Comic Book Creator #13 by TwoMorrows Publishing

ALSO IN THIS ISH: ™ ™

$8.95

in the USA

Publication

No. 13, Fall 2016

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

A Tw o M o r r o w s

01 1

82658 000634 82658 97073

also: THE AMAZING RAMONA FRADON: A CAREER-SPANNING INTERVIEW and more!

FALL

2016 NO. 13

$8.95 in the USA

Printed in China

All characters TM & © their respective copyright holders.

Fa l l 2 0 1 6 • Vo i c e o f t h e C o m i c s M e d i u m • N u m b e r 1 3

About Our Covers Art by M. W. KALUTA Colors by L. Kindzieski

Ye Ed’s Rant: An ode to the glory of benign neglect and the kindness of Kaluta............ 2 Comics Chatter The Wacky Pack Men: Underground comix legend Jay Lynch, creator of Nard ’n Pat and a founder of Bijou Funnies, discusses his “day job” at Topps Chewing Gum Company, where he helped produce the unforgettable, hilarious, and subversive Wacky Packages, along with stalwarts Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, Len Brown, Norm Saunders, Bhob Stewart, and the great Woody Gelman. Included in this pack o’ parodiable pleasantness is an original illustration by Jay depicting the Topps Team. Chew on that, fanboy!..... 3

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast

Otto on the Outside: An excerpt from Bill Schelly’s revised biography of Otto Binder detailing the most heartbreaking event in the renowned comics writer’s life ........ 10 Hembeck’s Dateline: Our Man Fred accuses Michael W. Kaluta of deception!.......... 14 Comics in the Library: Rich Arndt proves good mythology comics are no myth.......... 15 THE AMAZING RAMONA FRADON!

Above: MWK’s cover for The Private Files of the Shadow [1989]. Colors by Lavern Kindzieski. Below: Please see page 18 for the story behind our flip cover!

The Eclectic Woman: Thought that her work on Aquaman, Metamorpho, and Plastic Man was all you needed to know about Ramona Fradon? Wrong! CBC is proud to present a fascinating interview with the renowned cartoonist about her amazing, eclectic, and captivating life, whether her stint in the golden age of radio, hobnobbing with The New Yorker crowd, protesting the Vietnam War, and scribing an important scholarly book on Faustian legend! Plus we get in a query or two about her masterful 65+ years in the American comic book industry........... 16 THE MAIN EVENT

Characters TM & © DC Comics.

The Art of Michael William Kaluta: CBC talks with the enchanting MWK about his childhood love for the worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, beginnings in fandom, early success as the definitive artist on The Shadow, work on “Carson of Venus” and “Spawn of Frankenstein,” co-venture with Windsor-Smith, Wrightson, and Jones in The Studio, and reputation as the signature Vertigo cover artist. Plus Michael talks about his friendships with Frazetta, Krenkel, Al Williamson, and Dave Stevens, among others, as well as his little-known work in Hollywood......... 44 BACK MATTER If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,

PLEASE READ THIS: This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our website or Apps. If you downloaded it from another website or torrent, go ahead and read it, and if you decide to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal download, or a printed copy. Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR DEVICE and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, please pay for them so we can keep producing ones like this. Our digital editions should ONLY be downloaded within our Apps and at

www.twomorrows.com

Comic Book Creator is a proud joint production of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows

Coming Attractions: Definitive Kelly Jones interview and a ton of great features........ 77 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: The World’s Greatest Detectives!............... 80

Comic Book Artist Vol. 1 & 2 are now available as digital downloads from twomorrows.com! Comic Book Creator ™ is published quarterly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Jon B. Cooke, editor. John Morrow, publisher. Comic Book Creator editorial offices: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Four-issue subscriptions: $40 US, $60 International, $15.80 Digital. All characters © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2016 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

This issue is dedicated in memory of my brother from another mother (with the same last name), DARWYN COOKE ™

JON B. COOKE Editor & Designer

John Morrow Publisher & Consulting Editor

MICHAEL AUSHENKER Associate Editor

MICHAEL W. KALUTA Front Cover Artist

LOvern KindzieskI Front Cover Colorist

R. SIKORYAK (pencils/colors) & STEPHEN DeSTEFANO (inks) Reverse Cover Artists

DAVID COULSON Reverse Cover Logo & Lettering

GEORGE KHOURY RICHARD J. ARNDT TOM ZIUKO Contributing Editors

STEVEN THOMPSON BRIAN K. MORRIS Transcribers

J.D. KING CBC Cartoonist

TOM ZIUKO CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON CBC Illustrator

ROB SMENTEK Greg PRESTON CBC Contributing Photographer

KENDALL WHITEHOUSE CBC Convention Photographer

MICHAEL AUSHENKER FRED HEMBECK GEORGE KHOURY TOM ZIUKO CBC Columnists To contact CBC, please email jonbcooke@aol.com or snail-mail CBC, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 2

An ode to the glory of benign neglect and that mensch MWK beloved art form. Back in the late ’60s and early The best “corner” to hang out in ’70s, my younger brother, Andy, Seulingville? No less than the booth and I were raised by our single where sat two of the finest artistic mother, who, though in her upper talents in mainstream American comic thirties, had embraced the liberatbooks, Bernie Wrightson and Michael ing spirit of the “youthquake” of W. Kaluta. For whatever reason, the that time, and it’s fair to say we guys, especially MWK, took a shine had a hippie mom. In late 1970, to Andy, and while I was off seeking she whisked us away for a yearan audience with Jack “The King” long stay in Europe (where we Kirby, my brother was recruited as the lived on “$5-A-Day”), an advenpair’s gofer, scurrying off to get them ture that permanently transformed coffee in return for a sketch. As they us into creative persons, and the fended off snotty fanboys badgering two youngest Cooke boys remain for free art while offering unsolicited, forever grateful to mother dearest obnoxious opinions, MWK and Bernie for that amazing opportunity. allowed my diminutive sibling to sit Strangely enough, it was beside them—behind the table!—as there, across the pond, where serious a demarcation between Them we became avid comic book fans and Us as the Maginot Line. However (Mom would let us buy a single comic much I wanted to think otherwise, every day at Brentano’s, the American Andrew D. Cooke was now a cool kid. bookstore in Paris), and, when we Though the story is recounted in three made it to England, li’l bro and MWK’s interview herein, allow me to I would scour the news agents, on spotlight it here, with no small measure our own, in citywide searches to find of gratitude to the Man Behind The imported U.S. funnybooks. Shadow: Being (ahem) a rambunctious You need to understand that teen, one year—probably ’74—I got those years were an entirely into a scrape (there was some beers, different era for kids than the way Michael W. Kaluta by Ronn Sutton a few cops, and a girl… long story), it is today. Many of us (especially and my mother—gasp!—had the temerity to ban me as those with a counter-culture parent) thrived on a punishment from attending that year’s con. And so my sort-of benign neglect, where, so long as we were little brother went alone… without his elder brethren. home by dusk, we could be trusted to roam the planet The Saturday night of that particular convention (and, in our case, give wide berth to the truant officers was particularly tumultuous, as a wild and violent sumas, while we were becoming enormously educated mer storm, replete with incessant lightning and thunder through ravenous book reading and endless historical claps, appeared content to stand idle over midtown tours, we weren’t frequenting any classroom). The Manhattan. I remember worrying about Andy when he world seemed… well… friendlier and safer then. anxiously called home from a lobby phone to say there Today’s younger generation will likely be shocked was no way he could walk the 20 blocks to our sister’s to hear that, upon our return to the states, our mom apartment. I mean, geesh, he was my little brother and allowed her 11- and 13-year-old sons to travel via bus wasn’t keeping him safe my single most important job? by our lonesome for the 1972 July 4th weekend Comic I needn’t have stressed. Mensch that he is, Michael Art Convention, in big, bad New York City. Truth be stayed up the entire night with Andy, who was, after told, while we did sleep at least once under the chairs all, just a kid, as the two sat on the carpeted mezzanine during the all-night movie screening, our oldest sister had an apartment downtown. But, dude, this was early stairway, chatting about all things comic book until dawn broke over the city that never sleeps. At a time ’70s NYC, when Times Square weren’t no Disneyland! when I was powerless to protect him, my brother—a Despite its notorious reputation, while we attendperson I treasure with all of my heart—was kept safe ed Phil Seuling’s amazing con, the Big Apple was welcoming to us, and we felt safe in our neighborhood, from the deluge, safe from the mean streets, safe to come home again. Thanks, Michael William Kaluta. the palatial ballroom of the (pre-Trump) Commodore From one brother to another, I owe you. Hotel, among our kindred, the fans and creators of our

cbc contributors T odd Adams Richard J. Arndt Gregory Benton Michael Cassiello Andrew D. Cooke David Coulson Stephen DeStefano

Chris Duffy Michael Eury Richard Fowlks Ramona Fradon Drew Friedman Fred Hembeck Michael W. Kaluta

Lovern Kindzieski J.D. King Seth Kushner Terra Kushner Elaine Lee Sonny Liew Jay Lynch

—Y e Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com

Russ Maheras Chris Ryall & IDW Bill Schelly Robert Sikoryak Andrew Steven Ronn Sutton Jan Tabert

Roy Thomas Michael Turek John Watson Kendall Whitehouse Glenn Whitmore Rob Yeremian Tom Ziuko

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

CBC Proofreader

The Kindness of Kaluta

Life at the Topps

The Wacky Pack Men Underground comix legend Jay Lynch remembers the “Titanic Topps Think-Tank”!

by JAY LYNCH Back in the 1960s, it is said, Marvel Comics had its legendary “Mighty Marvel Bullpen,” where the publisher’s artists and writers ping ponged their ideas back and forth off one another in their fancy midtown Manhattan offices. The comic fans were very much into who wrote or drew what in the comic books of the so-called “House of Ideas.” For bubble gum card collectors, however, it was a totally different story. It was characteristic of collectors of gum cards back then to not really care about who was behind the uncredited art and gags on the cards that came with their bubble gum. Yes, they were meticulous at collecting the trading cards, but they really had no interest at all in the folks who wrote and drew them. Yet I don’t think most of the people who worked on the gum cards felt slighted in any way about working in anonymity in those days either. It was a good-paying gig at the time, and, for us, that was the main thing that mattered. In an old factory by the Brooklyn Navy Yards, upstairs from the long abandoned Uneeda Doll factory, was the executive headquarters of the Topps Chewing Gum Company, where a small group of anonymous artists and gag writers labored, unknown and unsung, on various novelty bubble gum trading cards. The work was unsigned. Our identities were kept secret by the outfit, lest competitors should steal us away. Decades later, with the advent of the Internet, that all has now changed. The activities of the retroactively dubbed (by me, just now) “Titanic Topps ThinkTank” has since been chronicled and exposed to the new breed of trading card collectors. Following along the same path as comic book fans, the card collectors are now very interested in the history of the creative forces behind their favorite trading card sets of yesteryear. Now we, the writers and artists who worked on this stuff, have all become household words to these collectors… especially in households where they can’t figure out how to remove the old gum card stickers from their fifty-year-old refrigerators. Wacky Packages was the official name of one of Topps’ most popular products of the 1970s. To this day, Topps continues to churn out new “Wacky Packs,” as the collectors nicknamed them in their childhood days. The official name of the product though is—and always has been—Wacky Packages. “Wackys,” as was our inter-office term for them back then, were product-packaging parodies of popular consumer products. Devised in 1967 by Art Spiegelman, Len Brown, and Woody Gelman, these subversive sticker cards are reprinted today in book form (sans adhesive) by Abrams Comic Arts… in two volumes, yet! The first is called, appropriately enough, Wacky Packages and has a red cover with an introduction by Spiegelman. The second, with a blue cover, is called Wacky Packages New, New, New, with an introduction by yours truly. In the first collection, Art explains the method he devised for naming the parodied product: You go through the alphabet, substituting each letter for the first letter of the real product. If that doesn’t work, you go through the alphabet on the second letter of the real product. If the second letter is a vowel, you just restrict your choices to vowels…and so on until you eventually come up with a name. So if the product is, for example, TIDE, “Tied and Toad Wait For No Man” by Jay Lynch At right is a typical day at the Titanic Topps Think-Tank, circa 1973, where the Toppsters devise a Wacky Package parody. See next page for a guide to the luminaries immortalized by Mr. Lynch. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Below: Caption to come.

Above: A few years back. Abrams published two hardcovers collecting Wacky Packages imagery. Below: Jay’s schematic for his illustration on the previous page.

in touch with today. (The numbers, natch, correlate to the schematic at left, which calls out our Topps Titans on the previous page.) 1. RICK VARESI From his office in Topps’ Product Development Department, Rick designed and executed all the packaging for most of the Topps products of the ’70s, including Wacky Packages. He designed the original WP logo that is used on them ’til this day. In addition to his lettering and layout skills, Varesi was also an extremely versatile cartoonist. When deadlines were tight, he often was called upon to duplicate the styles of the various freelance Topps cartoonists to finish off, in the nick of time, the cards needed to complete a series. In the ’80s, he more or less got out of the art biz and into the computer programming game. 2. BILL GRIFFITH Griffy wrote and did roughs for many of the original Wacky Packages. Kentucky Fried Fingers, Kick-a-man Soy Sauce… the list of Bill’s Wacky gags from the early years is a lengthy one. An early pioneer in the underground comix movement, his work appeared in early titles of that genre. It was in the early undergrounds that his most famous character, Zippy the Pinhead, was born. Griffith and Art Spiegelman also co-edited the comix magazine Arcade in the mid-’70s. Today, Zippy is syndicated by King Features, and appears in daily newspapers throughout the land. His graphic novel, Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist, was published last year, and it earned this year’s Eisner Award for Best Graphic Novel. 3. STAN HART MAD magazine writer Stan Hart wrote a great deal of stuff for Topps in those early years. ’Twas he who set the tone for the MAD-ish flavor of the art on the Topps novelty cards in the late ’50s by bringing in Jack Davis, Wallace Wood, Basil Wolverton, and other MAD artists into the Topps lineup. By the time Wacky Packages came around, Stan was bi-coastal, traveling from Brooklyn to Burbank on a regular basis. He was writing for TV comedy shows such as The Carol Burnett Show and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. As a matter of fact, it was Stan’s off-Broadway hit, The Mad Show (the book of which was co-written by fellow MAD regular Larry Siegel), that supplied the format for Laugh-In. It was also in The Mad Show where future Laugh-In regular Jo Anne Worley got her start… but I digress. When Stan wasn’t busy with the higher paying TV gigs, he was no stranger to Topps’ Wacky Packs editorial meetings. 4. LEN BROWN Len was my main contact at Topps. He had written the renowned Mars Attacks gum card series with Woody Gelman. With Wallace Wood, Len created T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents for Tower Comics. Gelman hired Len to work at Topps when Len was but a teenager, just out of high-school. This was genius on Gelman’s part. Closer to the age of the gum card consumers, and in tune with the trends, Len knew what the kids wanted, with Mars Attacks being but one example. As the years passed, Len

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Wacky Packages TM & © Topps Chewing Gum Company. Art © Jay Lynch.

then it’s “Aide,” “Bide,” “Cide,” “Dide,” etc. (all with a hard vowel sound for the “I”). Then it’s “Tade,” “Tede,” “Tide,” “Tode,” and so on. So easy, and yet few humans have been able to master it. The process is too esoteric for anyone to bother to devise a Wacky Pack naming computer program, however. Apparently, demand for such software is severely limited. Back in 1967, when the first Wacky Packages series came out, the satire industry in America was in its infancy. This was before The Onion. This was before Saturday Night Live. There were then only a handful of precedents. Ernie Kovacs, MAD magazine, Stan Freberg… The list was finite. There were but three TV networks, and they all constantly ran commercials for the same consumer products that we mocked in the Wackys. Thus, every TV commercial was in a sense an ad for or endeavor. Time proved the thing worked both ways, though. Although the Wacky Packs’ skeptical attitude got kids into thinking for themselves, causing them to question authority and consider the “spin factor” of the claims printed on product packaging before making their purchasing decisions, there remained a certain loyalty to the products we parodied that seems to have stuck with the youthful consumers well into adulthood. Today, the Wacky fan, now middle-aged, might ask his or her better half to pick up a six-pack of “Mountain Goo,” based on a fond memory of the parody version of the beverage. So the Wacky Packs turned out to be beneficial to the manufacturers of the real products as well. Who knew? Go figure. In the ‘70s, the phrase “Political Correctness” hadn’t yet been invented. It was a different time. It was the ’60s and early ’70s. It was a time of re-examining old values. It was a new generation with a new vibration! And, with the Wacky Packs, if there is one thing that we did that benefited society, it was getting kids to question the hype of manufacturers as touted on their packaging and hopefully to question their decisions in other aspects of life as well. The marketplace is the ballot box. But also…the ballot box is the ballot box! Umm… we’re in an election year, kids. These Wacky Packages were the work of many artists and writers over the past four decades. Here are the guys I remember from the earliest days of Wackys, many of whom I am still

remained on the cutting edge. He was always able to spot the trends before anyone else. He had a big screen TV before I even knew there was such a thing. Len was an avid E.C. Comics reader as a youngster, as were Art Spiegelman and I. He also had a vast knowledge of old movies. This came in handy when we’d discuss projects over the phone. Casting the character type on a card rough we could do verbally. “So would it be a Leo Carillo type…or an Alfonso Bedoya kind of guy?” I’d ask. “Go with Bedoya,” Len would respond. I tell ya, the guy knew his stuff! And thus countless hours of were saved in speeding up the gag-writing/ rough-drawing process. While at Topps, Len also wrote paperback books, magazine articles, and a plethora of other stuff on the side. He was a full-time employee at Topps from 1959 all the way up into the ’90s, when he retired, and moved to Austin, Texas, with his wife and his country music and early rockabilly record collection. These days, Len is a deejay on KOOP radio, in Austin. Len’s radio show Country Roots is on Fridays at 9:00 a.m., Austin time. Check out his show online at www.koop.org! 5. ART SPIEGELMAN I had known Art since we were kids. In the early ’60s, I worked on fanzines with him. I contributed cartoons to his Blasé fanzine, which Art published on a hectograph when he was 14 years old. In the mid-’60s, Art was hired at Topps by Woody Gelman. It was Artie who brought me into the gum card biz as a gag writer/cartoonist. Later, we worked together in the early underground comix. Spiegelman wrote the gags and roughed out the first Wacky Packages series in 1967. It was printed on cardboard with a gummed back. The kids would punch out the product images and lick the backs to stick ‘em on stuff. But the Wacky Packs didn’t really take off big until the early ’70s, when Topps began printing them on peel-back pressure-sensitized sticker paper. While doing Wacky gags, and working on other Topps projects during the day, Art spent his evenings working on his graphic novel Maus, which later won him a Pulitzer Prize, in 1992. During the ’80s, Art and his wife, Françoise Mouly, published the ground-breaking, avant-garde comics magazine RAW, opening up the comics field to the broader horizons we have seen in the last three-plus decades. 6. FAYE FLEISCHER Faye was Woody Gelman’s secretary, and thus she was also the secretary for the Topps creative department, which was officially known as the Product Development Department during the early Wacky years. Was she somehow related in any way to animators Max and Dave Fleischer? I don’t know.

Wacky Packages TM & © Topps Chewing Gum Company. Art © Jay Lynch.

7. WOODY GELMAN A number of guys at Topps came from Max Fleischer’s and/ or Paramount’s animation studios, where they all worked on the old Popeye cartoons. Ben Solomon, Woody Gelman, and Larry Riley (who devised Topps’ Flying Things, a series of collectible Styrofoam airplanes shaped like hot dogs, monsters, and other crazy things in the form of aerodynamically correct gliders that actually flew) were all Fleischer alumni. After the animation years, Solomon and Gelman formed an ad agency where they did ads for Popsicles, the quiescently frozen confection made by the old Joe Lowe Company. These ads featured Popsicle Pete, and ran in DC comic books, for which Gelman also did the regular title, Dodo and the Frog. Impressed by the Popsicle Pete stuff, Topps hired both Gelman and Solomon (and later Riley) full-time. At the bubble gum company, Woody became the head of the Product Development Department and Ben Solomon became the head of the Art Department. This was followed by the introduction of the Bazooka Joe character, created by Gelman and his chum, cartoonist Wesley

Morse. During the Davy Crockett craze, Gelman and Solomon launched a line of kids’ books called Triple Nickel Books. An apt moniker, since they retailed for 15¢ each. The first was a Crockett book. Followed by a Wyatt Earp book and a series of boys’ adventure novels. In 1967, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans and Brillo boxes were catching on with the pop art aficionados. Woody thought it would just be a matter of time before the bubble gum-chewing, kid-consumers would get in on the trend of collecting lick-and-stick images of real consumer products. Art and Len, who were brought up on the old Harvey Kurtzman MAD comics’ ad parodies, lobbied for the humorous approach. This was also, in a way, more practical. Since with parodies Topps wouldn’t have to get permission from all the individual manufacturers to use real images of their products. Woody agreed to try it both ways and, in tests with real kids, the goofy product parodies won by a landslide. On the side, in ’67, Woody ran a small publishing company called Nostalgia Press, which was, among other things, the first outfit to print a hardcover reprint book of the old E.C. horror comics and the first to do a hardcover reprint of Windsor McCay’s classic Sunday newspaper comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. Gelman tracked down McCay’s son, who, in the ’40s, was known to have cut up, pasted, re-wrote, and re-lettered some of his old man’s work to fit the comic book-sized format. But, by the early ’60s, the heyday of that type of newsstand comic book was over, and McCay the Younger was using his dad’s originals as coasters to protect the surface of his coffee table from the ravages of TV dinner spillage. The shocked Gelman bought all the original art from the McCay son, thus preserving it for future historians. Woody had an incredible enthusiasm for the comic strip/comic book medium back then, when only a tiny handful of collectors thought this material was worth preserving.

Above: Jay Lynch Wacky Packages marker comp from 1975. Below: Jay shares, “Political correctness had not yet reared its ugly head in the ’70s.”

Below: As discussed in the accompanying feature, two parodies of Tide Detergent. Jay said, “Art Spiegelman wrote the gag for Tied… I wrote the gag for Toad. Norm Saunders did the final painting on both.”

8. JAY LYNCH That’s me. Art Spiegelman brought me into the Topps fold 49 years ago, and I still do occasional gags for Wacky Packages and its sort-off offspring, Garbage Pail Kids, today, as Topps continues to put out new

Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Above: Bhob Stewart missive to Jay Lynch written after the 1968 Chicago riot. Note the instruction to be funny like Bob Hope and less like Ernie Kovacs.

Wackys and GPKs on a regular basis. Sometimes they do subsets that reprint the Wacky Packages classics of the ‘70s, but these days they mostly do new material, the majority of which is painted by a cadre of new artists with the respectful attempt to retain and preserve the original look of the original ’70s Norman Saunders paintings. There are dozens of new Wacky Pack artists and writers. Drew Friedman did a bunch of ’em in the ’80s. So did John Pound, Mark Newgarden, James Warhola (Andy Warhol’s nephew), Pat Pigott, and many others. In the 2000s, artists include many who were kids when the original Wackys came out. Dave Gross, Neil Camera, Brent Engstrom… the list is endless. Now, me, I mainly did it for the money. Plus, Topps would reimburse me for the food products I’d buy to use as models, which I would eventually eat. But, for me, the holiest of work was always the underground comix stuff, which I still do today, almost exclusively for Mineshaft magazine, a great publication which prints the work of sophisticated “fancy” cartoonists, including Kim Deitch (Kim wrote some early Wacky Pack gags… Blunder Bread was one of his), Skip Williamson, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and many other early underground cartoonists. Mineshaft also prints many of the fancier new cartoonists as well, including the highly detailed inkwork of Nina Bunjevac and the anxiety-ridden comics of Aaron Lange. Try it, okay? 9. BHOB STEWART

10. BEN SOLOMON Ben was the gruff but lovable Topps art director. He wouldn’t immediately accept the X-Acto knife as an 6

11. NORMAN SAUNDERS Last on the list, but probably the most important factor in the success of Wacky Packages, was the art of Norm Saunders. Norm was a pulp magazine illustrator in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. The drama and excitement of his sci-fi cover paintings of those previous decades showed through dramatically when he painted the 1960 series Mars Attacks. With the Wacky Packages (Norm painted virtually all of the early ones), he developed a whole new humorous style, which in an alternate universe would have been at home in the pages of MAD magazine. When Spiegelman and I were doing the ink-and-Magic Marker quickly sketchedout gag roughs, we would often use cartoon clichés like the blue eye shadow on women’s eyelids. Or the wacky looking moron character with the striped shirt and the propeller beanie. Norm took the craziness one step further by putting the blue eye shadow on the eyelids of the moron characters. And later, purple eye shadow on the eyelids of lots of characters in the final paintings, as well. Most of the changes demanded by the Topps execs were made through pencil notations on the roughs, which Saunders was given to work from. Norm worked at home. But when the execs would want changes in the final paintings, Saunders would come in to the offices and paint the alterations in the Art Department, surrounded by the silently-manned drawing boards of half a dozen other souls, all engrossed in the meticulous process of pasting up the backs of the baseball cards. At home, Saunders worked with the thinnest possible brushes and a magnifying glass. The Saunders style of humorous painting is what characterized the look of the Wacky Packages. Other gum companies tried to imitate ’em, but none of their painters ever came close to matching the perfect mixture of incredible detail and unbridled insanity that characterized Saunders’ Wacky art. Well, let’s see now. Did I leave anyone out? Probably. Between the first release of Wacky Packages, in 1967, there was a lull. The second series didn’t come out until a few years later. In between the first and second series, there was something called Wacky Billboards, or something like

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Wacky Packages TM & © Topps Chewing Gum Company. Art © Jay Lynch.

Above: Jay reveals, “On the Valve-Eater one: Sometimes the gags made no sense at all, but we dared to be stupid. Give us credit for that.” Below: And sometimes the quips were so outrageously offensive, they had zero chance of being produced, as was this John Pound gag about the Irish famine.

Like Art and I, Bhob also came to Topps through the world of fanzines and underground comix. He was an early underground filmmaker and, at one point, he was the guy who wrote the movie summations for TV Guide. In 1953, the teenaged Bhob edited what might have been the first E.C. fanzine, The E.C. Fan Bulletin. In the late ’60s, he worked on Castle of Frankenstein magazine. Stewart was one of Wallace Wood’s assistants. Wood worked from his studio on many Topps products, such as Mars Attacks, Ugly Stickers, Batty Book Covers… tons of stuff. Bhob worked full-time at Topps during the early Wacky Pack era. He wrote and roughed out Wacky Pack gags, including Weakinson’s Sore, a parody of Wilkinson’s Sword razor blades, and Mustard Charge, a take on the credit card, just a couple of his Wacky titles. An expert on the early E.C. Comics and MAD comics, Bhob wrote many introductions for the chapters in the various MAD reprint books. In the ’80s, he wrote a regular column in Heavy Metal magazine. Bhob’s book Against the Grain: MAD Artist Wallace Wood is an essential volume for fans of Wood’s inkwork.

appropriate tool, and made the folks in the art department cut Rubylith and Zip-A-Tone for color separations with single-edge razor blades for many years before allowing the new technology of the X-Acto on Topps premises. But from Ben I learned invaluable cost-cutting lessons, without which I never would have been able to afford to publish the first issue of Bijou Funnies, in 1968, one of the first underground comic books. The Topps Art Department was on the other side of the building from the Product Development Department. The Product Development was peopled by a bunch of fun-loving wise guys. The Art Department, whose main function was turning out the baseball cards, was more like a late 19th century sweat shop. I worked mostly in the Product Development offices when I came in to New York City to work for Topps. One time, I did finish up early on that side of the building, though. So I spent a week on the other side, in the Art Department, pasting up baseball card backs and developing my skills with the single-edge razor blade, to the point where I didn’t need shaving cream from then on. As he was an early Popeye animator, we would use that cartoon sailor’s lingo to convey certain concepts to Ben. Spiegelman and I often used the prototypical propeller-beanie wearing, striped-shirted, goofy-looking “moron” character on the old Wacky Packs. I recall once explaining to Ben that the image on one of ’em would be that of a moron. “What do you mean?” he said. “You mean like Oscar?” Luckily I was familiar with the old Popeye character, the goofy-looking Oscar. “Right,” I replied. “Like Oscar.” Conveying complex concepts like that was easy, if you knew the lingo.

Wacky Packages TM & © Topps Chewing Gum Company. Art © Jay Lynch.

that. These were large-size cardboard cards with billboards depicted on the fronts and lick-and-stick glue on the back. The kid would punch out the product from the advertisement for said product on the billboard, lick the back, and stick it somewhere. Art, Bhob, Len, and I devised the gags for these and comic book artist Tom Sutton did the paintings. Later, when Topps decided to try again with cards of just the packaging (without the billboard ad part) on sticker paper under the name Wacky Packages again, some of Sutton’s paintings of only the products were used as stickers in the first series of Wackys that were actually printed on sticker paper. The drawing of the crowd scene of Topps staffers which accompanies this article I did mostly from memory. There are few (if any) photos of some of these guys on the Web as they looked in the ’70s. Cameras were forbidden at the Topps offices at the time. So, if any of their descendants are reading this, please forgive me if I erred in any of their likenesses. I worked mostly from my apartment in Chicago on the Topps stuff, although I would travel to Brooklyn every six months or so to work on projects in the Topps offices. Usually I’d crash at Art’s pad or stay at the Hotel Earl, in Greenwich Village. The Earl cost eight dollars a night, which was a lot of money then. It was the official Topps hotel, and Topps footed the bill for my lodgings there as well as for my plane fare. I can’t think about the Wacky Packages stuff without thinking of little Anya. So I might as well close with a tale of Chicago, which was a kinder, gentler place in the ’70s. I lived next door

to a couple from Poland who were friends of ours. For a living, the dad constructed Plexiglas cubes, which the hip urbanites used as accent tables back then. He had two little daughters and one was six-year-old Anya. In those days, our back doors were unlocked and the neighbor kids would often come over unannounced to invade our refrigerator during the day. One day, I was sitting at the dining room table drawing Wacky Pack roughs and coloring them in with markers. Entering the dining room from the kitchen with a self-made, unsupervised and crudely constructed peanut butter sandwich was little Anya, who studied my activities and confronted me with a harshly worded question. “Vhy do you not vork?” she inquired in heavily accented speech. “I do work,” I responded. “I draw these pictures and send them to a bubble gum card company and they send me money.” She picked up one of the marker roughs and squinted skeptically at the image on the paper before her. “And for zis zey give you money?” she questioned. Finishing her sandwich, she returned to her home. Later that afternoon, my doorbell rang. I descended the three flights of stairs required of me to answer the front door and, upon opening it, there was little Anya. In one hand she held a sheaf of 8 ½" by 11" sheets of paper upon which she had made crayon drawings of cats, houses, cars, and various other subjects of interest to her. Her other hand was tightly clenched to a fist-full of quarters, which she showed me as she said “You ver right!” Apparently she was going from door to door selling her sketches and making a bundle doing so. Every time I think about Wacky Packs I wonder what became of that kid. Today she’d be close to Top: Original Norm Saunders piece. fifty. I wonder if she pursued an art career. If so… Anya, if you’re out there, I apologize to you as well. Above: Jay Lynch in 2013.

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#3: ADAMS AT MARVEL #4: WARREN PUBLISHING

#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

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

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

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

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

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#12: CHARLTON PART 2

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

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#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

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

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

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

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

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

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#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

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

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

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

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

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#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

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

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

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

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

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

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

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

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

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otto binder’s darkest chapter

Otto on the Outside

After an unimaginable family tragedy, writer Otto Binder leaves the comics “rat race” by Bill Schelly

Above: Cover for Otto Binder: The Life and Work of a Comic Book and Science Fiction Visionary by Bill Schelly. Published by North Atlantic Books, the biography features a forward by Richard A. Lupoff.

Ione Binder’s niece Patricia, daughter of her brother Frank and his wife Alice, was a regular guest at the Binder home in the mid-1960s, since her father and Ione were especially close. One of her most vivid memories is baking cakes with her aunt. Patricia recalled, “We lived in the New York area, so I celebrated quite a few birthdays with Uncle Otto and Aunt Ione. I was very close to their daughter Mary. They were excellent parents.”1 Mary Binder, born in September 1952, had outgrown the baby fat of her early years. “She was beautiful,” Patricia said. “She had long, straight blonde hair. She was angelic, almost.” With regard to Mary’s personality, Patricia added, “She had a beautiful personality. I always remember thinking I’d like to be like her. She was caring, sensitive, she loved animals…. She was just very attuned to what people needed, an all-around nice person. Very bright.” Though Mary was seven years Patricia’s senior, Otto’s

Below: From left, spouses Ione and Otto Binder and spouses Olga and Jack Binder, circa 1950. Otto and Jack were, of course, brothers. Photo is courtesy of Michael Turek.

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

[Born in 1911 and brother of ambitious Golden Age artist Jack Binder, Otto Binder (rhymes with cinder) was a noted writer of science fiction classics as well as clever and revered comic book stories, with almost 1,000 Captain Marvel and Marvel family tales to his credit. Equally celebrated were his engaging scripts for DC’s Superman family titles, where he co-created Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes, and wrote what many consider the first “imaginary tale.” After some three decades in the business, the writer suddenly vanished from the field. In the following book excerpt (which combines two chapters) from Otto Binder: The Life and Work of a Comic Book and Science Fiction Visionary (just published by North Atlantic Books), author Bill Schelly shares the story behind that disappearance.—Y.E.]

daughter loved spending time with her young cousin. “We used to play games a lot, and play with Barbie dolls. We used to swim a lot in a neighbor’s outdoor pool. It was one of those that was above ground, you know? Everyone in our family swam very young so I was swimming by the time I was five. It wasn’t a problem with me going swimming but Mary, she was very attentive. You know, like she’d hold my hand when I was in the water, just to make sure I was okay.” The Binders had been no strangers to death in the family. In March of 1965, Otto’s mother Marie died. She was ninety-one years old, and had been in a nursing home for several years. More shocking was the news in October of the following year that Otto’s brother Earl, his writing partner in the 1930s, had passed away. The only known cause, which doesn’t fully explain what took him, was that he succumbed of deteriorating health due to chronic alcoholism. But nothing could have prepared them for the news they were to receive at 4:00 p.m. on March 27, 1967. Otto was on the telephone with publisher Calvin Beck (publisher of Castle of Frankenstein) when an operator broke in on the call with the news that Mary had been in a car accident. It isn’t known whether the Binders were informed by telephone that their daughter was dead. More likely they were summoned to Englewood Hospital where Mary was taken, or given the news by a minion of the law at their door. The accident took place at Dwight Morrow Junior High, just three blocks from the Binder home. Mary was kneeling to pick up some books in a school driveway when she was struck and instantly killed. The Bergen County Evening Record on the following day conveyed all the important details in the article headlined, “Car Kills Teen-Age Girl In Sight Of Classmates.” Patricia Turek added, “The boy [twenty-year-old Brian

Hetzel] was mentally handicapped and didn’t have a driver’s license. He had no business being behind the wheel of a car.” Hetzel and a sixteen-year-old passenger were motoring on the driveway looking for a friend. Witnesses said the car was moving rather slowly, and Hetzel later said that he saw the two girls in the driveway and thought they had passed the area. What seems to have happened is the boys were looking around for their friend when they struck Mary Binder. It was later described as a “freak accident,” something so unlikely that it almost seemed as if fate had gone out of its way to end Mary’s life. The death of their daughter — a beautiful girl, with such promise — was the event that colored the rest of Otto’s and Ione’s lives in the darkest of hues. The impact was felt almost as keenly by Ione’s brother Frank, who was especially attached to Mary. His daughter Patricia remembers him openly weeping at the news, remarkable because of his usual emotional reserve. “It was as if Mary was an angel, and God needed her in heaven,” Patricia said. “Have you heard the expression, ‘she was too good for this world’? That really seemed to apply to Mary.” Jack and Olga were devastated, and the loss resounded throughout the Binders and Tureks. Many of Otto and Ione’s friends had grown attached to Mary, and even if they hadn’t, who couldn’t understand how much the death of a fourteen-year-old daughter would mean to her parents? The funeral was held on March 29. William Woolfolk said, “It was a terrible, terrible, terrible thing. I couldn’t go to her funeral. It was just too much.”2 Michael and John Cassiello, two teenage boys who lived next door to the Binders, and knew Mary quite well, were shattered by her demise. “I was profoundly affected by Mary’s death,” Michael Cassiello recently wrote. “I still keep four photos of Mary displayed in my living room. Even forty-eight years later, on March 27 and September 13 (Mary’s birthday), I never forget to reflect on the tragedy. She was very intelligent. I will always remember that when asked (even as a young child) ‘what do you want to be when you grow up,’ she would say ‘a scientist.’ What would she have accomplished?”3 The students at Dwight Morrow, many of whom attended Mary’s funeral, started a memorial scholarship fund in her name. Contributions sent to the Binders were donated to one of Ione’s favorite causes, child care centers—in this case, to purchase equipment for play groups. The Binders were quoted in the Evening Record as saying, “Because any contribution of any kind which helps anyone, children or adults, means so much to us, we ask that you, if you wish, contribute to Memorial House as we are doing, for all funds personally addressed to us by relatives and friends go there.” Otto formally requested that the school erect barriers to block automobile access to certain parts of the Dwight Morrow campus (including the area where his daughter was killed). The next year was an awful one for Otto and Ione. Despite a trip to Paris in November 1967 (with Frank’s family) for a complete change of scene, both drank heavily to numb their grief. Ione’s behavior became increasingly erratic, and Otto was lost in despair. Despite being prostrate with grief, Otto Binder still had to make a living. Yet his situation at DC Comics became increasingly difficult and frustrating in the year following Mary’s death, not in this case due to problems with Superman editor Mort Weisinger (who was nearing retirement), but the way management was sticking to business practices that had long been accepted in the comics industry. The Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Top: Newspaper clipping from the Mar. 28, 1967, edition of the Bergen County Evening Record. Above: Mary Binder, posing for a photo in the autumn of 1966, with the Binder home in the background. Courtesy of Michael Cassiello. Photo taken by John Cassiello. 11

Above: Mary near the Binder home, at 467 Voorhees Street, in Englewood, New Jersey. Courtesy of Michael Turek.

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Superman, Supergirl, and Mary Marvel TM & © DC Comics.

workers had no benefits: no paid vacations, no sick leave, no health care coverage. Since the Depression, workers during comics’ Golden Age were generally grateful to have jobs, and didn’t want to make waves. Most were young, and had yet to face serious medical conditions. Writers and artists were freelancers who sold all rights to their “work-for-hire” upon cashing their checks. The workers were paid by the amount of product they turned out. This went back to the owners thinking of producing comic books in the same way garment-makers think of producing pants. Creativity was a component to be bought like fabric and thread. Once the product was used up, it would be thrown away and replaced by another. Or would it? “Work-for-hire” also meant creative folk weren’t paid for reprints of the stories they wrote, drew, lettered or colored. The fact that reprints were “free” to the company was one of the main reasons their use was increased dramatically through the 1960s, as a way of fighting rising costs and maximizing profits. An explosion of annuals and reprints in the back of regular comic books meant, in essence, that Binder was losing work to himself. Many of the reprints of the Superman family were tales he’d written between 1954 and 1960. Bill Finger, who was not a fast writer but was one of the best in the business, was especially angry about the lack of payment for reprints. At the 1998 Comic-Con International in San Diego, prominent DC writer John Broome recalled, “I developed a fixed idea that DC should pay us for reprint material. When they reprinted a whole story without paying us, that was a stealing of our abilities. It was stealing something away from us. I knew that, in movies and television and ASCAP [the composers’ union], they paid royalties… so I thought comics should pay royalties and I talked to the other writers.”4 The issues of “work-for-hire” and Above: Bill Schelly portrait of health insurance weren’t unrelated. Otto Binder and photo of the writer Freelancers could seldom afford to pay for at work editing Space World health insurance independently, when their magazine in 1960. markets were filling books with reprint material — much of it written or drawn by themselves. Health

Above: At right is the first issue of Mary Marvel Comics [Dec. 1945], a creation of writer Otto Binder and artist Marc Swayze. Otto’s brother Jack drew this cover as well as innumerable exploits of Billy Batson’s twin sister. At left is another Otto Binder creation, Supergirl. Action Comics #252 [May ’59].

insurance was especially important to Otto, because of the costs he was incurring for psychiatric help for Ione and monthly upkeep for Robert, his son with Down syndrome, who lived in a group home. Thus occurred what has come to be known as the “writers’ rebellion” at DC, a matter that was a strict secret for many years. Otto Binder, Bill Finger, John Broome, Arnold Drake, and Gardner Fox were involved, as was a single artist, Kurt Schaffenberger. Some of them individually met with management to see what could be done. Their requests were deemed unreasonable and were firmly rejected. This response was a blow, but the ensuing repercussions were the worst part. In the book Superman at Fifty [1987], Dennis O’Neil wrote, “Only last year, after I’d been working in comics for two decades, I learned that I was originally hired by DC in 1968 because a few of the regular scripters had asked — not demanded, asked — for health insurance. The reply was instant dismissal. (Today, employment and compensation practices are eminently fair; score one for progress.)”5 There’s no evidence Otto Binder was instantly dismissed from DC, and he never said that his participation in the writer’s rebellion led to the termination of his work for DC. Binder maintained that his cessation of work at the firm was of his own volition. In a letter in late 1968 to fan Louis Black, when the Binders were planning to move to upstate New York, Otto wrote, “I’m kissing off Mort Weisinger and his Superman line, as it is impossible to work with him by mail, and I cannot come down to see him every week. But naturally I’m going to praise the Lord for that, getting him off my neck.”6 To Dick Lupoff, a year later, he wrote, “I [have] switched [back] to my first love, science fiction. It’s just as well I quit comics cold as I heard that as soon as Mort Weisinger retired (as editor of Superman), the new editors dropped his writers and artists (the usual custom).”7 But this was at best only partly true, because Curt Swan continued on Superman for years. After all, the new editor of the Superman title was Binder’s old friend, Julius Schwartz. And Otto had been writing for another editor in the late 1960s, Murray Boltinoff, on stories for Mystery in Space. Comics historian Mark Evanier evinces the view that the parting of the ways was not for one clear-cut reason. He wrote, “I think it’s a little simplistic to say the new editors dropped the old talent. First of all, [DC editorial director

Captain Marvel, Shazam! TM & © DC Comics

Carmine] Infantino was the main one assigning such things and he’d already started shaking up the talent on Weisinger’s books, even before Mort left. Just about all the writing assignments on all DC comics changed about this time. A few of the writers who’d been writing for Weisinger did still work for DC. Leo Dorfman, for instance, and Bob Haney. “Binder saw the whole company changing and a lot of longtime editors and freelancers being cut loose. If anyone there was willing to use him (and after the rebellion, that was probably discouraged), he must have known it wouldn’t last long. All of the DC editors except [Murray] Boltinoff preferred to work with new writers.”8 “The House that Captain Marvel Built” on Voorhees Street had been a place of good cheer. After Mary’s death, it was like a mausoleum. Where once there had been convivial barbecues and impromptu jam sessions, with lively conversation and children’s laughter reverberating through the premises, now came bursts of anger and tears, alternating with dark depression. Otto came to a decision: he was through with the comics “rat race.” He wanted to eliminate that reminder of his late daughter—because she shared her first name with Mary Marvel, one of the gems in his comic book crown. “I remember talking to Otto soon after his daughter’s death,” Roy Thomas recalled. “He told me that he didn’t have the enthusiasm for [comics writing] anymore. He hinted that with his daughter’s death, it was a little too painful, and he would just as soon forget about comics.”9 The Binders decided to sell the house in Englewood. Remaining there would have consigned them to a kind of purgatory, facing phantoms of Mary everywhere. Also, with Otto’s income much reduced, they had little choice but to adopt a more modest lifestyle. As he put it to Jim Steranko, “We finally made up our minds to ‘start a new life.’ I quit DC and comics entirely and went back into the sci-fi paperback field.”10 Otto contacted his brother Jack, asking if he knew of any inexpensive properties in the Lake George area. He wanted to move closer to Jack and Olga and their family. Fortunately, on September 17, 1968, a $7,500 cash settlement had been made by the New Jersey Superior Court against the driver of the car that had killed Mary. With that, and whatever equity had been regained in the Englewood house (including the vacant lot next door, which the Binders also owned), Otto was able to purchase a modest home near Chestertown, New York, about a mile from Jack and Olga’s place. Niece Patricia Turek recalled, “The house they moved to in upstate New York was about as far into the boonies as you could get.”11 Chestertown, New York, was a community of some sixteen hundred inhabitants, more if you count those who lived nearby and were served by the handful of shops,

restaurants, and gas stations that comprised its downtown area. The closest “big city” was Albany, some eighty miles to the south. Towns of Igerna, Riparius, and Darrowsville are nearby. The Binders bought a house on Friend’s Lake Road, even though they had never seen it without its thick snow cover. The land was hilly, thick with pine and spruce woods, and very beautiful. Their new home was more modest than the New Jersey place, though still in the white Colonial style. Tucked away in the pines, with no neighbors closer than half a mile, the house was quite isolated. They moved there in February 1969. In wintertime, the area was replete with picture-postcard images of rustic homes and snow-laden mailboxes. The many paintings of covered wooden bridges could all have been made within a ten-mile radius. Television reception was spotty. The Binders would sometimes need to have their long driveway plowed to get out after a snowfall. When spring arrived, he wrote a friend, “Our new home is wonderful. We both love it. The beautiful woodland setting and untouched surroundings are superb. And oddly enough, we had quite mild weather with no real storms at all, whereas Jersey was blasted by five weekend blizzards in a row. Precognition? I moved in time. “A new thing — my new bag — is writing for the Encyclopedia Britannica! Yes, the real thing. They just couldn’t do without me. Actually, I’m writing for the Young Children’s EB, a branch project of theirs. This work came through my old writing pal (now editor of the project) W. Ryerson Johnson. The pay is $25 a page, whereas the best in comics was $16 … and half the work.”12 In the wooded quiet, living close to nature, Ione and Otto began their new kind of life together. Their love had endured through their greatest crisis, and if neither was the same afterward, they still held onto each other and found a way to go on. 1. A ll quotes attributed to Patricia Turek are from an interview with the author, Oct. 18, 2002. 2. A uthor’s interview with William Woolfolk, June 29, 2002. 3. E mail from Michael Cassiello, May 3, 2015. 4. M urphy Anderson, Mike W. Barr, John Broome, Mark Evanier, Julius Schwartz, “I Think I Was A Natural-Born Comic Writer,” Alter Ego Vol. 3 #60 [July 2006]. 5. D ennis O’Neil, “The Man of Steel and Me,” Superman at Fifty, Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle, editors, [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987]. 6. L etter from Otto Binder to Louis Black, Nov. 30, 1968. 7. L etter from Otto Binder to Richard Lupoff, Dec. 2, 1969. 8. E mail from Mark Evanier, July 25, 2003. 9. Author’s interview with Roy Thomas, July 8, 2002. 10. Jim Steranko, Steranko’s History of the Comics, Vol. 2. 11. Patricia Turek interview. 12. Letter from Otto Binder to Louis Black, Mar. 22, 1969.

Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Top: Left is Ione and Otto Binder at their home on Friend’s Lake Road near Chestertown, New York, circa 1971. Courtesy of Jan Tabert. Right is the Binders house in upstate New York, where they started a “new life” after the tragic death of daughter Mary. Courtesy of Michael Turek. Above: Frequent Captain Marvel scripter Otto Binder makes a cameo in this Beck panel from Shazam! #1.

Above: Detail from that same ish of Shazam!, #1 [Feb. 1973]. Art by C.C. Beck, co-creator of Captain Marvel. 13

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast. Captain Infinity TM & © the respective copyright holder. Dateline strip © Fred Hembeck.

comics in the library

Good Gods… It’s Good Comics! Quality mythology comics are no myth, thanks to the Graphic Universe series

All are TM & © the respective copyright holders.

by RicHard J. Arndt CBC Contributing Editor It’s not that it is difficult to find mythology graphic novels for a library; there a lot of them out there, from nearly every publisher you can look at. It’s that so many of them are freaking dreadful. None that I’ve examined are short on the actual details of various mythologies. That sort of information is readily available and generally authoritative from any publisher or author. No, it is the often abysmal artwork in these books that gives one pause and makes searching for a good set somewhat of a challenge. See, library booksellers, whether on the Internet or in a catalog, tend to present just the cover for potential buyers. It’s rare to be able to see examples of the interior art. Some publishers — and I’m looking at you, World Almanac Library — put their budget into an attractive cover and apparently scrimp on the inside art by hiring artists who appear to have only a slightly better knowledge of Photoshop, anatomy, and perspective than I do. And I have none. There are some truly terrible artwork in the many graphic mythology books out there. Most, if not all, by artists you’ve never heard of. Thankfully, there is a set that I can thoroughly recommend. Lerner Publications’ Graphic Universe series consist of 28 volumes, with each running 48 pages. The scripts feature top-notch, tight writing by writers that many will actually be familiar, including Paul D. Storrie, Dan Jolley, Jeff Limke, Justine and Ron Fontes, and Marie P. Croall. Storrie, Jolley, and Limke provide the bulk of the writing, and their work, along with their compatriots, is accurate, tightly written, and fairly witty. The artwork too, has many familiar names, including Thomas Yeates, Ron Randall, Sandy Carruthers, Anne Timmons, the team of Ray Lago and Craig Hamilton, Gordon Purcell, and John McCrea, as well as artists I’ve not heard of before, such as Steve Kurth, David Witt, Tim Seeley, and Clint Hilinski. It is perhaps no surprise to see longtime pros doing such excellent work on these books. Yeates’ style, in particular, is made for these types of stories and he delivers every time. I particularly like his work in Atalanta: The Race against Destiny, Perseus: The Hunt for Medusa’s Head, Robin Hood: Outlaw of Sherwood Forest, King Arthur: Excalibur Unsheathed, and Arthur & Lancelot: The Fight for Camelot. (By the way, somebody really needs to hire Yeates to do a full version of the saga of King Arthur.) Ron Randall gets to strut his stuff on such titles as Guan Yu: Blood Brothers to the End, Psyche & Eros: The Lady and the Monster, Beowulf: Monster Slayer, Tristan & Isolde: The Warrior and the Princess, and Thor & Loki: In the Land of Giants. I really enjoyed the last title there, which I first became aware of the original from the “Tales of Asgard” series Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did back in the days of Journey into Mystery. What is especially good about this new version is the subtle way author Limke and artist Randall let the reader know that Loki is actually the reasonable, thinking god here and that Thor is acting like a complete and utter jerk. Anne Timmons does a particularly fine job on Pigling: A Cinderella Story. Timmons’ art tends to project a nice warmth for the reader and this well-paced Chinese version of the Cinderella story greatly benefits from that.

Gordon Purcell turns in a bright, almost Wonder Woman-style version of the fall of Troy. Ray Lago and Craig Hamilton provide delightful art for the West African tale of Marwe: Into the Land of the Dead, which also has a sprightly script by Marie P. Croall. Sandy Carruthers, whom I’ve only just become aware of due to his stunning work on Charlton Neo’s revival of Pat Boyette’s The Spookman, delivers some finely-tuned pages for Sunjata: Warrior King of Mali and Yu the Great: Conquering the Flood. David Witt, an illustrator I’m not familiar with, does excellent work on such diverse titles as the Mayan myth The Hero Twins: Against the Lords of Death, the Aztec legend The Smoking Mountain: The story Of Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl and the Egyptian centered Isis & Osiris: to the Ends of the Earth. His work reminds me a bit of a cross between Don Simpson and Dan Burr. I like it a lot. In fact, nobody here — whether writer or artist delivers anything less that top-notch work. I strongly recommend this series for any librarian looking for a good series of mythology and any parent who wants their child to become familiar with such myths. I mentioned the Lee/Kirby “Tales of Asgard” series and there is a nice six-volume hardcover set of the stories available from Marvel Spotlight. The first three books feature the early individual myth adaptations while the last three collect the first Fafnir the Dragon story as well as the final “Tales of Asgard” tale from the original team — the Arabian Nights-influenced “Tragedy of Hogun.” The books are very slim — only 24 pages each—but the stories and art are both vastly entertaining and well presented, with excellent covers by Olivier Coipel and Mark Morales. This would make another excellent addition to your school or public library. Although they so far have focused solely on the Greek gods, George O’Connor’s seven-volume (so far, an eighth is promised for this summer) mythology set is both well-written and decently drawn. The books focus on a single Greek god per volume and have to date covered Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite (a very nice volume), and Ares. Plenty of the gods not yet showcased show up in the editions printed to date. It’s a good series that is quite popular among my students and I thoroughly recommend it.

Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Above: Cover of Atalanta: The Race against Destiny, drawn by the always excellent Thomas Yeates and but one of 28 volumes of mythological tales published by Lerner Publications’ Graphic Universe series.

Below: Detail from Anne Timmons’ particularly fine job on Pigling: A Cinderella Story.

Next: Marc Tyler Nobleman’s comics creator books! 15

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#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

metamorphosis of an eclectic woman

interview conducted by jon b. cooke

A chance encounter results in a deep appreciation for the rich life of the talented cartoonist and author, who can boast over 65 years in the biz! I always knew I’ve had a passion for Ramona Fradon. That passion, of course, is for her endlessly buoyant and engaging artwork, whether her great “Metamorpho” run, those endearing “Aquaman” stories from the 1950s and early ’60s, or her mid-’70s Plastic Man stint. Even that rare Marvel job knocked me out—the one-shot issue of Fantastic Four from ’73, which featured chain-wielding Thundra. Because, you see, as much as I was enthralled with the Neal Adams school of hyper-realistic super-hero stories, I also could never get enough of cartoonists who infused their art with broad humor and remarkably original stylings, a select group of which Ramona was unquestionably a true queen among fellow pros. What I didn’t know about the woman—which turned out to be volumes—I caught wind of during a serendipitous, impromptu conversation aboard a Boeing 737 last summer when, upon realizing we were sharing a flight back east from Comic-Con International, I seized the opportunity to sit beside her during the four-hour jaunt between San Diego and a Chicago layover. (Astonishingly, the recording of our in-depth chat, which happened amid the constant roar of the Southwest plane’s jet engines, was unfathomably deciphered by CBC’s intrepid transcriber, Steve “Flash” Thompson, who deserves a medal of valor!) I followed up the transcontinental talk in late February with a visit to the artist’s Hudson Valley abode, where she now lives with her daughter,

and the entire two-session interview, which was subsequently corrected and clarified by the subject, has been integrated into this final piece. Here you will be regaled about her illustrious pedigree, brush with broadcasting giants, presence in the most coveted cartoonist community of all time, participation in the seismic political scene of the ’60s, and her exemplary achievement in academia… and maybe a word or two on her 65 years in comics. Prepare to learn about the fascinating, eclectic life and career of the amazing Ramona Fradon. But, first, a few biographical details: Ramona’s father, noted advertising “lettering man” Peter Dom (the last name a truncation of Dombrezian—a name also spelled in various documents as Domborrajian, Domboorijean, and Domboorajian) was born in Tehran, Persia, to his Armenian parents, mother Shushan and father Mehran. Peter was the middle son in a brood of seven. At 12, Peter immigrated to the United States, and the family, according to the 1920 U.S. Census, settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1923, already working in the Chicago advertising scene creating logos and headline letter-forms, he married Irma Haefeli, Illinois native and daughter of immigrant Swiss-German parents, Previous page: A portrait of Ramona Fradon by Drew Friedman, which originally appeared in Drew’s lovely 2014 book, Heroes of the Comics: Portraits of the Pioneering Legends of Comic Books. A sequel, More Heroes, will be featured in our next ish.

Portrait by Drew Friedman • Transcribed by Steve “Flash” Thompson Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

ABOUT OUR RAMONA FRADON TRIBUTE COVER Natch, our special “flip cover” tribute is a loving pastiche of the Brave and the Bold #57 [Jan. 1965] cover penciled by the amazing Ramona with inks by Charles Paris, the same issue that introduced Metamorpho, the Element Man, that unforgettably charismatic and downright weird hero created by our featured artist and writer Bob Haney. Your humble editor came up with the concept of aping the classic Silver Age cover, sporting vignettes of Ramona’s eclectic career and, with the able consultation of pal and SpongeBob SquarePants editor Chris Duffy, we enlisted the artistry of the great cartoonist — and brilliant art mimic — Robert Sikoryak (Masterpiece Comics), who penciled and colored our cover (as well as adding clever touches, such as including the New Yorker cartoon characters, each drawn in the style of their respective artists). The piece was graced with the inks of CBC chum Stephen DeStefano, the extraordinary cartoonist perhaps best remembered by comic book fans as artist and creator (with writer Bob Rozakis) of the charming ’80s DC Comics series ’Mazing Man. Topping off our B&B homage, logo king David Coulson was recruited to approximate the logos and lettering of the source. What a superb team effort from these huge fans of fantastic Fradon! barber John Haefeli and housewife Louise (Thut). Peter and Irma had two children, son Jay (born 1925) and daughter Ramona (born on Oct. 1, 1926).—JBC.

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Brave and the Bold, Metamorpho TM & © DC Comics. Good News! TM & © the respective copyright holder.

Above: Besides perennial font favorite Dom Casual, perhaps the most memorable creation of Ramona’s father, Peter Dom, is the logo for the New York City luxury department store Lord & Taylor. Attesting to its durability, the logo is still used by the company today, 70 or so years after being introduced. Inset right: Peter Dom graces the cover of the Oct.–Nov. 1951 issue of typographer industry journal Good News! Below inset is an excerpt from the article therein (titled “Dom Casual Hits the Jackpot!”), giving some biographical information and making mention of his talented children. The piece discusses the development of Dom Casual, a typeface that has a hand-drawn appearance and one that remains quite popular with designers today. Below: Peter Dom’s logo for the cosmetic company.

Comic Book Creator: Where are you originally from? Ramona Fradon: I was born in Chicago, but I grew up in Westchester County, in the suburbs outside of New York City. We lived in Larchmont and Mamaroneck, but most of the time in Bronxville, where I went to a wonderful high school. CBC: Did you have creative people in your family? Ramona: My father was a commercial lettering man. He designed the Elizabeth Arden and Camel logos—some of the things that you still see around. I think Elizabeth Arden has a new one now, but they used my father’s version for years. He also lettered the Lord & Taylor logo… you know, the one that’s beautiful but you can’t read. [laughs] CBC: Wow! Did he win awards for his work? Ramona: I don’t know. He never felt he got as much recognition as he deserved—as much as a top illustrator would have—but he was recognized as top among lettering men back in those days.

CBC: So he commuted from Westchester into the city? Ramona: He commuted for a few years, but then he and my mother got divorced. CBC: How old were you when you moved from Chicago? Ramona: Five. CBC: Do you remember Chicago at all? Ramona: Well, we used to go back a lot. My mother loved it and she didn’t like the East. I guess Chicagoans felt competitive with New York. I notice they do in L.A., too. At any rate, we used to go back, so I remember it quite well. It was a lovely city, at least around the lakefront. I don’t know about the South Side, though. It’s a horribly divided city and doesn’t seem to be getting better. CBC: Did you have siblings? Ramona: An older brother. He did lettering, too. My uncle was also a lettering man. CBC: Is that what they called them? Ramona: Yes, “lettering men.” CBC: And they were predominantly doing advertising and logo work? Ramona: Yes. By hand. But then lettering men like my father began to design fonts that were made into typefaces. So, instead of hiring a lettering man, they’d use these fonts, as they do today. My father designed the Dom Casual and other typefaces and everybody told him not to do it because it would put them all out of business. And it did. CBC: Any other fonts? Ramona: Well, Dom Bold… and I think there were a couple of others, but I don’t remember their names.

CBC: So he didn’t get royalties from them? He just sold them outright? Ramona: I don’t really know. He wasn’t living with us then, so I have no idea. CBC: Is Fradon a married name or is that your family name? Ramona: No, that was my married name. My father was Armenian. His name was Domboorajian, but he changed it to Dom. CBC: Hence, the “Dom Casual.” Ramona: Yes. CBC: So you were born Ramona Dom? Ramona: Yes. CBC: Do you have a middle name? Ramona: No, I never got one. [laughs] CBC: That’s too cheap! [Ramona laughs] So what was the household like? Upper class or upper middle class? Ramona: Well, during the Depression in Chicago, we were very well off, living on the Gold Coast overlooking Lake Michigan when everybody else was on bread lines. And when we moved to New York, we were okay for a while. But then, when my parents broke up… My father was an alcoholic, by the way… he rarely gave us money. We were living in this very wealthy town with no money! We were sort of on the other side of the tracks. All my friends belonged to the country club and had nice, stable fathers who were bankers or CEOs, and they could buy cigarettes whereas I mostly bummed them. But it still was fun, and a great place to grow up. CBC: Did you go into the city much? Ramona: You know, it’s funny. In those days… I remember, when I was 11, I used to go into the city by myself. CBC: When you were 11 years old? Ramona: Yes! CBC: Alone? Ramona: Yes! Well, I’d go in with friends. Nobody would worry about me. It was a different world back then. CBC: So what’d you do? Go to Radio City Music Hall? Ramona: I don’t remember what we’d do. One time I met a boy I knew from summer camp. Of course, later on we went to see Sinatra at the Paramount! Oh my god! I was a bobbysoxer! We used to sit there and scream, you know? I remember one time I’m screaming and I’m thinking, “Why am I doing this?” [laughs] CBC: ’Cause everybody else is! Ramona: Because everybody else is, right! CBC: I just saw a documentary in HBO and I was thinking, “Why are these girls screaming for this skinny little runt of a guy?” Ramona: Oh, no! He didn’t look that way to us! He was very beautiful! And his voice was lovely then, before he started smoking and drinking. CBC: That was in the early ’40s? Ramona: Yes. I guess the original bobbysoxers were the women who liked Rudolph Valentino. And then there was nothing until Sinatra came along. It was quite a phenomenon. CBC: Did you go out dancing? Ramona: In Bronxville, you mean? CBC: Yeah, did you go out dancing on Saturday nights? Ramona: It wasn’t like that. The Meadowlands, in New Jersey, was the place kids use to go on Saturday nights, but we didn’t do it too much then. It was wartime and if someone had a car there was no gas. We had parties. But that’s about it. We used to actually go out after school and have baseball games. We had exercise and fresh air. No computers! [laughs]

CBC: How much older was your brother? Ramona: About two years older than me. CBC: Were you pretty close? Ramona: No. I didn’t care for him too much. He wasn’t very nice to me. But he was very popular. Sort of irresponsible like my father, I guess. My mother was ill. It was really sad growing up, actually, except that Bronxville and the social life became my family. It was just that my mother was dying and it was really not… It was sad. She finally died when I was about 26. CBC: Was it cancer? Ramona: No, multiple sclerosis. They had no cure for it. They had no idea what to do about it. CBC: If he wasn’t giving money, how did she survive? Ramona: We just scraped by. And yet, we were living in this wealthy enclave and I was going out with the rich kids. CBC: You mentioned going to Bronxville High School, which you said was wonderful. What made it so? Ramona: I think of myself as having come from Bronxville, not from Chicago. It implanted me with a certain eagerness to learn and a respect for learning. It wasn’t a school where it was all about football or things like that, the way schools are now. It was a serious school. They had excellent teachers and the English teacher that I mentioned, particularly, Miss Clever—she was a Mrs. Chips. She was there for you and she was so supportive and so amused at how much we thought we knew! [laughs] She understood kids and everybody loved her. She was really an inspiration to me. So

Above: This essay is a companion piece to article, “Kirby’s Kingdom: The Commerce of Art,” in CBC #1. Below: Another Marvelmania piece, this one featuring Galactus and his herald, The Silver Surfer (a sole Kirby creation.

This page: Various photos of the Peter and Irma Dom family, which included Jay and Ramona. At right is the artist at large as a toddler. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Above: Books Ramona cited as being influential in her childhood include perennial favorite Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the Raggedy Ann and Andy series by Johnny Gruelle, and the Smoky, the Cow Horse, series by Will James. The latter authors also illustrated—superbly—their own books.

Ramona: And really good, yes. It sees to have run in the family because my uncle and my brother were lettering men, too. CBC: When did your father pass away? Ramona: In 1962. He had cancer. CBC: Did you get to know him? Ramona: No. I never knew Dad. When he was sober, he was remote and withdrawn. When he was drunk, he would talk and talk about things he probably shouldn’t even talk about. But, no, I never knew Dad, really. When he was living with us in Chicago, I adored him. He used to seem like a hero because all of his friends admired him. He was friends with a lot of other lettering men and other people in advertising. My parents seemed very glamorous to me at that point, but that was just from a five-year-old’s perspective. But then he went to New York and we really didn’t see much of him after that. CBC: Was it tragic for your mom? Ramona: Oh, yes. It was awful! It was just awful. It was humiliating! And I felt humiliated through her. CBC: How old were you when they split? Ramona: Eleven. It was bad. And we had just moved to Bronxville at that point. My brother was almost two years older than me. CBC: Did you talk culture with your mom? Ramona: I don’t remember talking to her about it and, in some ways, she… Well, she had a very strict Swiss-German upbringing, so she was rebelling against her parents. She wanted to be a dancer, then went to an art school and then she married an artist. She had that side of her. She loved culture, but she also didn’t talk a lot about it. In fact, there were areas in which she was rather close-minded. I can’t say anymore about it than that because I’m not clear about her. I still don’t see my mother clearly. CBC: And you regret that? Ramona: Oh yes, I do. I didn’t treat her very well either when I was a teenager. And that’s the big regret of my life. CBC: But you were just a teenager, Ramona. Ramona: I know. I was obnoxious. [laughter] In this case, it was serious business. I realize she took us to the symphony, she had us going to art school and she did everything that she could do. She played the opera all the time—which I hated at that point! CBC: Do you like it now? Ramona: I do. I do like some opera. I love music, but I didn’t like it when I was a kid. It didn’t take. But we always had books and she read to us and we always had books. I think I got a good foundation. CBC: Did you have any interest in drawing early on? Ramona: I always drew from as far back as I can remember. My father was a freelance artist and sometimes he would work at home, so he had a drawing board and all of the stuff—pens, pencils, triangles, T-squares. So I became familiar with all of that by the time I was three. My mother used to take us to the Art Institute in Chicago! This must #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All TM & © the respective copyright holders

when I wrote that book, I thought maybe she’d like the dedication I wrote, you know? She’d be pleased. [laughs] There was a lot of emphasis on history and civics. It was a serious school. And they let me take as many art classes as I wanted. CBC: Where is this? Ramona: Do you know where Scarsdale is? Or New Rochelle? It’s in that area, near Yonkers, a little enclave, about a mile square and just stacked with money. You know, big houses on hills and an excellent school where all the kids went to college. It was a college prep school. CBC: It was all-white? Ramona: It was all-white, but also non-Jewish. I remember when I came in to the school there was this rumor going around the halls that a Jewish boy had just come in to the senior class. It was that kind of a place. I remember some of the grown-ups used the phrase “congenial community,” which meant it contained only “people like us.” And the real estate agents screened everybody else out, you know? CBC: So congenial was like a code word for… what? Ramona: Exclusive. It means, “We have just let in people who are like us.” My father, a dark Armenian, tried to rent a place there and they thought he was Jewish. And he was indignant because my father was not exactly a liberal thinking person, so… [laughs] I thought it served him right. So, anyway, I was lucky to get an education like that. CBC: Your mom was ill a lot? Ramona: Yes, but she was very much interested in culture and education, and she saw to it that we got the best exposure that we could. We probably should not have moved there because we didn’t have the money, but she did it anyway because she wanted us to go to a good school and some of the other towns around there were rougher (though I imagine their schools were still good). For some reason, my brother went to a school in Mamaroneck for a year, and he was in fights all the time. So there we were. I lived a very sheltered, exclusive life. In fact, I remember when we moved to New York, we were living in Larchmont at the time, which is another town in Westchester. It’s along the Sound, another very wealthy town. And I used to be driven to school by a chauffeur. My mother liked to spend money. And, of course, my father hated the way all the money was disappearing. That’s why I never felt poor. CBC: Was he working in Manhattan at the time? Ramona: Yes. He had an office in the Chrysler Building for a while. He was doing an awful lot of work for J. Walter Thompson, which was a big ad agency then, and some of the other ones. He as always busy. He was very successful, obviously. CBC: And talented!

Li’l Abner TM & © the estate of Al Capp.

have been before I was five. And we would sit there and draw! There was a place where you’d go down in the basement and they’d have copies of Greek statues. [laughs] And we would sit there and sketch them! I didn’t even know what they were or why we were doing that! So I was exposed very early to drawing. CBC: Were these art classes? Ramona: I don’t know what they were! I mean, I was, like, four! I did some sketches. CBC: You were four? Was it any good? Ramona: I have no idea! Probably not. CBC: Chicago had some great comic strips. Did you see them? Ramona: Oh god, yes. I loved the newspaper strips! That was in the ’30s. I used to love Alley Oop, Li’l Abner, The Phantom, Little Orphan Annie… all of them! Every one of them! And those big, colorful Sunday pages in the Chicago Tribune! I just devoured them! And my father would bring home The Daily News when we got to New York and I’d read all of those comics! It never occurred to me I’d be a cartoonist. It’s just that I loved looking at those drawings. My mother was a baseball fan. We used to go to Cubs games in Chicago before she got sick, and then, in New York, we followed the Giants (although I am secretly still a Cub fan and I know they will win a pennant someday). I used to read the little cartoons in the sports section drawn by some guy… I can’t remember his name, but he was very well known. He used to draw baseball players and these wonderful little cartoon figures. I just loved that drawing. CBC: And what paper was this? Ramona: I think it was The Daily News. I’m not sure. I tried to look it up recently and I just couldn’t remember the man’s name. I was very influenced by his drawing. It was very loose, exaggerated drawing. I think more than anything else, that influenced the way I draw. CBC: We’ve gotta find his name! [laughter] Ramona: So, anyway, that’s what I was interested in. And then I loved the illustrations in children’s books, the Raggedy Ann books. And Will James’s drawing; he wrote Smoky the Cow Horse—it still makes me cry—and the horses he drew were beautiful. I didn’t know anything about fine art at that point. It was Will James, Raggedy Ann, and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and book and magazine illustrations that I loved. CBC: Now, the school you’d gone to, was it pretty much college prep? Ramona: Totally. It was probably one of the best schools in the country. We were fortunate. We had an English teacher who influenced me completely and changed my life. She was so enthusiastic about books, and I became an avid reader because of her. And when I wrote the book about Faust and the Gnostics I dedicated it to her because she was such an inspiration. CBC: What was her name again? Ramona: Elizabeth Clever. She was the kind of teacher all the kids loved. Everybody should have a teacher like that. CBC: Was she encouraging that you could do anything you wanted? Ramona: Yes, and she even used to come up and visit my mother. She was a wonderful, teacher and a special person. You know Goodbye, Mr. Chips? Like I said, she was a Mrs. Chips! [Jon laughs] CBC: And what did you read? Did you read literature? Ramona: Yes, I read a lot. I used to read Charles Norris, a well-known writer back then. I loved rags to riches books… CBC: What do you mean? Horatio Alger? Ramona: Well, stories where people overcame odds. And then I liked sports, so I used to read a lot of wonderful books about “Cinderella teams,” you know? Kids who exceeded expectations, things like that. I read a lot of Jack London. I loved a textbook we had on English prose and poetry. Later on, I began to read non-fiction. I love history especially; ancient religion and anything esoteric. I even

read the blurbs on cereal boxes… CBC: Were you influenced by the literature of the day? You had Hemingway, you had… Ramona: Yes, I read all of those—Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway… but I read mostly the earlier classics. CBC: Considering the income you had, was your exposure at the public library? Ramona: Oh, yes! We had a wonderful library. We used to go there all the time. CBC: “We”? Ramona: Well, I would go with friends. It was different then. CBC: That was a different world! [Ramona laughs] Ramona: Yes, we would go every week and get books. Bronxville was really an exceptional school. It encouraged learning and fostered curiosity. I actually learned grammar, too. It kills me the way people nowadays murder grammar! And on TV, too. I keep telling my daughter, “It’s not ‘between you and I’, it’s ‘between you and me,’”and she will not do it. She’s in her fifties now! [Jon laughs] That’s the last thing I’m going to tell her on my deathbed: “It’s ‘between you and me’! Not ‘between you and I.’” [laughter] CBC: So, with the income disparity again, were your friends taking vacations and going off to exotic locales… Ramona: Well, somehow we got to go to summer camp. That was before it got too bad. We went to a wonderful farming camp one year and to a horseback camp another. Those were exciting summers. My mother was always interested in exposing us to all kinds of things. Oh my god, she used to take us to the Chicago Symphony when I was four. I hated it! [laughs] The only thing that got me through was watching the man with the kettle drum and the cymbals! But she was a culture maven and I’m grateful to her for it now. She took us to museums… CBC: Did she come from means? Ramona: No, my grandfather was a barber. He was Swiss-German, you know; very strict. They had come from Switzerland. So it was a half-Armenian (on my father’s side) and half-Swiss family. [laughs] CBC: In 1916, the Armenians suffered through genocide at the hands of the Turks. Ramona: Oh, yes. My father came over in 1911, just in time to escape the slaughter. He was born in Tehran, Iran, (or as it was then: Tehran, Persia). CBC: So they came across the frontier from Turkey? Ramona: I don’t know what route they took, but he came with his brothers and sisters CBC: Were they fleeing? Ramona: Well, yes. I think they knew what was coming. He used to kid that he was slightly bowlegged from the Turkish bullets whizzing between his legs! [laughs] CBC: Did he lose family members? Ramona: I really don’t know. He wasn’t around long enough for me to know what his life was like. CBC: Are you sensitive to the genocide? You know, it still remains a political issue today. Ramona: Well, yes. I think the Turks are nuts. Why don’t they just admit what they did and get it over with? I remember, years ago, an article Michael J. Arlen wrote in The New Yorker. He was Armenian and he wanted to go

Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Above: Miss Ramona Dom in an undated and fetching portrait, likely lensed during her teenage years. Inset left: Typical Sunday newspaper color comics page from the early ’40s. The strips of that era were immensely enjoyed by young Ramona. Below: Francis Albert Sinatra during his crooner years in the 1940s, when he frequently headlined at the famed Paramount Theater before audiences packed with hysterical teenaged girls (among them Ramona) given the collective moniker of “bobbysoxers.

Right: Ramona was a page at CBS radio during their news department’s golden age. From right, broadcast journalists Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and Charles Collingwood.

back and see Armenia. He talked a lot about the Armenian Holocaust and how nobody ever recognized it in the way the Jewish Holocaust is recognized. It’s almost like a non-event and yet it was a horrible thing! Especially those death marches across the desert. Oh, lord! But, anyway, they all came over here and they all became successful. My paternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister and my grandmother had gone to Mount Holyoke, so that side of the family was well-educated. On the other side, my maternal grandfather was a barber. He lost everything he had saved in the crash of ’29, and he and my grandmother came to live with us. CBC: So you remember the Depression? Ramona: I remember people on breadlines and sandwich men walking around, for a penny a day, with advertising signs on their fronts and backs. Dana, my ex-husband, grew up during the Depression and his parents were immigrants. His father kept losing jobs and they went through hell in that period. Meanwhile, we were very well off. CBC: And the wealth just came from your father’s salary? Ramona: Yes. He was very successful. CBC: Were you athletic at all? Ramona: Yes, very! I loved sports. I was good at basketball and baseball, swimming. I never played tennis. I loved riding. I just loved sports! If I’d been born maybe 30, 40 years later, I would have been an athlete. That’s what I was very interested in. But that wasn’t something girls did back then. CBC: Did you go to movies frequently? Ramona: Oh, yes. I loved movies. Every Friday night, we’d go to the movies and sit up in the balcony and smoke. [laughter] Smoking was a big thing. CBC: Were you a good girl or were you adventurous? Ramona: I was a good girl… until I got to art school. Then I wasn’t such a good girl. [laughter] CBC: You had an ailing mother, you had an absent father. Did you just live your own life, so to speak? Ramona: Well, it was sad. It was just very empty at home and what I did was transfer everything into my social life. The gang became my family, you might say. CBC: Who was your best friend? Ramona: A girl named Helen Colegrove. She was my buddy. We kept in

touch until she died! When we got married, our husbands became close friends and we spent a lot of time together. He was a teacher at a private school and they always managed somehow to be near where we were. CBC: Was she fun? Ramona: Oh, yes. We used to play vicious ping pong in the cellar of her house. She taught me to smoke and swear, and all of the boys were in love with her. She was kind of a role model for me when we were in school. CBC: What about you? What was your personality? Were you outgoing? Ramona: I was, but I really think that I’m an introvert. I forced myself to be outgoing in those days. But, really, I like to be alone. [laughs] It’s an effort for me to be social. CBC: You’re going to be moving in with your daughter, right? Ramona: Yes, and that’s going to be weird. I’m used to running my life and having everything my way. My daughter and I have been really good friends and we see each other a lot, but this will be a role reversal. And I love her husband and, by the way, my ex-husband is going to live with us, too. [laughs] We’re all going be in this one house. It’s crazy! CBC: Wow! So you’re friends with the ex? Ramona: Yes! We always remained friends. CBC: That’s awesome. So, you’re Ramona Dom. What were you planning to do after school? Ramona: Well, my father wanted me to be the artist in the family. I mean, he really steered me into being an artist. So I always took art classes and didn’t work hard in school. I’d get an “excellent” one month and then a “failing” the next month. So, when it was time for college, my grades were so bad, I couldn’t have gotten in if I had wanted to. So I went to art school. And I really had no ambition to be an artist… or anything else for that matter. CBC: But you said you were drawing at a young age. Ramona: True, but it was like doodling, you know? I’d draw horses and things like that,. When I applied for a scholarship at Parsons, they told me I wasn’t good enough, but my art teacher put in a good word for me and I got the scholarship. I only stayed there a year because I didn’t like it. I wasn’t interested in fashion and they didn’t emphasize basic drawing skills, and I thought for some reason I should learn to draw, so I switched to the New York Art Students League. It’s a long established fine arts school and it’s sort of free-form, with no curriculum. You just take the courses you want, so I took lots and lots of sketch classes and some classes in painting. I wasn’t very good at that, but I could draw, especially action poses and I remember one time I was sketching a model and somebody looked at my drawing and said, “You should be a cartoonist.” I was insulted. [laughs] In art school, there’s a lot of snobbery. So I did learn to draw, but I couldn’t paint very well and, when I got out, I had no idea what I was going to do. I know there are

Above inset: Radio announcer Sandy Becker, who worked at CBS while Ramona was a page for the company, turned many a head with his dashing good looks, including that of the young artist-in-the-making. Becker would seamlessly adapt to TV and go on to kiddie renown as host of his self-named children’s game show, in the 1960s. 22

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

people—like Joe Staton, for instance—he wanted to draw Dick Tracy from the time he was three or something. I didn’t have anything like that, but I married Dana Fradon, whom I met in art school, and he encouraged me to try cartooning. CBC: Did you have any exposure to comic books as a child? Ramona: No, never. I don’t think my mother would let us read them. They weren’t allowed. CBC: Pulps not at all? Ramona: I wasn’t interested in that kind of thing. It was the newspaper strips that I loved. CBC: Now, where were you when you heard that Pearl Harbor was attacked? Ramona: I don’t know. But I do remember where I was when Hitler invaded Poland. It was at the end of summer. CBC: September 1, 1939. Ramona: Right. I was just coming home from summer camp on the train and I heard the news. And, at that time, Superman had come out and he was really popular and I was around 11 or 12 , and I thought, “Maybe Superman can save us.” Nobody who didn’t live through that period can know how threatened our existence seemed. Hitler appeared invincible at that moment. He’d been invading all those countries in Europe, almost without resistance and somehow it seemed as if Superman was the only one who could stand up to him. [laughs] CBC: Well, you had FDR! Is there any affinity between Armenians and the Jews? Ramona: They shared a similar fate. Armenians were Christians in the Middle East and had the same history as the Jews of being persecuted. And they’re both, in a sense, kind of culture-bearers… The Armenians were very well-educated people, as were the Jews, of course. So yes, there’s a lot of similarity. CBC: Did your father have any political leanings? Ramona: He was a Republican. My mother was a Democrat. CBC: What attracted them to each other? Ramona: I don’t know. They were young. So my brother became a Republican and I became a Democrat. [laughs] CBC: A New Deal Democrat? Ramona: Oh, my mother loved Roosevelt and my father hated him. CBC: So did you revere FDR? Ramona: I still do. I have his picture on my refrigerator door. I went over to his home in Hyde Park, where I’ve been several times, and I had a picture taken with me sitting next to the bronze statues there of Franklin and Eleanor. Oh, my god! It felt like he was alive! Really! You have no idea if you didn’t grow up in the Depression what Roosevelt meant to people. He kept my ex-husband’s family alive! He really did. CBC: For lack of a better term, did you feel cheated that you were a girl? Obviously the treatment of males was different. Ramona: Certainly it was in my family. You sort of form an idea of what people are like from your parents. My experience was that my father was strong and mobile and out in the world, and my mother was confined and helpless. So, in some ways, I didn’t want to be like that. And it was really hard. In that time (at least in my mind), achieving out in the world seemed more like what men did than what women did and I was conflicted. Not only was the inequality in my family my central life perception but, in those days, women actually did not have the power or influence they do today. CBC: Did your dad want you to be something? Ramona: Yes. He wanted me to be an artist. CBC: There were examples for you? On Madison Avenue? Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Ramona: I don’t know. It didn’t seem to me there were many women around doing much of anything. There were women studying fashion at Parsons when I was there, but when I went to the League, the GIs had all come in and it was mostly men with just a sprinkling of women. Of course, there were female colleges, but to me they seemed less consequential than the male schools. CBC: So was your intention to become a professional? Ramona: I had no intention. I was just sort of going along. I don’t even remember ever wanting to be a movie star, although, at some point, I thought I wanted to be a singer (which is funny, because my daughter turned out to be a singer). But I never had any ambition. I wish somebody had said, “Go to college,” and I would have been a writer or an historian, because that’s what I’m really interested in. But, instead, I went to art school and here we are. CBC: [Laughs] Well, we’ve got a ways to go, Ramona. That must have been frustrating: the presumption that you have to get married and have children. Ramona: Or you’re going to be a secretary or a nurse, none of which I could have done. Or you’re going to get some crummy job in a department store. There were no big opportunities for women. Or, if there were, it was only for the aggressive, smart women who would break through to do different things. Most of my friends who went to college became secretaries or housewives or maybe worked at publishing houses. CBC: Were there influential instructors at the art school? Ramona: Yes. I learned a lot from Robert Johnson, who taught drawing. His style of teaching was very Top: Young Ramona Dom received significant instruction at the renowned Art Students League of New York in the mid- to late 1940s. Left inset: At the art school, she met Dana Fradon, a fellow artist who would go on to lead a notable career as a cartoonist for the celebrated New Yorker magazine. The two married in 1948. 23

when so much history was being made. I was working there when Murrow gave that crucial talk that began Senator McCarthy’s downfall. Everybody was riveted to his words and the building was almost shaking from fear of what the consequence might be. It was a very exciting time to be there. However, those of us in the page lounge were just 18-year-old kids and our behavior didn’t meet the standard set by Murrow and that great group of CBS journalists. We would get in there at 5 o’clock and somebody would be assigned to go down to Third Avenue and 57th Street to get beer and pickles. [laughter] Every night. And it was fun. CBC: Did you meet any celebrities when you were at CBS? Ramona: Oh, I used to see Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid. CBC: Cronkite? Ramona: No, that was before Cronkite. I remember seeing Lana Turner sweeping through the halls to a private elevator, her mink coat dragging casually along the floor. I met Ella Fitzgerald when she was a guest on one of the shows and I remember standing behind Hedy Lamarr for some reason… she seemed enormous. Greta Garbo lived somewhere in the neighborhood and I used to see her on someone’s arm walking down the street, her face obscured by an enormous hat. I’d see Rex Harrison in the elevator. Very wrinkly skin. But mostly it was those elegant announcers —Murrow, Sevareid, and Collingwood. They wore Homburg hats, Chesterfield coats, very dignified. Not like the lightweight cable reporters today. No, they were serious people. And they didn’t speak to the pages. Only the announcers did! People like Sandy Becker, Ned Calmer, and others (whose names escape me now). They had beautiful voices that used to echo and resound through the corridors. I had a big crush on Sandy and got to know him rather well. He hated what he was doing. He had been studying medicine and then somebody heard his voice and hired him to be an announcer. The money was so good that he gave up the idea of being a doctor. CBC: Did they ever flirt with you? Ramona: Of course. It was very exciting. CBC: He hosted some show, Wonderama, in the 1950s. Ramona: It was a kiddie show. He landed it after I left CBS. I remember bumping into him once later on when he was doing that show and I said, “I see you’re coming up in the world, Sandy.” And he said, “Throwing up is more like it.” I was a page at CBS. I delivered messages around the building. And I don’t even know where the messages came from. I worked between 5:00 p.m. and 10 or 11 at This page: Dana Fradon (presumably in the 1980s) and various examples of his cartoons, as well as the cover of the first issue of his most prestigious account, The New Yorker.

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The New Yorker TM & © Condé Nast. Cartoons © Dana Fradon.

agreeable to me. He had us drawing from models doing quick sketches, thirty-second sketches, and learning to catch the action quickly—to absorb it and express the full intention of the figure. That has served me well in drawing comics, where action is everything. I learned a lot about art there and developed taste and discrimination. I think it’s so important when you’re drawing to be able to look at what you’ve done with a critical eye. CBC: So who are your favorite painters? Ramona: Well, I guess I’ll start with Bruegel. I love Chinese painting and a lot of the Renaissance painters but mostly I love the northern European pre-Renaissance painters. I love their simplicity and their use of big patterns and a directness that the later fascination with perspective and anatomy somewhat obscured. CBC: So did you frequent museums and art exhibits? Ramona: Sure. When you’re in art school, that’s what you do. I used to hang out at the Brooklyn Museum and we’d go to the ballet. We’d do what art students do. We’d sit up in the peanut gallery at the opera. I had a boyfriend who loved Wagner and we saw most of his operas. CBC: You went willingly this time. Ramona: Oh, yeah. [laughs] I liked Wagner a lot, but I liked ballet even more. CBC: So, for you, it was really an advantage to being in the New York area. Ramona: Oh, sure. It was a great opportunity. There was an automat right down the street from the League, so we’d go and get really good 35¢ meals there. And then I got a job at CBS as a page after school to get some money. CBC: Radio? Ramona: Yes, I was one of the pages. We used to schlep messages around the building to famous radio personalities at a tumultuous time

Books TM & © Dana Fradon.

night. We used to deliver to the different radio shows and to offices around the building. That was our job and we were awful! [laughs] I mean, it was crazy! In fact, they disbanded the page thing shortly after I left, because nobody was supervising us and we were just kids. We drank beer, you know, and we were flirting with the announcers. It was terrible! We would sit in this page lounge, waiting for messages to come in to whomever. CBC: Did you deal with audiences at all? Ramona: No. We were down at Colby’s, the bar in the CBS building where everybody would go, and these news legends would come in. They wouldn’t talk to anybody except themselves. Very dignified and aloof. That’s the way news was in those days. They were very impressive actually… but then I was 19 or 18 or something and things are more impressive at that age. CBC: Was it a job you could brag to your friends about? Ramona: No. I don’t think I ever mentioned it. It was just a job. I mean, we were low on the totem pole, just copy girls, you might say, just schlepping messages around. [laughs] We had a uniform, a nice little jacket and skirt, and that was it. I needed money, so it was a good after-school job for a kid. When I went back, maybe ten years ago, to visit the Art Students League, and the minute I entered, the first thing I thought of was: “Hangover!” [laughs] ’Cause I used to come in some days with a hangover. It was terrible! I could smell turpentine in the school and I thought, “Hangover!” CBC: So the Art Students League is still in the same location? Ramona: Yeah, it’s still at 57th Street, diagonally across from Carnegie Hall. It’s a venerable old school with creaking floors, y’know? It’s like something out of that Somerset Maugham book about art school and artists. This was a real art school, straight from the 19th century, and I liked it for that reason. It wasn’t all flash and efficiency. CBC: But you learned the fundamentals there. Ramona: Oh, yes! It was an excellent school! They had some really top artists teaching. I learned about [Japanese woodblock artist Utagawa] Kuniyoshi and a lot of top advertising people taught there. It’s an excellent school! In fact, Dana and I went there when they were having sort of a retrospective of work of the students who had gone there. There were Norman Rockwell paintings up on the wall. Really good, successful artists came out of the League. They taught both painters and half of The New Yorker staff went to the League — or at least three or four of ’em! They produced all kinds of art. CBC: Were they preparing people both for the life of a starving artist and commercial art? Ramona: Sure. They weren’t really preparing. It was up to you. These classes were available, you know? Really rich classes and you could take any courses you wanted. There was no degree. You just came, learned, and then left. And you learned at your own speed and how much you wanted to learn. For me, it was perfect because I never liked order or to adhere according to somebody else’s plan. CBC: How did you get in? Ramona: I had a scholarship. They were very generous in those days (and they may still be). That was when all the GIs were there, right after the war with this influx of government money that came in along with the returning veterans. I had a working scholarship and was supposed to take

attendance at classes, things like that. So it was really a blessing for me. CBC: Did you have to submit a portfolio to go, to be accepted? Ramona: I probably did, yes, but I don’t think they really cared. They were just allowing people to come in… because I was not any good in those days. I don’t even know that I showed much promise when I first started. I was turned down at Parsons for a scholarship, but I got in because my art teacher put on a word for me. I just thought it was really easy to get in at that time so it must me that they weren’t that discriminating. They just let people come in. And they may still be doing it. It’s that kind of a place. It’s really a lovely school. CBC: And you really benefited from it. Ramona: Oh, absolutely! I learned how to draw there! And I could have learned how to paint. I mean, everything was there. Dana did a lot of painting while he was there and then he became a cartoonist from going to school. But he learned how to draw. He developed taste there and some discrimination. It’s a wonderful opportunity. CBC: Are your memories of Manhattan of a golden age? Ramona: It didn’t seem that way to me at the time. I’d been going in there since I was a kid. It was nothing special to me. CBC: You were spoiled rotten! [Ramona laughs]

Top: As was the case for many a New Yorker cartoonist, Dana’s work was compiled into collections, and he also produced children’s books. Inset above: Ramona and Dana in the 1950s. Right: Mr. and Mrs. Fradon, and friends, at home in the ’60s. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Above: Early in their marriage, Dana and Ramona collaborated on prospective daily newspaper comic strips, including one about a detective. These samples appeared in Howard Chaykin’s book-length interview, The Art of Ramona Fradon.

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

TM & © DC Comics.

How did you meet your husband? Ramona: At the League. CBC: And what were the circumstances? Ramona: Well, you know, you meet everybody sooner or later. He used to like to sing. There was a group of people who used to sing and I met him that way. CBC: What do you mean? Just stand around a piano and sing? Ramona: No piano. Just standing around in a hall. Kids like to sing. CBC: Just spontaneously? Ramona: Yes. Haven’t you ever been on a train with a bunch of high school kids and they’re all singing? So, that’s what we did. The first thing he ever said to me was, “You’re off-key.” [laughter] But, anyway, he was from Chicago, so we got to know each other and then we got married. He was 26, I was 21. He was living on the GI Bill. CBC: Did he serve? Ramona: Yes, he was in the Air Force, but didn’t serve overseas. CBC: Did Dana come from a creative family at all? Ramona: No, he came from a very poor immigrant family. But his sisters

were all very talented and they wanted to get out of there and be somebody. They were ambitious and they encouraged Dana to do everything he was capable of. CBC: What’s the ethnic background of Dana? Ramona: His parents came over from Russia, and there’s some French in his background, too… so he’s a mixture. CBC: Were you friendly with his family? Ramona: Yes. They were very interesting people. But mostly it was his older sister who determined that they were not going to stay poverty-stricken, that they were going to get out, and they were going to be somebody. She sort of inculcated Dana with that notion, that he was going to make something of himself. So, even when I met him, he was submitting to The New Yorker. He’d always wanted to be a New Yorker cartoonist. So, finally, he got his first okay and then he got a contract after a while. CBC: He got in the New Yorker? Ramona: Yes. He was a New Yorker cartoonist. CBC: I didn’t know that! Ramona: Yes, Dana was always in the magazine. He was considered to be about the best gag man in the country. He thought of his own ideas and drew them too. CBC: Was that not so of some of the other guys? Ramona: Well, I think most of them, in those days… I think they wanted people who could draw and also think of gags, but they had people who just thought of gags, too, and they would give their ideas to the contract cartoonists. CBC: It was really prestigious. Charles Addams, Roger Price, Peter Arno… these people were celebrities, of a sort. And they lived a life of just being in these intellectual circles. Were you in one of those circles? Ramona: Well, most of our friends were New Yorker cartoonists. They were smart and witty—an interesting group of people. What was that circle back in the ’20s, with Dorothy Parker? CBC: The Algonquin Round Table. Ramona: Right, they were kind of like that. They would have lunch every week with the [art] editor, Jim Geraghty, and the wit flew around. When we first got married, though, we were living on the G.I. Bill, $75 a month, living in a cold water flat for $35 a month. No hot water, no heat. I don’t know how we survived, frankly. CBC: Did your father pay for the wedding? Ramona: No, I wouldn’t have asked him to. We just had a small wedding. CBC: Was your mother there? Ramona: No, she couldn’t get around. We just went off and got married. CBC: Just a local thing? Ramona: Well, we were in the city. CBC: Was it love at first sight? Ramona: No, no. [laughs] It was hate at first sight. He could be very crusty.

TM & © DC Comics.

CBC: What did you like about him? Ramona: I had great confidence in him. I mean, I had some really horrible boyfriends…. unstable… They were smart and attractive , but I knew I should really not be with them for too long. [laughs] They were not wholesome guys. They drank a lot, but Dana seemed really solid. CBC: Did you ever think for a time maybe that you were attracted to somebody like your father? Ramona: I don’t know. I was irresponsible, I suppose. CBC: Bad boys. Ramona: And I knew that Dana would be good for me. CBC: Was he nice? Ramona: Yes. And he was very steady and he’s a good person. CBC: Did he love you? Ramona: I tend to think so. He married me, didn’t he? [laughter] When I met Dana he was going from class to class looking for girls. CBC: To date or to draw? Ramona: No, no. To date. The first time I went out with him, he needed a date to go to a party that some other girl he was interested in was going to. [Jon laughs] And then we got to know each other after that. So, finally, we got married. CBC: Was the plan to have children? Ramona: No, it was not to have children until I decided finally I wanted to have them. CBC: So what did you wanna do? Ramona: I had no ambition to do anything. CBC: You were looking to be a housewife or… what? Ramona: No. Nothing. When I got out of art school, it was like a big blank hole. I had no idea about what to do. It was, I think, 1947. I was what would you call a very confused, disturbed kid! CBC: Disturbed? Ramona: Yes. I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know what the rules were. I had no direction. It was really awful. CBC: And your brother? Ramona: My brother was a big drinker, but he did become a lettering man and had a successful business, though not a successful life, I would say. CBC: Is he still around? Ramona: No, he died about 10 years ago. CBC: Did you ever bond with your brother? Ramona: He wasn’t very nice to me when I was a kid, so I never really got over not liking him. He tried to be friendly with me, but I just didn’t care for him that much. CBC: So you were really isolated. Ramona: Yes, I was. When I met Dana, he seemed so safe to me and I really needed that. [laughs] I would say Dana has been a rock in my life. Sometimes a hard rock, but nevertheless… [laughter] He’s the one that talked me into being a cartoonist. Back before I submitted to the comics, Dana and I did a couple newspaper strips together. We never submitted ’em, but you know, they were damn good! The drawing was quite good. Some of them, I think, are in that book by Howard Chaykin [see previous page]. One was about a detective and one was sort of an Ali Baba. You know, a little guy. CBC: But it was comical? Ramona: Yeah, it was comic and the other one was an adventure strip. We tried… Dana and Bob Kraus, another New Yorker cartoonist, wrote a strip that was called Jonathan Bond or something, about a broker. But I finally rebelled because I was doing all the work! [laughs] They would sit there having fun thinking of ideas and I would have to spend hours drawing ’em, so I said I’m not doing this anymore. But I just drifted. That’s all. I’ve never really pursued any goal except to get my house fixed when I had it. Everything just drops in my lap and if it looks all right I take it. [laughs] CBC: But you had a work ethic. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Ramona: Yes, I did. CBC: What was the primary thing? Was it to make money? Was it to please the editors? Just keep the money steady? Ramona: I don’t know. It was just something that I always thought I should do—that I should really work, that I should have some kind of a job or career. And I think that’s because of my father. I mean, he seriously expected me to be an artist! So it never occurred to me to go to college. I was heading for art school. I had no idea why. CBC: Was there any notion? A fashion artist or…? Ramona: He did want me to be a fashion artist. You know, do the Lord & Taylor ads and that kind of stuff. CBC: Under his logo. Ramona: Right! [laughs] And, you know, I dutifully went to Parsons and just had no interest in it whatsoever, because they weren’t teaching me how to draw. I thought it was fun but I wasn’t learning anything. Then a friend of mine was going to the Art Students League and suggested I do that. So I switched over and it was a good move. CBC: Now, were you influenced by any other artists? Ramona: Not at that time. Top: DC’s amphibious super-hero, Aquaman, was Ramona’s longest-running assignment in the comics field, lasting between 1951–63. Left inset: Now and again, she would contribute a random job for the publisher’s mystery books, including this for House of Mystery #48 [Mar. 1956]. 27

the ’30s and ’40s. I just always knew that I could do it. That’s all. It didn’t seem too difficult. I just had to learn to use brushes and learn inking and get faster. And I had to learn about making faces look alike. That’s a trick, I think, that you develop. You have to absorb the face so that you’d know that it’s recognizable when it’s a side-view or front-view or even back-view. You have to know that person. At first it was hard for me because I was trying to do it literally, but that’s not the way you do it. You have to do it by “feeling” that person’s face. Is that clear to you or not? CBC: Not really, because you know and I don’t. [laughter] You’re an artist. I mean, how do you feel a face? Ramona: [Laughs] That’s how I draw, Jon! I have to feel it. I have to feel the action. That is hard. I draw from the inside out. That’s all I can say. CBC: You know, the Beats were starting to come up and Greenwich Village was starting to be a center of culture. Did you and Dana go with that crowd at all? Ramona: Yes. We hung out at Julius’s, Minetta Tavern, and what’s that other one…? The San Remo, the place we hung out most. We were down there every night, drinking with the Village crowd. Joe Gould, a guy who was writing the oral history of the world, hung out at Minetta Tavern. Maxwell Bodenheim, a very odd character who wrote an off-color book called Replenishing Jessica, used to peer in the windows at the San Remo, disappear and appear again in another window. Nobody paid any attention

Above: In 1961, Ramona’s signature character was given a four-issue solo tryout in Showcase [#30–33, Jan.–Aug.], which included an origin story highlighting the hero’s command over sea life. Right: The artist recently re-imagined the spectacle in pencil.

to him. And Carson McCuller’s brother, Tom, used to hang out there. I knew his wife—she was a page at CBS when I was there—and for some reason I lent him $300, which he never paid back. In those days, the Village was still the Village. It wasn’t owned by the rich. CBC: So your father was an alcoholic. Were you able to drink and then put the glass down? Ramona: I drank lot. We all did. CBC: Did it get out of hand? Ramona: Well, I think I drank too much, but I wasn’t an alcoholic. I was just a really heavy social drinker. We’d start drinking at five o’clock and we’d drink through the evening. It was ridiculous. When you’re young, I guess you can do that. CBC: You weren’t an angry drinker? Ramona: Oh, no. It was just a bad habit. CBC: Well, amongst the creative community, you really started seeing a shift… Basically, pot came in and there was heroin in the jazz clubs. Stuff like that. Was that ever a part of your scene? Ramona: No, we never did drugs. To this day, I’ve never done anything— marijuana, nothing—because I really thought that if I started, I would have become addicted. CBC: Were you obsessed with other things? Ramona: Basically eating. I’ll happily overeat if I don’t watch myself. So I thought if I started doing drugs, it would be the end of me. CBC: Did you see cautionary tales around you? Ramona: Yes, my father for one, and I liked to be healthy. I didn’t want to be a slave to drugs. Being a slave to cigarettes was bad enough. CBC: So you had just enough self-esteem… Ramona: That’s right, and I can’t stand being unhealthy. I did smoke, though. I smoked… Oh, my god. #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Aquaman TM & © DC Comics.

CBC: How did you develop your style? Is it totally you? Ramona: I used to read the newspapers a lot, and I loved the drawing that this one fellow did. I think he was a sports cartoonist for The Daily News (but it could have been another paper). It was wonderfully loose drawing. And I found that’s that how I’m inclined to draw, a kind of exaggerated, loose sort of drawing. When I was in a sketch class and somebody was looking at my drawings, they said, “You should be a cartoonist.” And I guess I was a cartoonist without realizing it. I grew up on book illustrations, too. There were some wonderful book illustrations! Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Moby Dick… I know we had an edition of Moby Dick with the most beautiful drawings in it. I don’t think I was exposed to much fine art at that point, before I went to art school, but I was very much exposed to commercial, popular art. And I loved it! I really did. CBC: You have a natural storytelling ability. Where did you get that? Ramona: It was just natural. I didn’t pick it up; I just had it. CBC: You weren’t even looking at comic books? Ramona: No. I never looked at comic books. CBC: While you were in the business, you never looked at other people’s comic books? Ramona: Not much, no. Well, I mean I ran out and got ’em when I made samples. That’s when I first became acquainted with them. As far as storytelling ability, I think you either have it or you don’t. CBC: Well, it’s one thing to be an illustrator. It’s another thing to be a storyteller. Ramona: That’s true. I knew right off the bat, even when Dana and I were doing those strips, I knew this one should be a close-up, that one should be a long shot and I just knew it. I think it was by osmosis, by looking at Caniff’s drawing. That was such masterful storytelling I just absorbed that all during

Aquaman and Aqualad TM & © DC Comics.

CBC: But the Surgeon General’s Report hadn’t come out yet. Ramona: No, but when it did, I quit. CBC: Four out of five doctors say that Chesterfield actually makes you feel better. [laughter] Ramona: Well, I was so addicted to cigarettes. I quit about five times and always started again.…” CBC: “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” [laughter] You and Dana were invited to parties. Were you friendly with James Thurber and those New Yorker people? Ramona: Oh, yes. We knew a lot of people connected with the magazine. At one time or another, I met all of them. Barney Tobey, Whitney Darrow, and the ones you mentioned, were a bit older than the group we hung out with although we knew William Steig quite well. Our friends were Bill Hamilton, Ed Fisher, Don Reilly, Lee Lorenz, Bob Kraus, Jim Mulligan, Joe Mirachi… CBC: Were the rates really good? Ramona: Oh, yes! While I was making $35 a page drawing comics, Dana was getting a thousand for a cartoon plus bonuses! CBC: For a single cartoon? Ramona: Depending on how they sized it. CBC: Who was the cartoon editor again? Ramona: Jim Geraghty, a charming guy. For over thirty years he nurtured the excellence New Yorker cartoons were noted for then. CBC: What was the ratio, generally, for how many cartoons Dana would do and how many would be accepted? Ramona: [Laughs] I can’t give you an exact figure, but maybe he’d do twenty roughs a week and hoped he’d get one okay. And that meant he could go ahead and make a finished drawing. It was a grind. He would sweat it out every week, waiting for the okays. CBC: Did he look to you for ideas? Ramona: No. I never could think of gags. But I did help him with his drawing. He used to get stuck on doing an animal or something, so I’d help him with that. CBC: You mean some of your art appeared in the New Yorker then? Ramona: Well, corrections. And I did a few spots. Little drawings that they interspersed throughout the magazine. But I couldn’t think of gags. It takes a great deal of focus to reduce a complicated thought into one line. CBC: So Dana would typically get one in an issue? Ramona: He would be in there almost every week. CBC: You guys were doing well! That’s $50,000! What did you mean, bonuses? Ramona: Well, they had some kind of a bonus system. Every year, for signing, they’d get a bonus and they had a retirement plan and incredible medical insurance. CBC: But Christmas was good? Ramona: I can’t remember all the details. It’s been so long. But I do know it was a lot better than what I was making drawing comics! [laughs] CBC: I guess we should segue into comics. When did you pick up your first comic? Ramona: When I was talked into trying to get a job doing comics. George Ward, a friend of ours who was lettering comics used to talk about a guy named Joe Maneely, who was making a fortune drawing comics. One day he said, “Why don’t you make some samples and try to get a job? You could do it.” He had seen a strip that Dana and I had been working on together. Dana was writing and I was drawing it. CBC: What was it? Ramona: It was a newspaper strip about a detective. We never tried to sell it, but I had gotten a lot of practice doing it and George thought it looked pretty good. This was probably 1950 or ’51. CBC: I think Joe got in the business around ’46. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Ramona: Right, so he was already established and making $2,000 a month. CBC: [Laughs] Did you know he also did something like 20,000 pages for Stan Lee? Did you know how prolific he was? Ramona: That’s the thing! I thought, “Well, that’s the business I want to be in! [laughs] I mean, I’d been working in Bloomingdale’s basement selling underwear, so anything would have been better than that. But, when I started, I could barely do a page a week. CBC: “Women’s bloomers.” Ramona: No, men’s underwear! [Jon laughs] Fruit of the Loom! CBC: So you were a page at CBS for a number of years? Ramona: While I was in art school, yes. For about three years, 1945 to ’48. CBC: Where were you on V-E Day? Did you go down to Times Square? Ramona: No. What I remember is the day of the atom bomb. I was in Martha’s Vineyard. It was during our summer vacation. I remember that headline and thinking, “Oh my god, nothing is going to be the same after this.” V-E Day? I don’t remember where I was. CBC: It must have been a relief, though. Top: Artist John Watson based his painting (which graced the cover of Alter Ego V.3 #69 [June 2007]) on an exquisite Ramona Fradon pencil drawing. Thanks to A/E editor Roy Thomas for this presentation. Left inset: For her many convention appearances, Ramona produces any number of commission pieces. 29

Must have been a relief for your brother. Ramona: Yes, he went overseas. He was a technician in the Air Corps, keeping the planes flying. He was there during the whole thing, but never saw any combat. CBC: Was he in England? Ramona: I think he was in France because he learned to say, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” [“Do you want to sleep with me tonight?”] [laughs] CBC: When did your mother pass away? Ramona: In ’52. And she was so interested in the election campaign where Adlai Stevenson was running [against Dwight Eisenhower]. But she died right before the election and didn’t get a chance to find out who won. She’d been sick for years and years, her health going down and down. It was so sad. CBC: Did you have any feelings about Civil Rights? Ramona: Oh, yes. When I was 19, I thought, “Now I’m going to be voting pretty soon,” and I started reading all the newspapers and immediately got radicalized, y’know? [laughs] I mean, I wanted to go over and fight in Israel… Everything! I was very radical! I thought I might be a communist then and work to alleviate the plight of the starving masses, but one day I was walking down the street looking around and I thought, “Gee, everybody looks pretty well fed here. It can’t be as bad as they say!” I mean, we voted for Truman even though we preferred [1948 Progressive Party candidate for President Henry] Wallace. We were pretty reasonable Democrats, I think. But I’m a progressive Democrat. I wanted to see some big changes, and still do CBC: Abortions were actually illegal, right? Ramona: Right. I had a couple of friends who got illegal abortions. It

This page and next: And so was born, to Ramona and Dana Fradon, on Nov. 29, 1959, daughter Amy. Courtesy of her mother, here are various snapshots of Amy as a baby and youngster with her parents. Included are Ramona’s commission work, depictions of her most celebrated assignment of the 1950s — Aquaman and (her co-creation) Aqualad—and her unforgettable ’60s co-invention, Metamorpho, the Element Man! 30

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Aquaman and Aqualad TM & © DC Comics.

wasn’t pretty. Wasn’t at all. CBC: Because birth control wasn’t available. Was there a sense of frustration about that? Ramona: Well, birth control was available. But some girls got pregnant by mistake and a friend of mine who got an abortion was put right out on the street after she had it. That’s the way it was. There was no lying around in a bed getting waited on. It was illegal. And that’s what’s happening again in the United States. People just don’t remember how dangerous illegal abortions were. CBC: Was feminism becoming part of your outlook? Ramona: Not at that time. That didn’t affect me ’til the ’70s. I mean, I was already working and I was already out in the world. Many of my friends became radicalized though. They were housewives and a lot of them were frustrated just doing housework and they wished that they’d been out doing something else. So it just sort of passed me by until maybe the late ’70s or early ’80s, and then the ideas began to filter down to me. CBC: By your description, you were passive. In retrospect you were fine with that? Ramona: Yes. I mean, it’s the way I have to operate. I can’t function any other way. Some people decide they want something and go out and get it. I’m not like that. I have to wait for the wave to come along. CBC: You can’t control circumstances. Your father left you and your mother passed away at a young age. Ramona: Maybe that’s it. But I think it’s just the way I am, you know? I’m just content to wait ’til it’s time. CBC: Were you equal partners? Ramona: Dana and I? Yes. I mean, he made most of the money so, of course, he was paying most of the bills. We had a farm and we boarded horses out in Connecticut when we moved out there. And I took care of the horses and did the housework, took care of the baby, you know? I did a lot. But we were equal, yes. CBC: So you didn’t have your separate bank account? Ramona: No, no. We were good about that. Money was no problem for us. CBC: That’s awesome to have a comfortable existence after your respective childhoods growing up. Ramona: Yes, it was. But the way Dana grew up in Chicago… being so frightened and on welfare…he never got over that, whereas I had that initial comfortable upbringing, so I never felt poor. CBC: Oh, so you didn’t feel like your peers were richer? Ramona: No. [laughs] But it was annoying to me. CBC: Because you couldn’t do what they did? Ramona: Yes! Mostly because I couldn’t buy cigarettes… but I never felt poor! I just felt we’re living in this place and it wasn’t a bad place. In Bronxville, nothing’s bad. But, to this day, I think Dana feels poor and he’s 93 now. CBC: The Depression really... Ramona: The one we had in 2008 was nothing compared to that. If the next one is worse, really worse, maybe they’ll finally break up the banks. CBC: Maybe. [laughs] Then Korea comes along. Ramona: Yes, I thought that was a misguided war. Later on, I heard [U.S. Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles say that they were mistaken. They were convinced Stalin had put the North up to invading the South, but then

Metamorpho TM & © DC Comics.

they learned that he hadn’t. CBC: When did you get pregnant? Ramona: 1959. My daughter was born in November, 1959. CBC: But you got married years earlier, right? Ramona: Forty-eight. Yes. I didn’t really think of having kids and then, all of a sudden, I decided I wanted to have a baby and we had Amy. If any astrologers are reading this: Uranus was on my Moon. CBC: You were intrigued with Joe Maneely’s success. So did you make samples? Ramona: I didn’t know anything about comics so I went out and bought detective, romance, Westerns, about everything I could find, and spent a couple of weeks wading through those things. [laughs] CBC: What was your take? Ramona: Well… you know, you start reading the stories and you get caught up in them. So that happened, sure, it was entertaining. Because I liked drawing horses, I decided I would do a page of Western vignettes, so that’s what I did. Just pencils! CBC: Now, did you know how to do them? Did you know that it was twice up? Or did you do it same size, maybe? Ramona: Maybe [cartoonist and Walt Kelly assistant] George Ward gave me some tips on what to do. And Dana had been trying to get into newspaper strips for a long time, so I think I got some help from him. But, in terms of what to draw, I just drew. And it was funny because I knew just how to make action lines and where the “pows” went. I knew because I had read so many comic strips as a kid and I just had a feeling. I never questioned that I could do it. So I drew that one page and started to take it around and everywhere I went I got a job. CBC: Was it unusual for a woman to be coming in? Where did you go? Do you remember? Ramona: Oh, yes. I think the first place that I went was Fox and they gave me a 12-page script. And then I heard that they didn’t pay, so I gave them back their script! [laughs] I was sort of intimidated by it, anyway. Then I went to Timely. That was up in the Empire State Building, you know, Stan Lee’s thing before it was Marvel. I got a couple of stories there to illustrate, but they were war stories and I was anti-war, so I hated doing them! CBC: Did you draw ’em? Ramona: Yes. I may have inked them, too. I did ink them because the second one I spilled ink on. I figured then I was terminated. [laughs] CBC: Really? Stan fired you? Ramona: Well it wasn’t Stan. It was a guy named Bob Brown, I think. CBC: Bob Brown, the artist? Ramona: I don’t know who he was but anyway, he was the one who hired me. And I don’t think I was terminated exactly, but I think I thought maybe I’d better go somewhere else. For some reason, I wasn’t there anymore. Then I went up to DC and got my first job from them. CBC: When did you—roughly—go to Timely? Ramona: Nineteen fifty-one? 1952, I think. When was the Korean War going on? Probably 1951. CBC: So it must have been a violent story that you did. Ramona: Well, of course; everybody was killing everybody else. CBC: The “yellow menace.” Ramona: I had to draw tanks and all that stuff, and I didn’t know what I was doing really. But then, I went to DC and that was it. I was there forever. CBC: When a woman comes in, was there a change in attitude? Were there jerks? Ramona: Well, nobody was ever a jerk. They’d just hire me. I think [DC editor] Murray Boltinoff came out and looked at my drawings in the hall. I guess that’s how they did it. In fact, Dana said he used to have to deliver his roughs on Wednesday to the different magazines and they’d have to stand out in the hall. They called the cartoonists the “bread line.” Cartooning wasn’t held in very high esteem. CBC: But there were a lot of jobs, right? Ramona: There were jobs. There were a lot of magazines back then. So Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Murray Boltinoff came out, looked at my work and he said, “Did you do this?” [laughs] And I assumed that meant he liked it because he gave me a script. CBC: What did you show him? Ramona: I don’t know what I showed him. I have no idea. It may have been that same page of samples. He gave me a “Shining Knight” story. I think it was a four- or a six-pager, something like that. And then he kept giving me assignments until finally I started doing “Aquaman.” CBC: Did you hand-deliver the jobs? Ramona: Yes. CBC: And you lived in Connecticut at the time? Ramona: Yes. CBC: When did you move to Connecticut? Ramona: I think we may have been in New York for five years, then moved out to Connecticut, to Newtown, near Danbury. CBC: Newtown, where the Sandy Hook massacre took place? Ramona: Yes, my daughter went to that school for a year. CBC: That must have hit home. Ramona: Yes, it really did. A friend of Amy’s who had lived in Sandy Hook and went to that school longer than Amy did was visiting when the shooting took place. He was identifying the different classrooms from an aerial photo found on the Internet. He remembered the one where the carnage took place and I tried not to think of Amy and Colin in that situation when they were little kids. But, anyway, that’s where we lived. CBC: You made a decision to have children, right? Ramona: After we had Amy I tried to have another and it didn’t happen. I had a friend who had a couple of kids and they were always fighting and I thought, [laughs] “Maybe I don’t want to do this.” So we stayed with one child and I love her. CBC: Was it a good pregnancy? Was it difficult? Ramona: Yes to the first question, no to the second. Amy was born quickly on November 29th, 1959. CBC: What was your experience when you arrived at DC? Ramona: When I brought that first story in, Murray took me into the small office, and there were [editors] Jack Schiff, George Kashdan, and Mort Weisinger sitting at desks. When I came in, there was a sudden silence. [laughs] But they were perfectly polite and nice, and I got to be good friends with George Kashdan. There was just one jerk up there who used to kiss me on the neck all the time and he was just a jerk. CBC: Did he work in production? Ramona: Yes. I know his name, but I’m not going to say it. Everybody else was nice except the nephew of the guy who owned the place? CBC: Harry Donenfeld? Ramona: Yeah, his nephew. He was another jerk. He was a young fellow. I don’t know his name. But I was hardly ever there. I’d just go in, drop off a script, pick up another one, and leave. This was until I did “Metamorpho.” Then I started hanging out more and got 31

you to do a page? Ramona: I got faster, but I think the first job I did was, like, rubber cement, paste-up… CBC: No self confidence on it or it was bad? Ramona: Well, it’s just that I had to get the faces to look alike, and then inking was hard. I was learning on the job. CBC: In the beginning, were you doing House of Mystery and House of Secrets? Ramona: All different things, but not the mysteries yet. I drew Westerns, Gang Busters, a couple of romance stories. I even did a Plop! [story] once. It was a silly thing. Have you seen that book The Art of Ramona Fradon? They reprinted some of my early drawings and there was this Plop! thing… Oh my god. CBC: But that’s not that early. That would be the early ’70s. So, there were a lot of politics that were taking place in the office. Mort Weisinger had a real reputation! Ramona: I’ve heard, but I didn’t know anything about it at the time. I vaguely got that he was somewhat controversial. I learned more about it in George’s interview. CBC: Did you ever hang out with any other comic pros? Ramona: No, and people used to ask, “Do you know Top: While we rummaged through her archives. Ramona and I found a mock-up for a children’s book titled The Richest Woman in the World, written by Joanne Homick and penciled (except for this one inked and colored spread) by Ramona. Left: The artist took a leave from comics for much of the ’60s to raise her young daughter. #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Art TM & © Ramona Fradon.

to know George better. We became friends and I got to know Bob Haney. Then, when I worked for Joe Orlando, we became good friends, too. But that’s about it. I didn’t know anybody else because I wasn’t there and I’m not so friendly and outgoing that I would have started talking to everybody because I don’t do that. CBC: What made you become friends with George? Ramona: I felt we were kind of kindred spirits. We talked about everything but comics. And after reading that interview he did for Alter Ego [#93–94], I regret that we didn’t spend more time on that. I learned lot of things I didn’t know about the business and the personalities in it. He was a shrewd observer and had strong opinions about the other people up there. He was quite an intellectual guy. I think he went to a school in New York for gifted students… Science and Art maybe. He seemed to me to be out of place in comics, but he was good at what he did, so I guess he wasn’t. He and Joe Orlando were the only people I really knew. Murray Boltinoff was, like, up… you know… CBC: Uptight? Ramona: Oh, yes! Straightlaced, uptight. CBC: Was he professional in that sense? Ramona: Yes. CBC: Did he have a check waiting for you when you came in? Ramona: Always. CBC: That must have been nice. Ramona: It was. I mean the checks were pathetic but, still, you know...They were there and there was no baloney. CBC: What was your page rate? Ramona: I think at that point it was $35. [laughs] CBC: How long would it take

Metamorpho TM & © DC Comics.

CBC: You were always right? How was Murray as an editor? Marie Severin?” I never met Marie until 1995, in San Diego. [laughs] I wish Ramona: I don’t think he was that interested in the drawing. It was the I’d known her before. I love her. We had such fun complaining about super writing. Most of the editors were like that. They were interested in the heroes and mens’ fantasies. CBC: Did you ever look at comic books at all? Did you ever save the com- stories. The only editor who was different was Joe Orlando. He was an artist himself and was interested in the drawing and in helping me improve. ics that you had done? Ramona: Well, they’d give them to me, so I would look through them and I learned a lot from Joe. CBC: People bring this stuff up to you to autograph, right? Do you occaI hated seeing my work in print. Oh my god! It was painful then, but now sionally look through it? Did your storytelling improve over time? some of it doesn’t look so bad. I tend to be super-critical of my work when Ramona: You know, I was always pretty good at storytelling. I knew from it first comes out and then later on I become more forgiving. I would look the beginning how to do that. at the other artists in that book, but that was all. I never bought comics, CBC: Was it intuitive? never looked at them. I didn’t know what was going on and so when I did Metamorpho I had no idea it had taken off. I just didn’t know! I was living in Ramona: I suppose so. Of course, I went to movies and absorbed closeups and long shots, and had the another world… good fortune to follow artists like CBC: When did you and Dana get Eisner and Caniff, who were master divorced? storytellers. But it was also intuitive. Ramona: In ’82. I remember Howard Chaykin asked CBC: So you were summering in me if I used this method or that Martha’s Vineyard, living in Conmethod of laying out a page. I didn’t necticut. You were pretty comforthave a method. I’d read the script able. and pictures would come into my Ramona: Oh, yes. I was a subhead, you know? This is a close-up urban matron, driving my child to or that’s a looking up or a long shot school, attending PTA meetings, and or… but I had no method. then a script would come in and I’d CBC: I think I saw some character be drawing all this blood and gore. designs. Metamorpho, right? Bob [laughs] Haney wrote that. Can you tell me CBC: Now, you’d just started your the process? Was it just another career and Wertham had come in. assignment for you or were you part Did you sense that? of the creative process? Ramona: Oh, yes. Comics seemed Ramona: Oh, yes. I had stopped completely disreputable to me. I work to raise my daughter and was embarrassed that I was doing George called me one day and said comics and I‘ve heard a lot of other he had an idea that he thought I cartoonists, who were working at should draw, would be good on. that time, say the same thing. They My first instinct was to say, “No, wouldn’t tell people what they did. I’m raising my child!” But he said, CBC: What did you tell people that “Would you just get this started?” you did? Then he told me what he had in Ramona: Well, people knew what mind and I began to be intrigued. I was doing, but Dana was a New Bob Haney had come up with a Yorker cartoonist, so I was happy story that I thought had so much to be in the background. I suppose comic potential I couldn’t resist people thought it amusing. Not like it. So I agreed to get it started, to it is today, where suddenly we’re design the characters, do the first celebrities and people rummage four issues, and maybe some extra around in your waste basket looking covers. Then we had to had to figure for drawings you’ve thrown out. out what Metamorpho should look Hollywood publicity has transformed like. [laughs] us. Where we used to be schlumps, CBC: What was the description now we are somebody. that was given to you on that? CBC: So you were embarrassed by Ramona: Well, I knew he was a what you were doing? character who was made up of four Ramona: Yes, I was. I still don’t understand why grown-up men read Above: Certainly among CBC’s favorite Ramona Fradon work is her collaboration — elements. and co-creation — with underrated writer Bob Haney, Metamorpho, and endearing, CBC: What were the four elecomics. I’m sorry, but… [laughter] charming, and utterly outrageous character who, after an initial two-issue tryout in ments? CBC: That’s your legacy, Ramona! The Brave and the Bold, had a nearly three-year run in his solo title. This is the cover Ramona: Well, traditionally they I’m sorry, but you really are good! of his second appearance, The Brave and the Bold #58 [Feb.–Mar. 1965]. are earth, air, fire, and water, and [Ramona laughs] What, you don’t I vaguely followed that formula believe it? except that he ended up looking like he had a disease. I knew that he could Ramona: That I’m a good artist? I think I do good sketches. I like the change his body, could shuffle his atoms around and turn into different drawings I’m doing now and I think I did a good job on Super Friends and things, like steel and gas and things like that. And I knew that he’d been Metamorpho… and Plastic Man. The goofy stuff. But not so much on the disfigured after being in this pyramid. That’s all I knew about him. I started serious super-heroes. by putting him in a cape and a mask… you know, the typical stuff, but CBC: I think it’s charming work. You obviously had a nice long gig with that didn’t work. Finally, we were sitting around talking and I’m not sure “Aquaman.” who figured it out but it turned out that since his body changes shape all Ramona: Yes, that was during the ’50s. the time his body shouldn’t be covered by clothes! So I put him in nothing CBC: Was Bob Haney writing all those or no? but shorts… of course, with an “M” on the belt, divided his body into four Ramona: No, I think it was Jack Miller. That’s what I understood. But I different colors and textures that were supposed to represent elements, never met him. and then I had to figure out what his face would look like, and I am solely CBC: You didn’t have any collaboration with him? responsible for that. [laughs] Ramona: No. CBC: Metamorpho is an odd-looking character! CBC: Did you ever hear of any complaints that you got anything wrong? Ramona: But he was also sexy, so never mind! Ramona: No. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

This page: At top left is the original art for the splash page of Metamorpho #2 [Sept.–Oct. ’65], with inks by the renowned inker Charles Paris, best recalled for his delineation on the Batman stories of pencilers Sheldon Moldoff and Dick Sprang. The Element Man is frequently requested by fans for Ramona’s commission assignments. 34

Ramona: Well, yes. And the ’70s and early ’80s. CBC: By the late ’60s, the underground artists were coming in. Ramona: I never read those either. CBC: Hippies weren’t #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Metamorpho TM & © DC Comics.

CBC: I guess that was around the time that Batmania started, 1965-66? My memory has it that Metamorpho started off in The Brave and the Bold. But you had an understanding, as far as you recall, of a planned four issues? They had already decided they were gonna give him his own title? Ramona: I guess they had! I think the first two were in B&B. It must have taken off right away because they gave him a title pretty soon. But I didn’t know then. Nobody told me. CBC: What was Metamorpho’s real name? Ramona: Rex Mason. CBC: And what was he? Ramona: He was an adventurer. CBC: It was a job at the time. [Ramona laughs] “What’s your job?” “Adventurer.” And he had a girlfriend. Ramona: Sapphire Stagg, a beautiful, spoiled heiress. Her father was a billionaire, a nasty scientist. CBC: He’s the money that the motivated the plot… Ramona: Yes. [laughs] That’s what I loved about it: there were all these stereotypes! They were so deliciously awful. CBC: “Deliciously awful”! [laughs] Ramona: It was just fun, you know? I mean, up until then I’d been drawing these boring faceless super-heroes, and now suddenly I get this script that was so bizarre! I decided that now I could finally draw the way I wanted to and I really loved that. CBC: So “Aquaman” was just boring? Ramona: Well, yes. I hate to say it. CBC: Did you hate it so much that you used raising a daughter as an excuse to quit or you really had to? Ramona: Well, she was two then, hanging on my knee, and I’d be trying

to meet deadlines. It was ridiculous. I couldn’t continue to do that. CBC: Did you have to stay up late often? What did you do? Ramona: I would, of course, wait ’til the deadline was looming. What did I do? I went crazy. And the poor little thing. We used to drop pencils and crayons—Dana, too—on the floor and she’d be down there coloring, you know? [laughs] CBC: That’s what mommy’s doing, right? Ramona: She has told me she liked that! But it wasn’t fair to her. I couldn’t keep doing it. If I had been faster it would have been one thing, but I wasn’t. CBC: Did you really need the money? Ramona: No, but my mother used to say, “Don’t do what I did.” She gave up her work. She wanted to be an artist, too. So I had it stuck in my mind that because we got left high and dry I figured somehow I had to keep working no matter what, even though I wasn’t making any real money. But it was something, you know. CBC: So did your husband have a studio in the house? Ramona: Yes. CBC: So you were both there during weekdays? Did you interact with each other at all? Ramona: Oh, sure. We weren’t in the same space—I had a little studio and he was up in the attic studio—but, yes, we were both there and we’d eat lunch together and we’d work around the place. CBC: Were you friends? Ramona: Yes, we were. CBC: It’s probably about a year, year-and-a-half that you just worked raising Amy, right? Ramona: No, it was seven years! I waited ’til she was in school. I hadn’t planned to go back, but I was getting a little restless just being a housewife. And then one day Roy Thomas called me and asked me if I wanted to do a story. CBC: So the Metamorpho thing was just an anomaly? Ramona: Yes. I just did that to help George out, to get it started. CBC: Right. So then you went back to child-rearing. Were you just planning, “That was the last thing I will do in comics”? Was that the thought? Ramona: I didn’t have any plan. I never do. CBC: Just day by day? Ramona: [Laughs] So this wave came along and I got on it when Roy called me. CBC: There was a lot going on at the time. A lot of the changes were from 1960–70. Ramona: It didn’t hit suburbia, I can tell you. CBC: It hit Westchester. Ramona: Did it really? CBC: Well, yeah. People were getting divorced, the whole counterculture came in. Ramona: Oh, that’s when everybody was having affairs… CBC: John Cheever and key parties and… Ramona: Yes, there was a lot of that. In fact, all my friends got involved with each other. It was a mess. CBC: Were you still hanging around the New Yorker crowd this late, in the ’60s?

Art TM & © Ramona Fradon.

really part of your world? Ramona: No, I didn’t like hippies. CBC: What’d you think? Ramona: By that time I was over 30 and it was the ’60s. You know what they used to say: “Over 30? Forget it.” I was one of those, except I used to go on marches. We spent the whole ’60s doing politics against the war. That’s what we did. CBC: Did you sympathize with the kids in the Chicago riots in ’68? Ramona: Yes, some of them. But I think the cops were ridiculous. They were out for blood. They still are horrible out there. But, yes, we took over our town and we got delegates. We learned about the process. We were really good at it. Dana was a big organizer. In fact, that’s where we met Bill Clinton. He was in Connecticut, at Yale, and he’d come over to organize our district, so we worked with him. We had Clinton over for dinner one night—I made delicious sausage and peppers. He was beautiful, had a kind of aura around him. Everybody knew he was going to be president. There was something about him. I can’t stand him now. He turned the Democrats into a corporate, Wall Street party and is constantly trying to foist his wife on us. He was just engaged to Hillary when he was at our house and while he was talking about her the glow around him got even brighter. That didn’t prevent him from dallying with one of my friends during that period, however. CBC: Where were you when JFK was assassinated? Were you home? Ramona: Oh, yes. I remember that weekend. It was a gray November day and a friend of mine had a little boy who was dying of cancer and they were at the hospital in Boston, so I was over at their house babysitting their daughter. It was awful! The dirges playing on the TV, the injustice of such a vibrant young life taken away, and then Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Those were terrible years. People look back on the ’60s nostalgically, but they were not fun times! CBC: Creatively, it was explosive. Ramona: Oh, that’s true. There’s no doubt about that. Civil Rights, protest marches, incredible music, LSD, and Tantra, and all the Eastern religions. It was a remarkable stew. CBC: Did you see that? Did you sense it? Ramona: Not really. I didn’t know the extent of it then. CBC: What about the Civil Rights movement in the early ’60s? Ramona: We were very involved.. CBC: Did you watch Martin Luther King make his “I have a dream” speech? Ramona: Oh, sure. We weren’t there for that, but I went down to every Civil Rights or anti-war protest I could. CBC: Can you give me a sense of when you began to pay attention to the Vietnam War? Ramona: I remember Eisenhower started sending supplies over there. He didn’t get us that involved, but started the ball rolling. Then Kennedy came in. We knew this was bad. He sent advisors over and he was big on the Green Berets. And, from the very beginning, we started protesting against that war. It just seemed totally wrong. CBC: Were you part of the Ban the Bomb movement? Ramona: Oh, sure. All of that. We went to all of those protests and collected petition signatures. We took over our town committee. When [U.S. Senator] Eugene McCarthy ran for president, we worked for him. We worked for [1970 U.S. Senate candidate] Joe Duffey. To me, that’s what the ‘60s was about. Every dinner party was a fight! Everybody fought with everybody over that damn war. It was horrible.

CBC: There was such a mix. John and Bobby Kennedy exuded this great hope, and then you had these enormous tragedies that had to take place. But you guys would always climb back. Ramona: But then, when [U.S. Presidential candidate George] McGovern was trounced [in 1972], that took the wind out of our sails. I think we were the Tea Party of the ’60s, I really do. We were extreme, we hated the establishment, we organized ferociously. We were just like they are only on opposite sides. CBC: [Laughs] You probably hated Nixon as much as they hate Obama. Ramona: Oh, yes! Absolutely! Well, George W. Bush, too. It’s really a shame that we do that on both sides—heaping venom on our opponents. CBC: It’s the system, really. They’ve come up with the perfect formula with cable TV using conflict as entertainment. So, your daughter was growing. She was born in ’59. Ramona: Yes, and I’d take her on marches with me. She loved it. CBC: Did you know anti-war personalities? Ramona: Well Dana knew more than I did from his work. Tony Podesta, Ann Wexler, Joe Leiberman, one of the Berrigan brothers, Stan Greenberg, Francine du Plessix Gray… William Styron was a stalwart. We met a lot of those people and were right in the middle of it all. And we had a friend, Stephanie Middleton, who was a super-human organizer. She was running most of the election district that we were living in and several others, too. She was indomitable. But McGovern’s defeat did us in. It was so decisive, and I suppose, so predictable. CBC: “Don’t Blame Me. I’m From Massachusetts.” [laughter] As you were involved in the anti-war movement, were you being watched by the F.B.I.? Ramona: Oh, yes! I think it was during the Eugene McCarthy years. We would go out and collect petition signatures on the streets and I remember more than once seeing guys in dark suits with cameras photographing us. Dana got audited three times—three times!—because he was doing all this anti-war stuff. And a friend of mine, who was doing a lot of mobilizing, got hate mail and threats. “You’re in our crosshairs,” type of thing. So there was a lot of hostility. I mean a lot! It was either you were for the war or you were against it. It was that simple. CBC: Have you ever done a Freedom of Information to find out if the F.B.I. was keeping tabs? Ramona: No, who cares at this point? I’m too old. [laughter] CBC: What did you do specifically in the anti-war movement? Ramona: I was on the phone 24 hours a day calling people. At first, we were living in Newtown [Connecticut] and the Democratic Party was moribund, practically run by the local St. Rose parish, all conservative Irish Catholics, and they were all for the war and. You know, they were Party people. So we set about redoing our town committee. We got on the phone

Top: Ramona and Dana Fradon were active in the Connecticut Democratic Party while they lived in Newtown, particularly in the 1960s when they, along with many other Americans, were increasingly alarmed about the U.S. military escalation in South Vietnam. This is a photo of a massive Hartford area rally during the October 1969 Vietnam Moratorium. Above inset: Undetermined watercolor illustration by Ramona, likely attached to another children’s book pitch — maybe inspired by Danny and the Dinosaur…? Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

This page: For a brief shining moment in the early 1970s, Ramona Fradon joined up with the House of Ideas to draw their flagship title, The Fantastic Four. Upper left is a page (inked by Joe Sinnott) of her single published comic book for Marvel during that time, FF #133 [Apr. ’73], “Thundra at Dawn. Though the title was cancelled before her contribution could see print, the artist did complete an issue of The Cat (inked by Jim Mooney). This commission sketch, at right, (and self-caricature) was drawn for Russ Garwood, and originally appeared in Alter Ego #69.

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Cat TM & © Marvel Characters.

and called people and we found there were a lot of liberal, anti-war people and we managed to get them to run. The St. Rose people weren’t paying attention at that point, so we managed to remake our town committee and then we learned how to get delegates. CBC: So, by the ‘60s, would you say that you were radicalized? Ramona: I’m radical to the extent Bernie Sanders is, y’know? I just think we need to overthrow this system of millionaires running this country. To me, it’s perfectly clear what is happening. The Congress is not independent. They’re not representing me… So yeah, I’m radical to that extent. That’s as far as it goes. CBC: So, by the mid-’60s, you saw Vietnam as a folly? Ramona: Oh, absolutely! I’m what you would now call a progressive. CBC: But that didn’t translate into the women’s liberation movement, necessarily? Ramona: No, I didn’t pick up on that until maybe the late ’70s or early ’80s. Because I was drawing and already had a career. And to me, in my experience, the women I knew out in the suburbs were housewives and a lot of them were very frustrated. They just never developed any part of themselves except being mothers and wives, which is great, but a lot of them were very depressed and felt incomplete. But I never did because I was always working, so I didn’t relate to that. I know there were other aspects to it, but that was the part of it that I saw… But it gradually began to seep in on me, you know? By 1980 or so, I suddenly said, “Well, here I am taking care of the house, I’m tending the horses...” — we had horses then — “I’m commuting into New York, going to college, I’m drawing. I can’t do all this!” He’s going to disagree with me on this, but I sat down with Dana and went, “I can’t do all of this. You’re going to have to do more of the housework.” There was this silence! [laughs] And I guess that was the influence that Women’s Lib had on me, that I had some rights, you know? But I’m not a militant feminist at all. I’m just too lazy. [laughter] I mean I could be militant about that and politics, too. CBC: Do you go to Europe for vacations? Ramona: Oh, yes. I love to travel. Just came back from Italy about a month ago. I must have been to Italy four or five times—to Germany, England, Switzerland, France, Yugoslavia, Spain, and even to Morocco, two years ago. CBC: Do you speak any other languages?

Ramona: Well, a little. I can get around. I used to know French and Spanish very well, I can read them, but when they start talking, not so much. But the food, the history, and just the way they live is so beautiful. CBC: So you were in suburbia and you were doing okay. Did you yearn for anything or was self-expression just enough? Ramona: Well, you know I wrote a couple of kids books during that period and I have one that I’m still selling. In fact, I’m thinking of trying to get it published. It’s a funny little book, drawn in loose-line and wash, and in poetry form. It’s comical and I sell a lot of them at conventions. CBC: You self-published? Ramona: Yes, which is the way to go except for the fact that I’m not a good publicist. I didn’t even try to publicize it and you don’t sell that much on Amazon if you don’t. But I take them to conventions and it sells well, so I probably should try to get it published. At any rate, I wasn’t entirely idle during that period. CBC: So this was in the late ’60s? Ramona: Yes. CBC: Your thought was to break in to children’s publishing? Ramona: Maybe, but I never did it. CBC: Fandom was rising up pretty strongly in the late ’60s. Did anyone try to get in touch with you? Ramona: No. I knew the fan mail that got printed in the comics, but I didn’t know anything about conventions. CBC: Did you get freelance work? Ramona: No. I really wasn’t looking to work. I think I sold a couple of spots to The New Yorker, but that’s it. I’m not very enterprising. Everything that I have has just dropped into my lap. CBC: Would you say you’re content? Ramona: Yes, I am. I don’t have to be in love anymore. I’m too old for that and life is peaceful. CBC: How did Roy Thomas get your number? Ramona: I think that was probably George Kashdan. CBC: He just called up DC? Ramona: I heard from George that Stan Lee loved Metamorpho. He really liked the drawing. So they knew me. Marvel had this series called The Cat and Roy wanted me to do an issue. It was the ’70s and it was a feature

Super Friends, Plastic Man TM & © DC Comics.

about a woman, so they may have been looking for a woman to draw it. I think that Marie Severin had done maybe an issue or two. CBC: With Wallace Wood, yeah. Ramona: So I go up there after not working for seven years and I mean everything was a shock! The office…! [laughs] You’ve been up at Marvel? It was completely free-form! There were no halls, no doors, no offices, no men in suits sitting behind, not on, their desks… It was just chaos! And then Roy hands me this one paragraph [laughter] and he says, “Here, make a 17-page story.” The first thing I thought was, “I’m writing this and drawing it for the same price?” But, anyway, I took it home and struggled through it and then they killed the feature, fortunately, before it even came out. CBC: What do you mean “fortunately”? Ramona: Because I think what I did was really awful. I was rusty… I didn’t know the characters.… I mean, from one paragraph, I’m supposed to produce an entire story? CBC: That’s the Marvel Method. Thank you, Stan Lee. Ramona: I think he ruined comics ultimately because it’s gotten to the point now where everybody’s drawing posters, basically, to sell at the conventions. Storytelling is an afterthought. CBC: You were given their flagship title, Fantastic Four. What’s the story behind that? Same thing? Ramona: Maybe it’s because Stan Lee liked my drawing. But, at any rate, they gave me a script for that one and I thought I did a pretty good job. It may not have looked exactly like Kirby but… I saw Joe Sinnott last year. We were together somewhere and somebody showed us a copy of that story. He looked at it and he said, “Huh! It’s better than I thought it was!” [laughter] Fortunately, he had inked it. But I thought it was not bad! Have you seen it! CBC: Of course! I thought it was a little surprising to see your credit in a Marvel comic. Ramona: Yes, it was different. CBC: I think it was fortunate that you were bringing in a new character. Ramona: Thundra. CBC: But then you disappeared. Ramona: I know. I didn’t think I did a good job. Roy insists that he would have given me more, but I don’t think I did well. I mean, I was rusty! I hadn’t been drawing a lot. You have to be in a groove, you know? CBC: Did you look at other guys’ work? Ramona: I guess I did. I had to see what the characters looked like. But I don’t think I really understood it… to the extent that I had to. I don’t think I ever got along well at Marvel. I had those war stories in the ’50s and then… I just don’t feel we were a good mix. So then I went back to DC. I felt, “Well, now that I’m back in comics, I might as well get another job.” CBC: So did you just stop over there? Ramona: Yes, and they were happy to see me. They liked my work. CBC: And you came along at a perfect Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

time, too. They were reviving characters like Plastic Man. It had been over ten years since the character had been in print. Ramona: I guess so. CBC: And Super Friends was more kid-friendly. Ramona: Yes, and my style was right for that. CBC: By this time, the feminist movement was having a huge impact . Ramona: I read a couple of things that made sense to me that I hadn’t thought about before. As I said, I had always thought there was something wrong with me because I really resented having to do all the housework and not get any help. Which is just the way marriages were back then in the ’50s. And I thought I should really not feel this way. And when the women’s movement came along, I learned that there were a lot of other women out there who felt the same. So, to that extent, I was interested in it, but as far as being stuck as a housewife and not having any career, I didn’t relate to that. CBC: You were taking to the streets with the Vietnam war protests. Ramona: Well, that too. CBC: So you did work for Marvel for a brief period. Is that all you did? You did Fantastic Four and The Cat? Ramona: Yes, just those two. CBC: How did you meet up with Joe Orlando? Ramona: Well, I went up there and someone steered me to Joe. He was doing mysteries and he was looking to give out assignments. CBC: Well, he had Plop! He did have that weird humor magazine. Ramona: Yes, he had that, too, but basically he was doing the mysteries. He looked at my work and gave me jobs. But he knew who I was. I was pretty sure that if I went up there, I’d get work again. CBC: So you went on your own volition up there? Ramona: Right. CBC: You were given kid-friendly books? Ramona: Well, no. I was given the mysteries. I did all of those. House of Secrets and House of Mystery. I loved that. Working with Joe was fun. He was always looking for ways to get around the Code, [laughs] so he’d use humor if he had to. One story that I worked on where a person was killed was just too gruesome, though. At the end, this woman was poisoned and I had to draw her eyes bulging out and her swollen tongue sticking out of her mouth. Maybe I got a little carried away on that one. There was another one where they had to change some of the pictures because they were too gross. Another was about somebody butchering horses for dog food and it was just too graphic, CBC: Oh, they asked for revisions? Ramona: No, somebody else would do it. But it was fun working on those mysteries because they were all so melodramatic. [laughs] You couldn’t take them seriously. And Joe was This page: Soon after her abortive attempt at joining the Marvel Bullpen, Ramona was back at DC, where she produced memorable work on Super Friends and (especially) a wonderful Plastic Man revival (written by Steve Skeates), a series that perfectly complemented her style. 37

wouldn’t have if she’d stayed at Newtown. CBC: So, in her teenage years, she was a good student? Ramona: Yes, then she accelerated and graduated at 16, which we probably shouldn’t have let her do. She went to Skidmore for a year and didn’t like it, so she switched to New York University. And, when I went to NYU, I was a grade behind her! She was a sophomore by that time and I was a freshman! CBC: Ramona decided to go to college? Ramona: I did, at age 50 or so. CBC: What’d you major in? Ramona: I was going to study psychology and become a therapist, but I got so I hated it. I didn’t like reading about dissecting little kittens, I was not about to do statistics, and everybody in the department was so serious it was unnerving. So I ended up studying ancient religion, history, and literature. Those were the things I really loved. And that’s when I got the idea to write a book that was published in 2006. But, anyway, Amy met a guy who was a drummer. [laughter] The fact is, he was the son of friends of ours, but he was a professional musician by then, so she quit school, ran off to Woodstock with him and became a singer. CBC: Oh, you mean the town, not the music festival. She would’ve been nine, Ramona. Ramona: No, the town, not the concert! [laughter] CBC: So, what years did you go to college? Ramona: I started in 1977 and it took me eleven years to get through. I was working, you know. So I graduated in ’88. I loved it. CBC: I’m just so impressed. Was this a dream of yours? Ramona: I think, in the back of my mind, I’d always wanted to go to college, in spite of my poor high school performance, and NYU was a wonderful school for an older person who was motivated CBC: Did you have to go to the city from Connecticut? Ramona: Yes, I was commuting at first, but then Dana and I got divorced, and so I was living in the Village, near the campus. Those were happy years. CBC: Let’s talk about your book. What is it about? Ramona: Well, I took a course at NYU called “The Myth of Faust.” The first book we read was the original version of the Faust legend. It was a 16th century folk book that established the basic theme of the man who sells his soul to the Devil for, in that case, forbidden knowledge. Faust was a legendary character out of literature. It is the essential story of the man who sells his soul to the Devil, in exchange for either gold or knowledge or beautiful women or whatever. But the idea is he’s doomed because he sells his soul. We use that expression all the time and it comes from that source. The funny thing is that it’s become this essential modern myth of the modern restless man, like Goethe’s Faust described. He seems to be typical of Western man: never content, always striving but never reaching his goal. But the funny thing is that its basis is so oriental and so un-Western and just the opposite. Because it’s the story of a spiritual initiation, which is the complete opposite of working and striving in this phenomenal world. Faust is an inward story and yet it became so successful over the generations. It was always adapted to the values of the age. Like he started out wanting forbidden knowledge. That was when the Church was sitting on everybody’s inquiries, you know? And then, in some periods, he was looking for gold and Left: Though less than thrilled with her assignment on Freedom Fighters in the mid–’70s (where her pencils were obliterated by insensitive inking), Ramona recently produced this lovely rendition of the Quality Comics anti-fascist “Earth-Q” super-team for some lucky fan. #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Freedom Fighters TM & © DC Comics.

such a great editor. CBC: What made him great? Ramona: He knew how to draw and he taught me a lot about inking. I inked the mysteries. He gave me some tips on what to look for and how to do certain things, leave out lines and put texture in, that kind of thing. He was interested in the drawing. Other editors weren’t, as I said before. If you could do it, fine, but they weren’t in to the fine points of drawing. And I never got any criticism-you know, do this differently or change that. Nobody ever did that and I don’t think that’s good. You need criticism; that’s one of the ways you learn CBC: Did you always ink your own stuff? Ramona: No, I inked “Aquaman” and I inked the mysteries. CBC: What about Metamorpho? Ramona: No, that was Charlie Paris. CBC: Oh! From Batman. Ramona: He did a great job. CBC: They look like your inks. Ramona: They’re better than mine. They were really strong, bold. CBC: Charlie Paris. Did you know him? Ramona: No. He lived somewhere else. CBC: Did you know any other comics people? Ramona: No, none. I’d meet a writer once in a while but… CBC: Did you meet Bob Haney? Ramona: Well, Bob Haney, yes. I worked with him. I loved Bob. He seemed to me as if he should be doing something more than writing comics. I think he always wanted to write a novel but didn’t. He was frustrated in that way. But he was interesting to talk to and it was totally fun doing that story. He’d give me a script and we’d laugh over it, then I’d take it home and draw it, and then we’d laugh over the drawings and that would give him new ideas. You know, we were just bouncing off of each other. CBC: So just when you would go in to the office? You would meet at the office? Ramona: Yes, I spent much more time there then than I ever did. CBC: What stories were these for? Ramona: These were for Metamorpho. I would have to go in the bullpen and do sketches for covers because I was doing the covers then. I would spend two or three hours up there at a time, whereas I never did that before. So I got to know Joe and then a couple of other people later on. CBC: Did you ever try to go to other publishers? Ramona: No, I had all the work I could use. I didn’t want any more work than I had. And I still wasn’t that fast, you know? I would take a month on a 17-page story and, of course, I’d wait until the last minute, when the deadline was due. And then I could turn the pages out, like three a day. But if it wasn’t, it would take me a long time. CBC: Was that your money or did that go in the house fund? Ramona: I always noticed that when I started making money, Dana wouldn’t get as many okays. [laughs] I thought, “Now I’m gonna take this money and have fun with it,” but I’d end up paying bills. [laughs] CBC: Around 1975, you participated in a brief revival of Metamorpho. Ramona: Yeah. I met Bob somewhere and we thought, “Well, let’s try it,” but the time had passed. And the drawing wasn’t the same. It just wasn’t the same. You can’t go home. CBC: How was Amy as a daughter? Ramona: Oh, perfect, of course. She’s very creative. We sent her to a private school in eighth grade, Wooster Academy, in Danbury, Connecticut. She interacted with older kids and had a lot of contact with teachers. It was a very informal school, so she got a lot of exposure to things she

then it could be women. It was made into operas. It started out being puppet farces all over Europe. It was just an instant success because it was blasphemous. The Church hated it because it was about this man who was looking for extra-clerical knowledge, you might say. So it went all over Europe and then finally, Christopher Marlowe read it and made his adaptation and that just launched it into eternity, you might say. But it obviously had a powerful core message that has always struck a note in every generation. And there’ll probably be more Faust versions before everything is said and done. It’s a remarkably powerful story. And it was fascinating to me to decipher that. And it was really a matter of deciphering it. The book we reviewed in class was filled with strange images, symbols, and numbers, and I thought, “There’s something here that doesn’t meet the eye.” So, I wrote a paper on the subject and discovered that there was, indeed, more there than met the eye. I’d found some alchemical engravings whose subject matter was the same as one of the chapters in the Faust book, so that clued me in, and I began to research alchemy after that. Then I came across the first English edition of a book called the Nag Hammadi Library, which is a collection of Gnostic myths, hymns, and gospels that had been discovered in Egypt in 1947, I think, and first published in English in 1977, the year I took that course. As I read them, I thought, the Faust book is telling the same story as these myths, only in metaphor. I finally realized that the Faust book was a parody or coded version of a composite Gnostic creation myth, whose central character was the goddess Sophia. The story of her transgression fall, corruption, and redemption was the central theme of Gnostic speculation, and was parodied by Faustus as he strayed from the Godly path, made league with the Devil, and indulged in various forms of vice. In the myth, Sophia repents and is saved, and, even as Faustus is killed by the Devil and damned in the surface story, its symbols and imagery point to Sophia’s—and his—redemption. It took me 30 years to decipher it and I actually got it published. [laughs] And by the way, it not only referenced alchemy and the Gnostic myth, but a tantric initiation, as well. Faust and the other characters and events in the Faust book parodied all of these themes at once because the stages and events in the Gnostic myth, alchemy, and the tantric process all happen to coincide. Chinese and Indian alchemists practiced tantric yoga and alchemy simultaneously, and their processes were underpinned by a philosophy whose features resembled Gnostic speculation. Those three things went together and, apparently in the 16th century, they were still going together. CBC: When was it published? Ramona: In 2006. When I was 81, I published my first book! [laughs] It was very exciting. You know, in alchemy, they say the time it takes to reach the end of the process is 24 years since 24 is the number that represents completion of a cycle. So Faust pledged himself to the Devil for a period of 24 years or to completion of his process of initiation. Well, I would work on the book for a while and then put it aside, leave it for months, and then go back to it. Years went by and then suddenly I realized I was coming up to the 24th year and was about

to finish it! [laughs] Isn’t that weird? CBC: Did you feel a spiritual presence? Ramona: I hesitate to say so, but I did. In some instances I was guided to certain books and even pages of books in a way I can’t explain. I even began to identify with the author, who was anonymous. CBC: Who do you suspect? Ramona: I had a picture of a cultured man in a red robe with dark hair, curly hair. It’s odd isn’t it? CBC: Going into a church, you think? Ramona: No! He was definitely a heretic! He would have been a Rosicrucian or a Hermeticist. Otherwise, why write in those particular symbols and convey that particular message? CBC: What drew you to it? Ramona: I don’t know. I’ve always been interested in esoteric subjects. Always. I was reading a book on alchemy when I first came across it and I thought, “Oh, my god. Look at all these weird images!” There are all these numbers and symbols, and I thought this has to be a message, you know? It has to be more than this simple little story. I really felt as if I was guided while I was doing it. That sounds nutty, I know. It sounds weird but I can’t explain it any other way. I went to a bookstore one day in the very same year this book on Gnostic scripture translated into English came out, and I just picked it up off the shelf and started thumbing through it, and I thought, “This is the same story that they’re telling in Faust, only Faust is making it into an almost cartoony story.” You know, this German scholar when it’s really a goddess, Sophia. I mean, it just came to me! CBC: It blew your mind! Ramona: It really did! And then I was hooked. I couldn’t stop doing it. I wrote a few papers when I was in New York University and then I realized this was going to be a book. CBC: What was the response? Ramona: They thought it was very significant and that it would have some impact. You know, it’s just very stuffy. First of all, they gave it that terrible title. Who the hell is going to pick up a book with a title like that? The Gnostic Faustus: The Secret Teachings Behind the Classic Tale. And they did some editing that I don’t think helped, really (but doesn’t every writer say that about a book they published?). But readers did think it was significant and it got good reviews. I feel I made a contribution. I’m proud of it. I did it. It took me 24 years to do it. CBC: Is the book still in print? Ramona: Yes, it’s on Amazon and has gotten good reviews. CBC: “She’s got a brain! Wow!” So, what did your daughter think about you going to the same school? Did she think it was cool or did she go, “Aw, come on, mom”? Ramona: Oh, she thought it was funny. [laughs] Especially that she was a grade ahead of me. CBC: I assume you were with younger people? Ramona: Yes, 18- and 19-year-old kids. You know, I wonder if college is wasted on kids. In the classes I took, nobody talked. They seemed apathetic. I guess they knew how to take notes, but it’s sort of sad because I thought it was so exciting. I learned so much. CBC: So you divorced in ’82, right? Just tired of it? Wanted to do your own thing?

This page: Life beyond comics…? Who knew! Ramona Fradon spent nearly a quarter of a century researching Faustian legend and similarities in myths of other cultures, which resulted in the 2006 scholarly book, The Gnostic Faustus: The Secret Teachings Behind the Classic Tale, published when she was 81 years old! Here’s the book’s cover and a beautifully illustrated poster for an early 20th century Dutch stage production of Goethe’s Faust thrown in for good measure… the Devil made us do it! Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

sure they did — to carry on the strip. But I sent some samples and got the job. CBC: Had you been warned that it was a grind? Ramona: Yes. In fact, Joe Ferris or somebody told me, “Don’t do it! You’ll be on a treadmill for the rest of your life.” [laughs] And it’s true. It is a grind. CBC: You couldn’t go on vacation? Ramona: Yeah, you had to get ahead! Either that or had to take the work with you, which is the thing I did. One summer, I went to Italy and I had to keep going to the FedEx office (which was a project in itself trying to ship something from Italy). It was hard! Then a couple of times I hired inkers to help me get ahead and I could go away. CBC: Did you give up comic book work to do it? Ramona: Yeah, I quit… just when the pay scale changed! [laughs] CBC: Back-tracking to Super Friends and Plastic Man… Ramona: I liked them both and, by the time I worked on Super Friends, I knew how to draw. I was very confident, but it wasn’t much fun working with E. Nelson Bridwell. He was very serious about his characters and he invented them all. (I didn’t create any of them to my knowledge, although I have been told that I did.) He was very precise! He wanted me to get those costumes exactly right! CBC: So pages came back to you? Ramona: If I’d bring them in, he’d say, “This button belongs over there,” and that kind of thing. He was very precise. And, unfortunately, quite sick at that time. But Plastic Man was the character I enjoyed the most. CBC: You captured something of Jack Cole but you also added a Metamorpho kind of fun to it. Ramona: I think what I’m doing is pouring my personality into the drawings, you know? It’s not mechanical. I don’t draw mechanically. I draw from inside out and I think that shows. People respond to it. That’s all I can say. I’ve got some drawings somewhere here that I think myself are so charming. But there’s always humor in my stuff. CBC: Do you think there’s a feminine quality to it? Ramona: You know, Trina Robbins once said that women tend to draw more in patterns. They draw in big shapes more. Men do a lot of shading and filling in and breaking up the figure. I think that to that extent, yes. My drawings tend to be simpler. More like kids’ books drawings. And grown men respond to that. CBC: Who wrote your Plastic Man material? Ramona: Steve Skeates. He was nice. I really like all the political satire Steve put in the scripts and it’s fun to draw Plastic Man because

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Brenda Starr TM & © Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Ramona: Well… we had our reasons. [laughs] I had just been hired to draw Brenda Starr, so I had a steady income and could support myself. CBC: Was that the Chicago newspaper comic strip? Ramona: Well, it was in the New York Daily News, too, but when I took over it was losing papers like crazy. CBC: Was Dale Messick still around? Ramona: Yes, but the editors all wanted to dump continuity strips. They just wanted humorous ones so they could print them small. CBC: How was that? That’s a different grind! Ramona: It was a grind, really. I mean, you’re never away from it unless you get ahead. If I wanted to go away, I’d either have to hire an inker to get ahead or take it with me and settle near a FedEx office. I did it for 15 years and my drawing began to deteriorate, so I thought I had better quit. CBC: Was your heart not in it? It was just too much? Ramona: Too much. I thought I retired then, but apparently I haven’t. [laughs] CBC: How did you approach a story? Did you first sketch it out as thumbnails? Ramona: Well, it would always help if I had a whole script. The thing is to get to know the characters. I would read it and then could lay out the whole story better. When I started drawing Brenda Starr, I never knew the entire story because they were making it up as they went along, and it was really important to me to be able to grasp the whole thing, to understand the characters and why they were doing what they were doing to the extent that those characters did. So it was a big difference. If I get an entire script, I begin to see pictures in my mind because there was a rhythm to it and a completeness to it. These are hard questions to answer, you know? CBC: Well, were you successful with Brenda Starr at all? Ramona: I think we kept it from sinking completely when I took over. It was losing papers like crazy, and I think all the old story strips were losing at that time. Only a few have survived. CBC: What I mean is… as far as the artistry itself, did you feel periods of success? You had frustration because you only had the script for the day’s installment, but did you feel you made some achievements? Were you satisfied with some of the work? Ramona: When I first started, the first year, Dale was still writing. She wasn’t drawing any more, but she was writing. She was in Chicago and she would send me a page of layouts, sketches, rough layouts. So I drew from those and her layouts were quite dynamic. They were really very good! But she never wrote a formal script; she sent me drawings. It was a great boost, a big help to see how her mind was working and she was really good at what she did… even though I think her drawing was weird. I never liked her drawing when I was a kid. I never looked at her strip because I thought it was too scratchy, you know? But I came to appreciate it more as I worked on it and I especially appreciated her writing because she knew how to write a strip. She really knew how to tell a story. CBC: There’ a reason it lasted as long as it did, right? Ramona: Yeah! I mean, there’s a difference between writing a story and writing a story for static panels. You have to know what that panel’s going to look like to some extent, so that the pictures carry it. It was hard working with the writers I had because they had never worked in comics. They’d all grown up on television, you know? They weren’t really writing for a series of still shots. There’s a difference. A big difference. CBC: How did you get the job? Ramona: Somebody called me. I think it was Gill Fox or somebody called me and said they were looking for a cartoonist. They had been beating the bushes. I think they really wanted a woman — in fact, I’m

Brenda Starr TM & © Tribune Media Services, Inc.

he can do anything. It’s different from having a character that you really love and can get into. Obviously, those are my characters in Metamorpho, so I knew them better than anyone else would ever know them. [laughs] And I think that’s true. I never knew Brenda the way Dale knew her. Brenda was Dale and vice-versa. I know other people drew Metamorpho, but I don’t think anybody ever caught the humor in his face. He had this skull-like head and yet Metamorpho was comical. He was sexy! You had to give him all of these qualities or it was ridiculous! CBC: He had true presence and all that, and yet it was as silly as anything. Ramona: Yeah, it really was. And I loved Haney! He had the guts to make a character like that be a romantic hero. It was just so ridiculous! CBC: I think Haney’s one of the best writers that mainstream comics ever had. He focused on the story and less on the trappings of genre and continuity. Did you ever have any desire to write yourself? Ramona: I wrote Brenda after they fired Dale summarily (which was quite horrible). They gave her this piddly little pension after she’d been making god knows how much money for them. I had to pay for her pension out of my paycheck! There was a week when I had to write it and I loved doing it just for that week. It made drawing so easy, to write it yourself. You know what the pictures are and I probably should have insisted that I write it… but I couldn’t live like that, thinking about Brenda Starr 24 hours a day. I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to be thinking of plots all the time. “What am I gonna do tomorrow?” CBC: There are comic book artists and there are cartoonists. Some say cartoonists are those who write and draw. Do you wish that you could do that? Ramona: I never really had any thought of doing that. I was never that ambitious or energetic. CBC: And did you have Bob Smith inking Plastic Man? Ramona: Yes, Bob did a great job and Mike Royer inked one that I particularly liked. CBC: And this was a Plastic Man story? Ramona: It was one about a blob that lived in the sewers. CBC: Were those your two main DC assignments? Ramona: I also did Freedom Fighters for a while. Oh, I hated that thing. I learned, later on, that DC had just acquired some characters from Quality Comics, and cobbled some plots together around them. It seemed vapid and disjointed. CBC: It was like a Nazi world? Ramona: Speaking of which, whoever wrote it was sadistic. I never had to draw so many characters and so much action in one story. I begged Paul Levitz to take me off of it. Besides, Vince Colletta was doing the inking. He would put his faces on everything. Tiny little noses. They were all the same face! And if there was something in the background he didn’t feel like inking he

would just erase it. I gather that nobody liked having him ink their work. So I got off of it finally. CBC: Now, original art was coming up at the time as having some value. Ramona: Yes, and you know what I did? It was the ’80s and I sold a stack this high to some dealer for $500 when I moved into New York. I had no idea. I thought that was great money at the time. CBC: Do you see your stuff going up for auction? Ramona: Every once in a while I do. I get sick. I did get hold of one of the covers—a Metamorpho one—and sold that for about $10,000. It was nice. But you know, I wish I had all those pages. CBC: Do you do re-creations of your covers? Ramona: Yes, I do. CBC: Do you have a list of commissions that you owe? Ramona: I’ve got a whole suitcase full of them. They’ll keep me busy until January. I like to work in the evenings. I listen to the talking heads on TV while draw. I work until about 11:00. CBC: Who do you listen to? Ramona: Chris Matthews. He makes me furious! I mean, it’s fun to get furious. I listen to Rachel Maddow, mostly MSNBC. I heard that whenever [U.S. Vice President Dick] Cheney traveled and went to a hotel, orders would be sent ahead to have Fox News playing on the television! [laughs] I’m almost that bad, but I don’t like that MSNBC has become an arm of the Democratic National Committee and trashes Bernie Sanders if they mention him at all. CBC: Comics are going through a real transition now. SpongeBob Comics. I mean kids comics are rising up really quickly! Ramona: Oh I’m glad to hear that. I did an Archie cover recently—a pinup—and I had to read a whole lot of Archie. I have to say, I really enjoyed it. And I love doing the

This page and previous: Despite acclaim for her DC Comics work, many Ramona Fradon fans do not realize that, between 1980–95, she was the artist — and sometime writer — on the newspaper comic strip Brenda Starr, succeeding creator Dale Messick. The continuity strip was about a “glamorous, spirited, redheaded reporter” [Washington Post], enamored with the mysterious, eye-patched Basil St. John, but, as Trina Robbins told The Post, Brenda “always solved her own problems and got herself out of fixes.” Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

SpongeBob stories—Mermaid Man and some of their pirate comics. They are goofy and don’t pretend to be anything else. CBC: You still do some work now and then, often for editor Chris Duffy on the SpongeBob, right? Ramona: Oh, yeah. I’ve been working for Chris. Years ago, I did a story for Nickelodeon and then I did a wonderful story for Bongo, called Muffelatto, the Ailment Man, a takeoff on Metamorpho. He was made up of four food groups. [laughs] It was really clever. Batton Lash wrote it. I really admire that writing. I love humor, so that was fun. But I do a lot of work for SpongeBob. There’s a thing called Mermaid Man and there’s some pirate characters that I do and that’s fun. I do a couple of those a year. That’s enough because I don’t like drawing from a script anymore. I really don’t. CBC: You just like sketching? Ramona: Yes. I think I’m really good at penciling. I can almost paint with a pencil, you know? It seems redundant. My drawing’s so tight I’m just repeating myself with the inking. CBC: Did you ever have other people do breakdowns for you? Ramona: No. I wish I had. Just Dale Messick. She did it and I drew on top of her sketches. And I did some really good drawings because of that. She had dynamic layouts. A good writer will help you… me, anyway. I was talking to Howard Chaykin about that and he can draw no matter what. He can do really good drawings even if he doesn’t have a script that suggests any good pictures. I can’t. If I don’t have a script, everything just goes dead. CBC: Did you actually hand scripts back? Ramona: No. I never did. CBC: Except in the beginning, right? Ramona: Just that one. [laughs] And that was it. But I need a good script or I just can’t do it. CBC: Now, you enjoyed working with Joe Orlando. Ramona: Oh, I loved Joe. CBC: He was an artist, too. Did you have favorite scriptwriters? Did you team up with anyone? Ramona: There was a woman. I think her name was Maxine Fay. Whoever she was, she ended up writing pornography. [laughs] But I loved doing her stuff! All of those mysteries were very melodramatic. I mean to the point of ridiculousness! There was something about her stuff that was so vivid to me that I really loved working with her. Then, I enjoyed working with Bob Haney, of 42

course. That character is so ridiculous. I like goofy! If it’s goofy, I’m gonna get into it. CBC: Do you ever read any graphic novels? Ramona: I have and I think some wonderful stuff is happening there. I remember Persepolis particularly. Everything was black… big splashes of black I learned that the author really doesn’t draw that way but she adapted her style perfectly to the subject matter. And then I’ve read some of Crumb’s books and others that I admired. The form has brought out a lot of creativity, I think. CBC: What’s Dignifying Science? Do you remember that? Ramona: Jim Ottaviani asked me to do a cover for that so I drew a portrait of Hedy Lamarr. She was apparently a scientist, a very interesting one. I stood behind her once on the stage. I don’t know why I was there. [laughs] Big! CBC: What were you doing in the ’90s? Ramona: It was just Brenda Starr from ’80 to ’95. Fifteen years! CBC: What was The Adventures of Unemployed Man? Ramona: That was a wonderful book that came out about five years ago that was a wonderful takeoff on our economic system. By two guys named Gan Golan and Erich Origen. It was very funny! They did all the aspects of our economic system in super-hero form. They were all representing one thing or another. It was really a very clever book! Like 80 pages or something. CBC: And then basically just doing stuff with Chris Duffy. Ramona: Yeah, that’s mostly what I do. I try to not do anything else. CBC: Are you proud of it? That you’re part of the tapestry and the history of comics? Ramona: Well, I don’t think of myself that way. I’ve come to realize that I’ve given a lot of people pleasure and entertainment over the years and I’m happy about that. CBC: Did you ever think of folding your interest into your vocation? Ramona: No, and while I’m fascinated with alchemy, Tantra and the hidden initiatory tradition, it never occurred to me to dramatize it in comic form the way Alan Moore or some others have done. From what I understand, Moore’s acquaintance with some of these practices is direct, so in a sense he was recording intense personal experiences. I mean, it’s probably visceral with him, whereas with me it’s just an avid interest. CBC: Do you think that might be a part of your passivity? Ramona: I didn’t realize all the time that I was drawing #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Characters TM & © Viacom International Inc.

comics and dealing with its vivid imagery, that so much of it is akin to alchemy and by extension Tantra. The notion of the transformation and interchangeability of forms, which is the stuff of the super-hero genre, is essentially alchemical, and the acquisition of super-powers as a result of personal transformations is not only Tantric but Gnostic. People like Moore, who seem to have lived it, utilized the imagery of comics to communicate a deeply personal and profound experience. CBC: Do you do panels at all? Ramona: Yes, but as you can tell, I don’t know much about the business of cartooning. So I don’t feel I really have much to contribute. CBC: You just get stock questions? “When did you start,” etc.? Ramona: Yes, and “what was my favorite character?” I was on a panel the other day with Trina Robbins, who has written a book about women of the ’40s. Some really good cartoonists! I didn’t know anything about them. It was an interesting panel and about all I did was listen and learn a lot CBC: Are you happy with your career? Ramona: I’m pleased that people like my work. I try hard to make good drawings, so I’m happy that people respond to them and I’m so lucky that everybody’s interested in superheroes these days and particularly the old stuff. The culture has been kind enough to change in my favor. So I get treated like Jessica Fletcher, at conventions you know? [laughs] Like I’m wined and dined, and fussed over. CBC: What does your daughter think of your career? Ramona: Oh, she thinks it’s funny! Dana always called me the “queen of the comic books.” [laughter] It’s just something I stumbled into, and here I am. CBC: Has Dana received much recognition for his work? Ramona: Oh, yes. He always has. He doesn’t submit to The New Yorker anymore, but he’s still selling reprints of his work because his gags were so good. CBC: Right, now it’s the reverse of the old days! [laughter] Do you think he’s secretly jealous sometimes of the attention you receive? Ramona: Well, I know that The New Yorker was his alter ego and it was a big blow to him when [editor] Tina Brown took over and everything changed, so he just quit submitting. Now, once in a while, he’ll submit something, but he feels he doesn’t want to be associated with the magazine the way it is now. CBC: Those were salad days, no? Ramona: Yes. The New Yorker was truly unique It isn’t the magazine it used to be, but times have changed, and if it were, I don’t how well it would do these days. CBC: Was he able to squirrel away enough money? Ramona: Oh, yes. The New Yorker was very generous. CBC: You guys are all in a comfortable situation? Ramona: Well, I have an old house that devours money and I have to keep working to pay the bills. CBC: I mean because you’ve had a relatively passive life with comics. We’re all nuts and crazy about it and then you’ve got this, “You wanna pay me to draw?” Ramona: Yeah, really! [laughs] CBC: Do you have people who are particularly freakish about your stuff? Ramona: Oh, yes. I have one fan who has been buying a drawing from me every two months or so for 15 years. He must have added a room to his house by now to hold them all. I keep meeting college professors who are totally into comics. There’s one who thinks he’s Spider-Man who’s a

professor of ancient religion! I mean, it’s bizarre! I actually had a fan come to my house recently who rummaged through my waste basket looking for discarded drawings. So strange! CBC: Here’s a question: What’s the oddest thing you’ve ever been asked to draw? Ramona: All right. Let me think. I try to put them out of my head. [laughs] Somebody asked me to draw Wonder Woman without her clothes. Well, how can you tell it’s Wonder Woman then? [laughs] CBC: He will! Ramona: That is so bizarre! CBC: I guess the tiara! Ramona: [Laughs] I was talking to Tony Dezuñiga’s wife in San Diego last year and she said that was what the men always wanted Tony to draw—boobs and that kind of thing. But fortunately I rarely get asked to do that. CBC: What’s Amy doing now? Ramona: She’s teaching and still singing, but… CBC: She’s singing? She was a professional singer? Ramona: Yes. She sang with another girl. They were known as Amy and Leslie. They charted a couple of times, but then developed different ideas about what kind of music they wanted to do and broke up.

CBC: They made some money? Ramona: No, you never make any money unless you’re at the top. CBC: So what kind of music was it? Ramona: I guess pop and folk, but Amy likes to sing all kinds of music. CBC: Do you have grandchildren? Ramona: No. CBC: You have a cartoonist community in the region where you live. Do you guys get together, not only at memorials? Ramona: Oh, yes, we do. We have lunch every couple of months and we see each other at conventions. We were all at Herb Trimpe’s funeral. CBC: Regarding your fame in comics, honestly, to what do you attribute it beyond the work itself? I mean, do you think it’s people’s obsessions with their childhood trappings? Is there an authentic affection for your work? How do you look at it? Do you deal with these people who are coming up to you now and giving you green stuff in return for your drawings? Ramona: I never understood it. Because I know that I’m not the craftsman in the same class as, say, Gil Kane or a lot of other people. I never even studied anatomy. I just drew from a model. So I don’t even know what the muscles are. I can’t draw as well as a lot of these people do… But I remember once Ham Fisher, who used to draw Joe Palooka, said, “Well I’m not a very good drawer, but my characters are alive.” And I think that’s what it is. I think my drawing has a certain amount of charm that most comic book drawing doesn’t have because it’s got some life in it. So I think people respond to that. But I don’t really know why. CBC: Are you grateful for your career and what’s happened in comics, just how everything has transpired? Ramona: Yes, I’m lucky. I’m really lucky. The whole culture changed just for me! [laughs] I mean, comics were nothing when I started. Now they’re everything and it’s all to my benefit! [laughs] CBC: I could not ask for a greater quote than that. Ramona: Never mind that it’s getting dumber and dumber. [laughter] CBC: We’ll leave that quote out. Ramona: It’s like I’ve been dream-walking my whole life and things come, they fall in my lap, and then I do them. I end up in this lovely room with a view! I think some lives just pan out that way. I must have had a horrible time in my former life and they’re giving me a break this time. [laughter]

Previous page: At top left is the Woodstock area domicile that includes (from left) Dana Fradon, Amy Fradon, Ramona, Amy’s husband, Peter Schoenberger, holding the latest household addition, Ramona’s pup, Charlie. Upper left is daughter and mother. Inset top is Ramona and her interviewer. Amy, a professional vocalist, partnered with Leslie Ritter for a number of years as the singing team Amy & Leslie. This page: Recently, Ramona has drawn for editor Chris Duffy on SpongeBob SquarePants Comics. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Michael William Kaluta, who first made an impact in the fertile climes of 1960s’ fandom, struggled when he initially broke into the field of mainstream American comic books. But, inspired by art nouveau, deco, and classic illustrators — and motivated by the swift progress of his peers’ abilities — very soon the convivial young man established himself as a formidable talent in the comics scene of the early 1970s. With his definitive version of ’30s pulp hero The Shadow, his cachet skyrocketed and the Virginia-raised artist has since never looked back. Today, MWK resides in the same Upper West Side Manhattan apartment where he has lived for decades, surrounded by a museumquality hoard of pop cultural ephemera, from ray-guns to aviator helmets, as well as in-progress commission artwork. Comic Book Creator visited the artist on a cloudy spring weekend for the following interview conducted between May 18–19, 2013.

quite sure. But I was born in Guatemala, and I was eventually a naturalized citizen. I was immediately naturalized because my parents were both Americans and it was the Panama Zone or whatever you call it. But when I was probably eighteen, I got to legally choose whether I’d be an American or a Guatemalan. I said, “I’ll be an American, thank you very much.” My dad put it more succinctly, he said, “Oh, son, you could become a Guatemalan. Hell, you could even become President of Guatemala for half an hour,” and he makes a gun with his finger and went “pow!” [laughter] After I was born, we then moved, I think, to Texas, Louisiana, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts… Pennsylvania, did I say? And then Alabama and Virginia, and then pretty much stayed in Virginia. My father was at the Pentagon at the time. He was in the Air Force. He had been, of course, in the Army Air Force during the war. So had my mother, as a matter of fact. They met in Russia at the Allied bomber bases that we had finally convinced Stalin to give us. CBC: Was your father a pilot? Michael: No, he was an engineer. He was born in America, but his dad was from Russia, so my dad spoke Russian, which, for a while, was something they didn’t let anyone know. So, technically, he was a spy. Everybody was a spy in those days. Because the Soviet Union was so paranoid (probably for good reasons on some level or another), but they just didn’t trust anybody. There were things that they wouldn’t allow their people to do around the Americans and that was act like an American. You weren’t allowed to act like an American [chuckles] or be friendly with an American or talk to them about anything. Of course, the G.I.s got around that. Everybody got around that. Anyway, my mother was an Army nurse and when they first met, she outranked him, which is something that she had a point of pride about. [chuckles] CBC: What was her name? Michael: Coltilde Gavony. She was of Italian extraction, born in America, though her parents both came from Italy. So my father was a first generation American with Russian heritage and my mom was first generation American with Italian parentage, and she lived in New England, my father lived in New York, and of course they’d never would have bumped into each other, completely different circles in America. But he went to Russia because they needed Russian-speaking Americans and they needed engineers to help build these bases and she went. There were twelve nurses sent, four for each of the three bases. There were two basically fighter bases and one bomber base and each had four nurses, their little M.A.S.H. units. I don’t know if they weren’t called “M.A.S.H.” at the time, of course, but that’s what they were. They met and were married in ’44 or ’45. His name is William. CBC: Is your father Slavic? What’s the ethnic background? Michael: Russian, from Belarus, near Minsk, a little town on the Polish border called Dubicze, where his father came from. CBC: And the family, what like social strata — were they peasants? Michael: I guess it’d be somewhat Russian middle class. [chuckles] I don’t really know. I’ll have to ask my older sister. She did a little more studying on it. I know that both my grandfather and grandmother, who didn’t know each other then — they were very young at the time of the Russian Revolution/World War I. When they left, they both basically snuck out. It turned out that my grandmother didn’t have to. Her way had been paid, but they just didn’t get to her to tell her that he was had been paid and that people had been bribed all #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

Comic Book Creator: I’ve been very much looking forward to doing this interview for a long time. We really do go back, whether you know it or not. I’m pulling out The Shadow #1 and [reading inscription] “To Jon and Andy, M.W. Kaluta,” on July 4 th, 1973. Michael W. Kaluta: That’s right when that first issue came out. The Shadow had a very, very weird effect on me, having been invisible at all the Seuling conventions since 1967-ish, to also be in a room with a line of kids around and out the door with the comic book, I wasn’t ready for it. It really was something. CBC: You always used to be at the table with Barry Windsor-Smith, right? Michael: That was later, after all this. Barry and I started hanging out during the Studio days, which had been between ’76 and ’78. CBC: I remember Bernie at the table. Michael: Bernie definitely. We were roommates right over here at 79th Street and we were pals, you know? And Jeff Jones, as well. Jeff lived at 79th Street originally and, when Bernie moved up to New York, he wanted to get a place near him because they had met back in ’67, like I said. So, in the Summer of ’68, Bernie got an apartment on West 77th Street, just two blocks south of where Jeff lived. I moved in with Wrightson about six months later, in January, ’69, and we’d visit Jeff on 79th Street. Then, about a year later, I came back from a trip and a place had opened up in Jeff’s building and we had already started to move without me even knowing it. So I ended up in there for a couple, three years, and I went up to West 92nd Street. Speaking of West 92nd Street, I found out from Will Eisner that he lived just around the corner on, let’s see, on 90th and Riverside Drive back in the Fifties. So that was cool. CBC: You guys were exceedingly friendly. I don’t know why my mother allowed us to do it, but my little brother and I came down from Rhode Island on the bus. We’d stay at my sister’s apartment downtown. You were very friendly and you put my little brother to work getting coffee and, in return, doing sketches for him. And there was one night where there was one year, probably ’74, where I was grounded and I wasn’t allowed to come because I’d gotten in a little trouble, so he came down alone and there was, on a Saturday night of the July 4 th weekend, there was a torrential downpour that took place and he couldn’t get out to walk the 20 blocks to get to my sister’s, you stayed up with him all night. He was probably thirteen years old and you spent the entire night with him. Michael: In the lobby, probably. Doing drawings and such. CBC: Yeah, until dawn broke and the rain subsided. Michael: I could do that back then. [laughs] CBC: And what a profound act of kindness it was. Michael: Well, yeah, I’m sure that I just wasn’t sleepy. [Jon chuckles] But that’s great. Like I don’t remember the downpour, of course, because I was staying inside. Convention time, there’s always a pumped-upness that, as years went by, I’d get more and more tired and not realize it because I was in convention mode and then just afterwards, you know, just be exhausted or in later years, get ill because you fly out, spend a week at the San Diego, and running around to do this, that, and the other thing, and then come back with having had, what, four hours of sleep a night … slam… collapse. [Jon chuckles] But anyway, back then, it was different. I was twenty-ish, twenty-one. CBC: Those are heady days and there was a great deal of creativity that was coming out of you group of guys, the young Turks who came into the field. But if we can start at the start, where are you from? Michael: I’m from a military family, so I’m not

Poster © the estate of Phil Seuling.

along. So she went on her own, using jewels to bribe people. CBC: As far as you know, are there other creative Kalutas? Michael: Well, there’s definitely a creative one. Cinematographer Vilen Kaluta’s film, Burnt by the Sun, won an Academy Award in the mid-’90s. I don’t know if we’re related. There used to be no Kalutas in America except for my grandparents, my father and his brother and the girls that were in the family before they got married. Then it turns out there’s a whole gang of Kalutas up in Canada, which aren’t at all from the same place, but the name’s there. And one of them, Michael Kaluta, and I used to talk on the Internet some. He is becoming a writer and I think that he was coming in about 20 years after I started, that it’s a bit of an upstream fight for him because the name was all over the Internet as the guy who draws comic books, not the young writer. I’m sure he’s dealt with that, one way or another. CBC: Is there creativity with your other family members? Michael: Oh, yeah. My older sister, Joan, was very — we’ll call it “crafty.” She could take nothing and make it into something so her Christmas packages were always very unique, so on and so forth. And my kid sister was very much like me, although she didn’t draw pictures, but we’re of a like mind, growing up. We read Edgar Rice Burroughs at the same time and watched the same TV shows and so on, so forth. Her name is Jean and she went on to work with repairing and troubleshooting mainframe computers. CBC: So there are two brothers and two sisters. Michael: Right, John and Roman are my brothers. I’m second oldest. There is Joan, myself, Jean, Roman, and John. From the time I was ten years old on up, in 1957, we lived permanently in Virginia. CBC: And how was it growing up? Michael: Well, it was suburban Virginia, the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, and it had a lot of elements of the Ray Bradbury stories… because, back then, you could get on your bike and could ride for miles and visit friends and get home after dark and nobody minded, unless you came back really, really late without calling or something. Then there was trouble. If you got your chores done, you had the run of the whole town. And that part of Virginia, Arlington, is very tree-lined; very, very large. Beautiful shade trees… It didn’t have a feeling of urban sprawl whatsoever. It was right on the hip of Washington, so it wasn’t sleepy. My basic neighborhood was somewhat of a backwater in that you didn’t get a lot of traffic going through except [chuckles] on our road, on which, I guess, there were four or five automobile crashes per year. CBC: Have you ever been back? Michael: Yes, I still have relatives down there. CBC: Was your father strict? Michael: I certainly felt he was. But then when I matched him up against other people’s parents, no, he wasn’t. [chuckles] He wasn’t very strict at all, but he had his rules. Well, he should have been trying to figure out what they might be. I know he thought he’d laid the rules down, but there seemed to have been a big gray area when something was okay and when it was not okay. There was kind of a grayish area there, though once I got old enough to look back, I realized that a lot of the trouble that I’d got into could have been circumvented with a phone call or just asking. I always thought, “Why ask if he’s just going to say no?” So I would just go and do and then see if he’d pay any attention to it, I suppose. So I was not very much in

trouble. CBC: Yeah, was it pretty much a traditional ’50s upbringing? Riding bikes around, reading comics, and baseball? Michael: Well, I certainly had all that. No baseball because I was just inept at sports, but climbing trees, crawling through sewers… playing up on the roof, building models, hanging out at the hobby store. The county of Arlington has got Fort Mayer on it where the Wright Brothers showed the Army the first airplane. [chuckles] They said, “This is it.” I think the Army ordered three of them. But also, they have Arlington Cemetery and Fort Mayer, although had other business in the military, also, was the home of the old guard which is the unit that takes the Caissons into the … CBC: Funerals? Michael: Yeah, for funerals because it’s a big deal in burying a warrior, all kinds of things. Boots on backwards on the beautiful, beautiful Caparisoned horses. Going to the officers’ pool, you have to walk past the stables, and that was always a treat, just to see these absolutely gorgeous animals because they’re all matched pairs, or sets even, because they were funeral animals and had to look like not just like piebald stagecoach horses; they had to look very elegant and they did. They were very, very well taken care of and, of course, loved by everybody. We saw them all in panoply, and they’d all be lined up, four to six in the front and then the one that has the boots on and the stirrups backwards and the sheathed sword and the coffin flag and all the guys in their dress uniforms, you just didn’t think, “Oh, look, there’s a body.” You just go, “Oh, that’s so beautiful.” CBC: Were you a sociable kid? Did you have a gang? Michael: Not a gang. It was always one friend and then a couple other almost-best friends. They were different people. There was a fellow named John Barton, who lived in the neighborhood, and we hung out all the time. If he built a model airplane, he made it look like a real airplane. And when I made a model, I just glued it together. I never painted it or anything like that. It was nothing to write home about it at all. So I could hang out at his place and watch him and his father do these things with their hands. John and I rode our bicycles around, we made up stories. Sometimes we’d be fighter pilots on our bikes and sometimes there’d be stand-ins for horses or whatever the games meant. CBC: Pretend. Michael: Yeah, pretend. John had this fascinating thing where, after Christmas, he’d go around the neighborhood and collect the trees that people were tossing away and drag them up into the big tree in his back yard and make a fort out of Christmas trees. [Jon chuckles] I even have photographs of that somewhere. I was like, “That’s spectacular. It would never even have crossed my mind to do that.” [chuckles] CBC: Did your family have TV? Michael: Oh, sure. As has been noted in other interviews, I watched Jon Gnagy pretty much as often as I could, since when we lived in Alabama. That’s where I first bought a little Jon Gnagy kit, which had the paper and the kneaded eraser and the sandpaper block. It’s for you to sharpen all the stuff, the pencils and the charcoal and stuff on. CBC: Gnagy was an art instructor on the TV? Michael: Yes, Learn To Draw. CBC: Had you always been drawing? Michael: Well, I’d been drawing and doodling, but never with any point.

Previous and this page: The discussion begins with a look at the CBC editor’s coveted — and inscribed — copy of The Shadow #1 [Nov. 1973], autographed at the 1973 Comic Art Convention, in New York City. The attention Michael received at that fateful gathering was a surreal experience, he shares. For that same Phil Seuling event, Michael W. Kaluta drew the poster at top of this page. Bottom inset is MWK’s father’s high school graduation picture, shot by Seth Kushner in the artist’s Upper West Side apartment. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

appeal of it. I also used to move around a lot as a kid and I was drawn to the Doctor Dolittle series and the Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn books. I think there’s the same truth about the super-heroes and continuing characters in that they didn’t go away. You could always find solace and comfort in these series because things would stay the same while real life was constantly changing. I wonder if there’s a psychological aspect to collectors and fans. Michael: Right, good chance. If one could canvas all kids that had to move around a lot and find out whether or not they’d end up becoming collectors. As a kid growing up, we had to move every year. Just pull up stakes, off you go … and you’d always leave things behind though it got to the point of where there was no sense looking for something if it wasn’t right there in your room because it wasn’t going to be anyplace else. CBC: Is there anything that you miss? Michael: Don’t know. Out of sight, out of mind. That are things that I wanted that I didn’t have and now I have some of those things. [Points to a toy gun] There’s that Atomo Destructo Disintegrator Ray Gun, and now I have it. [laughter] CBC: With the kid culture of the time, were you into Captain Video? Michael: Yeah, but Captain Midnight was my favorite because he was basically Captain Video with a different name, and he had better toys and stuff advertised on the television program that you could get with cereal box-tops and so on, so forth. And I got a few of those things, but I really remember a piece of phosphorescent paper and this little red gun that was basically a flashlight. And you’d go in the dark and you’d write — or not even in the dark — but you could write on the phosphorescent paper and, by pulling the trigger on the gun, it’d glow in the dark and there’d be something written on there because it was basically a light that was just making the phosphorus phosphoresce — fluoresce. I liked Captain Midnight and Steve Canyon and … what else? A lot of the Western stuff. CBC: Yeah, what was your favorite Western character? Michael: Oh, Tim McCoy was one of the guys I liked. When a Western came on, I’d watch it, no matter what, and often the guy in the white hat was Tim McCoy. “Oh, great! It’s Tim McCoy.”

Graphic Showcase © the respective copyright holder. “Eyes of Mars” © Michael Wm. Kaluta.

Mostly I seem to absorb perspective from his instruction. Almost every picture he did had an element of perspective. He showed how to make shadows from objects and such like that. But he definitely did the train tracks and the telegraph poles going into the distance to show one-point perspective. So you got to learn all that stuff. The history of perspective is fascinating. If you go to any of the major museums, you can go through rooms and rooms where people have never even considered that there was such a thing as perspective and it ruins, pretty much — pasted up against the canvas. And then way in the distance, there’d be some trees and things like that. And then there’s a period between that and the full perspective understand where they were trying it and some of them were actually comical, but there’s a lot of heart and soul and hard work put into them to make the things look like they’ve got depth. So if there were — if it was a battle scene, there’d be any number of, say, lances or something like that, lying on the ground, pointing back so that — and they’re kind of bigger, closer to you, to trying to get this feeling that things were in the distance. [chuckles] But things were at a distance, but they were floating way above the horizon line because no one had doped it out yet, that if you just drew a line across where your eyes are, and make everything point to that, you’ve got perspective to almost 70% of almost everything you need. That’s all you need. It’s another — wherever your eyes look is where the perspective goes. There’s ways of drawing things that aren’t art tumbling in space. CBC: I remember very well your Escher knock-off on that House of Secrets [#99, Aug. ’72] cover. Talk about perspective! [chuckles] Michael: Well, that was a knock-off. I was very mad about it because it wasn’t what I wanted to do. [HOS editor] Joe Orlando had just gotten an Escher book and said, “Oh, this is cool!” I’m going, “Yeah, but it’s somebody else’s work.” He said, “Nah, just copy it.” CBC: Oh, sorry to bring it up. [laughter] Michael: His name’s in there somewhere, or initials, anyway. I put his initials in the thing. It was his idea. But, unlike the Escher thing which is a hand and a guy holding the hand — the hand holding the ball is reflected in the ball. In my cover, of course, it’s me in my room, trapped inside of a ball being held by a withered monster hand or something. [chuckles] CBC: You know, something reminds me of the purple cover of HOS #101 [Oct. ’71]… it had a very H.P. Lovecraft vibe. Did you have any exposure to Arkham House books? Michael: No, not really. I knew about them. I knew the title Skullface and Others, but I never, never read any of that stuff. CBC: Now here I would naturally assume that you were into that stuff… Michael: No, Wrightson was the one. He was the creepy one. I read Tom Corbett and Tom Swift and all the other Toms… and Nancy Drew. I absolutely adored Nancy Drew. In later years, I had met someone who ended up having a roommate who became “Carolyn Keene” for a while, ghostwriting the series. And I call her up on the phone. I was going on and on about Nancy Drew and she said, “Kaluta, I don’t understand you. What’s this thing you’ve got with Nancy Drew? I mean the woman hasn’t had her bra off in thirty years.” [laughter] And I said, “She has a roadster! [Jon laughs] I mean, come on! She has a roadster.” Sometimes it was blue, sometimes it was green. CBC: What was she, sixteen or seventeen, or about that? Michael: I don’t even know. My sisters, of course, had the books. And then of course, they all looked the same without their dust jackets. They were the same cover color as The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. CBC: Did that fact that they were a series appeal to you? Michael: Not so much. It was all one story to me. It’s like a chapter or a TV show, right? There was a flow. At least in the Tom Swift books I got during those years, they all had the same endpapers. It was Tom leaning inside his interesting airplane, looking out a window at a rocket plane and he’s talking into a headset. So it’s basically the same book with a different title and a different story inside. [laughs] CBC: I guess that’s a major part of the Right inset: Among MWK’s first published work is this cover of Graphic Showcase #1 [1967], a collaboration with Steve Harper. Inside the prozine’s pages was Michael’s “Eyes of Mars” serial, an Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche. 48

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

House of Secrets TM & © DC Comics. Max Escher artwork © the respective copyright holder. “Star Child” TM & © Michael Wm. Kaluta.

CBC: Did you go to the movies? Michael: Yeah, sure, for between 10¢ and 25¢ a show because, wherever we were, there was a military base and we’d go on the base to watch the movies. I remember I had already seen The Guns of Navarone maybe three times at Fort Mayer and then a bunch of friends from school said, “Oh, we’re going to see Guns of Navarone up at the Buckingham,” which is a regular theater, just up several blocks away from my place. And I went, “Great, I love that movie. Let’s go.” I’d go no matter what. I really loved that movie. CBC: Apparently. [laughter] How about radio? Michael: Well, I listened to some radio because both my parents had grown up with the radio. And some of the serials from their actual movie-going days when they were kids. There’d be times when all the kids would be rousted out of bed at ten o’clock at night (which was very late for us at the time) and my father sits down in front of the TV because Dracula or Frankenstein or The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the one with Charles Laughton), and we’d be in our jammies and all like, [sleepily] “What up?” And he’d be there going, “Oh, good! Now watch this. This is my favorite part!” He was really animated about these things. And then with something like Dracula, and when it was obvious that I was getting the hell scared out of me, he’d start saying, “Well, you know, right behind, over here, there’s this guy over here with a big megaphone and there’s the camera guy and the light guy, a mob of people here and this is make-believe. It’s not really happening.” [chuckles] I’m like, “Too late! You woke me up and this is what you did to me.” [laughter] My kid sister, Jean, and I went to see The Horror of Dracula and, if you remember the beginning of that movie, it’s in full-color with blood splattering everywhere. It didn’t take long for us to move closer and closer to the exit and we left the theater before the film was over. I could not sleep without thinking about Dracula for years and years after that. He’s outside the window, he’s gonna come in, he’s… oh man, I was scared to death. It took many, many years for a grown-up man, a guy who drew many “I, Vampire” covers, to finally get the nerve to see the end of Horror of Dracula. CBC: [Laughs] Was it titillating at all to be that afraid? Michael: I didn’t understand it as a thrill. When I met Wrightson and we were talking about monster movies and he would light up, talking about a monster movie, and I’d be starting to feel uncomfortable. But I still absorbed it all and felt that I could draw that stuff. I’m not a fan of, “Oh, here’s five more kids going into the woods” because I was one of the kids that would go into the woods. The last thing I ever thought about as a kid was that there was going to be anybody in there to hurt me. You know, there’s old fairy tales and such, but going in the woods was a pleasant thing for me. I had such a great time as a kid, wandering through the woods and peopling it with my own characters or whatever. So when horror movies started to become basically the slasher things — somebody’s going to sneak up on you, no matter where you were, and getcha — it held no interest for me. It’s scary, it’s thrilling, but it’s unpleasant. I once opened this Jerzy Kosinski book, The Painted Bird, because I loved the cover. It was a Hieronymus Bosch detail. I opened it up and read about four or five paragraphs, closed it, put it down, and the imagery in those paragraphs has been stuck in my brain ever since and it was horrific. How can anybody think like that or write like that? But horror people get a thrill… I’d look at Wrightson [laughs] and go, “Okay, now. I would feel the same if I were on a roller coaster. It’s not that, ‘Oh, I might die,’ it’s just that, ‘Oh, the whole weightlessness and that thrill of this, and being trapped but not being trapped.’ Whereas I’d actually get the same damn thrill watching The Old Dark House or the more modern variants of that. CBC: So it’s the thrill of living and not the thrill of death? Michael: Dying. I wouldn’t run toward that. I’ve got some favorite movies that I got big thrills out of, like The Premature Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Burial with Ray Milland. But I enjoyed more of the horror movies through having Wrightson tell me about them, or other people talk about them, than from actually seeing them. And then, when I see them, I have that memory of them having gone through it and enjoyed it, to help me process it. That’s better. CBC: So you didn’t go see Psycho? Michael: Nah. I saw Psycho when I was a full-grown person. I said, “You know, if somebody had told me “this E.C. story,” then I would have gone for it. But they never said it was an E.C. story. They kept talking about, “Oh, the woman and the blood and the this and that.” I said, “Yeah, but she deserved it. She was a criminal, in a way.” CBC: Right, it’s a black comedy. Michael: Yes, and it was very, very well done. But I also have an issue when it’s always the woman getting chopped up. Bernie used to go on about Frenzy, also by Hitchcock. I said, “But, Wrightson, I’m not interested. It’s a guy killing women. I don’t understand, I don’t want to see it and it’s going to be done well because it’s Hitchcock. I don’t get it. Now a woman and everybody else being attacked by a bunch of birds, I can go there. That’s something different. But when it’s about a predator, I’m not interested in beTop: MWK appeared in early issue of the underground comix tabloid Gothic Blimp Works, including this page from #4 [Spring 1969]. Left inset: Michael discusses his Max Escher-inspired House of Secrets #99 [Aug. ’72] cover in the interview. 49

Top: The splash pages of MWK’s earliest mainstream work, for Charlton Comics. From left, Teen Confessions #59 [Dec. ’69], Billy the Kid #85 [July ’71], and Flash Gordon #18 [Jan. ’70]. Right inset: One glance at this breathtaking splash page for the prozine Heritage #1 [’72], proves Michael’s abilities were developing at an astonishing rate. CBC kudos must be made to Todd Adams for sharing an amazing array of images in this issue and for his definitive Kaluta checklist at glimmergraphicsprints.com. 50

be this funky, almost thumb prints with word balloons, and my mind took it and ran with it. So I began to understand that sometimes overdrawing the comic book may not have been even worth it because it’s just having enough information in there for the child reading it to use what they’ve got, their native stuff in their brain. That’s all it really took. That’s what my mom and dad used to say about the radio: the listener was an active participant. Yeah, there were sound effects and there were voices and there’s spooky music sometimes, but the pictures were all in your head. No two people saw the same scene in their brain when they were listening to that stuff. It’s interesting. CBC: So you didn’t select the comics to read; they were just a big pile to pick from? Michael: Right, and I liked all the comics I read. I was a big fan of Chilly Willy, and Betty and Veronica, Jughead — I didn’t care for Reggie so much, but there he was — Baby Huey, Little Lotta… and I guess there was some Superman and Batman or things like that were in there, but they never impressed me as a genre. They were all just comic books. When I started buying comic books, it was war comics that I bought, particularly anything to do with flying because I love the whole idea. “Sgt. Rock” was a lot of fun, but if there was a “but” involved, it was the stories were so similar that you had to chew through a bunch of them before, all of a sudden, there was something that was very different. Some of the stories seemed very silly to me as a kid. Like, “Hi, I’m Ice Cream Soldier’s M-1 rifle,” or whatever… CBC: [Laughs] Bob Kanigher’s talking weapons. Michael: I’d be going, “I don’t care about a talking gun.” But it still was interesting because, you know, it did catch my imagination. But I liked best Lt. Johnny Cloud, the American Indian who flew the Mustang in All-American Men at War. Although the one war #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Charlton Comics material TM & © the respective copyright holder. Flash Gordon TM & © King Features Syndicate.

ing a part of it or watching the workings of this mind, or like that, as clever as it might be.” It just didn’t interest me … or it interested me too much. I didn’t want to go there, one of the two. [laughs] CBC: The comics of the ’50s: horror was a big deal at E.C. Michael: Yeah, I read all those things. I didn’t buy them; I read them. We had cousins and/or relatives of some sort — that’d be “Dutch relatives,” as they say — but friends of the family up here in New York. There were two girls and they bought every comic that ever was. Read them and read them, read them. Then their parents would pack them up, and send them to us. So we’d get these CARE packages, big bags of comic books that my mother eventually threw away, because we didn’t clean them up. “Mom, they were our comic books!” And, in later years, she said, “Sweetheart, if I’d had any idea how much they’d be worth, I wouldn’t have done it.” I said, “Well, the only reason they’re worth so much, is because moms everywhere have been throwing them away.” [laughter] There were two or three stories that really frightened me to death. One I found since and it’s fairly well-drawn … colored badly, but that didn’t matter. None of that mattered when I was a kid. It was like a movie when I was a kid, it really was CinemaScope. And when I became a comic book artist, I recalled, “Oh, I remember what it was like to read a comic book.” It didn’t matter what it looked like, it didn’t matter if it had big, sweeping double-page spreads and such. It could

A Princess of Mars TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

comic I just didn’t get, because I guess I wasn’t a prehistoric monster fan, was Star-Spangled War Stories, with pterodactyls and gwangis and things like that. I just said, “Wha--!?” I wasn’t curious enough to find out. I never bothered to read any of those things, but it really was, “Wha--!??” It turns out a whole gang of people my age that loved that stuff. They just can’t get enough of it. “You need to give me some more dinosaurs and tanks.” CBC: “The War That Time Forgot.” And the E.C.s, did they have any particular effect? Michael: The most effect that E.C. had was when I was a young artist. This was due to the Smithsonian. As I say, I lived in the Washington, D.C., area. This was the late ’60s, the museum put a lot of their paper stuff onto microfiche and they basically gave away to anybody who wanted them, the comic books. And a friend of the gang I was with this time, Alan Simons, showed up with a big ol’ pile of E.C. Comics, all rubber-stamped “Smithsonian” because they no longer wanted the comic books. So I got to read some of the real, actual comics and have them forever because he doled out comics to some of us. When I went to college, one of the comics that came along with me, contained the story called “The Monkey” drawn by Joe Orlando. And it was about a drug addict and it was very colorful, written very colorfully. Grab one of those E.C. Comics and they’re so, so thick and rich. I remember that character sweating in his room with “a sink stained bilious from my heavings.” So, all through college days, I’d ask, “Have you seen ‘The Monkey’? Come here!” and we’d hunker over “The Monkey.” I still have it somewhere, signed by Orlando with a very sweet dedication to me. A lot of the early days of drawing the comics with all the friends I had — Wrightson, Bruce Jones, Jeff Jones — E.C. Comics were really a springboard to the point of where, when we put out this comic book ourselves called The Abyss, Bruce Jones had found a LeRoy Lettering set (with which all the lettering in E.C. Comics was done), a mechanical lettering thing, and Bruce lettered his strips in with this LeRoy Lettering thing. It got to be very tedious. But I still remember catchphrases we would throw at one another. We’d be sitting, drawing pictures, absolutely silent, and then Wrightson would jump back from the drawing board and look over and go, “That’s just it, Forbes! What woman?”— a line from an E.C. Comic. And, of course “spa fon” and “squa tront” and all these other little exclamations that we tossed around in there… “But what’s wrong with wanting to settle down to a little solar ranch with the woman you love?” Which is the lead-up to, “That’s just it, Forbes! What woman?” Yeah, anyway, these things that I committed to memory… CBC: But your high school years were pretty much typical? Michael: Yeah. I didn’t date in high school very much. I tried it, but it was more hanging out with friends, if those could be called “dates.” We had a lot of fun. CBC: Did you find like-minded guys? Michael: Eventually, in the last couple of years of high school, I started to hang with a regular group. There was the first time I looked around and went, “Huh! I have some friends.” Up to that point, the moving around, even though I’d been in town for years, since 1957, so once I got into high school and bumped into a number of different people, we kinda stuck to each other like protons

and neutrons. CBC: What held you together? Michael: Just the feeling of the times, I guess. We’re all artists, we all admired Bob Dylan’s songs, Donovan, and [Canadian folk duo] Ian & Sylvia. Eventually, Tolkien, Aubrey Beardsley, Heinrich Kley, and a bunch of this kind of stuff. So when we’d be together, we’d tell stories and each add some element to it, and just build some other world in our brains, not a world we were in. It was playing, but it was basic sitting and talking about stuff as opposed to getting on our bikes and running around, you know, because we were in high school, after all. It wasn’t time to jump on your bike and run around. It was now time to sit and talk about stuff. It was great. It was a lot of fun. I’m sitting here trying to think of the past, and I guess I was more the observer/ collector-type as opposed to the people I used to watch in school, for example, going out and doing stuff. I wasn’t one of the people that built the giant turkey for the Thanksgiving Day football game or whatever, but I had friends who did. CBC: Were you shy? Michael: Well, part of me was, I’m sure. CBC: Maybe stoic? Michael: Mmm, it’s just it didn’t seem like, in retrospect, there are things that, “Golly, I wish I’d worked on that,” or, “That’d been fun to work with,” or, “Wouldn’t that have been great to be a part of that?” But while it was happening, or when they were leading up to it, I’d be going, “Nahhh, I’m not interested,” or whatever. So I think I missed out on a whole lot of stuff that I assumed I wasn’t going to enjoy. But I did have a very vivid fantasy life. During high school I was reading most of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books and I was on Mars. I wasn’t anywhere near Arlington, Virginia. CBC: [Chuckles] When did you first encounter ERB? Michael: Oh, when the Ballantine paperbacks first started coming out. Around 1961 or ’62. I could have read Tarzan when I was very, very young, but not as a collector or an avid reader. They were just there because boys read Tarzan books. But, in the ’60s, I had a friend whose name I can’t remember (Cliff?), who said, “Hey, you’re going to like this,” and handed me Llana of Gathol by Edgar Rice Burroughs and it had the [Robert K.] Abbett cover painting, with a very large flying machine coming at you with something exploding in the background. And I did love it and went and tried to find as many as I could. At that time, I guess Ace had put out Princess of Mars, Warlord of Mars, Thuvia, and Gods of Mars, and then eventually, they’d have other ones. Then I found the Ace books because I was looking for more Barsoomian books and they had the Roy Krenkel/Frank Frazetta covers. I said, “Well, I liked this Mars stuff, let me check out some of this other stuff.” I became a big fan, bought as many of them as I could, and every once in a while, I’d find a Grosset and Dunlap or A.L. Burt edition, with some of the earlier illustrations. I’d be going, “Oh, cool.” Every once in a while, I’d see in [the Warren magazines] Spaceman or Famous Monsters of Filmland some J. Allen St. John image, and I’d be going, “Whoa! This is great!” I graduated high school in 1965 and I didn’t go right off to college. I worked in an art department in a very large department store, in Alexandria. One night, it’s fairly late, and one of my returning customers came in, an adorable gal. I didn’t think of her as an old person,

Top: From a tender age, Michael W. Kaluta has retained an enduring appreciation for the adventure stories of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, including his recent illustrated edition of the first John Carter volume, A Princess of Mars, published in 2014 by IDW. Inset above: MWK in the 1970s. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Inset right: MWK renders the Ape Man in a 2015 illustration for an auction benefiting the Kubert School. 52

had bumped into, in intervening years, people I’d gone to school with and we remained friends. Very few remembered me as I remembered them because I was paying much more attention to them and they were doing things, you see. CBC: [Laughs] That’s earth-shattering. What do you mean “trivial”? Michael: I know. It was great. It was really great. CBC: If I may share an observation: many male comics fans are very, very afraid and nervous in front of girls. But I’ve always sensed you had a comfort level with women. Michael: Well, I had two sisters. It turns out none of my friends have got sisters, none of them. But mostly, it was I’d watch them around girls and I’m going, “She’s just a girl.” Now, of course, if it was just a girl who I wanted to be next to, then I’d just be the same or even more goofy, but it was very easy for me to have girls who were friends because I had sisters. They were my friends. CBC: And that’s apparent in your work too. What do you think? Michael: I suppose. I don’t know. I don’t think very much. I mean, somebody will say something like that, and I’ll go, “Huh?” CBC: That there’s a kindness in your work, there’s a humanity and compassion. Michael: I suppose. But remember: most of the stuff that I drew, somebody else wrote. I don’t really do my own writing so much. You know, I add some things and certainly add to a story. No matter who wrote it, I do add something in the artwork that improves the story. Different writers have said, “You’ve done more to the story than I ever meant anyone to do for it. You really made it a level above where I thought it was going to be.” That’s very, very flattering when someone says that. When being complimented about the Starstruck work, whenever anybody starts to stray into linking me with the concepts, which I think are fantastic, I have to go, “Whoa, they’re not my concepts. This is Elaine Lee’s world and I’m doing the drawings. I enhance and I may add to a character with a raised eyebrow in a place that she might not have thought an eyebrow would be raised… But, no, I’m the visualizer of the work, and Elaine’s the one that has these absolutely wacky concepts and weird humor. CBC: I hadn’t really thought about this before, but I would venture to say, in certain ways, it’s not really Sandman or Swamp Thing that were the first Vertigo titles, but Madame Xanadu. Your covers are really female-friendly. There’s no doubt about that. You’ve done a series of covers that you do for Vertigo that are extremely appealing because women are not portrayed, perhaps, as victims. #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Tarzan TM & © Tarzan Properties, Inc.

but she wasn’t my age, and she always knew exactly what she wanted. She wasn’t one of the ditherers and she always bought four of these frames of a particular size, and also brought with her the pictures that were going to be framed. When she came in, I was drawing a Martian scene and so on, so forth, and I went over to help her. And when I was pulling out the backing boards or whatever, she glanced over and says, “Oh, my son draws those.” I said, “Well, I know that they look like boats but they’re really—.” She interrupts and says, “Oh, fliers from Barsoom. I know what they are.” [laughter] What? You mean there are other people who know what this stuff is, including a grownup? So she said, “Oh, I’ll send him up.” And I was there one night and up comes this guy with his brother and a gal he knew from school and he had a big portfolio of drawings and that was Steve Hickman. [chuckles] And, as it turns out later, he said, “I’d met you before because that was the art department and I’d always come up and buy art supplies.” That was the beginning of a very long friendship. And through Steve, I met Steve Harper, who was more steeped in the older Edgar Rice Burroughs books. He had copies of the actual pulp magazines, Amazing and Argosy. CBC: Did you read ERB-Dom and the Burroughs fanzines? Michael: No, but Harper did. I found out about them when I got into college, when I met, through another friend, fan publisher Tom Long (who hadn’t published anything yet but was going to do a fanzine, which I got to be in), and Hickman got to meet Harper and Mike Cody. I had a comic strip that Tom felt would fit into the magazine very well. He brought over a bunch of fanzines and showed me what a fanzine was. Amongst them were all these things, ERB-Dom, Spa Fon… and I sent letters to some of the guys, particularly Spa Fon. Later I was shown my letter by publisher Rich Hauser, the publisher, and realized what a cheeky bastard I was! I had written him and talked about how crappy the art was. [Jon laughs] “Who is that kid?” I thought I was a sweet, darlin’ kind of guy, but apparently I was just a cocky little sh*t! I got to reworking the stuff that I had first culled together, the “Eyes of Mars” comic strip, to make it look good enough to be published. I got a letter back from Rich Hauser and [Spa-Fon co-editor] Helmut Mueller saying, “Oh, about you meeting our art standards as you criticized? We agree. It sucks!” [laughter] But I did a thing called “A Hole In Space,” which was a little skeleton of a story for to hang images on and I still have no idea what either of these stories are supposed to be about. “Eyes of Mars” appeared in Graphic Showcase [#1, Fall 1967] and “A Hole in Space” for Spa Fon #3 [June ’67]. CBC: Were you known as an artist in high school? Michael: Only by the other artists. CBC: No yearbook stuff or anything like that? Michael: I worked on The Penman, which was our literary magazine. I did some drawings to accompany poems. They all sucked. Best left really alone, Jon. [laughter] CBC: Were you well-remembered in high school? Michael: No. I go to high school reunions and I had to convince them by giving chapter and verse that I was there when Kennedy died and, “Here’s where you were: You were sitting right next to me, crying.” “Oh, was that you?” [laughter] “That was me.” Yeah, but then I looked a little different because I have a lot less hair and have a beard and I’m tubby. I used to be very, very skinny. I stayed in touch with, or

Fantastic © the respective copyright holder.

They’re just people. Michael: Yeah, they were never full of vituperation. With Joe Orlando one time, he’d give me an idea that — this was so silly… I’ll put it this way: a lot of the House of Mystery/House of Secrets covers had been drawn before. When you go through the mystery covers on that coverbrowser.com, you can see that, over the years, they would recycle cover concepts. The one that you brought up with the monster outside the window and the guy typing? You could probably find a cover from the ’50s that had the same idea. They gave me the idea of what to draw but never told me it was a recycled concept, that they were regurgitating stuff and I got to draw it differently. I’m just glad I didn’t know. There was a cover idea Joe had wanted me to do and the idea was a mummy inside of a suit of armor, obviously in a castle setting. So the mummy is inside a suit of armor and is attacking a woman. I put her in a maxi-dress and she’s giving back as much as this mummy is giving her. There’s no fear at all in her. I love the dynamics I got between the two; it was balanced. And I took it in and Joe went, “No, no, this isn’t what I want. Give her a mini-skirt, bigger breasts, and make her frightened.” I went, “Joe, how is that going to help the cover?” He said, “That’s what kids want. It’s what people want.” I say, “It’s what you want.” [chuckles] You know, we just argued it back and forth. I didn’t make any changes and it was never published as far as I remember. And it happened a few times where I said no. Other times, I didn’t realize what I was doing. Elaine was once talking about sexist covers, when we were first working on Starstruck, and she pointed out one of these Time Warp covers, and I said, “Well, it’s not really sexist. It harkens back to the 1930s pulp thing.” She said, “I know that, and you know that, but some kid, who’s never seen the ’30s thing, is seeing a woman attacked by a weird robot, about to get her neck punctured by hypodermic needles, and she has a body language that says she’s really, really, enjoying this and she has an orgasmic look to her.” I’m sure I blushed and went, “But that’s not what I intended…” She said, “And the worst thing about it is that you do it so well.” [laughter] Now that is the sweetest backhanded compliment I ever got. But I understand. It’s really a fun cover, everything being equal, but outside of its context, it’s exactly what she said. It’s a woman enjoying being tortured… and I had no idea. I just got into the way that it looked. Dave Stevens once said, “This is one of my favorite covers.” I said, “Well, thanks. It’s one of my favorite covers, too,” and I told him the whole story about Elaine. He says, “Um, but I really have to give you credit for having done this cover because it really, really influenced me.” I said, “In what way?” He said, “Well, look at it.” I’m looking at it, I’m going, “Well, you draw better girls. I mean, what? This is a kind of a tip-of-the-hat to Famous Funnies-kind of woman-throwing-her-head-back like that.” But he kept forcing me to look and look and finally took his finger and he set it on part of the robot that’s on his back, the backpack. I’m looking at it and looking at it, I’m going, “Oh, my god… it’s the Rocketeer rocket pack.” He said, “That’s where I got it,” [laughter] That son of a gun! It even had the rings. CBC: The physique of your women’s figures are very realistic. They are not this typical, buxom, over-accentuated, full-figured gal. I don’t know what you want to call it — they’re not zaftig. Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. CBC: And I guess I’m just making an observation that that’s just lovely. They look like real bodies, you know? And the sensuality and natural… Michael: I certainly try. I think I learned fairly early on that the most effective fantastic picture is the one in which there’s a lot to relate to and then there’s this fantastic element. If we’re in a fairyland setting with thousands of fairies around, that’s not fantastic. But if it’s a little fairy in an everyday modern setting, that’s fantastic. It’s getting some of that dichoto-

my going, some tension between the realistic and the fantasy. I’d always had trouble drawing women of any variety because, well, I just did. But, with Starstruck, of course, there were the seven, eight, or nine actresses in the play that were used as characters in the comic book, so that made it easy to draw real people because in effect, they were real people. I got to make up all the poses. The idea behind the Erotica Ann android was — and this is Elaine’s concept — that she was built to be a pin-up. She was built to be a sexual fantasy realized in flesh, but she made herself into a Mr. Spock, you know, because he had a giant android brain and he filled it up with stuff and broke her programming. But it didn’t break her body type, body style, or body movements. So as she’s talking about all the Mr. Spock-type of stuff on the deck of the Harpy, she’s posing like these [pinup artist Gil] Elvgren characters, right? And meanwhile, the gunnery officer, Priscilla, who’s this big, butch kind of gal, is so pissed off because of all the girly-girl stuff that the other one’s doing, but the other one’s smarter than she is. It’s fun to depict. CBC: What did you want to do when you were graduating high school? Did you plan to go to college? Michael: Not really. I had no math skills, no language skills, no science skills. I was certainly curious and thought science was fun, but I couldn’t make out a path in front of me. It just seemed to me that the only thing that I could really do was to draw, so I thought, “Well, maybe I could draw comic books.” During senior year, I’d gone looking at other colleges and became fascinated with Pratt, in New York, and I got their syllabus. I thought, “Well, my dad lived in New York, so this might be a shoo-in.” I handed it to him and he looked at it and said it would cost $2,000 a semester. He says, “No, you’re going to go to a school in Virginia.” As it turned out, the school I went to, R.P.I. — Richmond Professional Institute, which is now Virginia Commonwealth University — was $500 for the year, including all meals, so that’s where I went and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was absolutely perfect. It was so laid back, in such a beautiful town. It had some weird Southern elements to it, a Southern Gothic patina, which added to it. The art that I was exposed to wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. It was fine art and composition, and all these other kind of things, and they did it in such a weird way that I didn’t know what I was learning until, one day when I was drawing one of my comic strips and stuff started to fall into place like it never had before. I finally realized, “Oh, they were teaching me stuff, but

Previous and this page: At top inset left are two of the three covers MWK rendered early in his career for the digest magazine Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, for celebrated editor Ted White, to which he also contributed innumerable interior illustrations. Upper right is the actual original art of the latter, from Fantastic Vol. 19, #6 [Aug. 1970]. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Top inset: In the latter ’70s, MWK returned to DC Comics to contribute numerous covers, including Time Warp #5 [July ’80]. Right: Kaluta illustration for Metropolis by Thea Von Harbou, published by Donning, in 1988. 54

Art dealers were pushing it and advertising picked up on all the old letter forms, and, of course, they added the psychedelic colors, which is fascinating. Stanley Mouse and the rock concert poster artists borrowed a few Mucha things. By then, when I was working at the art store, and there was a bookstore next to it, and it had a giant art book about the turn-of-the-century art nouveau movement, and I don’t remember how much it cost at the time, but I know it was a lot of dough for me. But I was working, so I bought that and it had Mucha’s Médée, a kind Statue of Liberty figure, a veil going across her face, and with has a shocked look in her eyes, bloody knife, and her children are dead at her feet. That impressed the hell out of me. That book was my bible for a while. I carried around this big, old, heavy book. I still have it somewhere. So I became aware that there was a Mucha and I became sensitized to art nouveau and I started to notice it everywhere. Right on the heels of Nouveau, and probably in reaction to it, was the Jugendstil and Art Deco movements where, basically, you can make a machine make it instead of having a hand-crafted. The best examples are absolutely stunning and magnificent once you feel it. And that caught on a lot more. CBC: Are we talking Radio City? Michael: Well, yeah, Radio City, … the Chrysler building is a little more fantastic version of it, but yeah, all that stuff. CBC: Art Nouveau and Art Deco: that’s really the organic and the synthetic, right? Michael: I suppose. I’m not sure that the art history folks will agree, but yeah, you could say that. One relies on forms from nature — a plant, river bottoms, root systems, things like that — and the other is crafted. If you get any big, comprehensive book on Nouveau or Deco, they break it up into the various categories, either by country or schools of thought. CBC: What’s your take? How would you characterize both Art Nouveau and Deco within your own work? Michael: Well, I’m always inspired by Art Nouveau and I’m continually finding new takes on it that have been around for over a hundred years that refresh everything that I liked about it. There are some art style technique presentations that can thrill when first seen and then, after a while, you start to think, “Well, you know, it tastes the same. It’s an ice cube. Who cares? You do something different with it or don’t bother me with it.” Whereas Nouveau continues to reinvigorate me. If I’m stuck in the doldrums, I can’t get anything done at the drawing board, all I need to do is open an Alphonse Mucha book and I’m off to the races because there’s so much in there that drags all the good stuff I like about whatever I can do out of me, puts it on the paper without copying it. It’s just inspiration. And the Deco, Bauhaus does not inspire me so much unless I’m doing something like a Things to Come take on a science lab or something. Then the Bauhaus seems to have something going for it. But the Jugdenstil, which is a precursor to what became the Arts Décoratifs, the decorative Deco art, it’s got the same principles in the way the shapes are set up. There’s a lot of squareedged things, but it just sparkles. Both the Nouveau and the Deco inform my #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Time Warp TM & © DC Comics. Metropolis © the respective copyright holder.

it’s coming in a different way.” It’s being educated without even knowing it, whereas what I wanted to do was study the old masters and do all the fussy stuff. One of my high school friends had gone to the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, in Washington, D.C., and he was drawing on tea-soaked paper with Conté crayon and then used a triple-zero brush with Chinese White ink, painting the highlights in so it looked like an old silverplate drawing by an old master… The grass was so green on either side! During that time, I was drawing what I thought was comic books, comic strips, and delving into copying illustrations by John R. Neill, who illustrated the Oz books, and Johnny Gruelle, who drew Raggedy Ann and Andy and also did some fairytale things that I absorbed. CBC: How did you get exposed to those? Michael: I knew about Raggedy Ann and Andy. Who didn’t? But it’s not anything that I had read specifically or searched out. But when I was working at the Hick Company, one of the women that worked there, she saw what I was drawing. She said, “Oh, I’ve got a book that you’d probably really love and I can’t give it to you, but I can let you look at it,” and she brought it in. It was The Magical Land of Noom [1922] (which is “moon” spelled backwards). It was full of these beautiful line drawings and some very subtle, fragile kind of paintings. I caught the name and went, “Johnny Gruelle, he’s Raggedy Ann and Andy.” And I found some of reprints and Magical Land of Noom was what started. CBC: The Oz books I’ve seen are very impressive, the whole package. Michael: Oh, yeah. When I did the two illustrated Robert E. Howard books of his Arabian adventure stories, I wanted them to have that sort of feeling, where you had different styles of the color, the line, and then some tonework, and such. I’d had a glimpse during that time of The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner as illustrated by Willie Pogany and he’d done that Oz thing, but in spades. There are pages with gold printing on it, there are water colors that have got — they are tipped in with pieces of oils — not oilskin, but vellum over the top of them, there are some just tone drawings, some line drawings — oh, they’re just so rich. I thought that’s the way I ought to illustrate a book, so especially the second of the books, The Swords of Shahrazar. CBC: You were also influenced by Alphonse Mucha, the art nouveau illustrator? Michael: Yeah, right at the same time. There was a little magazine I saw on a magazine rack, an auction collecting magazine, and it had a Mucha on the cover of it because he’d just been rediscovered at the time, in the mid-’60s. Nouveau was starting to be revived. Beardsley started to show up again. And this little pamphlet thing had a beautiful Mucha on the cover and then a bunch of his drawings inside, and I’d never seen such delicate, beautiful drawings. It felt very delicate. Around 1967, a book by Cornelia Otis Skinner had come out which had used a Sarah Bernhardt poster on the cover by Mucha, and suddenly Mucha was the next big thing again.

My Name is Parisˆ © the respective copyright holder.

Poster art © Michael Wm. Kaluta.

art. It’s underneath what I do. How much I like both those approaches… I could get lost and not have a springboard for what I’m doing to come up from, but both Nouveau and Deco can unify almost any of the type of comic book work that I do. That’s it. CBC: Are they of equal importance to you? Michael: They’re of equal importance when I’m paying attention to them. They don’t cancel out each other, but if one’s looking for opulence, one leans more toward the Nouveau, because the curves are relaxing and tentacle-like. They bring you in and so on and so forth. And the Deco is much more of like a brass band in that it blares more. So, if you wanted to have a real fun, exciting sci-fi battle that didn’t look like Star Wars, you could take a look through three or four books on Art Deco and then run away with that, taking the forms of the various teapots and drink shakers and so on, so forth, and making them into the things that people are flying around. And using some of the patterns that you find in their glassware and so on and so forth for the explosions or the various ray beams that are coming out, and you’ll have a very jazzy looking sci-fi thing that doesn’t lean on that quasi-NASA, Ralph MacQuarrie nuts-and-bolts thing that Star Wars and Star Trek generally has. If you do the same story with a Nouveau base, then it’s gonna feel maybe more alien. You can make it feel more alien. It depends on to which degree you do it, how alien you could get. But certainly if you take Deco to its — anywhere close to where it promises to go, it pretty much cancels out the humanity. There’s no reason for someone to surround himself with that much squareness. [chuckles] And with Nouveau taken way to the limit, then it’s like being in a rain forest or something. You’re trapped. You know, it could be choking, cloying. Eh, a little dab’ll do you on both. [laughter] CBC: But back in high school, you were talking about you and your buddies would create these fantastic scenarios. What was the substance of them? Were they extra-terrestrial? Michael: No, generally it was post-apocalyptic, but the getting there had nothing to do with the story. There was this clean slate with some slight reference to the past to add a little bit of pathos and bathos. It just evoked that Twilight Zone “nobody lives here.” Had our minds gone that way, if we were a little more ruthless and angry, it would have become a Mad Max-type scenario. It’s just basically wandering through devastation, cut it with whatever popped into our minds. But since it

wasn’t for anything except our own entertainment at the time, it wasn’t really committed. We had no Boswell writing it all down, saying, “Ah, I must preserve this for history.” CBC: So when did the concept of storytelling…? Michael: It was forced on me. [Jon chuckles] I had no idea that comics were about storytelling. I thought comics were just pictures that were stuck together like a daily comic strip. There’s storytelling in there too, but you don’t get much. You’ve got to tell what happened before and you’re gonna tell what happened next and you have one panel in-between, generally, you have in a daily comic strip. But when I read comic books, I read it as like I’d go to school, trying to learn how to do it. I’d read comic books like watching a movie or a TV show, absolutely for entertainment purposes. I didn’t care who drew it at the time, you know, when I was a reader, as opposed to an artist. I only found out later who did it or that even that people did it. It didn’t even cross my mind to even consider that somebody sat in a room and drew all the stuff. You know, if an airplane was drawn wrong, I’d go, “Well, that airplane isn’t right.” But I wouldn’t say, “This guy, Jack Abel, doesn’t know what he’s doing,” or something like that. Of course Jack would have been inking somebody else’s who didn’t know what they were doing and it would look good. But as far as watching how everything was set to move across the page and all that, it didn’t happen until I got my first interviews with Joe Orlando and Dick Giordano, the first interaction I had with professional editors. They would give me a one- or two-page script and I’d draw it up, taking weeks to do it, bring it in, and then they’d go through it panel-by-panel and show what I’d done and then how it could have been more one way or another, more powerful human element of storytelling, more powerful dramatic element just by emphasizing the focus in various panels. I took one of the pages I’d done for Charlton before I’d gone to DC, and showed it to Orlando — this was when I really hadn’t started to work for him yet — and he took out a big piece of tracing paper and put it over the top of my page and, instead of drawing and tracing something, he just took a pencil and he circled the mass of action in each of the seven panels, six panels that were on the page. And then he held up the piece of tracing paper and said, “So that’s your page,” and it was as dull as dishwater. There were circles about the size of a cue ball — one, two, three, four, five, six. There was no dynamism between anything. It was just boring. I had focused on all the details — horses and riders and knives and castles and this and that — but what was there overall, as far as storytelling went, was a really dull, plodding, nothing story even though it was two armies attacking each other with sword work and everything else going on. It’s just… dull. So one learned to sense it, that when you laid it out and to bring a face much closer, if it looked wrong close like that, bring it closer. Try that. That was a comment that I think Howard Pyle had given, or N.C. Wyeth had said to his son or something. You know, if it looks wrong close-up, bring it closer as opposed to push it back Top: Michael contributed cover art and interior illustrations to a four-book mystery series produced by the late Byron Preiss, My Name is Paris, written by Elizabeth Howard. This is the Mystery of the Metro volume. Left: MWK poster art for a 1980 art exhibit held in Erie, Pennsylvania.

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#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All © Michael Wm. Kaluta.

versus the narrative viewpoint and because your mind knew what it so on and so forth to get a story wanted, but you didn’t trust it so you across that leaves out a lot of the brought it up to a certain point. And, busy stuff. more often than not, that saved the CBC: So what did you want to do? picture. Did you want to do nice pictures or One of the things I enjoy doing, tell stories? as long as it doesn’t get in the way Michael: Well, I wanted to illusof the story or it goes along or I can trate. I had no idea of that comics convince the editor that it works is wasn’t just putting a bunch of to play the action completely against pictures together. I really did want to what’s being said. Now that’s very draw science fiction and there was easy to do with Elaine because it no science fiction being done at the was Starstruck and she loves that, time. I just wanted to illustrate. because it adds to the content CBC: So what were the content of that she’s trying to imply with the the fanzine stories you were doing? dialogue, the characters, and so on, Michael: Very little content, just so forth. By having a story that you standard stories. There was nothing read in the caption, having a story in surprising or exciting. What might the word balloons that the charachave been a surprise was, “Look at ters are saying, and to see the action that really big city,” or, “Look, there’s happening from the point of view of a girl on a dragon,” or something somebody that might not be involved like that. It wasn’t a story as much in the action makes a really thick it was moments linked together by and rich bit of storytelling. It can being next to each other. That was in put some people off. My father said the very early days before I started that as far as comic books for him, doing any kind of work. But when he wanted them predigested. He you work from a script, there’s an wanted to be taken by the hand and implied story or more so, there’s an led through the story. That’s the way implied — there’s actually story that he grew up, you know. you get to put pictures to. But as you CBC: Are you in service to your get more sophisticated, you learn father, leading somebody through a there are things that you can do with story or …? the art that will make the story that Michael: Oh, no. I like pleasing much more interesting. Sometimes myself. With Starstruck, I like doing a Frazetta/Williamson story is just stuff that excites Elaine, that makes standard, dull, who-cares-what’sher go and write more and underhappening story, and it’s so beautiful stand she has the elasticity to imply that it’s a treasure. There’s nothing exciting about those Thun’da stories or three different stories at once because I’m going to take care of my side interesting or different or post-modernist or anything like that. They’re just of it and that will be adding into whatever she’s trying to get across in the various bits of narration and dialogue. In a story where it seems to be pretty jungle stories, same old stuff, but so beautiful that you can’t get enough of it and you want more. It’s like any horror book drawn by Wrightson is going straightforward, what I like to try to do is make it feel like if it’s taking place to be better than a horror book drawn by somebody who has no sense of in the woods at winter, make it feel like they’re in the woods at winter, not how to draw horror. Maybe the same stories with the same lack of content, just have the faces and some snow. But there are things you can do that but Bernie doesn’t need to have a great story to draw a great comic book, accentuate the environment and, if you can make the environment one of whereas other people, with a great story, their work can be perfect for just the characters in the story, we know in novels that that works beautifully. for like backing up a great story. So you rather hope that the people who If you read Manhattan Transfer, the city is one of the main characters, but haven’t got the drawing chops have got really good stories to work from. it’s never referred to as a personified, active character, but it shapes all CBC: It is often said there are two schools: illustrative Alex Raymond/Hal of the action that happens in the story. The stories wouldn’t be the stories they are without the city being there. Whenever I did The Shadow, I always Foster and minimalist Milton Caniff/Noel Sickles. Did you perceive that? tried to have that happen. If there’s a car or if there’s a gun or it’s a city, they Michael: No, not until I was doing professional work. The pictures I had in my mind, the approach I was taking, was the Hal are as much characters as the characters that are in the story, wandering Foster approach. Not that I could draw like that, or around, shooting each other. It just seems to make it seem like more. would draw like that, but it was presented as if it It seems more authentic or something. were on a stage in front of you. You were never inCBC: Rich. side a grouping of people, you were always watchMichael: Rich. But there’s never for me, there’s not one kind of ing from outside. The trick with Prince storytelling. To get back to what I was saying: I didn’t understand Valiant, of course, is that there are that storytelling had anything to do with it. I didn’t know what no word balloons. They talk through storytelling was and it’s very, very difficult to teach storytellthe captions, so you just see these ing without doing comics. You have to have the right pictures and, as you’re absorbing equipment for it, to learn by reading out of a book, the pictures, you get to read and you how to tell a story. But until you start trying get to put the words into the characto do it, you don’t know what you’re doing. ters. The balloons don’t fight each other, Young writers and certainly young artists you don’t have to have characters stand will put too much in. They’ll show too at one place. much where they didn’t need to and It’s one of the things when they learned as they work you learn with comics. If on it more and more, there are three balloons they know how to in a comic strip panel and use the flashback This page and next: At top is MWK’s strip in Gothic Blimp there’s only two people, I mean technique or the Works #7 [Fall ’69]. Above is 1970 MWK illustration. Top somebody’s talking twice and flash-forward techright is MWK magazine cover for American Politics [June they’re talking twice one-two and nique or the personal viewpoint ’88]. Inset right is promotional Shadow illo by MWK.

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

the third person answers “No problem.” If it’s one, then the other person and then the first person again, there’s only a few ways you can do that without having these tails criss-crossing or word balloons popping up over or have a word balloon at the bottom that’s laying the top of over half your picture. It’s really tough. There are some people who are genius at it. Alex Toth was a genius at it. You don’t even see his word balloons unless you look at the page to see what he did with the word balloons, but they’re invisible as you’re reading the story. They’re just not there. They’re there, they’re just not there [chuckles] because he’s so good at it. I will never be able to match that. Every once in a while, I get away with a really fun balloon placement. CBC: I think Barry Windsor-Smith is just brilliant with his balloon placement. Michael: Yes, Barry does that, very much, on purpose. He is very, very clever. CBC: There was a struggle with the storytelling for you in the beginning, correct? Michael: Oh, definitely. It was good to learn at DC Comics on the horror books — or the “mystery” books, as we called them at the time. At the most, they were maybe ten pages, but usually shorter — three to five pages. You could afford to experiment and could keep your focus instead of having to do a 22-page assignment every month. That’s for later. CBC: Bernie learned that early on with Nightmaster. [chuckles] So you meet Steve Hickman and Steve Harper, and getting involved in the fanzine world, producing these short stories. And 1967 comes along… Michael: Nineteen sixty-seven was when we all met up at the World Science Fiction Convention, the one that had the Dum-Dum, whichever that one is. [NYCon III, Sept. 2, Pen-Garden Hotel, New York City.] I always thought of it as a Phil Seuling convention because that’s where I met him too. He had a couple, several tables in one corner and was very loud and brassy and Phil, very Phil. Though it felt like a huge convention, it really was just a little lecture room off the corner of the second floor from the mezzanine ballroom. Harper had been to a couple of conventions already, but this was the first time for Hickman and myself. Harper had said, “Listen, Frazetta and Krenkel are going to be at this convention there in New York at the Statler-Hilton.” It turned out that Rich Hauser and Helmet Mueller from Spa Fon and a bunch were going to be there as well. I don’t remember anything about how we got the room… how did we even pay for it? I don’t have any idea, but there was room enough for three people. We took the train up and it was a whirlwind, right from the very beginning. And one of the first people we met was Bernie Wrightson. There’s a young kid, little bitty kid, going around with a bunch of his art, trying to sell it. We’re all looking at the art because it all looked like Frazetta. We were introduced to Wrightson and we all hit it off. [laughs] It was great. This is all basically happening at Phil’s table. At one point, I’m standing there with Harper and he goes, “Hey, look. It’s Krenkel,” and I look around and there’s Roy looking like Christopher Lloyd from Back To the Future. You know, hair bouffed out like that, highwater pants, bouncing up and down on his toes, going through a collection of AMRAs or something like that. [laughs] We didn’t say anything, we just watched. “Oh, cool.” The story’s been told before, but the “Chicago boys” — Rich Hauser and Helmut Mueller — had already been hanging out with Frazetta and had bought two pictures, I think for $200 or $250 each. They said, “We’re going to go up to Frazetta’s room.” And we just ran up the stairs. I don’t know how many floors it was, but up we went. And it was Wrightson, Hickman, Harper, and myself, all standing with our portfolios like that in Frazetta’s hotel room. He was there with three kids, a little bitty baby girl and the two boys, and Frank’s on his hands and knees, trying to plug the TV in because they all want to watch Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

cartoons. Then he got up and looked through all our art, giving us pointers and this and that, very sweet about it. Bernie had already given him a drawing and Frank was very pleased with it and he took out this big stack of Johnny Comet original art strips — which he was selling for nothing — and, oh god, they were incredible. So that would have been enough but, later that night, we were invited back with a bunch of other people and the room was just stuffed with folks. And Frank had a couple of big envelopes full of his paintings, and he’d slide each one out and we’d all gasp as each one was revealed. Oh, it was spectacular, of course. We all knew that the guy was good. We’d studied his stuff until there were holes in the paperback covers. [Jon chuckles] But to actually see the painting and to realize that if you wanted to, you could reach into the painting and take Conan by the tummy and pull him out, it was so damn 3-D. It was so amazing. We were all artists and we all knew what it took (or thought we knew what it took) to get something on the paper. But then to see it so amazingly there, more there than we ever thought it would — could possibly be, even though we’d studied it to the hilt. That was really, really a knockout event for all of us. CBC: What was Frank like? Michael: He was a guy. He was very self-confident, very grounded. He had nothing to prove. That was the thing: he had nothing to prove. CBC: Did you get a sense of what it was to be a professional? Michael: Well, I didn’t talk to him about when he worked for Al Capp. But we talked a little bit about Johnny Comet, fun stories about rushing it in at the end of the deadline, having to put the Zip-ATone on while riding on the subway with an X-Acto knife. But he could do that because he had such control. It was a strong, pretty 57

exquisite control. Talking with Al Williamson, I’ve gotten more of an insight to that, yes, it was all fun and yes, it was all beautiful, but that it had to be done because the wheels of industry demanded it be done in a certain time. If you didn’t do it, then stuff happened to the point of where you’d just be thrown away and they’d use anybody else. It wasn’t because it was so good because you did it; it was because it was filling this slot on the newspaper page and if they’d found some way of putting something else in there, like a crossword puzzle or something like that, you could have been just as easily been gone because there are some people who preferred that stuff, but they weren’t necessarily the newspaper publishers. It didn’t matter how much we loved doing it, it didn’t matter how great it was, how good the anatomy was or any of that. In comic books, certain editors like Joe Orlando, specifically, and Dick Giordano, as well, liked looking at the good stuff, work that was drawn really, really well. It reminded them of when they were kids, trying to do it themselves. Other editors, not so much. But the bottom line really was it doesn’t matter how good it is, it’s just gotta be in on time. Not having worked for Marvel during those years, I never was involved in the “assembly line” process, with someone else is waiting on what you’re doing to do their part. With rare exception, I always ink my own work, which is one of the reasons it was so scratchy and goofy. Luckily, I

had Orlando who didn’t want a polished look necessarily. He liked the fact that all the work looked different and that it was enthusiastic. He liked the imprint of youth in the work. CBC: What was your takeaway from Krenkel? Michael: Everything. He was just a great guy. I was never, ever disappointed with him. He was (what’s that expression?) worth the price of admission — a lot of bang for the buck. He was so full of energy, so full of insight, very, very well read in the places that he wanted to be. There were certain areas of science that he had studied up on and was learning more about during the early ’70s. He was very interested in paleontology, and specifically the dentation of marsupials. You know, that kind of stuff. CBC: First Fridays — how did it become a continuing social thing? Michael: It had been before I ever came into town. I think that Jeff Jones was involved with them at John Benson’s apartment. John still lives somewhere right in this neighborhood and he was a longtime comics and adventure pulp guy, and still is. But he’s very quiet, very quiet about it. And apparently the First Fridays, or whatever they were called, were at his place for quite some time and then at Jeff’s. Jeff had moved up into a bigger apartment in the building, so they started going over there. Weezie was always a terrific hostess and loved it and is very much involved because she knew all the stuff that everyone was talking about. CBC: Who would also attend? Michael: Wrightson, myself, Alan Weiss, Mary Skrenes, Rick Bryant, Mark Hanerfeld, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman. At one point, Larry Hama came in with Ralph Reese. Archie Goodwin, definitely. Bill Stillwell. Krenkel would generally be there. CBC: Did Wallace Wood show up? Michael: No, though he was just on the corner in an apartment at 74th Street. No Larry Ivie, though he was right in the neighborhood, too. It was hard to get any of the gals there. Every once in a while, there’d be some of the women. It all seems like one night when I run it through my mind. CBC: The first Fridays of the month, right? Michael: Well, who knows? You know, it’d be changed. Sometimes on Tuesdays, sometimes it was on Thursdays, it depended on when people were available being freelance. CBC: Did it go on into the wee hours or…? Michael: Eventually, they did. Once Al Weiss started bringing booze, he inspired everybody. He was a party guy. He was a cheerleader. [chuckles] And there’s a quote that I attribute to Larry Hama and, on occasion, he has attributed it to me. Either of us would have wished we were definitely the ones that had said it, but it was one or the other. I like to think it was Larry because it just sounds like Larry. I would love for it to be me because I wish I were that witty. [chuckles] Do you know Alan Weiss at all? CBC: Of course. Yes. Michael: [Imitates Larry Hama] “Yeah, you know, Kaluta, about that Alan Weiss,” he says, “Somewhere in a closet, there’s going to be a painting of him getting hipper and hipper.” [laughter]

All characters TM & © Condé Nast.

This page and next: At top left is 1987 print rendered by MWK. At right are MWK’s cover art for Russ Maheras’s fanzines. On next page are the poster for The Studio 1979 book signing at Forbidden Planet; The Studio book cover; The Studio-mates (from left, Bernie Wrightson, Jeffrey Jones, MWK, and Barry Windsor-Smith); and photos taken this summer of the building that was home to the artist collective, located at 37 W. 26 th Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Photos by Andrew D. Cooke. #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Studio TM & © the estate of Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Michael W. Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Bernie Wrightson.

If Hickman were in town, he’d be there. If Harper was in town, he’d show up, but he’d be very quiet. He was always very quiet except one-on-one. Harper, you couldn’t shut him up. [Howard] Chaykin, eventually, and definitely Walt [Simonson]. There was a time where there were parties and it didn’t get way out of hand, but they got a little out of hand. It was a lot of fun. CBC: Drugs come into the play? Michael: No, there was never drugs. It was always just some booze and beer, some food, and some sex. Just my kind of party. [laughter] CBC: Do you think ACBA grew from those get-togethers? Michael: Not so much from those get-togethers. No, I think ACBA grew from Neal [Adams] saying that we ought to have a guild. Not a union, because he knew a union wouldn’t work. You can’t unionize creative people because you can’t strike because all you can do is draw and you’re chosen each separately because of what you can do. [sighs] I thought ACBA was great. There’s a bunch of my artwork out there with a little ACBA lightning bolt on it and stuff. I was given an award, got it somewhere. CBC: Now initially, it started off as being like the Academy Awards, right? I mean a trade kind of thing. Then it became more like a guild… Michael: Yeah, it was. I don’t know how it changed. I don’t know where it went, but — CBC: Well, wasn’t pushing more for a guild at odds with higher-ups at DC and Marvel? Michael: Oh, I don’t know. I have no idea since I probably wasn’t paying any attention. There were more girls by then. CBC: What about the influx of Filipino artists? Was that of any concern to you? Michael: Well, I was concerned only in that they did really, really good work and got paid a lot less, but there was still plenty of work for everybody. The only time it did impact me, but it wasn’t anything critical because I was having my own issues at the time. When DC decided that they were paying too much to the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate for the rights to all those characters, DC said, “Well, to get around it is we’ll have the Filipinos do it because they’re making so much less.” It’s fine for them where they are. They’d be making a ton of dough at $26 a page or whatever it was. It was a ton of dough where they were and they were very happy to get it. But if they gave the Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff to them, and of course would be drawn beautifully — Niño and Alcala and those guys or whoever else… They all drew the same way: beautifully. Then DC felt they could afford to have the Edgar Rice Burroughs license. I was doing the “Carson of Venus” at the time and I said, “But I’m doing ‘Carson of Venus.’” They said, “Oh, you can keep doing it, but you’ll have to work from the same rate as the Filipinos.” I said, “Okay!” So I was writing it, drawing it, and inking it at the time. And then, of course, they said, “Well, they letter it too.” It’s like, “I can’t really letter, but we’ll see what — ” I tried it and then I came in one day and said, “I can’t do it. I can’t work the way I’ve worked for what in its essence was about a quarter of what I would have been paid.” I think about a quarter of what I’d been paid per page. So … [sighs] sorry. CBC: That must have pissed you off, didn’t it? Michael: No, it didn’t, because I had my issues at the time. I was hitting one of my first stretches of non-productivity. I just kind of went retrograde and ended up doing a lot of posters, which is always what I wanted to do. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

There wasn’t a lot of money in it, but I didn’t need a lot of money. I was kind of booted back. They gave The Shadow to somebody else because I wasn’t meeting my deadlines and it was entirely my fault. Nothing to do with anything over there, it’s just me sitting around, worrying about the next line. CBC: You were going through a crisis? Michael: Yeah, some kind of damn thing. Denny [O’Neil] seemed to think I was partying too much because, every time I’d show up, there’d be a different girl on my arm. [laughs] I’d say to the girl, “You know, these guys think we’re sleeping together. Could you just like not disillusion them because my reputation is terrific.” But they were just friends. Would I have wanted to? Sure! That would have been fun, but it wasn’t really happening the way that most people thought it would. I remember one time Denny called me into the office and he said, “You know, you have some problems here and I could suggest somebody to talk to.” I went, “Wha--?” [laughs] Years later, I thought that might have been good to do that at the time, trying to figure out which side the bread was buttered on. Separate the work from the play. If you work, you get money and then you can play, right? Because other stuff got in the way. I just didn’t quite see where I was or what I was doing. But it did get me into doing illustrated books for nearly no money and the posters for nearly no money, but I sold one of those Studio illustrations for thousands of dollars… CBC: How’d you break into DC? [Then editorial director] Carmine [Infantino] distinctly recalled meeting you at a convention. Michael: Well, Carmine had nothing to do with my first showing up there. He met me at any number of conventions. We used to meet through parties. One time, Weiss, myself, Chaykin definitely, Rick Bryant, and one or two other guys, we’re dressed as high-fashioned as we possibly could. We were at this rather somewhat upscale to-do and it might have been a Christmas thing, where people were dressed up. There was this gal, she was tallish and she was va-va-voom and she had the look in her eye. There was nothing floozy about her, she just knew who she was and what she wanted and knew that it wasn’t any skin off her nose to make us guys to feel at least kind of good about ourselves when she talked to us. And each of us were doing the best we could to make ourselves memorable and be cool. We were all being our Cary Grants [Jon chuckles] and making time, 59

This page and next: MWK art gracing the cover of The New York Times Book Review [Mar. 20, 1977]; cover for Robert E. Howard’s The Swords of Shahrazar [FAX, ’76]; Head #6 [Sept. ’76] magazine illustration; and cover for Offworld #1 [Fall ’93].

“Great Battles of History: Shiraz” [Flash Gordon #18, Jan. 1970], where Tamerlane was against Shah Mansur. And I did it up. You can look at it and go, “What the—? It’s gotta be Kaluta’s. Nobody does that stuff except Kaluta trying to do somebody else.” [Jon laughs] And it’s not great at all, but there’s things in there that go, “Oh, look. This guy might eventually do something.” I can even look at it and smile. It doesn’t haunt me like the Western and the romance do. [chuckles] Ugh! Especially the romance. That sucks. Anyway, it was $10 per page for pencils and $10 per page for inks, I think. The big bucks. And, during that time, Bernie was working on the “Nightmaster” stories [Showcase #83–84, May–June ’69] but he wasn’t ready. They’re neat-looking, but in two or three years, they would have gone for it. So I helped him with the two issues of Nightmaster during that time period as well. But every time he went up to DC Comics, I went with him and I’d sit out in the reception room. And when whoever came out to talk to him, or they’d take him inside, I’d go, “You got a script lying around…” By that time, Giordano was working there, he’d gotten a job editing there, and I’m sitting, counting my thumbs, Bernie comes out, he goes, “Here you go.” “What’s that?” “It’s a two-page script. And Giordano says do it as fast as you can and bring it back to him.” I remember running home through the park! Bernie helped me so much. He’d look at it and he’d go, “Hey, look. It’s a Wrightson panel.” It’s a very, very Wrightsony thing with some big layouts and this and that. And take my pencils in and Giordano would go over it and say, “You could do this and that and that and pull this,” and just basically got me into the throb and the thrum. I did three of those short stories. I can only see two in my mind, but I know I did three and I know in my little account book that there’s a third one, called “Trick or Treat.” [MWK did two “Trick or Treat” one-and-a-half page stories, The Witching Hour #7, Feb.–Mar. #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The New York Times Book Review © The New York Times Company. The Swords of Shahrazar © the estate of Robert E. Howard.

you know, and she was there and we’re all thinking, “Who the hell is this?” because they didn’t work in the comics and look at her, she’s a knockout and she’s very personable and I feel like a million bucks. And then around the corner comes Carmine, all tuxed-out and a little kind of boutonnière, looking like the Godfather. And then he goes, “Hey, you guys doing?” and he goes over and puts his arm around her. We’re going, “Oh, f*ck! It’s his girl!” [laughs] He kind of made fun of us a little bit and she laughed a little bit — oh, but we could tell that she was doing it sweetly. He might have punched one or the other of us in the arm and said, “In your dreams, boys, in your dreams.” Then he walked away with her. I guess I was the last in the line because I was there and I was watching, going, “Oh, man, that ship has so sailed.” [laughs] And he looks over and goes, “You couldn’t afford her.” I said, “Pay me more.” [laughter] CBC: Good retort. How did you break in? Michael: The first way I broke in was because of Phil Seuling taking Spa Fon and Graphic Showcase and showing them to Al Williamson. I guess I got a call from Phil saying, “Williamson’s looking at your stuff and he’d like to meet you and talk over your working together.” Of course, it’s a dream to me, and so I said, “I’m coming.” Somewhere along the line, wires got crossed, because Hickman thought that he was the one who was going to get the job with Williamson. I don’t know how that happened. I remember some sense of him being a little upset at Seuling. So the only job that seemed to be being offered was this one that, you know, working with Al. Somehow I ended up getting the offer to work with Al. CBC: Was this on the King Comics’ Flash Gordon? Michael: Oh no. CBC: I thought you were credited in Flash Gordon comics. Michael: Not in Flash Gordon, no. [chuckles] Show me. I’d like to know. No, not in Flash Gordon. Al wanted to get back into doing more comics. He’d gotten a script from Joe Orlando over at DC called “The Beautiful Beast,” or something, and it was maybe six pages. It was about a guy that goes into the jungle and ends up being attacked by a snake that really was a girl or some damn thing like that. When I talked to Al about it, he said, “Take it and make it longer. Make it like twelve pages or longer. And put a lot more boots and babes in it and dinosaurs and such.” So I did. I know it was really awful. I tried my best, but I remember it was fairly awful. I have a couple of representative samples of two or three panels that he probably used, to a point. I know that he used a couple of the things that I did, but it didn’t look like I’d drawn them. They looked like he did them. And then when I was called in to — I went up there in ’69 and worked with him in New York. He let me work on one big panel, about putting black dots on some mushrooms and a little castle in the background and some fronds and things like that. But wherever there was a gal, he’d do it. I’d watch him, he’d go — bam! There’d be this beautiful drawing and I thought, “I want to be able to do that.” So he had put the word in with Giordano, who at the time was working at Charlton. He wasn’t at DC yet. This is still very early ’69. After a couple of weeks at Al’s, the phone rang and it was Bernie, calling I guess on Jeff’s phone because he didn’t have a phone. He said, “Look, you just got a script from Charlton,” and Al said, “Off you go! Off you go! Go do it. Send me pictures of it.” So I went home and I drew it up. Then I got two more scripts and, by the time I was getting the third one, Giordano had left Charlton and gone back to being freelance, so I didn’t have any connection up there. They tried me out on Westerns and romance stories. The first story I’d done was that thing I’d shown to Orlando and he’d drawn the circles on the tracing paper. It was called

Head, Off World © the respective copyright holders.

’70, and House of Mystery #195, Oct. ’71.] Around that time, I was given a script called “The Coming of Ghaglan” [House of Secrets #87, Aug.–Sept. ’70], and it was a Mummy’s Curse type of thing, an Egyptian story. And I had an epiphany. I started drawing it as if it were a typical ’50s/’60s DC Comics story, what I called “Republican art.” It’s just there. You know, it’s got blue, some green, and if Jimmy Olsen just happens to be in there, some orange. But you know, it’s like, “Oh, god, I hate this stuff,” and the characters are all just kind of standing around, like little fingers. It might have been the third page or something and I went, “Oh, God, I know exactly what that’s going to look like. Aaarrrggghhh!” And something inside clicked and I went, “I’m going to have them all floating through space. I’m going to have the land going out like an island and the space below it is the same as the space above it. It’s like this islands in space and this and that.” I just went crazy and used Zip-A-Tone, which wasn’t allowed yet, and I brought it in and jaws hit the floor. It wasn’t all the well-drawn, necessarily, but it was like, “What the hell is this? We’ve never seen anything like this. It was some great rah-rah-rah.” And I thought, “I am on my way.” Even Giordano said, “You’ve impressed some people with this, Bubba. Think of it as a big buzz here.” [chuckles] Then he went freelance and, again, I had nobody up there. I should have learned right then use every minute you’re up there: when you’re not talking to your editor, meet with all the other ones. Show them your stuff, try to get work, because if you’re working with one guy, they’re going to go and no one will know who you are. And that’s happened to me maybe four times in my career where I should have and I didn’t because I’d be so happy — “I’m working for someone!” So off Giordano went and there I was like, “I was the guy that did that thing and for 15 minutes, I could have got some other work.” But I did have my foot in the door a Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

little bit and I guess Neal had started working there at the time, and so all the other young guys are showing up, and we used to come and sit in the coffee room, which is part Independent News they shared the floor with and we’d just hang out there. We’d talk, we’d yak, like and then every once in a while, somebody’d come in and we’d talk to them or they’d come in and just look at us. Eventually I got to have a meeting with Orlando and I probably took that Shock Suspenstories in there and had him sign it. There was a story that they’d given to Wrightson and Bernie said to me, “Could you pencil this and then I’ll tackle the inks?” “He Who Laughs Last…” [House of Mystery #221, Dec. ’73] is about a clown in a circus, carnival-type thing. And then a thing that spins around like in the “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” I drew the hell out of it. I penciled the hell out of it, knowing that Bernie was going to ink it so I did some of those Bernie tropes and memes, [chuckles] things of shapes that looked like Wrightson. And I went in with him into Orlando’s office. He said, “Come with me,” so we were both sitting in there, and Joe’s sitting with his feet up. “So whaddya got?” Bernie has these pages, he hands it to him. And he’s sitting back there, he’s looking through, pencils only … he does that, you know. “So maybe Kaluta helped a little bit with this?” Bernie goes, “He drew it all.” Joe goes, “Oh.” So, from that point on, I was in line for stuff. I got a little job here, a little job there, and I was so nervous and trying so hard to do my best that I couldn’t do my best. I don’t think I ever did anything again that really has some voomp in it. [chuckles] But I was trying my best. Then, one day, I’m up there. No one else seemed to be around. I was sitting, probably in Neal’s room, and Orlando came in, looked around, and said, “You know, DC just got the rights from Gold Key for the Tarzan stuff. Kubert’s going to do the Tarzan stuff.” I said, “Oh, that’s great news. That oughta be fun.” He says, “But what that means is we’ve got all of the Burroughs stuff.” He said, “Is there anything Burroughs did that you want to do?” I went, “John Carter of Mars!” He went, “Murphy Anderson’s got that. He’s been wanting to do that since he was a kid.” I said, “Of course, he did.” I said, “Well, fine. How about ‘Carson of Venus’?” He goes, “I never read it.” [chuckles] I went home, got a book, came back, and gave it to him. I said, “Here you go.” And he called a day or three later, he said, “Yeah, okay, you can do this.” [“Carson of Venus” appeared in Korak, Son of Tarzan #46 (May–June ’72)–#56 (Feb.–Mar. ’74)] And he put Len Wein on it and Len and I did those little five or six-page back-ups until the fifth or sixth issue, and Len had to go off and do more work, which was Swamp Thing. Len couldn’t handle it anymore, so I got to write and draw it. And then I choked… eventually. CBC: Too much work or just not priorities? Michael: No, I worried too much about it. I just worried about every line to the point of where I couldn’t do it. So I’d just go to sleep. But, in my kicking myself for a bunch of years 61

afterwards, it didn’t cross my mind until way afterward that I was doing the regular Shadow title slowly, missing deadlines or stretching out so far, and that was 20 or 22 pages. I was also writing and drawing five pages of “Carson of Venus” and drawing “The Spawn of Frankenstein” [The Phantom Stranger #23 (Jan.–Feb. ’73)– #25 (June–July ’73)], seven or eight pages a month. Of course I choked! Whew, boy. When I realized that, I really gave myself some space. I went, “So there. You’re not that bad of a guy after all. You just have taken too much on.” CBC: I think you forgot to mention “The Fabulous World of Krypton” [Superman #240, July ’71]. Michael: Well, that was a one-shot, but yeah. [Indicating character in “Carson of Venus”] This is Krenkel. I used Krenkel as Admiral Perry. CBC: Did you announce to your father that you were going to become a professional artist? Michael: I said I was going to New York and be an artist. He said, “How much money do you have?” I said, “Three hundred bucks.” “But son, $300 will be gone in a month” I said, “Well, I’ll get a job.” I did. I got a regular job in a bookstore for a while, Book Masters, on Eighth Street. That was 1969, the summer of Woodstock. CBC: [Pointing to Korak, Son of Tarzan #47 letters page illustration] Did you do that? Michael: No, that’s Jeff Jones inking over a Krenkel. There’s a beautiful Krenkel ballpoint drawing of that that will be in one or another Krenkel books, but Carmine kept it. He said, “Oh, no. I’m keeping that.” Oh, jeez, it’s so beautiful.

This page and next: Madame Xanadu was a notable MWK creation from the late 1970s. Included on this spread is the original art for Doorway Into Nightmare #1 [Feb. ’78], the rejected and published versions of Madame Xanadu #1 [’81], covers for a 2009 Xanadu story arc, and detail from Who’s Who in the DC Universe #14 [Apr. ’86]. 62

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

CBC: [Looking through “Carson of Venus” in Korak, Son of Tarzan #50] Wow, you were really cooking here… Michael: This is when I realized, “Hey, I’m doing Burroughs. F*ck it. Let’s get busy now.” And that’s some of the Nouveau that you’re talking about. [Indicating panel four, page four] It’s one of the panels that I’m absolutely floored that I was able to do. It’s got everything that I’d ever want to do in a Burroughs story. He’s captured, but he’s pulling the guy in. You don’t see the death off-camera, but you feel it. And he’s holding the sword and the sword feels like it’s part of him. Everything, everything that could work is working in that panel. I never read the letters column. I have all these books but somebody put them together in one volume with letters pages, and I was looking through it for other reasons and I started to read the letters page and I was blushing. There’s so much praise in those letters pages that had, I think, had I read them, I would have thought, “Oh, jeez, I’ve gotta keep — I’ve really got to get at this because these people are watching.” It was just — it was unending praise for the work I was doing. CBC: But didn’t you get that at the conventions? Michael: Well, maybe at the conventions. CBC: “The Spawn of Frankenstein.” Michael: Yep. I got to this page and they called Wrightson. I was up at 92nd Street by this time, I said, “Wrightson, I’m doing this ‘Spawn of Frankenstein’ thing.” “Yeah?” I asked, “Where are the stitches? Like where on the body are the stitches, if there are any stitches?” He said, “Oh, there’s stitches all over Karloff’s. That’s in the movie, but he wasn’t made out of body parts stitched together like in the movies. He’s put in a vat and boiled out and it’s just skin. It just stretches over the framework so he looks weirdly desiccated.” I went, “Thanks,” and I drew that, which is as happy as I can be with to this day. How many years has it been? I’m going, “Yeah, that was pretty good.” CBC: [Chuckles] That is one gruesome-looking Frankenstein monster. Was this simultaneous to Mike Ploog doing his Frankenstein monster at Marvel? Michael: I don’t know. CBC: I think it’s pretty close. At the same time as we had these two wonderful series coming out, there was a pretty good movie, a TV movie starring Michael Sarrazin as the monster that was quite good [Frankenstein: The True Story, 1973]. Michael: I remember that. CBC: Why was “Spawn of Frankenstein” so short-lived? Were you getting burned out? Michael: I enjoyed parts of it and when it started to become really predictable, I choked and rewrote and redrew it, so they fired me. [laughs] It was great. I was so fired. CBC: It was “great”? Michael: Well, it was me being very, very silly. I might have been able to do it had I just called up and asked, “Listen, can I give this thing a crack myself? And then you can like check it out and see if I’m on the right beam?” But I just went ahead and did it. I just said, “F*ck it, I’m just going to write and draw it and send it in.” So somebody paraded it around the production room, saying, “Look what Kaluta did for Orlando,” and I was fired. [chuckles] [Referring to Phantom Stranger #23] This woman’s based on a woman, Denise Vladimir, who worked at DC, and she’s holding an F. Scott Fitzgerald book, I think, because I used to call her “Zelda.” CBC: That’s almost amazing it got through the Comics Code. Did you ever have problems with the Code? Michael: I don’t know. The editors would handle that. I was never told. Not that I remember. I was real happy when I drew it and then they colored with such thick — rather than render it, just bam! like old-time comics. You just put the color on it and let it roll. CBC: Weird Worlds #4 cover: it looks like your layout but it certainly doesn’t look like your finish. It’s attributed to Joe Orlando. Is that one of the only pairings you two ever had? Michael: No, actually, I did something else too. Something that very people know is that Orlando did most of the Sea Monkey family pictures in those comic book ads. Joe said, “Look, I need to come up with one featuring the whole family, with the little boy and girl. If you could pencil it for me

and I’ll ink it, I’ll give you $75,” or something. So I did. So I don’t remember precisely which ad it is, but it’s one from this time period. CBC: [Laughs] The Sea Monkey/Orlando-Kaluta team-up! Mystery solved! [Indicating MWK’s detail in the Weird Worlds #4 Pellucidar story] Michael: Where the hell did I find the time? Oh, good lord. I mean I didn’t go as crazy as I normally would do on a background so it’s obvious that I felt somewhat of a time constraint. But eventually, I started to go a little more crazy. CBC: Did you need any pharmaceutical help to make your deadlines? Michael: I probably did, I just couldn’t find it. CBC: [Indicating The Shadow house ad by Bernie Wrightson] “The Shadow knows”! Michael: That’s so brilliant. The only thing I chided Bernie on was the light switch. I said, “Bernie, it should have been push buttons. They didn’t have those light switches back then.” They probably did, but in New York, all the switches were push-button. [Indicating restaurant sign on the cover of The Shadow #1] My dad said, “My friend Frank Oliver has a kid who is a big comics fan, so you put his name in there somewhere?” So I put Oliver in backwards, “Revilo’s.” And then, some friend from Canada told me, “Oh, there are some guys who are big fans of yours called The Revillos and they’ve got a little New Wave rock song out,” [laughs] which they got off of this. I said, “Do they know that it’s ‘Oliver’ backwards?” He went, “No, they haven’t the slightest idea.” I said, “Well, maybe you should tell them just for the hell of it.” CBC: And here I always thought it was a famous New York restaurant from the ’30s! [laughter] The color scheme on this cover really works. Was that the old [DC production manager] Jack Adler graytone process? Michael: Yes. I did the Shadow figure in a black ink wash, so it’s just tonal, and then Jack just laid the colors on it. I was out of town when I did this. I was in down there in Virginia and I wrote him a letter, which I was given. [chuckles] And it’s similar to the letter that I sent to Rich Hauser about how awful the artwork in Spa Fon. I included a little color photo of a Shadow cover by either Graves Gladney or George Rozen, that showed the colors I wanted and, of course, to pay homage to those cover painters. Then I yapped for two pages and I wrote, “Just put the colors on, don’t drop any black into color because they’re doing that a lot…” I went on and on and I said, “I want all the windows yellow. I don’t want them pink and blue and green… I want this, I want that, I want that.” I heard back that Jack was stomping around the production room, saying, “Who does this kid think he is? Does he think I haven’t ever done a cover before?” But later, Jack said, “We did a great cover, didn’t we?” I said, “Yes, we did, didn’t we? Thank you for not f*cking it up by trying to be clever because there’s enough cleverness.” I just knew what I didn’t want, and he did great. CBC: What a beautifully designed cover. Did you know that DC was seeking the Shadow license from Condé Nast? Michael: No, I’d had no idea what and I’ve asked around about how DC ended up with this. There’s no reason for it. It’s so odd for that and they didn’t license anything else at the time that I remember anyway. CBC: Well, Marvel had Doc Savage. Michael: Yeah, well, maybe they did. CBC: So maybe the timing was as such as, “Let’s us grab this before the competition.” It was an Archie comic book in the ’60s, which was not anything to trumpet about. Michael: The one in the 1940s was pretty good. I liked that one. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

CBC: Did you like Edd Cartier’s illustrations? Michael: Edd Cartier? Oh, yes. I didn’t see enough of them. When I started seeing some, it was in one of Steranko’s Comixscene. There was one where you couldn’t tell it was a human being; it was just a hat and cloak. And I went, “That is so brilliant!” I had previously thought, “Well, you’ve got to show his face,” but, of course, I didn’t have to. Eventually, I learned to do it different ways so it wasn’t always tipping his head back. CBC: Was The Shadow well received? Michael: It was well received. There were a number of people who wrote in. As Denny has said, you don’t want the professors writing to you on their university letterhead stationery. You want the ones written in crayon. [laughter] And almost all of them were saying, “I like it that he just killed the guy,” and we were nervous about that. CBC: Legend has it that Alex Toth was interested in getting the job, and Bernie obviously wanted it, given the page he submitted. So, if all these people were pitching to get the job, how did you get the assignment? Michael: Well, Bernie ended up doing Swamp Thing and was too busy. I thought for sure Bernie would have had it in a heartbeat and I’d have loved to have seen it too. Steranko wanted it, but he had a screenwriter to help with the writing and, at that time, that wasn’t going to happen. I had asked Denny who he wanted and he said, “Jim Aparo, but Jim Aparo was drawing everything.” It was Harper who nudged me and said, “Look, I think they want you to ask to do it.” I said, “Don’t be nuts. I’m already doing five pages for a bi-monthly book and The Shadow is 20 pages.” Harper said, “But they haven’t got anybody and they wouldn’t be still hesitating.” I thought, “I don’t think he’s right,” but I went and asked and Denny jumped out of the chair and said, “Hold on!” [laughs] He just left the room. And I don’t know how long that he was gone, but he came back and said, “Okay, you 63

This page and next: For a stint in the early ’70s, MWK produced a pile of covers for DC editor Julius Schwartz. Here, with a novel Batman sketch, are two examples. On the next page is a 1978 promotional poster for Elektra Records. 64

GOLDFISH.” “C S N A R N.” I had a friend, she thought it was cute. “Baby, see de goldfish?” “El am no goldfish.” “See, yes’n are!” CBC: [Groans, then laughs] I wasn’t paying attention. Michael: Yeah, that’s all Wrightson’s inks too. We penciled and inked, and handed it back and forth. I know we had a ball with that. CBC: Were you familiar with the character? Michael: Not so much, no, when I first got it. [Indicates page 19, panel one] Wrightson said, “Let me ink that one just without you touching it.” I said, “Sure, go ahead.” Look at the Thompson submachine gun. It’s the “rattat,” the space gun. It’s not really a Thompson, whereas the Thompson in all the other ones — because I changed them. I said, “Wrightson, that’s a toy gun you’re doing.” But in this one, he wanted to ink it just as it was. I said, “Okay, go ahead.” It’s a brilliant pose. CBC: Everything built up to this crescendo with this great collaboration… just perfection. This is really the apex. [Indicates final panel] “The Shadow never fails.” [chuckles] Wow, just great stuff. Michael: [Indicates The Shadow #4] And this one’s got everybody working on it. [Indicates license plates on splash page truck] You can see which pages Howard, Steve Hickman, Bernie, and Chaykin worked on: “S.F.H. 1-2-3-4,” “WRIGHTS. 1–15,” “CHAYKIN 8–9–10.” CBC: Well, look at that! Michael: [Indicates page seven, panel one] I showed this to my dad and he says, “Bowery, huh?” And I said, “Yeah, look at the Fatima Cigarettes poster.” He said, “But where’s the elevated train?” I went, “Oh, sh*t.” [Indicates page eight] This is Chaykin and he pretty much did the whole page. CBC: Do you get any of the original art pages back? Michael: This was right at the very beginning, when they started returning original art. The first issue didn’t come back come back to me, and, in an interview, I took a shot in the dark as to who I thought had the pages and then, after the interview was published, all the pages came back to me. So I did get all the Shadow pages and I eventually sold them all. CBC: [Indicates pages 16–17 spread] That’s really nice. Michael: I got to this point, I was very late. I went, “You know, I’m just going to do it and let the chips fall where they may.” This is, somewhere in here, I also made a tip of the hat to one of the girls in a sign there, “Maggie’s.” CBC: Did Frank Robbins come on to give you a respite? Michael: Well, he filled in between that because [indicates The Shadow #6] this took so long to do it and his fill-in was supposed to get me back on track and I was ready to go. But Carmine called me in and said, “Look, Mikey, this isn’t really your kind of stuff.” I went, “No, it is. I’m just not meeting my deadlines.” I talked about all the stuff I was doing, and basically he said, “It’d probably be better if you just didn’t do it anymore and we’ll give it to somebody else.” I said, “Okay.” I rolled over because I wasn’t in the right place in my head to go for it. CBC: Did you feel defeated… or sad? #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

got it.” It was as simple as that. Now apparently, I don’t recall this, but apparently Ronn Sutton was there as well and had some key part in getting some people together on it. I don’t know because I don’t remember him being there. I remember myself, Harper, and then Denny, and Steve Skeates sitting at a table, complaining that they couldn’t find anybody to draw it or didn’t have anybody to draw it. That’s all I remember. CBC: Really? I would think that would have been absolutely a no-brainer. You seemed perfect for the job. Michael: Why? Nobody had seen me draw this stuff. I was just drawing Carson of Venus at the time, right? CBC: But there’s a pulpish quality to your work that was evident in the mystery work and with those Batman covers. Your work is more illustrative. The Shadow stories, really, are crime stories. They’re different than super-heroes. At the time, I thought this was a perfect combination of artist and property. Michael: It all worked out and I have no reason to apologize for anything. CBC: No, you don’t! [laughter] Michael: Except for not doing more. CBC: Well, you did quite a bit. Were you happy with what you did? Michael: To a point. There’s things that are in these comics that I’d change ever so slightly for when The Private Files of the Shadow [collection] came out. And I still, in my mind, see the things that I should have changed. They’re not big changes. Every once in a while, I drew a woman’s face that was too long and horsey… things like that. CBC: Did you talk with Dennis about what kind of stories you wanted to do? Michael: No. [Indicating The Shadow #1] This one was taken from a pulp story and I asked to be able to read it. He said no, but I wish I had because I didn’t know what I was doing when I was drawing this. I didn’t feel like I had anything to stand on. I carried it off, but had I been able to read the story — which I have since –I could have added more feeling. It wasn’t that I wanted to compare his script against the pulp story or something. [Pointing to his depiction of the character] I liked this because it looked so weird, but a couple of my friends said, “That nose, it’s Jimmy Durante.” I’d say, “Well, he’s weird. It’s not his real nose.” CBC: [Indicating The Shadow #1–4] Look at all these covers you did with the special Adler process. Were aware of Adler’s covers from the late ’50s and early ’60s? Michael: No, I don’t. I remember Neal doing stuff. All of these were done on two pieces of paper, a line drawing and a tonal page, which you combine. CBC: [Indicating The Shadow #3] Bernie and you were quite the team. Michael: Now this is almost all Wrightson inking on this one, almost all. [Points to page two, panel one] “A B C DEE GOLDFISH”? [points to page four, panel one] “L M N OH

Michael: Nah. No, the only time I felt defeated was after Elaine and I had a discussion, years later, with Dick Giordano at DC in which he asked us if we would like to write and draw The Shadow. I said yes and then two, three weeks later, I found out they’d given it to Chaykin. [chuckles] I went, “Dammit, I thought I was going to do that.” I understood because Chaykin was very hot at the time. CBC: And he made quite an impact with that, too. So what were the prospects with you not having a regular DC assignment…? Michael: What’s that? I don’t know. I can’t remember anything from that time period. This would have been 1974 or ’75. I went into illustrated books, Lost Valley of Iskandar and Swords of Shahrazar, which were published by a company called FAX. They were hardbacks, with dust jacket and endpapers. They were by Robert E. Howard and they were stories eventually made into Conan stories later. CBC: Right. These were the non-Conan stories because [small press publisher] Donald Grant had the Conan license. You did Sowers of the Thunder for Donald. When did you start painting? Michael: Well, I did some really awful paintings when I first started working for Amazing and Fantastic magazines. They’re not anything to write home about, but there they are. I did some okay drawing in there. In talking about the FAX books, there were three intended. After I’d done two, for absolutely no money (though I did get some books), the fellow sent me the stories for the third one and I read through them and they all were set out in the desert. And I thought, “Yeah, but it would have been jumping through hoops to try to put interesting pictures into all of these things and at least the second book had a lot to draw from. I thought, “If it’s just going to be desert stories, I’ll pass.” So he gave it to somebody else. Later, I was at one of those conventions at the Statler-Hilton, behind my table, and somebody asked me about it and I said, “Well, I read the thing and there were no temples, there were no girls, there were no demons, there was just lots of desert.” Stan Mack was in the room at the time. Next week, when the new episode of Stan Mack Real Life Funnies came out in The Village Voice, there’s a cartoon of me, sitting at my table, going, “No girls, no temples, just … just sand.” And I sounded just as pompous as it really was. [laughter] CBC: Cartoon journalism gets you every time! Michael: Yeah, I had that somewhere. CBC: So did the book illustrating take the better part of a year to do? Even longer? Michael: Oh, it was up to me. I can’t remember how long it took. CBC: Yeah, how did you survive? Michael: I don’t know. CBC: [Laughs] Was it cheap to live in New York? Michael: Well, when I had one little room, it was $90 a month. That was cheap. Then, after a couple of years, the couple who lived in the other part of the apartment (we had a door separating us ) went off to the country to have a baby so I took over the other apartment and made it all into one. Then it was $225 a month, something like that. CBC: So the Studio began around this time…? Michael: The Studio started around 1976 and went to ’79. CBC: So you’re doing covers for DC, right? You went back. Michael: Now and then, I did covers for DC, yeah. CBC: Was that when Jenette came in? Carmine was out by January of ’76. You did Time Warp covers for her Dollar Comics… Michael: I had a lot of fun doing those covers. There’s a few that pop up every once in a while on people’s websites or Facebook, but they were never used as covers. And then there’s a third one that’s lost and the only place I’ve had an image of it is in one of those APAzines, a crummy black&-white snapshot of it. I’d completely forgotten I’d ever drawn this, and it’s got, twelve to fourteen robots and a black guy in it. I went, “Damn, I forgot about that.” Len Wein was editing a revival of Mystery in Space, and I said, “I’m open for covers any time you want me.” He said, “Ah, well, you know, you did those Time Warp covers and the books didn’t really sell that much so this time, we’re going to go with the A-Team. We’re going to have Kubert and we’re going to have Heath…” I said, “Great!” A year later, he found me at a convention, and he said, “Uh, you know, it probably wasn’t your covers because even with the A-Team, on all these things, they just didn’t sell.” [chuckles] I said, “It’s the stuff inside Time Warp and in Mystery in Space. It was garbage that nobody liked. You’ve got to give them new stories.” That was my point and Len agreed with me. A few times in my life when I’ve known something was so wrong and the person who knew it was so wrong would admit, “You were absolutely right and I was so wrong.” And it feels Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

very good. “You were right.” CBC: In the early ’70s, you did some covers for Julie Schwartz, which I just thought that that was almost incongruous. Michael: Good point. The first one I did was a Detective Comics cover [#423, May ’72], the one with Batman as an assassin up on the smokestack, and if you look at the original black-&-white art, it’s very, very much a tip of the hat to Will Eisner and I did a lot of drawing in it that just doesn’t come across in with the color. They kind of killed a lot of the rendering linework I put in there. Be that as it may, it still made a very effective cover. I also did one Batman where he had a gun up to his head [Detective Comics #426, 65

ing, “We’re simpatico This is kinda neat!” CBC: So you met Bernie in your early years in the ’60s at a con. Michael: In 1967, right. Bernie’s the kind of guy with whom you’re immediately friends. We have all referred to him by the blues epithet: he’s a natural-born man. [chuckles] He just does the things that he does, the way he does them. Unlike, say, almost everybody else in the Studio, he didn’t sit with his head in his hand, going, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.” He just does it. Once, an artist, holding up two different pieces of Wrightson’s work, asked me, “Look, Bernie did these two pieces at the same time. This one is f*cking brilliant and this one is f*cking vapid. Why is that? Doesn’t he realize?” I said, “No, he doesn’t. He just draws. It just comes out.” I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the guy work, but it’s mesmerizing to watch the guy just draw because he could see how it’s coming out of him. You don’t know where it’s coming from, but he has no doubt as to what’s coming out and where it’s going to go. I’ve always been impressed with him and if I ever have any doubt, I just go and look at the Frankenstein plates. They’re just stunning. Just to recap: Hickman, Harper, and myself are standing around, taking in all the sights and smells of that science fiction convention in New York City, and a very young kid is showing us artwork, which is really beautifully feathered, rendered artwork, all in brown ink on cream paper. And he said that it was by this guy, Wrightson, and either at that convention or another one right around the same time, Bernie had been crowned as “Best New Talent” or something like that. I can remember Hickman, Harper, and myself opening doors for this kid, a brand new friend and he was cut from the same cloth perhaps… though on a far-distant side as he could draw better than all of us. [laughs] I used to think, “God, what it must have been like to be Al Williamson or Angelo Torres or George Woodbridge or any of these other fellows at the Artists and Illustrators School when Frazetta came in, which goes back to The Agony and the Ecstasy with the way it’s described in there when

This page and next: Above are MWK’s preliminary “roughs” for the Carson of Venus installment, “Mutiny at Sea,” in Korak, Son of Tarzan #51 [Apr. ’73], as well as small repros of the actual printed pages. On the next page is the MWK cover for The Phantom Stranger #26 [Sept. ’73], featuring his awesome (albeit short-lived) co-creation, The Spawn of Frankenstein. At right is a detail from Who’s Who in the DC Universe #21 [Nov. ’86]. 66

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Aug. ’72]. That one didn’t work as well as it could have, but it was shocking, though the drawing needed to be better. But I really love that one of “Stop! Nobody Leaves This Magazine Till A Murder is Solved,” where he’s pointing right at you [Detective Comics #431, Jan. ’73]. That was nice. That dead body was fun to draw. CBC: You did a “Batman R.I.P.” [Batman #242, June ’72] that was just great. Michael: Yeah, that worked and I was very happy with that. That was the first one I handed in. I was at the office, everybody had gone off to the Sparta Color folks, or something like that, to go on a bus trip. I decided not to go and I was alone, in Neal’s room, one of the halls just past where Orlando was and just opposite Julie Schwartz. I was in there, just doodling, and Carmine came by. “Mike, I thought you went with the other boys.” “Nope, no.” I said something about not wanting to do. He said, “Well, if you ever come up with some Batman cover ideas, I think you’d be good for that. [chuckles] So I started drawing right then and the first sketch has the “Bruce Wayne, R.I.P.” thing on it, but the Batman’s back a little further. He’s got a flashlight, very much like a cover I did many years later [Batman Annual #12, 1988]. But somehow I came up with Batman crouching on top of a gravestone, and it was, “Yay! That’s the one. That’s good.” CBC: So it was Carmine who approached you. It wasn’t Julie. Michael: Right. Julie was a funny guy. Whenever he’d look at one of my covers, he’d go, “Damn, you remind me of Johnny Giunta. Johnny Giunta could do the stars the same way as you…” He would go on and give me the same spiel every time, because years earlier he had worked with Giunta and he really, really liked what Giunta could do. So that was always a sign he liked my work. I knew I’d rung the bell when he’d go, “Damn, Kaluta, this reminds me of Johnny Giunta.” Whereas I remind myself of Leo E. O’Mealia. He did some work in very early Action Comics. There’s one of a guy and a gal having bailed out of a plane [#2, July 1938]. I look at that and I go, “God, can I do that?” [laughs] Patting myself on the back with somebody else’s hand, but that’s fine. I’ve looked around and found other stuff by the guy, go-

Michelangelo is drawing. He was so damn good that all the other students, who could draw better than almost anybody in the world, and here’s this guy who could draw ten times better than they could and didn’t know it. He’s just a natural talent, whose art just came right out effortlessly. That was something I had to deal with because every drawing I got done, I did by clawing and chipping away at it, trying to get something on the paper, never being satisfied at the time because it just didn’t look like I was hoping it would look. Whereas Wrightson just drew and got what he wanted. You never heard him go, “Oh, no! This isn’t what I want.” He just drew it. It’s just, “No, that’s what I want to do,” and that was all fine. He had lots of technique, but the technique never overpowered his subject matter and such like that. It always kind of went hand-in-hand and he woke a lot of people up to, “Oh, I didn’t knew you could do that with the pen or the brush or with the shadow.” You couldn’t easily see the progression, saying, “But where did all that come from?” You could refer back to the E.C. Comics and perhaps draw some lines between one or another artist if you’re looking at, say, one of The Walking Dead. You can go, “Oh, well, that looks very much like ‘Ghastly’ Graham Ingels and it’s probably inspired by…” But Ingels would have loved to have been able to throw a brush around like Bernie. I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t want to be able to throw a brush around like Bernie. He’s that good at it. When he finally chose to do the pen, he’d say, “I don’t work with a pen. I can’t work with a pen.” Well, he made it his own and heavily referential to Franklin Booth’s style; but again, he made it his own and it was just codified the Frankenstein book “that book by Wrightson” as opposed to “that book by Mary Shelly.” [laughs] Oh, yes. Let’s call it Wrightson’s Frankenstein. And, along with the whole Studio, I got to watch him do that. So anyway, we became very friendly very quickly, all of us, and I took his artwork back to Virginia and showed it to Tom Long, who had published the first Graphic Showcase and he was preparing his second or third ’zine, which had Wrightson’s “Uncle Bill’s Barrel” in it. But it was a comic strip that he’d had — hadn’t published anywhere, complete finish; very, very young Wrightson and a very funny story, very E.C. in its reveal and so on and so forth, but so beautifully done. So Tom Long published it in Graphic Showcase, along with work by Harper, Hickman, Mike Cody, and myself. So that was ’67 when we first met. I know we all met again about ’68, June or maybe the July 4th comic art convention. By August, Bernie had moved to New York and he said, “Come on up and work in comics.” I came in the beginning of ’69, and was his roommate for three or four years, between ’69 and ’72. By ’72, I moved up to West 92nd Street. During those few years, I got to sit and watch the guy draw, which he did all the time. He was an example. [chuckles] He was a good example of what you should do if you wanted to draw comics and that was to wake up and start drawing. And I learned subsequently that any time I wake up and draw first before I do anything else, it’s always a good drawing day, always. So I learned the key from Bernie, not to wander off and do other things and say, “Oh, I’ll get around to the drawing part later.” I could still do it now and then, but I tell you, it takes hours after that. But you start and you get a lot of stuff done very quickly, it makes the day better, a better day for the artwork. CBC: Did you learn any technique from him? Michael: Probably, but not any definite or specific because it just seemed to come so damn naturally to him. I could portray scope — big scenes, background spatial things — this is early on. So if I worked on one of his strips, I would do backgrounds. I’d work up just pencil drawings, never the inking. Somewhere along the line, I’m sure I learned something, but at this point, I come with any specifics and I didn’t do what a real artist should do, which was just study the guy, because it would have helped a lot. [laughs] CBC: Was there a natural competitive nature at all? Michael: No, none. There was no sense in competing. Nobody could come close to him and he wasn’t trying. This is the trick. Back then, he wasn’t trying, he was just drawing. He’d always done that. He’d just always had drawn and it all had a flair. Every once in a while, during those days, Bernie would react defensively to the idea that he had not gone to school for art. Jeff and I certainly had gone to school… so he’d get defensive every now and then. But we’d all say, “It doesn’t matter. Look at what you do. We could learn to do that in school. You just don’t worry about it.” But it wasn’t so much the specific of, “Oh, I never went to school, so I feel somewhat inadequate.” It was, “I don’t understand what you guys are talking about because I don’t know the nomenclature that comes from being in art school.” The one thing that escaped him, although he used it all the time, was the concept of drawing negative space. He just didn’t get it. And he would kinda stomp around a bit in those days, as if we were making fun. [chuckles] Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Then, one day, it came to him, and he went, “Wait a minute! You’re talking about everything that’s around the drawing, right?” I said, “Yes. So, if you have to draw a figure and you draw then all the negative space properly, the figure’s proper as well. You don’t have to draw the figure, you can draw all the shapes around him.” And one of the things that’s taught in the schools, and one of the things that Jeff and I both hammered him with, was that. Look at the space inside the arm. You get that right, that arm is exactly where it’s supposed to be whereas if you draw the arm, making wiggle all over the place — we’re talking about early days — Bernie didn’t have much problem with proportions. But making interesting shapes out of the space that’s around what you’re drawing makes the drawing more interesting without you having to put the work in like with a glossy technique or big boobs or something. [chuckles] We just — “I don’t know why I like that drawing, but I really like that drawing and its proper use of negative space.” And, of course, the improper use, the paying-no-attention to negative space, you can get some really nice drawings that look good when you get up to them. But if you’re looking out from any sort of distance, going, “Is that a pimple? What the hell am I looking at?” Because there’s nothing to define what’s in the picture. So once Wrightson realized that he’d always been working really well with negative space and shapes, negative shapes in space, then any inadequacy that he had imagined that was tarred on him by not going to school was gone. Thank God for that. CBC: He’d graduated. [chuckles] How did you meet Jeff? Michael: Well, 67

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Bernie had met Jeff, I’d imagine, because of the art show that was at that convention. I met Jeff through Bernie. I may have seen Jeff’s work prior to that. I hadn’t seen a whole lot of stuff, especially once you’re in New York and everybody that’s there is there. You go, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” every day. Yeah, it’s like being in Memphis and listening to music and going, “Oh, my God, everybody’s really good.” And the measuring stick starts where most other measuring sticks would stop. Now, being from Virginia, sure, there are people who draw — I was one of them — but it wasn’t anything like people who were drawing for a living, professional types, and what they could do. CBC: What kind of person was Jeff? Michael: Quiet, but happy. He was a family man when I met him and a little daughter, Julie, and Louise, his wife, they’d all come up from Atlanta, Georgia. None of them had real drawn-out Southern accents. I was from the South, I was used to and love a Southern accent. But even though they were born down there, I guess — certainly bred down there — they weren’t bringing with them a slow, lazy Georgia accent, which is interesting, you know, to think about in retrospect. CBC: What did you think of Jeff’s work? Michael: I absolute love his painting that in just a few years after I met him really hit its stride. All the drawing came together, all his conception and referencing other artists and so-and-so, it all blended into just a magnificent mature style that just kept getting more and more… Jeff. During the Studio years, he evinced a suspicion that his paintings and drawings weren’t worth as much as Bernie’s or mine or Barry’s because he didn’t have to work for them. He said, “I see you guys drawing and erasing and cursing…” I was the one who cursed the most. Jeff said, “And I just draw and it just comes out,” kind of the way I was describing Bernie, but even more so. It was like more a magician. Bernie could see him applying it like a carpenter or like a craftsman or an embroidery machine or something like that. It would just come out and you’d watch it happen. Whereas Jeff might stand with his back to a canvas and then a picture would appear, almost like that. And it certainly felt that way to him. For a while, he tried using brushes that he had crushed and mashed so that his

line wouldn’t be as svelte and slick. He’d call it “slick,” but it was not slick. But so he had to actually think about getting the medium onto — the media I guess it is — because he was suspicious that because no work went into it, it couldn’t be valid. And again, Bernie and myself — maybe even Barry, I can’t remember because I remember this one conversation specifically, and I know Barry wasn’t there at the time — but it’s of Bernie and me taking Jeff to task because it doesn’t matter if it comes easy. Just look at it. It is what it is so do more of it. [chuckles] Just do more of it! I think in the long run, it parted — that got a bit in Jeff’s way of painting, that he just continued to think, “Well, I don’t know where it comes from.” I would talk to him, and I’d say, “It’s like Merlin in the way that Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave described Merlin in that he didn’t have any power, but he was a vessel, a conduit for power to come through and he couldn’t conjure. It had to come through him and it took him over and it did what it did. Put your hand out and everything comes right through you. Don’t worry about it. CBC: Acceptance. Michael: Well, yeah. So during the Studio years, he did some nice big canvasses, really marvelous stuff. CBC: Did you watch him paint? Michael: To a point, yes. I didn’t sit on a stool watching him, but I probably should have. I took it for granted that everybody in the Studio was doing that they do. Every once in a while, you’d look at what they’d done, but rarely ever watching them do it, with the exception of Bernie because when he was doing the Frankenstein plates, he’d have six, eight, twelve of them working at one time, all penciled very, very carefully and then he would just sit and the stuff would come out. You could hang over his shoulder and it wouldn’t get in the way because he wasn’t creating, he was doing whatever he was doing. I like to think from their perspective that I was doing the same kind of — that there was a blank paper and then look, there’s magic. But I was inside myself. They just did it and it was a beautiful … it was like pulling teeth for me as far as I was concerned. CBC: But you kept going? Michael: Oh, yes. Maybe if I’d had a family, if I had something outside of me that needed me to make the kind of money that one normally would have to make… But I just lived, and always have, from check-to-check, hand-to-mouth. Sometimes a little too much hand-to-mouth. All the rest of the Studio guys had, at one time or another, projects that just became them. They were subsumed in what they were doing and it was bigger than they were in a way. I’m not sure that I did that. I can’t remember. CBC: You did some writing on “Carson of Venus,” right? Michael: Well, I was adapting, yes. CBC: How about generating your own stories? Michael: No, though I’ve done it in very small amounts in fanzines and such, two-page stories and things like that. But I’ve never been the storyteller. Lots of other folks that I know, have stories that just flow out of them, to me, like magic. And, even if I tried really hard, I couldn’t write a sustained story. CBC: Why do you think that is? Michael: Why? I don’t know. I haven’t had even the energy to try to figure it out because rather than do that, why don’t I just do something else? Focus on what I can do. CBC: Well, creator-owned properties seem to be the path — Michael: Nah. I never thought politically, one way or another. CBC: Well, not politically — Michael: Well, it is. CBC: — but economically. It’s like having a — Michael: No. That’s way beyond my thinking. Some bartender once said, “You ought to buy a property.” I said, “Why?” “Well, equity.” I said, “What’s that?” “Well, then you’ll have something.” I said, “Yeah, but I don’t get it,” and I was blank to it. I didn’t understand what anyone was trying to say. It was to have something of your own that you can negotiate later into something else. And the idea of writing and drawing your own characters and having all that stuff, it just didn’t impact me. I knew that people were thinking that way and doing that way and some were arguing with the major companies to try to get them to pay at least lip service to creators’ rights, but I never became a champion of that or really cared much. So I did covers and worked on scripts. I didn’t have anything inside me burning to

get out except “give me something interesting to draw and I’ll try to draw it better than I thought I could.” But as far as stories go, they just weren’t in there. They never have been. CBC: There was no thought of doing a Shadow knockoff? Michael: Good Lord, no. Why do that when working The Shadow was so much more fun? CBC: Well, because most of the money was going to other people. Michael: Yeah, but I never thought about it one way or the other. Besides, it’s kinda cheesy, isn’t it? CBC: Well, Superman begot a lot of cheese. [laughs] Michael: Yeah, oh definitely. But I think it’s cheesy. I don’t really care for it. I should come up with an idea like a Superman or a Batman. That’s valid. But when you do a Batman-like character and then spend the rest of your life denying that it came from Batman, I mean where’s the fun in that? CBC: Can you be a storyteller through a single illustration? Michael: Yes, definitely. That’s why I like doing the covers. Sometimes, of course, the story is very simple. The early days, you know, “Look, a guy with a gun, the ‘Look-Guy-Silhouetted-By-the-Moon Guy with a gun.’” But it still is presented in an intriguing way to try to get somebody to go, “Oh, I wonder what that’s all about,” which eventually, of course, would lead to fans being annoyed that they weren’t going to get inside what they got on the outside. “Why am I paying 25¢ for something that doesn’t look the same inside?” I did the best I could. “Why did you draw the insides?” Because it takes ages to draw that stuff. CBC: Did Jeff want to draw comics? Michael: He did it now and again, but he didn’t care for it a bit, not that I remember. The last comic book project he did was a lot of fun for everybody because he gathered all the First Friday folk and dressed them up and took photographs for the characters he was going to do. One was in togas and the other was something like a 15th century story. “The Frog Prince,” I think, where the guy or the girl turns into a frog. Weezie was the princess and then there were all these guys as courtiers and bakers and piemen. Jeff had gone to the print room at the library where you could go through all these just image files they had and borrow them. And he had baskets of various pieces of cloth and stuff like that. And we’d try to take these pieces of cloth and make them look as close to some of these costumes as possible, like wrapping a scarf this way and then taking a golden belt or something and wrapping it around there and then wrapping it around the head like a turban. And it looks just like those damn Shadow paintings or some damn thing like that. So there are photos floating around of what I can remember was myself, Robert Armstrong, Len Wein, Rick Bryant, all as these courtiers, I guess. We’re all hamming it up for the camera. CBC: So he’d take pictures and use them as visual reference for the stories? Michael: Sure, right. It made it easier and he just didn’t really care for the whole thing on drawing comics. He may have liked it earlier on, I don’t know. But he liked painting on stretched canvas much better. CBC: He got a regular comic strip gig with National Lampoon so that paid the bills? Michael: I don’t know how he got the assignment, but it was really terrific. He did all the pages like they were old comic book pages in that they were giant.

CBC: You guys did a photoshoot for a story that got to be quite popular, Swamp Thing. Michael: Right. I was a character. I played the bad guy. CBC: Was it unusual for Bernie to work from photo reference? Michael: Oh, yes, but he knew that he was going to have lots of other folks working on the art too. He wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this is going to be ‘Swamp Thing.’” It was just a damn story. CBC: Right. I can’t, for the life of me, think of any other story with which he used photo reference. Michael: Well, he may have, but generally speaking, no. But he may have been inspired by us just having us just done something with Jeff on some, one of the other things that Jeff had done. Jeff photographed Bernie a lot for his paintings. Bernie had worked as a stock boy and he had a lot of muscles so he was the closest to the hero of all of us. I remember a morning Jeff had finished a painting. I was hanging out and little Julie came in. [laughs] She looked at the picture and goes, “Is that Bernie going to poke that monster with that stick?” “Yes, that Bernie is.” So I guess Bernie’s in many of the paintings. But Jeff also used himself, of course, and other folks who were around. CBC: How did you meet Barry? Michael: Well, I’m not sure how I first met him. Maybe at an ACBA event at the Society of Illustrators or someplace like that. But we got to know each other a lot better and we shared interests in a number of things. There was a Detroit convention where our time was auctioned off. There’s photographs of us standing there — body language: arms folded, legs crossed — at this podium while we were being auctioned off. They auctioned us off together, which was “thank goodness” as far as I was concerned because Barry was very popular and I knew that the big money would be going for Barry. The bids kept going up. And after $300, I leaned over to the auctioneer and said, “Anything after $300, we get.” He said, “Sure,” because they were stunned that it was that kind of dough, which was a lot in those days. CBC: What was Barry like? Michael: He was smart and had a beautiful accent. In those days, we attended a Detroit convention, where we talked about everything under the sun except maybe drawing. And unlike most of the big conventions now — it was a big convention for its day — but it was a very comfortable space. You weren’t whisked away and inundated day in and day out. And you could be standing in the hallway and people would come up to you and chat and leave. It wasn’t like the modern day. At the end of the con, there was a dinner in which the servers took way too long. During all that time we’re waiting for the food, you’re talking and going off in different spaces and places, getting to know each other. Meanwhile, Barry would jump up and excuse himself and disappear for a while, then he’d come back and he’d be drawn back into the conversation. After the third or fourth time, he explained what was happening. He said, “Look, it’s really silly. It’s just being in Detroit, we’re close enough to get some Canadian television and a show called Monty Python’s Flying Circus was being shown.” So that, not getting the food and having to be just sitting at this table, we got to talk a lot without being asked questions about what we were working on or whatever in the context of the convention. And then leaving, flying back to New York, the flight was delayed for a while, and we were having drinks and getting into these discussions about UFOs or where fairy tales came from and the lives of other artists — not contemporaries, but from a long time ago — just trading information back and forth. [chuckles] We

This page and previous: At far left is MWK’s 1976 Robert E. Howard-inspired print, Sacrifice, and inset is his promotional art for Marvel’s Conan titles from 1984. Above inset is MWK’s promotional art for his and writer Elaine Lee’s celebrated and long-running series Starstruck, which was initially a play, produced in 1980. Due to space considerations, and because having Elaine’s insights would be simply awesome, we have excised discussion of Starstruck from the interview for an extended feature in a future CBC. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

CBC: Do you ever take a break and go out of town? Michael: Not anymore. I used to. I’d go anywhere: home, Virginia. I never went on vacation except if there was a convention in some other country. I’d call that a vacation. And generally, when you’re in another country, it’s much more of a vacation than going to a convention in America. CBC: During the Studio days, was there a thought that you were post-comics? Michael: Very much post-comics. No one was drawing comics at the time yet even if, including Jeff, we had all come from comics. But Bernie and Barry, especially, had really come from comics. They were prolific. CBC: Your page count was nothing to sneeze at, Michael. Michael: Well, later, Starstruck added to the page count, but… CBC: For a period of time there, you were prolific. Then it burned you out. Michael: If you think about it, I got “famous” when The Shadow came out and I ended up doing five issues of it. [chuckles] That’s nothing when you talk about a Kubert or anybody like that. And it wasn’t consistently good… CBC: I remember specifically when I first saw your work. It was one of the stories in a mystery anthology. There were those of us who were paying attention to Kaluta. Bernie, Jeff, and Barry all had fans, too. Did you guys consider, “Well, we could sell directly to our fans”? Michael: Nah… CBC: Well, how did you think you were going to make money? Michael: Didn’t think, didn’t think. CBC: Well, somebody must have been talking about it. Michael: Not talking about it. When we started the Studio, it was to have someplace to draw that wasn’t at the house, so you wouldn’t have to be home all the time to go to work, you’d go to a place. And sharing it with like-minded people, it’d be affordable, no matter where it was because they could split the rent. But there wasn’t a “we’ll have a studio and we’ll publish a book and it’ll be this thing.” It was just about having a space. Again, I think all four artists each had a different idea of what it was meant to be or what it could be or even what it was what it was. But we were on a different tangent just before this that I hadn’t finished with… CBC: We were talking about fans buying prints… Michael: Barry had his own company, Gorblimey Press, and he had a bunch of different art prints and he was very conscientious about having really nice stuff to sell to fans. CBC: And make a living. Michael: And make a living, I’m sure. So that may have been part of his “wouldn’t it be great to have a space where I could have all this stuff stored and be able to mail it out from there as well as draw there and so on and so forth and have an apartment that’s just a living space?” Because there was a lot of inventory. I do believe that because of Barry publishing the stuff, we all caught the bug. But I think it must have been Jeff who came up with the idea of the photo print, but Barry will set you straight right quickly if he had also been doing photo prints. I don’t remember that he was. He was doing art prints, lithographs. CBC: I’m sorry, what’s the difference? Michael: Well, one’s a photograph of a painting, a drawing or whatever. The other is an offset lithograph. CBC: So you’re just coming along for the space for a place to work and have a nice creative environment?

This page and next: At top is the MWK print, Marionettes, produced for Graphitti Designs, in 1991. The next page are two examples of MWK’s humor work, including the header for National Lampoon’s comics section in the 1970s and his Buster Brown parody from Apple Pie #3 [July ’75]. 70

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

talked so long, we missed at least two flights and had to book a new flight and sat and talked. It wasn’t really until the Studio started to happen when Barry and I spent as much time as I normally would have spent with Jeff or Bernie when we were all living together or living in the same building. It was Barry’s wish to have a studio and I know he had some idea in his mind of what he wanted it to be, but wasn’t completely formulated. But I’m assuming, like all of us, that he had some assumptions as to what it would be once this studio place got all together. For myself, I didn’t even know what to expect. For me, there wasn’t any game-plan. You know, to me, it was simply a space to work. As it turned out, it was a space where four artists worked on their own stuff and every once in a while, would interact with each other, especially when someone ran up against a problem or wanted to share an idea. CBC: So what was the original concept? Michael: I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Barry had gotten together with Bernie and they’d gone out looking for a studio space. Somewhere along the line, I was told that they were doing it, you know, by one or the other. “Oh, we’re looking for a studio.” And somewhere along the line they were looking for space. I don’t know if it was every day, but certainly on the weekends, we were trying to find a suitable, affordable, nice, comfortable space, not in some skeevy area, wouldn’t be prone to break-in. And then Jeff, who lived on 21st Street at the time, became part of the search team and they found a place and cleaned it up, and they were painting the walls. It was a big empty space that had been all painted the first day I showed up. CBC: Where was the Studio located? Michael: On 26th Street, between 6th Avenue and Broadway. It’s now called the Princess Marion Kiamie Building. The Kiamies had owned the building all along, but it hadn’t been spruced up. But the area was just an industrial loft area at the time. It was very bustle-ly during the day from fairly early in the morning — sometimes two, three, or four o’clock in the morning — until five to five-thirty in late afternoon. And then it just shut down. There was nothing. There was one little corner grocery that stayed open until maybe ten or eleven, thank goodness, because there was nowhere else to go. It was the top floor, but there was another floor above — half-floor — that was a penthouse, if you will. And it was within a few blocks of the Empire State Building. If you went on the roof, the Empire State Building was right there. [chuckles] The view was pretty spectacular. CBC: You love New York, don’t you? Michael: Oh, I do. Oh yeah, absolutely. CBC: What is it? Michael: It’s New York. If you have to ask… CBC: I have to ask. It’s an interview. [chuckles] Michael: No, no, I have no idea. I have no idea. CBC: Earlier, you were talking about the city as being a character in your Shadow stories. Michael: Well, it’s a character in everything and, of course, the city doesn’t care. But a person can dress it up with whatever emotion one wants and have that reflected back. It’s very telling as the beginning of Woody Allen’s Manhattan when he starts with the Gershwin “Rhapsody in Blue” and the panning over the city and he starts the introduction over and over again because the city can be anything to anybody.

Michael: Nah, it was more just to have someone to hang out with. They had to badger me. I really wasn’t interested. I had to be badgered into it. [chuckles] And they finally said, “Look, if you don’t come there, we’re going to have to give the space to ‘fill-in-theblank.’” Though I’m not going to say who it was, [laughs] but there’s some few people lobbying, “Oh, well, if you need one more person, I’ll be that person,” and all them, united, said to themselves, “Well, we’ve gotta get Kaluta because we don’t want somebody else.” CBC: Now is that a testament to your gregarious nature? Michael: No, it’s a testament to how annoying it would have been to have a studio with those other people. CBC: [Chuckles] Well, I know, but you were less annoying than those guys, right? How are you going to make a living? Michael: I hadn’t planned on it. I had little things I was doing. What, I don’t know, I can’t remember. I’ll look in a second and find out. CBC: You have an accounting of all your work? Michael: Yes. Something that Wrightson’s dad showed me very, very early on when Bernie and I were living over at 77th Street in the one room. He said, “Mike!” [chuckles] He looked me — he was a great guy who reminded me of a mixture between a sweet J. Jonah Jameson and Popeye. He had a little mustache. Great guy. Both of Bernie’s parents were lovely, lovely people, happy-go-lucky. And he showed me how to keep track of everything right from the very beginning. I’m really glad he did because if I had to catch up, it wouldn’t have worked. I have an accounting of everything I’ve ever done that I at least remembered to put in. There are times I might have forgotten something. CBC: So how long did the Studio last? Michael: Three years. CBC: Three years. What was the idea for the Dragon’s Dream book? Michael: There was no idea. Nope, we had no idea. Dragon’s Dream came looking for Jeff. They were in the United States, signing up artists to do books on. This was [famed album cover artist] Roger Dean and his brother Martyn, and a fellow named Alex Mosley. And they showed up at the Studio to have a meeting with Jeff. And they walked in, looked around, and went, “Oh! Well, we should do four books; one on each of you.” But none of us, except Jeff, had enough to fill up a book, and we made a decision right away because I know we couldn’t each fill one hundred and sixty pages with art, except maybe Jeff. Jeff had been painting all along and he’d done everything from commercial work to very personal, emotive paintings. So he was a natural for an entire book, but Jeff gave in to the idea of having a book on the four of us where we each would have a section. CBC: Did Roger did the logo? Michael: No, a friend of Barry’s, whose name escapes me a quite wellknown logo designer. His name must be in there. He’d better be in there. A few things aren’t. There’s a few photographers that I forgot to lobby to get in there and so they got left out. CBC: Did the Dean brothers deem to call it The Studio? Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

Michael: Nope. We’d gone through I don’t know how many months’ worth of stuff just way before this book ever happened. We thought, “Well, we’re no longer doing comics so people don’t see our work all the time. Let’s put out a little newsletter to reach our fans. You know, a 8½" by 11" folded sheet so we each got a portion. The cover would be different every issue and it wouldn’t be any particular time frame for them to come out or anything; just whenever we felt like it. But we knew that we needed a name. So somewhere — I don’t have them, so maybe Jeff must have had them — we put a bunch of rolls of craft paper down the outside of the darkroom and whenever somebody got an idea, they’d write don a suggested title for this little newsletter we were going to do. Bernie and my favorite was “Monkey Pie.” We also had “Conan in the Swamp, Looking at His Shadows of His Dead Thing,” and “Jones.” [laughter] We couldn’t come up with a name. Finally, when we were all girlfriended up, we left them in the studio and we’d gone off to dinner and we finally came up with our idea. “Oh, man, that’s great. Oh, it’s got everything. It’s got this, it’s got the pathos, it’s got the bathos, it says everything.” And so, when we came back, we were all jumping up and down and the gals all looked us over. “What?” they asked. “We came up with the name!” we exclaimed. “Oh, really?” says they, and they’re getting excited. We announce, “‘The Bastard King’!” And they’re like crickets. “ What?” We say, “No! Don’t you get it? Like the Bastard King, like you know, like he’s the king, but he’s the Bastard King because he’s not really the king and he’s…” For some reason, it had hit all four of us as the coolest name but the girlfriends said, “We don’t get it.” But we never did the newsletter anyway, so it didn’t really matter. But that was a fun and silly time, the night we came up with “The Bastard King.” CBC: So you just all decided on “The Studio” as a compromise? Michael: We did try names like “Italia” or “The Loft” or this or that… But we finally said, “We could just call it ‘The Studio.’ Let’s call it ‘The Studio.’ Everyone else calls it ‘The Studio,’ we should call it ‘The Studio.’” And it was like, you know, “Duh, of course. It’s ‘The Studio.’” CBC: Did you have people come up and visit? Michael: Everybody. People came by all the time. We even had Brooke Shields come by, because the rest of the floor was fashion photographers and one of her favorite photographers was just down around the corner from us. CBC: Why did the Studio last only three years? Michael: Well, we were subleasing it from a paper box printing company that was in that same building on the fourth or fifth floor. I guess we had a three-year lease. And when it was coming close to the end of the lease, they said they didn’t want to give us another lease, but we were welcome to rent month-by-month. And we all looked at each other and said, “It would take me more than a month to move out of here.” We’d been there for three years, so it was like this, full of stuff. So we opted to just say, “Okay, goodbye.” 71

because it’s just jaw-jack in a way. But it’s what artists do. So that’s the kind of thing that would happen in the Studio every now and then. It was really like what you expect with artists sitting around, contemplating things that needed no questioning but once questioned, needed to be discussed. CBC: Did you have a common area? Michael: Well, there was a lounging area right by the darkroom and the front door. CBC: Did you have a kitchen area? Michael: Yeah, but there was no running water in the place. I had to get water from the bathroom out in the hall. CBC: Was it warm in the winter? Michael: No. And during the day it was, it was toasty. Most of the tenants were closed by five, 5:30 and they shut the building down. The heat was turned off. And having six giant panes of glass, or six double-panes of glass, on one side of your room, in the winter meant that they radiated the cold as much as they would have radiated the heat had the sun been up. So you’d feel it as a wall of cold coming in. We had space heaters. Not everybody worked at night, but I worked almost always at night and it was bitter cold. At one point, I built a kind of a tent over the top of my drawing board because it could heat that pretty easily from the space heater. A New York winter is colder than hell. CBC: Are you nocturnal? Michael: Oh, I used to be, very much so. Now, I’m not even sure. I’ve been nocturnal lately, but I don’t know. My schedule switched around back in about 2000, maybe earlier. CBC: What was Daydreams? You had a gallery showing…? Michael: I did. I guess I did call it Daydreams. I had a gallery show in 1977, at The New York Comic Art Gallery. It was like Sixty-somethingth Street and Madison or Park or Lexington, somewhere in there. I’ve forgotten his name, but I think every one of us had a show there. Bernie did that one — Please Stop Me — and though I’m not sure if Barry had one there, Jeff certainly did, and then so did a bunch of other folks. They had some really nice exhibits there. CBC: How was your show? Michael: It was what it was. I made enough pocket money to go to Europe. I was just turning thirty that year or the next, whenever it was, and a friend I had gone to school with said, “We should go to Europe before we’re thirty.” So we did. And I had a bunch of money from selling artwork at the gallery. It was mostly Lost Valley of Iskandar and Swords of Shahrazar art that was sold. CBC: A lot of people showed? Michael: Sure, yes. CBC: And was it interesting to be the center of attention like that? Michael: Well, I suppose. I was real happy that a bunch of friends from Virginia came up. Charlie Vess was there, he hadn’t move to town yet. I guess he was just moving in town right then, ’77, somewhere in there. CBC: Was your work known in Europe? Michael: Yes, sure. After we went to England — that’s where we were going for this whole thing — but we had a side trip planned to Paris. And Fershid Bharucha had been my European art representative so he had a bunch of francs waiting for me, which I immediately spent on cool stuff. But it wasn’t even a ton of dough, but it was more than I needed. That was the best part: having more money than I needed. CBC: How long did you stay in Europe? Michael: About two-and-a-half months. CBC: Did you do work for Heavy Metal? Michael: No. I wanted to, but he and Dionnet were not pals. Fershid didn’t bother to tell me that, so I kept wondering, “Well, why isn’t he signing it to Métal Hurlant?” God, I wanted so much to be in Métal Hurlant with all that cool art. As it turns out, being in Heavy Metal was just as cool, but most of my stuff didn’t end up in Heavy Metal. I got a couple of single images in there, but Fershid had access to all this stuff, but he ended up publishing it himself, which was still cool… but it wasn’t Métal Hurlant. #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

CBC: You go your separate ways? Michael: Well, yeah, back to the apartments or whatever. CBC: How was it while it lasted? Michael: Oh, it was what it was. Like the photos that were in The Studio book, they give an idea what it was like day-to-day. Around 2:30 during the summer and earlier during the winter, the sun would start coming in through the six windows we had. The first few weeks, we did not have shades, because we thought, “Who needs shades?” But then we realized that sun coming through glass for hours turned the place into an oven. So Bernie sprung for these old fashioned shades, the ones you pull down and click. And boy, they made all the difference and they really added to the ambiance of the place, having sun coming through the little slatted areas instead of just a blaring big white set of windows. We had an air conditioner, which we weren’t really supposed to use, but we did because there it was and nobody ever complained about it and it helped some, the big, old thing. Near the front door there a couch and this was right next to my section. So I became the kind of unofficial greeter because I was closest to the door and we’d leave the door open because, after all, there were photographer models coming by! We’re like, “Helloooooo.” [Jon chuckles] And that’s when Brooke Shields peeked in one time. She was in her teens. She peeked in and looked around. Bernie was over by the window, Barry was over by the other window, then Jeff was tucked in this back corner. And we each had our own kind of lighting. No florescent unless it was like a close little florescent personal thing, but no fluorescents from the ceilings. None of that office-feeling stuff. Most of it was light that came down a lot — way far from a very tall ceiling and then lit up these pooled light areas. And that added again to the ambiance. There was no one day or evening where the place looked the same because it depended on which light was on or who was working or what, or what the sunlight was like outside or something like that. All these mixed together so it was really — had a different atmosphere every day. That was kinda cool. CBC: Was there a sense that this was a special time when you were there? Michael: Oh, I suppose. But we weren’t precious about it. I don’t know about the rest of the guys, but I wish that I hadn’t been there so I could have seen The Studio book and imagined what it was like… because imagining what it was like would be a lot more oomphy, or whatever, than what it was really like. Sometimes it was really, really cool, but other times, it was just another work day. Having four such disparate types, although sharing much of the same mindset, was an interesting situation. One or another would come up with something… like Bernie, one time, decided to build a Frankenstein face out of clay. So he bought one of those plastic skulls, stuck it onto a little plinth thing, and then started putting the clay on top of it. Once he got the whole thing covered with clay, he covered it with some kind of goopy stuff that melted the plasticine and it became one of the ugliest things in the world, but he kept it… When Jeff was painting his Blind Narcissus, we had this long discussion that went through everybody and our contributions to it were based on our personalities. Barry was drawing from the previous centuries’ art theory about the question at hand. Bernie was just like winging it. I was intrigued by what Jeff was asking, but it took a while to understand what he was asking and I was very impressed that anybody would ask that because it never would have crossed my mind. He wanted Blind Narcissus to be life-size and he says, “If she’s life-size, then what’s this frond and bird in front of her? How big is that? Is it life-size too? That means it’s a flat plane. But if there’s any kind of depth in there, because I’m trying to make a naturalistic picture, then this bird has to be life-size which means she’s not life-size because she’s in the picture about twelve feet or seven feet or whatever it is.” So was the surface of the canvas the delineator for life-size? Or is it the illusion of life-size? And you know, this is really something that there’s no really no need to talk about it

CBC: Was the production nice on the European editions of your work? Michael: Yeah, it wasn’t like the big publishing houses. It was paperback, black-&-white interiors, and there was no art book. It was comics and sketchbook work and stuff like that. CBC: Did you have any input with The Studio book? In as far as the layout and the presentation and the choices of the art? Michael: Yes, all that. We almost didn’t. I mean we had done a bunch of set-up stuff and gave it to Martyn Dean and, for the longest time, we didn’t hear back. So Jeff and I got on an airplane and went over to England, walked up to his front door, knocked on the door, scared the hell out of him. “What? What are you guys doing here?” he says. “We want to see our book.” So he showed us the layouts and he’d just changed everything. We went, “It’s not what you promised us.” So we reported back to Barry. Barry needed to know everything so he could work it out so it came out more like we wanted. So although each person may have some reservations about what it looks like, I’m perfectly happy with the way it looks. I like the book a lot. There’s so much stuff in it and the artwork gets a big presentation. It’s a really nice-sized book. CBC: And the text is good? Michael: I did the text so it’d better be good. We were going to hire a fellow in and he was a professional writer. He worked for Time magazine, and he interviewed all four of us at length and the section he wrote for me was basically a question/answer, with a few snarky comments that he thought were hip. I thought, “This is embarrassing.” With both Jeff and Barry, he had taken some of the personal stuff that they talked about that wasn’t for publication and put that in because it was more interesting. We certainly liked the guy, but had to tell him, “Look, this is not how we want ourselves represented.” “Yes, but you hired me to do it. I mean if I hired you to do a picture of a girl, I’d have to take whatever you painted for me.” He had some kind of theory about that. We said, “Well, we’re sorry, but no.” CBC: So did you each do your own text? Michael: Yeah. Yes, we did. CBC: [Looking through The Studio] You’re a photographer? Michael: No. Well, we just had cameras. Barry and Jeff were much more the photographers. Jeff had four or five cameras. CBC: Did you produce work specifically for the book? Michael: No, nothing specific. Somewhere in the world, I have a mock-up of the book that has doped-in, rough drawings by each of us of what was going to be there. So you got all these Barry Windsor-Smith sketches and all these Jeff Jones sketches and all these Kaluta sketches and all these Wrightson sketches. I don’t know where it is. I used to know where it was but then the last time I looked there, it wasn’t. But I know I have it. [chuckles] I just don’t quite know where I put it. CBC: Wow! By the time this book was published… Michael: That was basically the end of the Studio. The publisher’s people kept saying, “We need to know who you are so we can have something to hang this on. Our marketing people need to know where we are going to

put it in bookstores. What is it about? What’s the theme behind this?” And there just wasn’t a unifying theme that we could figure out. So trying to figure out who we were kind of took a lot of the energy out of the Studio. It became a lot about us trying to find out who we were as opposed to just being… I was happy with the book except for the fact that the spine breaks so easily, because it wasn’t perfect-bound; it was glued. CBC: Did you share in the profits of it? Michael: There were no profits. Never saw another dime. We got, I think, $4,000 each; $16,000 in total. That’s what we were given and then that was it. There may have been money, but we didn’t know about it. CBC: Has there ever been talk of reprinting it? Michael: Always. Tons of talk. It’s talk. There was a moment where it might have happened, but it won’t happen now. CBC: What were your prospects when the Studio ended? Michael: I had nothing to do. I had just my regular old stuff. I was home, I had a roommate, Charlie Vess, who by then had already broken into the business. He’d been there for three years. CBC: Had commission work come to play in the ’70s? Michael: [Looking through an accounting book] There’s some commissions listed here: royalties from Dante’s Inferno, $275; kill fees from Portal Press, $200… They were going to do a bunch of posters and I did the picture of Solo, which is that horse-legged woman leaning against the big mushroom, and the She’s Leaving Home, a little girl on the carpet, flying away. I was doing these things for the fellow who ran Portal Press, and he said, “Well, you know, I showed them to the secretaries and they said they were too dark, so we’re not going to do those.” I replied, “Well, you hired me to do them, I painted them, and you just can’t say you’re not going to do them and not pay me anything.” [Reading] Batman Family #17… Doorway To Nightmare #4, $125. That had to be for inking or something because that’s awful, not a lot of money. I was still doing posters for Portal Press in ’78; Dragon’s Dream, first payment, $1,000; second payment, $1,000. Seems that DC was paying me $125 for these Doorway To Nightmare covers. That’s really ridiculous, but I guess it was big money at the time. Heavy Metal paid me $400 to use a picture from Swords of Shahrazar in one of their calendars. House of Secrets cover, $200. Dragon’s Dream, final advance, $1,600… Heavy Metal paid $500 to use Behind Neptune Throne for double-page spread. Poster royalties from Dragon’s Dream, $1,500 (that’s not bad). Poster royalties, $1,500; poster royalties, Metropolis, $1,500. It’s all Dragon’s Dream. There you go. CBC: So it’s all steady, steady income coming in? Michael: Well, it’s as steady as any freelance. CBC: When did you meet Dave Stevens? Michael: I don’t remember when we first, but probably by ’77, when Star Wars first came out, right? I showed up for the San Diego Comic-Con and got my own room in the Travelator, which is a little place right next to the El Cortez hotel, which was where the convention used to be. You know, when it was very quaint and very fun little convention, sitting around the pool and

This page and previous: Left inset is MWK’s cover illustration for Vampirella Master Series #5 [Aug. 2011]. Above are two MWK illos from the Lord of the Rings calendar [’94]. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

those things. Amazing. CBC: Oh, man. Kismet. [laughs] [Editor’s note: At this point in the interview, the discussion turned to an extended talk about Michael’s collaboration and friendship with write and playwright Elaine Lee, specifically regarding Starstruck, the science fiction/space opera series that has intermittently spanned the decades since their meeting in the ’70s. That portion will appear in an extended Starstruck feature in a near-future issue of CBC. — Y.E.] CBC: You hadn’t done much work for Marvel in the ’70s, had you? Had you tried? Michael: I did some coloring-type work. CBC: You did a cover for the science fiction anthology, Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction [#2, Mar. ’75], and some Conan paintings. Michael: That UWOSF cover was not originally for them. I remember Stan the Man came in, looked at the thing. There was just a white background and he said he wanted some gray planets in it to give it a spacey look. He said, “Earth, you know, a big, gray Earth back there.” I said, “Why gray?” He goes, “You know, gray from space.” [laughs] As you know, that was based on the famous Iwo Jima photograph. That was fun to paint. CBC: The idea of Starstruck as a comic

book: was that a natural? Michael: Well, it wasn’t a natural. I wasn’t doing comics anymore. I was completely disenchanted with comics. CBC: Why? Michael: But it wasn’t because of them so much; it was because of me. The excuse I gave was that every script I’d been getting was taken from the news. I’m not interested in news. I want some hot fantasy. I want it to be something you can’t find on TV. It’s like, why don’t we do advertising then? The one time I asked for a new script specifically, Joe Orlando had gone to another writer to do a script and it was the same typical thing: a girl gets picked up while hitchhiking by a guy in the truck, who drives into a field, beats her up, is going to rape her, and then a monster comes and gets him because he’s hurt the girl. I’m like, “Damn! That’s yesterday’s news. I want a story, please.” But, you know, I wasn’t that dedicated. CBC: Did Hollywood come calling at all? I know that Bernie got to work on Ghostbusters and there was animation work for comic book artists out West. Michael: If I’d moved out there, there would have been plenty of work. Dave Stevens sent some movie work my way, though very little of it ended up on the screen. I would do concept work that was shown to other concept artists to get them to get out of their rut. One time I worked for Marvel Entertainment on a trailer. These were the people who are doing Biker Mice From Mars, the same gang, which was a success, that they’re doing good work with that. This thing that we put together never went anywhere. I went out there for — I don’t know how many weeks — months. I had my own apartment on Sunset Boulevard, had a car, had my own little office… it was great. CBC: Did you like it out there? Michael: No. [laughter] I mean yes, but no. What I liked was hanging out with Dave. That was fun. This was — it was work. The thing about Hollywood is that they never take the first good idea. “Well, that’s fine,” they’d say, “but can you do this?”

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

drawing and such. But I remember getting in the room, throwing the stuff down and then walking across this little arching bridge and wandering around until I saw somebody I knew and I followed them. And there was Dave and about twelve other comic book and movie types, all talking about Star Wars, but not from the entertainment side or from “watching it” side, but from the talking about which props had been stolen by whom and [mutual chuckling] all this insider California stuff. Dave had lived and worked in San Diego. He was very conversant with that town. CBC: He was a very charming person. Michael: Dave was a terrific guy who I sure wish was still around. Now, when the phone rings late at night, I know it won’t be him and that’s a damn shame. Yeah. Well, he knew so much and he remembered so much and he could put it all together. He was never didactic or pedantic about things that he was interested in. But, if you got on a thread, he knew everything about it and all the people that did it, he remembered and could give credit where credit was due. And I’ve got a number of friends who have that sort of take on the real world. I admire it, but I can’t do it myself. I just don’t have that kind of brain. It didn’t work that way. I wish it did. But yeah, warm-hearted, happy-go-lucky. Loved himself a burger, loved onion rings, especially… I took him to the Dallas Barbeque and they had this beer-soaked onion ring tower. I can remember he was just in f*cking heaven. [Jon chuckles] And a big plate of ribs and he’d dive in, like King Kong or something. His art was — if you didn’t look at it for a long time, you could fit in your mind that yeah, it’s really good. But then you saw it and you went, “Oh, my god. It’s so good. This guy’s got such a hand.” He complained about it all the time but then almost every artist who is worth their salt, complains about their own work. I told him, “You know, if you didn’t bother with all this fussy stuff, you’d have a lot more work done.” I said, “Look in this drawer. This work, you’d finish that foot and this picture is done.” He’d say, “No, no, no, it’s got to have a background…” I’d say, “No, it doesn’t.” He’d always talk about how fast I worked and how much stuff I got done, but I said, “But look at it, Dave. It’s slapdash. You nurture the work for good reason: because it looks so good.” CBC: There’s obviously a ’30s thing that comes out of your respective work. Were you simpatico with Dave? Michael: Oh, sure. Definitely. I visited him one time and he goes, “Hey, Kaluta. Look at this.” And he handed me a little booklet of postcards. You open it up and it accordions out and it’s from the mid-’30s, beautiful black&-white photographs. They were all different landmarks in Hollywood of the time. The Hollywood Bowl, the pass through Laurel Canyon… So it was that time period, right, the time period of the Rocketeer. I said, “Oh, man! If you ever find another one of these things — I won’t find one in New York — if you find another one of these things, you’ve gotta get it for me.” He said, “Well, I should give you this one.” I said, “Yes, you should.” [chuckles] He said, “No, look at the address.” It had been mailed in the ’30s to exactly the same New York City address where I lived at the time, 312 West 92nd Street! I went, “What? That’s impossible!” It was just one of

Until, all of a sudden, it all homogenizes. I went to the director after a while and said, “So when you said, ‘We want this to not look like anything else at all,’ you really meant, ‘We want it to look exactly like everything else but maybe be five percent different,’ right?” He said, “Three percent different.” I said, “Well, why didn’t you tell me that? I busted my hump on stuff that you just couldn’t use.” He said, “Well, that’s the way we do it here.” A writer-director named Christoph Gans and producer Samuel Hadida wanted to make a film about a trooper from the future coming back to the 1930s America. So I got to design this movie. I had to buy a fax machine because it cost so much to send faxes through a regular copy shop, whatever. I got some of the money for it and then it just stopped and no more phone calls, and this was the first time I ran into this mindset. It didn’t mean that somebody didn’t like me; it meant they just had stopped. They weren’t going to do it anymore. It was a lot of fun doing all the designs, but you know, when it stopped, it stopped. And that had been the case with every other situation in Hollywood is that when they need you, they need you, and the phone rings all the time, you are the only person in the world until they don’t need you. You’ll get the money, though, as opposed to in comics where they just jack you off all the time and then you don’t get the money. But, with Hollywood, the money’s always there. Money doesn’t mean much to them. They don’t even use it as a bargaining chip. It’s credit, access, being able to decide something’s going to be some way, that’s the stuff that is the real coin of the realm. CBC: Has Elaine been your main collaborator over the years? Michael: Well, almost the only one in effect. Most of the work I have done is from script and just drawing it. I collaborated with Joel Goss on the comic book version of The Shadow movie, which we rewrote and made it all make sense as far as we were concerned. We weren’t all that happy with the arc of the movie, and we felt that they could have made it more like the pulp version, because he doesn’t get to do very much in the movie. He laughs, he drops his guns twice, shoots the “cement shoes” off of somebody’s feet, and wings the enemy once by accident, almost. That’s not the Shadow, I’m sorry. CBC: Did you like the movie? Michael: I liked parts of it and I can watch it with the sound off. CBC: Did you meet Alec Baldwin? Michael: Oh, yes. I gave him some Shadow pins. I’d heard he was a local, so I kept these little Shadow pins that I designed in my pocket. I was having lunch — maybe it was with Mike Richardson — and Alec was hanging out in this little breezeway at the restaurant, talking to some of the help. So I went over, introduced myself, and gave him the pin. CBC: Were you involved in the production design at all? Michael: I have a credit as “Mike Kaluta.” Yeah, I got to see my name on the credits when they rolled at the very, very, very end, sitting next to Edd Cartier. Edd had come out to see the movie. CBC: They were obviously hoping for a franchise. Michael: Oh, yes. But if they’d listened to any of us — Steranko was on their case on one side, Mike Richardson was on another, any number of other Shadow buffs; myself, I was right there, swinging and pounding at them, going, “This isn’t the Shadow! It’s something else. But if you want the Shadow, don’t describe where he comes from. He had 245 books with nobody knowing who he was and sold millions. You don’t need to know who he is. You’re wasting time. Have people asking that you want — ‘Who is this guy? Who is this guy?’ Look at what happened with Freddie Kruger. He was much more Shadow than this guy was.” [laughs] Yeah, anyway! Be that as it may. I had issues. CBC: So, what other work did you do in the ’90s? Did you do much work on The Shadow movie? Michael: Not really. I gave them a bunch of images and eventually toured the sets. That was kind of fun. I got to drive one of those vintage automobiles. CBC: As you said, they gave you a credit in the end-crawl… Michael: The credit said, “Additional artwork by Mike Kaluta.” CBC: What else did you do in the ’90s? Michael: I did some Shadow mini-series, including that adaptation. The Shadow: In the Coils of Leviathan, with Gary Gianni. That’s where “My City” appeared, which I wrote. I wrote this with Joel Goss, an actual writer. We teamed up. Joel is a friend of mine. Jamming, we come up with some cool ideas. CBC: Did you know Gary Gianni?

Michael: I didn’t know him before he did the work, no. I thought his work was great. I’d done layouts for all the stories that [laughs] he charmingly didn’t follow. Every once in a while, we had to say, “Now this has to be exactly the way it was because it’s important that you get this timing for what we’re trying to say.” But most of the time, he would do a lot more work than he needed to which made the comic book that much more his. I mean I can’t fault him for it. I wasn’t dictatorial except for maybe two places. CBC: And this was done in anticipation of the movie being successful, right? Michael: Well, Dark Horse had the contract because the movie was going to be a big deal. And then the movie wasn’t a big deal… CBC: Did you have a friendship with [DC/Vertigo editor] Karen Berger? Michael: Oh, sure. She’d been Len Wein’s assistant editor and then she became editor of House of Mystery. She even assigned to me the last House of Mystery cover [#321, Oct. ’83]. I did plenty of covers for her. Then, when she became the absolute boss of Vertigo, whenever I went up there, I’d sit in her office and talk about things. I let her know that I was always ready for covers and, if it was the right comic book, well, I could do that too. Every once in a while, something would come up, like the Madame Xanadu… that was nice. CBC: How did you meet Charles Vess? Michael: I was just visiting Richmond where I’d gone to school and he was friends with my friend, the guy I went to Europe with, and Charlie was in school at the time, drawing comics for a student paper. CBC: Did he have a style that is recognizable as the style he has today? Michael: Oh, yes. He was initially very interested in the mainstream stuff. He’s got a comic book from years and years ago that was a big super-hero thing. But he became a lot more lyrical and whimsical during college and then, when he came to work in New York, he ended up being able to get a number of jobs doing exactly what he wanted to do, which was great. CBC: Did you introduce him to a lot of work? Michael: I introduced him to some stuff and he’s introduced me to a lot

Previous page: At top is MWK’s cover art for Richard Alfieri’s Ricardo: Diary of a Matinee Idol [1989], a novel which also contained three MWK chapter illustrations. Below is MWK’s 2012 CD cover art and T-shirt design for the “big rockalicious” band Venrez’s “Sell the Lie.” Above: Wonder Con souvenir program cover by MWK [1991]. Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

[Editor’s note: Photographer/graphic novelist Seth Kushner, who had visited Michael W. Kaluta’s apartment in mid-interview to take the artist’s photo portrait for this issue, had the assist of his friend and fellow future Hai Dai Editions co-founder, award-winning cartoonist Gregory Benton. Ye Editor, who had spent the session taking pictures of the picture-takers, asked Gregory to share his memories of that overcast Sunday afternoon.] In the spring of 2013, Seth Kushner and I were working an early morning at Hang Dai Studios. He was having an email exchange with Jon B. Cooke. It finished and pushing himself back from his desk, he enthused: “I’ve got an assignment. I’m going to shoot Michael Kaluta!” “Shoot him?!” I exclaimed as I pantomimed cocking a gun. “No, silly! Shoot his portrait.” Seth had a long history of taking notable cartoonists’ portraits exceptionally well. His book with essayist Christopher Irving, Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics, is a testament to Seth’s skill in illuminating an emotional connection with his subject. Much more than a mere headshot, my friend always found a way to engage those he was capturing and convey that energy and respect within the four corners of the photograph. He was ferociously sought after by my peers; most everyone I know has a Seth Kushner author photo, artifacts both prized and revered. “Do you need an assistant for the shoot?” I asked half-jokingly, and I continued to plead my case: “Kaluta lives in my neighborhood; I see him walking around all the time. I’ve never said hello to him, though.” Seth did not hesitate, “Sure!” A couple of days later, I met Seth on the street out in front of Michael Kaluta’s Upper West Side apartment. Seth’s excitement radiated off him like a super-power. The light May rain that fell around us did nothing to dampen his mood. (And Seth did let me carry his ridiculously heavy backpack full of equipment upstairs, so I could fulfill my obligation as an assistant.) Michael William Kaluta opened the door to his place and welcomed us with a huge smile. Seth and I were in awe of the overstuffed apartment. Books, vintage toys, and art poured from every crevice, and their collector was gracious and magnanimous. With gusto, he shared with us the provenance and anecdotes about whatever grabbed our attention, whether it was a ray gun, antique model airplane, or rare original artwork. more. He’s got a slide show of the fantasy and fairy tale artists that puts everybody in their place. CBC: Vertigo was a very steady gig for you, right? Michael: Pretty much, though mostly covers. I did The Books of Magic, and then, about four years later, I did Lucifer. CBC: Who did the coloring on your Vertigo covers? Michael: Me. This was very nice and it was very lucrative at the time. But there was a downside to that, which was though I could make my rent, utilities, and basic living expenses with one cover, that meant I didn’t draw a whole lot more than that. After Books of Magic ended and before Lucifer, I had to hustle around and make the same kind of money. At first, it was like, “Aw, man, this is work.” But then my drawing got better [laughs] because I was devoting time to it. I got to see that I had been coasting. CBC: Now how much commission work do you do? Michael: I don’t know if I could break it up into percentages, mainly because a good amount of commission work is around for a long time, much longer than it should be. [Indicating large Harry Potter illustration] So, this picture, for example, it’s been just about exactly one year since the guy approved the sketch and there it is, not finished yet. So how do you parse that into how much work do you have for a week or for a month…? Not easy. CBC: [Looking at accounting records] What did you do for Tundra? Michael: I had a story in a book called Skin Tight Orbit, an anthology of science fiction stories that Elaine wrote and different artists drew. And then Charlie and I did the “Girl Guide” story that never got published. It was Starstruck Lite. We were going to do a whole bunch of them, but Tundra folded. I think I started doing the Marvel King cover — Conan the King, I think I started doing those. CBC: Did you do dozens of those? Michael: No, six or seven. CBC: It seems like quite a lot in the mind’s eye. Michael: Well, I sent a note to Barry that give him a laugh. I wrote, “I’ve done six or seven covers for Conan the King and I’m now being referred to 76

Above: Taking a respite from the May 19, 2013, photo shoot, are (from left) photographer Seth Kushner, subject Michael W. Kaluta, and cartoonist Gregory Benton.

When it came time to work, Seth made a complete switch from aficionado to pro. The fan-boy fell away, and the consummate professional took over. Seth was direct and clear in his vision as he gently and assuredly guided Kaluta into almost mischievous moments. It was fun, though, as well as serious business. It was, I suppose, funny business! Seth had been made for this creative work. I’m so f*cking thankful I got to see him ply his trade, and call him my friend. — Gregory Benton [Endnote: After a tenacious fight against cancer and to the deep consternation of the Brooklyn arts community, Gregory’s friend passed away, at 41, on May 17, 2015, almost exactly two years after the memorable session, leaving behind his beloved wife, Terra, and much adored son, Jackson. Officially Seth was CBC’s masthead photographer; mostly he was our friend.] in the press as ‘The Conan Artist.’ So now you know: you’ve been superseded.” [laughter] CBC: Did Elaine do more comics work, beyond Starstruck? Michael: Sure, she did a title called Vamps for Vertigo, which, at the time, with the exception of Sandman, was their top-selling comic book when she was doing it. She did a thing called The Transmutation of Ike Garuda, a two-part science fiction thing for Epic Comics, with Jim Sherman doing the art. And she did a thing called Steeltown Rockers for Marvel, with Steve Leialoha as the artist, which is about a garage band. CBC: What is your favorite period of work? Was it all good? Michael: Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think about it. I think of what I’m doing right now. You know, like in the present day. CBC: You live in the now? Michael: I don’t live in it. [Jon chuckles] Now it’s the long slog for me. [Looking through accounting book] Oh, in the ’90s, I also worked out in San Francisco on a game that never went anywhere with Roger Dean and gang. I did a lot of work. I lived out there for six months, I think, and I was paid big dough. I also did a lot of Books of Magic covers for DC Comics at the time. So that’s what I was doing, and I worked for Segasoft at the same time, on another game that didn’t go anywhere. So I made a ton of dough and paid a ton of taxes. The Minidoka book by Edgar Rice Burroughs… You know that one? It was called Minidoka, 937th Earl of One Mile Series M. It was a story that Burroughs had written, basically, for his kids. And it’s very L. Frank Baum as opposed to being ERB, much more Oz-like. It’s about an America in which the warriors ride cows and Minidoka is looking for some damn thing and he goes on a quest. Winged bunny rabbits fall out of the skies, all kinds of crazy stuff that happens. So I got to illustrate that. There were, I guess, four color plates and a whole bunch of interior illustrations, full sizes and maybe some little ones as well. I didn’t get to do a cover, however, because they had an unpublished J. Allen St. John drawing that looked like more like Hamlin, but it still had a feeling of the same time period and it was kind of #13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

have been fun. I could have done that.” But these are very minor regrets nice. I was bumped by J. Allen St. John… not unpleasant. because there’s plenty of other stuff to do. CBC: What’s your plans for the future? CBC: Often, concept artists and designers don’t necessarily see their Michael: No plans. work end up on screen. Would that be okay with you? CBC: No plans, still day-to-day, hand-to-mouth? Michael: Yeah. It pleases me to make up stuff. I don’t get as Michael: Yep. much pleasure out of refining and finishing the artwork as I CBC: [Looking around the apartment] You’ve got quite a bit do out of making stuff up. It’s the wonderful thing about of stuff to eBay here if you wanted. designing for TV and for movies is I don’t have to do Michael: Well, there’s that, yeah. finished product. CBC: [Chuckles] There’s that. CBC: Are you grateful for your association with Michael: There’s definitely that. [Jon laughs] The Shadow? CBC: Do you have a dream job? Michael: Yes, very much so. Because, after Michael: No. Right now, my dream is to get all, I had nothing to do with developing the all the commission work that I have sitting character… I mean The Shadow lives, like around finished and sent to those that I Tarzan, in the minds of people. They just promised, because there’s a lot of them. know when it’s right and when it’s wrong. CBC: This has been a good talk. What does [chuckles] They know when something’s Michael William Kaluta want to say about authentically The Shadow and what I did himself that he hasn’t already said? turned out to be authentic for a lot of people, Michael: Oh, I don’t know. some to the point of where they would credit CBC: Has it been good? me with everything and all I did was take it from Michael: Oh, definitely. Would I do it again? Above: Michael Wm. Kaluta and someone else, use everything that I loved and Yes, probably exactly the same and that’s what Ye Editor, taken by Seth Kushner on the learned by watching The Untouchables and everyHell will be. [laughter] There’s very few comroof of MWK’s Upper West Side thing else like that and did what — the best I could. plaints. There’s things that I wish had happened apartment building. And it really, really worked and I’m fine — I’m fine with years ago. The people who had the rights to do a that. Yep, I’ve never balked at going back to working on the Shadow film called and said, “We want you to design the character. film.” I said, “Okay,” but then it never went anywhere. That’d CBC: And you’ll continue to collaborate with Elaine? been nice. That’d have been fun. I would have loved to have been involved Michael: Sure! As long as she wants to. Now that there’s the Starstruck in something like Farscape, being a designer on something like that where Kickstarter, we’ll get that going and if it’s received well enough, we’ll do the it was a totally encapsulated world with all those crazy costumes and that rest of it because there’s plenty of other art already done that’s waiting for it was a fan favorite, of cult status, so that’d be just so much fun to just be the surrounding story to flesh it out. You don’t want that art to go to waste. able to pour out the stuff. CBC: Thank you very much. I don’t know if you know your football, but the Redskins player named Michael: You’re welcome. Riggins, he said, “Just give me the ball.” [chuckles] And it may be like half a yard, six inches, eight inches, and then there’s a 25-yard run, or more. Just let me keep hammering at it. The more I work at something, EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to events beyond the control of all involved, aside the better it gets, right? So all I want is for one of these film companies to from the opening spread, Seth Kushner’s photos of Michael W. Kaluta say, “Oh, here’s something that you can design. Go ahead, design it.” And in his studio will appear in a near future issue of CBC. Thanks and many have. But it starts off with, “We want you to do it,” and then, “We’ll appreciation to Terra Kushner and Gregory Benton for their effort. get back to you,” and it never happens. So it’s like, “Well, damn! That’d

coming attractions: cbc #14 in the fall

The Killer Art Stylings of Kelley Jones COMIC BOOK CREATOR #14 examines the life, career, and artistry of the magnificent Kelley Jones, with an in-depth interview, conducted by Peter Quinones, examining his start in the comics field as an inker on Marvel’s Micronauts and sudden—and astonishing—stylistic reinvention with a re-imaging of Deadman as a skeletal superspook. Besides his renowned collaborations with writers Michael Baron and Doug Moench, Kelley recounts his recent success with the Len Wein-scribed Swamp Thing mini-series. Along with the return of CBC’s letters column (bumped for this ish), our fall number includes an interview with sensational cartoonist SONNY LIEW on his amazing graphic novel, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye; pulp historian Will Murray’s investigative article, “The Trouble With BOB KANE: A Ghost Story,” a hard look at the nefarious legacy of Batman’s co-creator, replete with tragic souls and rapacious greed; Eti Berland’s profile of the avid army of aficionados and astonishing accomplishments of Smile cartoonist phenom RAINA TELGEMEIER. Plus more goodness, including the hilarity of HEMBECK and a new photo gallery feature! Full-color, 80 pages, $8.95

Comic Book Creator • Summer 2016 • #13

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DAVID SIEGEL talks to RICHARD ARNDT about how, from 1991-2005, he brought the greatest artists of the Golden Age to the San Diego Comic-Con! With art and artifacts by FRADON, GIELLA, MOLDOFF, LAMPERT, CUIDERA, FLESSEL, NORRIS, SULLIVAN, NOVICK, SCHAFFENBERGER, GROTHKOPF, and others! Plus how writer JOHN BROOME got to the Con, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, FCA, and more!

DON GLUT discusses his early years as comic book writer for Marvel, Warren, and Gold Key, with art by SANTOS, MAROTO, CHAN, NEBRES, KUPPERBERG, TUSKA, TRIMPE, SAL BUSCEMA, and others! Also, SAL AMENDOLA and ROY THOMAS on the 1970s professional Academy of Comic Book Arts, founded by STAN LEE and CARMINE INFANTINO! Plus Mr. Monster, FCA, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

MARK CARLSON documents 1940s-50s ACE COMICS (with super-heroes Magno & Davey, Lash Lightning, The Raven, Unknown Soldier, Captain Courageous, Vulcan, and others)! Art by KURTZMAN, MOONEY, BERG, L.B. COLE, PALAIS, and more. Plus: RICHARD ARNDT’s interview with BILL HARRIS (1960s-70s editor of Gold Key and King Comics), FCA, Comic Crypt, and Comic Fandom Archive.

40 years after the debut of Marvel’s STAR WARS #1, its writer/editor ROY THOMAS tells RICHARD ARNDT the story behind that landmark comic, plus interviews with artists HOWARD CHAYKIN, RICK HOBERG, and BILL WRAY. Also: GEORGE BRENNER, creator of The Clock—“Jazz in Comics” by MICHAEL T. GILBERT—the finale of BILL SCHELLY’s salute to G.B. LOVE—FCA—and more! CHAYKIN cover.

DOUG MOENCH in the 1970s at Warren and Marvel (Master of Kung Fu, Planet of the Apes, Deathlok, Werewolf by Night, Morbius, Moon Knight, Ka-Zar, Weirdworld)! Art by BUSCEMA, GULACY, PLOOG, BUCKLER, ZECK, DAY, PERLIN, & HEATH! MICHAEL T. GILBERT on EC’s oddball “variant covers”—FCA—and a neverpublished Golden Age super-hero story by MARV LEVY! Cover by PAUL GULACY!

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“All-Jerks Issue!” Guy Gardner, Namor in the Bronze Age, J. Jonah Jameson, Flash Thompson, DC’s Biggest Blowhards, the Heckler, Obnoxio the Clown, and Archie’s “pal” Reggie Mantle! Featuring the work of (non-jerks) RICH BUCKLER, KURT BUSIEK, JOHN BYRNE, STEVE ENGLEHART, KEITH GIFFEN, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and many more. Cover-featuring KEVIN MAGUIRE’s iconic Batman/Guy Gardner “One Punch”!

“Bronze Age Halloween!” The Swamp Thing revival of 1982, Swamp Thing in Hollywood, Phantom Stranger team-ups, KUPPERBERG & MIGNOLA’s Phantom Stranger miniseries, DC’s The Witching Hour, the Living Mummy, and an index of Marvel’s 1970s’ horror anthologies! Featuring the work of RICH BUCKLER, ANDY MANGELS, VAL MAYERIK, MARTIN PASKO, MICHAEL USLAN, TOM YEATES, and many more. Cover by YEATES.

“All-Captains Issue!” Bronze Age histories of Shazam! (Captain Marvel) and Captain MarVell, Captain Carrot, Captain Storm and the Losers, Captain Universe, and Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers. Featuring C. C. BECK, PAT BRODERICK, JACK KIRBY, ELLIOT S. MAGGIN, BILL MANTLO, DON NEWTON, BOB OKSNER, SCOTT SHAW!, JIM STARLIN, ROY THOMAS, and more. Cover painting by DAVE COCKRUM!

“Indie Super-Heroes!” NEAL ADAMS Ms. Mystic interview, Continuity Comics, BILL BLACK Captain Paragon interview, Justice Machine history, STEVEN GRANT/NORM BREYFOGLE Whisper “Pro2Pro” interview, and the ’80s revivals of Mighty Crusaders and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. Featuring BUCKLER, DEODATO, ELLIS, GRINDBERG, GUSTOVICH, ISABELLA, REINHOLD, ORDWAY, PÉREZ, and more. Cover by NEAL ADAMS!

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LEGO GAMING! IMAGINE RIGNEY shows his Bioshock builds, NICK JENSEN talks about his characters and props from HALO and other video games, and GamerLUG member SIMON LIU builds LEGO versions of video game characters, spaceships and more! Plus: Building instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art, Minifigure Customization with JARED K. BURKS, MINDSTORMS lessons & more!

Super-star DC penciler HOWARD PORTER demos his creative process, and JAMAL IGLE discusses everything from storyboarding to penciling as he gives a breakdown of his working methods. Plus there’s Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS reviewing art supplies, JERRY ORDWAY showing the Ord-Way of doing comics, and Comic Art Bootcamp lessons with BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

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KIRBY’S PARTNERS! Cap/Falcon/Bucky, Sandman & Sandy, Orion & Lightray, Johnny & Ben, Dingbats, Newsboys, plus features on JOE SIMON, MIKE ROYER, CHIC STONE, DICK AYERS, JOE SINNOTT, MIKE THIBODEAUX — even ROZ KIRBY! Also, BATTLE FOR A 3-D WORLD, the 2016 Comic-Con Kirby Tribute Panel, MARK EVANIER, and galleries of Kirby pencil art! Cover inked by JOE SINNOTT!

KIRBY: ALPHA! Looks at the beginnings of Kirby’s greatest concepts, and how he looked back in time and to the future for the origins of ideas like DEVIL DINOSAUR, FOREVER PEOPLE, 2001, ETERNALS, KAMANDI, OMAC, and more! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 WonderCon Kirby Tribute Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by MIKE ROYER!

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a picture is worth a thousand words

Follow the clues, and the evidence is obvious — we clearly have three masters of their craft at work here: The Bat-Man. Sherlock Holmes. Michael Wm. Kaluta. Detective Comics #572 [Mar. 1987]. — TZ

#13 • Summer 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

from the archives of Tom Ziuko

™

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

Edited by JON B. COOKE, COMIC BOOK CREATOR is the Eisner and Harvey Award nominated magazine, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics—focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. It’s the follow-up to Jon’s multiEisner Award winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST magazine. TwoMorrows also offers Digital Editions of Comic Book Artist Vol. 2 (the “Top Shelf” issues, left) at www.twomorrows.com

Subscribe at www.twomorrows.com 4 issues: $40 US, $60 International

No. 3, Fall 2013

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

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

JOE KUBERT double-size tribute issue! With comprehensive examinations of each facet of Joe’s career, from Golden Age artist and 3-D comics pioneer, to top Tarzan artist, editor, and founder of the Kubert School. KUBERT INTERVIEWS, rare art, testimonials, remembrances, portraits, anecdotes, and interviews with JOE KUBERT, ADAM & ANDY KUBERT, RUSS HEATH, and FRANK THORNE!

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

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

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

DENIS KITCHEN close-up—from cartoonist, publisher, author, and art agent, to his friendships with HARVEY KURTZMAN, R. CRUMB, WILL EISNER, and many others! Plus we look at the triumphant final splash of the late, great BILL EVERETT, Prof. CAROL L. TILLEY discusses the shoddy research and falsified evidence in the book SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, DENYS COWAN interview part two, and more!

SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS dredges up The Heap! ManThing! Swamp Thing! Marvin the Dead Thing! Bog Beast! The Lurker and It! and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou! Features interviews with WRIGHTSON, MOORE, PLOOG, WEIN, GERBER, BISSETTE, VEITCH, MAYERIK, MOONEY, TOTLEBEN, VEITCH, and others. FRANK CHO cover!

Huge career-spanning BERNIE WRIGHTSON The creators of Madman and Flaming interview on his life and art—from his fanCarrot—MIKE ALLRED & BOB BURDEN— nish days, Swamp Thing, Frankenstein, and share a cover and provide comprehensive work with STEPHEN KING, to his ghoulish interviews and art galore, plus BILL movie work (Ghostbusters, The Thing, SCHELLY is interviewed about his new etc.). Plus Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of HARVEY KURTZMAN biography; we Horror’s BILL MORRISON; interview with present the conclusion of our BATTON BATTON LASH, feature on HARDMAN & LASH interview; STAN LEE on his final BECHKO, RICHARD BRUNING, HEMBECK, European comic convention tour; fanand more! favorite HEMBECK, and more!

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

(192-page paperback with COLOR) $21.95 (Digital Edition) $9.95

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

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

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JOE STATON on his comics career (from E-MAN, to co-creating The Huntress, and his current stint on the Dick Tracy comic strip), plus we showcase the lost treasure GODS OF MOUNT OLYMPUS drawn by Joe! Plus, Part One of our interview with the late STAN GOLDBERG, JOHN WORKMAN’s Mighty Aphrodite, GEORGE KHOURY talks with artist LEILA LEIZ, plus HEMBECK and more!

WARP examined! Massive PETER BAGGE retrospective! It’s a double focus on the Broadway sci-fi epic, with a comprehensive feature including art director NEAL ADAMS and director STUART (Reanimator) GORDON, plus cast and crew! Also a career-spanning conversation with the man of HATE! and NEAT STUFF on the real story behind Buddy Bradley! Plus the revival of MIRACLEMAN, Captain Marvel’s 75th birthday, and more!

Retrospective on GIL KANE, co-creator of the modern Green Lantern and Atom, and early progenitor of the graphic novel. Kane cover newly-inked by KLAUS JANSON, plus remembrances from friends, fans, and collaborators, and a Kane art gallery. Also, our tribute to the late HERB TRIMPE, interview with PAUL LEVITZ about his new book Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel, and more!

JACK KIRBY’s mid-life work examined, from Fantastic Four and Thor at Marvel in the middle ’60s to the Fourth World at DC (including the real-life background drama that unfolded during that tumultuous era)! Plus a career-spanning interview with underground comix pioneer HOWARD CRUSE, the extraordinary cartoonist and graphic novelist of the award-winning Stuck Rubber Baby! Cover by STEVE RUDE!

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

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