Comic Book Creator #23 Preview

™

A TwoMorrows Publication

No. 23, Summer 2020

$9.95

ElfQuest and related characters TM & © Warp Graphics, Inc.

All characters TM & © Mark Schultz.

in the USA

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Cover art by Eric Powell

Summer 2020 • The Wendy Pini Issue • Number 23

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Ye Ed’s Rant: The vanished 2020 and devastation of Covid-19 on the comics world...... 2 ELFWOODY CBC mascot by J.D. KING ©2020 J.D. King.

About Our Cover Art and Colors by WENDY PINI

COMICS CHATTER Up Front: The Great Marcos. Michael Aushenker’s appreciation of and interview with the great Tales of the Zombie and digital comic strip artist............... 3 Yakkin’ with Yoe: Part two of our career-spanning talk with the mastermind behind Yoe Books on his eclectic experiences and brushes with the greats............. 6 Incoming: Debating whether R. Crumb is the greatest cartoonist of them all.............. 18 Ten Questions: Darrick Patrick poses some queries to Jimmy Palmiotti...................... 22 The Man Called… Koster: The last (and only?) interview with the Adventure House Press co-publisher and Gil Kane childhood friend & business partner......... 24

ElfQuest TM & © Warp Graphics, Inc.

Comics in the Library: Rich Arndt on illustrated classics on the book shelves........... 28 Hembeck’s Dateline: Our Man Fred on Amazo and other amalgamated baddies....... 29 THE MAIN EVENTS

Above: Wendy Pini goes all old-school for her CBC cover, featuring the ElfQuest gang.

While the series has been collected in hardcover volumes by Dark Horse, Wendy and Richard Pini have made the entire pre-2014 ElfQuest run available for (gulp!) FREE online for all to read, some 36 years’ worth of storyline! www.elfquest.com/read/

Shadows & Sunlight: The Deep Sorrows and Radiant Joys of Wendy Pini.

A significant and revealing interview with the amazing comic book creator who shares about her dysfunctional upbringing, salvation through boundless creativity and unquenchable ambition, and fascinating achievements from precocious artistic beginnings to trailblazing cosplay performances as Red Sonja to her lifetime achievement producing 40 years of ElfQuest, as well as so many other engaging projects in between!.......................................................... 32 Starman: WaRP Speed with Richard Pini. A too-short conversation with the co-creator of ElfQuest on life with his wife of almost 50 years, Wendy, and being the Poughkeepsie point man for their company, Warp Graphics, Inc............. 72 BACK MATTER Creators at the Con: A Guinness Book record is captured by Kendall Whitehouse........ 78 Creator’s Creators: Rose Rummel-Eury, CBC’s newest transcriber, tells her story......... 79 Coming Attractions: Scout master Timothy Truman tells all about his storied career.... 79

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions!

C’mon citizen, DO THE RIGHT THING! A Mom & Pop publisher like us needs every sale just to survive! DON’T DOWNLOAD OR READ ILLEGAL COPIES ONLINE!

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Art by Tom Ziuko! We kid you not!.............. 80 Right: A detail of Wendy Pini’s cover for ElfQuest: The Final Quest #24 [Feb. 2018], which contained the grand finale, after 40 freakin’ years, of the journey of the characters in Wendy and Richard’s epic tale.

Comic Book Artist Vol. 1 & 2 are available as digital downloads from twomorrows.com

Buy affordable, legal downloads only at

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& DON’T SHARE THEM WITH FRIENDS OR POST THEM ONLINE. Help us keep producing great publications like this one!

COMIC BOOK CREATOR is a proud joint production of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows

Comic Book Creator ™ is published quarterly (more or less) 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 601, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Four-issue subscriptions: $45 US, $67 International, $18 Digital. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2020 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437.

Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

CRAIN, MORT DRUCKER, CLARE BRETÉCHER, ALICE SCHENKER, MARTY PASKO, RICHARD SALA, and GENE DEITCH

up front

Marcos the Great

Appreciating Pablo Marcos and a chat with the superb Peruvian comics artist

by MICHAEL AUSHENKER CBC Associate Editor

Self-portrait © Pablo Marcos. Simon Garth, Zombie, TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Che cover © the respective copyright holder.

In our increasingly divisive world, there may be few positive benefits to being on Facebook these days, but artist Pablo Marcos is one of them.

Marcos is among my favorite Facebook friends because, at 83, the revered comic book illustrator—who is currently doing work for Tarzan overlords Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.—retains his chops and remains prolific; regularly brightening up my newsfeed with his full-color takes on Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja, and Batman.

The 1970s were a fun and funky time for American super-hero comics, especially at Marvel, and Pablo Marcos— born Pablo Marcos Ortega, in the small town of Laran, Peru (about 112 miles from Lima)—was a big reason for that.

Not to be confused with the wave of solid-stock Filipino artists bearing Spanish surnames and filling the pages of Marvel black-&-white magazines, Marcos’ hyper-realistic, naturalistic style of illustration graced such supernatural super-hero tales as Dracula Lives, Monsters Unleashed, Vampire Tales, and, most famously, Tales of the Zombie, in which he drew the tragic adventures of one living dead unfortunate, Simon Garth.

Marcos’ first color-comics work in the U.S. was the cover of Marvel’s Giant-Size Dracula #2 [Sept. 1974]. He freelanced for DC Comics, drawing the ultra-cool Frank Robbins’ creation Man-Bat in Detective Comics, and drew random issues of Kamandi, Kobra, Teen Titans, and Secret Society of Super-Villains, all for DC. When he returned to the House of Ideas, his signature was on everything from Marvel Two-in-One to The Avengers to The Mighty Thor.

Marcos is simultaneously a living legend and an underrated penciler and inker. While the Johns—Romita and Buscema—may have been the biggest names in the industry in that era, you had scores of outstanding artists ably filling the brick-and-mortar of the House of Ideas, people such as Gil Kane, Tony DeZuñiga, Rich Buckler, Ross Andru, and certainly, most definitely, without a sliver of doubt, Señor Pablo Marcos.

On a personal note that certainly benefited the TwoMorrows reader, when Back Issue editor Michael Eury scrambled to re-jigger his scheduled issue themes following the death of idiosyncratic writer and Howard the Duck creator Steve Gerber, in Sept. 2008, I took on the assignment to write about “Gerber’s Gruesomes”; four series scribed by the idiosyncratic writer featuring Gothic anti-heroes— Man-Thing, Son of Satan, Lilith, and his collaboration with Marcos, Simon Garth, the Zombie. I asked Pablo if he wanted to supply me with an illustration for my article and, in seemingly no time at all, I received four jpegs with current illustrations Marcos had whipped up—including solo and group sketches—pen-&-ink with wash—for my piece. All done in that signature atmospheric style with black-&-white washes that we lovingly remember from his peak Tales of the Zombie magazine work. Generous beyond belief!

Many readers may not realize or remember that The Zombie from Tales of the Zombie was, in fact, a creation of Stan Lee and Bill Everett. That’s because this is one of those rare cases—like Frank Miller with Daredevil or Bill Sienkiewicz with Moon Knight—in which an artist other than the original creator took over the creation So, completely as to make it their own and become associated as the character’s definitive artist. That most definitely happened with Pablo Marcos and Simon Garth.

However, as you’re about to read, Pablo Marcos is all of that, but alSo, So, much more…

Comic Book Creator: How did your family feel about your artistic talents and were they supportive when you wanted to go pro?

Pablo Marcos: I don’t think my family realized that I preferred art, because I was in school and it just seemed like I just liked to draw, especially when it came to my homework assignments, on which I did a lot of illustrations. Later on, while still a student, I joined a national newspaper and was assigned to illustrate political caricatures for the paper.

Many days I would get in late as I had to go to school early in the morning. This went on for a long time. My parents thought that I had taken the job while I was in school just to make some money. While I was finishing up high school, my father advised me to do whatever possible to be able to attend the university. He alSo, pointed out that a career as an artist did not guarantee success. So, I followed his

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2020 • #23

Above: Pablo Marcos self-portrait from 2015. Please visit www.pablomarcosart. com to see a vast galley of the renowned Peruvian comic book artist’s work.

Inset left: Pablo’s painting of his signature character, Simon Garth, the Zombie.

Below: Before making an impact in American comics, in the late ’60s and into the ’70s, Pablo Marcos contributed to Estampa, the Sunday magazine supplement of Lima, Peru’s Expreso newspaper. Here is his Oct. 15, 1967, cover art that depicts the violent death of Marxist revolutionary Che that occurred mere days beforehand.

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the road to yoe books

Yakkin’ with Yoe Part two of our chat with the wacky cartoonist and mastermind behind Yoe Books Conducted by JON B. COOKE CBC Editor [For this final segment of the interview, I visited Craig Yoe in his home outside of New York City, where I partook in a pizza dinner with Craig, wife Clizia, and his two youngest kids, Griffin and Gracie. In CBC #20, we learned of Yoe Books publisher Craig Yoe’s early years in fandom, producing his YOEssarrian fanzine, high school experience (attending the art club boasting The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde and Dark Horse’s David Scroggy as members), anti-war activism at Akron University, and sudden transformation—“I got zapped, like Captain Marvel’s lightning bolt”—into Born Again Christianity. As self-described “Jesus Freak,” Craig produced a religious underground comic book with ZAP Comix cartoonist and legendary poster artist Rick Griffin. When last we left the conversation, Craig was a prominent leader in the Above: Ye Ed snapped this pic Jesus People movement.—Y.E.]

of Craig Yoe beside a treasured possession, a Joe Shuster original of co-creation Superman.

Below: Craig Yoe is not only an author, historian, editor, and publisher (as well as toy inventor and creative juggernaut) but he’s also a wacky cartoonist!

Here’s a 2017 example.

#23 • Summer 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Superman TM & © DC Comics. Cartoon © Craig Yoe.

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Comic Book Creator: How long were you the leader of the church, Craig?

Craig Yoe: The hippie church, Jon? I don’t know. I’m not really good on dates. The church evolved from a hippie nightclub into a hippie church. I think the church and the communal houses and Jesus Free Store that helped the poor went on for four or five years.

CBC: When were your oldest kids born?

Craig: Well, they’re all in their 30s now… I have two very much grown grandchildren.

CBC: What are your kids’ names?

Craig: We were inspired by the unusual names the Griffins gave their kids, Flavin, Adelia, Miles, and Katy (who was named after Katy Keene). So, Avarelle is my first born, then there’s Valissa, and Donovan. I made up the names Avarelle, and Valissa. But for Donovan I loved the music of the folk singer Donovan—a good hippie! I wanted my son to be a hippie like me and thought this name would help. He’s now a cop!

Donovan’s a good cop; and Avarelle, a special ed teacher; and Valissa, a DJ and stylist to the stars; they are all doing great stuff. I deeply love them and I’m immensely proud of them.

CBC: You have two little kids now?

Craig: Yes, I got divorced,

sadly, but I met my second wife, Clizia, when I was a guest of an Italian comic convention in Lucca, Italy. The convention mounted an exhibit of art from my book, The Art of Mickey Mouse. Clizia and her dad put together the art show.

We fell in love, she came to the States, and we got married.

We work together on Yoe Books, but our greatest creations are our kids!

Griffin just turned nine and Gracie is six. They are the loves of my life and keep me going every day. They are the best things that ever happened to me in my old age!

CBC: How many hours do you work a day? Do you work seven days a week?

Craig: I was a workaholic before I met Clizia. Italians know how to work hard and they know how to relax. I think she rubbed off a lot on me and I know more how to chill sometimes now. And I rubbed off on her, too, maybe in a bad way, because sometimes we do work a little too much.

We put our noses to the grindstone and grind away, but try to have fun with the kids, too. We work at home, which is really fantastic, as you know, so you don’t have to factor in commuting so we see the kids more and they are part of what we are doing.

Griffin just edited a recent book, Gorgo vs Konga by Steve Ditko! Nine-year-old comics editor—that’s one for the record books! And Gracie comes up with riddles for my riddle books! She’s funny and I’m working on a graphic novel of her material! Griffin and Gracie created comic books of their own and sold them at Mike Carbonaro’s Big Apple con next to Clizia and my books—and they outsold us! Yay! We all get a lot done. People say, “How do you accomplish so much?” Mainly I think it’s because we don’t have a TV. I think that has a lot to do with it!

CBC: [Looks around the living room] You don’t have a TV! Craig: I do get sucked into the internet and Facebook, but that’s also a part of my work, too: keeping in touch with other comic fans and collectors who help us on our projects and talking about our books and making new friends and keeping the old!

CBC: What happened with the church?

Craig: Well, it had a sad ending. I began to realize in my mind that Christianity and the scriptures talked strongly about helping the poor and disaffected, and beating swords into plowshares, and loving your enemy. And Christ—the first person he saw was a woman, his mother, Mary, and the last people he saw at the cross were women, and the first people who were at the empty tomb were women—I really felt that part of his mission was to empower women.

So, I started sharing some of these thoughts in my sermons: being against war, the importance of women being strong and being treated equally, and the God-ordained mission of helping the poor and prisoners.

The helping the needy part got a lot of support in my church. We had a free store where we gave away food and clothing to the people in our inner-city neighborhood. But some of the other things like being anti-war and Christian feminism, didn’t sit well with some of the people in our church. We had a big, heartbreaking split. It didn’t end with a whimper; it ended with a bang. The church was decimated and we all went off to do our own things.

CBC: Did you stay in the same place?

Photo © the respective copyright holder. Yoe Books logo TM & © Craig Yoe.

Craig: Yeah, I stayed in Akron for a while and worked as an artist doing things like grocery store ads. A lot of grocery store ads in newspapers used to be done all by hand. They came from the tradition of the hand-painted signs that hung in the grocery store windows. I’m fascinated by sign painting because I then became involved in that tradition, and, again, Rick did such stunning lettering also, because a lot of early cartoonists started as sign painters.

CBC: Ever see Justin Green’s book on sign painting?

Craig: Oh, I love Justin Green’s book, but there was a lot of earlier stuff, too! Eugene “Zim” Zimmerman did sign painting. Winsor McCay used to paint signs for circuses and all. Rudy Palais was a sign painter. There were different schools for sign painting back in the day. Detroit had one of the bigger ones. Back then, artists didn’t have computers and access to fonts. There was lead type for newspapers, but if you wanted a sign for your billboard or your movie house… the movie companies often didn’t send out posters, so a local sign painter would paint a sign for your movie! If you wanted a sign in your department store, or for the side of your truck, all of these things were painted by hand by incredibly talented craftsmen—and women!

A lot of these sign painters got great with the brush but they wanted to maybe do something else and do something with a bigger content and value and payola, so the sign painters with a sense of humor got into cartooning. In their sign making days they would sometimes paint little cartoon characters onto the signs so it was a natural progression.

It was intertwined, sign painting and cartooning. It’s an interesting link.

CBC: Did you learn that after the fact or was this simultaneous?

Craig: Early on, when I was haunting old bookstores and

buying books of cartoons and the history of cartoons and cartoonists… the section right next to it was the art section including commercial art. So, I discovered those books about lettering and did some hand lettering for my underground hippie newspaper. I was always into lettering.

CBC: This is very applicable to comics.

Craig: Right, Jon! To this day, I’m deeply interested in comics, but I also have a real jones for lettering on its own and the traditional sign painting!

CBC: Did you see that there was a career for you with the cartooning at all?

Craig: Early on I actually started with the sign painting myself! Here’s my story: When I graduated from high school, I wanted a summer job and saw an ad in the paper for a job in Akron, working in the sewers. The sewers were calling me!

CBC: Ed Norton!

Craig: Ha! I figured, “Start at the bottom—in the sewers!” Back then, like now, I was a hippie with long hair and the guy in charge of the sewer department looked at me when I showed up and was aghast! Sewers were part of the world of burly construction guys with hard hats—those guys hated long-haired beatnik/peacenik, smelly hippies!

I had passed the civil service test, but the sewer boss hadn’t seen me, and, shocked and bewilderedly, he said, “Sit over there and let me figure out what to do with you!”

Miraculously, another guy at that instant happened to walk in the door and took one look at me and blurted, “Are you an artist?” I replied, “Yes.” I thought he might hit me with his hard hat. But instead, he asked the sewer boss, “Can I have this guy?” “Yes, take my hippie, please!”

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2020 • #23

Above: In the 1980s, Craig Yoe was hired by Jim Henson (seen here singing with Craig (top left) and friends) as creative director and general manager of The Muppets, where Craig worked on numerable aspects of the beloved characters, including theme parks and television.

Below: The longest gig Craig Yoe has had is as the creative force, along with wife Clizia Gussoni, behind his titular company, Yoe Books, that creates books with IDW, Clover Press, Dark Horse, Simon & Schuster, Abrams, and other publishers.

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incoming

Is Crumb the Greatest of All? Apparently, there’s no accounting for one’s taste in comic book geniuses, eh?

Write to CBC: jonbcooke@aol.com or P. O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892

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#23 • Summer 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

ACE: All Comics Evaluated TM & © Time Capsule Productions. Dawn TM & © Joseph Michael Linsner. Wonder Woman, Batman TM & © DC Comics. Thor, Ant-Man, Iron Man TM & © Marvel Characters Inc. Stormtrooper, Boba Fett TM & © Lucasfilm Ltd.

Below: Ye Ed is still heartbroken that ACE: All Comics Evaluated bit the dust before this amazing Joseph Michael Linsner cover art saw print.

[A plea on Facebook for letters of comment brought in a few cool stuff, some of which I had never seen before. What an missives this time out, so, to those accommodating readers, issue! And thanks again for continually inspiring my own many thanks! Keep those letters and emails comin’, folks! comics artwork.

— Ye Crusading Editor] [Thank you, my friend. Folks, Jay has been a faithful reader of my material since the earliest days of Comic Book Jay Willson Artist and I’m proud to say that I will be designing his Don Newton bio-slash-art book when the time is ripe. And allow It had been a while since my last LOC, and CBC #21 was me to express regret that I didn’t include Jay’s detailed particularly outstanding, so I thought it was time to rectify comments regarding future interview suggestions, but I that problem. will say I love the work of more than a few listed: Jonathan Issue 21 was, as is the case with all my favorite issues Hickman, Nick Dragotta, Daniel Warren Johnson, Michel of Comic Book Creator, a potpourri of great discussions, creative people, and artwork. This one particularly exceed- Fiffe, Al Ewing, Sean Murphy, Brian Michael Bendis, Nick Bradshaw, Scott Snyder, Tom King, and Eric Stephenson. ed in the last part, as any mag with Robert Crumb, John Hey, get me direct contact and I’d happily pursue!—Y.E.] Romita Sr., Steve Mannion, and Eric Powell is going to get me to pull out my wallet every time. What a terrific issue of amazing artwork.

Jason Young Although I had heard it on the podcast, the Crumb I started reading CBC earlier this year and I wanted to let interview was still was a wonderful read. It was very satisyou know how much I love it! It’s amazing that there is still fying to read Crumb’s comments as he walked, somewhat a mag in print where you can find essays and interviews stunned, through the great history of Weirdo. Congrats yet featuring comics writers and artists. I have always loved again on producing that wonderful Book of Weirdo. reading those kinds of things (whether or not I am familiar John Romita is always a worthy subject of conversation, with the subject, as long as they make comics I am interconsidering his history and the amount of great artwork the ested)! man has produced. I am always especially pleased to read CBC reminds me of a halfway point between The Comof the artist’s delight at seeing his great work published in ics Journal and Wizard magazine as far as the journalism book form, as is the case currently with the Spider-Man and excitement contained within (which wasn’t supposed comic strips. to sound like an insult). I loved both those other mags, but Steve Mannion is a phenomenal artist. One-part on occasion the Journal would be a little too pretentious for Frazetta, one-part Wrightme and Wizard a bit too...Wizardy. But I have always dug son or Ghastly Graham interviews with cartoonists. Reading online is something I Engel, one-part good-girl find tedious and undoubtedly if I came across some of the artist, and, finally, an artist same interviews and articles on the web I would just ignore possessing some amazing them. So, thanks for all the hard work you and your team technical skill that brings me does, it is much appreciated! to a great appreciation level In closing, I wanted to specifically mention the fall 2019 every time I see something issue was chock full of great reading and the Eric Powell drawn by him. I’ve been interview inspired me to draw the enclosed Goon sketch attempting to purchase an (I am an amateur comic artist and realized I had never original of his for months and tried my hand at Eric’s fantastic creation so I knew I had to am not having a lot of luck. remedy that situation)! So, my plea is to please keep CBC in Obviously, I am not the only print, I for one am along for the long haul. one with great love for the [A new reader of CBC? How cool is that! Welcome artwork of Mr. Mannion. aboard, Jason, and I hope you enjoy future issues! And, Finally, the main interin the meantime, check out past issues, descriptions of view, with the great Eric which you’ll find in our house ad pages. And check online Powell. I’ve loved Powell’s at www.twomorrows.com as my publisher frequently has Wrightson-influenced work sales. Oh, and yours truly actually attempted a magazine for years, but don’t own a more towards the Wizard model with his ACE: All Comics lot of it. As I was reading Evaluated magazine that lasted three issues in early 2015. It the interview, I enjoyed was a fantastic experience, as the entirety of the contemreading about him so much porary comics scene was covered, with a healthy splash of that I logged into Amazon retro material. Alas, the shops just didn’t support the effort, and purchased the first so we’ll be sticking with the tried and true.—Y.E.] volume of his Goon series.

Next up will be Hillbilly and, Joe Frank eventually, I’ll own all of it.

What a fantastic artist and a Though most of your subjects were unfamiliar or completely seemingly great guy. unknown to me in CBC #21, for once, I still enjoyed aspects Mixed in with these of this issue. In introducing us to some comics practitioners, great interviews was terrific maybe you’ll spark interest or focus on someone not articles on a whole host of already a well-known commodity?

darrick patrick’s ten questions

Jimmy Palmiotti: 10 Qs Darrick Patrick asks the jovial artist and Painkiller Jane co-creator a bunch of queries

by DARRICK PATRICK Jimmy Palmiotti is a pro writer and inker who has worked on lots and lots of comic book titles, including Harley Quinn, The Punisher, Ash, Ghost Rider, Monolith, Painkiller Jane, The ’Nam, Catwoman, Deadpool, The Pro, among others, many with his wife and frequent collaborator, Amanda Conner. In 1994, he and now Marvel Comics creative director Joe Quesada formed Event Comics, and, a few years later, they were contracted to do several books for Marvel, known as Marvel Knights. Ever since then, life has been quite active for Palmiotti.

Above: Fan fave artist Amanda Conner drew this nifty Painkiller Jane: The Price of Freedom #2 [Dec. 2013] cover for hubby Jimmy Palmiotti, who co-created the character. Below: Jimmy himself as lensed by Kendall Whitehouse, at the 2014 ComicCon International: San Diego.

Next page: “Painkiller” Jane Vosko print by Amanda.

#23 • Summer 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Painkiller Jane TM & © Jimmy Palmiotti & Joe Quesada. Photo © Kendall Whitehouse.

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

Jimmy Palmiotti: I originally wanted to draw comics and make that my living. I even went so far as to go to the High School of Art and Design, in New York City, taking comic book art as a major but, along the way, I met and worked for some comic book professionals. I saw that there wasn’t much of a living to be had. I was already poor, in a sense, and didn’t want to get into a field with no future. So, I switched my major to advertising and went to college for that.

After I graduated, I landed a job at an ad agency and worked on many big accounts, including Pepsi, Maybelline, and with Bill Gold designing movie posters, on and off, for nine years. After-hours, I met a few guys making their own comics who needed some help. I worked for Eternity Comics doing coloring and inking, getting paid just enough to take the train and eat once in a while. It was a learning experience, and I worked on titles like Ex-Mutants, Ninja, and Alien Nation. I did this work on the side of my regular job and at night until I finally got a break working for my high school buddy, Mark Texeira, and started to pick up inking gigs.

My next big move was teaming up with Joe Quesada and creating Event Comics. That’s when I started self-publishing. A couple years after, we were approached by Marvel to create Marvel Knights and I have been super-busy ever since. The steady income did not come for many years, but I saved enough in the bank and lived cheaply until it started to pay better. To this day, I am still constantly hustling.

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

Jimmy: Looking back at my life, my parents are the standouts in so many ways.

My dad was in World War II, came back, got married to my mom, in Brooklyn, where both families lived, and owned a paint store until he semi-retired in the 1980s. My father barely made a living and worked six days a week, from 6:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., each and every day. My mom also had it tough, as anyone would, having four boys to look after. They both worked their asses off and treated everyone around them with kindness, understanding, and respect. They each had an amazing amount of integrity and set an example for all of us.

It wasn’t until I was older when I fully appreciated all they gave up in their lives to have us kids and create a safe environment for us to grow and explore all of our options.

With them both, whatever thing I was interested in at the moment, they would encourage me to explore it. My dad took my brother and I into New York City many times to go to comic shows. He would even haggle for me when buying comics that cost more than a dollar. I have a wonderful memory of him talking down a dealer that wanted to charge me six bucks for Conan the Barbarian #1. He got it down to half-price, explaining how much snow I had to shovel to afford even the $3.00.

I remember him bringing home reams of paper, where the back of the paper was printing errors of people’s stationary. He always made sure we had supplies. My mother treated each piece of art like a Picasso, and made sure to tell me how beautiful it was and so on. Both of them showed others empathy and understanding, and I learned from their example. Every bad habit I have was learned from outside my home.

The saddest part of all this for me is I lost my dad at 70, a few years before I did my first professional mainstream comic book. He would have exploded watching my career over the past 30 years. I do remember he was around for the first indie comic I inked for Eternity Comics called Ninja.

He told me that my grandfather would have been so proud to see the Palmiotti name in print. I would trade everything I own to have both of them back, even for a day.

Darrick: Do you have any words of advice for other individuals looking to make a career with their abilities in writing/inking?

Jimmy: My most basic rule is being kind, pay it forward, and respect yourself. Slow things down and have integrity.

Travel the world, read about a place you are going to, and spend time learning the history and culture. After that, like any skill, practice as much as possible. Understand that it takes years to get anywhere in this business. Shoot for the stars, but really appreciate every step you take moving forward. Be realistic and dream big. Again, practice your art and absorb what others are doing around you. You want to write? Read books. You want to draw? Draw from real life.

Simple rules.

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

Jimmy: I wake up before my wife does and write the bulk of what I have to before noon. I then break for some lunch and see what I have on my plate that is needed to be done as soon as possible. I honestly am so busy, I write things down constantly. My desk is made up of pads of lists I check off as I get things done. I also like to get out for a

gil kane’s able partner

The Man Called… Koster

Final—and only?—interview with one-time Gil Kane business partner Larry Koster

by JON B. COOKE

The Purple Robes In the late 1930s, 12-year-old New York City native Larry Koster relocated with his family to an outer borough.

“We moved to Brooklyn, and lived at 1696 Park Place, on the fifth floor, and I came walking down our block, between Ralph Avenue and Howard Avenue, and there was a kid with chalk, drawing on the sidewalk… So, I walked past and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m an artist. I’m just practicing.’

I said, ‘What’s your name?’

He said, ‘Eli.’ He said, ‘You want to go to Lincoln Park and wrestle a little bit?’

I said, ‘Sure.’ He was a good head taller than me.

He was about 13.”

Eli, of course, was Eli Katz, the future Gil Kane.

Koster continued, “When you looked across the street, at 1675 [Park Place], 24

you could see, diagonally across, right through the window and see Gil’s drawing board.”

According to Koster, the pair became inseparable. “Eli and I became like brothers. We were always together.”

Chuckling, Koster added, “We also became the Purple Robes. (I bet you’ve never heard of that!) My mother was a dressmaker and had a big piece of leftover cloth, and she made us two robes. We made these darts by cutting off the end of a matchstick—the igniting part—making a very fine point at the end, and have a throwing dart. We went out at night and coax the gang who hung out at the candy store, throw darts at them, and make them chase us through the alleyway, and we’d boost onto the roof and get away.”

Koster then related a tale he dubbed, “the best story of all,” where a puny neighborhood kid let the two swashbucklers tie a double-braided clothesline around his waist, and, in an effort to retrieve balls laying in an inaccessible lot between tenements—balls that landed after being hit there during stickball games—they roped down the bound youngster out of the window. “We were lowering the kid down two stories to get the balls—there must have been 15 to 20 there—and, out of the blue, while we held the rope tight, there was suddenly no tension on the line! The kid went falling down the two flights! We ran to the window and screamed, ‘Are you all right?’ The kid said, ‘Yeah, I’m okay!’

How scared we were! Then he gathered up all the balls and we hauled him up, but that scared the hell out of us!”

Besides horseplay, daring-do, and reckless behavior, Kane was fascinated with comics and became determined to break into the business. But Koster was less impressed with the medium than he was with his new best buddy. “I didn’t have that much cash to buy comics, so I wasn’t heavily influenced by them. I think Gil influenced me more.”

Koster & Katz Comics Together, with the aid of a Pantograph—a device used to trace images—the boys made up sample comic book pages. They would swipe drawings drawn by the better artists working in comics at the time—Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, Irv Novick, and Jack Kirby, to name a few. “We used to wait every month ’til when the comic books came out and go into the store, grab one by a well-known artist, with art we wanted to copy. We went behind the telephone booth and

#23 • Summer 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photo courtesy of Terry Koster. Black Condor TM & © DC Comics. Meteor Comics TM & © the respective copyright holder. His Name Is… Savage TM & © the estate of Gil Kane.

Above: Portrait of young Larry Koster snapped during his military service just after World War II. The draftee served in post-war Europe as a company clerk (typist) in the U.S. Army.

Inset right: “Black Condor” splash page (credited to Lou Fine) and Gil Kane’s cover for the one-shot Meteor Comics, [Nov. 1945], which features a bald-faced swipe of the former, perhaps accomplished by use of a Pantograph. Below: His Name Is… Savage #1, with cover painting by Bob Foster.

Sometime in the mid-1960s, stalwart comic book artist Gil Kane, upon whom DC Comics depended for two regular super-hero titles, was feeling restless. He’d recently been hit with an epiphany that had invigorated his stylistic approach and the longtime freelancer also yearned to take a stab at a self-generated project. Since the ’50s—and years before Marvel obtained the license—one notion he coveted was to adapt Robert E. Howard’s barbarian character, Conan, to the comic book format, even going so far as to secure a license from the estate for a pair of Howard’s stories.

Around that same time, Kane forged a friendship with publisher James Warren, who had made inroads on U.S. newsstands with adult-oriented horror comics that skirted the Comics Code Authority by being sold magazine-size and in black-&-white. Perhaps intrigued with the success of Warren’s Creepy and Eerie, as well as the freedom in not having to deal with the censoring Comics Code Authority, Kane developed My Name is… Savage, a b-&-w, mag-size comic book starring a murderous secret agent whose violent streak owed as much to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer as the Cimmerian warrior. Released in early 1968, the one-shot is considered a progenitor of the graphic novel.

His business partner in self-publishing was a childhood pal, Larry Koster, who had helped Eli Katz (Kane’s birth name) develop comic book proposals in the Golden Age. Upon historian Brian Kane (no relation) alerting me to Larry’s existence and son Terry Koster facilitating a visit, I traveled to Queens, New York, in late winter 2017, and spent a morning with the ailing artist. What follows are interview highlights woven into narrative.

Photo courtesy of Terry Koster. His Name Is… Savage TM & © the estate of Gil Kane.

discretely ripped out pages of well-drawn stories and then put the comic book back on the shelf, and we’d walk out with comic pages for us to swipe!”

Before Kane would quit to pursue a professional career in the comics industry, both he and Koster attended a technical high school, the School of Industrial Art (where Koster recalls becoming friends with classmate and future comics legend Dick Giordano). Though Koster wanted to follow Kane’s path, his brothers tried to talk him out of it.

“My brothers said, ‘What do you want to be an artist for?

You’ve gotta make a living to support mom and pop. You’re better off working and making some money than trying to be something that you’ll never be.’” He also remembered getting little support from Kane about getting in the business, though Kane did assist his own cousin, Marty Elkin, who would have some work published in the 1950s (though, by decade’s end, Elkin ended up selling cars in Florida). “Gil was trying to help Marty get into the comics business, more than helping me, because he was a favorite cousin,” Koster explained. “Gil was always trying to get him into comics.”

Still, on his own, Koster did make the rounds to the comics companies. “Oh, I made up samples—like we all did— and went around to the publishers and showed ’em. I think it was Harvey Comics, Alfred Harvey, where they gave me a script (about pilots or soldiers shooting off a cliff and there were planes in the background and Japs are coming up the cliff, and they were shooting down on them), but when I came back with the finished pages, they said the drawings were junk, so… I went on to do some backgrounds, Pantographic work for Gil. But, when he got paid, he never gave me a quarter. Let’s just say he was elusive in that way.”

Mr. Fear After each served in the military, Kane and Koster came up with a character to pitch to Sheldon Mayer, the famed DC Comics editor. The concept was “Mr. Fear,” a pistol-wielding private detective, a property that owed much to Will Eisner’s The Spirit. The two produced an eight-page sample story with Koster as writer and Kane as artist. (A contemporaneous photo of the cover appears on the next page.)

The pair also conceived of an Archie Andrews knock-off teenage humor strip. Alas, both notions went unsold.

About “Mr. Fear,” Koster said, “I thought it was very good. But the reason why it didn’t sell was there was a very big paper shortage and they were just able to get out what they already had scheduled with paper they were allotted.”

And, he added about The Spirit’s creator, “Will Eisner was the best there was. There was nobody as good as him.”

Without any mention of his chum Koster, Kane told Gary Groth in his epic Comics Journal interview, “I’ve been doing material independently since I came out of the Army. My first independent effort was a book called Mr. Fear… It was completely inspired by Eisner, and I worked on it to such an extent and I was such a tenth-rate artist… but I committed

myself. When I finished the book, I took it to DC and Shelly Mayer thought I was a genius. He was taken by my conviction, because there was nothing else in the material. I never was able to bring that to any of the material he gave me, so he never liked what I did.”

In the years that followed, Koster and an associate opened up a furrier design studio and, he said, “I did pretty well at it. I fell into the business through my brothers.” (In early 1962, Koster-Pearl Furs, Inc., of 150 W. 28th St., New York City, run by a Larry Koster and partners, admitted to violating the Federal Trade Commission’s “Fur Products Labeling Act of 1952” and “falsely and deceptively” invoicing fur products. The company was subsequently ordered by the FTC to cease and desist, and it evidently complied.)

Above: On the left is Eli Katz (pre-nose job) and a smidgen of Larry Koster, photographed in the late 1940s. On the drawing table is their co-creation, Mr. Fear. Inset left: Koster exhibits a Pantograph, a tool used to trace other drawings. Below: Larry Koster’s name appears in this unfinished title page intended for His Name Is… Savage #2, which was abandoned by artist Gil Kane, despite Koster’s pleas to finish work on the issue.

Along Comes… Savage!

Sometime in the mid-1960s, Koster explained, “When I had my designing studio, the door opens up and who comes walking in? Gil! We embraced and sat down. He said, ‘I’ve got a good idea’ and tells me about it. I said, ‘It’s okay.’ But he said, ‘I’ve got no money.’

I said to him, ‘I’ve got $8,000 in the bank.’ And he said, ‘I’d like to open up the studio and we can get it accomplished.’ And that was His Name Is… Savage.”

The business partners named their new imprint Adventure House Press, which was run out of 245 E. 63rd Street, in a recently-built Upper East Side apartment building, Regency Towers.

The rent, Koster remembered, was $300 a month and Kane lived there with his associate staying over on occasion.

After striking out with the most prominent national magazine distributors, Kane made a deal with lower-tier Kable News, who fronted the men a $5,000 advance to help cover printing costs.

Initially, the partners spent time kicking ideas back and forth. And,

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2020 • #23

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#23 • Summer 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Sunlight and Shadow © Warp Graphics, Inc.

This spread: Wendy Pini’s diptych Sunlight and Shadow, published as a limited edition print in 2004.

I have long admired Wendy Pini.

Yes, of course, she is a beautiful woman with a spellbinding gaze near impossible to break from when she looks at you. And, yup, during the 1970s’ convention scene, the woman was an absolute hit as the quintessential Red Sonja cosplayer—this was way before that was even a word!—back when young Ms. Pini would positively be possessed by the sword-slinging maiden. But my admiration is more than about surface charms. Much more.

I’ve always wanted to converse with her about WaRP’s beginnings in the late ’70s, as her and husband Richard’s self-publishing outfit was among the first of the independents to emerge during those nascent days of the direct market. The couple had established an original property, ElfQuest, one reminiscent of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and also of sword & sorcery, which had become a popular genre in 1970s comics. Along with Jack Katz’s First Kingdom and Dave Sim’s Cerebus, the Pinis’ ElfQuest was a trailblazer in a new brave realm of comics, one outside the mainstream and full of promise.

So, over the years, I have chatted with the couple at shows, hoping they might find time, but this and then that got in the way. Then, as with so very

many relationships I have in this world, it was through a mutual affection for Jack Kirby’s work that a stronger connection was made between us three. (Check out Wendy’s piece in Kirby100, about her appreciation of the King and his Inhumans creation, Triton.)

But it was this past summer when things suddenly shifted to high gear as the couple (married for almost 48 years!) met with me at San Diego Comic-Con and a feature on Wendy in CBC was suggested. That fall, I went to Poughkeepsie, New York, and we had an in-person, one-on-one interview.

What follows is an amazingly frank conversation with a fearless interview subject willing to discuss deeply personal matters, some which helped to form her as a comic book creator. After our talk, which took place at Richard’s home with him helpfully within earshot to answer a question now and again, and a quick dinner (when I briefly interviewed Richard), I drove back to Rhode Island overwhelmed with this sense of absolute awe for Wendy Fletcher Pini: survivor, pioneer, and true American original. Hers is a rare and wondrous talent worth celebrating.

— Jon B. Cooke

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2020 • #23

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#23 • Summer 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

“From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” © the estate of Ursula Le Guin.

Top: Richard Pini snapped this pic of Ye Ed and Wendy beginning their conversation. Above: Legendary fantasy author Ursula Le Guin wrote an essay entitled “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” which discusses her genre of choice and pedestrian writing styles. The piece eventually prompted Poughkeepsie resident Richard Pini to write her and say, actually, ElFQuest was being produced in that New York city. The writer then sent back a convivial reply.

Comic Book Creator: Hi, Wendy.

Wendy Pini: [Laughs] Are you comfortable?

CBC: I am, thank you. It is Oct. 6th, Sunday, and we are in Poughkeepsie and we shall dispense with the Ursula Le Guin aspersion about Po-skip-see…

Wendy: Po-keep-see.

CBC: Po-skip-see, as I said as a child. I grew up not far away, in Westchester county, when I was a kid.

Wendy: If I remember right, Richard wrote to Ursula and said, “Believe it or not, we produce a comic about elves in Poughkeepsie.” [laughs] “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.”

CBC: And she wrote back! That was wonderful!

Wendy: Yes! CBC: That’s very cool. I’d like to start even before the beginning. If you could talk about your family and where they’re from and, you know, a general idea of a background and where you came from, creatively. How it all informs who you are.

Wendy: That’s a difficult topic.

CBC: Is it?

Wendy: Yes. But I will do it. I think it’s good. I think it’s good for other creators to hear that, if you come from a tough background, that’s often the inspiration for your creativity because creativity becomes a coping mechanism.

So… I was born on the wrong side of the blankets in San Francisco and adopted about six weeks later into a very difficult family.

CBC: Dysfunctional?

Wendy: Yeeeeah. They lived in Gilroy, California, so I grew up there, about 70 miles south of San Francisco. It’s the heartland of San Francisco. Prunes and garlic! Prunes and garlic is what we grew! We also had a big cannery and, if they were canning tomatoes and the Gentry plant was processing garlic, you’d go [sniffs] and you’d smell pizza every morning! There were a lot of smells because of the sewer farm too. [Jon laughs] It was very agricultural, very rich, very fertile, very, you know…

CBC: Farmy!

Wendy: Farmy. And the house was out in the middle of it. It was flanked on three sides by open fields where they continually rotated crops. We had no neighbors. No close neighbors anyway. So it was a very isolated situation and I didn’t have any children to play with. My brother was six years older than me and he was also adopted. There were just difficulties in the family. Everybody had a lot of trouble getting along with everybody else. For that reason, at least as far as I can remember, I became a kid who was always fantasizing, always imagining other places to be and other people to be with, other types of families or tribes.

CBC: Did you have television?

Wendy: I had television and animated cartoons were my best friends. I just was wild about cartoons and actually practiced drawing… I’m untrained. I’m not formally trained as an artist at all. I just sort of trained myself. I started out with cartooning, which was difficult in itself because my parents—particularly my mother—thought that comics and cartoons were trash. So she did just about everything she could think of to discourage me from watching cartoons.

She either wanted me to get outside and play… by myself [chuckles]—or she wanted me to work around the ranch. It was a completely functioning ranch. My father ran a prune orchard.

CBC: That’s plums, right?

Wendy: Plums, right. So I knew the process, the seasons, the blossoms, the growth of the fruit, and how the orchard changed over the years. I got very connected to nature out there but it was a solitary experience.

CBC: Were you loved?

Wendy: Was I loved? [Pause] That’s a powerful question to ask, Jon. When people don’t love themselves, it’s very difficult for them to love somebody else. I think that my brother and I were both adopted to try to make the marriage better. My brother was adopted six years ahead of me and from him I learned that the adoption agency had my parents under observation because there was apparently some doubt as to whether they were qualified to adopt another child. Which is why it took that long.

CBC: So did anyone from the adoption agency ever come while… ?

Wendy: No, I never saw anyone. This was back in 1951 and by no means were they as watchful as they are today.

My parents, also, just put on a very, very good face. I’m sure that anyone in the circle that they ran in would say that they were pillars of the community. My father was on the school board, he was a member of the county planning commission, he was a staunch Barry Goldwater Republican. [laughter] CBC: You were in a world of migrants out there.

Wendy: That’s another thing. That’s how I think I developed a feeling about tribe: because the migrant workers would come every year to pick my father’s crop. And I used to love to go out there and be with them. And my parents did not want me to do that.

CBC: But your mother told you to get out of the house!

Wendy: [Chuckles] They told me to get out of the house but they did not want me to fraternize with them. But I did anyway. Because there were kids out there and they also cooked out there. They brought their little stoves. They made delicious beans and tortillas! [exaggerated voice] I loved that! I just got a sense that… I’m going to use the word “brown” people… They’re people, darn it! But I got the feeling that brown people knew a lot more about family than what my family knew about it and I think my sense of tribe came from hanging out with migrant workers.

CBC: And being slightly outside of their tribe, slightly detached… ?

Wendy: Sure! I mean, I don’t know what they thought of me, this white kid whose father they worked for. And, you know, he wasn’t very nice to them. He didn’t provide them any kind of adequate living facilities. A lot of them stayed overnight and went to work early the next day. There was a shack out on the other end of the orchard that had no running water… It had an outhouse and that was about it.

But, back in the ’50s, that was acceptable. That’s the way migrant workers were treated in a lot of farming communities.

CBC: Well, the government had the “Wetback” program back then. That was the official name of the operation, not just used as a derogatory term.

Wendy: Right. So that’s what I grew up around. I was an escapist. I fantasized. My paternal grandmother was a teacher. She was quite elderly as my parents adopted both

Photos © the respective copyright holders.

me and my brother late. So I had a very elderly grandmother who also had a house on the ranch property. She had been a teacher and she had a marvelous library. She had a lot of gorgeous fairy tale books, books illustrated by Willy Pogany, Aubrey Beardsley, and Arthur Rackham. I spent a lot of time over there studying that artwork and wanting to copy it. So, I found inspiration in fantasy.

CBC: On the property!

Wendy: On the property, right, because of my grandmother.

CBC: Were you ever able to go to the public library?

Wendy: Oh yes. As a matter of fact, my mother was really active with the Library Association because she had a real affinity for history. She was particularly fascinated with family history (which I find very ironic because our family was so difficult). But she loved to research all her relatives way, way back who I guess did have a lot to do with the foundation of the Gilroy community. I think the ancestral name was Thomas. I think that part of it came from my father’s side. If you think about it, it’s only natural that our family would have difficulties because my mother’s father abandoned her and her sister, and her mother, when my mother was, I think, around 13 years old. He just deserted, and so the women were left to take care of each other and raise each other at a time when that was really, really hard.

My mother was born in 1913.

CBC: Before the Depression. California was starting to boom.

Wendy: It was, yes.

CBC: Was substance abuse an issue in the family history?

Alcohol or—?

Wendy: Gee, I have no idea. They didn’t tell me much. I was never allowed to meet my father’s father. And on my father’s side it was even rougher because he apparently had to kick his own father off the ranch, I think because of substance and physical abuse toward my grandmother.

CBC: Oh! Wendy: So my father kicked his own father out of the house and then took over running the ranch. Then he married my mother and…

CBC: He could’ve been in his 20s when he did this?

Wendy: Yes. Very young.

CBC: Wow… Wendy: So, on both sides, they had really strong issues with abusive parents.

CBC: Were they abusive to each other?

Wendy: Yes, emotionally. Emotional abuse was the main thing.

CBC: So, you were on tenterhooks when you were in the house?

Wendy: Oh, I’m walking on eggshells. Every day.

CBC: Was there one you were more peaceful with?

Wendy: Well, because my father was out working a lot,

my mother and I had a difficult bond, but I suppose you could say we were closer.

CBC: You had moments.

Wendy: Right.

CBC: And also an affinity for books helps, right?

Wendy: Yes, I didn’t have any affinity for the family history because I… you know, I always knew I was adopted.

CBC: They always told you that you were adopted?

Wendy: Yes, I think they told me when I was three or four years old.

CBC: How did you feel about that?

Wendy: I think it was the right thing to do. Yeah, I never objected to that, but they wouldn’t tell me anything about my biological mother… That’s the thing. They told me I was adopted, but they wouldn’t give me any information about her.

CBC: Do you think it was good, because it was a difficult family, to say… that it gave you a little bit of an emotional “out,” so to speak, to be at least distanced from it?

Wendy: It made me identify with the changeling fantasy.

You know how the elves… I’ve loved elves and fairies since I was about two years old.

CBC: In your imagination, do the characters live in secret?

Wendy: Well, they’re surreptitious.

CBC: They hide from the humans?

Wendy: They hide from the humans. They have their own thoughts and their own ways of doing things and it’s eldritch, it’s very different. It’s “other.” I put the word other in quotes. Otherness was always a big deal to me. I always identified with the other, the strange, the fantastic. That felt more like my world than where I was at. So I started telling stories really, really early.

CBC: Telling stories to yourself?

Wendy: Well, kind of, because I had two parents who didn’t go for fantasy.

CBC: And your older brother was so much older. Did you have any connection with him?

Wendy: That was tough.

Because he was gay. And you can imagine growing up in a Barry Goldwater Republican family in the ’50s, the hassles between him and the parents…

CBC: You knew he was gay?

Wendy: No. No, I didn’t know it ’til long after.

CBC: But they had friction?

Wendy: Yes. He left home when he

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2020 • #23

Above: The rural town of Gilroy, California, where grew up Wendy Fletcher. This Main Street view was likely snapped in the 1950s. Called the “heartland of San Francisco,” the agricultural locale is renowned for its main harvests of prunes and garlic.

The latter is celebrated with Gilroy’s annual garlic festival, held since 1979. (It was site of a tragic mass shooting in 2019.)

Below: Typical dilapidated shack housing Mexican migrant workers in California, perhaps not unlike those who picked garlic during the time Wendy grew up in Gilroy.

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San Francisco years later and, in the 2000s, was when he and I really started communicating again and started getting to know each other and, like, almost becoming friends.

Again, he would never talk about his lifestyle.

Scott did not understand what a friend he had in me because I’ve always kind of been super-friendly towards LGBTQ. The very first novella I wrote was what’s called in Japan a Yaoi. Those are stories about beautiful male, gay characters in love and their trials. [laughs] Sixteen-year-old girls love to fantasize about stuff like that so I think if my brother had known how friendly I was towards gay people I think we could have had a closer relationship. But he was always… he led what I would call a fugitive life. And then… let’s see… Richard…? Was it 2006 that my brother died? He owned some property in Palm Springs. He ended up in San Francisco renovating a beautiful Victorian house on Castro Street and Richard and I had a couple of Thanksgivings with him.

CBC: Oh, good!

Wendy: Yeah. Then one day we got a phone call. We were getting ready for Thanksgiving, but we were gonna have this one at our house in Los Angeles. We got a phone call from a neighbor who said, “I’ve been trying to reach Scott. I haven’t heard from him and his answering machine is full.” And we hadn’t called Scott yet, so we called and his answering machine was full, and that was very unusual for him. We started to get very worried so then the police were called by the neighbor. The police had to break into his house. His dogs were there and… [pauses] and he had passed away. He had been gone for about ten days. But he didn’t have anybody he was close to in the neighborhood so there was nobody to check on him. So, that’s how Richard and I spent that Thanksgiving, going up to San Francisco and taking care of… [sighs] everything.

CBC: Wow. Wendy: Yeah.

CBC: A sister to the end, huh?

Wendy: Not really. Like I said, we were just starting to become friends. I don’t know how interested he was in my work. I mean, ElfQuest had been out many years, but he never said anything about it.

CBC: What was the fate of your parents?

Wendy: My mother passed away when I was 26 years old, just a very few years after I married Richard. She had a heart attack and died in her sleep.

CBC: How old was she?

Wendy: She was 64. She was not old. But she was a very, very unhappy person, and had to deal with high blood pressure and stress. I think she was an undiagnosed manic-depressive.

CBC: Was she angry by nature?

#23 • Summer 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Ruby Shepherd TM & © Wendy Pini.

Above: “The Ruby Shepherd” was, as Richard Pini describes in his Line of Beauty: The Art of Wendy Pini, “Wendy’s first attempt at an epic fantasy tale of adventure, love, and loss… and it was also her first foray in what later would be widely recognized and was what’s called in Japan a yaoi, the manga that loosely translates as ‘boys’ love.” Below: Early on, Wendy Fletcher developed a love of dance. Bottom: 1956 kindergarten class of Gilroy’s Eliot School, which included Wendy.

was 17 and joined the Coast Guard. I was 12. I knew that there were whispers, tensions, and all that, and talk about him behind his back.

That was another thing my family did. See, you asked about love and love was a very tricky thing in our family but… we didn’t even like each other and that was even harder.

CBC: Oh, I know.

Wendy: Sometimes it’s better to know that…

CBC: Oh, I know. I love my kids, but sometimes I don’t like them. [laughs] Wendy: Yeah. And so, if you grow up in a family where nobody really likes each other or trusts each other, you have to find your own way. They didn’t like my brother because he was different.

CBC: Was he creative?

Wendy: Not the same. Let me couch that in music. My brother did something very unusual for those days. He collected old 78 records. [Jon reacts audibly] I can see that you know that…

CBC: Like Robert Crumb.

Wendy: Yes. That was the part about my brother that I really loved because I enjoyed listening to some of that music, particularly classical music like Mendelssohn or Wagner on these old, scratchy 78 records. That’s kind of where I got my education in classical music, But then he would also play those crazy jazz pieces that were often in Warner Brothers cartoons. And because I was a cartoon addict, I knew all that stuff! I would hear these familiar themes and that’s where I learned that it was music from the 1920s. So there was kind of a relationship there that we both enjoyed.

CBC: Did you stay in touch?

Wendy: [Sighs, long pause] My brother left home and joined the Coast Guard and never really came back. He also never really came out. In those times, it was really, really hard. He could never bring anybody home. I never knew much about him and he kind of disappeared out of my life after I married Richard. I would hear from him occasionally.

I think he was in New Orleans for a while and had a serious substance abuse problem. [long pause] He came back to

Costume design sketches © Wendy Pini. Portrait © Richard Pini. Red Sonja TM & © Red Sonja LLC. The Mike Douglas Show © the respective copyright holder.

ably drove Richard out of his mind! [laughs] He said it was like living with a ghost. But, mentioning past life regression, I went through that and I had a powerful memory of having been burned at the stake as a witch. I connected that with movies I watched growing up. I had always been fascinated with Joan of Arc and I even played her in high school.

And, of course, she was burned at the stake. And good old Barbara Steele, our beloved horror actress. I guess she must have done several movies where she was burned at the stake as well, you know? Always loved her.

CBC: It’s a trope.

Wendy: [Laughs] “It’s a trope.” If a woman was too strong, especially back in the ‘60s, burn her! That’s the answer! [laughs] CBC: The Crucible.

Wendy: So ElfQuest starts with a burning at the stake because it is a primal—deep inside me—memory of the ultimate rejection. The ultimate rejection that society can offer a human being is to want to burn ’em up alive, and spit on them while they’re doing it. And somehow, I could imagine what that felt like.

CBC: You had empathy toward the migrants. Were you attracted to the civil rights movement at all? Did that have any meaning to you?

Wendy: No, it didn’t.

No, I shouldn’t say it didn’t! I had simply no exposure to black culture. The people of color in my life were the migrants and the Mexican people who actually lived and worked in Gilroy. I was not supposed to associate with, quote/unquote, the Mexicans. I dated a Mexican boy on the sly when I was 14. And when my father found out about it… whooop! [laughter] They made me get on the phone and tell him that I was not going to see him again.

I remember to this day what he looked like.

I think I put him in ElfQuest. But that was the kind of family I grew up in. Black, brown, whatever. There was bigotry in my family.

I really only started to become conscious of the revolution going around—the black culture, Angela Davis, and all that—when I got to college, because there were a lot of black students there. Just people I’d never been exposed to before. It was exciting and it was scary because they were so angry, and if you sat down and talked to them, almost the first thing that came out would be anger. So very scary… and wonderful. Both scary and wonderful.

Going back to ElfQuest, I mentioned the burning at the stake because I knew that I wanted to start off the story depicting a situation of bigotry and hatred against the “other,” so the humans, the primitive, caveman-like humans, represented that collective bigotry against something

Right: Wendy appeared as Red Sonja in a surprise cameo on The Mike Douglas Show, on July 27, 1977.

She’s seen here with the host, Phil Seuling, and Jamie Farr.

This page: Wendy is arguably the world’s first great cosplayer as she added not just amazing detail to her Red Sonja costume, but also with her expert performance, which had her becoming the auburnmaned warrior. Included here are her designs and costume closeup, as well as Richard Pini’s photo of Wendy in her get-up.

Above: Two pages of Frank Thorne’s original art for his “The Wizard and Red Sonja Show” story in Savage Sword of Conan #29 [May 1978], these featuring Wendy Pini and Frank in his Wizard persona. In the story, Thorne also depicted other Red Sonja cosplayers Linda Behrle, Angelique Trouvere, Dianne DeKalb, and Wendy Snow, Below: Wendy produced a series of images for use in a Red Sonja slideshow showing a different facet of the character.

CBC: That’s empowerment, right, coming from that?

Wendy: Yeah. That you can be small and vulnerable and have a lot going against you but if you say no, I’m going to survive this and my people are going to survive this… You rise up and say, “No.” CBC: Allegorically, do you think they’re brown people?

Wendy: They’re any persecuted group. They’re gay.

They’re any color, any sex that’s ever been persecuted.

They represent any group that’s ever been marginalized because they’re different.

CBC: You start off with the burning at the stake. Ultimately are they going to be destroyed or are they going to survive?

Wendy: Well, that’s the story. They start off with the burning of one character and then when that character is rescued at the cost of the life of one of the humans, the humans get vengeful and… they burn down the whole forest!

Which was my way of saying that people who hate enough will destroy themselves as well as their imagined enemy to express their hate. It really backfired because their homes were destroyed, too, in this act of crazy vengeance. It was something I wanted to say about how violence and revenge really does turn right back on you.

CBC: Did you have any feelings about the Vietnam War? Wendy: Mmm-hmmm. I was scared to death that Richard was gonna get… what do you call it… conscripted? Drafted! I did not believe in the war. It was the first time, I think, the entire world—because of the state of media reporting at the time, becoming as advanced as it was at the time, and reporters going in, right into the thick of the battle, like they never had before—you saw those images and your heart would break. The images of murder and cruelty… that famous one of that naked child running.

#23 • Summer 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Red Sonja TM & © Red Sonja LLC.

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that they were afraid of and didn’t understand. I wanted my readers to identify with the elves immediately, so I made them humanoid. I made them childlike in size, I gave them large, childlike eyes—again, of course, the manga influence from Osamu Tezuka. I designed them to look immediately sympathetic, but, at the same time, to have alien qualities like these large pointed ears and these slanted eyes, plus their affiliation with wolves, also a persecuted species. So the elves immediately, as you get to know them in the story, have this dichotomy. They’re appealing and look vulnerable in certain ways because they’re small, but at the same time they have these sinister elements: they’re affiliated with wolves, they’re fantastic warriors, they’re dangerous, they’re deadly. They know how to protect themselves and you see that within the first six pages of ElfQuest, and how they’re willing to kill to defend their own people. These are not just little, innocent, pure-hearted beings that are helpless victims. These represent the evolution of creatures who have been bullied and had to rise up to it and have become as strong as their bullies. So, really legitimate foes to the humans.

CBC: When do you think that notion started gestating? Do you think it was from your childhood?

Wendy: I think it was always a theme in any story I ever told.

Above: The success of ElfQuest spawned a plethora of spin-off items, including role playing games, board games, prose novels, and the like. Included is a button drawn by Wendy.

Below: The initial ElfQuest magazine-sized 21-issue run [1978–’85] was collected into a four-volume full-color series published by the Donning Company under their Starblaze imprint.

and I would dance onstage at times when she was off stage. I would do a bit and then she would come back on.

What was I? The “entr’acte”? [laughs] So, yeah, I was pretty good at it and the side-benefit was that without even thinking about it, I got into belly-dancing shape. I was built like a greyhound. We were at a comic convention in Boston, and Frank Thorne, who was the artist and just the power behind Red Sonja then, spotted me. We were already fans of Red Sonja.

CBC: So it was in Marvel Feature at the time? This was right in the beginning, pretty much, right, of Frank’s reinvention?

Wendy: Richard, had the individual series of Red Sonja come out by then?

Richard: I couldn’t tell you. You’d have to look up the dates. This would have been early ’76, that convention.

Because Sonja-Con was November ’76.

CBC: Yeah, that’s right about when Marvel Feature #1 [Nov. 1975] came out.

Wendy: Yeah. So, Richard, we met Frank and then, a few months after that, we did the first Sonja-Con, right?

Richard: Yeah, he said to you in Boston, “Why didn’t you throw your hat in the ring?”

Wendy: Yeah, he wanted me to…

CBC: So, you had the long locks and…

Wendy: I didn’t have the Sonja hair. I’ve never had that much hair. The costume was a real costume and as far as the hair goes, that was four wigs.

CBC: Four?

Wendy: Four different red wigs, put together, sewn together, to give that “Frank Thorne” effect!

CBC: Wow. Wendy: As far as the costume goes, one of the things I wanted was authenticity. Because we had seen other interpretations of Sonja where the girls were using bellydancing bangles that were plastic. You know, to look like the chain mail, scale bikini. But I wanted authentic armor so Richard, bless his heart, went and found 500 steel discs and drilled holes and then I sewed them onto the bikini.

CBC: With a lot of lining, I’d think, right?

Wendy: Leather! This was authentic. I used leather.

CBC: I mean, you’ve gotta keep the chain mail off your skin, right?

Wendy: Yeah. I used what I thought Sonja would have used. And then the shoulder guards were real metal. It was a wire armature built up with, like… kind of like an epoxy putty, and then soldered, actually soldered to give it that metallic effect. The sword? We found a long harpoon at an

ElfQuest TM & © Warp Graphics, Inc.

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#23 • Summer 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photos by Jon B. Cooke

antique store somewhere and polished that up and [laughs] I think Richard took a doorknob and attached that to the other end to make the hilt and we did the crosspiece somehow.

CBC: Was it heavy?

Wendy: The whole thing came to about 25 pounds.

CBC: And the sword?

Wendy: Yes. We still have the sword downstairs.

Richard: Actually, it’s at Columbia with the rest.

Wendy: Oh, then the whole Red Sonja gear is at Columbia University now. Long story short: I entered the lookalike contest and the other girls came on with their belly-dancing plastic bangles and did their little burlesque acts and then I came on and I clanked! When I walked, I clanked! I had a really good grasp of the character and when I walked I just knew how she’d talk and I… CBC: Just before I came here, I got an email from my friend Steven Thompson who said you burst into the room and marched right up to Frank waving the sword and tossing out coins. [laughs] He said you were the only one in full-performance mode and scared everybody in the room!

Wendy: Oh, yeah! It was scary. Any time I had the costume in, I stayed in character, I never broke. So everything I did was what I felt Sonja would do and she was just not taking anything from anybody. [laughs] Over the course of time, over a year or so, Richard and I, with Frank, developed the idea of the traveling Red Sonja and the Wizard Show. I don’t know if you’ve seen the video online, but you might enjoy watching. It’s the only record of it now. Some wonderful fan caught most of the show on Super-8 film. And again, this goes back to Richard’s and my days at the planetarium. We had experience working together as a team using slide effects to animate my artwork. So for The Red Sonja and the Wizard Show, Richard was our technician and at one point there was a dancing unicorn that was animated from my drawings. Richard used two slide projectors to make the unicorn dance across the stage.

And then we had a demon, a monster, and he was animated with different movements and Red Sonja slays the demon onstage. It was before its time! If you consider 1978, I’d say there’d never been anything like it at a comic convention. It was a brandnew, multimedia performance at a comic book convention.

CBC: How was Frank? Was he lecherous at all? A little bit?

Wendy: If he was, it was in the sweetest, most delicious… [Jon chuckles] Of course, he was a horny fellow! But he was in love with Sonja. So anybody who did Sonja, they were all his loves. There was a bunch of girls. But I was the “go-to” Sonja. I was the actress and he knew that he and I together could pull it off and give a full performance.

CBC: Well, yeah. You were charming, too. That was a part of it.

Not only were you beautiful, you transcended the inherent sexuality, the objectification, of what the character is. Boobs and ass and all that stuff.

Wendy: Yes, that’s how we looked at it.

CBC: They looked beyond that, immediately going to the eyes and going, “Wow! She’s got chutzpah!” [Wendy laughs] Wendy: That’s how we felt about it. We would often talk about it that way. Frank would say to me, “We must protect her. We must preserve the spirit of Sonja.” When I had that outfit on, I felt like I was fully dressed. I never felt three-quarters naked.

CBC: If somebody was leering at you, were you still in character? Were you, like, “Hey, buddy! Hey!” Wendy: Oh, I would give what I called “the stare.” If someone made a raunchy comment, I would look at him like, “You wanna come over here and say that?” I also got very good with my dagger. I was extremely fast and I had the dagger fixed to my thigh. I could pull that thing out in the space of a split second. There were threatening gestures, facial expressions. I knew all the “back off” signals. But oddly enough, I didn’t have to put up with too much of that.

CBC: The fanboys were scared to death.

Wendy: One incident that happened that was pretty memorable was when Frank and I hosted the 1978 masquerade at San Diego Con, where we gave our last performance of The Red Sonja and the Wizard Show. Richard and I were already getting into ElfQuest and phasing out of the show.

CBC: And you had the hip thing.

Wendy: And that was coming, too. But I was still perfectly fine for dancing COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2020 • #23

This page: Richard shares that the sword the Pinis exhibit here “is a recreation of Cutter’s sword, New Moon, done by the legendary C.C. Beck. Aside from being the original artist on Captain Marvel in 1940, Beck had the hobby of making replicas of historical and fictional weapons entirely out of paper, card stock, and balsa wood. He was a fan of what we were doing with ElfQuest and offered to make New Moon for us as a gift. In the story, there’s a key (to a treasure trove) disguised as the pommel of the sword and C.C. went the extra mile to make his recreation accurate, including the secret key and the hidden peg you had to remove to get the key out of the hilt.”

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WaRP Speed with

Above: Richard Pini, whose fascination with space travel is evident by the NASA memorabilia seen throughout their home, sent this shot and shared, “This 2016 photo of Wendy and I with astronaut Gene Cernan is probably the high point of my space geek life. Every year we go to Space-fest, in Tucson, Arizona, which is an awesome gathering of astronauts, authors, artists, and other people who are really into the space program. A few years ago, I got to spend time sitting at Gene Cernan’s booth, helping him out (as everyone sells their books and wares) and it was the thrill of a lifetime for me. Sadly it was also the last time I would see him as he passed away a few months later, on Jan. 16, 2017. He was the last Apollo astronaut to walk on the moon. These men and women are such heroes!”

Next page: Recent photos of the bi-coastal couple at work in their respective studios. At left is Wendy standing at her Cintiq (“It’s healthier”) in her California environs and, on the right, is Richard manning the helm at the New York division of Warp!

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[The following interview took place immediately after my Q-&-A with Wendy (during which husband Richard piped in now and again) and before dinner arrived at Longobardi’s Italian restaurant, near the Pini abode in Poughkeepsie.

This is nowhere near the comprehensive interview I hope to someday conduct with Richard, an important participant in the nascent days of the independent comics movement, and thus more breezy and chatty with his wife and creative/ business partner Wendy actively participating in the back&-forth. But it is still quite informational and entertaining.

From the start and to his credit, Richard had put any jealousy aside and he selflessly insisted that Wendy be singularly featured in CBC, so, in turn, I insisted he had to have his own space somewhere in the ish!—JBC.] Comic Book Creator: So, Richard, the birth of alternative comics: what’s your memory of that?

Richard Pini: Y’know, part of me wants to say, we were the birth of alternative comics, but that’s not true. It’s just a reflection of my experience.

As Wendy said, we got into this not knowing what the hell we were doing. ElfQuest had been turned down by Marvel, DC, Bud Plant, and Mike Friedrich, so, with the exception of that one little pothole of an experience with Fantasy Quarterly, we knew we were going to have to do it ourselves. Bud Plant was publishing First Kingdom and Mike Friedrich was publishing Star*Reach, and those two titles were the only ones that I was aware of that weren’t underground comix. I knew about the underground comix.

I knew ZAP, Death Rattle, and all that stuff, but both First Kingdom and Star*Reach were different. They weren’t just T-&-A, weren’t salacious for the sake of being shocking.

They were also magazine-size, which was different from most of the undergrounds. When we decided to publish ourselves, those were the two exemplars that I used when I would go around to printers and ask, “Can you print me

up stuff like this?” That is my memory of it. I’m sure there were other comics titles, other creators, but those are the two I was aware of in 1978, when I set out to become an alternative publisher.

We didn’t have alternative or indie comics. The closest were called “ground-level,” a term, I think, Mike Friedrich coined because, he said, there was mainstream and then there was underground and in-between was ground-level. That’s my memory of the birth of the whole thing. We weren’t first. Actually, Cerebus came out a couple months earlier than we did, but I had no idea that Dave Sim was doing that and he had no idea we were developing ElfQuest.

Those were parallel developments.

CBC: When did First Kingdom come out?

Richard: Oh, I remember 1973, ’74 as being the time frame.

CBC: You guys were exposed to it? I’m talking about seeing the content and seeing fantastic material and knowing there was a market.

Richard: We didn’t know from markets.

Wendy Pini: We didn’t.

Richard: All we wanted to do was tell the story and not go broke in the process. I didn’t know about advertising; I didn’t know about marketing.

CBC: Well, there was nothing to the direct market, really.

Richard: It was just starting!

CBC: It was just Seagate and Bud Plant.

Richard: And we knew both of them, particularly Phil [Seuling, of Seagate]. I had been going to his New York Comic Art Convention since about 1972, and both Phil and Bud knew of Wendy’s work and were favorably disposed toward it. So during a conversation, I said, “Do you guys want to carry our book?” And, based on those factors, they said yes and… Boom! Ten thousand copies of Fantasy Quarterly #1 sold, then 20,000 of #2, and 40,000 of #3.

CBC: Those were the days! [chuckles] Richard: Oh, those were some days!

CBC: So when did you first get into comics?

Richard: My first memory of comics is, I was seven or eight years old. Maybe I’d had my tonsils out, maybe I had the flu, but an aunt brought over five or six DC comics.

And there maybe was an Annual or you know, one of their 80-page specials in there. But it was all Superman and Batman. There were like three eight-page stories per regular title and that was my introduction to comic books. Now, my introduction to “comic books” [laughs] I used to…oh god, here it comes. I used to take accordion lessons, because my grandmother had played the accordion, so she made my mother play the accordion, so my mother made me play the accordion…

CBC: A good Italian family.

Richard: Good Italian tradition. And I used to take lessons at a place called Vi-Jon’s in Ansonia, Connecticut, and, while I was waiting my turn, I would go across the street to a convenience store and they had a spinner rack of comics.

I picked up a copy of Fantastic Four #37.

CBC: [Laughs] We are such nerds.

Richard: And it was the second issue to feature the Frightful Four, who I think had been introduced the issue before. (I may be off by one or two.)

Wendy: Isn’t this interesting that Frightful Four is how we both got started?

Richard: I had read comics for years and they were always based on the DC model—three eight-page stories, little self-contained things. But I read this issue and it came

#23 • Summer 2020 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Pini at the Helm

screeching to a halt at a cliffhanger. And I was literally, “WTF?!” before I knew what that expression was…and I didn’t say, “fudge.” I just said to myself, “I have to find out what happens next month!” [laughter] And it was the worst kind of heroin. I was addicted from the get-go. It was Kirby and Lee at their finest. And then, you know, the next issue had a cliffhanger and the next issue and then they brought in Dr. Doom and Daredevil, and then suddenly the Inhumans! All over the map! And then they followed that act…with Galactus!

CBC: With God![laughs] Richard: The Great Refuge sinks and then out in space here comes this little squiggle that’s the Silver Surfer. Who knew where that was going? It was the best three-issue storyline ever done. And then what did they follow that with? Issue 50 they defeated Galactus. Number 51, “This Man, This Monster.” Best single-issue storytelling ever! By that time, I was doomed. I was buying every Marvel title off the spinner rack. It got to the point where the shop owner let me snip the wire open on the bundle and I could pick out the best copy… I was between 14 and 16 when all that was coming out…

CBC: So, did you collect the Marvel line, hook, line, and sinker?

Richard: I was a Marvel Zombie long before that term was invented.

CBC: You were born in 1950?

Richard: Yes, and that was the same year as Dunkin Donuts, credit cards, and the first movie shown on an airplane.

CBC: That’s a rather random list, Richard.

Richard: And I was faithful to Marvel. Every Tuesday—it was Tuesdays then —I was there, I got the best copy of all of the comics. I mean, 12¢ apiece, you could get eight for a dollar… and get change! And then they went to 20¢ and blah-blah-blah. But, by about 1972-73, I was still collecting, but it was feeling like an obligation.

CBC: The letter that you wrote to Wendy—have you saved it?

Richard: Oh, yeah.

CBC: What’s it say?

Richard: [To Wendy] You know better than I do.

Wendy: Pretty much it said, “I really liked what you had to say in your letter to Silver Surfer, but if you’d like to know more about me, you have to write to me and I promise you surprises await.”

Richard: So I knew something about marketing. [laughter] Wendy: Of all the letters that I received from guys that wanted to meet a girl who liked comics, his was the only one that did not tell me all the comics he liked, what color his hair was, how many pimples he had… He was a man of mystery and he intrigued me.

CBC: Did you write to anybody else?

Richard: No. I was never a fan in fandom. I didn’t discover fandom until I knew her.

CBC: You didn’t know fanzines or anything like that?

Richard: No. I was in my own little world. I was reading the comics and I saw these names in the letters column.

Wendy: You didn’t even know about conventions.

Richard: I didn’t know about conventions. When I look back now and I see… Oh, yeah! Roy Thomas had a letter in Fantastic Four # 3, or maybe somebody else whose name you’d recognize now. All of these professionals had letters printed. I didn’t recognize any of those names. Her letter was different in tone than all the other letters. It was very philosophical, it was very compassionate, and it was… very Wendy! It was a girl. [chuckles] Wendy: As far as you knew.

Richard: As far as I knew. This wasn’t the internet. So, I’m a guy, I’m 18 years old, I’m in my single room at MIT and there’s 8,000 men and 200 IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, women. The ratio was horrible.

CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS CBC: Had you ever known a girl who liked comics?

ISSUE IN PRINT OR DIGITAL FORMAT! Richard: Before then? No. I mean, I didn’t ask around to see if any people I knew liked comics. Comics was a pastime I brought from home. I read ’em, I liked ’em, and then I went about my life, but I was very solitary.

CBC: Do you still have them?

Richard: I do have the letters, and for a time I did collect comics. In fact, I built up complete runs of Marvel comics twice, and then sold them. My parents didn’t care. If I had left them at home in an unlocked closet, they would have thrown them out, but I got a big padlock. And, when I got a letter back from Wendy, I didn’t know that such things even happened, like fandom or like correspondence between people with like interests. I was just throwing the bait out into the dark.

CBC: Had you had a girlfriend before this?

Richard: Sort of… One. CBC: [To Wendy] So what did you write him back? “Hey, I’m Wendy…?”

Wendy: I honestly don’t remember what I wrote him back. I think I was working on a drawing when I got his letter so I finished the drawing COMIC BOOK CREATOR #23 and I discusses her days as Redhave been very sent it to him. I don’t remember WENDY what IPINI said to you.

It can’t Sonja cosplayer, & 40+ years of ELFQUEST! interesting.

Plus RICHARD PINI on their 48-year marriage and creative partnership!

Also: We have the final installment CRAIG Richard: It was, you know, from a great remove, it was kindofofourlike, “ItYOE interview! GIL KANE’s business partner LARRY KOSTER talks was good to hear from you. Thank drawing.” wasn’t aboutyou. their Here’s adventuresatogether!

PABLOThere MARCOS on his Marvel horror work, HEMBECK, and more! Cover by WENDY PINI. much to it.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 CBC: There wasn’t an invitation to respond?

(Digital Edition) $4.99

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke • Transcribed by Steven Thompson https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=133&products_id=1543

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2020 • #23

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