The Birth & Death of P*S: A previously unpublished Q+A with creator Will Eisner reveals the origin of P*S, and contributors speak of the magazine’s recent demise
fun Ghost Machine independent comics line
Man in Argentina: Pablo Stadelman on “El Loco Chávez” and “El Negro Blanco”
THE MAIN EVENT
Len Wein: Weined on Comics
In a candid and amusing radio interview conducted overnight by the “Nuff Said” WBAI hosts Ken Gale and Ed Menja, Leonard Norman Wein talks about his early comic book years, participating in the first (though totally unauthorized) Marvel/DC crossover, quitting as Watchmen editor over a disagreement with Alan Moore, creating Swamp Thing with Bernie Wrightson, life after working for the “Big Two,” and coping with the continuity mess created in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths
Quietly, behind the scenes, an American institution founded by The Spirit’s creator vanishes
by JON B. COOKE
Having always had a fascination with oddball comics stuff, when I first heard of Will Eisner’s P*S magazine, the colorful, digest-sized, comics-friendly U.S. Army periodical devoted to preventive maintenance, I just had to know more about it. But by the time Eisner had moved on, I had sent in a letter to some address I found, begging for a copy, and it was Murphy Anderson (my idol when I first became a fan!) — Murph’s studio which had the contract from 1973–83* to produce the monthly — who sent me a box full of copies. Though I hadn’t the slightest interest in the instructional aspect, I just loved the entire effort.
So, naturally, when I interviewed Eisner for the documentary my brother and I produced, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, I had the legendary cartoonist recount the origin story, which starts off this paean to the now deceased P*S
“In early ’42, I was finally drafted,” Eisner told me. “By then, I had been doing The Spirit for about a year-and-a-half and, when I got into the Army, by then I was fully convinced that this medium that we call comics, what I today call ‘sequential art,’ was a valid, useful medium, capable of instructing, too. And I was doing basic training at Aberdeen Training Grounds. I was in my tent after a day of crawling through mud and two guys walked in, and said, ‘You’re Will Eisner.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘We’ve been seeing your stuff in The Baltimore Sun.’ Now,
*Getting technical, Murph’s company, Visual Concepts, skipped six issues in 1978–79, when it was produced by Zeke Zekely’s packaging outfit Sponsored Comics, in Beverly Hills, California, featuring comics work by Dan Spiegle and illustrations by Alfredo Alcala.
Baltimore was about 15 miles away from Aberdeen, in the big neighboring city. And he said, ‘We have a camp newspaper and we could use a comic strip. Would you be interested in doing a comic strip?’ Well, I looked down at the shovel I was holding and I thought to myself, ‘Well, that could be better.’”
THE FLAMING BOMB’S PRIVATE DOGTAG
That (colorfully named) camp newspaper was The Flaming Bomb and, mere weeks after finishing basic training, Eisner’s comic strip, “Private Dogtag,” about a hapless Army recruit, became a regular feature. He explained, “Aberdeen Proving Ground was a training camp and they were using a lot of visuals at the time. You know, slide [projector] film and stuff of that kind. But I realized that they weren’t using what I felt was a very valid training material, and I remember talking to the lieutenant colonel who was in charge of the camp newspaper that I was on. I said to him one day, ‘You know, can we introduce the use of comics as a training material at the schools here on the post?’ So he said, ‘Well, that’s an interesting idea,’ and I gave him a long sales pitch on it. And since I was doing it professionally, and I was a name – in italics again – he apparently took what I said seriously. He says, ‘I’ll talk to them about it.’ He came back two or three days later and he said, ‘You know, the Ordnance Corps,’ which was then the predecessor of the Ordnance Department in the Army, ‘is planning to introduce “preventative maintenance,”’ which was a maintenance system very similar to what we do today when you take your car in for servicing. They add oil, change the oil, and they tape up any wires that are
This page: Clockwise from top is Corporal Will Eisner inspecting a copy of The Flaming Bomb with fellow staff members, circa 1942; copy of that newspaper with an Eisner illo; the cartoonist’s APG identification; P*S #1 [June ’51].
This spread: Clockwise from above is the cover of Army Motors Vol. 3 #1 [Apr. ’42], which appeared a month before Will Eisner was inducted (on May 1), and appears to have artwork signed by DC publisher Harry Donenfeld(?!); two rarely seen Superman strips prepared specially for Army Motors; mascots Connie Rodd and Half-Mast before and after the Eisner make-overs; Eisner cover of Firepower #10 [Oct. ’44]; Joe Dope spread from Army Motors; and Eisner strip from The Flaming Bomb [Sept. 3, ’42].
shredding, and so forth. So he said, ‘I’ve told them that you think you can create manuals.’ And I gave him a pitch. I said to him, ‘Well, the reason this is very valuable is because what you’re asking for is voluntary support from your troops. It’s like issuing an order, saying there will be morale in this unit as of 0900. You just can’t do that anymore. You’re going to get a guy who’s going to be willing to put oil in a crankcase when the oil leaves it and drive the vehicle.’ So he says, ‘Yeah, you got a good argument. I’m going to use that argument.’ Next thing I knew, they moved me to Holabird Ordnance Depot, where there was a new little maintenance bulletin that was being started called Army Motors, which was a little eight-page thing* that they were issuing to Army mechanics. By that time, the Ordnance Corps became the Army Ordnance Department, and they were given responsibility for trucks and other vehicles besides armaments.”
FIREPOWER
“So I began introducing the use of comics as a teaching tool in this little Army Motors magazine, which was becoming very, very popular,” Eisner said. “The next thing I knew, I was transferred to the Pentagon building where I was in charge of a magazine called Firepower [The Ordnanceman’s Journal], which I helped them begin. I began my career of using comics as a teaching tool. In fact, I was able to get them to include in a training manual, which was really like the Bible, a two-page
*Actually, in the multiple copies seen, Army Motors was a nicely illustrated black-&-white interior 32-page plus two-color cover monthly. By the time Eisner started contributing (the earliest edition found was the Nov. ’42 issue), Army Motors (conceived in ’39) was volume three.
comic explaining some area of maintenance; warehouse maintenance, I think it was, whatever it was. Anyway, that began the growth of Army Motors, which ultimately had close to a two-million circulation in the Army.
“I built a staff and, of course, it re-enforced my innate belief that comics were a medium that could teach; what we called comics, or what I call today ‘sequential art’ or the arrangement of images in a sequence that tells a story… I invariably would introduce characters and use humor – interceding in the fabric of this medium, you could use humor or in human relationships, which always created humor — and I had a lot of trouble starting the idea because the adjutant general was violently against it. He felt I was embarrassing the military because I was interfering with what he referred to as ‘military discipline,’ or the system of officers wearing a bar were always smarter than the guy who had only stripes, and a guy who had a star was smarter than the guy who had bars. It was the military order of things. But it grew to a point where there was a real struggle.”
PUTTING COMICS TO THE TEST
Eisner continued, “The adjutant general was in charge of military literature and the only way he could kill what I was doing was he said he would run a test… I was on the staff of the chief of ordnance and I was doing other things besides that, using my talents to develop sequentially told images, on the staff, supporting the general’s speeches and explanations to the Senate committees on why he was doing which he was doing.
“At any rate, they hired the University of Chicago to run the tests, and testing my magazine, Army Motors, against the regular Army manuals. And we outdistanced them. We creamed them because, you see, we were writing to the G.I. We were writing in G.I. language. There were two languages; there was the Army language and the G.I. language. The Army language said, ‘Remove all foreign matter from the engine.’ We said, ‘Clean the crud out of the engine,’ and the G.I.s understood what ‘crud’ meant. So we established ourselves as a very valid medium and the Army began to using this medium as a training device.”
For Army Motors, Eisner brought in his Private Dogtag character from The Flaming Bomb and revamped it into the Army’s knuckleheaded nebbish, Joe Dope, which was described by Eddie Campbell as being a “hypothetical soldier who always screws up. In appearance, he is very much at the grotesque end of Eisner’s gallery of types and this would cause problems with the brass later on.”
Army Motors items courtesy of Stuart Henderson.
a.k.a. doctor oldie
The Mad Peck Method
A look at how the late, great Rhode Island-based cartoonist swiped from the very best
This page: Above is probably the most recognizable item John “The Mad” Peck worked on. Produced with former Brown University classmate Les Daniels, Comix: A History of Comic Books in America [’71] included the Marvel Bullpen chapter written by Peck. Inset right and bottom are the two most beloved character in Peck’s repertoire, The Masked Marvel and Dr. Oldie. Below, artist Drew Friedman included Peck this portrait in his book, Icons of Underground Comix [’22].
by JON B. COOKE
What’s that old adage by the late, great Wallace Wood…? “Never draw what you can swipe, never swipe what you can trace, never trace what you can cut out and paste-in, and never do any of that if you can hire somebody to do it for you.” Welp, while I’m not sure he ever did hire anyone to do work like that for him, I can say that my late, great friend, John Peck, a.k.a. The Mad Peck, often lived by Woody’s axiom, particularly during the 1970s and ’80s, when the Providence-based cartoon ist was at his most prolific, whether producing comic strips for Fusion magazine, The Village Voice, Creem, or local alternative publications. I was certainly always aware of Peck’s mas sive appreciation for the work of Matt Baker, maybe the greatest “good girl” artist American comics ever produced. After all, we worked together to put out — at his suggestion — a Baker “South Sea Girl” reprint collection, where he’d provide the South Seas Comics and for me to scan and compile, but wasn’t meant to be. Nor did the career-spanning interview we were planning ever come to pass, as Peck (who always, as did R. Crumb, called me simply, “Cooke”) left this mortal coil on the Ides of March, 2025. But, despite his demise at 82, I’m still involved — quite deeply — in all things Peck as our mutual friend Rob Yeremian is in charge of the artist’s archives and has enlisted me to help compile a massive website in John’s honor, detailing the man’s extensive creative endeavors, from his concert posters, Catalogues of Good Stuff, and Ghost Mother Comics in the hippie dippy days to producing record reviews in the form of comic strips to launching such wild endeavors as a T-Shirt of the Month Club to his This Week in TV History strip to… oh, you get the gist: the guy did A LOT!
ASSIGNMENT:
MUTTS
While Rhode Island was proud to call him their own, the rest of the world pretty much ignored John Peck. And I’d be lying if I said the Mad One wasn’t at least a tiny bit resentful that his San Franciscobased concert poster-slash-comix book artist contemporaries got all — and I mean all — of the attention. But he was shy by nature, anyway — a subhead on an article in his hometown newspaper stated, “Providence’s Mad Peck receives little recognition and wants even less” — and he was well loved and cared for by Rob, so he was appreciated when it counted.
Still, when he sold a Creem concert poster, the one resembling a Camel cigarette package that would advertise the band’s final concert anywhere, for a pretty penny — Heritage auctioned off a copy for $4,250, in July ’24 — that was certainly gratifying. In a biographical sketch he penned for me, Peck wrote:
“Back in the 1960s, I was turning out underground cartoons and psychedelic rock posters. Occasionally I would fantasize that someday the art establishment would cease its derision of these forms and they would be accepted by galleries and auctions. Then Mary Jane would wear off, and I would go back to making marks on paper to keep myself in brown rice and nicotine. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that my posters would fetch thousands of dollars on the open market.”
But what often kept him in a sufficient supply of cooked grain and tobacco (dude, Peck was a seriously thin guy who loved his ciggy-butts and Mary Jane!) was freelance work, and one of those gigs was for a Providence East Side pizza eatery called Mutts.* A man who kept meticulous records of his endeavors, Peck had in his files many of the visual references — almost always derived from comics from the ’40s to the ’60s — to his comix and advertising work, including a comic strip starring his signature character, The Masked Marvel, a curvaceous charmer (obviously inspired by the Harvey Comics super-hero, The Black Cat), as well as his alter ego, Dr. Oldie, a persona he used as a disk jockey.
Also a renowned DJ and music historian, the fellow Rhode Islander was very much a part of the state’s eccentric fabric, joining sometime creative partner Les Daniels and one Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
* Legend (and a 1982 People magazine article) has it that, as a Brown student, JFK, Jr., took Brooke Shields on a date to Mutts, but was too impatient to wait for their fabled Sicilian pizza and instead had grinders (local slang for sub sandwiches).
This spread: From above, clockwise, is National Lampoon’s most notorious cover, #34 [Jan. ’73]; photo of Adrian B. Lopez, circa 1960; first two issues of Satire, Adrian’s debut magazine, from 1936; his MAD magazine knockoff, Frenzy #1 [Apr. ’58]; a curious illustrated item from The Daily News [Jan.16, ’74] that’s neither here nor there, but it does link the words lampoon with harpoon, so maybe was an influence…?; Apple Pie #1 [Mar. ’75]; illo of ghostly Volitant, the dead horse whose victory in life brought success to Lopez, from The New Republic [Apr. 15, ’46]; and Harpoon #1 [Sept. ’74].
comix
contributors of the National Lampoon knockoffs, Harpoon & Apple Pie
by JON B. COOKE & SHAUN CLANCY
And so it was, just a few days before the first spring morning of the 1970s dawned on a troubled planet, there debuted one of the most successful magazines of the decade, National Lampoon. Destined to become a cultural juggernaut, one that spawned its own branded movies, television sitcoms, and radio programs, the humor monthly also launched endless one-shots, paperbacks, off-Broadway shows, and even a stack of record albums. Best of all, the Lampoon enlisted a lot of talent from the comics realm, whether established or underground.
Mainstreamers Neal Adams, Russ Heath, Bernie Wrightson, Barry Windsor-Smith, Joe Orlando, Jeffrey Jones, M. W. Kaluta, John Romita, Ernie Cólon, Ralph Reese, and Gray Morrow joined with comix (and like) folk Shary Flenniken, Gahan Wilson, Bobby London, Dan O’Neill, M.K. Brown, Vaughn Bodé, Charles Rodrigues, Randall Enos, and Ed Subitzky to grace NatLamp’s pages with a magnificent array of cartoon excellence.
But Adrian Bernard Lopez had less of an eye on the caliber of cartoonists in NatLamp than on its spectacular circulation numbers, which, by the Oct. 1974 issue, had peaked at one million copies. Adrian was the publisher of Lopez Publications and, with the help of sons* Dennis as editor and Barry as contributing editor, he was intent on making a Lopez version.
That imitation was audaciously named Harpoon (subtitled “The New American Humor Magazine”), a name selection that provoked the wrath of the genre’s originator. Thus Lopez Publications — using a sub-imprint name of Histrionic Publications — sidestepped legalities to avoid a NatLamp lawsuit by renaming the bi-monthly, Apple Pie. In all, Harpoon lasted three issues and the renamed successor had ten issues.
20 TO 1
But before delving into the humor mags, there’s lots to learn about Dennis’s father, the aforementioned Adrian B. Lopez [1906–2004], publisher of Harpoon and longtime magazine maven. Son of a Havana cigar factory owner, Adrian attended the University of Notre Dame, where he enjoyed writing for school publications. After the Depression stymied an engineering career at Otis Elevator Company, a college chum alerted Adrian that there was money to be made writing for the pulps. And write Adrian did for, among others, Argosy, Dime Detective, and Black Mask (the latter which he’d publish in the ’70s).
In 1935, Adrian teamed with former classmates to create the humor magazine, Satire, which ran for four issues lampooning respective subjects that included detective pulps, movie mags, and politics. Pulp historian David Saunders described Satire as full of “sexy pin-ups of starlets, showgirls, and strippers, risqué gags, and humorous articles.” In 1938, while Adrian was gaining some recognition among his brethren in publishing, the future looked precarious when his efforts to repay moneylenders became a problem.
In 1942, The Washington Post reported, “It wasn’t so long ago that a copy-setter named Adrian Lopez managed to save $200 from his small earnings. He owed $500 to some loansharks and decided that his only hope of getting enough money to cancel his debts was to bet on a horse named Volitant.”
While a subpar imposter it certainly was — as Harpoon/ Apple Pie never did attract writers as funny as Doug Kenney, Michael O’Donoghue, or Sean Kelly — the knock-off did poach a nice selection of comics/comix people to give it an appealing graphic varnish. And, in 2014, to uncover what there is to learn about the publication, intrepid historian and interviewer Shaun Clancy tenaciously tracked down the magazine’s editor and sometime writer, Dennis Holston Lopez, to ask questions.
*Technically, Adrian was Dennis and Barry’s adoptive father, as the boys’ divorced mother married Adrian in 1955 and the youngsters assumed the Lopez surname.
David A. Munro, in a 1946 piece in The New Republic, picked up the tale: “The Volitant Publishing Company… was named after a horse. Volitant came in 20 to 1, and a bettor named Adrian B. Lopez suddenly found himself in the big money.” (The Post said his $200 bet netted him $3,300, while Adrian’s New York Times obituary reported it was a $1,000 wager that resulted in a $6,000 jackpot, and the Times of Aug. 3, 1938, said Volitant’s odds that day at the Saratoga track were 7 to 1.) “Out of respect for the horse, which died soon afterward,” Munro explained, “Lopez founded the Volitant company.”
(The Post went on to relate a co-founder of DC Comics became tied to Adrian’s fate: “Lopez paid the loan shark and then brought his $3,000 balance for investment advice to Harry Donenfeld, the publisher of Superman comics… Donenfeld put up $3,000 of his own money and, with the $6,000 capital, they started a new publishing venture.” In the ’40s, Volitant was based at 480 Lexington Avenue, in the same building as DC.)
The New Republic continued, “There is nothing horsey about Volitant; it reflects another side of Mr. Lopez’s character. Its half-dozen magazines are all what is known in the trade as girlie books. His most
popular titles are Laff and G.I. Joe. But, no matter what the title, the major editorial ingredient of the Volitant magazines is a scantily clad and sketchily drawn female figure.”
Like so many of his peers, Adrian followed trends and imitated successful publications, such as Lady’s Circle, a knockoff of Ladies Home Journal; and Real Story, an ersatz True Story By the later ’40s and into the ’50s, he became associated with comic books through Youthful Magazines, Inc., publishing Atomic Attack, Beware, Captain Science, and others, though he baled just prior to the industry collapse. In the late ’50s, Adrian published the MAD magazine wannabe, Frenzy, and, after acquiring what became Surfing magazine (at the suggestion, it is said, of son Dennis), he had a short-lived rock ’n’ roll slick, Strobe, in 1969. Then, by the mid-’70s, National Lampoon had become a newsstand sensation and Adrian wanted in.
RAIDING NATLAMP
“I got out of college and went to work for my father who was a newsprint publisher from the 1940s,” Dennis Lopez explained to Clancy. “To those guys, you copy some other magazine and get the distributor to stack it right next to the other one and hope it gets noticed. I said, ‘Dad, I’m not sure [copying National Lampoon] is the right thing to do.’ He had a lot of legit magazines.”
Still, the son hardly protested. “It was really his idea. We were both struck by the success of Lampoon. I really just need-
ed a project; I was new there and needed to get out of his hair, so he dreamed up Harpoon. We needed a funny magazine.”
Regarding his dad’s foray into funnybooks decades prior, Dennis said, “I can’t remember Adrian publishing any comic books, but he had some 5” x 7” joke books on newsprint with one cartoon on each page with a caption. One was called Laff and one was Army Laffs,* post-World War II. Those were big sellers for him in the late ’40s. After that, he was [publishing] mostly just-newsprint magazines: Sir!, Man to Man, Escape to Adventure… which was really cool. It had a WWII guy with a machine gun and torn uniform. He was escaping from a Japanese camp with a beautiful babe! The cover would be [a painting]. Very campy and all of that stuff went down the toilet by 1961 or ’62. He bought K&R Publications: Lady’s Circle, Lady’s Circle Knitting and Crochet Guide, Lady’s Circle Needlepoint, Lady’s Circle Casseroles … and — boom! — he had all this circulation. He was pretty good at amalgamating these tertiary titles and then just churning them out like widgets.”
UNDERGROUND INFILTRATION
About Harpoon/Apple Pie’s monolithic competition, Dennis said, “I tried to get a bunch of [National Lampoon] writers and ex-writers and artists [to moonlight at] Harpoon. It was really a convoluted project. It had its points, but done on a shoestring budget by my father.” And one talented pool of cartoonists that could be gotten cheap were those floundering from the then-ongoing collapse of the underground comix business.
In a February 1975 letter to Stan Lee, comix publisher Denis Kitchen, then editing Marvel’s Comix Book, a quasi-underground humor magazine then sharing rack space with the Lopez publication, said Apple Pie had comparable rates. “I mention this as a fourth competitor only because it is beginning to solicit work from more and more underground artists. The publisher, Dennis Lopez, is paying $100/page, which equals the Comix Book rate, but he has begun to promise the artists a compromise on the copyright policy. I did not see this new policy in writing, but according to one artist (Kim Deitch), Lopez is allowing the artist to retain the copyright on his work in return for which Lopez gets exclusive use of the material for something like 18 months and has a special option for reprints. If this is true, it sets a precedent that will attract many artists.”
*Actually, Crestwood Publications published Army Laffs between 1941–49. Adrian’s military-themed humor mag was G.I. Joe [’46–?].
or maybe willis is morty’s muse
What, Me Commercial?
Part deux of our interview by mail with Stupendous Steve Willis, King of the Mini Comics!
This page: Clockwise from inset right, vignette of a cheerful Morty the Dog; cover of Steve Willis’s Hamlet adaptation, The Tragedy of Morty, Prince of Denmarke V1; S.W. in recent times with Max, one of his three cats; and wry commentary regarding these interesting times.
Conducted by JON B. COOKE
[Editor's Note: Last ish, brilliant alt-cartoonist Steve Willis was sharing about his early times, participation in the “Evergreen Mafia,” a loosely aligned cartoonist circle from Willis’s college years that included Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, and Charles Burns. He also recalled participating in the 1980s “newave” comics scene and association with Michael Dowers’ Seattle-based Starhead Comix. Willis’s work, usually seen by a tiny audience in his Xeroxed mini comics traded through the mail, briefly appeared in shops nationwide when, in 1987, Dowers published two issues of Morty the Dog, which starred the cartoonist‘s signature character, but the attempt to reach a mainstream audience flopped. But did that deter the “cartoonists’ cartoonist”…? Let’s find out in this episode derived from a Q&A exchange with moi via mail. — Y.E.]
The newave era was exciting, electric. The gentrification of comic art had indeed already started, but had not achieved the territory it currently holds. There were no “graphic novels,” just long comic stories like my Tragedy of Morty, almost 200 pages.* The Washington State University collection [which Willis started] was the first academic effort of its kind on the West Coast. Establishing that gathering of underground, newave, and small press comix was considered radical and controversial in the early 1980s. Now it seems every public library celebrates a ’zine collection.
My comics career can be deconstructed and compartmentalized in the following stages:
Washington. Long ago, Brad and I were sort of like the bookends of the newave. He was trained in architectural type drawing, I was unable to draw a straight line with a ruler. He used real ink and high quality paper, I used felt tip and crappy, cheap paper. He specialized in X-rated stuff, I never did. He’s urban, I’m rural. He’s Texas, I’m Washington. He had commercial ambitions as an artist, I did not. We are the same age but, by the time I stumbled into the newave, in late 1981, Brad was already there and one of the best known of the cartoonists in that group.
We jammed on two full-length comics in that era: One Normal Guy Talking with a Nut, where one interviewed each other in cartoon form, and Amused to No End. In the former title, it was pretty obvious to the reader, Brad is the nut. As proof, I own a coffee cup that has the word “Norm” on it, so that settles that, I think. (Of course, anything I write in these missives is fair game for the interview. I don’t envy your editing task.)
1.) Born
2.) Suffered
3.) Died (pending)
Ah, you mentioned my colleague, Mr. Bradley Wayne Mark Joseph Foster [Brad Foster], by far the most prolific of the newave comix crew. I love his pen work. Only met him once at a convention in SeaTac,
*About The Tragedy of Morty, Prince of Denmarke, Willis wrote in his introduction to a Volume One reprint, “the entire five-book set took around a year-and-a-half to complete.” Produced between 1983–85, the endeavor was an adaptation of — you guessed it — William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though this version, as Bruce Chrislip pointed out, included cameos by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, and the cartoonist himself cast as Horatio.
SUB-PRO COMIX
Although I had several flirtations with going pro in comix in the early–mid-1980s with Esquire, Atlantic, and Lears via Jay Kennedy’s prodding, I sabotaged myself initially and then flat-out refused to play at the end. To me, comix are my sacred ground and I don’t like being told how to express myself, but I could do that since I already had a career in another field — librarianship.
Thirty-five years of my life was spent in a field where I didn’t belong, but it did support my family and pay the bills. The whole
A conversation with romance/pin-up artist (and — oorah! — ex-U.S. Marine) Jay Scott Pike
Conducted by BRYAN STROUD
[Oh, boy. I had intended to run my long interview with Jay Scott Pike, conducted back in the spring of 2004, talking with the premiere romance comic book artist and painter of the most beautiful pin-up girls. And I had the interview sessions all transcribed, though unedited, and here I am, today, laying out this last feature I need to finish in CBC while my anxious publisher paces the floor awaiting the files, and I discover Scott and I didn’t devote enough time to DC and rather discussed his upbringing, married life, work in his studio as painter, and life in Florida, as I got along particularly swell with the modest ex-Marine! While that interview is definitely worthy of being published, it needs editing and the clock is ticking…! I discover my pal Bryan Stroud has a never-been-printed Q+A with JSP, so here we are! Thanks, Bryan! — Ye Ed.]
Bryan’s Introduction: Jay Scott Pike (born September 6, 1924) was an American comic book artist and commercial illustrator known for his work with Marvel and DC through the 1950s and ’60s, as well as his advertising and “good girl” art. He co-created the Marvel character, Jann of the Jungle, with author Don Rico and created the DC character Dolphin. As an advertising artist, he worked on campaigns for clients including Borden, Ford Motor Company, General Mills, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, and Trans World Airlines.
After a long hiatus from comic books, Pike returned in 1993 to draw layouts and some pencils for Scarlett #12–#14 [Dec. ’93–Feb. ’94] for DC Comics. He also penciled the 58-page story, “All Good Things,” in DC’s one-shot Star Trek: The Next Generation — The Series Finale [July ’94].
Mr. Pike passed away on September 13, 2015, one week after his 91st birthday. Scott Pike’s comic book work wasn’t the be-all and end-all of his career, but he sure did some wonderful stuff while he pursued it. A very nice, humble guy who had a true mastery of the female form, Scott was an enjoyable interview and I wish he were still with us. This interview originally took place over the phone, on August 20, 2010.
Bryan Stroud: You must have had a very early interest in art. I understand you enrolled in the Art Student’s League at the age of 16. Is that correct?
Jay Scott Pike: Yeah, it is. I was 15 or 16. I know I was partway into high school. I wasn’t a junior or senior yet.
Bryan: What spurred your interest?
Jay: I always liked to draw, and when I was a kid the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs movie was out in the theaters and I used to draw the dwarfs and even tried to draw Snow White. I don’t know that I was any good at drawing her, but I can remember doing that and I just really liked to draw.
Bryan: I think probably Walt Disney started some careers whether he knew it or not.
Jay: Probably so.
Bryan: Apparently you also had other training at the Parsons School of Design and the Ringling School of Art?
Jay: That’s right. I went into the Marine Corps in ’42 and I got out in ’46, and I went to Parsons, I guess, in ’46 on the G.I. Bill for one year. I wanted mainly to do illustration and Parsons didn’t seem to give me what I wanted, although Parsons is a good school. So I took a semester at Syracuse and didn’t like them much better, and then heard about Ringling and the idea of being down in the sunshine seemed good to me. So, anyway, we were married in ’48 and we came down here to Florida — where we live now — and I went to Ringling for a year-and-a-half.
When I got out, we went back up to northern New Jersey, near enough to New York so I could get in and out every day. I was hoping… really expecting to find that New York would have been just waiting for me to get there. [laughter] But, by golly, they weren’t. In fact, I couldn’t get any work at all. I want-
Inset right: Jay Scott Pike commission artwork featuring his DC Comics creation, Dolphin.
Dolphin, Green
Below: Pike’s friend Neal Adams used him as inspiration for the bald version of Oliver Queen. Panel from The Flash #219 [Jan. ’73]
ed to get work without actually working in a studio in New York. I wanted to work at home where we lived in New Jersey. Somebody said, “You ought to go talk to Al Hartley. He’s a comic book artist.” I thought, “Gee, that’s probably the bottom of the barrel,” but, anyway, I did and met Al and Al was doing very well. He had a beautiful home and a brand-new car in his circular driveway with a private pond in the back, and a pretty good-sized pond at that. He was obviously making plenty of money. So, I went into drawing comics with Al, but we just didn’t get along — so, by the time we decided to split, I’d gotten to know Stan Lee and Stan said that he would give me work of my own. So I got started with what was then Timely Comics and then drew comics for the next seven or eight years. The bulk of my comic career was in the ’50s.
Bryan: The earliest credit I could find for you was in 1951 on a Western comic book.
Jay: That sounds right.
Bryan: Since you started at that point and also did some a little bit later, it sounds like you did work both before and after the Comics Code was instituted. Did that have any effect on your work, Scott?
Jay: Yes, it did, because at that time, when I first came out, I was drawing jungle girl comics. “Jann of the Jungle” and “Lorna the Jungle Queen,” and it seems like another one, too. And I can remember I got a whole book back and had to make the bosoms smaller on the jungle girl, whichever one it was, and when she was flying through the trees on a vine or something her skirt couldn’t go above her knees. I can remember having to go over the whole book and having to fix those things.
Bryan: Censoring to meet the standard. I remember when I spoke to Russ Heath about it, he was kind of cussing the Code, saying that if you showed someone sweating it was too violent.
Jay: [Chuckles] Well, it did get ridiculous. When did you last speak with Russ?
Bryan: About a week ago, in fact.
Jay: I haven’t seen him for about 50 years, I guess, but his dad was actually a neighbor of ours when we lived in Montclair, New Jersey. That was how I got acquainted with Russ.
Bryan: He’s a great talent and still knocking out work, like yourself.
Jay: Well, I haven’t done any comic work in decades, but I have done recent paintings of Dolphin, a comic book character that I created. It was an oil painting of her.
Bryan: I’m glad you brought that up as I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Dolphin. It looks like that was a oneman show. You scripted it and illustrated it all in one.
Jay: Yeah, it was all me. I did that and I decided that if I was going to keep doing it I wanted part of the copyright, so I went in to talk to [DC editorial director Irwin] Donenfeld about it and he didn’t even give the idea a glance. It just wasn’t done at that time. So, I said, “Hell, I’m not going to write this thing and draw it, too.” It was too much work. So that was really the end of Dolphin as far as I was concerned.
Above: Jay Scott Pike at work on a Dolphin commission painting in his Sarasota art studio. Inset left: Pike’s iconic Dolphin image graces the cover of Showcase #79 [Dec. ’68]. Below: Among JSP’s freelance gigs were magazine covers, including this beauty.
darrick patrick’s ten questions
Brave Mr. Boldman
Chatting with onetime Kubie, cartoonist, comics writer, model, and actor Craig Boldman
by DARRICK PATRICK
[Craig Boldman is an Ohio-based professional cartoonist whose majority of projects have been for Archie Comics. He has worked on titles such as Archie’s Pal Jughead, Superman, Tailipoe, Looney Tunes, Cap’n Catnip, Action Comics, Betty and Veronica, ‘Mazing Man, and many more. He was also the writer of the Archie syndicated newspaper strip for over two decades. When he’s not creating stories, Craig can be found acting in film and television commercials (really!). — D.P.]
Darrick: What was the journey that led you to working professionally within comic books?
Craig: My older (by one year) sibling, Loyd, introduced me to comics. I was the tag-along brother and often got caught up the latest cool things that he discovered. The first issues I remember reading were early Silver Age books edited by Julius Schwartz: The Flash #130 [Aug. ’62], “Who Doomed the Flash?” and Justice League of America #13 [Aug. ’62], “Riddle of the Robot Justice League.” Loyd shared them with me at a vacation cabin in a place called Pike Lake in Bainbridge, Ohio. Those books introduced me to many key characters and concepts and left me needing more.
The covers of those comics, by the way, followed Julie‘s trademark formula and worked exactly as intended. They presented tantalizing set-ups that defied you to walk away from the spinner rack. You had to stay and find out how it all got resolved. Or perhaps even buy a copy! (Julie would conspire with his writer to create a compelling cover image, usually some sort of impossible situation for the hero, and then send the writer away to create the story that would resolve the cover.)
So that was my first taste, but I didn’t appreciate, until years later, the degree to which my interest in comics deepened due to my grandparents. They lived in a rural farm village, population 250, called Highland, Ohio. They operated a general store-type business, but had retired from that when I was still quite young. Visiting them on weekends was always a pleasant break from my “high pressure” suburban neighborhood.
My grandmother brought out comics to pacify us kids during these weekend visits; comics that were strangely different from the ones I was accustomed to. These were Golden Age comics, presumably ones read by my dad when he was growing
up. My siblings and I treated these comics very badly from a collector’s standpoint. We wrote on them, drew on them, folded them, cut them up. They were well-read and well-loved. It was through these comics that I discovered Plastic Man, Captain Marvel, The Spirit, and a Superman who was curiously distinct from the Superman I read about at home.
Eventually I learned about the history of the comics industry and gained some understanding of how those “Earth-1” and “Earth-2” comics I grew up on all fit together. At some point, Loyd and I caught the bug to draw our own comics. We collaborated and competed at making home-grown super-hero stories and sharpened our skills that way.
In school, I was only just an average student. Art class (where I drew comics) was the only thing I ever really sunk my teeth into. Comics as a profession was a dream, but I didn’t see a pathway there. Later I studied art, since that was the closest thing to my area of interest, at Miami University of Ohio. Fine art was too far off the mark, though, and didn’t satisfy me.
I became aware of the newly formed Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, New Jersey. I wondered if I would be a good fit, since Joe Kubert at that time was synonymous with the DC war comics line, and I had become interested in humor and children’s book illustration. I made the trip to Dover to show my portfolio to Joe, and he was very encouraging. I was admitted and became a learner at the school in its second year of operation.
My tuition was paid from the sale of a comic that my dad and I discovered at my grandparents’ house! It was an uncirculated copy of Marvel Comics #1 [Oct. ’39] (the first appearance of the Human Torch) stored in a box of unsold stock from the days when they operated a local market.
Among my teachers at the school were veteran cartoonists and comic book artists Dick Ayers, Hy Eisman, Irwin Hasen, Tex Blaisdell, Ric Estrada, and Joe Kubert himself. All were
Photo of Craig and fellow Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art students back in the late ’70s. From left, on the front row, are Kim DeMulder, Scott Beachler, Craig, Jan Duursema, and Tom Mandrake. Back row is unknown, Dave Dorman, Stanley Fukuoka, and Goldie Zeiglman. Below: Craig paid for his Kubert School tuition by selling an uncirculated copy of Marvel Comics #1 [Oct. ’39], which he and his father found in Craig’s grandparents’ house — they used to run a general store, y’see.
Above: Cartoonist and comics writer Craig Boldman poses with his variant cover art for Archie Is Mr. Justice #1 [Jan. ’25]. Inset left:
Stainless Steve & Artful Arnold
LOCs about Steve Englehart and Arnold Drake (and Maronie’s pix) — fill
thish’s column
This page: Since Jeff Clem mentions her in our LOC column, why not share a couple of Michael Wm. Kaluta images of the Tarot card reader character. Both MWK pieces here are from Madame Xanadu #1 [July ’81]. Next page: The other two photos Sam Maronie shared of a bizarre 1975 New York City Creation Con skit staged by H. Chaykin, B. Wrightson, J. Starlin, S. Gerber, and M. Skrenes appearing in CBC #37 (pix I wrongly credited to Ronn Sutton) and Yeates’ uncropped CBC #37 cover art.
[Cripes, Ye Ed called Rick Veitch “Vermont’s official poet laureate” in CBC #38??? Everybody knows he was named the Green Mountain State’s cartoonist laureate in 2020… Mea culpa, O’ Roarin’ One! Now let’s catch up on the mail, as we skipped our “Incoming” feature in last ish’s Dave Stevens special Ye Ed.]
Jeff Clem
When I saw that the latest issue of Comic Book Creator (#37) would feature a major interview with my favorite comic book writer, Steve Englehart, I looked forward to it on one hand, because I am a real fan of his work. But, on the other hand, having read possibly every interview with him and article about him, I felt your interview would not contain any new information for me. I bought it just because it was Englehart, not expecting much.
Of course, I was wrong. Your questions were very interesting and Steve’s answers gave me an even more complete understanding of the man.
I have met the man various times and communicated with him quite a bit throughout the years, yet your interview told me more about him than I knew. I have consistently been quite the fanboy with him, asking many far-ranging questions that would have tested the patience of most people right away. But he was always very helpful and patient with me and I consider him to be as good a person as he is a writer.
Having said that, the interview was only near-perfect, and I do have some nit-picky corrections:
The subject of Steve’s unpublished “Deadman/Demon” story — when Steve wrote the two-part Madame Xanadu story that he pulled from DC in a page-rate dispute, he turned that into a three-part “Scorpio Rose” story at Eclipse. The Madame Xanadu stories featured Deadman and the Demon, yet he had to legally alter them in the Scorpio Rose series to her spurned gypsy lover Zachariaz (spelling?) and the demon-rapist whose name I forget. (Of course, we know that the third Scorpio Rose issue was finally published in the volume one of the Image five-volume set of Coyote trade paperbacks in 2005.)
Also, in your caption about Steve’s Warren/Vampirella work on page 55, you state that he wrote a Vampi story in Vampirella #74, besides the three stories in #21–23. Not necessarily true; the Vampi stories in # 74 are actually reprints of the stories from #s 22 and 23.
Steve wrote non-character stories in Vampirella #78, Creepy #84 and 104, as well as art in Vampirella #10 (art with Neal Adams and story by Denny O’Neil), art and story in Eerie #35, and uncredited Spanish-to-English translation of Maroto’s Dax in Eerie #46.
And, I have to congratulate you for being one of the few comic book fans who has mentioned the uncredited inking of Dave Cockrum’s art in Giant-Size Avengers #2 — no index I am aware of ever mentions that the final several pages feature Neal Adams inks, as well as other unidentifiable Crusty Bunkers.
Thanks for a great issue!
[Much appreciated, Jeff. Glad you enjoyed the ish, flaws ’n’ all! Next is a missive from my brother editor (whom I’ll have to start paying given his frequent LOC appearances!) — Ye Ed.]
Roy Thomas
It was good to read still more of the long interview with Arnold Drake, who, with his co-creation of “Deadman” and “Doom Patrol” and even “Guardians of the Galaxy,” contributed so much to the Silver Age of Comics. I was a fan of “Doom Patrol” before I became a professional and I liked Arnold personally, even putting up with the smelly Turkish cigarettes he dragged into the Marvel Bullpen in the days when it was still permissible to poison people’s lungs in closed rooms.
That said, it was sad to see that, up to the end of his life, he persisted in a couple of potential delusions — one of which I’m certain, the other of which I’m as certain as I can be without having been an eyewitness.
Certain it is that artists and others in the 1960s went back and forth between DC and Marvel often enough that it isn’t impossible that Stan Lee knew about Arnold’s concept of “Doom Patrol” before it came out and worked out The X-Men with Jack Kirby in order to copy the forthcoming DC series. (Of course, this means that some of the inveterate Stan-haters will now have to turn their generally ludicrous wrath on Jack, because, after all, we all know that Jack Kirby created everything at Marvel, which lets Stan off Arnold’s hook, right? But, as Peter David would say, I digress.) However, is it really likely that Marvel (whether Stan, Jack, Stan-and-Jack, or Artie Simek) at that stage in its development would have gone to all that trouble to preempt an unproven DC features? Isn’t it a bit more likely that the long-told tale is true: that Martin Goodman, flush with Marvel’s rising sales figures, told Stan Lee he wanted a new super-heroteam-in-a-box created in a new title, just as The Fantastic Four had been a couple of years earlier?
After all, in his interview in Alter Ego #17, published while he was thankfully very much alive, Arnold seemed intent on emphasizing that he was beating the drums at DC for the powers-that-were to pay attention to what Marvel was doing and to get some of that same relative realism and excitement into DC’s own mags. Surely, given his acuity in that arena, Arnold must have noticed that Marvel had already, in 1961, launched a four-person super-hero group that contained an egghead leader, a man charged with energy that enabled him to fly and shoot out bursts of a particular kind of energy-burst and a third, human-derived but now-bereft-of-most-of-his-humanity entity whose main contribution to the team was raw strength and a woman to round out the group. Let’s see… what was that name of that Marvel group again? Oh, yeah… The Fantastic Four. I give “Doom Patrol” several stars as a creation, but let’s not delude ourselves — as Arnold, alas, insisted on deluding himself — that the Doom Patrol didn’t echo the FF every bit as much as the X-Men could possibly be said to echo the DP. Once you get past the fact that both team-leaders were wheelchair-bound, Arnold was just seeing what he wanted to see.
The marquee comic book writer on his new (and yet vintage) Ghost Machine comics line
Conducted by MATT MERANTE
[In his book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being [Penguin, 2003], super-star music producer Rick Rubin describes the process of creative collaboration as a partnership between the art that precedes you and the art that follows. If any comic creator today represents this connection, it’s Geoff Johns. The writer is well-known for revamping DC Silver Age mainstays Flash, Green Lantern, and Aquaman for a post-9/11 audience, spearheading both the “Sinestro Corps Wars” and “Blackest Night” crossovers, and creating DC character Courtney Whitmore/Stargirl as a tribute to his late sister. Additionally, Johns has been a showrunner (Stargirl), film executive (Warner Bros./DC), screenwriter, producer, and even a comic book retailer. Johns may lean a little bit “old school” when it comes to comics, as he has a penchant for long runs on titles, deep character dives, and clear, serialized storytelling. These inclinations are evident throughout his current endeavor, the Ghost Machine Productions published by Image Comics. Geoff was generous enough to spend some time discussing his first box of comics, his newest books — Geiger, Redcoat, Rook: Exodus, and Hyde Street — and his collaborative approach to creator-owned work… This interview was conducted in December 2024. — M.M.]
Comic Book Creator: CBC is a magazine where the audience loves Silver and Bronze Age comics, yet has a vested interest in modern books, too. The mag’s editor mentioned that he picks up all of the Ghost Machine titles! He also loves that retro checkerboard pattern across the top of your books.
Geoff Johns: I’m really pleased to hear that your editor enjoys the titles. That makes me happy. We’re having so much fun working on them. I’ll tell you the origin of the checkerboard: I was introduced to super-heroes, in a similar way as other people my age, [through] animation, such as Challenge of the Superfriends cartoon, and Superman the movie, toys, T-shirts, and stuff. But really [initially] I didn’t know much about comic books or read a lot of comic books.
My brother and I grew up in Detroit. We were in my grandparents’ little small house and went up to the attic one day and we found a box of old comic books and they were from the ’60s. They belonged to my uncle and there were Marvels in there and a lot of DCs. I read things like Fantastic Four and Daredevil On the DC side, a lot of Superman and Action, Flash, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, and I loved those books. When there was a checkerboard on top of it, I just gravitated toward that story. I started to look for it and I liked that the checkerboard signified a cohesion, and a collective and it represented an era to me. I thought that checkerboard was part of the same universe or style of the books. When we were doing Geiger, I just had such an affinity for that checkerboard and it symbolized to me quality and creativity…
Gary [Frank] and I weren’t sure we were going to do a lot more than Geiger. We didn’t realize we were going to be doing as much as we are doing, let alone Ghost Machine. At Ghost Machine, we call them the “four corners of reality,” but really there’s four shared universes of titles divided by genre. All the “Unnamed” books have a checkerboard across them… because they all coexist.
The Unnamed is almost super-hero adjacent because these stories take place between the birth of America in 1776 starting with Redcoat, this immortal British soldier, and they stretch all the way to Geiger which is 25 years in the future in a post-nuclear war America, essentially the death of America. So we go from the birth to the death of America and there are all these characters akin to American myths, like Paul Bunyan and John Henry. I always loved those old stories.
CBC: For Redcoat, it seems like you’re having a ton of fun with American history. Have you always been a history buff? And in some ways has this book forced you to become one, or forced you to look at history a little bit differently?
Johns: I’ve always been one. One of the things that Ghost Machine has allowed me to do is really explore things, genres, and life in a way that I haven’t previously. I love super-heroes. I love DC. But superheroes are a very specific thing. Writing a book like Redcoat and diving into American history is amazing because I get to explore and have fun with things I’ve always loved but never touched upon. Even the issue with Johnny Appleseed [Redcoat #10, Mar. ’25] was so much fun to do and I can’t wait for people to see it. With Redcoat, I’m doing a ton of
Above: Born of atomic holocaust, Geiger, the Meltdown Man, is the nexus of the “checkered” universe of Geoff Johns and company. Geiger #1 [Apr. ’21] art by Gary Frank. Below: The Ghost Machine Productions chief engineer, Geoff Johns, hawks books at Manhattan’s Midtown Comics, in April, 2024.
research… So, in a weird way, I’m kind of treating American history like the DC Universe. There are all these minor characters [from history], and it’s fun to explore who they were, what their personalities were like, what their stories were, and what their secret tales with Simon Pure were. That’s super-fun.
CBC: You’ve been a comic book writer, chief creative officer, film writer, TV producer, and now head of your own comic book imprint. What is something you try to stick to philosophically in all of your endeavors? And what is something that you’ve evolved/updated over time?
Johns: Well, it’s always about the creative: the character and the emotion. So it all has to come back to that no matter what. If you’re telling a story about Simon Pure and his friend, Johnny Appleseed, and what having a friend really means, and exploring that emotionally, or you’re telling a story like Blackest Night and it’s a giant DC crossover event, you need to find the emotion and character in that. That was all about emotion. To have the Black Lanterns instigate an emotion from someone, whether it’s love or fear or rage… that was really what the story was all about. It allowed me and other writers to do very emotional stories. You could have someone confront a loved one they lost, or an enemy they feared, or someone they killed. There was so much great emotion for someone coming back from the dead. We could explore all these stories within a super-hero universe about regret, loss, hope, life, and death.
It’s always been instinctual but, over the years, it’s been crystallized in my head that everything’s about character and
emotion. All the other stuff only works if character and emotion work. Even books like Forever Evil are built off of emotion. Geiger is built off emotion. Hyde Street’s built off emotion. That was always there for me because of the way I began with Stargirl. The emotional relationships between people is paramount with everything. Ghost Machine is not just the evolution of my career, but also everyone else’s career: Bryan Hitch, Gary Frank, Peter Tomasi, everybody that’s part of Ghost Machine. It’s our company. We own it together. We run it together.
CBC: It’s a collective?
Johns: It’s a collective. Everyone owns Geiger. Everybody does. We looked at what Image Comics did and we wanted to do that but evolve it for today. And, really, for us it was joint ownership. And we focus on creativity, we focus on character, we focus on collaboration, and we focus on consistency.
CBC: I wanted to ask you about that word, “consistency,” because not only has your career been very consistent, but your book has had the same writer and the same artist for six (consecutive) months. Some books have not done that in five months; That’s pretty darn impressive!
Johns: We are all about quality, not quantity. I love writing monthly books. I haven’t written monthly books like this in a long, long time. But I did 10-year runs on Justice Society and Green Lantern, and long runs on The Flash and Teen Titans. I love long runs. That’s where you get to tell stories like Simon Pure and Johnny Appleseed or Geiger’s two-headed wolf, Barney. We have a single issue in Rook coming up that spotlights a
from down argentine way
Crazy Chávez and B-&-W Man
A
brief look
at two exquisitely drawn Argentinian daily comic strips written by Carlos Trillo
The title character of
Inset right: Smartly drawn sequence by Altuna, an artist who would have given the legendary Alex Toth some competition!
Below: The Buenos Aires daily newspaper where both El Loco and El Negro Blanco appeared.
Bottom: A batch of characters visualized by Horacio Altuna.
by PABLO STADELMAN
[By day, a secondary school English and geography teacher, on his personal time Pablo Stadelman toils as a comics historian, with three books to his credit: the two-volume oral history, Cosa de Fans, and Decisiones Heroicas, an investigation of the industry’s growth from 1979–90. This year, Pablo has finished a film documentary, Palabra de Comic (Comic Word), about the formation of both DC and Marvel. Our Argentine amigo will be contributing a regular feature in CBC on diverse subjects, including native-born comics, as found here. Welcome, Pablo! — Y.E.]
El Loco Chávez, whose title character has the real name of Hugo Chávez, is a daily Argentinian comic strip printed on the back cover of the newspaper, Clarín (the country’s largest newspaper and second largest in the Spanish-speaking world!),/ from July 26, 1975–November 11, 1987. Written by Carlos Trillo and drawn by Horacio Altuna, it tells the adventures of Loco from his beginnings as a journalist in Europe, until his return to his native country in South America, where he works in the editorial office of the same daily he appears in, Clarín, where he experiences unusual adventures as a result of the investigations he carries out, spiced up by the appearance of secondary characters, and the women who surround him, the famous “Minas de Altuna.”
Among the main characters are Guillermo Sacco, alias Malone (whose likeness is based on screenwriter Guillermo Saccomano, and who combines his work as a private detective with that of philosopher), Balderi (his editor-in-chief and unconditional friend of El Loco), Juan (a co-worker), and Homero (El Loco’s adman confidant, whom he always asks for advice and is a lifelong lover of tango and philosophy). This group of friends casually meets at the bar, “El Buen Trato.”
The women of El Loco are important to the plot, drawn in detail by Altuna, one of the main points of interest for young readers of the time. Pampita, the newspaper’s photographer, stood out. She was El Loco’s true love and with whom he goes to live in Spain at the end of the saga.
Due to the success of the strip, a color story called “Los Reportajes del Loco Chávez” (“The Crazy Chávez Reports”) was published every two weeks in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. These stories would later be compiled in the Argentine comics anthology magazine, Skorpio, starting with the first strip. Television also took advantage of the character’s popularity as, in 1978, Channel 11
In 1986, the strip began to be published in Spanish anthology magazine Cimoc, in #67 [Sept. ’86]. For the occasion, Altuna reworked the series, stripping bare the women who appeared in their underwear in the original, as the comic strip was reworked and repackaged for the new format. In 1982, Altuna settled in Spain, so the drawings began to appear less frequently, as the pace of his work slowed down. And so, in 1987, he decided to end the strip, bequeathing to El Loco a new life in Spain with his everlasting love, Pampita.
MR. BLACK-&-WHITE
El Negro Blanco was the comic strip that succeeded El Loco Chávez on the back cover of Clarín, running from 1987 until ’94. Also written by Carlos Trillo, the daily feature was drawn by Ernesto García Seijas, and it presents the life of Roberto Blanco, known by his nickname “Negro” [a common moniker in Argentina] in his work as a journalist for the Clarín newspaper, where he is assigned to carry out all kinds of unusual investigations that serve as axis of the stories.
Added to this are the personality of the character, who is sexist, a blackmailer, and a real womanizer, along with a gallery of characters, such as Aníbal (his editor-in-chief), Susana (his eternally-in-love co-worker), Chispa (his architect girlfriend, whom he can never forget), Flopy (a journalism student and later television host, inspired by model Araceli Gonzáles), Agatha (a witch to whom “El Negro” turns to for help in his
aired Las aventuras del Loco Chávez (The Adventures of Crazy Chávez), starring Carlos Rotundo and Adriana Salgueiro as Pampita.
El Loco Chávez
Above:
El Loco Chávez, the Argentine comic strip by writer Carlos Trillo and artist Horacio Altuna that ran in Clarín.
The WBAI “Nuff Said” Len Wein Radio Interview
Conducted by Ken Gale & Ed Menja
Introducing a 2010 interview with his pal, renowned comics writer Marv Wolfman called Leonard Norman Wein [June 12, 1948–September 10, 2017] his “oldest and dearest friend.” Happenstance would have it that, before they created the Illegitimate Sons of Superman fan group together and took by storm the comics world as young writers at DC and Marvel, the two met as 13-year-olds in Wein’s hometown of Levittown, New York, where the boys spent an afternoon chatting about comics. When he departed, Marv said, “Len got on his bike, started to ride away, turned around to wave goodbye, and promptly smacked his head into a tree branch, knocking him out. That should have been a warning.” What follows is a different Q&A, from 1994, with hosts Ken Gale and Ed Menja conducted on their WBAI “Nuff Said” radio show.
Photo by Alan Light • Illustration by Bernie Wrightson
Above: Unpublished 1972 Swamp Thing illustration by Bernie Wrightson, the artist who created the man-monster character with Len Wein. Opposite page: Alan Light took this photo of the writer at the 1982 San Diego Comic-Con.
Above: Ken Gale (left) and Ed Menja in the WBAI -FM broadcast booth, hosting their “Nuff Said” overnight radio show devoted to comics. The program was heard on the New York City-based Pacifica station from the mid-’90s until the show was cancelled in 2002 (though “Nuff Said” was revived on occasion in years to follow).
Inset right: Len Wein originally wanted to become a comic book artist, as evidenced by this sketch from 1969. Below: Years before turning professional, Len Wein conducted what is considered the very first fanzine interview with Jack Kirby, which was published in Masquerader #6 [Spring ’64] .
[The following interview was conducted in the wee hours of April 12, 1994, between 3:30–6:00 a.m. with Menja and Gale in New York City and Wein in his Woodland Hills, California, home.]
Ed Menja: Hi, you guys and gals, Ed Menja here and Ken Gale’s next to me. He’s going to take the controls this time and I’m going to do a first here — maybe it’s a first, I don’t know — but maybe it’s been done before, I’m not sure. But I’m going to be producing comic-book art and comic-book radio talk at the same time! So if you hear scritchy-scratchy noises, that’s me drawing with my Crowquill pen on pages of The Good Guys for Defiant. [chuckles] And we’ll start everything off and get Len Wein on the phone… [musical interlude]
Ken Gale: And that was the Ramones with “Beat on the Brat”…
Ed: And “The Blitzkeig Bop”!
Ken: Also by the Ramones, Ed’s favorite band! Len, do we have you? [the hosts resolve sound difficulties]… You’re coming in better now.
Len Wein: Okay, good. Don’t you love this high-tech stuff? I kept telling you guys to get me a better pair of tin cans with a string, but you wouldn’t listen.
Ken: Well, maybe some bird is trying to make a nest with that
string somewhere between here and California.
Len: That’s not impossible.
Ken: Our guest today on Nuff Said is Len Wein, who is… geez, you got a ton of credits… creator of the new X-Men and Swamp Thing, and probably the best writer The Phantom Stranger ever had, and Justice League writer… and Batman and Superman… and the editor of Crisis on Infinite Earths and editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics for a while. You’re editing for Disney now, aren’t you?
Len: Oh no, I haven’t been editing for Disney for about two years.
Ken: For about two years. All right.
Len: I was editor-in-chief over there for a couple of years also.
Ken: So how did you get started in this crazy business?
Len: I don’t know. I must’ve done something wrong in a previous life, I’m not completely sure. It’s actually what I always wanted to do, from the time I was about seven years old. I always wanted to be in the comic book business. I figured any job where I wouldn’t have to wear a tie to work any day was fine by me.
Ken: You were at DC when they were still at 575, weren’t you?
Len: Yeah, 575 Lexington, the old Grolier Building.
Ken: So how did you get started there? I mean, it’s fine to wish to be there, but how did you actually get there?
Len: Well, I got there not exactly by accident, I think more by design. Years and years and years ago, DC used to give tours on Thursday afternoons and, for a number of years, as often as I could, I would cut school on Thursday and go up to DC to take the tours, just to become a familiar face, and eventually did. Marv Wolfman and I began together in fanzines. I worked for his, he worked for mine, and decided to try breaking into the business and we sort of just made pests of ourselves. Eventually, we were working on that one day a week at DC. We were cutting up old photo stats, doing whatever work, just for free. We were free hands. We decided to… “Hello? We’re familiar! Remember, we’re here.” Eventually, we submitted some work we had done together to… Well, actually we came to submit it to Dick Giordano who was out sick the day we came to submit it. So we submitted our work to Joe Orlando, who I had done some writing to go with some of my artwork. Marv had done some of his own artwork, and bottom line was that Joe liked
Photo courtesy of Michelle Vladich. Masquerader #6 courtesy of Mike Friedrich.
both of our writing more than he liked the artwork, and so he offered us the opportunity to submit ideas for the mystery anthologies that DC was doing at the time… House of Mystery, House of Secrets… and I went home that night, worked up a couple of ideas, came back the next day, and he bought one of them, and I’ve been a writer ever since.
Ken: Now, did that story ever get published?
Len: No, thank God!
Ken: So they’re still holding it for blackmail, huh?
Len: For several years, Joe used to claim exactly that. He used to threaten that if I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d print that story.
Ken: So then you must have done what he wanted in all those years.
Len: So that’s why Joe’s career is in the kind of shape that it’s in today, because he kept blackmailing me.
Ken: Now, I seem to recall a funny story when they moved to 909 Third Avenue, they didn’t tell you…?
Len: What?
Ken: Is that true? Or maybe that was Gerry Conway. I remember hearing that from somebody…
Len: To this day, Gerry doesn’t know they’ve moved and he keeps sending [garbled] and nothing gets published… [musical interlude while sound issues are resolved]
Ken: That was Malcolm McLaren, the man who discovered the Sex Pistols, doing “Swamp Thing.” Len, are you back?
Len: I’m here and I’d like to publicly apologize to everybody for that song… [laughs] I’d never heard that before.
Ken: A friend of mine, who was at a comic shop in England, he saw Malcolm McLaren outside the shop with a lady companion pointing to one of the Swamp Thing comics in the window. So there is a relationship between that song and your character.
Len: Well, as I said, I claim no responsibility for the song.
Ken: Now, was the Swamp Thing sort of an outgrowth of you doing all those House of Mystery and House of Secrets stories, or is it… ?
Len: Absolutely. In fact, “Swamp Thing” was originally a House of Secrets story.
Ken: In number 92.
Len: Yep. People always ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” And, honest to God, I cannot tell you where that one came from. It came to me on the subway one day. It’s generation, I don’t know, but I came up with the idea while taking the subway to the office and typed it up in one of the writer’s rooms they used to have back in those days when there wasn’t so much staff and there was room for freelancers to be around. And Joe Orlando bought it and the rest, as they say, is history.
Ken: But that wasn’t meant to be a series when you first started it.
Len: Originally, it was simply a short story. It was a story I wanted to do. I did it full script as opposed to the way the series went and then most of the stuff I’ve done since, which is to do a plot page, panel breakdown, and then dialogue from the actual pencils. I did the short story, sold it to Joe Orlando, and then, at a party that same weekend, where I was hanging around with Bernie Wrightson, I convinced him to pencil this story and he did. Well, he and company actually penciled that story. Bernie inked it all, but a number of people helped him out on the penciling.
Ken: Oh, I didn’t know that. So all the people used to hang around in those days, huh?
Len: Oh yeah. Alan Weiss, Mike Kaluta… and I don’t recall who else… all worked on the pencils of that story.
Ken: Now did it get turned into a series because of sales,
because of acclaim, because you wanted to do it?
Len: No, actually, it was because of the sales. Initially… it was amazing. That issue of House of Secrets was the best-selling book DC published that month. It outsold the Superman books and everything else that they were doing. And Carmine Infantino, who was editorial director at the time, wanted to do a series based on the story. But the story had some personal meaning to both Bernie and myself, and we didn’t want to water it down. We said, “No, we did the story. We want the story to stand the way we wrote it.” And it took about a year for me to realize I didn’t have to do a series that absolutely followed the short story; just do something with the same attitude and tone. So we essentially came to Joe Orlando and said, “You win, we’ll do a book. We want to do it set contemporaneously with a different set of characters, who are similar to the characters in the short story, but not the same characters.” And Joe said, “Swell,” and the book was born.
Ken: So you and Bernie were able to tell Joe Orlando, “No, we’re not doing the book…?”
Len: Yes.
Ken: In those days, there were all these stories about Infantino dictating to everybody what they can or cannot do. So it couldn’t have been that bad then…?
Len: No, it really wasn’t. At least, not at that point. I mean, at that point, Carmine was simply editorial director. He became publisher later on and then had some problems. I think he “Peter Principled” himself out of the job.
Ken: Now what year are we talking here for Swamp Thing?
Len: The short story was ’70 and I think it appeared in ’71 and the series was 70, began in ’71 or ’72.
Ken: And Carmine lasted another five years after that. So that was still the good old days.
Len: Exactly.
Ken: So how long were you at DC, your first stint there?
Len: My first stint in DC, I guess, was about four or five years.
Above: “Lenny” Wein’s senior portrait from Levittown’s Division Avenue High School 1966 Perspectum yearbook, which listed him as participating in the senior prom committee and serving as art editor for the school publication The Flame. Below: In an undated candid photo, from left, feminist icon cartoonist Trina Robbins, King of Comics Jack Kirby, and wily writer Len Wein, presumably at the San Diego Comic-Con sometime in the 1970s. Bottom: Len Wein’s Aurora #4 fanzine [Dec. ’63] featured a cover by Kirby (though, technically, as was the process for mimeographed ’zines, it was a tracing of the original art rendered on a mimeo master sheet).
Above: Signed copy of House of Secrets #92 [July ’71], the one that started the whole Swamp Thing thing. Below: The extraordinary Neal Adams cover to The Phantom Stranger #14 [Aug. ’71], containing Wein’s first script for the series, a stint lasting until #26 [Sept. ’73].
Ken: So why did you leave?
Len: I didn’t actually leave on purpose. [chuckles] When I was doing all this stuff at DC, I was writing Justice League and The Phantom Stranger and various Batman stories, and things here and there. At the time, I was rooming with Gerry Conway — we were sharing an apartment — and he had gone over to Marvel. He’d left DC to go to Marvel. Roy Thomas was editor-in-chief there, at the time. And Roy liked my work, and I went over to Marvel by attrition. What happened was that Gerry was writing a book I would enjoy and be promoted to some other title and leave it. And Roy would ask me, “Are you interested in taking over Marvel Team-Up? And then various other Marvel titles?” And I would go, “Well, sure! Sounds interesting.” One by one, I kept taking on these Marvel assignments and realized I was giving up DC assignments to do it, and I sort of woke up one morning and went, “My god, I’m working for Marvel.” It was really almost accidental.
Ken: The JLAs you wrote… now, one of them was really the first Marvel-DC team-up. Justice League #103 [Dec. ’72] and Gerry Conway’s Thor #207 [Jan. ’73] was sort of one story.
Len: Was Gerry doing Thor and Steve Engelhart was doing “The Beast” [in Amazing Adventures]?
that could have been the House of Mystery. He would invite comics professionals and friends up every year to be part of this parade, and it became sort of a tradition. A number of DC Batman stories are set in Rutland during Halloween and some of the experiences of that story — because my then-wife [Glynis Wein], myself, Gerry, and Steve Engelhart are all characters in those stories — and a number of things that actually happened to us that particular weekend were incorporated into the scripts.
Ken: Now, the artwork was also tied in together. I mean, you guys are wearing the same clothing both in the DC stories and the Marvel stories. I mean, it was colored the same, the car was the same make and model. Everything was exactly the same. How much coordination was there involved in that?
Len: Enough to make it work! I have to be honest, after 20-something years, I don’t remember all the details of how we made it work. I think Glynis, who was my wife at the time, colored all the books, which maybe one of the reasons that all three of them had the same color scheme.
Ken: Oh, she colored the DC books as well.
Len: She was coloring Justice League, for a while, for me and a couple of other things.
Ken: Yeah, I remember that Glynis was the first colorist ever to get a credit.
Len: Was she really? I didn’t know that.
Ken: Yeah, they had never created a colorist until then, but she was in the story, and so they gave her a credit line and they did ever since, and DC followed suit not that long afterwards.
Len: You know more about this than I do.
Ken: Well, it’s fun to be a radio host, I actually have to know things.
Ken: Right.
Len: Yes. All three of those books crossed over. [Wein is referring to Amazing Adventures #16, Jan. ’73].
Ken: Well, these stories were very tied together with Thor and Justice League, more so than with the Beast and Justice League
Len: Yes. Well, again, it was easy for Gerry and me to do that.
Ken: So what’s the origin of that historic team-up?
Len: Well, back in those days, every Halloween, DC traditionally did stories that were set in Rutland, Vermont. Back in the early ’70s. There was a Halloween parade that ran up in that small town and —
Ken: Very small town.
Len: Boy, was it ever. Tom Fagan was one of the world’s foremost Batman fans at the time and was the caretaker of this wonderful old mansion
Len: That’s true. Actually, one of my favorite aspects of that particular story was that, after it saw print and all the mail started coming in, commenting on the obvious crossover, Julie Schwartz, who was the editor of the Justice League of America, went ballistic. He was furious for having done this. He called me on the carpet and said, basically, “If you had told me you were doing this, I never would’ve let you do it.” And I said, “Well, that’s why I didn’t tell you.”
Ken: Why was he so angry?
Len: I think he was afraid that somebody would get in trouble for all this cross-company… He was very loyal to DC — was and remains — and I think he somehow felt that somebody had put something over on him, which, of course, we had.
Ken: So he had absolutely no clue until the letters came in.
Len: None whatsoever until the letters came in.
Ken: So even when the comics were out, when the proofs came in, he still didn’t know.
Len: Well, he didn’t read the Marvel books, so he wouldn’t have.
Ken: But weren’t people talking about it?
Len: No, we tried very hard not to let Julie know what we were doing.
Ken: And he still kept you on?
Len: Oh, yeah.
Ken: Because in those days, you were doing all the JLA/JSA team-ups where DC had just bought the Quality heroes, and so you were the first person to write those for DC. They bought all the Fawcett characters. So you were the first one to write those, as well. Who named the Earths that they were put in. Now, obviously, you kept them all on the same Earth. They were separate companies, so you made them separate Earths and…
Len: Well, actually Julie did, in one case, in the case of the Quality characters, because everyone had a designation, they were Earth-One, Earth-Two, etc. When I actually wrote the script
for “Crisis on” what became “Crisis on Earth X, it was actually Crisis on Earth-, and the symbol was a swastika, and Julie just wouldn’t allow me to do that. There were a lot of very unpleasant memories attached to that symbol for people of Julie’s generation, and he said, “Nope, that’s not going to be one of my books. I’m not going to use that mark.” So he just simplified it to an “X.”
Ken: And Earth-S, I guess, for Shazam, right?
Len: Exactly.
Ken: So it was your idea to name the Earths, because that sort of…
Len: You needed to have names for these…
Ken: Instead of just having them be on another dimension or something like that, because that seems to be what really created “Crises on Infinite Earths” years later.
Len: Well, that’s part of it, but another factor was simply the fact that every previous one of those crossovers that involved Earths-1, 2, 3, and so forth, established a precedent that the summer thing would involve some parallel dimension, another Earth somewhere. So I was just following tradition and having a good time doing it, actually.
Ken: Okay. So it’s not long after that, you were at Marvel Comics and you were writing quite a few books over there, and then suddenly you’re editor-in-chief. How’d you get that job?
Len: I was tricked into it, again. I was offered the job of Roy Thomas’s assistant and… having tried for several years to get an editorial position at DC and constantly being turned down, one of Carmine’s brilliances, Joe Orlando and Dick Giordano both pushed very hard in my first incarnation at DC to get me in editorial position, which I hadn’t actively sought, but they felt I would make a good editor, and they kept suggesting it to Carmine, and Carmine saw this guy in his early 20s and said, “Well, he hasn’t got the experience. He hasn’t been doing this in a long time. He’s not ready.” So, a part of it, I think, was when Roy offered me the job as his assistant was, “Well, fine. I’ll show you guys.” And I took the job. Then, four weeks later, Roy quit as editor-in-chief and, the next thing I knew, I was running Marvel Comics.
Ken: You couldn’t back out of it at that point, huh?
Len: Well, back out of the opportunity to run Marvel? (Well, actually, several people did later on but, at that point, who knew?) [chuckles]
Ken: So how long you did that for? Three years or something?
Len: Oh, I was editor-in-chief for about nine months.
Ken: Oh, that was nine months.
Len: So I gave birth to a huge ulcer and decided the job wasn’t worth all the aggravation. At the time I was running Marvel, I was in charge of about 54 comics a month all by myself.
Ken: Fifty-four!
Len: A job,I kept telling them, that couldn’t be done by one person, to which they kept arguing, “Of course, you could,” until I quit after nine months. At which point, they said, “Y’know, one person can’t really do this job.” So they started breaking up the elements, and now you look at comics today, and there’s no editor who has more than three or four titles a month, and usually a full-time assistant to help them with those.
Ken: Well, didn’t you sort of have the role the Carmine had at DC and then what Jim Shooter later had at Marvel?
Len: Yes, I oversaw everything, but there was nobody between me and the writers, otherwise. There was no editorial staff.
Ken: Oh, I see.
Len: So it was me and the writers and the artists, and that was it.
Ken: So when Marv took over after you, they gave him editors?
Len: Yes, they started getting him support. He started getting assistants. Then it started spreading into a line of editors. The business changed entirely. I mean, had it been that way then, for all I know, I, I’d still be at Marvel now.
Ken: Would you go back?
Len: To run the company, if they asked me?
Ken: Yeah.
Len: I’d have to move back to New York and I’m not sure I’m ready to do that.
Ken: It’s funny because so many people at DC used to call you the New Yorker who thinks he lives in California, because they said you were in New York more often than you were there. That was Barbara Randall’s description of you.
Len: Really?
Ken: She described you to a bunch of us while you were in the room and you just sort of looked at her and left the room. Len: I don’t understand what she means by that, then or now. I don’t get back to New York more than two or three times a year, if that, since I’ve moved out here. In fact, it was about a
we’ll be running five days a week in the fall, which I’m actually writing episodes of the television series, as well, and Mike Golden has done the covers for those mini-series, so he’s still keeping busy, here and there, as he’s inclined. Jack, as I said, his style, I think, is still the seminal influence of what comic books, certainly super-hero comic books, are. No matter what things look like now, they’re all derivative of what Jack did first.
Ken: The style over substance that you were referring to: do you think that has hurt comics a lot or is it something that is a cycle that’ll come and go?
Len: It’s a cycle. I mean basically I think the guys at Image are, to some degree, responsible for the look of style over substance, but even they have come to realize that the substance is what matters and the story, again, is king.
Ken: Do you think they’ve become more style over substance since leaving Marvel?
Len: It’s back the other way. I think they were, in the beginning, more interested in the big pin-up shots and how the original art would look for their ability to resell it later. They weren’t telling any kind of story and they quickly learned you can’t really continue series on that basis. Todd McFarlane had Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman and Dave Sim and all sorts of really talented guys — Frank Miller — writing issues of his Spawn book. Speaking of Jim Shooter, Rob Liefeld just asked Jim to write several issues of his Youngblood book. In fact, from what I’m told, the quote is, “I’d like you to write a few issues for me and teach me how to write comics,” so they can learn. To finish the original question you asked me, working for Jim is terrific. I have had a better time working for Defiant for the past year than I’ve had in comics in a long time. It sort of feels like the old early days of Marvel, that kind of energy where you’re trying to work with a small group to produce a new kind of comic and top quality stuff.
Ken: Is he the same Jim Shooter that was working at Marvel?
Len: Yes, same in terms of if you check his fingerprints or in terms of his personality? [chuckles]
Ken: In terms of his personality and his working style.
Len: I think he’s matured. I think we all have.
Ed: I was over the office today picking up these pages and I asked Jim what should I ask you about. [laughs] And he said we should find out about… it would be interesting for the listening audience to know about your bachelor party.
Len: Oh, no, it wouldn’t. There’ll be a parking lot where your studio is on Monday if we do that. [laughter]
Ken: There’s nobody listening.
Len: [Laughs] With my luck, some of the guys who were at the party are listening. No, I think I’ll stay out of jail probably a lot longer if I just don’t recount that party.
Christine Valada: Is this bachelor party number one?
Len: Yes, dear. [laughter] My dearly beloved wife who’s busy drafting divorce papers even as we speak. [laughter]
Ken: Welcome to Nuff Said!
Christine: I’ve been on all along.
Len: She’s been eavesdropping for this entire thing.
Ed: We just wanted to get a little humor into this… [chuckles]
Ken: Any good stories about cooking oatmeal that you could relate?
Len: That was Marv! Marv’s the oatmeal cookie guy. You’ll
have to get it from him, straight from the Quaker’s mouth, so to speak.
Ken: But you were the one telling the stories more than he was when they happened!
Len: Was I? Certainly not the oatmeal story! No, this is terrible! You’re depriving… you’re tantalizing the way audience with information that I guarantee you I refuse to divulge under any circumstance!
Ken: [Laughs] Well, we just have to wait for another show
one of Wein’s fave scripts.
Below: Another of Wein’s forays into animation was Exosquad, which he also adapted in comics. Cover of Exosquad #0 [Jan. ’94] by Michael Golden.
Above: J.G. Jones cover art for Dark Dominion #8 [May ’94], contained
This page: Asked to cite his favorite stories, Wein mentioned two successive issues of The Incredible Hulk, #189 [July ’75] and #190 [Aug. ’75]. Art above, Herb Trimpe, below, Trimpe and Marie Severin.
and people can ask. Now you are doing another book for Defiant, aren’t you?
Len: Well, I’ve been dialoguing Warriors of Plasm. I did a few issues of that. As I said, I’ve sort of taken a break for a couple of issues to work on Schism. Theoretically, I will be going back to Warriors of Plasm and the book I have been doing pretty much from its inception is Dark Dominion, which, if you like the old Phantom Stranger stuff, you will love Dark Dominion. Ken: I was just about to make that very analogy. You’re sort of going back into the pseudo-occult, but not quite, type of writing.
Len: Yeah, and I’m having a terrific time. I’ve enjoyed this book more than I’ve enjoyed anything quite a while. The two-parter that I just finished coming out, issues #5 and 6, are probably the story I am proudest of what I have done in the past several years in comics.
Ken: That’s saying quite a bit. Well let’s take one of these phone calls. WBAI You’re on the air.
Caller Four: I was wondering: do they still make classic comics?
Len: No, but I believe there is stuff in the works. There is a company that currently has the rights to the old Classics Illustrated who intend, in the next year or two, to start producing new ones, but there haven’t been any of the original Classic comics from our youth probably in 20, 25 years, if not longer, and the various other versions… Marvel tried a Classics Illustrated sort of line in the mid-’70s, but didn’t sell terribly well, so there haven’t been Classics comics for a long time.
Caller Four: Those got me through high school. I mean, I never read any of those books; I just read the comics. They were wonderful. And I was wondering why did the Fantastic Four go so downhill? It used to be so good and now it’s so bad.
Ken: Oh, you want to touch that one, Len?
Len: Well, that’s all subjective. I’m sure there is somebody out there, God
knows, who thinks the Fantastic Four is their favorite comic right now. It’s always a matter of taste. I think you tend to, as a reader — and not you specifically — but many of us — tend to like most of the stuff we started out with and, as any book changes… I mean, some of what I was talking about earlier, there’s a natural tendency to go, “It’s not as good anymore.” Occasionally, it’s better. In point of fact, it’s generally not as good anymore, but I think that, certainly, Tom [DeFalco] is giving it the best shot he’s got and I know they’re in the midst of doing some revamping again, so I wouldn’t really judge until I saw how Tom and Paul Ryan finished revamping the book.
Caller Four: Okay, and my last question: you talked about an artist breaking in. How would you suggest that a writer would break in? I’m going to hang up and listen, thank you.
Len: Same thing. You learn to write by writing, keep at it, listen to people speak, learn stories, structure, read books on writing. Don’t read comics to learn how to write. And then, if you want to submit story ideas, no more than two pages, nothing longer than two pages. There is no editor in this business who has the time or inclination to read great tomes. If you can’t sell them in two pages, you’re not going to sell ‘em at all.
Ken: WBAI. You’re on the air.
Caller Five: Oh, hi. Yeah, I just wanted to confirm that Robert Crumb did do that New Yorker cover. Actually, it was the annual anniversary issue. It was supposed to be this big deal that, for the first time, they didn’t just rerun the original cover and instead they had this Crumb design that eventually they announced in a press release the use of this Eustace Tilley, the New Yorker symbol’s grandson or something.
Len: I think the idea was if had premiered today, as opposed to 100 years ago, what would Eustace Tilley look like? And they asked Robert Crumb to design it?
Caller Five: No, actually, they [New Yorker editor] Tina Brown claims that Crumb just submitted this design and she didn’t even notice. It looked sort of like Eustace Tilley until she’d already had it for a while, but when she realized, she decided she would run that as the anniversary issue cover instead of the traditional one.
Len: That’s terrific. It was a great cover.
Caller Five: Yeah, well, a lot of people didn’t like it and people had written in letters to the [Comics] Buyer’s Guide saying this showed the downfall of civilization and all this.
Len: Then there are people worried about revamping the Fantastic Four. See, there are priorities.
BOOK CREATOR #41 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! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99
Caller Five: And also I wanted to ask Len if Jenette Kahn had any particular reason for wanting to kill off Supergirl besides keeping Superman as the last survivor of Krypton.
Len: I think it was a combination of reasons. I think keeping Superman the sole Kryptonian survivor was part of it. I think the other part was that Jenette honestly never believed — and this is Jenette, so don’t shoot me — Jenette simply never believed the character had ever been done really well.
Caller Five: Well actually, I don’t really disagree with her that much, but I don’t think that’s really a good reason to kill her.
Len: Well, I mean, there were several characters poor Marv killed off in the course of that that he’s been crucified for that weren’t his choice. The Flash was another, that was another of Jenette’s…
Caller Five: And that caused endless repercussions that would’ve been better avoided.
Len: Well, yes. That’s, as I said, I think (hopefully) some of that will be resolved with Zero Hour this summer, but since I haven’t read Zero Hour yet, I can’t tell you for sure.
