a boatload of textbook comics for McGraw Hill and others. We’re working on one right now for Ohio State University about health insurance for farmers.

CBC: You’re kidding! That’s outstanding!

Rick: It’s really challenging in a fun way and it pays commercial art rates. We did a series of math graphic novels, which were essentially fantasy graphic novels with fantasy characters running around, having adventures. And then, every couple of pages, they stop and they count the loot and they figure out the ratio between the gold ones and the silver ones, and then they how to figure out how to throw the rope over this object, and how long’s the rope got to be, using math. They’re practical math exercises baked into a full-color graphic novel.

CBC: So how do you and Steve work?

Rick: We split the freelance, depending on what the job requires. Sometimes they want my style, sometimes they want his style, and we will just switch it around. But there’s been plenty of work for both of us. A big part of it is maintaining relations with the clients and Steve is really good at that.

CBC: You guys started Comicon.com, right?

Rick: Yeah.

CBC: How did that idea come up?

Rick: Well, the comics industry had just collapsed again. This was around 1998, and the comics distribution had become a monopoly run by Diamond and controlled by DC and Marvel.

And obviously the indies were going to get squeezed out. We could see it happening, so we were looking for a new way of COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

Below: Dan and Kevin notably worked together on the Superman vs. Aliens mini-series [three issues, July–Sept. 1995], a joint DC/Dark Horse presentation.

doing things, and the internet was just starting. Steve was building websites, so he understood the mechanics of how to do it. And he and I were talking about how a website for comics would function. And he asked me, “What would you want it to do?” And I said, “I want it to do everything that I do at a convention. I want to meet people, I want sell books. I want to sell art, I want to network.” And he had just been to a symposium in Greece about how to structure a website. And he said one of the metaphors they were talking about was a convention. And,

Above: Rick Veitch’s painted cover illustration as scanned by Heritage Auctions appeared as cover for Heartburst, the graphic novel published by Marvel in 1984.

Below: Screen-grab of Rick and Steve Conley’s Comicon.com home page, circa 2005, courtesy of the Way Back Machine.

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* Spearheaded by alternative comics creator Dave Sim, the “Spirits of Independence” tour was a series of events at comic shops in North America in the mid-’90s celebrating the independent, creator-owned comics movement.

60

CBC: How was the income from that? Were there flush years?

Rick: They were. We’d probably bring in $7–8,000 a year, which was not huge, not enough to live on. I still had to work.

But I was finding gigs directly through the site, selling sketches and books, and people finding me through Comicon.com, as well.

CBC: So you didn’t feel like you were not giving all to your work with the time spent on the website?

Rick: It was part of my work because we were looking for a new way to get our comics out. The door was being shut at Diamond and we all knew that. So it was time for a new form of distribution and that’s what we were hoping to build. We were a little ahead of the curve. I mean, there’s a lot more going on right now in terms of selling online and stuff but, in those days, there was no credit card online or PayPal. So it was all done by mail, but what we were hoping was that we could build a network of retailers and start soliciting books just like we did through Diamond, but we were never able to pull that together.

It needed somebody else to focus on the logistics. Steve and I just weren’t able to do that.

CBC: Right. And you need to have a guaranteed income to be able to attract somebody like that…

Rick: Or someone could see the potential in it and just start a business by themselves. It was really what was needed and it never quite happened.

[After a break, talk resumes about how Marvel and DC deal respectively with on-screen credit and reprint fees.]

CBC: Marvel’s been good, I’ve heard. If they put a name on the screen, that person gets a check.

Rick: But it’s not a big check. For all the books that have been reprinted through DC, I get quarterly royalties.

CBC: Can you buy groceries with your four checks a year?

Rick: I probably pull in about $15,000 a year now, but depending on what’s released. When they released the Alan Moore/Rick Veitch Swamp Thing stuff, I made $25,000. But there are constant sales of the backlist and they’re really good about getting checks to freelancers.

CBC: And people are really good about buying them again!

Rick: Yeah! Everybody must have bought those Swamp Things a dozen times by now.

CBC: This independent streak of yours: where did this start developing?

Rick: It’s an extension of what I was doing as a kid; making my own home-brew comics. I wanted to make my own comics and tell my own stories. That was me from the beginning.

Even at Kubert School, I remember articulating to my lettering teacher, Hy Eisman, “I really want to learn lettering because I want to move back to Vermont and just do my own comics rather than stay in New York and become part of the machine.”

And so I took the time to learn lettering and doing that opened incredible doors for me.

CBC: That and everything else you learned, right? Coloring, production techniques of separations…

Rick: Yeah. The whole nine yards.

CBC: With Epic, did you ever do press checks or anything like that? Or how deep could you go into production…?

Rick: You couldn’t. I was doing fully painted comics, but these were gang-scanned on this giant drum scanner, so you never knew what you were going to get for color separations. And it was always about saving money, so it always looked like sh*t. But now, with desktop publishing and my own high-end scanner, I can get those painted pages to look just #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Abraxas and the Earthman, The One TM & © Rick Veitch.

in that phone call, the name Comicon.com popped up, and we were in business.

CBC: How did it go?

Rick: The first couple of years were great. In the beginning, we were selling advertising and virtual booths and people were sending us checks. The concept was growing by leaps and bounds.

People liked it. People wanted to have booths. What really kicked it off was when Marvel sued their freelancers. Do you remember all that?

CBC: I don’t remember them suing their freelancers.

Rick: Well, it was something that happened during the Marvel bankruptcy. One of the parties to the bankruptcy was suing the freelancers and ex-employees for their severance packages, and Above: Ever an advocate for we got the story. We ran it on our little news site, the Splash, self-publishing and independent and it attracted all kinds of people to the site; so much so the comics, Rick has compiled his she servers couldn’t keep up with it. We were able to build on creator-owned material into that, build a readership, and also build a network of sources. color collections to be sold on his Because, once that hit, I got contacted by people up and down website, including Abraxas and the and in and out of the industry, wanting to describe what was Earthman, bringing together really going on behind the scenes at Marvel, DC, Diamond, and his nine-part Epic Illustrated others. They were all pissed off that the once promising direct serial from1982–83. sales market had been hijacked by the greed heads.

And we were doing great getting that information out and Below: The cartoonist has also selling ads. But then Google came through with their targeted partnered with IDW on occasion advertising. So, instead of going to Comicon.com to find comto create hardbound editions of ic-book people, you go to Google. And that caused our income earlier efforts, including The One stream to vanish and it was all downhill from there. We kept it [2018], collecting his 1985–86 going for another 10 years until we finally sold it. six-issue mini-series for Epic CBC: I remember being astonished in those first few years of Comics, edited by Archie Goodwin. connecting with any number of creators and the concept of it alone, it did feel like a comic convention. It lived up to its premise, a rare thing.

Rick: And I love working with Steve. He’s a sweetheart.

CBC: He’s a fine artist. Where did he, just quickly, where did he develop his chops?

Rick: I think he was like me. He was a kid doing comics, but he caught onto computers really early somehow. So he was like 12 or something when he got his first Mac. And so, by the time I met him, he was probably… well, actually, I had met him before we started Comicon.com. He had come to a couple of the Spirits of Independence* things, and so I got to know him a little bit there. But he was writing code while I was still learning to copy and paste.

Swamp Thing TM & © DC Comics. Miracleman TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

us. And then, when I met Cindy, she was from New Jersey. I brought her back to show her Vermont, and she’s like, “We’re living here.” [laughs] So she helped kick my butt to get me back here.

CBC: So do you maintain contact with Ezra?

Rick: Oh, yeah. He lives a few towns over. We work on comics together, as well.

CBC: Cool. What does he do as a day job?

Rick: He’s an art teacher. He’s teaching comics at a local private school.

CBC: How are you as a dad?

Rick: Probably not as attentive as I should be, but I’m not overpowering either. I’m sure I fail on many, many levels. I try to be there. Now there’s a grandson, too, so that’s awesome. like I want them to.

CBC: What’s his name?

CBC: So the IDW collections, for instance, all of that was Rick: Jasper. He’s 12. re-scanned?

Rick: Anything I owned and knew I wanted to republish later, CBC: How’s it to be a grandfaI kept, so I’ve got all that Epic art. Brat Pack was rescanned from ther?

Rick: Completely changes your the original art. The One was recolored by life. You see your genetics carried Kirby Veitch. on.

CBC: So you lived in Dover, right, and frequented New York CBC: So you got divorced in what year, roughly?

City. What did you think of the city?

Rick: Probably would’ve been… well, we separated while I Rick: I was younger then and so I was really into the hustle was at Kubert School. So that would’ve been, like, ’77. And then and bustle of it. This was just at the beginning of hip hop, so it took a couple of years for the divorce to actually be finalized. you’d see that kind of music going on in the back of buses CBC: What was your or on the street corners. And I found that really interesting. I reaction to the Steven was reading Henry Miller Spielberg letter about at the time, and so he’s got Bissette and your work on the this thing about walking the 1941 adaptation?* streets cogitating about life Rick: We were too green and philosophy, and so I was to even understand what we into it on that level. But it was had done. Heavy Metal gave also that it was the center of us this job. We lit out for comic book publishing at the Vermont and just went crazy. time. And a very easy 30-minWe weren’t even thinking that utes from Dover. and you’re this was a commercial gig into lower Manhattan… and we needed to make sure CBC: So, from early on, at the client’s happy. We just the Kubert School, you knew went with our underground you were going to come back instincts. And the production up to Vermont? became such a beast between Rick: Well, it was my hope Steve and I. Trying to get him because I really love Vermont focused and working was a and I had a kid up here by my major, major problem. first wife, so I wanted to be a CBC: Is that when you part of that. vowed not to work with CBC: When did you get him again? married?

Rick: Nineteen seven*The comics adaptation of Spielty-three, maybe. Something berg’s movie was not appreciated like that. by the director, who, despite CBC: This was after your calling the artists, “ruthlessly epiphany? talented (though demented),” Rick: Yeah. I had Ezra with was disturbed by the “savage representation.“ her. But it didn’t work out for COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

This page: After a period of animus between creator and corporation, Rick Veitch is now having his Swamp Thing stories collected by DC featuring his credit as author.

Does that mean his unpublished Swamp Thing #88 will ever see the light of day? Stranger things have happened… Oh, and we include a panel from Miracleman #9 [July ’86] and a specialty drawing.

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Inset right: Rick estimates he produced 200 or so pages of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles material for creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, including TMNT #25 [Sept. ’89].

Below: Rick Veitch is just too cool for school with this wild TMNT commission that’s a pastiche of Jack Kirby’s great final New Gods #1 [Mar. ’71] page, seen above.

Kirby pencils, Vince Colletta inks.

Rick: Well, not to rely on him for a production job. I really loved working with him on the creative end, In fact, the way I got drawn into Swamp Thing was by ghosting pages for him; not for the money but just the pleasure of drawing comics together and working on Alan’s scripts.

CBC: To what do you attribute your pragmatism and keeping an eye on the ball?

Rick: I think it goes back to me doing this as a kid, For me there’s a certain element of play in making comics. And it’s still how I want to center my life, playing with this amazing art form every day. The way the industry is set up, you’re often overworked. But the way I’m set up now, it’s just perfect. I get up every morning and go, “Oh, boy. I get to draw comics.”

And then I just spend as much time as feels right. And I’m not on the monthly grind anymore, but I’m turning out new Maximortal comics all the time, and Rare Bit Fiends and the Panel Vision series.

CBC: Are you the happiest man in comics?

Rick: I don’t know if I’m the happiest man, but I found my groove. In fact this is how I always imagined it would be as a kid . “Oh yes, I’ll live in the country, with a beautiful wife and kids, in a beautiful place, get stoned, and make comics.”

CBC: Do you say, “I’m having my play, but I’m not going to hit miss my deadline.” That’s your gift to yourself or whatever?

Rick: Well, I was always good at doing production work, but I have to say that, over time, it would wear you down and the play aspect would dissipate. So it’s great to be free of the production aspects and let the creativity flow more naturally.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TM & © Viacom International, Inc. New Gods TM & © DC Comics.

CBC: Typically, for a mainstream series, how long would that period last? You were cut short with Swamp Thing, right?

Rick: Yeah, but that was a good solid three years. I was either penciling, or writing and penciling, so that was an insane amount of work.

CBC: What is your limit, typically?

Rick: Swamp Thing should have been my limit, but also I was doing side jobs. I took on a couple issues of Miracleman.

I did a fill in on Nexus, “Munden’s Bar,” stuff like that. We’d bought this old house in need of work. So, if it was time to put a roof on it, and I needed five grand, I’d pencil an extra issue of something alongside Swamp Thing and not sleep for a couple of weeks.

CBC: So that part’s no fun.

Rick: It wasn’t horrible. I take some perverse pride in being able to do it. I think Army@Love was the last big grind.

CBC: How long did that last?

Rick: It was 18 issues, bi-monthly books. So that was about three years, too.

CBC: What years? Why am I blanking on that?

Rick: Launched in 2007. It was after Can’t Get No. CBC: Was that working for Shelly Bond or…

Rick: No, that was Karen. Although, day-to-day, I worked with [associate editor] Pornsak Pichetshote. He was awesome.

CBC: What do you think of that whole Vertigo thing?

Rick: It was great. Karen had amazing instincts for finding audiences for stuff that was outside of what was considered the norm. I mean, she midwifed Sandman, which was unlike anything else at the time. She gave it all the power of a major label and built it into a giant franchise. That’s really an achievement.

CBC: They just let it go. Vertigo’s gone…

Rick: Yeah, but Sandman lives on. DC is a whole different organization now. Because of super-hero films they’ve been swallowed and digested by the corporate food chain.

CBC: It’s interesting that Kinney National Services bought DC

Brat Pack TM & © Rick Veitch. 1963 TM & © the respective copyright holder(s). Nexus TM & © Mike Baron and Steve Rude.

Comics because of the success of Batman TV show because they saw the licensing as cash cow. But DC still maintained a separate identity, to some degree. Even when the Superman movies happened, they were still distinct. But now DC is corporate through and through, and it’s become a living entity unto itself that doesn’t even seem to have a human presence in it.

Rick: Well, Jenette told me about that the guy who ran Kinney, Steve Ross. She was dating him when he had bought DC and he told her that he was going to fire everyone and go all-reprint. She talked him out of it, saying “No, comics are an American art form…” And so he gave her the job as publisher.

And here’s like Sol Harrison and all these old guys that have been around forever, and she had to face them down and try to make sense of DC Comics.

CBC: Sol adapted, but Carmine was already out.

Rick: Carmine was out, but it was still this guard of old guys.

Been there forever. And, of course, here comes this young woman, who’s dating the new corporate master, and you can imagine the dynamic she was put into. I think she did a really great job on many levels.

CBC: She did just an astonishing job, I agree. Then the Implosion happened, and that was a great loss…

Rick: But it’s almost as if that was done to her. That was her first year-and-a-half in there. And so, she’s like, “Okay, we’re going to do all these new books.” Sabotaged because they wanted to get rid of her.

CBC: Did the Implosion affect you?

Rick: Yes. Coming out of Kubert School in 1978, here was no work for us at DC. That’s why we ended up at Marvel. We went up to DC and they didn’t know what to do with us. There was no work for even the older guys. So we went over to Marvel and the black-&-white magazines were just starting to get going under Rick Marschall. He was looking for weird stuff. And here come Bissette and Veitch.

CBC: Rick was out of Marvel pretty quickly…

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Rick: I don’t know what happened, but one funny thing that did happen afterwards was, when I was at Lucca, Epic won the Yellow Kid Award and Rick accepted the award for the magazine. He’d just been fired, so he kept it. [laughter] CBC: He bought an interesting sensibility to that stuff, and he understood what Heavy Metal was doing.

Rick: It was odd that he was in Marvel because he loved weird material. You’d bring in really crazy experimental stuff and he would dig it. And his vision for Epic was spot on.

CBC: For what you’d think was a Heavy Metal knock-off, it actually had its own identity.

Rick: It did. Archie Goodwin was the perfect guy to carry it on. Besides just being a lovely guy who you naturally liked and trusted, he was a terrific editor with a great eye for improving what you brought him. He’d look at what you brought and, if he didn’t like it, he’d just sort of lean back and say, “Oh, we have enough of these,” and very easily let you down. But, if he liked it, he would lean forward and would pull something out that was exactly what was needed, something simple. It might just be one panel or one word balloon or something to bring the story into focus and then — bam! — it would work a million times better.

CBC: Is that learned or is that…

Rick: Instinctual? He had both instinctual sense and learned talent. I mean, he wrote those Creepy stories that were so perfect realized, every one of them.

CBC: And artists and creators, and writers, they loved him.

Rick: He was the best. He was the antidote to Shooter.

Shooter was all sharp elbows.

And Archie was just the opposite. Alan Moore wouldn’t work for Shooter, but he would work for Archie.

CBC: Archie’s carrot or Shooter’s stick.

Rick: I connected with Archie because I worked with Al Williamson. Al needed a letterer for The Empire Strikes Back. So I drove out to his place in Honesdale [Pennsylvania]. I’d stay overnight for a day or two, and just letter whatever he had going. And, on one of the early trips, he was working on the scenes in Empire with the [At-At] Walkers on Hoth. And Lucas, who normally supplied him with reams of photo reference, had only sent him two little Polaroids of the mode and

Above: After the Swamp Thing #88 debacle, Rick channeled his frustrations into the searing “kid sidekick” satire, Brat Pack [’90–91], launching his King Hell Heroica universe in the process. Inset left: House ad promoting Nexus #29 [Feb. ’87]. Below: Rick delved into his love of old comics with the 1963 Image mini-series [’93].

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Above: With the riches derived from sales of the 1963 mini-series, Rick launched his Rare Bit Fiends self-published series, which lasted 21 issues between 1994–96, though it’s been revived in recent years as a thick (sort-of) annual.

Inset right, below: Rick often worked with Alan Moore into the 1990s, particularly with their great Supreme and Greyshirt collaborations.

self-publish, Rick.” And so, when the Swamp Thing #88 situation blew up in my face and they were looking for people to do the Turtles book, I did four issues of Turtles then the Casey Jones mini-series later. Kevin and Peter offered a low up-front page rate with a generous 50/50 back-end. This worked out good at first. I was receiving royalties for the trade collections and foreign editions. But then Kevin and Peter reneged on the agreement. They demanded that I sign over all rights for a very small amount of money, like $2,500.

CBC: What else were you doing?

Rick: Well, by that point, I was working on Brat Pack. Tundra had happened, but I still had equity in these Turtle books, and they refused to reprint them at the original terms we agreed on.

And so they have sat fallow all these years. The thing is, I understand that they had to get control of the licensing phenomena that Turtles had become. But there was no need to deny the artists who’d trusted them. We all would have been delighted to sign contracts giving them all rights for a guarantee of the 50/50 back end we’d been promised.

CBC: What was the timing with this, with Denis Kitchen merging with them?

Rick: It was before Denis. This was at the beginning of Tundra. I wouldn’t sign, and it became this sticking issue.

CBC: A betrayal?

Rick: You half expect it from the big publishers. But when it’s your friends, man, it really sucks.

CBC: You never had a reconciliation at all?

Rick: Over the decades, we have tried, but every time they give it to a lawyer or a business guy, and then nothing happens.

This year, I got approached by Paramount, who now owns the Turtles, and they asked for a proposal on a buyout of my stuff.

But then said they changed their publishing plan. So the thing is all in limbo. It’s a big chunk of my creative work, like 200 pages at a key moment when I’m really cranking on all cylinders.

Rare Bit Fiends TM & © Rick Veitch. Greyshirt TM & © Alan Moore & Rick Veitch. Supreme TM & © Rob Liefeld.

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they didn’t show much. So Al was really fretting. Carlos Garzón was first assistant, and he was flummoxed, too. I had worked on cars and machinery a bit, so I sort of had a basic idea of how mechanical things had to work.

So I said, “Let me try to figure it out.” It was a pretty simple robot actually. The knees and hips had to have joints, the neck had to flexible etc. And I was able to make drawings for Al. And he was like, “Yes, yes, yes!” And so I was promoted to second assistant, penciling the Walkers.

And Al was so happy that I solved his problem. I was on his team forever after that.

A few days later, I’m going up to Marvel to visit Epic, expecting to see Rick Marschall but he’s been fired.

Here’s Archie Goodwin. And so Al had been talking to Archie about how happy he was with me because I’d solved this problem for him. So I think that made Archie really open to working with me. And I became part of that tight-knit group of Archie and Al and a few other people.

CBC: That must’ve been something! Al was such a charismatic guy, such a guy’s guy…

Rick: What an artist! He was in his mid-40s, pushing 50, when I hung out with him, but he was still a kid at heart. He was like us. He still loved comics. And, every time I go over there, he’d go into his closet and out would come some batch of original art that he had picked up somewhere. “Have you seen Cisco Kid by Salinas, old sport?” [laughter] And just blow your mind with some stuff. And then, to watch him actually draw, and how his hands worked, and the tools he used to get the effects… I wish I’d paid more attention!

CBC: And so you got mainstream jobs or whatever with Eclipse, also with the Miracleman and with Swamp Thing after Epic. The alternative comic scene is rising up. Independent comics were rising up. What was your plan?

Rick: I was still working, doing Swamp Thing. Things were always rocky with DC behind the scenes, but I was still committed to it, and we hadn’t reached the final explosion yet. But I was hanging out with Bissette, Eastman, [Peter] Laird, [Michael] Zulli, Murphy and a few other people who were trying to come up with new ways of doing comics and getting around the comic business. We met sometimes as the Blacklist Group.

CBC: How far do you live from Northampton [the location of Mirage and Tundra]?

Rick: It’s like an hour-and-a-half away. Eastman and Laird were allied with Sim, and they were putting together these meetings — they called ’em the summits — with larger groups of people, also trying to come up with new ways of doing comics and figuring out how to get around the horrible business sh*t that was going on. So I was someone who could produce comics, and Eastman and Laird were saying, “You need to

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

minutes every day figuring it would add up to 24 hours.

CBC: Are they all just freehand and no penciling at all?

Rick: There might be the slightest bit of penciling underneath, but mostly freehand done in the back of taxis or bars.

It was, like, this weird obsession. But, after I had done 100 or more dreams, I saw the value in it. Like, “Oh man, I could really give this my full illustrative abilities. I could really do something.”

CBC: How were the sales on Rare Bit Fiends?

Rick: Good. It made enough to keep me going until distribution blew up. I did 21 issues. Then I took a pause of twenty-odd years. Once I figured out this whole Kindle direct paperback stuff, I got back into it and I’ve done four more issues.

CBC: I meant how many copies were sold?

Rick: We started out about 7,000 and it just kind of slowly went down. And then it seemed to level at around 3,500, but since it was a monthly book, it paid enough.

CBC: So you did it for two years?

Rick: Yes. Plus we were barnstorming the country, going to conventions, pushing the indie thing. It was a really crazy time.

CBC: Was it fun?

Rick: It was fun, but it was crazy.

CBC: You put a strain on your marriage?

Rick: No! Cindy was brilliant.

CBC: So you’ve restarted the series?

Rick: Yeah, once I’d figured out print-on-demand.

CBC: How long ago?

Rick: Maybe 2016 or 2017, something like that. I’m just starting a new issue of Rare Bit Fiends right now. I got a new True-Man, the Maximortal coming out this week.

This page: Post-Brat Pack, the King Hell Heroica titles. True-Man #1 was released in September ’24.

All TM & © Rick Veitch.

CBC: So it’s never been collected.

Rick: It was collected in ’91, while they were still honoring our agreement. After I didn’t sign they refused to keep the stuff in print.

CBC: So when did Rare Bit Fiends come in?

Rick: That came after I made a nice pot of money on the 1963 series. This bought me the time I needed to get self-publishing up and running. By then, I’d learned how to actually solicit books myself and get everything through production, and so I did my dream comic.

CBC: Well, let’s back up to 1963 then. Why wasn’t that finished?

Rick: I guess the core of it is that Alan and Steve’s friendship blew up. It was a very stressful project that had a lot of kinks that had to be worked out on the fly. But we ended up making this really beautiful thing. And more money than we’d ever made on anything before. And so both Steve and I decided to take our shares and pour it into self-publishing, and he did Tyrant and I did Rare Bit Fiends.

CBC: How do you feel about Don Simpson going ahead and making the 1963 annual recently?

Rick: I’m for anything that gets him back drawing comics. He’s one of those cartoonists who can make me laugh.

CBC: What a great cartoonist, for sure. So, Rare Bit Fiends: what was your thinking with that? Was that “I’m going to express my spiritual center,” or “I’m going to make something that somebody wants to buy”?

Rick: It’s me following my creative muse. While we were at Tundra, Scott McCloud came up with the idea of the 24-hour comic. But I didn’t have time to take a day and do 24 pages, so I started doing one page of my dream sketchbook for 15 or 20

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KING HELL HEROICA A Glimpse at Rick’s Awesome Veitchverse of Super-Heroes

Book One: The Maximortal (seven issues, 1992–93, 176 pages) — “This tells the story of the birth of the Maximortal, his adventures as a baby, and hints at the existence beyond time and space.” The saga also relates (à lá roman à clef) the tragic tale of the creators of Superman. Talking to Comics Scene in 1994 about using the real travails of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Veitch explained.

“I fictionalize and slightly exaggerate some of the scenes to make it work as a comic book, and especially a satirical, black-humor comic book, but just about everything is based on things that really happened.”

He continued, “Siegel and Shuster got really screwed, as bad as anyone could get screwed. In so doing, they established the whole history of creators being screwed in comics. It’s now so endemic to the structure of these corporations that they can’t change it. The only way they can change it is to throw Siegel and Shuster like $20,000 a year and get them to sign non-disclosure forms so that the real truth gets squashed. Definitely, one of my reasons for doing this kind of stuff is to try to bring this story into consciousness of comics readers * The name “King Hell” was derived from — what else when it comes to Veitch? — a dream he had about his underground comix strip characters Crazymouse and Old Magik encountering a devil called “Hell,” who dwells “at the furthest end of the universe.” Rick recounted that spectacular dream in Rare Bit Fiends #15 [Jan. ’95].

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again, so they’ll at least start discussing it.”

Of the Cleveland-raised creative team’s plight, Veitch said, “This is one of the things I want to bring in the spotlight. By using the history of cartoonists as the backdrop to a super-hero story, I want people to realize what was happening in the back of the store while the puppet show was going on out front.”

Book Two: Boy Maximortal (four issues, 2017–23, 199 pages) — “The story will concern the life of the Maximortal as an adolescent and continue my fictionalization of the history of comic book publishing through the ’60s and into the underground comix movement,” Veitch shared. His website describes the series: “Boy Maximortal continues the story of True-Man, now a teenager hiding from an increasingly desperate military while trying to come to grips with powers far beyind those of normal men, all played against a backdrop of the sleazy underworld of comic book publishing. Veitch’s super-hero deconstruction digs deep into the roots and heart of a cultural mythos that has come to define our times.” Boy Maximortal #4 includes a reprint of Brat Pack/Maximortal Super Special #1–2, 1996–97, which ends full-circle with Doctor Blasphemy reading the first page of Boy Maximortal #1.

Book Three: True-Man, The Maximortal (projected four issues, 2024–?, unknown pages) — The first issue is now available on Amazon and it is described thusly, “True-Man is a higher dimensional creature who has been captured by the CIA and brainwashed by MK-Ultra.

Seen as a way to upend world geopolitics, True-Man is being shaped and programmed into the ultimate apex predator. Meanwhile, a small group of those who care and those who fear organize to free him.”

Book Four: Brat Pack (five issues, 1990–91, TPB has significantly altered ending, 176 pages) — “This book tells the story of the Maximortal’s world after his defeat and disappearance, and how the so-called heroes of that time use his absence to allow their venal sides free reign, as seem through the eyes of their kid sidekicks.” This, the first released Heroica book, is (to be technical) a f*cked-up trip and it’s best to direct those curious to Veitch buddy Stephen R. Bissette’s ridiculously detailed Teen Angels & New Mutants: Rick Veitch’s Brat Pack and the Art, Karma, and Commerce of Killing Sidekicks [2011].

Book Five: Death of the Maximortal (forthcoming) — “This will… cap the whole story with the Maximortal’s final battle with El Guano at the end of time.” (In 2023, the cartoonist told Bleeding Cool that the book is half-finished.) Elsewhere Veitch said, 40 pages were completed and, “The plan is to tackle the final chapters to this, finishing the Heroica…”

(Veitch and John Totleben’s unfinished Hellhead had once been announced as in the Heroicaverse, though it shared no characters or plotlines.

To date, the 40 or so completed pages sadly remain unpublished.) #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

True-Man, The Maximortal , Midnight Mink, Chippy TM & © Rick Veitch. Teen Angels & New Mutants © Stephen R. Bissette.

Rick Veitch was first to admit that Brat Pack, his black humored, brutally satirical assessment of super-powered costumed characters and their hapless sidekicks, was fueled by the predicament of his “Swampy Meets Jesus” yarn originally greenlighted for Swamp Thing #88, but rejected before going to press by the DC publisher. After he discussed the situation publicly, including to The Wall Street Journal, the ire of the House of Superman was dispensed with a vengeance.

“Brat Pack was more of a response to what happened to me at DC,” he told the Under Guides Graphic Novel Podcast. “I was really angry about it. I was angry about how the structure of publishing comics was going on inside the organizations, the sort of cynicism, and rampant greed that people didn’t even try to hide. I just didn’t fit into that…”

In an interview with The Comics Journal, the cartoonist revealed what ignited his fury: “My wife was pregnant, the baby was due; it was just a couple days before she went into labor and we got a call saying that DC was going to fire me as an employee of Warner Communications and they were canceling my health insurance policy. Anyone who’s had a baby knows the last few days of labor watch are just incredibly tense and you’re extremely vulnerable. I was devastated. I got right on the horn to the Warner personnel department, and it turns out there’s a law against canceling health insurance for retribution because I was a real employee, not a work-for-hire! I was able to keep it up by making the payments myself. Fortunately, all went well with the birth, and we got this great little baby boy named Kirby. It seemed so fitting, after all the bullsh*t that Jack Kirby had been through, and all the bullsh*t I had been through. It seemed a perfect exclamation point.”

Roarin’ Rick’s rage would manifest into an examination of the very company’s origins, but what launched his King Hell Heroica — “a total fictional universe that asks all the right questions, challenges all the big lies, and draws its own strange conclusions as to the nature of the super-hero phenomena as a 20th century cultural force” — was a look at super-hero sidekicks, Brat Pack, which would eventually become Book Four in his over-arching saga.

King Hell* Heroica is, Veitch says, as follows:

All TM & © Rick Veitch.

CBC: Joe Kubert used to devote Sundays to his personal work. Do you do anything like that?

Rick: Not like that, no. Usually, if we’ve got a big Eureka Comics job, I’ll focus on that and we’ll get that done, because that’s the real money-maker. But then I’m free to structure my life as I need.

CBC: What did you think about independent comics when distribution collapsed?

Rick: It was like comics strangling itself, and now we’re here. It’s an aging collectors’ market where Batman has 17 variant covers.

Those variants aren’t meant to be read. They are to be put away somewhere as collectors items. So that’s what I really like about the Kindle Direct thing. These stories are to be read, not hoarded.

CBC: Did you discover print on demand with Bissette? I remember him raving about it 10 or so years ago.

Rick: Yeah. Steve showed me horror mags that lost newsstand distribution and moved their whole operation to print on demand. He knew I would do it. I like the way I can literally do everything myself from beginning to end.

CBC: I remember feeling Steve’s enthusiasm and being tempted to do it myself.

Rick: It fits perfectly into the little kid Ricky

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Veitch who made his own homemade comics.

It’s exactly the same feeling, except technology has advanced from clipboards, paper and pencils.

CBC: Are you the only one doing this?

Rick: No, I think there’s a few others doing it.

I might be the most commercial name doing it.

I’ve been able to build on some sort of previous readership.

CBC: How do you maintain that readership?

Through interaction on Facebook?

Rick: Yeah, basically. If I took the time to do more social media and podcasts I know I could grow it.

CBC: I remember I ordered The Spotted Stone, which just f*cking blew me away.

Rick: Woo-hoo! Nominated for an Eisner Award.

CBC: That was just astonishing, a totally wordless story that, and then you shared with me a story for Slow Death Zero that was political in nature about modern technology.

Rick: Just doing my bit. But I couldn’t pitch a book like Spotted Stone to any publisher. 64 pages with one panel on each page? They would dismiss it out of hand. But, with this system, I can explore outside the box.

Left: Cover of Rick’s Eisner Award-nominated Panel Vision effort, The Spotted Stone [’17]. Below: A page from the artist’s Rare Bit Fiends sketchbook.

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Above: Rick’s wild take on good ol’ Mick was put to good use after its appearance as cover art for Rare Bit Fields #17 [Jan. ’96], repurposing it for the third collection of his “Dream Art “ books, Crypto Zoo [’04], as well as for a poster titled “Dreams.”

Below: Rick’s trippy work, from the ’60s to the ’10s, including a complete reprinting of Two-Fisted Zombies, appears in his Bong! Comix [July ’22] self-published collection.

issue of True-Man, the Maximortal. And, if it all looks good, then I click the go button and it goes up for sale on Amazon.

CBC: And they take what percentage?

Rick: I don’t know how the exact percentages work, but on a 200-page book for $19.95, I get $7.40 every copy sold. On a 100- pager, $9.95 book, I get about $3.

CBC: That’s pretty good. I mean, that’s not something you get from Diamond, is it?

Rick: No, and it’s a lot easier. You’re just not in retail outlets.

But you’re on Amazon and everybody’s got Amazon. I think the big downside is that Amazon doesn’t package ’em with any care at all. So you order a comic and some guy throws it in a bag, and who knows what it’s going to look like when you get it. What I found though was, if you order a bunch of books; enough to fill a small box, then they’ll box it up really nice.

CBC: Is there any regularity with the Maximortal books?

Rick: No, but I get about one issue a year done, and that’s like 50 new pages of art and then, in the back, I put 50 pages of weird, old, crazy stuff that I’ve got in my archives. So it has that kind of rough-and-ready self-publishing quality, which I like, and I like the fact that it’s going to people who will read it, not collect it.

CBC: You seem to be living the dream…

Rick: Yeah, I found the groove. I’m really right where I need to be right now.

CBC: I don’t know if there’s many other people in the business who can say that.

Rick: I think more people will move in this direction by necessity.

CBC: You got to have the audience though, right?

Rick: Yes. You got to bring an audience with you or you got to get out there, which I don’t do as much as I should. I’m only on Facebook, but if I got on Instagram and Twitter and all those, I’m sure I would move a lot more books. Or just do more interviews with comic books sites. They’re always asking me to interview, but I’m just too lazy.

CBC: So how many years do you have left in you for comics?

Rick: Well, I can finish the King Hell Heroica in about three years if I stay on the same pace I’m at. So that’ll be five graphic novels that will be completely done, with Brat Pack at the heart #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All TM & © Rick Veitch.

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CBC: People heard about it from others, and it was nominated, so it definitely got a little buzz on that.

Rick: Everybody’s got Amazon, so it’s easily accessible. So when someone does a YouTube video, like the Cartoonist Kayfabe guys sales pop.

CBC: The “Kayfabe bump.” I experienced that. I’ll miss those guys. Is there anything learned from Ed Piskor and what the internet hath wrought? Did comics or the internet kill him?

Rick: Going back to Comicon.com, specifically its on-line message board, I have to say that I watched a culture of bullying develop on the internet. You wonder how many poor bastards have been driven to suicide by internet trolls.

CBC: On the flipside, I have mortal fear of being cancelled. [chuckles] That’s another form of bullying unto itself.

Rick: Yeah. Our society has to come to grips with this cancellation thing.

CBC: Talk to me about print on demand. What’s the process?

Rick: Well, first I write and draw my comic and these days I’m working digitally. I’ve got a Cintiq graphics monitor that I draw on with a stylus.

I’ve got Photoshop, but rely on Clip Studio software for making comics. It’s unbelievably great. So then, once my comic is together, I format it in Pages as a PDF, and put it up on the Amazon Kindle servers. They run it through their system to make sure everything looks good. Then I order a printed proof, which I will get tomorrow for this new

All TM & © Rick Veitch.

of it. I’m willing if the flesh is willing.

CBC: So do you have to color the black-&-white stuff?

Rick: It could be eventually. Right now I’ll do it this way through self-publishing, and then, once the whole thing is together, go talk to other publishers about doing a color set of the whole thing.

CBC: How did you get Brat Pack to IDW involved? Did you approach them or?

Rick: I’d been talking to Scott Dunbier about it, He was my editor at ABC. CBC: That’s right. “Greyshirt” in Tomorrow Stories.

Rick: It made a lot of sense to do Brat Pack in hardcover. I know the edition sold out.

CBC: What is King Hell Heroica?

Rick: It began with Brat Pack, which was my completely twisted take on super-heroes that I did in 1991. Sort of like a scathing satire of the kid sidekick phenomenon. It is on the level of The Boys, with completely over-the-top blood and guts and offensive ideas.

CBC: Where did the idea start?

Rick: I actually pitched it to DC Comics. It began in conversations with Alan Moore when he was working on Watchmen, when we were first discussing the revisionist super-hero. And Alan did Watchmen with knock-offs of the Charltons, which solved a big problem for me as I didn’t need to have Robin and the DC sidekicks. I could create my own versions and really go to town. This all happened around the time Swamp Thing #88 blew up in my face, so I was really pissed off when I wrote and drew it. I just let all the poison out of me and readers responded.

CBC: So it’s the Teen Titans, basically?

Rick: Well, it’s these sort of archetypal sidekicks with archetypal heroes — making fun of every aspect of it.

CBC: What’s your favorite sequence, for instance?

Rick: Favorite sequence? Gee, I dunno. The whole thing’s a COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

blur to me now. Thing is, I got it out of my system at the end. Tundra wanted more Brat Pack, and I just didn’t have it in me to do it. I didn’t want to spend my life just spewing that sh*t. I wanted to explore deeper themes. And so I talked them into doing Maximortal, which is a spin-off in that universe and different in tone.

CBC: What makes Maximortal different than Brat Pack?

Rick: Brat Pack pokes the reader in the eye. Maximortal is a deep-dive meditation on what super-hero culture is. It’s something I was really happy to be exploring. And so I conceived of five graphic novels, no problem. [laughs] “Sure, I’ll finish that next year!” But the market dropped out from under me, and I got into Rare Bit Fiends, which was just so much more interesting to me.

CBC: And you’ve revived Rare Bit Fiends?

Rick: Yeah. So the one I’m working on now will be #26.

Anyway, if I get three good years… that means my wrist has got to hold up. It’s doing good. My eyes have to hold up. I had my cataracts done, which was great. And then everything else has got to hold up. Stroke or heart attack or something could knock me off my game. I’m 73, so anything can happen.

[The conversation continues in Rick’s trailer home studio.]

CBC: Are you glad you got into comics? Was it inevitable?

Rick: Yes, I am blessed. I mean, if I hadn’t done it, I would’ve been a miserable wretch of a human being. It was like one of those things I knew from the time I’m a little guy: I am an artist.

This is what I have to do.

CBC: So it wasn’t comic strips, it was comic books…

Rick: Well, comic books were a natural part of it, but strips, too. I loved any graphics. If someone had noticed that I was artistic and educated me, I might’ve become a fine artist. Even though I’ve worked in the commercial medium of comic books, I’m often trying to pull out of myself.

CBC: Did you ever do anything else?

Rick: Menial stuff. Pumped gas, worked in a wood stove

Above: Those out of the loop may not be aware that Rick Veitch has been as productive as ever, producing his Panel Vision books, seen here, as well as the somewhat annual King Hell Heroica volumes — he just started his True-Man: The Maximortal story arc this past summer — and Rare Bit Fiends books. (The latter has included a contribution from Ye Ed about his Kirby convention dream!). Rick, you might say, is living the dream.

Below: Rick’s last mainstream assignment was Army @ Love, a battlefield romance title which he wrote, as well as drew (with inking

by Gary Erskine), which lasted for 18 issues between 2007–09.

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Inset right: An interesting oddity is this WNET.org education comic book that includes work by Rick (who contributes the cover, as well as a humorous six-page fantasy tale, “Dragonhelm”), Thomas Yeates, Mark Evanier, Josh Neufeld, as well as Sabrina Jones — who Ye Ed. met with this past fall (see page 29!) — and others. The Unexpected World of Nature [’08] is apparently third in a series of Nature Comics published by the PBS station (according to GCD at comics.org).

Next page: Under their guise as Eureka Comics, Rick and Steve Conley, working with Rick’s youngest son, Kirby, produced Revisioning Food, Farm, and Forest [’20] for the Meadows Bee Farm, LLC. Another Eureka assignment was The Outliers, a three-book series for McGraw-Hill Education that pioneers the use of comics storytelling to teach math to middle schoolers.

Below: During Ye Ed.’s visit, the cartoonist, ever on the cutting edge of technology, showed off his Cinque drawing tablet to demonstrate how he creates his comic book work as of late.

don’t know what happens after a job is submitted. They never share with us how things perform in the marketplace.

CBC: And when was The Outliers done?

Rick: I think this one was about five, six years ago, so pre-Covid.

CBC: And did you get work afterwards?

Rick: Yeah, we did other stuff with ‘em. They still have… remember My Weekly Reader? They still have that going, although it’s called The Explorer now, and we did these doublepage spreads of comics.

CBC: What’s the content of those?

Rick: It’s all history stuff.

CBC: Did you write them, too?

Rick: Some we wrote. Usually they give us bullet points of what needs to be in there and then we craft it as comics to their approval. Sometimes they will provide full scripts.

CBC: Do you have a set schedule in the daytime and do you cut off at five or…?

Rick: I’m usually in here about 10:00 or 10:30 in the morning. Then I work for an hour or two, break for lunch, and then work ’til 3:00–4:00-ish. That’s about it.

CBC: So no late nights or anything like that?

Rick: I refuse to do late nights. Some of the Panel Vision books I did on an iPad at home, but that’ll be with a glass of wine and a joint… [coughs dryly] My throat is getting all scratchy from talking. I never talked this much.

CBC: Not in the 20 years since my last visit, anyway! Is there anything you want to get off your chest? You’re such a big subject. No offense. It’s hard to cover everything.

Rick: It’s one of the problems with my interviews because I’ve been going on so long and worked on so many different things.

CBC: Why don’t we talk about Maximortal a bit? Is this your treatise on Mort Weisinger?

Rick: I’m getting right to the heart of the archetype of the #38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Unexpected World of Nature TM & © NET/Thirteen.

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factory… I was a bicycle messenger.

CBC: No, I meant creatively.

Rick: Creatively, I played music a little bit. Not to get on stage or anything, but just make music.

CBC: Can you show me an example of the things you’re doing with Steve Conley right now with Eureka Comics? Is it all digital?

Rick: It’s all digital.

CBC: How is the internet up here?

Rick: It’s decent. [Opens file of The Outliers: Problem Solvers of Relicwood] This is just like a regular graphic novel. The characters are all running around and doing stuff. We introduce them all, then after some escapades, and they go and count the stuff they’ve stolen, and there’s the math lesson. Then there’s more adventures and lessons. It’s for middle school students, from 13 to 15.

CBC: How many pages is it?

Rick: This one was about 48 or 60 pages, something like that. There were six of these graphic novels Steve and I did.

Kirby and Ezra did coloring and lettering on some of them.

CBC: You sent me some organic gardening comics or was it local farming…?

Rick: We’ve become the go-to guys for farm comics! I’m working on one right now about health insurance for farmers for Ohio State University.

CBC: How’d you get involved?

Rick: After Steve and I formed Eureka, we went to symposiums on education, and started talking to people. And everybody loved the idea of educational comics. Everybody loved the samples, and we got invited to make a presentation to McGraw Hill Education. Everything flowed from there.

CBC: What kind of successes come from it?

Rick: Well, we’ve made decent money. The weird thing is we

Revisioning Food, Farm, and Forest © Meadow Bee Farm LLC. The Outliers TM & © McGraw-Hill Education. Self-caricature © Rick Veitch.

Superman, the Übermensch, which Nietzsche first Rick: Yeah, in this case though, Superman’s a white guy, so articulated in the later part of the 19th century. As a philosophit’s a white supremacist fantasy as well. ical concept the Übermensch became kind of a big deal in the CBC: Instead of this populist character who went after slumfirst part of the 20th century, George Bernard Shaw did a play, lords and crooked mayors…

Man and Superman, and this is where Siegel and Shuster prob- Rick: It was a fantasy originally to empower poor people, ably heard about it, and they turned it into a fantasy character. but it became a fantasy that controlled and shaped how people CBC: There was National Socialism, too, right? acted, and what they aspire to.

9 Rick: Yeah, well, what happened was 8 CBC: Warner Bros. movies of the late ’30s Nietzsche’s sister ended up with all his were emphatically anti-Nazi and implicitly stuff after he died, and she cherry supportive of the Warners’ own ethnicity.

7 picked his stuff to feed the Nazis There were Jews in the Dead End and 6 10 rationalization of fascism. And East Side Kids neighborhoods, The 11 1 so Nietzsche inadvertently Goldbergs was on the radio and TV, 12 5 became this kind of patron and American culture was ethnic.

3 2 4 saint of Nazism. All the early But, by the mid-’50s, ethnicity was 20th century dictators were preout on television and pop culture.

13 14 sented as Superman. I’ve seen Everything was WASP, everything 20 18 a double-page spread from an was middle-class, suburban 19 21 old Italian pre-war magazine white bread.

15 17 in which Mussolini is shown Rick: But fascism defined as a 33 inventing a new, 12-cylinder combination of government and 16 22 motor for a racing car And industry happened in America.

32 here he is writing a symphony They weren’t calling it fascism, 23 better than Mozart, and here he is but it was the same unholy alliance 26 27 discovering the atom and… of industry and politics. Eisenhower 24 CBC: Holy Josef Stalin! called it the military-industrial com25 Rick: But it’s part and parcel of plex. Nietzsche’s idea of Superman 28 fascism, in that sense, where you have to had nothing to do with that. It’s about have this strong man who people project the transitionary state between human 29 31 their hopes on. and God. 30 CBC: So you say it got perverted…?

He tended to write in these provocative Rick: Well, it got perverted for political purposes, phrases filled with puns. He was like a mad poet. It absolutely. is all just his rhetoric, entertaining rhetoric, but people Superman, when we first see him, he’s like going after corrupt take it at face value. But there’s a lot there. And now with the politicians, wife beaters, arms manufacturers who create wars, super-hero dominating 21st century culture in a lot of ways, it’s but then he gets turned into this Boy Scout All-American thing really a theme that I think is worth exploring. supporting the status quo. What really made him popular to CBC: Where does it end in general terms, not to be a spoiler? the everyman was taken away and he just became this corpoWhere does your thinking process end? Where’s this bringing rate icon and political tool. Superman is proudly American. And you? Where does Nietzsche bring you? so you put out a Superman movie that’s all around the world, Rick: Nietzsche points the way: the super-hero as a connector you’re sending a message to the rest of the world. to God. CBC: It’s akin to Walt Disney, too, right?

CBC: Well, what is this? Why this? I mean, comics went COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

CBC VEITCH CONTEST!

How fluent are you regarding the Wide Wonderful World of Veitch? Test your skills by naming all of Rick’s different characters and/or projects depicted on our cover using the numbers inset left. Most correct answers received first gets a free copy of Ye Ed’s SLOW DEATH ZERO, which features Rick’s “Tiny Dancer” story! Email answers to Ye Ed at jonbcooke@aol.com.

Next three pages: Talk about rarities! Rick’s brother had his own poetry ’zine — titled Tom Veitch Magazine — and the last ish [#4, 1971] included this feature on the Veitch brothers’ underground comix collaborations!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

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#38 • June 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Rick Veitch portrait © Ken Meyer, Jr. Used with permission. Rare Bit Fiends TM & © Rick Veitch.

through all these cycles of Westerns and romances. Well, but super-heroes is something that latched on since what…? Showcase #4, really? And it’s never let go since then.

Rick: Well, I think it’s because people can relate to it as pure fantasy, being super-empowered with flight and might. And, obviously, it’s kinky. But I think comics were strangled by the franchise owners of the super-heroes movies. That’s the latest screw up, anyway.

CBC: Well, it got screwed up, but the publishers cashed in.

Rick: They cashed in, but I think we are all poorer for it, in terms of what comics could be.

CBC: But there is the non super-hero material. Any number of graphic novels that are not super-hero have been adapted to other forms of entertainment.

Rick: But it isn’t like Japan, where you’re able appeal to a vast readership. I think we had that potential to build something into that in the ’80s, but it didn’t happen.

CBC: Why haven’t you left super-heroes behind?

Rick: Because I relate to the whole concept. It is such an important part of 20th and 21st century popular culture, so it’s worth exploring. And the franchise owners will never explore these aspects of it because it’ll cost them money if people are not thinking the “right” things.

CBC: And you’re able to get your autobiographical ya-yas out with your Rare Bit Fiends and Panel Vision books…?

Rick: I try to. I think because that’s where underground comix kind of dropped the ball. They could have explored that deeply, but they kind of pooped out.

CBC: So you’re an adult kid?

Rick: Yeah! Somebody who was in my studio the other day and said, “This looks like a teenager’s room.” I was, like, “Yeah!”

CBC: How did you avoid the draft?

Rick: I was just ready to take my induction physical, and I got in a car accident and broke my shoulder. It put me into the next year’s lottery, and then I was a high number. I never got drafted.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

What a lucky car accident.

CBC: And your brother was already past age, right?

Rick: No, he got a doctor to write a letter saying that he was schizophrenic.

CBC: And did you have a brother in-between?

Rick: Yeah, but Rob got married, so he was exempt from the draft, and then it was over after me.

CBC: Did you know people who went over?

Rick: Oh yeah, sure.

And you would see how they would change when they came back, they’d be haunted and they would just tell you, “Man, what you’re reading in the papers and seeing on TV, it’s bullsh*t.”

CBC: Lieutenant Calley just died and resurrected the reality of 600, as many as a thousand, civilians slaughtered [during the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre in 1968] on a whim.

Rick: Oh, yeah. So many people died for nothing, and then the Pentagon Papers were released, and the country knew that it was a useless war, that they couldn’t win, and they had kept pouring money and material into it… and lives.

[Conversation turns to the national election and then onto the subject of climate change.]

CBC: But how about climate?

Rick: Yeah, well, that’s the big one. Vermont’s really struggling right now with the flooding. Our little town, a thousand people has had to buy a million dollars worth of new culverts because the storms come on so heavy now that the regular culverts can’t manage the runoff anymore. And that’s going on all across the state. I mean, they’ve had three 100-year storms in Vermont in two years.

CBC: “Storm of the Century of the Week.”

Rick: We didn’t have these storms 10 years ago. It’s a mess, but it might be a good time to buy property here. I think if the floods keep going, the real estate market will tank… Give it a year or two of more rain and the rich people down south won’t want to live in Vermont.

CBC: It’s cool that you’re really digging deep into this corny super-hero kind of thing and looking behind the veil.

Rick: There’s something there worth talking about.

You’re never going to get it from the guys who own the franchises. They’re just not going to explore the meaning of their cash cows.

CBC: I guess that’s the word. I’ve just never seen “pretension” from you. I think that you haven’t been pretentious at all, while your peers, any number, give some airs.

Rick: Cindy could probably tell you different.

CBC: [To Cindy Veitch] Cindy, is Rick ever pretentious?

Cindy Veitch: Actually, he isn’t. He’s the opposite.

He’s so low key.

Above: Another fine portrait by Ken Meyer, Jr., this one of man of the issue Rick Veitch.

Inset left: Rick and Cindy Veitch, on August 27, 2024, during Ye Ed.’s visit to their bucolic southern Vermont abode.

Below: Roarin’ Rick is currently at work on the 26th issue of his self-published Rare Bit Fiends, which often includes contributions by a remarkable slate of creators.

Here’s the cover of #25 [May ’22].

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UPDATE #1

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creators at the con

Behind the Comics Pages: NYCC 2023 In “Behind the Comics Pages,” at the 2023 New York Comic Con, Scott Snyder discussed current and upcoming projects with a number of his acclaimed collaborators, including artists Tula Lotay, Jock, and Valeria Favoccia. Also on the panel, moderated by Will Dennis, was Jack Snyder, Scott’s son, with whom he recently collaborated on writing the dystopian thriller, By a Thread, illustrated by Favoccia.

Jock.

Tula Lotay.

Valeria Favoccia.

All photos © Kendall Whitehouse.

Jack Snyder and Scott Snyder.

Will Dennis.

Photography by Kendall Whitehouse 78

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coming attractions: sizzlin’ cbc #39 in july

Thomas Yeates — Kubie First Class!

THOMAS YEATES, artist supreme and main subject of CBC #39, grants a career-spanning interview about attending the Kubert School’s first graduating class, early start at DC on Swamp Thing, Eclipse Comics work (including the Michael Jackson/Captain EO comic!), and ascent to become the greatest adventure comic strip cartoonist working in the last 30 years, whether Zorro, Tarzan, or Prince Valiant! We reveal the tale how JIM STARLIN getting fired by Stan Lee would lead to his greatest success. The short but diverse comics career of GREG POTTER is examined as the writer discusses his ’70s Warren horror comics and ’80s reboot of Wonder Woman with George Pérez, and more. The wonderful “Jack Kirby” of kiddie comics, WARREN KREMER, is celebrated by historian MARK ARNOLD in a biographical essay, plus we look at the fascinating work of amazingly prolific “King of the Mini-Comics” and masterful cartoonist of Morty the Dog STEVE WILLIS in the first of a two-part look. And there’s the concluding portion of our profile on ERROL McCARTHY on his extraordinary artistry, whether for comix, toy companies, or hot rod cartoon mags. And, as always, there’s our regular CBC features, including the hilarious HEMBECK! Full-color, 84 pages, $10.95

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • June 2025 • #38

79

from the archives of Tom Ziuko

a picture is worth a thousand words

I was 18 when I first met Gil Kane, back in the early 1970s, at a Toronto comic con, where I purchased some original art layout pages from him (one of which, a Tomb of Dracula cover, was previously seen in CBC #22).

Ten years later, I followed my dream and was working at DC as colorist, where Gil was impressed with my work on one of his stories and personally asked me to color an upcoming assignment, which led to my collaborating with him on several projects, including Sword of the Atom and Superman Special #1, which he both wrote and drew. He was terrifically proud of his work on that story, as I was with my own.

Gil would often use his time riding the train into New York City filling the back of full-size original art pages with anatomy breakdowns and exercises.

I purchased a number of these pages — here is one where Gil had sketched and immortalized a number of his fellow commuters.

Enjoy and learn…

— TZ

All TM & © the estate of Gil Kane.

80

#38 • June 2025 • COMIC COMIC BOOK CREATOR

CRYPTOLOGY #2

CRYPTOLOGY #3

CRYPTOLOGY #4

CRYPTOLOGY #5

CRYPTOLOGY #6

ROGER HILL’s conversation with diabolical DON HECK, severed hand films, pre-Code comic book terrors, the otherworldly horrors of Hammer’s Quatermass, a Killer “B” movie classic, plus horror-inspired covers of the Shadow’s own comic book, and more!

Start the ghoul-year with retro-horror done right by FORSHAW, the KRONENBERGS, LEESE, RICHARD HAND, VON SHOLLY, and editor PETER NORMANTON.

See MARS ATTACKS banned cards, model kits, comics, and a few words from the film’s deranged storyboard artist PETE VON SHOLLY! Also, the chilling poster art of REYNOLD BROWN, terrifying puppets from film, and more comic books they’d prefer you forget! Plus, more Hammer Time, JUSTIN MARRIOT on obscure ’70s fear-filled paperbacks, another Killer “B” film, and more to satiate your sinister side!

Get ALEX ROSS’ gory lowdown on his Universal Monsters paintings! Spend Hammer Time with the “Brides of Dracula”, and 3-D horror movies and comics of the 1950s! Learn the origins of slasher films, chill to pre-Code artwork of Atlas’ BILL EVERETT and ACG’s 3-D maestro HARRY LAZARUS, see a Killer “B” movie, and more

by NORMANTON, the KRONENBERGS, LEESE, VOGER, and VON SHOLLY!

SKULL & BONES ISSUE! Ghost Rider from comics to movies, skeleton covers from Atlas Digests and pre-Code horror comics, HY FLEISHMAN’s 1950s skeleton covers and stories, Disney’s skeletons, ’70s Pirates of the Caribbean models and Last Gasp’s Skull Comics, the films of William Castle, and Killer B films: House on Haunted Hill, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, plus our Hammertime section!

ZOMBIE ISSUE! The films White Zombie and I Walked With A Zombie, GEORGE ROMERO and LUCIO FULCI’s zombie apocalypses, zombie pre-Code comics, BERNIE WRIGHTSON’s undead creations, horror comics of Brazil, the contributions of black stars of classic horror cinema, Hammer’s The Plague of Zombies, Fantaco’s Night of the Living Dead, France’s Revenant, and more!

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BRICKJOURNAL #90

ALTER EGO #193

ALTER EGO #194

ALTER EGO #195

ALTER EGO #196

THE BIG ISSUE! We get on board MARK STAFFA’s giant (working!) steam engine, and show PAUL HETHERINGTON’s colossal LEGO creations, including the biggest version of It’s A Small World you’ll see outside of Disneyland! Plus BRICKNERD, BANTHA BRICKS: Fans of LEGO Star Wars, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions

by CHRISTOPHER DECK, and Minifigure Customization with JARED K. BURKS!

An abridgment of EDDY ZENO’s “Drawn to Greatness” book, showcasing Superman artists who followed JOE SHUSTER: WAYNE BORING, PAUL CASSIDY, FRED RAY, JACK BURNLEY, WIN MORTIMER, and others. With appreciations by ORDWAY, KUPPERBERG, ISABELLA, JURGENS, WAID, MACCHIO, NEARY, NOWLAN, EURY, THOMAS, and more! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more!

ROY THOMAS celebrates 60 years in comics! Career-spanning interview by ALEX GRAND, e-mails to Roy from STAN LEE, the history of Wolverine’s creation, RT’s 1960s fan-letters to JULIUS SCHWARTZ, and his top dozen stories compiled by JOHN CIMINO! With art by BUSCEMA, KANE, ADAMS, WINDSOR-SMITH, COLAN, ORDWAY, BUCKLER, FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and cover by TONY GRAY!

NEAL ADAMS REVISITED! Interviews by ALEX GRAND and BILL FIELD, as well as EMILIO SOLTERA—and an overview of Neal’s merchandising art for Marvel and DC Comics and in other fields, conducted by JAMES ROSEN! Plus Adams art, as inked

by PALMER, GIORDANO, VERPOORTEN, ROUSSOS, SINNOTT, DEZUNIGA, and others! With FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more!

Concluding our presentation of EDDY ZENO’s book on the early SUPERMAN artists from ALTER EGO #193—with a focus on style-setting WAYNE BORING and classic cover illustrator WINSLOW MORTIMER! Featuring a fabulous, previously unprinted cover by BORING! Also: FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more! Edited by ROY THOMAS.

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TwoMorrows needs your help!

DIAMOND COMIC DISTRIBUTORS FILED FOR BANKRUPTCY IN JANUARY without paying for our December and January magazines and books, leaving us with enormous losses— and we still have to pay the expenses on those items, and keep producing new ones. Until payments from our new distributors begin in the Fall, we’re staying afloat with WEBSTORE SALES.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #39 KIRBY COLLECTOR #93

KIRBY COLLECTOR #94

KIRBY COLLECTOR #95

THOMAS YEATES career-spanning interview about the Kubert School, Swamp Thing, Eclipse Comics, and adventure strips Zorro, Tarzan, and Prince Valiant! GREG POTTER discusses his ’70s Warren horror comics and ’80s reboot of Wonder Woman with GEORGE PÉREZ, WARREN KREMER is celebrated by MARK ARNOLD, plus part one of a look at the work of STEVE WILLIS, part two of ERROL McCARTHY, and more!

SUPPORTING PLAYERS! Almost-major villains like Kanto the Assassin and Diablo, Rodney Rumpkin, Mr. Little, the Falcon, Randu Singh, and others take center stage!

Plus: 1970 interview with Jack by SHEL DORF, MARK EVANIER’s 2024 Kirby Tribute Panel from Comic-Con, neverreprinted Simon & Kirby story, pencil art gallery, and more! Unused Mister Miracle cover inked by MIKE ROYER!

SPACE RACES! Jack’s depictions of cosmic gods and life on other planets, including: how Ego, Tana Nile, and the Recorder took Thor to strange new worlds, OMAC’s space age future, time travelers in Kirby’s work, favorite Kirby sci-fi tropes in his stories, plus: a 1967 LEE/KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, never-reprinted Simon & Kirby story, robotic pencil art gallery, cover inked by TERRY AUSTIN!

MADNESS! Kirby’s most deranged work: Dingbats, Goody Rickels, Destroyer Duck, the Goozlebobber, Not Brand Echh, and wild animation concepts! Plus, a 1980s Kirby interview by JAMES VAN HISE, a look at Jack’s psychedelic coloring, Kirby’s depictions of Dr. Strange, Forever People art gallery, MARK EVANIER, a crazy 1950s Simon & Kirby story, behind an unused Machine Man cover inked by STEVE LEIALOHA!

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Every new order (print or digital) and subscription will help TwoMorrows get through this, and emerge even stronger for 2026. Please download our NEW 74-PAGE 2025 CATALOG and order something if you can: https://shorturl.at/gA9Fv Also, ask your local comics shop to change their orders from Diamond to LUNAR DISTRIBUTION, our new distributor. We’ve had to adjust our release dates for the remainder of 2025 while we wait for orders from our new distributor, so you may see some products ship earlier or later than originally scheduled.

We should be back to normal by end of Fall 2025; thanks for your patience!

New from TwoMorrows!

RETROFAN #38

RETROFAN #39

RETROFAN #40

RETROFAN #41

BACK ISSUE #158

Can your mind stand the shocking truth of… ED WOOD CAST CONFESSIONS? Plus: Ideal Toys’ Zeroids, television Tarzan RON ELY, Planters® Peanuts’ Mr. Peanut, CHARLES ADDAMS, TV’s The Fugitive, the forgotten 1981 Spider-Man cartoon, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, ED CATTO, and MARK VOGER.

Here comes TV’s Dennis the Menace, with stars JAY NORTH, GLORIA HENRY, and JEANNIE RUSSELL! Plus: Hogan’s Heroes turns 60, TV Western Have Gun–Will Travel, Big Little Books, The Incredible Hulk in animation, MICKY DOLENZ as Circus Boy, and more! Featuring columns by ED CATTO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER.

We kick off with TV’s original Kung Fu starring DAVID CARRADINE, a NANCY DREW history, Disney animator FLOYD NORMAN, TOM CORBETT: SPACE CADET, collectible ’60s and ’70s cereal premiums, in search of SAM GOODY, and more! Featuring columns and contributions by HERBIE J PILATO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, MARK VOGER, and editor ED CATTO!

HEY, MISTER ISSUE! The FF’s Mr. Fantastic, STEVE DITKO’s Mr. A, the 40th anniversary of MICHAEL T. GILBERT’s Mr. Monster, Mr. X, the Teen Titans’ Mr. Jupiter, R. CRUMB’s Mr. Natural, Archie’s Mr. Weatherbee, and a Mr. Freeze villain history! Featuring BYRNE, CARDY, CONWAY, DeCARLO, DINI, ENGLEHART, the HERNANDEZ BROS., MIGNOLA, MOTTER, and more!

Cover by ED McGUINNESS.

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All characters TM & © their respective owners.

Tune in to Saturday morning super-heroes Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, The Mod Squad, Hanna-Barbera cartoonists, Jesus Christ Superstar, Mr. Potato Head, ‘Old Yeller” actress BEVERLY WASHBURN, Flying Nun collectibles, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

BACK ISSUE #160

BACK ISSUE #161

BACK ISSUE #162

BACK ISSUE #163

SUMMER FUN ISSUE! Marvel’s Superhero Swimsuit Editions, Betty and Veronica swimsuit gallery, DC’s Strange Sports Stories, the DC/Marvel softball rivalry, San Diego Comic-Con history, Impossible Man Summer Vacation Specials, DC Slurpee cups, DC/Whitman variants, and more!

Featuring BATES, DeCARLO, HUGHES, JIM LEE, LOPRESTI, MAGGIN, ROZAKIS, STELFREEZE, and more! GUICE cover.

MUTANT MAYHEM ISSUE! BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH’s Weapon X Wolverine, the romance of Havok and Polaris, Rogue and Nightcrawler limited series, Brood and Arcade villain histories, “Mutant Massacre” crossover, and more! With JON BOGDANOVE, JOHN BYRNE, CHRIS CLAREMONT, DAVE COCKRUM, LOUISE SIMONSON, MIKE WIERINGO, and more!

WINDSOR-SMITH cover.

BACK ISSUE GOES MAD! Things get crazy this issue as we cover Madman, Batman: Mad Love, MAD superhero movie parodies, the Mad Hatter, Madballs, and more! Featuring the work of MICHAEL ALLRED, BRUCE TIMM, PAUL DINI, GERRY CONWAY, DOUG MOENCH, MIKE W. BARR, JEPH LOEB, and others. Madman cover by MICHAEL ALLRED! Edited by ROGER ASH.

MONKEYING AROUND! Featuring simian favorites including Gorilla Grodd, GorillaMan, King Kong, Angel and the Ape, and more monkey business. With the work of CARMINE INFANTINO, JOHN BROOME, CARY BATES, GERRY CONWAY, MARK WAID, STEVE ENGLEHART, SAL BUSCEMA, DON SIMPSON, PHIL FOGLIO, HOWARD CHAYKIN, PHILIP BOND, and others.

Gorilla Grodd cover by ARTHUR ADAMS!

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BACK ISSUE #159

CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS 40th ANNIVERSARY! Pre-Crisis tour of DC’s multiple Earths, analysis of Crisis and its crossovers, Crisis Death List, post-Crisis DC retro projects, guest editorial by MARV WOLFMAN, and more! Featuring BARR, ENGLEHART, GREENBERGER, LEVITZ, MAGGIN, MOENCH, ORDWAY, THOMAS, WAID, and more! With GEORGE PÉREZ’S Crisis on Infinite Earths Index #1 cover.