Comic Book Creator #26

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A TwoMorrows Publication

Adventureman TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc. and Terry Dodson.

No. 26, Summer 2021

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$9.95 in the USA

Cover art by Terry Dodson & Rachel Dodson

S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 • T h e Te r r y D o d s o n I s s u e • N u m b e r 2 6

T WOODY QUINN CBC mascot by J.D. KING

©2021 J.D. King.

About Our Cover Pencils & Colors: TERRY DODSON Adventureman TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc. and Terry Dodson.

Inks: RACHEL DODSON

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Ye Ed’s Rant: Keepin' nose to the grindstone in this new Covid-19 landscape............... 2 COMICS CHATTER Up Front: The Perplexing Puzzle of ProJunior. Ye Ed’s ridiculously thorough history of onetime fanzine mascot to star of his own underground comix................. 3 Sal Quartuccio’s Portfolio Investment: Part two of CBC’s detailed interview covers the prozine publisher on his prolific comics-related print & portfolio endeavors..... 12 Will Eisner’s Artifacts of Affection: The sequential art great’s Valentines and anniversary cards made for his wife, Ann, who passed away earlier this year....... 19 Once Upon a Long Ago: Steven Thompson on actress/comics writer Merrie Spaeth....23 Incoming: Our letters column returns with talk of P. Craig Russell and Wendy Pini..... 26 The Fabulous Fanzines of the ’70s: Ken Meyer, Jr., looks at great comics ’zines........ 28 Ten Questions: Darrick Patrick gets answers from “Stormbreaker” Peach Momoko... 34 Hembeck’s Dateline: Get into The Spirit with Fred’s Fab Four/Deadman mash-up..... 35 Comics in the Library: R. Arndt tells us what moves (and doesn’t) off the shelves.... 36 THE MAIN EVENT

Above: Featuring pencils and colors by Terry Dodson and inks

by Rachel Dodson, our cover features Clair Connelly, star of Terry and writer Matt Fraction’s Image Comics series, Adventureman, as well as the ’40s pulp hero (who shares the same name as the comic title) and Phaedra Phantom. The second story arc is set for release in September.

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“Sheer Chance” and the Art of Terry Dodson Our candid conversation with the superb artist about his pro career, from a start in alternative comics, early work at Malibu, partnership with wife Rachel, breakout with Harley Quinn, and years bouncing between Marvel and DC, with SpiderMan and the Black Cat, spectacular Wonder Woman run, various X-Men titles, and “dream come true” work on Star Wars: Princess Leia. Also included are brief though informative chats with Terry’s live-in creative collaborator, Rachel, and Matt Fraction, co-creator and writer of Terry’s latest hit, series, Adventureman!.......40 BACK MATTER Creators at the Con: Continuing a wistful look at NYCC by Kendall Whitehouse.......... 78 Coming Attractions: CBC #27 celebrates Paul Gulacy and remembers Joe Sinnott...... 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: George Pérez’s Thanagarian constables...... 80 Right: Terry Dodson jettisoned to stardom with his rendition of Harley Quinn in the ’00s. This detail is from Terry’s cover art for 2017’s Harley Quinn by Karl Kesel and Terry Dodson Deluxe Edition Vol. 1.

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Comic Book Artist Vol. 1 & 2 are available as digital downloads from twomorrows.com Harley Quinn TM & © DC Comics.

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: $46 US, $69 International, $18 Digital. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2021 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 to the memories of MARTINA BATAN, JOHN PAUL LEON, KEVIN JACKSON, STEVE LIGHTLE, GARY LEIB, FRANK JACOBS, and DAVID ANTHONY KRAFT ™

JON B. COOKE Editor & Designer

JOHN MORROW Publisher & Consulting Editor

MICHAEL AUSHENKER Associate Editor

TERRY & RACHEL DODSON Cover Artists

TERRY DODSON Cover Colors

RICHARD J. ARNDT TOM ZIUKO STEVEN THOMPSON Contributing Editors

STEVEN TICE ROSE RUMMEL-EURY Transcribers

J.D. KING CBC Cartoonist

TOM ZIUKO CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON CBC Illustrator

ROB SMENTEK CBC Proofreader

GREG PRESTON CBC Contributing Photographer

MICHAEL AUSHENKER FRED HEMBECK STEVEN THOMPSON TOM ZIUKO CBC Columnists To contact CBC, please email jonbcooke@aol.com or snail-mail Comic Book Creator c /o Jon B. Cooke, P.O. Box 601 West Kingston, RI 02892 2

Hopefully a productive new era lies ahead for all of us

captures an appropriate art deco veneer to all Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever been this aspects of Adventureman. Bravo! busy working this comics-related I’m glad I had a chance to reread the beat I’ve been on full-time for many story and take full notice of the disability years now. Just this year, I’ll be that the main protagonist must deal with, designing and co-authoring (with as deafness and hearing loss is rarely made Colorado kid Greg Biga, whose part of comic book adventures. It’s worth efforts will utterly dominate our next noting, and I’m sorry I didn’t specifically ask issue, with Biga’s Gulacy tribute and Adventureman co-creators Matt Fraction and Sinnott memorial) a wonderful new look Terry about featuring a lead character in at the late, great comics master with that condition. So why not ask ’em now, John Severin: Two-Fisted Comic Book before I send this ish to press, sez I! Artist. This book, the first ever written Terry replied,”From a pure comicabout Marie’s older brother, is the book storytelling angle, I was extremely result of Greg reaching out with the excited about the opportunity [to showcase notion years ago and my 2018 visit the disability]. This concept showed up to John’s daughter, Michelina Van before Matt wrote his Hawkeye series Gemert’s, Centennial, Colorado home, with the famous ‘Pizza Dog’ issue [#11, where Greg and I scanned an unbeAug. 2013]; I had so many things I wanted lievable array of the man’s masterful to play with visually for the loss of sound, work, from childhood work to the art and David Aja and Matt ended up putting that was on his drawing board when a lot of those same ideas into that he passed away in 2012. (So, yeah, issue. Oh well… but there are still a lot this work is authorized by the John of things to play with, and I’m having Severin estate.) As soon as I send a ball with it. Especially drawing all this CBC ish off to the publisher, I’ll those SOUND EFFECTS! be eagerly spending most of my “And we had an overwhelming summer in sweet Severinville! positive response to this from people Throughout this year and next, who are hard-of-hearing or have with co-author Jean Depelley, I’ll be relatives, etc, who are… we heard working hard on a history of illustratTerry Dodson by Ronn Sutton so many stories. It’s amazing what ed adult fantasy mags of the 1970s happens when you go beyond the average and explore and ’80s, Forging Metal. (We might be joined by a third the entire world of possibilities! Again, as a storytelling author on the book, but as we’ve yet to sort everything out, hopefully we’ll make an announcement soon.) This artist, it’s the best, because I get to create so many characters, situations, etc., that I can’t be ‘bored’ with project, in various incarnations, is almost 20 years in the making (thanks for your patience, Jean!) and I hope what I’m doing.”

Matt shared, “I don’t recall when exactly making it will stand with The Book of Weirdo to be a definitive Claire hard of hearing came into things. It may have work on the subject of Heavy Metal, Métal Hurlant, predated Hawkeye, even. I suspect parallel developEpic Illustrated, and other international magazines ment is more likely. We’d have to check Terry’s sketchdevoted to the fantastic. books and a zillion old e-mails to find a date.

On the homefront, it’s been a trying, many times “There’s clearly something I want to explore and awful time since October. Beth, my beloved wife of utilize in how both comics and sign use of a silent and nearly 34 years, has suffered a serious health concern gestural medium of communication that turns sound that (God willing) is now being overcome. I’m doing my best to be a dutiful husband and, if the spirit moves you, into images and images into complex linguistic and idiomatic aggregates.” please keep Casa Cooke in your thoughts and prayers.

Kudos to the two gentlemen for being progressive Before I go, I simply must rave about the first and inclusive by adding this innovative dimension to Adventureman collection—subtitled The End and Claire Connelly, a.k.a. Adventureman. As Ariel Baska Everything After—that compiles the first four issues, of the Comics Bookcase website puts it: “By showing which was only just now received from our cover feaher in this light, Fraction adds Adventureman to the tured artist, Terry Dodson! The oversize hardback is a gorgeous production, the bonus material engaging, and list of disability inclusive titles that give full agency to disabled characters, allowing them to be people, not I must mention Leonardo Olea’s exquisite design work just avatars for altruistic sentimentality.” Amen to that. for the collection (as well as the comic book), which

cbc contributors Ger Apeldoorn Mark Arnold Andrew D. Cooke Robert Crumb

Rachel Dodson Terry Dodson Don Dohler Greg Dohler

Ann Eisner John Fleskes Matt Fraction Justin Green

John Kinhart Denis Kitchen Jay Lynch Ken Meyer, Jr.

— Ye Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com Peach Momoko Leonardo Olea Sal Quartuccio Patrick Rosenkranz

Jim Simon Art Spiegelman Steven Thompson Skip Williamson

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Terry Dodson portrait © 2021 Ronn Sutton.

KENDALL WHITEHOUSE CBC Convention Photographer

Gettin’ Busy Again

up front

The Perplexing Puzzle of Don Dohler’s ProJunior Ye Ed cracks the case of the Wild! mascot’s journey from fanzines to hippie comix

Don Dohler’s ProJunior TM & © Denis Kitchen. Cover art © the estate of Jay Lynch. “ProJunior” splash © Robert Crumb. True Crime Comics panel © the respective copyright holder.

by JON B. COOKE I’ll be honest. I never really got it. And maybe it’s no surprise that I still don’t get it. But, boy oh boy, did it ever get me!

I’m talking about Don Dohler’s ProJunior, an anthology underground comic book published by Denis Kitchen in 1971. The one-shot, featuring mostly single-pagers by cartoonists of varying talent, was all centered around this oddball character, a young feller totally unknown to most everyone, who sometimes donned a leopard-skin jungle suit (think Elmo Lincoln in his Tarzan movies), though usually in normal-day attire. He sorta-kinda resembled Blondie’s Dagwood Bumstead, replete with cow-licked hair, though there was one glaring difference he had with Chic Young’s suburban dad: instead of whites in the eyes and dark pupils, ProJunior had freaky black eyeballs with white pupils!

It was likely 1972 when, as a newly-arrived teenager of 13 years, I got my greasy paws on an “Adults Only” 50¢ copy. Maybe I had already seen R. Crumb’s earlier take on the character, in Bijou Funnies #4 [’70], in a cover-featured five-pager (which also introduced ProJunior’s “faithful teen-age girl companion,” Honeybunch Kaminski). So it could be that my curiosity had already been piqued, but what I clearly recall is being baffled over the origins of this purported icon of underground comix. Had I somehow failed to recognize some ancient beloved comic strip of the distant past for which all hippie cartoonists were now hip?

I’d always been afflicted with a nerdish interest in pop culture of yore, so, sure, I recognized the Warner Brothers prison movie vibe of Jay Lynch’s cover art, but—bam!—

turning to the inside cover, with “Bosstown Glob” writer Joe Pilati’s introduction, I was—contextually—utterly lost. What in tarnation was Joe talking about? I didn’t know a Don Dohler Wild! from a Skip Williamson Squire. Any notion of “fanzine” was just beginning to gestate in my nascent noggin, and that was only because of what smidgen or two I’d learned about science fiction fandom.

So I reckon I’ve been on a quest ever since. Most anyone I’ve interviewed who may have had even the remotest association with that singular comic book has been peppered with my questions, which can be distilled down to a simple pair of queries: “Who ProJunior?” and “Why ProJunior?”

And—spoiler alert— even today, I’ve yet to be given a sufficient answer to either question, even though I’ve spoken with the character’s creator, as well as to ProJunior’s numerous revivalists, his publisher, and a few contributors to that single issue which apparently continues to haunt my dreams.

But, like they say, the journey’s the thing, so let’s embark on this ridiculously comprehensive, 15-years-in-the-making “investigative” feature on the lives and times of “America’s Favorite Teen-Age Jungle Lord,” sometime fearless protector of the proletariat, and struggling cartoonist, ProJunior!

From the Fanzines They Came Our search for the “who” of ProJunior begins with the guy who bore the name emblazoned Walt Disney-like atop the comic book’s logo: Mr. Don Dohler. Around 2005, through a friendly e-mail exchange, I was in touch with the gent (courtesy of Jay Lynch), who, since birthing the character, went on to some renown as a low-budget sciencefiction/horror filmmaker and founder of influential special effects magazine Cinemagic. But though he readily agreed to an interview about ProJunior and his influential fanzine work, Donald Michael Dohler sadly succumbed to cancer on Dec. 2, 2006.

Thankfully, filmmaker John Kinhart, who sub-

Above: Jay Lynch based his ProJunior cover on Jack Cole’s panel in True Crime Comics #2 [May 1948], below. The first printing contained an erroneous contributor count, later fixed on future printings.

Left: R. Crumb’s iconic splash page of his Bijou Funnies #4 [June 1970] ProJunior story, later used in part as an ironon T-shirt transfer sold by the Bijou Publishing Empire.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

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This spread: Clockwise from above are covers of the first two issues of Don Dohler’s Wild! fanzine, circa 1961, featuring his mascot creation, ProJunior; Dohler drew this comparison of his middle-school ProJunior design and the fanzine version for Mark James Estren’s A History of Underground Comics [1974]; Wild! #1 page introducing the ’zine’s mascot, replete with physical description; Jay Lynch cover art for Wild! #8; Lynch’s version of the mascot, 1962; panel by Dohler, using a backward spelling of his name; and Wild! co-editor Mark Tarka portrait of Dohler, taken after they called it quits on the ’zine.

first interaction between the teenagers?

“My memory is more fallible than ever,” Spiegelman recently confessed. “I remember it being Cracked, but that may only be the memory of once having remembered something. I’m sure we all read Sick as well as Cracked in that period, but [Pilati’s] letter definitely mentioned Smudge and, most importantly, had a contact address.”

Lynch also recalled it was after purchasing Smudge #1 through the mail when he started contributing to subsequent issues, but Lynch and Williamson cartoons were published in Pilati’s debut number. Discrepancies aside, what is important for our retrospective here is that Pilati, who would go on to write for the Boston Globe and provide the introduction in ProJunior #1, included in the review section

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Wild! TM & © the estate of Don Dohler.

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sequently directed Pigheaded, a fine documentary about the life and art of underground cartoonist Skip Williamson, had previously interviewed Dohler at great length for Kinhart’s debut effort, Blood, Boobs & Beast [2007], a flick specifically about Dohler’s eclectic, amazing career (available on Amazon Prime, kids!). Those multiple conversations included talk on the genesis of ProJunior and Kinhart generously shared relevant outtakes for our purposes here.

One popular notion of fanzines devoted to comics has it that they essentially began with Jerry Bails’ Alter-Ego, in 1961, but it was the E.C. Comics of the 1950s which had earlier spawned any number of ’zines, some of which expanded their focus to MAD magazine and its imitators.

And exposure to any given issue often prompted readers to start their own efforts. Robert Crumb said, “On the letter page in Humbug [#9, Apr. ’58], there was a letter from a guy [Doug Brown] who published a fanzine called Spoof, and that opened a whole world to [brother] Charles and me.

Discovering comic fandom broke us out of the isolation of our own little world of comics and changed our lives.”

A community of future comix cartoonists was forming, and (as with Spoof being mentioned in Humbug) it was in the pages of the newsstand mags where that crowd first came together, with one such letter serving as catalyst for connecting Jay Lynch, Art Spiegelman, and Skip Williamson. As legend would have it, around 1961, the three became acquainted due to a notice purportedly printed in Cracked—a MAD knock-off—which plugged 14-year-old Joe Pilati’s humor-focused fanzine, Smudge.

Despite the anecdote being repeated numerous times, most often by Lynch, a look through early issues of Cracked finds no such plug, though there is a single letter of comment by Pilati [#21, Sept. ’61], yet it doesn’t include his mailing address or mention of any fanzine. But, in another MAD rival mag, Sick #6 [June ’61], an intelligent LOC from Pilati does include his street address (though nothing about Smudge). Is it possible this missive was the conduit for the

Wild! TM & © the estate of Don Dohler. Jay Lynch artwork © the estate of Jay Lynch.

of Smudge #1 mention of Baltimore’s own Don Dohler’s Wild!, which introduced its mascot ProJunior to the fanzine world.

Dohler explained how Wild! came to Smudge’s attention: “Famous Monsters [of Filmland] used to have a section in the back called ‘Graveyard Examiner’ or something, and fans could send little notices in and Forrest Ackerman would publish them, so I had a notice published in Famous Monsters and, ironically, I think it was in the same issue, another guy had one, another notice a few [spaces] down from mine for some fanzine called Smudge, which was about comics. So I got in touch with him, he got in touch with me, and we became good friends.” He added with a chuckle, “So, it just kind of mushroomed from that. If it wouldn’t been for that little plug in Famous Monsters, Wild! would’ve probably [just] been handed out to my family and friends in the neighborhood, and that would have been the end of it. It turned out that I got people to actually send in money for it!”

Wild! Start The origins of ProJunior predate Wild!’s fanzine incarnation, stretching back to Dohler’s middle school years. “I think it was in the sixth grade; I think it was that year,” Dohler said.

“I don’t know how classrooms look nowadays, but back then we had these wooden desks and they’d line them up next to each other in rows. I happened to be in the back of the room that year, which was great, where you could goof off and the teacher really couldn’t see what you were doing.

My friends and I would be sitting back there, fooling around, drawing cartoons and stuff all day long.”

Horsing around with Dohler in the back row was classmate Mark Tarka, and together the pair conceived their first version of Wild! “We found we enjoyed drawing insane comic strips together,” Dohler said, “and a partnership, of sorts, was formed.” Thus, between 1959–60, the duo produced five hand-drawn, single-copy issues, which they would pass around for the pleasure of fellow students.

The nameless mascot of that early effort began life as a doodle Dohler sketched in class notebooks during fifth grade, in 1958, a version that originated the trademark weird eyes, but also had attributes not seen in its progeny: “jester’s hat, the corks in the ears, the double eyebrows, the two sideway teeth, and, of course, the long rectangular head.”

By 1961, the partners decided to transform Wild! into a ditto-zine and restart the numbering. “Although it might be considered ‘camp’ by today’s standards, [Wild! #1] was probably the worst fanzine in history,” Dohler said. But the ’zine’s mascot did finally received a name.

As related in A History of Underground Comics, by Mark James Estren [1974]: Dohler says he thought of the name when he began thinking of COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

Top: A visibly grateful Scott Shaw! displaying his basket of goodies on a 1950s’ Easter Sunday morning. Above: Recent pic of cartoonist Orlando Busino.

Bottom: The first few issues of Archie’s Tales Calculated to Drive You Bats contained Busino’s work, a huge influence on young Scott Shaw! This Busino cover is from #3 [Mar. 1962].

himself as a “junior professional editor.” After repeating that phrase to himself a few times, he decided to call the mascot “Junior Pro.” Then, says Dohler, “After staring at those two words on paper for an hour or so, it just seemed more catchy and less hackneyed to switch the words around. Thus ProJunior was formed. It had a nice ring to it—and was easy to say and easy to remember.

And somehow it fit my ’58-born character beautifully.”

In more recent years, Dohler described an influence: “I can tell you what the inspiration for the character was: there was a cartoonist who used to contribute to MAD magazine named Don Martin… [and] he just had this wild, crazy style of cartooning and I liked his characters,” he said.

“And that was kind of the inspiration for me to start doing this character with the elongated face and the wacky eyes, and I just tinkered it together.”

After getting notice within Smudge, Dohler received orders for Wild! and, soon enough, Jay Lynch, Skip Williamson, and Art Spiegelman

VERY SPECIAL THANKS

Much appreciation to Don’s son, GREG DOHLER, for his generous help with this feature.

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When we grew up, those of us who were kid cartoonists together, when we’d get jobs art directing and stuff, we’d hire each other.”

The fanzine community had its way of self-perpetuating an increasing number of titles, and soon enough Skip Williamson created Squire and Art Spiegelman helmed Blasé, both to which Lynch contributed. In his newsstand humor magazine Help!, their idol Harvey Kurtzman reprinted cartoons from their fanzines, giving Lynch and Williamson their first national exposure. Wild! lasted 11 issues, becoming increasingly sophisticated and ever more ambitious, though the ’zine lost its mascot midway through the run, as Mark James Estern writes, “Oddly enough, Dohler himself dropped [ProJunior]… after #6, because friends and readers kept telling him they hated mascots in general, if not ProJunior in particular.”

Soon, as that golden age of Kurtzman-inspired fanzines reached its twilight, and, with the young men leaving high school behind, the guys went off to their own professional careers, junior and otherwise. But ProJunior was only dormant, decidedly not dead and certainly not forgotten.

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were among those contributing cartoons to the ’zine Dohler described as a MAD take-off. “I was 15 when I started publishing Wild!,” he explained. “It was dittoed. I went out and bought a second-hand ditto machine. It was 40 bucks.

It was hand-crank; it wasn’t automatic, and that’s how I did it.”

Lynch described it thusly: “Wild! was a fanzine, a little magazine published by high school kids. It was printed with purple ink on ditto masters. A ditto machine was… when you were a kid, you’d get these tests in school printed with purple ink on this simple form of printing called a ditto machine. What Wild! was was our attempt to be like MAD magazine. It would have all these little stories, like ‘How to unclog a clogged-up toilet.’”

Of the readership, Lynch continued, “It was probably geared to people just like us or peers. Dohler’s friends got it, but it wasn’t just a Baltimore thing. He’d mail it out to people who lived in different cities. I was in Miami then. Spiegelman was in New York. Skip Williamson was in Missouri. It was kind of like networking. It was kind of like the first instance of that.

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Wild! TM & © the estate of Don Dohler. Smudge TM & © the estate of Joe Pilati. Sick TM & © the estate of Joe Simon. Don Martin artwork © the estate of Don Martin.

Above: Wild! #7 cover featuring photos of a strikingly creative group of high schoolers dedicated to the celebration of satirical comics, MAD magazine, and that mag’s knock-offs.

Inset right: Joe Pilati’s Smudge #1 resulted in Wild! being made aware of by Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson. Below: Letters page, Sick #6 [June 1961], with Joe Pilati’s letter of comment.

Down to the Underground “In 1970, I was working in Washington, D.C., for Eddie Leonard Restaurants,” Dohler related, “and one day I get this brown envelope in the mail from Jay Lynch. He and I kind of stayed in touch. I opened it up and there were these underground comix. Whoa! Cool! There was Bijou Funnies, which he, Skip, and Art contributed to.”

Indeed, those onetime Wild! contributors had been busy in the intervening years, as they joined the vanguard of underground cartoonists. ZAP Comix #1 had been published two years before, Crumb’s effort which began the entire comix movement, and, by 1970, Lynch and Williamson already had three issues of Bijou published. Plus, at the very start of that same year, in a seedy room in Manhattan’s Hotel Earle—“the official Topps hotel”—awhile brainstorming assignments for the bubblegum company, Lynch and Spiegelman, with the assist of Paul Simon, a.k.a. Paul Filth, revived Dohler’s Wild! mascot for a new era.

On page 23 of the New York City underground weekly tabloid The East Village Other, Vol. 5, #7, dated January 21, the full-page Lynch/Spiegelman/Simon jam (originally intended for rival N.Y.C. newspaper, Rat Subterranean News), “ProJunior, Jungle Lord,” reintroduced the legendary

Wacky Ads TM & © The Topps Bubblegum Company, Inc. “ProJunior, Jungle Lord” © Art Spiegelman and the estate of Jay Lynch.

character, this time to the hippie readership. Spiegelman explained about the (decidedly not PC) strip, “Back in the day, nobody drew the character except Don Dohler. He was the creator of this strange creature.

It started with Jay and I reminiscing about Wild! and we did a ProJunior comic strip for [EVO] that took place in the jungle.” The page was basically a ’40s jungle movie spoof.

Around that same time, the cartoonist duo continued their fling with the character with a joint art job on the cover for an obscure ditto-zine, The Private Papers of the Good Ol’ Doppler Gang, which features 16 of Spiegelman and Lynch’s groan-inducing cartoon puns riffing on the ProJunior name.

Maybe, when he had sent that package of comix to his old pal, Lynch was asking for permission to use Dohler’s character in the EVO or maybe he asked the creator’s forgiveness for appropriating ProJunior without asking, but, regardless, Dohler took it in stride. He was, in fact, delighted. “I don’t know where they came up with the ‘Jungle Lord’ thing,” he said. “I thought it was great.” From this moment on, Dohler bequeathed his ProJunior to the world, for anyone to use.

Whether he knew of that largesse or not, Robert Crumb jumped at the opportunity when his peers shared the EVO strip, ProJunior’s first appearance in a leopard-skin jungle suit. Lynch explained, “Robert Crumb said, ‘Well, what’s this about? Who is this guy? Why’s he wearing a jungle suit?’ (We had put a jungle suit on him for no apparent reason.)”

About the character, Crumb explained with a chuckle, “That’s funny. Jay Lynch brought up ProJunior. He was in touch with the guy who invented ProJunior, back in the late ’50s and the ’60s. Don Dohler, I think he was. He was the professional cartoonist, junior. The aspiring, young… it struck me… and the way he drew him was funny.

I thought he was a funny cartoon character to promote the young, aspiring idealist.”

By June, Crumb saw printed his version of junglesuited ProJunior, radical defender of the downtrodden, accompanied by teenage runaway Honeybunch Kaminski.

Behind their presence on the cover of Bijou Funnies #4, where the couple taunts the straight-laced, exasperated Mr. Man with finger guns, Crumb shares an exuberant five-page tale, mostly about Honeybunch fighting off the advances of malevolent Mr. Man, and ending with a graphic depiction of the pair engaged in, umm, let’s say, “mutual oral gratification.”

(The iconic Crumb splash page of that untitled story depicts ProJunior in a heroic pose, declaring, “I’m no playboy! I’m a workboy!” and a detail of same was part of the Bijou Funnies Iron-On T-Shirt Transfer set offered in 1970 by the “Bijou Publishing Empire.”)

Asked about the coarse sexual depiction of his COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

creation, Dohler laughed. “I think the underground comix were so blatant, you got beyond all the sexuality and the racism, because it was poking fun at everything in an in-your-face kind of a way. I thought it was hysterical.” And that last panel? “That was Crumb. He was just so good at doing stuff like that and making it look funny.”

Crumb returned to ProJunior and Honeybunch in Uneeda Comix #1 [Aug. 1970] and Bijou #6 [1971]. By then, Lynch said with a laugh, “People were writing, at the time, this literary analysis of Crumb’s stuff. Somebody wrote that, ‘Pro Junior is the proletariat son of working-class parents, and blah-blah-blah, and this is what it means’!” Lynch, who had his own ProJunior in high school story in Teen-Age Horizons of Shangrila #1 [Summer ’70], then went about organizing an ambitious anthology starring the character.

One-Shot to Stardom “So Jay instituted this thing with ProJunior with the underground comix artists,” Dohler said, “and they ended up doing different strips of the character and they decided to do an entire comic book, sort of a take-off from Disney, where it used to be Walt Disney’s Donald Duck; well, this was Don Dohler’s ProJunior. Then they had 20-something different artists do their own interpretation of the character, and they got me to do a one-page strip.” He added with a chuckle, “I’m not an artist and I think it took me three weeks to do this one stupid comic page.”

Lynch had enlisted his Bijou publisher Denis Kitchen to not only financially back the project, but also contribute a story and back cover. “I published the first and only ProJunior collection,” Kitchen said.

“That character became the cartoonists’ communal property… Jay was the impetus of the anthology. He said Don doesn’t care about owning the character, so it’s communal property. So we pulled it together and did it.”

Kitchen added, “A lot of good contributors were in it: Crumb, [S. Clay] Wilson, Justin [Green], Spiegelman, Trina [Robbins], Joel Beck… a bunch of people. I did a two-pager. Jay did the cover.”

Lynch based his cover on a panel out of the notorious 1948 Jack Cole comic book, True Crime Comics Vol. 1, #2, from the story, “A Match for Satan.” And while that cover was emblazoned with a banner trumpeting This page: At top are two examples of Topps’ Wacky Ads stickers from 1969. Postcard of the Hotel Earle, the “official” Topps hotel. Jay Lynch and Art Spiegelman’s “ProJunior, Jungle Lord,” from The East Village Other [Vol. 5, #7, Jan. 21, 1970], the first post-fanzine appearance of the character.

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the number of contributors to the issue, there was a problem when first printed.

“Somehow,” Kitchen recalled, “the contributor count was off and the diagonal stripe on the cover of the first printings said ‘23 Underground Cartoonists!’

But there were actually only 22, and we corrected the stripe text on later printings.

But the ‘23’ cover is one of those scarce variants underground collectors seek.”

The Kitchen Sink publisher added, “In retrospect, ProJunior was definitely an odd comix project, but the point was probably that we could all draw the same character, something novel at the moment.”

For his part, Lynch recalled, “I put together half of ProJunior and Denis put together the other half.”

Spiegelman made a fateful acquaintance with his ProJunior collaborator. “I did something with Justin Green—a jam—which we made when I first met him,” he said. “Justin’s already incipient, strange autobiographical tendency already was beginning to surface and that was a very big influence on me.”

Spiegelman added, “And it turned out that he and I had both taken the same correspondence course in cartooning, which we found in an ad, in the back pages of Popular Mechanics, called the Cartoonists’ Exchange, so we used that in our collaboration with ‘ProJunior Learns How to Draw.’ In it, there were a lot of riffs from what we remembered about taking that course. There’s an object called the ‘Laugh Finder’ you could spin in order to make gag cartoons, and the second page of our story was a full page of incredibly unfunny gag cartoons.”

Recalling the character, Justin Green said, “I knew that ProJunior had some kind of history and symbolic

meaning, but I saw him as an everyman character that ran counter to the hippie ideal. The ideal was to have very long hair and to be somewhat yogic and to, y’know, be part of the Love Generation. But ProJunior was a throwback to the rock ’n’ roll days, with his flattop and fenders.”

Green then offered some thoughts about that haircut.

“Barbershops used to have this poster of all the available hairstyles,” he said, “and I think it was sponsored by H-A Hair Arranger, a product, and it had pictures of all these haircuts you could ask your barber for, and the most daring of all was a ‘Flat Top with Fenders’! You had to train your hair with Butch Wax, to make it stand up straight, and you’d get the top almost flattened and the sides would comb gracefully into a ducktail in the back, so it was kind of a fetish hairstyle, which ProJunior had.”

The Comixjoint website opined about the comic book’s nearly two dozen cartoonist contributors: “It’s not surprising that ProJunior is an uneven collection of comics, but overall it’s still a pretty solid book. Most of the strips are one-pagers, a couple of which just toss out a snippet of an idea and not much more. The multi-page stories fare better, even when the writing isn’t all that good.”

By 1973, ProJunior would have four printings—each a 10,000-copy run—and that one-shot would prove to be the apex of the character’s presence in underground comix.

Aside from occasional viewings here and there, including cameos on a ’70s Justin Green/Denis Kitchen Krupp Comics Work Catalog cover and on the back cover of A History of Underground Comics, the character would thereafter only sporadically appear… and yet ProJunior still lives and remains the property of all who want to depict the guy.

Sightings One of the odder sightings of ProJunior appeared in the March 1975 debut issue of Apple Pie, a sub-par National Lampoon knock-off that lasted eight issues. “Manhattan Madness,” a five-pager by Gail Burwen, included ProJunior as jungle-suited cast member in her movie musical satire.

His one line of dialogue laments the “load of crap to get in this ‘woman’s comic,” as he performs high-kicks during rehearsal. The star of the story, City Slicker Bob, was a Burwen creation who also appeared in the undergrounds Cloud Comix and Drool Magazine. (Burwen, who died in 2017, was one of the founders of Cloud Studio, art directors of the first seven issues of National Lampoon.)

That summer, Justin Green featured his “Classics Crucified” parody of Goethe’s Faust starring wanna be professional comic book artist ProJunior (who vows, “One fine

All artwork © the respective artists.

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#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

day I’m gonna become a renegade cartoonist”), published in Arcade, The Comics Revue #2, edited by Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, who had his own one-pager in ProJunior.

Between 1978–96, Jay Lynch joined fellow cartoonist Gary Whitney to produce the comic strip, Phoebe and the Pigeon People, for The Chicago Reader, and, early on, the team resurrected ProJunior as the titular character’s “rambunctious” nephew. Once again wearing his leopard-skin attire, ProJunior frustrated his aunt with his “jungle boy routine” for four episodes of the weekly feature.

In the 1980s, at his Topps freelance gig, Lynch snuck ProJunior’s persona under the guise of a pain-in-the-butt, cocksure teenager, “Shades,” as part of a Bazooka Joe comic strip makeover that was drawn by Howard Cruse.

Lynch, a perennial member of the Topps creative team, shared with a laugh, “The character is like ProJunior, except that [higher-ups] wouldn’t accept the black eyes with white eyeballs without a logical explanation, so he wears sunglasses that are black with a white highlight on them.”

The last sighting of the onetime fanzine mascot was in 2005, when Robert Crumb drew the illustration, “ProJunior, Professional Shoe Salesman,” inscribed to his friend Tom Marion, which features grinning shoe store employee ProJunior feverishly gripping the foot of “the Naughty Girl,” a weeping, robust young lady seated before him.

All artwork © the respective artists.

Separate Ways Justin Green was wistful regarding the communal nature of the early underground comix community with its frequent jam efforts, among them, ProJunior, which was a bonding experience for that period. “We weren’t distinct, separate

entities, the way we are now,” he said. “There was a group spirit and an exchange of ideas, and that meant drawing together sometimes, which was really a lot of fun. Of course, we would all go on our separate ways.”

After the one-shot, Green would shortly see published his seminal autobiographical Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, eventually settling in Ohio, where he lives today with his wife, the brilliant cartoonist Carol Tyler.

Binky Brown would so affect one-time Justin Green roommate Art Spiegelman that it inspired the New Yorker to start work on what would become his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus.

Jay Lynch continued to freelance for Topps over the years and stayed busy with myriad projects, including authoring children’s book for Spiegelman’s Toon Books. Jay died in Candor, New York, in 2017, a mere 11 days before his Bijou Funnies partner Skip Williamson passed away in Albany, New York. Subsequent to his ProJunior work, Williamson toiled as art director on men’s skin mags, including Hustler and Playboy.

Denis Kitchen, founder of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, continued as Kitchen Sink publisher until its closing in 1999, and he’s since partnered with Dark Horse to head the Kitchen Sink Books imprint. Currently living in central Massachusetts, Kitchen is, of late, co-authoring books with daughter Violet.

This spread: Clockwise from top left is Lynch and Spiegelman’s cover for The Private Papers of the Good Ol’ Doppler Gang [1970]; Spiegelman and Green’s opening panel of their PJ #1 jam; center is Kitchen’s PJ from same; Williamson’s splash panel from same; cameo of ProJunior in Clyne’s “Dr. Lum Bago,” Bijou #4 [June 1970]; PJ by Rand Holmes from A History of Underground Comics; Green PJ from Arcade #2 [Summer ’75]; Dohler page from PJ #1; Lynch panel from Teen-Age Horizons of Shangrila #1 [Summer ’70]; Crumb panels from Bijou #6 [’71] and Uneeda [’70]; Crumb Bijou #4 cover; and Lynch back cover, Teen-Age Horizons of Shangrila #2 [Nov. ’72].

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After ProJunior, Robert Crumb would, of course, continue his cultural ascent as quintessential underground comix cartoonist, creating Weirdo magazine and ambitiously illustrating The Book of Genesis along the way. He lives in the south of France with wife and fellow comix legend, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, a.k.a. “Honeybunch” Kominsky(!).

No one in the ProJunior posse ventured farther afield from the comix scene than the character’s creator. After all, Don Dohler’s true passion was filmmaking and, upon ending fanzine work, he was determined to inaugurate a new magazine. “Way back in 1964,” he related eight years later, “I wrote a book-length letter to Forrest J Ackerman (editor of Famous Monsters [of Filmland] magazine) and detailed my plans for a magazine idea I had, devoted to ‘the world of amateur fantasy/science fiction/horror films…’ Mr. Ackerman approved. Unfortunately, my own inexperience, lack of money, and inability to interest other filmmakers in the magazine caused me to scrap the whole idea.” Exposure to Bijou Funnies and ProJunior, Dohler said, “That got me all interested in the publishing thing, which spurred me to finally get off my ass and do Cinemagic, which I’d been talking about since 1964.”

The first issue of Cinemagic was published in Dec. 1972, and, after 11 issues (during which it inspired an entire generation of movie makers, among them J.J. Abrams), Dohler sold the periodical to Starlog to singularly focus on his own filmmaking efforts, then in full swing.

The Alien Factor [1978], his first foray as feature film director, remains his most celebrated production, a “complete cheeseball that has a decent storyline and hypnotic music to enjoy while laughing at impossibly cheap alien costumes.” Dohler’s effort assuredly made another of his dreams come true when Famous Monsters editor

Forry Ackerman cover-featured Alien Factor for its May 1978 issue, #143.

Though he never hit the big time, Dohler would become, like his fellow Baltimore native and filmmaker, John Waters, a veritable institution within its city limits, producing a string of science fiction and horror that were, Abrams gushed, “Crazy movies that were made with incredible passion and love of genre.

There was a real charm to them.”

In the 1990s, Dohler briefly resumed magazine publishing while retaining a day-job as newspaper editor. By 2000, ProJunior’s pop returned to movie-making after an extended hiatus, with his final effort posthumously released to video after his untimely death at age 60, on Dec. 2, 2006.

In summation, Lynch said his old friend was an important example for comix creators. “Don would influence the underground comix scene in that he would publish Wild! no matter what anybody said,” Lynch said. “He would just do it. That’s why underground comix started: we had no alternative. There was a ‘good comics’ code, a censorship thing, and if you didn’t have a ‘good comics’ code seal, you couldn’t get a distributor, and so we just published and did it ourselves, which is, more or less, what Dohler did with Wild! And then it fed on itself. Dohler saw what we were doing and he thought, ‘Well, I can’t get a job with MGM, but I’ll make movies and distribute them myself—or I’ll do Cinemagic and distribute it myself.’ And that evolved to the movies.”

Lynch continued, “The thing about Dohler was: he got things done. A lot of us were cartoonists, but we never would have thought to publish our own magazines until we saw Wild! And, for being a 16-year-old kid, he was really obsessed with this! I would get a letter from Dohler every day or two. He would write stories and I would draw them, and he would publish them. And he really took it seriously at that young age. He was editing a magazine and he had

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Cinemagic TM & © Creative Group Acquisition Co. The Alien Factor TM & © the estate of Don Dohler. Famous Monsters of Filmland TM & © Philip Y. Kim. Phoebe and the Pigeon People TM & © Gary Witney and the estate of Jay Lynch.

This page: Clockwise from above is cover for Don Dohler’s Cinemagic #8 [1976]; Dohler on set of his breakout film, The Alien Factor, 1978; VHS cover for the same; Famous Monsters of Filmland #143 [May 1978], featuring photo from Dohler’s debut movie; portrait of the middle-aged creator of ProJunior; and installment of Jay Lynch and Gary Whitney’s Phoebe and the Pigeon People [’78–96], their weekly comic strip featured in The Chicago Reader, the Windy City’s alternative weekly newspaper. From 1979 to ’81, Kitchen Sink published three magazine collections. The PJ sequence lasted for four episodes.

Bazooka Joe TM & © The Topps Bubblegum Company, Inc. Crumb illustration © R. Crumb. Shades TM & © Topps. “Manhattan Madness” © the estate of Gail Burwen.

to get it out on a deadline. For most of us, that was our first experience with that kind of thing.”

The Perpetual Mystery Never mind about this writer’s continuing puzzlement regarding the character, ProJunior remains ever a mystery to even those who depicted him.

“There’s no context at all with ProJunior,” Art Spiegelman admitted. “It’s still a mystery what made Don want to use him. ‘ProJunior’ meant ‘junior professional,’ we assumed, who would eventually be published on real offset instead of spirt-duplication, or mimeograph, or something.

Why he had white pupils and black corneas, nobody knows.

There he was, just waiting to be used, so we just used him!”

Justin Green speculated on the name, saying, “I always thought the name came from the brand of hair comb called Pro Junior. It was almost like a barometer of inflation. In the ‘50s it was 29¢, in the ’60s it was 39¢, in the ’70s 59¢, until the ’80s and ’90s, when it disappeared, it was like $1.29! It was a simple black comb called Pro Junior, and I always thought that was the basis for the character.” Green added, “But I liked the idea of Pro Junior being an everyman dummy who we can all imbue meaning and that’s what I liked about the underground: that we were working together.”

Commenting on the name, Jay Lynch had his own take.

“Pro Junior, it turns out, is a brand of tripod or something

that they use in movie-making, because Dohler, when he was doing this fanzine, also had an interest in making Super-8 movies as a kid, and if you look at Pro Junior on the Internet, you get all these ads for tripods.”

Skip Williamson weighed in by sharing, “I’m not sure anybody ‘gets’ ProJunior or ever will. And what was real interesting, when we decided to do a comic featuring that character, was that everyone who was charged to do a story portrayed him in a different fashion.”

Williamson continued, “Essentially what it meant was that ProJunior was a junior professional cartoonist, someone who aspired to become a full professional. Now, I don’t know why he had black eyes and why he had the Dagwood haircut, but that’s just the way the guy drew him!”

Y’know, the more I think on it, I’m starting to believe that perhaps to search for meaning in ProJunior is a fool’s errand, but given the fact he’s a character that’s weird and vague enough to imbue with whatever personality one chooses—as Crumb did with PJ the revolutionary; Lynch and Spiegelman with Jungle Lord PJ; Green with proto-underground cartoonist PJ; or Dohner with PJ the goof—and, importantly, a public domain property anyone can freely use, he’s as much an icon for independent cartooning as anything. So, in the final analysis, the “who” and the “why” be damned!

Let’s agree that ProJunior simply… is!

This page: Clockwise from top left is Bazooka Joe comic strip from the mid-1980s, when Jay Lynch surreptitiously included a ProJunior-inspired character, Shades. Art by Howard Cruse; R. Crumb 2005 commission piece featuring PJ; Cruse’s character design for Shades (who, as you can see, was originally named Spike); and splash page to Gail Burwen’s “Manhattan Madness,” in Apple Pie #1 [Mar. 1975] featuring cameos

by ProJunior.

EDITOR’S NOTE: CBC extends our deepest appreciation for the work of Mark James Estren, Patrick Rosenkranz, and John Kinhart, whose scholarship and interviews were gratefully consulted in the writing of this feature.

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print & portfolio maven

SQP’s Portfolio Investment

Sal Quartuccio on riding the cresting wave during the comic art print and portfolio craze Interview conducted by JON B. COOKE [In the first part of his interview last issue, Brooklyn-born publisher Sal Quartuccio shared that he had taken his innovative prozine effort, Hot Stuf’, as far as it could go after eight issues, and he began to ease away from the comics publishing game. And, as we learn here, the savvy entrepreneur subsequently not only helped jumpstart an entirely new fad in fandom—the print and portfolio craze—he was the leading portfolio publisher during its 1975–85 heyday (and publisher of Judge Dredd for a spell). This interview, which includes a bit of background on Hot Stuf’ overlooked in the previous discussion, was conducted in late September of last year and then transcribed by Rose Rummel-Eury. Sal provided a final edit. —Y.E.]

Above and inset right: In 1978, Sal Quartuccio ventured into prints and portfolios with two sets of Neal Adams’ “Jungle Man” pieces originally produced for the Ballantine Tarzan paperback series.

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we came up with the idea of doing the Neal Adams’ Tarzan portfolio. We knew of a very good printer out in Long Island that specialized in heavy cardstock with heavy lamination— very classy. They mainly do a lot of point-of-purchase displays, fancy postcards, and flyers. We double-checked their press sizes that would give us four prints out of a sheet. We then checked with our envelope supplier for a large-enough envelope that could be printed and the interior cardboard for strength. We pieced it altogether and presented it to Neal. He loved the idea. He let us borrow 11 paintings out of the 12 in the set, and there was a 13th painting that was not complete, which is what we used on the folder. The 12th missing Tarzan painting was in [DC Comics President] Jenette Kahn’s office and she let us borrow it… she was very kind. We shot all the paintings and made beautiful transparencies of them, laid it all out, and we had the first

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Jungle Man TM & © Neal Adams.

Bottom: Photos of longtime SQP partners Sal Quartuccio and Bob Keehan at various times in their decades-long association, from the early years (left), to 2013 (center), and in 1997, flanking George Pérez.

Comic Book Creator: If you ask me, in the midto later ’70s, portfolios were a real craze. There seem to be so many that came out. Can you share the development of the portfolio trend in your memory?

How did this all start happening?

Sal Quartuccio: There were already portfolios being done by Middle Earth around 1973, Frazetta prints and I remember a set by John and Marie Severin...

CBC: Right. They did Kull the Conqueror and all that.

Sal: In 1977, [business partner] Bob [Keenan] and I were actually housesitting for Phil Seuling and [partner] Jonni Levas, who were on an overseas trip. We dropped them off at the airport and went back to their home in the Sea Gate community in Brooklyn. We were tossing ideas around and talked about the gorgeous Tarzan paintings Neal Adams was working on at the time. I said, “It would be beautiful if we could print those Tarzan paintings in a larger format than the very small size of the paperbacks [used as covers of the Ballantine paperback series].” We came up with a format based on press-size and paper-size, and the type of paper stock I’d want to use. Then we’d want to make a folder that the prints could all fit into, a larger press and paper size. Then we’d need different sized envelopes that could fit the prints along with cardboard and everything else. So it was at Phil’s that

Batman, Hawkman, Vigilante TM & © DC Comics. Black Terror TM & © the respective copyright holder. Lone Ranger and Tonto TM & © Classic Media, LLC.

set printed and the first set came with the folder, so it was a larger-sized envelope and such. People liked it! I was really, really pleased with the printing.

CBC: Do you remember the retail price?

Sal: I think it was $10.

CBC: Was the profit marginal? It sounds like a very expensive proposition.

Sal: It was expensive. We used a very high-quality stock… the packaging… we really stuck our neck out on that.

CBC: There has to be an ad somewhere.

Sal: It’s a beautiful thing.

CBC: Neal got a cut?

Sal: Neal got a cut and some samples. (It’s only been three or four decades, Jon!) I’m think Set A was 1978. We did a regular edition and a signed-&-numbered edition.

CBC: It was the first of its kind, right?

Sal: As far as the color printing and folder and everything else, I’m not sure. Middle Earth was at it a few years before us, and I think Schanes and Schanes started around the same time as us.

CBC: You sold them at shows and through the Comic Buyer’s Guide?

Sal: Yes, and through [distributors] Bud Plant, Sea Gate, and there were quite a few smaller distributors, and they all took some. The Adams Tarzan portfolio was what I showed to Bernie [Wrightson], Mike [Kaluta], and Jeff ( Jones ), and that’s what got them interested in doing it. They saw the repro was really wonderful.

From there, we did color sets with some of the TSR guys: Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, and Fred Fields. Some were like the Tarzan stuff, which were reprints of printed pieces, but the Wrightson, Kaluta, Jones, [Howard] Chaykin, [Jim] Starlin, Jerry Bingham, Joe Linsner—all their stuff was brand- new. All the subsequent Marvel prints I did were brand-new. The Batman stuff by Marshall Rogers was new...

CBC: How were the negotiations with DC for the Batman stuff?

Sal: Marshall wanted to do it. We talked with Paul Levitz.

We weren’t doing a lot of them, just for the comic market.

It was no problem. It wasn’t a huge print run. Marshall was very happy with it, even the limited plate that he did.

He did a little 8½" X 11" plate that was very nice. It did well, but dealing with DC is kind of tricky. You don’t want to get too involved with licensing—at least I didn’t want to get too involved with the licensing thing after the Marvel thing. I didn’t want to get too dependent on it. About the only licensed jobs I did after Marvel and DC were Conan and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. The two T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents portfolios I did with John Carbonaro, my old friend who owned the rights to the property. We got George Tuska to do a new black-&-white set and Tom Tenney (who works on

the Creepshow TV show) did a set. They didn’t do much at all, but it was nice that we did them.

CBC: What was your most successful one?

Sal: Almost all of them had the same print run, so nothing really stands out. Jerry Bingham’s set, Malevolent Maidens, Blood Lust by Jim Balent sold quickly. Kim DeMulder, Esteban Maroto, Hector Gomez, Simon Bisley, Craig Hamilton, Rich Corben, Bart Sears, Butch Guice, all were very popular. The Fastner/Larson Flesh and Blood was very popular.

They must have done 10 or 15 portfolios for us.

CBC: That was the beginning of your cheesecake stuff?

Sal: We found that our audience were not interested in the sci-fi type of images. Females in exciting situations, vampires, barbarians, very creative ideas. The masters of

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Above: Marshall Rogers produced a splendid set of color plates for the SQP-published 1981 portfolio.

Below: While not as big a seller as any number of SQP portfolios, Gray Morrow’s six color plate Heroes set from 1975 was beautiful work by an underappreciated comics master.

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This page: Impressed by the quality of SQP’s portfolios, Marvel granted a license for Sal and company to produce a series of Marvel Super Hero Portfolios, with each set containing prints rendered by Steve Fastner and Rich Larson. (X-Men Set One had two plates penciled by John Byrne.) Artwork for a Fantastic Four set was completed but unpublished as the license was yanked from SQP

by Marvel Comics in 1984.

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X-Men, Fantastic Four, Black Bolt TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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these images are Fastner/Larson. Rich Larson would pencil, and Steve Fastner would airbrush and tone. The sets would contain six or seven plates, which always looked gorgeous.

Nicely printed and, I think at that time, we discontinued the paper envelope idea. We ended up going with a plastic sleeve with a cardboard backing so you could actually see the top plate. At the beginning they were $10 and went to $12 years later.

CBC: Were they the staple of your business for a while?

Sal: We were doing Hot Stuf’ from 1974 to 1978, then the portfolios started in 1978 and ran to around 1998. In the middle of doing portfolios, in 1987, we got involved with IPC/ Fleetway and the whole Judge Dredd thing. IPC Magazines (a UK publisher) was publishing Eagle magazine and 2000 AD along with a very large line of youth oriented publications. I believe Titan had the reprint rights to the IPC material in comic book format for the U.K. and the U.S. starting around 1981 under Eagle Comics. They continued for a few years, and then a Spanish publisher, Lee Moncho, took over that reprint license and added several European countries to go along with the U.K. and U.S. around 1986.

Moncho hired Dez Skinn to put the packaging together and they listed Quality Periodicals as the publishing company. That lasted less than a year.

In early 1987, Lee Moncho contacted me (based on a recommendation from Josep Toutain) about taking over the packaging of the IPC material, which had been recently sold to Fleetway Publications. Lee wanted a fresh approach and a strong presence in the U.S., we had a week to create a plan to present to Lee who was flying to New York to meet us. Bob

and I came up with a nice plan of attack: the interior material would be pulled from the Fleetway files; we would create new logos and new cover art; do our monthly flyers and advertising to the comic book market; gather the orders; and the printing would be done in Spain.

We started around July of 1987 and sales were good.

We later switched printing from Spain to Hong Kong. We did it for about eight years, about 2,000 comics, trades, and specials were produced. Along with dozens of T-shirts, enamel pins, posters, and paper-weights.

During that time, DC and Fleetway were working on the Batman/Dredd team-up, Judgment on Gotham, written by [Alan] Grant and [John] Wagner and illustrated by Simon Bisley, a really beautiful project. This was around 1991, a huge success everywhere. In the U.K., they did two sizes—a big magazine-size and comic-book size. Around 1993, DC proposed to license the Dredd character from Fleetway for a new series for the U.S., but under the condition that the Fleetway/ Quality line of reprints would be discontinued.

Which meant eliminating me! I fought it for a couple of weeks. I said, “Their sales on a regular Dredd comic will not be as huge as the Batman/Judge Dredd team-up was. I guess DC promised them big numbers. Sure enough, DC got their way and a one-year license for Dredd. Fleetway said, “Sal, you gotta wrap it up.” I needed about six months to finish off the titles and have the various stories end.

So, we wrapped it up in late 1994. I really thought that, a month later, DC would have their Judge Dredd comic out, but no. It was over a year from when we stopped publishing that they finally did their first one. They did it for 12 issues with a one-year license. Their sales were less than my reprint sales (numbers which I was happy to show Fleetway).

They were really disappointed in what DC did. They didn’t care for the sales and didn’t care for the packaging. They did not renew DC’s contract. DC ran it for a year and that was it. Then, a few months after that, I was at the Bologna Book Fair and the managing editor (who I am still friends with) said, “How would you like to take Dredd over again?”

I said, “Thanks, but no thanks. We put a lot of effort into that line of books and did a lot of promotional work for the Dredd movie with Stallone and the toy line with Mattel, so no need to go back and start all over again.”

By early 1994, we started getting into the art book side with the availability of high-rez scanners and we’d be able to get the pencilled work reproduced properly. That was it.

X-Men, Ka-Zar, Hulk, and related characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

We just kind of swung totally to the portfolios and art books, and all through that time, we were doing T-shirts… we did a few hundred T-shirts.

CBC: I didn’t know that! Can you think of some of your top-sellers for the T-shirts?

Sal: We did a couple of “Mutant” T-shirts. One was a radiation symbol with a mutant logo. On another, Rich Larson drew a whole series of heads of different mutants. We did some Conan shirts, Judge Dredd shirts, lots of fantasy art images. We did enamel pins. We did a beautiful Judge Dredd shield paperweight. We did a lot of little items that people got a kick out of and, and a lot of fun to do.

CBC: Let me get the timeline correct: you started talking about the Batman Marshall Rogers thing. We didn’t talk in any detail about the Marvel work that preceded Rogers’ portfolio. What’s the story with the Marvel portfolios?

Sal: In 1979, I approached Marvel’s licensing people and showed them the first few color portfolios by Adams, Wrightson, etc.… I’d like to do a series of Marvel Portfolios with new material—airbrushed, full-color, quality paintings.

Jim Galton, president of Marvel at the time, really liked the idea and told his people, “Give Quartuccio a license.” So, we were given a fan publishing license. We started with the X-Men Set One, two pieces pencilled by John Byrne and the other two pieces pencilled by Rich Larson, with all four beautifully airbrushed by Steve Fastner.

The originals were very large, in case we decided to do a line of large posters later on. I think Rich and Steve are still cursing me out on that one.

The prints were 11" X 14" with cardboard backing, and shrink-wrapped. You could view our top cover sheet which had the Marvel and X-Men logos and the four images designed to look like a comic book cover. And an actual portfolio plate on the other side.

CBC: Nice.

Sal: That was successful. Everybody liked it and still talk about it. You can see the individual plates for sale on eBay for $20 or $30. The portfolio was $6.95; it was reasonably priced. It did really well. We then did a Hulk Set, a SpiderMan Set, and a second X-Men Set. I would bring samples up to the Marvel office and everyone really liked them. At the same time, we did The Art of John Buscema and The Art of John Byrne books. We started doing a few Marvel black-&-white portfolios: Michael Golden did Doctor Strange, Paul Gulacy did Black Widow, we did two Marvel Team-up Sets. Mike Zeck was working on Captain America, Neal Adams was working on X- Men. Fastner/Larson had just finished the Fantastic Four art and it was about to be printed. And Larson was just starting layouts to an Avengers Set. My licensing guy, who was very nice, called and said, “You’re all set for next year.” Two weeks later, it was, “Stop what you’re doing; come in.” So we came in.

I don’t think it was from licensing side; I think it was from the direct market side that wanted us done and gone. Carol Kalish was at every meeting, so I had the feeling that these portfolios were a good test for them.

I’ve seen that before: where Marvel will license something out and, if it’s successful, they’ll take it away and do it themselves. They did that with Simon and Schuster with the reprint trade paperbacks, Origins of Marvel, Son of Origins, etc., and the coloring book publisher they ended up buying. So we just settled. We could have hired lawyers, but Marvel had lawyers. It didn’t pay to fight it; it would have gotten us nowhere. We called it a day. We did not publish the Fantastic Four Set and had to stop the others in the works. During the Marvel wrap-up, I contacted Arthur Lieberman from Conan Properties. “I’d love to do some Conan.” He said, “Sure, come on in.” At the time, his sister, Mimi Shapiro, was in charge of Conan Properties—such a lovely, classy lady. I showed her what I was doing with Marvel and everything else and said, “I’d like to do this with Conan material.” She loved the idea and agreed right away to give me the license. We were set and were continuing

on. A day or two later, I got a call from Archie Goodwin at Marvel, who said, “I’m sorry to hear you’re going out of business.” I said, “It’s news to me. Thanks for letting me know, Archie, but I’m not going out of business.” He said, “They’re spreading it around that you’re done.” I said, “No, I don’t think so; I still have plenty to do.” We started doing Conan portfolios and we had quite a few artists do black-&-white sets—Billy Graham, John Buscema, Bart Sears, Jim Fletcher… Butch Guice did Red Sonja, and then we did ten Conan color classic sets that were six color plates and we were able to borrow paintings from artists and collectors. Once again, gorgeous reproduction and a reasonable price. All the artists got a reprint fee. By that time, it was towards the end of producing portfolios.

From 1995 on, we dedicated all of our time to art books. After our Marvel license was cancelled, a few months later, Marvel announced a Cloak and Dagger Portfolio…

by Rick Leonardi and inked by Terry Austin.

It was 1984. It was a nice portfolio. Black&-white interiors and sort of like a folder effect, I guess. I don’t think it did too well.

That was the first and last portfolio Marvel did, until maybe 30 years later.

CBC: Was it a fad? Did people get a little nutty about them? It seems to be of its time...

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

Above: “Battle for the Savage Land” portfolio print with Rich Larson pencils and finishes

by Steve Fastner. Below: Detail from the Fastner/Larson Incredible Hulk Portfolio, published by SQP.

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#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Doctor Strange TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Judge Dredd TM & © Rebellion A/S. Night’s End © the estate of Bernie Wrightson.

Sal: I think it was that period. I think it was also that posters used to take a beating being hung on the wall and take up a lot of space. Portfolios, you could frame, you could hang, you could put them in a binder—you had a lot of ways to view them and that’s what kept it going. By the time portfolios were starting to fade out, trading cards came in... all the artist trading cards that Comic Images, Friedlander, and Topps did, and all the other companies and I think that kind of replaced the portfolios.

CBC: How big did you guys get? How many employees did you have?

Sal: Employees? It had to be three. Sometimes, there would be a fourth. Basically everything was outsourced. All the artists were freelance, the printers, all of our suppliers. So, it was Bob doing a lot of design, I was doing most of the hiring, setting up the printers, setting up the artists, figuring out the packages. Together, we’d figure out what was going to be produced with the three-month lead time that our distributors needed. There would always be several projects in the works at one time. My wife would pitch in when we needed help on the mail orders and sometimes her sister would come in and help on the mail orders. That was it.

CBC: Who worked exclusively on the mail orders? Did you all pitch in or was there one person assigned to that? You said, three, so who was the third person?

Sal: It was between me; Bob; my wife, Ruthie;

and sometimes her sister would come in and pitch in, and sometimes we’d have… actually, my parents used to love coming over and collate portfolios. You’d buy them lunch and it was an opportunity for them to get out of the house.

That was it… it was just family really.

CBC: Did you make a lot of money?

Sal: Did we make a lot of money? [ponders] I think we made money at times and then something would go terribly wrong. We’d come up with wonderful ideas and then somebody would yank them away. With the Marvel stuff, we were making money and that got yanked away. With the Fleetway stuff we were making money and that got yanked away.

CBC: But you had some salad days? You had some good stretches?

Sal: Oh, yeah, definitely.

CBC: Did you vacation or travel?

Sal: When we were doing the Fleetway stuff, I was in London two times a year for about seven years, then, when I started doing the Gallery Girl books and I was dealing with a lot of Spanish artists: Esteban Maroto, Josep Gual, Blas Gallego, Luis Roca, Joan Pelaez, Arantza Sestayo, Sanjulian… many wonderful talented artists. Most of them worked through the Dalmau Agency, Jose and Esteve Dalmau. So I’d go to Barcelona at least twice a year and schedule about six months of work with everyone and enjoy many wonderful meals.

CBC: Were you able to bring Ruthie with you?

Sal: She came to Barcelona once and came to London once or twice. The one time I went to Italy for the Bologna Book Fair, she wasn’t with me for that. She loved Barcelona and London.

CBC: Do you have kids?

Sal: Yes, we have two boys. One is married in New Hampshire and I have three grandkids. His name is Joseph, named after my father. Our younger son is O’Brien, He’s single, and a marketing manager for IBM. Joe is 35 and O’Brien is 30.

CBC: Where did you call home?

Sal: Home has been in New Jersey since I’ve been married. We were in the Tom’s River area, which became congested and our warehouse space was becoming expensive, so we went to the western side of New Jersey, here in Columbus. There are a lot of homes—farms, really—homes with buildings—greenhouses, garages, pole barns… so we looked and tried to see if we could do something like that.

All sketchbooks TM & © the respective artists.

We found an old house with several buildings on the property. We fixed up the house and moved the whole business into the three buildings on our property. That helped keep the business going. So, now it’s all on one property—I roll out of bed and I’m at work.

You know what that’s like!

CBC: Ain’t it grand! How did you meet Bob? Sal: I think Doug Foley (from the Phase days) introduced me to Jim Glenn. Jim was a fan artist and published a couple of fanzines— Factors Unknown and Hot Shot, a nice comic book he did with George Pérez. I think this was George’s first published work. Jim introduced me to George.

Jim was very big into the old-time serials, The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Spy Smasher, etc.… and had a camera and did short films. He invited me over to help. I held the camera for him. That’s where I met Bob, another of Jim Glenn’s friends. Bob was funny and a treasure trove of comic book knowledge. He was finishing high school when we met. He asked me where I went to college, and he ended up going to the same college, New York City Community College, in downtown Brooklyn. Bob took the same graphic arts and advertising courses… he’s about five years younger than me. So, he became proficient in all the printing nonsense, too— paste-ups and all that business. He does mainly design work, ad work, now internet ads, Facebook ads, email ads....

CBC: You guys have good chemistry?

Sal: We always did. We always got along.

We both left Brooklyn and moved to New Jersey a few years apart and both had homes in Tom’s River in the 1980’s. A lot of his friends moved to L.A., and he visited there several times. He said, “I’d love to go.” I said, “Go ahead. We can do everything we need to do by computer.” So, that’s what he did and he’s living in L.A., and I’ll visit there every year to check on the restaurant scene. He does everything from there. We talk on the phone and online. It’s been about 17 years since he’s been there.

CBC: Fastner and Larson. When did you meet Rich and Steve?

Sal: It was Joel Thingvall. Do you know him?

CBC: I do know Mr. “Wonder Woman” Man. Sal: He’s always in that outfit! I would always see Joel at conventions and one day, way back at the very beginning of Hot Stuf’, he sent me Xeroxes of Rich Larson’s work from Charlton Comics, Rich was doing stories and covers. He said, “This guy is great.” I said, “Sure.” I think Larson had already met Steve Fastner in Minneapolis. They did one or two color things together, showed them to me, and I liked them. I think one of the first paintings they did was used for Hot Stuf’ #6.

Then, Steven Grant, who I’d met at conventions and liked his writing, had a short story for Larson to pencil and Tim Boxell did the inking, and that’s how Larson began doing interior stories for Hot Stuf’.

He and Steve did covers and that led to the black-&-white portfolios and the color portfolios, and all that. We’ve known each other for a long time. Great guys and they continue to do great stuff.

CBC: Did you deal with John Buscema COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

and John Byrne with the art books? Did you approach them at shows?

Sal: Yes, we were in Chicago at a convention and I approached John Byrne and he liked the idea. He leant us his sketchbooks, he wanted to do new covers and a beautiful centerfold and then I paid him and Terry Austin to do a batch of Superman pinups, and later on, John ended up doing Superman. Bob flew to Chicago to see John and do the interview and photos.

John Buscema I contacted directly. We went to visit him and his lovely wife in Long Island and all of us got along very well. He was willing to the wraparound cover and we borrowed drawings and stuff he would ink on the back of original pages—he used to do a lot of terrific sketches. It’s a shame John didn’t do more inked work; his inks were gorgeous. We did a long interview with him, but had to do a heavy edit on the interview.

CBC: Because of issues with Marvel?

Sal: Yes. Certain things he didn’t care for and certain people he didn’t care for and things like that. Between he and I, that’s fine, we can talk.

But we trimmed the interview and it worked out very well. It was a nice package and he was pleased.

CBC: Let’s talk about Hot Stuf’. How did that develop?

Sal: Phase was done in 1971 and that all kind of fell apart, and all three guys went different ways. Then I graduated college in the summer of 1972 and got a full-time job at the packaging place and was getting flush. A lot of people who were in Phase called and asked, “Are we doing another Phase?” I said, “No, but I’m thinking about something.” I waited about a year. In 1973, I started planning Hot Stuf’ with the hope of having it in time for the 1974 N.Y. Comic Art Convention. I contacted Rich Corben and he had two stories that were supposed to go in something else, but fell through, so he had two black-&-white stories that were never published. Rich Buckler had a story he penciled and inked, George Pérez did a funny story that Bob Keenan wrote. Bil Maher did a story. Doug Moench and Ernie Colón did a really cute story.

I think Neal Adams did just a one-page pinup.

He was going to do a story on the Kent State tragedy and didn’t get to it. Ken Barr did the front cover and Rich Corben did the back cover, and we printed it right before the 1974 New York Con and Phil gave us a little ballroom for a whole art exhibit, so Ken Barr, Neal Adams, Gray Morrow, and several others gave us originals to exhibit.

We had Hot Stuf’ #1 and I think a print or two.

CBC: Were you thinking of it as an annual to start with?

Sal: I think that’s pretty much how it ended up. I was working fulltime and had to have time to get material together. We did another one in 1975 and another one in late 1976, so basically it was about a yearly thing.

CBC: You did three issues in 1977.

Sal: Did I? What was I, crazy? I guess that’s This spread: Clockwise from top left is Michael Golden’s cover art for his Doctor Strange portfolio [1983]; three SQP sketchbook covers, by Mike Ploog, Mike Hoffman, and Clyde Caldwell; Bernie Wrightson’s “Night’s End,” one of the late artist’s plates published

by SQP, printed B.W.’s Apparitions portfolio; and Judge Dredd art by Brian Bolland—SQP published Judge Dredd reprint comics for a period.

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Above: At Baycon 1968, left to right, David Clark, Scott Shaw!, and Greg Bear. Below: The San Diego Five String Mob, from Jimmy Olsen #144 [Dec. 1971]

Above: As a promotion item, SQP supplied direct sales comic shops with this “no smoking” sign. Art by Hot Stuf’ contributor Bil Maher. Below: Though only briefly touched upon in Sal’s two-part interview, the vast bulk of SQP’s trade has been in art books featuring semi-clad and nude women. Here’s the cover of their latest catalog.

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Judge Dredd TM & © Rebellion A/S.

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when the material came in. I should have continued doing it beyond eight issues, but it was really, really tough to get enough material and get those packages out. There were two issues done by Rich Corben and all of his Kansas City gang—Herb Arnold, Tim Kirk, and Stan Dresser. They kind of laid out an entire book, where Rich did the front cover, Herb Arnold did the back cover, the book was broken up into chapters, and each artist would do a chapter, so the whole third issue was done and was very successful. That was the first comic-book sized issue and that helped with sales. They did the fifth issue—they were great to work with. In the meantime, I’m trying to get material from everybody. Gray Morrow redid the first chapter of Orion that he did for witzend, and he wanted to continue it, so he did two new chapters for us. After Hot Stuf’ was done, I think he brought Orion to Heavy Metal. Ernie Colón did Manimal and did three chapters. Larson did a couple of stories, and Maher did a couple of stories.

CBC: Alex Toth...

Sal: I have postcards from Alex Toth.

CBC: Don’t we all? He’d love you in the beginning and then he don’t love you no more!

Sal: Alex had done a “Scorpion “ story for Atlas Comics, it was never published there, Alex rewrote

and redrew into “The Vanguard “ which I published in Hot Stuf’ #4. I thought it looked great and asked “How about another chapter?” He said, “No way.” [chuckles] He was, you know…

CBC: Cranky?

Sal: Yeah.

CBC: Pretty much you were supported by Phil in the East and Bud out West for distribution? Did you do much direct mail order?

Sal: When I started publishing in the early 1970s, I started mail order. It has always been the saving grace. Also by that time, there were a lot of little distributors. There was Friendly Frank’s, Glenwood, Big Rapids, W.I.N.D., Capital City… there were so many—probably 16 or 17 distributors at one point and they were all buying small quantities. One hundred copies here and 200 copies there, and before you know it…

CBC: You’re fabulously wealthy!

Sal: Rich beyond your wildest dreams! [laughter] CBC: Did the numbers increase as you went along?

Sal: Yes, #1 was 2,500; #2 was 4,000; #3 was 8,000 and then to 10,000 and 12,000. The last two issues were 15,000— better than most DCs—today still better than most DCs! [chuckles] That’ll teach them! The comic book-size helped.

All the little mini-distributors, who all hustled and handled their section of the country, they helped expand the market.

Once they started to combine, sales started to dwindle.

CBC: Why did it end? You just got busy with other things?

Sal: Yeah, the Judge Dredd stuff, the portfolios and going into the art book side... there was always something to do.

CBC: Did you miss the comic book side of things?

Sal: No. [laughs] CBC: Why do you say it like that?

Sal: It was just a lot of work and a lot of time.

CBC: You said it was a lot of work, but I’m wondering if emotionally, it was “meh.”

Sal: After Hot Stuf’ and that led into the Dredd stuff, we were getting nice sales, but once Dredd ended, it didn’t pay to continue producing comic books. Putting comics together is a lot of work for a short sales period. The portfolios did not take a tremendous amount of work, other than getting the right pieces and artists. The art books were a lot of work, but had a longer lifespan. The comic books, they’re a hit this week, and then they’re gone. I’m still selling art books I had printed ten years ago, so the art books and portfolios had the longevity, and it didn’t pay to get back into comics and doing all of that work for basically a week.

That’s what it came down to.

CBC: Are you still a comics fan?

Sal: I read Previews every month and love to see who’s doing what, but I haven’t bought any comics in a while. I’ll buy some trades every once in a while, but regular comics seems a little high for the amount of pages, and I remember how I loved the old-style comics, the pulp paper comics for 12¢, 15¢, 20¢, 25¢. And now it’s $4 or $5 and I don’t think it’s worth it. The trades, you can sit and read something—six issues combined, but regular comics, no.

CBC: Are you proud of your work?

Sal: Very proud. I’m happy that I’ve remained friends with just about everybody I worked with. Pleased that people send me letters and call to compliment me on things done years ago. Fans who would stop me at conventions, “Oh, you did the Marvel Portfolios!” That makes me feel good.

We produced a lot of material that may never have been done without us. Introduced many young artists to the business. We’re constantly hearing from new people looking for the art books because comic stores don’t carry many of them and there aren’t that many bookstores, so people getting our catalogs and seeing what we have, and visiting our website www.sqpartbooks.com—it continues to bring in a new audience.

Thanks for thinking of me, Jon.

artifacts of affection

Will & Ann Eisner: A Spirited Romance

Declarations of devotion made by the legendary creator for his beloved wife

All © the estate of Will & Ann Eisner.

by JON B. COOKE In 2004, while my brother Andrew and I were shooting our documentary, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, us Cooke boys were witness to a tender moment between the great Will Eisner and his wife of 54 years, Ann. While the sequential art master was dutifully signing a batch of prints his art agent, Denis Kitchen, was shuffling one after the other before him, Will was engaged in a continuing and affectionate banter with Ann, who was in an adjoining room in their hotel suite. Nothing of any import was spoken between the couple; it was just a charming and witty backand-forth for a few minutes, and then the chatter turned to the evening plans. There was such warmth between the two amid the almost constant teasing and good-natured ribbing. The pair were playing to their audience a little bit, but beyond any performance, Andy and I could sense the enduring love the two had for one another.

That would be Will’s last Comic-Con International. The legendary graphic novelist died the following January, well before we finished our movie, but thereafter we developed an endearing friendship with Ann. She was playful with us, jokingly confessing to Andy and I that she couldn’t decide which Cooke brother was the most handsome. She allowed our film crew to take over her Florida condo for a day of interviewing and she sat between us at the premiere of our movie at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, telling us she was moved by the documentary and endorsing our effort.

It was easy to see why longtime bachelor William Erwin Eisner gave up the single life at 33 to marry Ann Louise Weingarten, on June 15, 1950. Sure, she was quite pretty, but most of all the diminutive charmer was smart and engaging, able to give just as much as she got. The couple had two kids, a daughter who, in her teens, died of leukemia, and a son with emotional issues, so life was serious as well as joyful. Through it all, and to her very end, on Nov. 12, 2020, at age 97, was a kind and generous soul, who will be missed by both Cooke brothers, including the handsomest one.

During our 2006 visit, Ann graciously allowed Yours Truly to scan personal artifacts, much of which is seen here.

Above: The newlyweds on their wedding day, June 15, 1950.

Inset left: A Valentine’s Day card (cover at far left; reveal at near left) from Will to Ann. Date unknown.

Pgs. 18 & 19: Various Valentine’s Day and birthday cards made by Will for his wife, Ann. Pg. 20: Clockwise from top left is Ann Eisner on her wedding day; the playful couple; Ann during Ye Ed’s visit in 2006; Will’s Valentine; Ann and her man.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

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All © the estate of Will and Ann Eisner.

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All © the estate of Will & Ann Eisner.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

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Self-caricatures © Scott Shaw! Photo portraits © Greg Preston.

All © the estate of Will & Ann Eisner.

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once upon a long ago

Merrie in the Shadows

From an outstanding comic turn in a Hollywood movie to scripting Gold Key comics

The World of Henry Orient TM & © 1964 United Artists Corporation. Dark Shadows TM & ©1969 Dan Curtis Productions, Inc. Smokey Bear TM & © Forest Service, USDA.

by STEVEN THOMPSON The World of Henry Orient is a delightful comedic drama from 1963 that stars Peter Sellers, Paula Prentiss, and Angela Lansbury. At its heart, though, it’s a coming of age film about two New York City high school girls played by 16-year-old Tippy Walker and 15-year-old Merrie Spaeth. I first caught the film in the 1970s on one of those afternoon movie shows where you can win some cash if they call you during the program. Spoiler: They never called.

But the picture itself—directed by George Roy Hill, who would later win an Oscar for The Sting—seemed like a prize to me. Since then, I’ve watched it just about every time I’ve stumbled across it. This past year, I watched it online while, over on the other side of my computer screen, I was researching an article for Back Issue on Gold Key’s Dark Shadows comic book.

Curiosity inspired me to look up the two young actresses and see whatever became of them. Turns out that Tippy Walker made only a few more movie and television appearances before exiting show business.

Okay. Merrie Spaeth, however, left the business even sooner, but went on to several memorable endeavors, including an early 1970s run for office, a stint as an advisor in President Reagan’s White House, and, as hard as this coincidence is to believe, as a writer for Gold Key’s Dark Shadows comics!

Initially, I found an IMDB post where a man wrote that he once met her uncle and he said that Merrie had written Superman comic books in the 1970s! Since DC was crediting its creative staff by that time, I was pretty sure that wasn’t true, but I posted about it online in a “secret comics history” Facebook group. Lots of speculation there led me to believe that her proud uncle had related the story in the only way he knew how. Superman was a comic book character; his niece had written comic books. Ipso facto, his niece had written Superman!

Her Wikipedia page indicated that she had worked for various New York publishers during that time period.

Some digging in the online newspaper archives followed, where I fleshed out Merrie Spaeth’s diverse accomplishments from such a young age. Turns out she never hid her comics writing at all. As early as 1971, she was mentioning in newspaper interviews when she ran for office that she had been writing Smokey Bear comics.

After seeing my posts, fellow comics historian Nat Gertler managed to make initial contact and Merrie owned up to the whole thing. Nat put me in direct touch with her and, after exchanging a number of emails, I spoke with her by phone at some length, avoiding politics, but gushing over the movie I loved so much and then probing her memories of her comic-writing career.

It turns out she only wrote for Gold Key Comics, working under editor Wally Green in Western Publish-

ing’s New York City office. Yes, she wrote numerous uncredited issues of Smokey Bear, as well as Dark Shadows and Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery (the four-color anthology series that outlasted the titular actor himself by more than a decade!).

Unfortunately, we don’t yet exactly know the stories or issues written by Ms. Spaeth, although they can be dated to 1971 and earlier because of a newspaper interview she gave at that time. With everything she has accomplished in her amazing and controversial career in the years since, comic books were only a small part of it. She does assure me she kept records, but, as of yet, has not been able to turn them up.

Interestingly, her name comes up in an issue of Robin Snyder’s The Comics, mentioned in a late-in-life interview with longtime DC editor Robert Kanigher as one of a number of women who wrote uncredited romance comics for DC around that same time. Kanigher even notes she had been in the Peter Sellers movie. While it’s certainly unlikely he would have just made it up, when I asked Merrie about it, she responded, “I may be having senior moments, but do not remember ever working for DC Comics or being a romance writer.”

These days, Merrie Spaeth heads up Spaeth Communications and continues to be an in-demand writer and speaker. She seems quite pleased that folks like myself have started to take an interest in her old comics work and is looking forward to the return of Comic-Con International so she can attend.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

This page: Clockwise from top is a screenshot from the 1964 Peter Sellers film comedy, The World of Henry Orient, which features remarkably naturalistic performances by novice actors Merrie Spaeth (left) and Tippy Walker; lobby card of same, with Merrie at left; random issue of Smokey Bear published

by Gold Key—this one, #6 [June 1971]. To date, Merrie’s precise comic book credits have yet to be uncovered, though the writer insists she has one somewhere!

At center is Dark Shadows #4 [Feb. ’70], another random pick.

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #10

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!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

4-issue subscriptions: $46 US $69 International

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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!

Comprehensive KELLEY JONES interview, from early years as Marvel inker to present-day greatness at DC depicting BATMAN, DEADMAN, and SWAMP THING (chockful of rarely-seen artwork)! Plus WILL MURRAY examines the nefarious legacy of Batman co-creator BOB KANE in an investigation into tragic ghosts and rapacious greed. We also look at RAINA TELGEMEIER and her magnificent army of devotees, and more!

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #20

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

The legacy and influence of WALLACE WOOD, with a comprehensive essay about Woody’s career, extended interview with Wood assistant RALPH REESE (artist for Marvel’s horror comics, National Lampoon, and underground), a long chat with cover artist HILARY BARTA (Marvel inker, Plastic Man and America’s Best artist with ALAN MOORE), plus our usual columns, features, and the humor of HEMBECK!

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

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

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #22

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #23

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #24 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #25

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #27

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

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

Cover by WENDY PINI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Winter 2022

The forerunner to COMIC BOOK CREATOR, COMIC BOOK ARTIST is the 20002004 Eisner Award winner for BEST COMICS-RELATED MAG! Edited by COMIC BOOK CREATOR’s JON B. COOKE, it features in-depth articles, interviews, and unseen art, celebrating the lives and careers of the great comics artists from the 1970s to today.

CBA BULLPEN COLLECTING THE UNKOWN ISSUES OF COMIC BOOK ARTIST!

COMIC BOOK ARTIST BULLPEN collects all seven issues of the little-seen labor of love fanzine published in the early 2000s by JON B. COOKE (editor of today’s COMIC BOOK CREATOR magazine), just after the original CBA ended its TwoMorrows run.

Featured are in-depth interviews with some of comics’ major league players, including GEORGE TUSKA, FRED HEMBECK, TERRY BEATTY, and FRANK BOLLE—and an amazing all-star tribute to Silver Age great JACK ABEL by the Marvel Comics Bullpen and others. That previously unpublished all-comics Abel appreciation (assembled by RICK PARKER) includes strips by JOE KUBERT, WALTER SIMONSON, KYLE BAKER, MARIE SEVERIN, GRAY MORROW, ALAN WEISS, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, MORT TODD, DICK AYERS, and many more! Plus a new bonus feature on JACK KIRBY’s unknown 1960s baseball card art, and a 16-page bonus full-color section, all behind a Jack Kirby cover!

(176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $24.95 • (Digital Edition) $8.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-105-9 • NOW SHIPPING!

ALSO AVAILABLE: DIGITAL EDITIONS OF ALL 25 ISSUES OF COMIC BOOK ARTIST, Vol. 1!

TwoMorrows also offers Digital Editions of Jon B. Cooke’s COMIC BOOK ARTIST Vol. 2 (the “Top Shelf” issues)

CBA Vol. 2 #1

CBA Vol. 2 #2

CBA Vol. 2 #3

CBA Vol. 2 #4

CBA Vol. 2 #5

CBA Vol. 2 #6

NEAL ADAMS/ALEX ROSS cover and interviews with both, history of “Arcade, The Comics Revue” with underground legends CRUMB, SPIEGELMAN, and GRIFFITH, MICHAEL MOORCOCK on comic book adaptations of his work, CRAIG THOMPSON sketchbook, and more!

Exhaustive FRANK CHO interview and sketchbook gallery, ALEX ROSS sketchbook section of never-before-seen pencils, MIKE FRIEDRICH on the history of Star*Reach, plus animator J.J. SEDELMAIER on his Ambiguously Gay Duo and The X-Presidents cartoons for Saturday Night Live.

Interview with DARWYN COOKE and a gallery of rarely-seen and unpublished artwork, a chat with DC Comics art director MARK CHIARELLO, an exploration of The Adventures of Little Archie with creator BOB BOLLING and artist DEXTER TAYLOR, new JAY STEPHENS sketchbook section, and more!

ALEX NIÑO’s first ever full-length interview and huge gallery of his artwork, interview with BYRON PREISS on his career in publishing, plus the most comprehensive look ever at the great Filipino comic book artists (NESTOR REDONDO, ALFREDO ALCALA, and others), a STEVE RUDE sketchbook, and more!

HOWARD CHAYKIN interview and gallery of unpublished artwork, a look at the ’70s black-&-white mags published by Skywald, tribute to Psycho and Nightmare writer/editor ALAN HEWETSON, LEAH MOORE & JOHN REPPION on Wild Girl, a SONNY LIEW sketchbook section, and more!

Double-sized tribute to WILL EISNER! Over 200 comics luminaries celebrate his career and impact: SPIEGELMAN, FEIFFER & McCLOUD on their friendships with Eisner, testimonials

by ALAN MOORE, NEIL GAIMAN, STAN LEE, RICHARD CORBEN, JOE KUBERT, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, JOE SIMON, and others!

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The Language of Illustrating P. Craig Russell and the continuing education of artists, plus Wendy Pini’s candor Write to CBC: jonbcooke@aol.com or P. O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 Below: In his letter o’ comment, Brian Martin makes mention of this snazzy “Arabian Nights Sandman” sculpture, the design of which was based on P. Craig Russell’s rendition of Neil Gaiman’s “Lord of Sleep” character in Sandman #50 [June 1993]. Design by PCR and sculpting by Randy Bowen.

Sorry you have not had letters to fill a page. In my case, it had been a very busy bunch of months. I hope I can make up for it now.

My comments on Comic Book Creator #22 will deal with the interview with P Craig Russell. He has always been a favorite of mine and I found his comments to be very concise and that has allowed me to offer my two cents on very specific paragraphs and subjects.

The descriptions of Mr. Russell’s inking technique on various artists, notably Steve Ditko and Gil Kane on pages 54 and 55 was wonderful. I love that sort of behind-thescenes stuff. It has always seemed to me that comic book art, be it penciling or inking, involves so much thinking as well as artistic skill. In that same vein, I believe inkers always get the short end of the stick when people talk about the process and comments like these show that to just not be true.

The fact that opera was a lower-class music was very funny. Especially for a Jeopardy fan who sees the dreaded “Opera” category appear fairly regularly. I’m always surprised how much I know about opera and a lot of that is probably because of people like Mr. Russell incorporating operatic themes and storylines or, in his case, adapting them directly. (Along the same lines, I often comment to people that my initial exposure to classical music as well as some opera was from Bugs Bunny cartoons!)

If I am not mistaken, the Sandman with the globe illustration on page 60 was replicated as a statue later on. As youngsters, we would never have considered that there would be a healthy market for statues based on comic book characters let alone ones based on specific panels or poses!

As someone who is a voracious reader outside of comics, I also have a love of comic book adaptations of prose stories. They always seem to be so much more faithful than if something is made into a movie. With that in mind, the dissection on page 64 of what the artist can add to an adaptation was quite revelatory. Of course, you have to make a concession for the fact that the artist’s interpretation of the characters rarely matches what you had in your head, but that is true with any adaptation and certainly with the voices of characters when the stories are made into movies.

I love the spread on pages 66–67. Doctor Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen? is one of my all-time favorite books. Strangely (pun intended), I did not pick up the original Dr. Strange Annual [#1, 1976] until years after I had read that book! I also might even have been a little disappointed that Mr. Russell did not revisit the tale in 2016 as he threatened he might in his text page since What Is It…? came 20 years after 1976’s Annual.

My other memory of that book is you mentioning in an early issue of Comic Book Artist that you had not seen the newer version. In one of the Marvel-centric early issues [#6, Nov. 1999], you discussed the Annual, but had not seen the redo and were pretty rabid about tracking it down.

When PCR talks about the… language, if you will… of illustrating comics, it makes me think. After reading comics for (gulp) 45 years, do I subconsciously understand what the artist is trying to do or is doing? Is that why I like some artists more than others? Is that why I find some stories flow better than others? I don’t have answers to these questions, but I do know, after reading years of scholarly comic magazines, I can see when an artist made an error.

This applies to when their storytelling does not make sense or even when a picture has a pair of lines that intersect incorrectly so as to make the image itself confusing.

At times, I think we are able to appreciate the “awesome pictures” when we see them, but our brains subliminally react to the problems that the artist had to overcome in composing the individual pages and pictures. It is good to know that even seasoned pros are still learning about these things.

About my only criticism of the article is that in more than one instance, illustrations that accompanied the article were placed on different pages than the sections of the text that referenced them. This just caused a bit more page flipping than usual.

Looking forward to future issues, and during these times, when they will go on sale!

[Well, I do strive to have graphics be close to relevant text, as much as possible, so please have mercy, Brian!

Thanks for writing.— Y.E.]

Joe Frank I laughed at the Ye Ed’s Rant assessment of your Wendy Pini interview “almost evolving into a therapy session!” I wouldn’t go quite that far. It was probing and personal, but she—like any subject—could simply ask you not go there, refuse to answer, or, for that matter, declare the interview over. (Question: Do you discuss parameters beforehand and are they edited, afterward, to omit any contentious exchanges, assuming there are any?)

This was, as advertised, an epic interview. Even more so since I’m not an Elfquest reader, yet greatly enjoyed the conversation. Oh, I knew of the title and admired the fact that it had done so well and been around so long, but I’ve never been a fan of outright fantasy. So, no criticism from me of her material as done… it’s unfamiliarity on my part rather than any negative judgment.

I did crack up, however, when she was asked about Tolkien’s work; if she’d read it. Loved her answer: “Ummm… I tried.” I attempted reading The Hobbit in third grade, and found it ten times more indecipherable than my worst school textbook. (Another great laugh: she got her comics at a pool hall.)

Also admirable was her assessment of how a challenging home life could find a positive outlet rather than nurturing self-destructive tendencies—“creativity becomes a coping mechanism.” Innovating work, in addition to reading examples by others, becomes a welcome escape. Though she was quite candid about her adoptive parents, she sure didn’t paint herself as a saint either, as [when she said]: “you can’t tell me no. You can’t tell me what to do.”

If she didn’t have friends at home, that nudged her, through her work, to make some outside. Those became her surrogate family. Yet, even there, it’s not perfect. Fans, #25 • Winter 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Sandman TM & © DC Comics.

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Brian Martin

Solaris TM & © the estate of Larry Koster.

as she noted, can read things into things or become hostile when expectations are not met.

Wendy is one of the few pros, in print, to express fondness for the ’66 Marvel Super-Heroes cartoons. I liked them, too. It was like getting a free comic book after school.

The look, taken from the printed stories, was just like the books. Even her drawings of Cap and Hawkeye, printed here, were terrific.

The fact she didn’t get a job with the samples she sent in, back then, actually worked to her advantage. She and Richard did their own comic; the content and ownership was theirs. No one telling them how it should be done or coming up with a bold new direction and sending them packing. Their work; their say. So, a tremendous success story for creators’ rights.

As always, with them, the biggest kick is that they met through a published comic book letter.

Though the interview mentioned no lack of challenges or setbacks, I see it as a happy ending. It made for an intriguing read, Jon. Sort of like with the Steve Rude interview in #18, showing that you tailor the conversation and questions to the specific individual.

The other one that caught my interest was your talk with Gil Kane’s friend and business partner Larry Koster.

Yes, some of it wasn’t flattering; his financial losses and Gil’s seeming indifference. Despite that, Gil was always asking his assessment of the work and they got together as friends in later years.

If Larry described Gil as “lazy,” it’s hard to reconcile that with Gil’s massive output, for so many companies in the

‘60s; later, his initiating work outside traditional comics (His Name is… Savage, Blackmark, Star Hawks, animation work, etc.) and his return to comics in the ’80s and ’90s. If he wanted to read the paper or go to the movies, well, even a champion swimmer needs to come up for air sometime.

Hard to believe Gil’s been gone for 20 years. His work was terrific! This and your earlier look in CBC #11 shows he’s thankfully not forgotten.

[Interviews are prepared for on a case by case basis, Joe. Intuition and decorum play a part.

The only condition coming to mind was when Alex Niño requested we avoid discussing an art book that came out in the 1970s. Usually I can sense when to tread lightly over the course of an interview. — Y.E.]

Above: Cover of Larry Koster’s unpublished graphic novel.

Solaris TM & © the estate of Larry Koster.

The Charlton Comics Empire

This page: Above is Charlton discovery and longtime comics master Joe Staton’s brand-new cover of The Charlton Companion, featuring his great E-Man, Nova, and Mike Mauser. Inset right is a vignette of the titular hero John Buscema’s short-lived 1950s Charlton Comics title, Nature Boy. COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2021 • #25

Over the course of the pandemic, besides taking advantage of the quarantine to get my ridiculously huge collections in order, I’ve been focused on an all-new compendium to the comics of the Derby, Connecticut, publisher, The Charlton Companion, a 256-page, full-color history coming soon from TwoMorrows.

Rather than simply reprint the two issues of Comic Book Artist devoted to the fabled all-in-one publishing outfit, I’ve opted to scribe an entirely new narrative that brings together myriad information to create the definitive—and fascinating—history of Charlton Press. Too often disparaged as a second-rate funny-book imprint, it produced a vast array of titles that span from the 1940s Golden Age to the Bronze Age of the ’70s in more genres than any other, whether hot rods and gangsters or cowboys in space or romantic horror stories.

The publisher experienced explosive bursts of creativity, most memorably the “Action Hero Line” edited by Dick Giordano in the 1960s. That era featured the renowned talents of Steve Ditko and a stellar team of creators, and then there was the unforgettable ’70s “Bullseye” era spawning E-Man and Doomsday +1, plus a plethora of fun, frightening horror comics by veterans and talented newcomers.

Charlton’s accomplishments also include producing America’s leading song-lyric magazine, Hit Parader; breaking the musical color barrier with Rhythm and Blues; printing maybe the most horrible horror comic series of the 1950s, The Thing!; launching Harvey Kurtzman’s creator-owned Humbug, perhaps the genius satirist’s greatest achievement; showcasing much of Ditko’s finest work (including Blue Beetle and The Question); presenting the classic “Children of Doom,” Denny O’Neil’s cautionary and classic tale of nuclear Armageddon; distributing the early issues of Larry Flynt’s Hustler(!) and other “girly” periodicals; and consistently serving as the (low-paying) training ground for an entire generation of comics creators all thriving in an environment of complete creative freedom.

Included are interviews with dozens of talented participants, including Giordano, O’Neil, Alex Toth, Sanho Kim, Tom Sutton, Pat Boyette, Nick Cuti, John Byrne, Mike Zeck, Joe Staton, and many more!

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infectious ’70s fanaticism

50 Years of Fanzines Ken Meyer, Jr., takes a look at the fan scene at 50, the epic playground of the past

by KEN MEYER, JR.

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Bill Pearson), Infinity, and Graphic Story Magazine (the latter being more a historical mag with highly literate interviews and articles). Some straddled the line between prozine and magazine, or even underground comic, such as Richard Corben’s flagship, Fantagor, or Hot Stuf’. I tend to classify those publications produced by fans as fanzines, regardless of the sheen of professionalism. Alter Ego is widely thought of as one of the best fanzines. It was started in 1961 by “superfan” Jerry Bails (who soon after published The Comicollector, the first comics adzine), and Roy Thomas, who came on board later… and we all know what happened to him! On the opposite end of the spectrum were those labeled with the not too flattering moniker “crudzines.” A favorite of modern fanzine aficionado Aaron Caplan, the crudzines were usually shoddily printed, totally fan populated, had smaller print runs, and substandard art. For some, like Caplan, they were the ones that had the purest fan enthusiasm.

Fanzines would cost anywhere from 25¢ to a couple of dollars. I cannot count the times I taped quarters to an index card and sent away for some treasure! But it was easily worth whatever coins we could scrounge together to see amazing art, interesting stories, informative articles, reports on conventions I could never attend, and photos of professionals I would never meet. Fanzines were a meeting place for the like-minded, a place where we could meet new friends, some we would keep for the rest of our lives.

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, The

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom TM & © Krause Publications. Metamorpho TM & © DC Comics. Alter Ego TM & © Roy and Dann Thomas. CPL TM & © Bob Layton. Toth artwork © the estate of Alex Toth.

Above: The one that started it all, Jerry Bails’ first fanzine, Alter Ego #1 [1961], represented by a sharpened scan here. Inset right: Fred Hembeck’s cover art for The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom #364 [Nov. 7, 1980].

Be sure to check out Fred’s career-spanning interview in The Comic Book Artist Bullpen Collection, coming soon from TwoMorrows! Below: Alex Toth’s extraordinary cover art for CPL #11 [1974].

A 14-year-old boy walked into the library during lunchtime to look at the usual art books, but the librarian (the nice one, not the mean one) called him over before he could reach the stacks. On the table in front of her was a newspaper.

But this looked like no newspaper he had ever seen. Across the front and back was a black-&-white drawing of a group of barbarians cresting a hill, swords and spears raised and ready for battle, a misty moon behind them. It was the coolest thing he had seen in a long while. She told him this was a newspaper all about his favorite subject—comic books! His mouth dropped open and remained there as he thumbed through the pages. Ads selling comics! Articles on comics! And advertisements for something totally new, something called… fanzines!

His mind was blown and his life had just been changed forever!

No doubt you’ve figured out that the youngster was me, and maybe even realized that the paper was The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom, one nexus in 1971 for comics and fandom among very few at that time. I wrote to the publisher, Alan Light, and he was incredibly nice to reply, not only with a subscription to the publication, but several current zines for free, as well! You can blame Alan for my ascent into the world of fanzines.

So, what are fanzines, anyway? There have been fanzines for almost every subject for quite a long time.

Wikipedia states that “the term was coined in an October 1940 science fiction fanzine by Russ Chauvenet and first popularized within science fiction fandom.” The term was later applied to any number of subjects presented by amateur fans of those subjects; comics, literature, sports, music… the list goes on and on. This article will focus primarily on the comic book centered fanzines of the late 1960s through to the early ’80s, which, coincidentally, was the timespan I was a fanzine maniac!

Fanzines had several levels of quality. Many still cannot agree on what constitutes the difference between a fanzine and a “pro-zine.” The latter usually had better design and production, a higher caliber of artists and writers (many already professionals), and a price tag to match. Some of the best include Heritage, Phase, witzend (from Wally Wood, later taken over by

The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom TM & © Krause Publications. RBCC TM & © the respective copyright holder. Blue Beetle TM & © DC Comics.

Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom (TBG), from Alan Light, was one of the few gathering places for comic book and fanzine fans. Remember, this was long before the internet.

People got their news either in the comics themselves or through the mail. There was a certain degree of anticipation that would build and build as you waited weeks to get your prized possession. Publisher Light maintained a very steady schedule, eventually coming out weekly while offering free subscriptions (the ads paid the bills). He added more and more editorial content as time went on, including columnists like Don and Maggie Thompson (who would later take over the publication and change the name to Comics Buyers Guide). The covers were occasionally done by established professionals like Dan Adkins, Joe Sinnott, Jack Kirby and Frank Thorne, but the lion’s share were done by fan artists. (You can see Alan’s many comics-related photos by searching his name at www.flickr.com.)

One other regular publication (fanzines did not usually last long or hold to a regular schedule) was Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector (RBCC). Formed when two fanzines merged (Rocket’s Blast and The Comicollector), RBCC was edited and published by G.B. Love and later taken over by James Van Hise. Van Hise fairly quickly moved the focus from ads to actual editorial content (TBG’s popularity had a hand in that, as well, attracting more ads) and gave some of the best artists of that time space to shine (those that Love had not already published). Covers were by artists such as Robert Kline (a fan fave who later made his career in animation), Mike Zeck, Don Newton, Bernie Wrightson, Kerry Gammill, and John G. Fantucchio (another fan favorite, who worked primarily a teacher), among many others.

Lastly in this category, is The Comic Reader (yet another Jerry Bails publication, started in 1961 as On the Drawing Board before changing its name). Though TCR ran through a slew of editors (most of whom went on to careers in the comic field), it lasted as long as almost any other fanzine.

It was, however, was more a news source for those comic fans than a space for creativity. It sported a ton of beautiful covers by the more polished fans and many pros. That

was, by and large, the only non-news material in its pages however (though later issues would contain strips by some of fandom’s most loved creators, including this magazine’s Fred Hembeck, as well as Alan Hanley).

Like other genres of fanzines, there were those specializing in very specific topics. E.C. Comics were covered in high-class zines, such as Squa Tront, Spa Fon, and Seraphim. Boasting illustrations by many industry greats, these zines were truly high-water marks. In addition to established pros, soon to be art gods such as Bernie Wrightson, Michael Kaluta, and Richard Corben filled the pages.

Squa Tront didn’t even need a title or any other text on the cover! Specific authors had their own fanzines as well.

Robert E. Howard dominated Amra and Fantasy Crossroads, while Edgar Rice Burroughs readers could indulge in ERB-Zine and The Jasoomian. Specific comic characters or groups had their own crusaders. Batman had Batmania, while The Legion of Super-Heroes had The Legion Outpost. By the late 1970s, the “big two” noticed the groundswell amongst their readers and published their own house fanzines, Marvel with FOOM (the acronym of Friends of Ol’ Marvel) and DC with The Amazing World of DC Comics.

I gathered an unofficial list through social media of the “best” fanzines of that

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

Above: The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom, #8 [Oct. 1971], with cover art by Dennis Fujitake. This was the issue of TBG that blew the mind of a young Ken Meyer, Jr. Below: Mike Zeck’s striking Blue Beetle cover art graces the cover of Rocket’s Blast Comicollector #135 [Apr. 1977].

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Above: James Steranko’s stunning cover art for Gary Groth’s Fantastic Fanzine #10 [1970], with inks by Joe Sinnott.

Below: This brilliant Steve Ditko artwork was printed with a two-color overlay for The Collector #26 [1972].

time. TBG and RBCC figure prominently, as do Squa Tront and Graphic Story Magazine. However, there are a group of zines that, at least to me, epitomize the combination of fannish enthusiasm with an intense desire to constantly improve. Though many of the editors of the following zines were not out of their teens when they started their respective publications, as a group, they elevated the field immensely.

Fantastic Fanzine was started like many, by some crazy kid in his basement, expressing his enthusiasm about beloved comics through print. In this case, that crazy kid was Gary Groth. Gary started his “crappy little Xerox zine” (his words) in his early teens…younger even than I was when I started reading them! Gary’s skills as an editor and publisher grew by leaps and bounds with each issue. By #10, he had a beautiful Steranko cover and people working with him such as Tony Isabella, Robert Kline, Dennis Fujitake, and Dave Cockrum, all on the cusp of going pro. He also had a returning stable of writers and artists from issue to issue, including Al Grinage, Mike O’Neil, and others. Like many youngsters with some proximity to comic cons, Gary scored sketches from

the professionals he loved to proudly display in his personal outlet. Fantastic Fanzine ran for 13 issues, and eventually led to Gary’s leading The Comics Journal to becoming the premier magazine about the comics field.

Of that transition to become TCJ, Gary told me that “I hadn’t the slightest idea what I really wanted to do; I was not a long-term thinker and my brain didn’t have anything rattling around in it that could be considered as thoughtful as a ‘goal.’ I was just having so much fun putting the ’zines together, making friends, and talking to artists I admired that I didn’t think beyond that. My path was not carefully mapped out, but ad hoc. In 1973, Roy Thomas offered me an assistant editor’s position at Marvel, but I demurred because I didn’t think I could live in New York on the salary he was offering; so, I went to work for Steranko instead for $15 a week. I’m not sure what I was thinking. But I was obviously flailing about, without a goal in sight.” Obviously Groth eventually found a goal worth pursuing, becoming one of the most erudite (and some would say crabby) critics of the field of comics. It was Gary that really gave the Hernandez brothers a forum for their award-winning comic, Love and Rockets.

Around the same time Gary was laboring in his basement, an 11-year-old Bill Wilson was doing the same (in 1967, to be exact), working on his own love letter to comics, The Collector. Like FF, The Collector started off as a rough, half-size little trifle, really. But, in its 29 issues, the ’zine grew to be one of the most consistent and best put-together publications of its type. His journey was related to me through a series of questions for my online column, Ink Stains. He lamented that “… production was the biggest challenge. I knew nothing about printing—especially photo-offset printing, which I’d chosen over mimeo for its ‘slick professional’ look—and what I did learn early on was culled from correspondence with other publishers.

As for the printing, I sent off those early issues to a printer Captain America TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Fantastic Fanzine TM & © Gary Groth. Mr. A TM & © the estate of Steve Ditko. The Collector TM & © Bill Wilson.

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#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Collector TM & © Bill Wilson. The Collector artwork © the estate of Ken Barr. The Defender TM & © the estate of Martin H. Greim. Defender artwork © James Steranko. Anomaly TM & © Jan Strnad. Anomaly artwork © the estate of Richard Corben.

hundreds of miles away because I knew nothing about any printers in my area.

“But that all changed when I discovered Prince Printing in my own hometown. The owner, Joe Prince, was impressed with my work and offered to show me the ropes of the printing biz, if I was interested. Of course I was, and when he upped the ante by agreeing to print TC for free in exchange for my time spent working after school and on Saturdays learning the craft (and doing everything from stocking shelves to making deliveries to cleaning up as a ‘printer’s devil’). I was hooked. I spent a decade in that shop, eventually honing my skills in the darkroom, as a typesetter (both cold and hot type), on press (offset and letterpress), and in management. That experience taught me design, production, and business lessons that have served me well my entire life.”

Since Bill knew #29 was to be his last, he scored some unprecedented pin-ups from many professionals of the time commemorating his time as a publisher/editor.

Greats like Kurt Schaffenberger and Joe Sinnott congratulated him. And the issue was filled not only with both big fans like Kline, Fantucchio, and Alan “Jim” Hanley, but those very soon to be big time pros, like John Byrne, Clyde Caldwell, and Ken Barr. It was definitely a big finish!

Around the same time that Groth and Wilson were starting their fanzine journeys, Martin L. Greim began his passage into fanzine history with Comic Crusader, which you could purchase for a mere two bits. Lasting 17 issues and chock full of youthful enthusiasm, it consistently grew more

polished with each issue. Eventually, Martin had all the usual suspects, including Cockrum, Fantucchio, Fujiake (one of the earliest to publish Dennis’s work), Don Newton, as well as work from professional illustrators that he largely scored at comic conventions (Steranko, Steve Ditko, Gene Colan, John Buscema, et al). Nicely balanced between pin-ups, articles, and strips, Comic Crusader was easily worth the price. One thing CC had that the others did not was a flagship character created by Greim—The Defender. Each issue would usually have an installment that Greim had some hand in (usually doing it all, but sometimes bringing in an inker).

Martin admitted to a fair amount of “swiping,” but somehow he managed to make it a cohesive and clean product. His last entry into fan publishing was a mammoth collection of strips called Comic Crusader Storybook. It was, Martin said, a 195-page publication “that had the best fan super-heroes in all-new stories by the original artists. It also had a lot of pro art and a ‘Mr. A’ story, with no dialogue, one of the best things [Ditko] ever did. It also had the first Thunder Bunny story that eventually caused me to do it as a pro.”

Contemporary Pictorial Literature, or CPL, was probably the ’zine with the highest percentage of future professionals published by that time. One main member of the crew, Roger Stern, recalls that CPL started as, “Bob Layton’s sales catalog and newsletter. At the time, Bob’s sideline was selling comics via mail order. But he was interested in honing his art and so he was slowly turning CPL into a fanzine. That was right around the time that he crossed paths with Roger Slifer, Duffy Vohland, and a few other central Indiana comics fans, myself included. We all wound up contributing to the ‘zine. I think it was Duffy who’d made the original contact with John Byrne. I started corresponding with John, and he became a major contributor to CPL. As fast as he was, we could always count on him for art and spot illustrations.”

Bob Layton himself told me, “I was selling back issues out of my apartment in Indianapolis through The Buyers’ Guide to supplement my meager income at the time and, because of that, I had created a puny catalog called CPL that I shipped to potential customers. A local fan in Indy named Steve Mattingly was publishing a small digest ’zine

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

Above: Detail of James Steranko’s cover art for the role-playing source book, Heroes Unlimited [circa 1987], a figure which was originally drawn as Martin H. Greim’s creation, The Defender.

Inset left: Ken Barr’s superb E.C. Comics homage drawn for Bill Wilson’s The Collector #28 [Sept. 1973].

Below: Richard Corben’s wraparound cover for his once and future collaborator Jan Strnad’s ’zine, Anomaly #3 [1973], published by Bud Plant.

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many other fanzines, including RBCC, The Monster Times, George, and Infinity. Anomaly got started while Strnad was, he explained, “[P]ursuing my degree in English Lit. I had no professional credits at all, but I would soon get them through the pages of Creepy and Eerie magazines, published by Jim Warren. Warren paid $45 for an eight-page story at that time, which happened to equal the rent on my ghetto apartment in Wichita.” Anomaly was a classy ’zine from the very beginning, with regulars such as Robert Kline and Richard Corben (who he would go on to work with on countless projects as a professional years later).

Jan reminisced about his first encounters with Corben and Kline by saying “Don and I visited Jerry Weist, a fellow Wichitan who was publishing Squa Tront, and I was inspired to do my own fanzine. Jerry handed me an envelope of sketches by a fan named Robert Kline. Jerry liked the work, but it didn’t fit with Squa Tront, so I wrote to Bob and he became a contributor and friend. Later he helped me get a job at Disney when I moved to Los Angeles. My first editor, Jymn Magon, was an Anomaly subscriber, as it turned out.”

He continued, “As for Corben, Don and I were at the World S-F Convention, in St. Louis, in 1969. We had a table where we hawked Anomaly. I was away from the table when he came by and subscribed. I discovered his subscription when I got back home and my jaw dropped.

I’d seen his work in Rudi Franke’s Voice of Comicdom and couldn’t believe that I’d missed meeting him because I was in the bathroom or somewhere. I approached him about contributing to Anomaly and he kindly accepted my invitation. Don and I later met him in Kansas City and I visited a number of times over the course of our collaborations.”

Though Anomaly focused more on fantasy/sf and sword and sorcery than comics, its four-issue run (the last issue technically an underground comic) places high in most “best zine” lists.

Many fanzine editors did their best to keep a healthy balance between text and images, but despite that, it remained an art-dominated medium. However, there were a few fanzines that tried to be as much, if not more of a showcase for the written word. The late David Heath Jr’s No Sex (a shortened version of a title David wanted, All Violence and No Sex) was primarily a science fiction outlet, though the Hernandez brothers had some of their first work published there.

Fantastic Fanzine had its share of fan fiction, as did zines such as Whizzard (mainly expansive pro interviews), but the king of this type of ’zine had to have been Space and Time, by Gordon Linzner (from 1966 to 2008, with following editors being Hildy Silverman and currently, Angela Yuriko Smith). This incredible run produced four issues a year for going on 50 years! Linzner went on to write many short stories and publish four novels after Space and Time.

Copper Toadstool was another ’zine that published more than its share of fiction, mostly light fantasy. Started as a digest-sized fanzine, it grew in page count with each issue, and eventually became a semi-pro and then professional magazine. Of the editors, Charles de Lint, went on to become an established author. Each issue would have various artists illustrating the stories, including Gary Kato, Gene and Dan Day, and Stephen Schwartz. From the second issue onward, a snazzy logo inspired by Roger Dean adorned the covers.

A large number of artists started publishing fanzines as an outlet for their own art, usually bringing along a few buddies who were into their wacky obsessions. Frank Cirocco, Gary Winnick, and Brent Anderson published Venture for five issues, ending with a full-color Neal Adams cover on the last issue. Brent also published his own Mindworks.

Mark Wheatley brought Nucleus into the world, Jackson “Butch” Guice took over a few issues of Batmania (which at that time had changed its name to Beyond the Clock), the great Wally Wood had his own witzend (so he and his

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Woweekazowie TM & © Peter Iro. Shazam! TM & © DC Comics. Captain Paragon TM & © Bill Black.

called Epoch and Sterno [Roger Stern] and I saw his ad in TBG and sought him out. As much as he desired to publish, Steve just wasn’t motivated to actually do the work past his first issue.

Fortunately, he introduced Sterno and me to an obscure Canadian fan artist named John Byrne. Once we formed a relationship with Byrne, the rest, as they say, was history. I found a local printer who charged me exorbitant amounts of money for the simplest print jobs. Remember that in the early ’70s, printing places like Kinko’s were non-existent. Once we had the pre-production done (which included me painstakingly justifying columns on an old-fashioned typewriter) and making mechanicals, we’d get it printed and have big collating parties (with a hand-saddle stitcher on the floor of my tiny apartment).”

Adding to the already impressive talent pool were Above: Willie Blyberg, Sam de regular contributors such as Don Maitz, Don Newton, Fujitala Rosa, and Pete Iro’s Captain ke, and covers/pin-ups by legends such as Alex Toth, Paul “Shazam!” Marvel on the cover Gulacy, and Neal Adams (most likely, obtained at comic of Pete’s Woweekazowie #4, conventions). Charlton Comics later became associated Fall–Winter 1978. with the crew because, as Slifer recalled, “Most of us had been fans of Charlton’s short-lived action hero line, especially those produced by Steve Ditko. We had decided to produce an over-sized double-issue of CPL—also known as The Charlton Portfolio—and thanks to Duffy’s footwork, Below: Prolific publisher Bill Charlton allowed us to print a previously unpublished Blue Black’s artworkfor his one-shot Beetle story in that issue. George Wildman, then the editor Captain Paragon #1 [1972] of Charlton, liked our work enough that he authorized Bob to produce [Charlton] Bullseye.” This led to the “CPL Gang” publishing seven issues of that Charlton fanzine (with unpublished material granted from Charlton itself), and later, several alumni (Byrne, for example) securing their first professional work from the company.

The last fanzine we cover in detail here is Anomaly, from Jan Strnad.

Jan did not actually start publishing Anomaly until he was in college, at age 18, so he might have had a leg up on his grammar school contemporaries in maturity and production knowledge. But his love for fandom had been in place for a while. He said that he discovered fandom in junior high school through G. B. Love’s RBCC, with his friend Don Bain, a fellow comic book fan. Strnad would later go on to write for

Ultrazine Special, Omniman TM & © Matt Bucher. Inkstains and Cooke caricature © Ken Meyer, Jr.

contemporaries could let their non-mainstream work see the light of day), Bob Layton’s aforementioned CPL (which actually became more of a vehicle for John Byrne, even though Byrne also published through ’zines like Chronicle, The Collector, and RBCC), while Wowiekazowie was started

by Willie Blyberg (who used many of his Interfan pals for assistance).

Interfan was an interesting anomaly within fandom.

Started by Steve Clement as a way to get his and various friends work in print, it provided reams of content for the ’zines of the day. Steve, and later Jim Bertges, would coordinate articles, spot illustrations, covers, and full stories for any zine that asked. All the Interfan crew required in exchange was a copy for each party involved.

Some of the illustrious names benefiting from the organization’s assistance include Dave Sim, Jerry Ordway, Sam de la Rosa, Karl Kesel, Larry Houston, John Beatty, Mike Machlan, and many, many others. A partial list of fanzines that utilized Interfan’s services include Alpha Touch, Radion,

Copper Toadstool, Entropy Comix, Fandom Circus, The Fan’s Zine, Fantasia, Great Krypton, Inertia, Lollapaloosa, Night Voyages, No Sex, Plastizine, Thrust, Superzine, Viper Visions, Ultrazine, Whizzard, and Wowiekazowie. You can read a history of Interfan and fandom in general online at inter-fan.org.

Believe or not, there were those that were not satisfied to publish just one zine, and those were what I call the “mini-moguls.” Now, there were some that would move from one zine to the next, like Jerry Bails with The Comicollector, Alter Ego, The Comic Reader/On The Drawing Board, Capa-Alpha, The Panelologist, and more. But here I am thinking about young go-getters like, for example, Bill Black and his Paragon empire. At one time, Bill had Paragon Golden-Age Greats, Paragon Illustrated, Paragon Presents, Fem Fantastique, Paragon Super Heroes, Captain Paragon, and Macabre Western/Paragon Western Stars. His smooth and professional art style dominated all the zines, but he would also enlist the aid of established pros like Jim Steranko to up the ante. Bill was going strong with his AC comics line as recently as a few years ago, so I guess fandom was a great training ground in Bill’s case!

Another multi-publisher was Matt Bucher. Matt told me via email that while in high school, he published 62 fanzines (and I believe it!). Included were not only did his

primary zine, Ultrazine, on a regular basis, but Omniman, Star Slayers (one of a few zines I myself worked on), and several tiny ’zines from the frenetic mind of Rick McCollum.

And that is not even counting the various one-offs filling Bucher’s portfolio. Matt’s primary cohorts were McCollum, Willie Peppers, Bill Anderson (who inked almost everything), David Heath Jr., and Mark Heike. All the Ultrazine group members shared an easily discernible love for the craft and fun of comics. Several other industrious individuals published a plethora of product (insert Broadcast News alliterative quote here), including Steve Keeter and Tim Corrigan (Corrigan continued his prodigious output as mini comics in the ’80s). There was a definite thrill to seeing your name in print and seeing all your work come to fruition… these guys just needed more fruit than most!

These days, the closest and most obvious equivalent to fanzines is probably the internet in general. Blogs, podcasts, columns (like mine, for example), and websites all fulfill the need to connect with others who share your interests. During the ’60s through the early ’80s, there were few, if any, avenues to do this, especially for youngsters with little or no money. You might follow the letters columns in comics, maybe you were lucky enough to live close enough to the few comic conventions that were starting to appear, and maybe luckier you had friends nearby, perhaps even a comics club of some kind. There are still a few print fanzines around today. Some groups exist to aid in this, like the UFO, or United Fanzine Organization. You can see their site at unitedfanzineorganization.weebly.com. In addition, there are hubs where you can find exhaustive listings of fanzines in general. One of the best is The Poopsheet Foundation

by Rick Bradford (poopsheetfoundation.com). If you like reading entertaining, informative and sometimes personal remembrances of those days, you must pick up the late Bill Schelly’s series of books, including Fandom’s Finest Comics, The Golden Age of Comic Fandom, Founders of Comic Fandom, Talks with the Founders of Comic Fandom, and Sense of Wonder (named after Bill’s own fanzine from the ’70s). Bill also wrote several books profiling some of the greats of the industry, such as Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Kubert, and James Warren.

Lastly, of course, I have to mention my monthly column, Ink Stains, with a new installment appearing on the first of every month at ComicAttack.net.

You can find all the past columns on my site at kenmeyerjr.com. Each month profiles one or several zines of the past, with PDFs of entire issues in almost all cases, and as much input from the original participants as possible. For me, it is incredibly interesting to see these talented writers and artists while they were still learning their craft.

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Above: Ken Meyer, Jr.’s slambang webpage header where you can find an abundance of fanzine PDFs for free download!

Visit kenmeyerjr.com/ink-stains. html. Inset left: Ultrazine Special #8 [July/Aug. 1981. Cover art by Willie Peppers. Bottom: Ye ed could not resist sharing with CBC readers this fan-freakin’tastic caricature of my humble self Ken produced for my latest non-TwoMorrows project, Slow Death Zero, published by Last Gasp. The motif, don’tchaknow, is the cataclysmic climate crisis facing our planet. Yowza!

Special Thanks

I am so grateful to TwoMorrows for giving me the space to share the incredible human spirit of creativity and connectivity that the fanzines of the past represent.

There were several actual humans that helped with opinions and input, including AARON CAPLAN, HERB WARREN, RUSS MAHERAS, MANNY MARIS, and especially DANA MARIE ANDRA. There are many more in the Facebook fanzine groups (that I encourage you to check out) who gave their valued time. I hope this article prompts you to check out many of the zines and sites mentioned…it will open a whole new world for you, as it did for me almost 50 years ago.

—Ken Meyer, Jr.

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darrick patrick’s ten questions

A Moment with Momoko Darrick Patrick gets all the right answers from “Stormbreaker” star Peach Momoko

by DARRICK PATRICK [Peach Momoko is a professional artist with a current focus primarily on variant comic book covers, though she has also produced short stories for Heavy Metal. As of late, the Japanese illustrator has been named one of Marvel’s “Stormbreakers” team, and is writing and illustrating her Demon Days saga, after signing an exclusive contract with the House of Ideas in late 2020, with the first two installments being Demon Days: X-Men (the first issue of which was released in March) and Demon Days: Mariko (scheduled for June).—D.P.]

This page: Peach Momoko (above) has been chosen by Marvel to be part of their roster of “Stormbreakers,” a group described as “the next generation of elite artists.” Inset right is the cover for her June release, Demon Days: Mariko, which features her writing and art, as well as her renditions of Black Widow and Nightcrawler.

Below is Peach’s version of Psylocke, who is featured in the Peach’ written and drawn Demon Days: X-Men (cover at bottom).

every day. There is a very small window to make a career with being any type of artist. I believe there is a famous quote that says “Success only works when preparation meets opportunity.” If you have the luck to get that chance with your artwork, the preparation is you creating art every day.

Darrick: What super-hero do you relate to most?

Peach: I am nowhere near being a super-hero, so I can’t relate to any of them. I think we all idolize those special powers they have. So, instead of relating to them in other ways, I put those idolized powers on paper.

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

Peach: I love watching horror and suspense movies, and murder documentaries.

Darrick: As you are a big fan of horror, what are some of your favorite works within that genre?

Peach: Yes, I love horror! There is so much that I like, I couldn’t possibly rank them. I don’t generally name anything as my favorites.

Darrick: Who are a few of the characters in the Marvel Universe that you haven’t worked on yet, but are hoping to in the future?

Peach: I don’t give answers about what I want to work on.

I hope you understand. So… no comment.

Darrick: If you had 24 hours left to live, how would you spend that time?

Peach: I would spend it with my family. And maybe I’d paint one last thing.

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Demon Days: X-Men, Demon Days: Mariko, Psylocke TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Darrick Patrick: What was the journey that led you to a career as an illustrator?

Peach Momoko: My journey has actually been pretty plain and simple. I just painted every day. Sometimes original work, sometimes fan art. Anything that I enjoyed painting for myself, and for fans. I painted at home, at comic conventions, at galleries, etc. Every day.

Darrick: When were you first exposed to comic books and graphic novels?

Peach: Manga is very normal reading material in Japan, so I don’t remember when I was initially exposed to it. I know my mom read children’s books to me, and I enjoyed looking at the artwork. I always liked Japanese folktales, too. I think folktales are a part of life, though, and are something many people go through, without actually recalling “the choice” in experiencing them.

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

Peach: My day is not very exciting. I wake up around 9:00 a.m., have tea or coffee, and then clean the house. Yes, I clean and vacuum every day. I take my dog, Momo, for a walk. After that, I paint. Eat. Paint. Take a break to play a video game, or watch a movie. Paint. And then I go to sleep around 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.

Darrick: Towards the end of 2020, you were announced as one of the Stormbreaker artists signed exclusively to Marvel. How did that come about?

Peach: I do not know how I became a part of the Stormbreakers!

C.B. Cebulski emailed me out of the blue. It was a pleasant surprise.

Demon Days: X-Men was discussed pretty much simultaneously, but the Demon Days pilot comic was actually made and pitched around 2018. So, for me, Demon Days has been in the works for a few years.

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

Peach: Please keep drawing

The Spirit, P’Gell TM & © Will Eisner Studios, Inc. The Beatles, Yellow Submarine TM & © Apple Corps, Ltd. Deadman TM & © DC Comics. Strip © Fred Hembeck & Tom Hegeman. COLOR BY GLENN WHITMORE.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

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comics in the library

What Moves, What Doesn’t Pondering what compels students to select one comics collection over another

by RICHARD J. ARNDT CBC Contributing Editor

Above: Raina Telgemeier’s best-selling graphic novels feature simply designed covers utilizing primary colors as backgrounds, likely one component of their popularity. Inset right: Ninth in Nathan Hale’s Hazard Tales series, Major Impossible, featuring the exploits of John Wesley Powell. Below: Harley Quinn figure based on Dustin Nguyen’s design of the character in his Li’l Gotham work.

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Guts TM & © Raina Telgemeier. Hazardous Tales TM & © Nathan Hale. Harley Quinn TM & © DC Comics.

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When I was a kid, and right on through for, at least, another two decades, one sure way to move me—and thousands of other kids and adults—to pick up a comic, a book or a magazine, was for it to have a cover by Frank Frazetta. The actual story could have been sheer garbage (and often was), but a Frazetta cover made the purchase worthwhile. Frazetta was closely followed by cover artists like Jeff Jones, Leo and Diane Dillon, Don Maitz, Boris Vallejo, and others, but Frazetta was always a sure thing.

For kids today, that’s no longer true. Readers at my school barely glance at a Frazetta cover. I can recommend the early volumes of the Creepy and Eerie Archives on our shelves ’til I’m blue in the face, but they only move at Halloween. The prose Conan books with the Ken Kelly covers on the shelf barely move all year. Neal Adams, Joe Kubert, and Jack Kirby covers are all relatively hit-andmiss. It’s the subject matter that moves them, not the art.

The only Kirby volume that is consistently looked at is The Losers. Kubert-covered books move better than Adams’ books, but I suspect that is, again, due more to the subject matter than the cover.

There’s been a sea-change in what kids look for in a cover illustration and it’s one that’s just starting to be noticed by the mainstream comic comics looking to grab some of that YA book market for their own.

What does move a book off a shelf and into a reader’s hand? On the evidence of my library: bright, simple cover design and art. Raina Telgemeier’s books are my top movers this year and you can’t get simpler than her cover design. Bright yellow smiley faces on an aqua or green background—simple figures not doing much of anything in the way of action, although each of the smiley faces feature something that punctuates the story within the book, along with an equally simple one-word title. Telgemeier’s covers are a brand name not only because they’re actually very good stories and are nicely drawn, but because you can identify them as a Telgemeier book from at least 30 feet away.

Svetlana Chmakova’s books are equally identifiable from a distance, and they also feature simply drawn characters in everyday poses. Her covers feature primary colors on the lead characters, mixed with black-&-white shading on secondary characters. Same goes for Vera Brosgol’s books. Chmakova and Brosgol’s books basically tie for my second most popular movers.

Fourth on that list are Nathan Hale’s cleverly funny and historically accurate Hazardous Tales series, which all feature simple cartoony covers with characters, like Chmakova’s covers, in full color and b-&-w.

Next is Jeff Smith’s Bone books, moved down from their longtime top position, but still doing very well.

Two decades ago, Smith was doing what Telgemeier, Chmakova, Brosgol, and Hale are doing right now: bright, bold primary-colored covers done in a car-

toony/animated style.

Number six the Tintin series by Herge (and guess what they have in common with the top five positions? Simple art—mind you, not simplistic art—just simple art that is eye-catching in design and coloring, with stories nowhere near as simple (or simplistic) as the covers might suggest.

There’s a lot going on in these books. Think Alex Toth’s animation cels, Doug Wildey’s Jonny Quest, or the Bruce Timm/Alan Burnett/Paul Din/Eric Randowski Superman, Batman, Justice League, etc. TV series. Tintin is their equal or better.

The seventh top mover is, somewhat to my surprise, about half of the Steve Ditko books in the stacks, the top being Creepy Presents: Steve Ditko. His Marvel Masterworks: Doctor Strange [Vol. 1] is popular, as well. Again, the common denominator isn’t that Ditko drew hundreds of comics but that his covers tend to be bright and—compared to the Kirby, Kubert, and Adams’ titles—simply yet beautifully drawn. His Creepy Presents volume moves so well that I’ve seriously considered buying the Bernie Wrightson and Alex Toth volumes, though the only reason I don’t is despite being beautifully drawn with strong writing is that they are so bloody gory!

In positions eight to ten, my best movers are all DC titles that are, yet again, characterized by an animated style throughout. Number eight is Darwyn Cooke’s Batman: Ego and Other Tales steadily moves at about twice the rate of any other super-hero title in the library. It not only features Cooke’s (and others) beautiful artwork, but his excellent writing as well.

In ninth place is Batman: A Lot of Li’l Gotham, by Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs, the concept of which is that the entire Batman Universe is done in the style of a Little Archie art and story approach. It’s a delightful book, with cunning (and quite humorous) writing and the artwork is spot-on. Nguyen’s art manages the hat trick of being funny in general, serious when needed, and somewhat sexy in a completely non-threatening way. (Check out Zatanna sporting a Mexican sombrero or Poison Ivy in just about every panel she appears). Having Harley Quinn’s hair stick out from under her harlequin hat like Archie Comics’ Li’l Jinx is quite charming.

Tenth place is shared by the first two volumes of Gotham Academy—the only two available in hardcover—comics that offer the (not-common for mid-school level) bonus of being girl-centric. The series features consistently high-quality writing by Becky Cloonan and Brenden Fletcher, and tasty manga-style artwork by Karl Kerschl. The two lead characters’ bonding and the premise of them, along with fellow classmates, forming a Scooby-Doo type detective team investigating mysteries at Gotham Academy are strong components of the series.

At least the mainstream comics companies—in particular, DC—now realize the advantage of marketing books with an animated style in appealing to midlevel teens. It’s a good move and I hope it succeeds.

OUR ARTISTS AT WAR THE BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN WAR COMICS The first book ever published in the US that solely examines War Comics published in America. It covers the talented writers and artists who supplied the finest, most compelling stories in the War Comics genre, which has long been neglected in the annals of comics history. Through the critical analysis of authors RICHARD J. ARNDT and STEVEN FEARS, this overlooked treasure trove is explored in-depth, finally giving it the respect it deserves! Included are pivotal series from EC COMICS (Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat), DC COMICS (Enemy Ace and the Big Five war books: All American Men of War, G.I. Combat, Our Fighting Forces, Our Army at War, and Star-Spangled War Stories), WARREN PUBLISHING (Blazing Combat), CHARLTON (Willy Schultz and the Iron Corporal) and more! Featuring the work of HARVEY KURTZMAN, JOHN SEVERIN, JACK DAVIS, WALLACE WOOD, JOE KUBERT, SAM GLANZMAN, JACK KIRBY, WILL ELDER, GENE COLAN, RUSS HEATH, ALEX TOTH, MORT DRUCKER, and many others. Introduction by ROY THOMAS, Foreword by WILLI FRANZ. Cover by JOE KUBERT. (160-page FULL-COLOR TRADE PAPERBACK) $27.95 • (Digital Edition) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-108-0 • SHIPS FALL 2021!

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Whether you loved watching The Lone Ranger, Rawhide, and Zorro from the 1950s—The Andy Griffith Show, The Monkees, and The Mod Squad in the 1960s—Adam-12, Battlestar Galactica, and The Bionic Woman in the 1970s—or Alf, Fraggle Rock, and “V” in the 1980s—there’s something here for fans of TV and comics alike!

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No other word comes to mind about the art of Terry Dodson except charm. Okay, in truth there’s lots of descriptive words I can lay on the almost 30-year comics veteran’s stuff, but let’s agree charm is near’bouts top of the list. I first encountered the native Oregonian’s work at a Big Apple Con, sometime in the mid-’00s, where (if memory serves) he and wife Rachel’s table was incongruently set next to the spot occupied by no less than S. Clay Wilson (selling his childhood pirate comics) and Spain Rodriguez, two legendary— and notorious—underground comix artists. Much as I was in the thrall of the work of those ZAP collective members, I was completely captivated

by Terry’s wonderful comic book work.

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#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Adventureman TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc., & Terry Dodson.

This spread: Clockwise from above, is Claire, the star of Adventureman; Vera Yelnikov from Red One; Coraline from Terry’s first Songes album; Terry’s portrait from the Star Wars online wiki page; and Phaedra Phantom, from Adventureman. Background is original art pages. All art by Terry with inks by Rachel Dodson.

Comic Book Creator: Where were you born, Terry?

Terry Dodson: Oregon, born and raised. Went to college at Portland State and then started working full-time in comics while still in college, so there was never a need for me to go anywhere else. Everyone in comics was either here or moved here. It was a nice place to live and it felt like the industry all came here eventually.

CBC: Whereabouts are you today?

Terry: I’m on the Oregon coast. I was born and grew up in a small town here. We were in Portland for almost 20 years and, once high-speed internet moved into the rural areas, we were ready to get out of the city and have more free time in the open green part.

CBC: Do you come from a big family?

Terry: Yes. I have four brothers.

CBC: Where do you stand in the mix?

Terry: I am the youngest. And by a gap, too, by six years with my next older brother. There are 14 years between the oldest and me.

CBC: Were they into comics and the trappings of American youth?

Terry: No. I was the only comic-book person. There was that gap in years and I was the only one who got into comics and creating art. I was completely different from my brothers, in that sense. There are no ties in that direction with either comics or creating art with my parents either. I was the last kid with more time and free space, you fill that up.

CBC: Did you have close neighbors?

Terry: For the most part, yes. The town I grew up in was pretty small, but we were in the “city part” of it.

CBC: Was there a group of kids you hung out with?

Terry: Yes. There were always kids to play with, play sports with, read comics with… whatever we did.

CBC: To what do you attribute your creative streak?

Red One TM & © Xavier Dorison & Terry Dodson. Coraline TM & © D.P. Filipini & Terry Dodson. Photo © the respective copyright holder.

From the moment of that startling discovery on, I was a Dodson fan, immediately recognizing the vital contribution that Rachel’s inks brought to her husband’s pencils, and I found myself scouring the comic racks for wherever the couple’s work appeared as they bounced back and forth between DC and Marvel assignments.

As of late, the Dodsons have been toiling in the independent realm, producing with writer Matt Fraction, Adventureman, an utterly (yes, there’s that word again) charming series published by Image that’s all-ages fun steeped in 1940s pulpish lore, supernatural menace, and New York City art deco. The first story arc was released amid the raging Covid-19 pandemic and widespread civil unrest. The second Adventureman arc is due about the time this CBC is out, hopefully a less viral, more healthy time.

After Ye Ed promised the Dodsons I’d conduct that interview when first we met, the day finally came via chats with Terry this April.—Ye Ed. Terry: It’s very complicated. My first memory of drawing wasn’t until I was at least eight. I didn’t draw as a kid. There was no drawing in the house. I have no memory of comics in my early years. I know when I first started drawing, because I’d seen Star Wars and I became friends with a kid who was a Star Wars fan and he drew. So, it was from that I started drawing. I had never drawn before that. During our first time together, he showed me how to draw Jawas and T.I.E. fighters. That’s my memory of when I started to draw.

CBC: You drew what?

Terry: Jawas and T.I.E. fighters. Star Wars stuff.

CBC: Sorry, I heard, “Jawas and typewriters.” [chuckles] Terry: He was showing me how to draw them, after he learned from the toys or photos, so, for my first drawing, I drew like my friend drew. And it went from there. I think it took a while for me to do my own. It wasn’t until he left after a couple of years and I was in the fifth grade. I started when I was eight and was 12 or 13, that age, when I was getting into comics and from that age on, in my spare time, I would draw to entertain myself.

CBC: You were born in 1969?

Terry: Nineteen seventy.

CBC: You saw Star Wars when it was first released?

Terry: Yes. I would have seen it late 1977 or even in mid-’78—I still haven’t figured that out exactly I was too young to understand the hype, but I remember there being magazines and books about it—I hadn’t even yet seen the trailer for it—and the vision of what

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Above: Due to a newborn fascination with the hit motion picture of that time, young Terry Dodson’s first exposure to fan culture came with Star Wars #14 [Aug. 1978] and Famous Monsters of Filmland #138 [Oct. ’77]. Below: Graduating preschooler Terry Dodson in 1975. Inset is the earliest existing work by Terry, who later described it: “Family Christmas card my mom had me draw in 1975, the year my dad died.”

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Star Wars TM & © Lucasfilm, Ltd. Famous Monsters of Filmland TM & © Philip Y. Kim.

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I thought it was came from seeing that stuff in the bookstore, and then going to the theater and being blown away. That weekend after we saw it, I remember going out and getting my first Star Wars comic book, #14 [Aug. ’78]… Famous Monsters of Filmland with the Star Wars cover [#138, Oct. ’77]… and it was all brand-new stuff for me, that kind of pop culture, fan culture. That was completely new. That got me into toys, which got me being with friends who played with the toys, and then I drew. I credit everything to Star Wars. It all channels back to that.

CBC: Is that one reason you took on the Princess Leia assignment?

Terry: Definitely. At that point, I had fairly burned out doing mainstream monthly work and I was already starting to do some creator-owned stuff and [chuckles] I got that phone call. There is one thing I would do on long-term mainstream project, it would be a Star Wars project. That would be it. When I heard about

Marvel getting the license, I thought, “That’s interesting!” But I was all ready to do creator-owned stuff and then I got that call: “We got the license.” “Oh, okay!” “We want to do something.” “That’s cool. What character?” “Princess Leia.” “Okay!

But what era?” “The second after Star Wars ends.” So that appealed to the Star Wars fan in me.

CBC: When you take on these assignments, do you confer with Rachel before you say yes or no?

Terry: Umm… sort of. [pauses] Anything major, I talk to her about. Her stance on it all is: if I’m excited about it, then it shows in my work so she’s very excited to work on it. She doesn’t really care what we do, but if I’m excited about it, then that insures her knowing it’s something she wants to work on. She has similar tastes in that way.

Our respective radar works well together to decide on what we will work on.

CBC: I was looking through the checklist of all your work and there are so many covers, especially in the last six or seven years. Can you make a living off just doing covers?

Terry: Yes, I could. However, I really enjoy storytelling, drawing pages, and creating worlds, which I can only really do in comics. But, yes, I could just do covers and get by, but I enjoy both.

I think I enjoy actually drawing the pages more—doing the storytelling and world-building, and all that stuff—but the covers are fun in that they are the closest I can get to illustration and you get to try out things. “This is good; this is fun,” and then move to something else.

CBC: Do you do other gigs? Do you teach at all?

Terry: My bread and butter is doing comics, but every year there is stuff that I do that is either commercial jobs or online work or just oddball things, because it’s kind of fun to try other things and take on any kind of new challenge.

My entire career, I’ve never been at a point where I had to look for something else. There’s always been an editor’s assignment in front of me. I think I’m in the 28th year now and there’s always been something else available for me to choose from. So there was never a point where I thought, “I need to get out and find something.” Teaching and all that… though there have been offers for that kind of stuff… but I’ve never been in a position to have to do things I hadn’t necessarily plan on doing. If I do something that is non-comics, it’s because it pays really well and it’s a challenge creatively. It’s good to develop a skill set.

CBC: Can you give me a description of taking on that annual non-comics job, pre-Covid?

Terry: Oh, let me think… I just did a piece for a video game, which hasn’t come out yet. That was a couple of months ago.

CBC: So, if you feel right for a job that’s offered, you just go for it?

Terry: I’m a creative person, and I like challenges, it’s good to get out of your comfort zone. Because of the internet, people are so easy to get a hold of nowadays. For 20 years now, it’s been easy to get a hold of me from the internet, so I get job offers from all over the place to do design work on something or illustration work for something.

So that stuff always comes filtering through. And I’m always kind of busy. My professional schedule is always full, but if something unique comes along, I can push the date to a certain point and if it’s worth my time and fits the schedule for me to do it… like the cereal box for Count Chocula! [chuckles] That was such an goofball assignment! Everybody in the world knows Count Chocula cereal outside of comics, and I have family members far more excited about

that than any of the other stuff I had done. Because everybody’s grown up with that cereal and knows what it is!

CBC: Of course!

Terry: In the span of my career, though, now everybody knows Star Wars, Spider-Man and the X-Men, and all this stuff. It’s all so mainstream now, so when I tell them I work on a mainstream comic, everybody knows what that stuff is. The pop-culture awareness in society is hilarious. So, me just working on an issue of Spider-Man, “Oh yeah, Spider-Man! We know what that is.” In the beginning, that wasn’t the case. Not that I care, but it’s hilarious how everybody in every age group knows—or is a fan of—Deadpool or Wonder Woman, but that just did not happen when I first started working.

CBC: Are your brothers cognizant of your work?

Terry: Yes… plus their kids! Their kids, my nieces and nephews, are way more interested in my stuff. That’s a nice way to connect with them.

CBC: Do you have kids?

Terry: No, but between Rachel and me, we have 25 or 30 nieces and nephews, so we didn’t really feel the need. [laughter] They’re always around.

CBC: Lucky you, Terry. You can say, “Goodbye.”

Terry: That is kind of a reason. [chuckles] Our oldest nieces and nephews are now in their 30s and they’re having kids and it’s pretty neat to see the family grow.

CBC: Were you sociable in junior high and high school?

Terry: Actually, I was. I’ve always been a quiet person, but I did sports. I did three sports a year: football, track, and basketball, from seventh grade through my senior year. My dad coached and my brothers coached, so it was normal.

I grew up playing sports and my friends played sports. I wasn’t that into sports, outside of me participating. I watch way more sports on TV now than I did as a kid. I didn’t really care about pro sports when I was playing… and winning! [laughs] CBC: Were you collecting comics through junior high and into high school?

Terry: Yes. Star Wars got me into comics and through the ads selling all the Marvel stuff, I started buying Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. As soon as I started buying, I was collecting almost simultaneously. I saw the Mile High Comics ads and noticed the price of some back issues, and I thought, “The Star Wars comics I bought are worth that much money?” In my mind, that’s what I was thinking, so I was buying comics to read and as collectibles—as a hobby—from fourth grade on. I subscribed to Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four in fourth or fifth grade for a year and then I realized that if I bought through the comic shop or the newsstand, I’d get them in better condition than the subscription copies.

CBC: Were you indulged as a kid? That’s pretty young for getting subscriptions.

Terry: They were just so cheap. I was very economically minded. With a subscription, you could get two for the price of one. That’s actually a really good deal. I think my first comic was 60¢ or 75¢, so I got a subscription, but I only did it for a year. I liked to go get the comic book. That was a big deal for me.

CBC: Did you have jobs as a kid?

Terry: My spending was pretty minimal. The only thing I spent money on as a kid was comics. I don’t know how much I was spending, but it wasn’t much. I didn’t start working until I was a freshman, summer jobs between eighth and ninth grades, and my spending increased then.

Sports were cheap and then, for reading, there was the library. I don’t remember going to movies that often. I liked them, but didn’t spend much money on them—maybe once or twice a year.

CBC: What did your dad do?

Terry: Both my parents were teachers. My dad worked at the high school and my mom taught at the elementary school.

CBC: When you were in elementary school, your mom was also there?

Terry: Yes, but what she did was switch the grades she taught, so she never taught my grades.

CBC: But she was in the building, so that must have been something! [chuckles] Terry: Yes. It was cool for me. After school, I’d go hang out in her classroom when all the kids were gone and draw or watch movies on the school VCR she had in the classroom.

We never had classes that overlapped. She did that on purpose.

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Above: Nine-year-old Terry drew this illo, circa 1980.

Below: Eugene Register Guard, Oct. 23, 1986, with “articles that opened my mind to the reality of drawing comics. Gary Martin was an inker living in Eugene, and there’s mention of the launch of Dark Horse Comics in Milwaukie! I studied and studied this paper!”

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Above: Everybody has to start somewhere! And for Terry Dodson that was Rock N’ Roll Comics #38 [Nov. 1991], his first professional art job. This is the splash page of that ish. Below: Scott Jackson’s cover for same.

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Rock N’ Roll Comics TM & © the respective copyright holder.

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CBC: Did you get along with your dad?

Terry: Actually, my dad died when I was four-and-a-half.

It was kind of weird because I have some memories of him, but because I was so young, I don’t have that much recollection. My mom basically raised all of us. My oldest brother was graduating from high school the week when my dad died, so he was out of the house that summer, but my mom essentially raised five boys by herself.

CBC: In retrospect, was it tough for her? Were you all good boys?

Terry: Yes. We were all pretty good kids; we were all good in school. We all did sports, so we were all fairly well occupied. I think she did well. All my brothers have done well in life with their careers. It’s an inspiring story to lose one’s husband at age 39 and raise five sons who have all gone off and become fairly successful in their lives.

CBC: Did he die in an accident?

Terry: He was 44 and had a stroke. I think there are some bad genes on that side of the family. I’m the youngest and I’m 50 and none of my brothers have inherited those bad genes, as far as we know, so we lucked-out.

CBC: Your mom never remarried?

Terry: No. I think she worked and raised the boys; she had

her hands full. Well, she did remarry, but that was years later, in later life.

CBC: In retrospect, even as a four-year-old, could you feel a sense of loss? Was it palpable?

Terry: I was pretty well taken care of. I remember I had a babysitter. So it wasn’t a big change in my life. It didn’t really upset too much of what I was doing. I was basically a kid playing. I was aware of it happening… and the more I think about it now, the more I realize it had to be extremely traumatic—for my mom especially—and my brothers, but for me, there was not much effect. I know that if my dad had lived, I would be a completely different person. I wouldn’t have been a comic book artist. It would have been a totally different upbringing.

CBC: Was it benign neglect that you were able to pursue your own muse?

Terry: Exactly! I think that’s exactly the reason why I ended up where I did. Once I was on my path as a kid, my mom was spending a lot of time working at her job, so that left a lot of time for me to become myself. It didn’t put me on a career to be a doctor; it put me on a career path to draw!

CBC: Is your mom still with us?

Terry: Yes! CBC: Do you see her with frequency?

Terry: Yes, she actually lives not far from us, so I’m able to see her every week. She’s actually doing extremely well.

Rachel’s parents and my mom are still alive and they’re getting older, and this year has been tough for them… because they really need to be out and seeing people and having people come and see them. So, with our parents have to take care of themselves, it’s been a difficult year. They’ve all been vaccinated now, so I’m hoping life will return to normal for them.

CBC: Is your mom in her mid-80s?

Terry: Yes. I’m glad my brothers and I have her family’s genes. Knowing my dad died when he did and now, realizing I’m 50 and that he died at 44, it’s just astounding.

CBC: Do you exercise?

Terry: Yes. Right after we got married, Rachel and I started exercising regularly. We’re religious about it. Our jobs are so sedentary, it’s so important we get out and do stuff.

CBC: Do you do it in the morning?

Terry: No, it’s in the afternoon. I’m so used to working half a day and then taking a break. All my exercise activities are in the afternoon. I’ll go outside and clear my head and solve my work problems. It’s such a big part of my life where I can unwind and take stress out, but also solve any work problems I have, whether it’s design work or story stuff. I can take my mind out, relax, and solve problems… when I’m not trying to solve them. Some people talk about solving problems while in the shower; for me, it’s while I’m on my runs or swimming or riding my bike. It’s really therapeutic.

CBC: Were you artistic in high school?

Terry: Yes, I was. By the time I got into high school, I’d finally started drawing enough that I had actually gotten decent at doing it. I was really behind the ball on drawing because I started drawing so late. In high school, I only drew in the summers because, during the school year, I just never had time. With academics and sports, there was never time in my day to draw for those nine months. In my junior and senior year, I took art class in school, which was the first time during the school year I could draw and paint.

It wasn’t that I learned a lot, but it did give me that hour a day during the school year to be creative.

CBC: Can you point to somebody in your teen years that maybe mentored you, in a sense? Or was there a teacher who really helped you out?

Terry: I think I was pretty self-motivated to learn. I remember showing my brother my sketchbook in the eighth grade that was focused on comic books, and he said, “Draw real life stuff.” That’s pretty much a motto of mine to this day, because the more I spent time drawing from life, the more I learned. When I went to college, I was doing life drawing

Mantra TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

and I realize how much that helped me and I can really see how much of a difference it made when I focused on being a good, well-rounded artist as opposed to being a comic book artist. What a difference that made and how it sped up my learning, rather than just trying to draw super-heroes (which I never really did)! From eighth grade on, I focused on drawing from real life.

CBC: That was an important thing to happen when your brother looked through your sketchbook, I would think. That must have been a vivid moment for you. Do you remember your brother making that suggestion?

Terry: Yes. It was something I kind of forgot about, but with you asking if anyone in my family mentored me, I remembered my brother talking about it. In my sketchbook, I switched over to drawing real life stuff, so by the time I was in high school and attending art class, when we were to draw real objects, I already knew how to draw that stuff; whereas, before that, I focused on comic-booky kind of stuff in my sketchbook. From eighth grade on, I understood that, in order to draw a thing, you had to see it with your eyes.

Then I started doing watercolors and stuff, but all through that time, I started doing sample pages. I was just doing two or three pages over a summer trying to be a comic book artist, but I was able to take those to conventions. The convention circuit in Oregon was, luckily for me, was actually okay, pretty decent, because there were enough guys who had worked at Marvel or DC who had moved back to Portland. Once or twice a year, there would be a show and I’d get to talk to those guys and show them my portfolio and get good feedback. So I was developing drawing, perspective, storytelling, and page layout for fun for a few months in the summer. That was beneficial. Each summer, I’d get better and better. By the time I was in college, the improvements were really paying off because I was getting some job offers. So, showing my work once or twice a year was huge to develop my art—to get positive feedback, to get art lessons,

and have people explain everything to me at a convention. I wasn’t getting that information anywhere else.

I wasn’t hanging out with people who were drawing. There was no formal learning or any of those resources around. The best thing I had at that point was How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way (which, kinda funny, there is some pretty solid stuff that will help you learn to draw). The portfolio review was really good. A light bulb went off when I got the feedback that I did.

CBC: Who helped you at those conventions?

Terry: Randy Emberlin, Chris Warner, Ron Randall, Karl Kesel, Aaron Lopresti, Gary Martin, the Allreds… these are the guys I remember helping me during my high school years. They’d be at the shows every year, so to hear that feedback from the same person a year later was really good.

By the time I was getting close to working, they knew who I was and they really focused and nail down what I was doing wrong—to really get critical, because they knew what I needed was as much criticism as possible. To really figure out how to get better. It was great. That’s the one thing I can point to as far as mentors. I had no connection to anyone outside that show. Once I left that show, I didn’t have any phone numbers, I didn’t have anybody I could seriously talk to about this stuff. I didn’t have a comic book group or a drawing club or anything like that. I had friends who thought what I did was cool, but no one else to really feed off of.

CBC: In retrospect, do you think you were a pre-professional artist or were you a comics fan who became a professional? What I mean by “fan,” I mean in a fannish way. Did you seek out fanzines?

Terry: I learned about the comics profession by reading Amazing Heroes and The Comics Journal. I dug up everything. It wasn’t just art for me, but I’d go into the library and read every book they had on art. Then I’d be going to the comic shops and dig through their magazines to find any article I could find that had anything on how to do comics. The whole time, even when I got my first real work, I wasn’t just on a path to become a comic book artist. I just enjoyed doing it and I knew it was a possibility. I was having fun drawing. It gave me a direction to go with my drawing, but it wasn’t a straight line that I was on, like, “Oh, I’m really close now.” Until that point, all my art classes and stuff, I really enjoyed art. I enjoyed painting, figure drawing, design, and art history. I just loved all that stuff. But I also loved comics, which was a whole other thing because of storytelling, where so much of the work you have to do is from your head. I enjoyed that challenge. I liked creating and designing; all sorts of stuff.

In comics, I could

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This page: Terry’s first regular comic book gig was as the somewhat regular penciler of Mantra, the monthly Malibu Comics “Ultraverse” series created by Mike Barr and featuring costume designs by Adam Hughes. Above is the first issue’s cover [July 1993], with art by Hoang Nguyen. Inset left is cover art detail for the cover of Mantra #2 [Aug. ’93], with pencils by Terry and inks by Jason Martin. Below is a pin-up of the super-hero drawn by Terry (likely sometime in the mid-2000s).

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Above: None other than the masterful Kevin Nowlan himself requested to ink young Terry’s pencils for the Dark Horse mini-series, Star Wars: Dark Force Rising. Page from #2 [June ’97]. Below: Cover for #1 [May ’97] by Mathieu Lauffray.

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Star Wars TM & © Lucasfilm. Ltd.

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really focus on that stuff; it really scratched that itch. When I was in college, I was studying engineering, which I went into because I like to create stuff. I didn’t want to be an architect—it was interesting, but not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. With an engineering degree, I could go into sophisticated design like cars or industrial. I didn’t know what that was. Then I realized that in comic books, I could design all that stuff! [chuckles] I could design cars, motorcycles, spaceships…all of it! I kept pursuing it, but not seriously until I was very close to getting regular work.

CBC: Hmm… that sounds pretty practical for a young man, Terry.

Terry: Yeah! [chuckles] CBC: Did you avoid partying and were you on a pretty safe path? Did you get into rock ’n’ roll?

Terry: No, I was on a pretty good path. (In high school, my mom worked in the district, so I had to be good.) In college, I had to work. I worked a job in order to pay for my education because my scholarships weren’t enough to pay for everything. Starting in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, from that point on, I worked a job to pay for my education. When you’re going to school

and working, there really isn’t time for much else. I started to really focus to get it done, and I took out a student loan so I wouldn’t have to work for a few years. By January, I got hired to work in comics full-time, so it was very fortuitous.

I got that job because I had gotten that loan, because it enabled me to free my time to get where I needed to be.

I did love rock n roll, though, I didn’t have money to go to concerts until I started working though…

CBC: So, you went to college for engineering, but was becoming a comic book artist always on your mind?

Terry: Yes, but I wasn’t thinking of it as a career; I just thought, “Oh, I just enjoy doing it.” I enjoyed making art— drawing, painting, designing, sculpture, creating. It was only in the summertime, when I wasn’t going to school, when I really had the time to do the portfolio stuff. By the time of my junior and senior year, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel was getting close. I wasn’t thinking long-term about being a comic book artist. I could see the practicality of being an engineer and then I got pushed to more of a business degree because I could see that being an engineer wasn’t what I wanted to do long-term. I could tell my brain was going somewhere else. [chuckles] The whole time, from my very first term, I took drawing classes because I needed something to fill up my engineering curriculum with something else besides math and science. So, I went, “Oh, I’ll take a drawing class,” because I had never really had the opportunity, and it was so much fun that, by the second term, I was taking drawing and design classes and then, by the second year, I was taking live drawing and a figure painting class, so the whole time I was taking engineering stuff, I’m taking art classes because I really enjoyed them and I was learning so much. It was helping my grades, too, because I was getting straight As. CBC: Where did you go to college?

Terry: Portland State University CBC: Was it nearby?

Terry: It was in Portland, basically a commuter school in downtown, I chose to go to school there as it was in Portland. That was a huge impetus to go to that school, because I wanted to be in Portland, because I wanted to be in a city.

I enjoyed it. It was a blast to go there. I could go to school and walk out and be in the city and go do stuff. I could go to the library, Powell’s Books, and the shops, as much as I wanted to, as they were all within walking distance. I’d go a couple hours a day. I enjoyed being in the city. I enjoyed the liveliness and the energy… and the anonymity of the city— still do! I could be alone and be able to think, look, study. It was very practical that way.

I really lucked out at Portland State because all the art teachers were retiring by the time I was done, and they were from a generation or two before, so I got very good practical, classical art training, which no one else was getting. If I had enrolled in another class, I would have had to settle for “Painting with Spray Cans,” but the person I ended up having was actually an old-school, classically-trained artist and then my life began. And that was huge and made me what I am today. If I had been in a different drawing class, that wasn’t doing real drawing, I would have given up real quick and gone ahead with my engineering.

But, since my very first drawing class, he brought out a skull and that’s what we drew that very first day. All of a sudden, I was learning and it was very exciting from the beginning.

My painting teacher was also classically trained and was from the French Impressionist school and that just opened my eyes to so much stuff that is, to this day, still influential on me. When I consider color, I don’t look at comic books; I look at the real world and classical paintings and so many other avenues that are out there. As an artist, the broader your influences, the better you are going to be because you’re pulling stuff from so many places.

CBC: When you were a senior in high school and then into college, were you dating?

Terry: Yeah. I actually met Rachel and started dating when

Generation X TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

I was in my junior year of high school. She was an artist as well, painting these gigantic five- by ten-foot animal paintings—wildlife paintings. We had numerous things in common, but for both of us to be interested in art was huge.

CBC: Wow. Terry: She didn’t have any interest in comics, but—and this is funny and something I forgot about—but her and I would read stuff like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. We loved that stuff. We would go in the high school library, grab the newspaper, and read the comics, so we did have a common ground in comic art, but I didn’t really think about it at the time as “comics,” because in my mind, comics was something completely different—comic books. It’s hilarious that we bonded over that stuff.

The first gift I ever got her in high school was a Far Side T-shirt and she got me a Calvin and Hobbes collection. [chuckles] Later on, and this makes perfect sense, there was a long gap between my comic book world crossing over with her world. She went to school for interior design and I started working while still in college. About a year after I started working, I hooked her up with a friend in Portland—Gary Martin—being his

assistant, inking, because she had natural control of the brush from the first time she tried it. She was instantly a professional inker. She came in from that direction, having no interest in being a comic book artist, just having an amazing skill at doing it. She had instantaneous control, which most people work their whole lives to get, and she just had it. And she’s really meticulous and, through her own art, has a really artistic background.

CBC: Were you each other’s first main relationship?

Terry: The first real longterm, obviously, though we dated others in high school, but we stayed together from then on.

It helped that she was a year older than me, so we weren’t always together in the same classes. Then we both went to different schools in Portland and I’d help her out with her school projects. She got done early with school and started working, so I had free time to just draw by myself. I think if she had been around more, I may not have done those portfolio samples, but there was a gap there when she was working, so during

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

This page: Terry drew an impressive run of the Marvel mutant title Generation X in the later ’90s. At top left is inprogress page from #52 [June ’99]. Above is cover art for #53 [July ’99]. Inset left is #37 [Apr. ’98] cover detail. Below is #45 cover [Early Dec. ’98].

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This page: Of course, it was T.D.’s run on Harley Quinn that was his breakout gig. Above is cover for #1 [Dec. ’00] .

Right is detail from #12 cover [Nov. 2001].

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Harley Quinn TM & © DC Comics.

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that year or two, that was me going from being “almost good enough” to being “good enough.” It was just sheer chance all that stuff worked out, that I had extra time to draw and get good, at a professional level, for comics.

CBC: Some people might argue with me, but I think in many ways, the art of comics right now is as good as it has ever been. I don’t care where they were born, but even in the super-hero comics, but there is an amazing ability to do wonderful stuff. Do you look at comics, from 1990, as compared to now, that comics have risen up maybe just incrementally closer to fine art?

That it is just getting better?

Terry: Yes, definitely. It’s not so apparent that it’s fine art as it is its own art form, but across the board, it’s unbelievable how much comics have changed. Comics exploded in the mainstream when I was a fan in my teenage years, when Dark Knight, Maus, and Watchmen happened, so as a teenager, I thought that was normal. I don’t know how much better it’s

gotten, because when I first got into comics, they were already really, really good.

The Image thing happened, when they were really polished and publishing their own work, when I was breaking in. My first regular work was Ultraverse with Malibu and that all happened because of Image money. [Between 1992–93, Malibu was the original “publisher of record” for Image Comics—Ed. note.] That was normal to me. You can go be successful, own your work, and be a good artist, and that’s what I assumed would happen. So, to see today that everybody is getting better, it makes complete sense to me.

I think page rates, ownership, art sales, and conventions— all that stuff—has gone hand-in-hand in my career. And you can see why there’s good art being done. Because people are getting exposed to good work, and printing is better, schools are better, competition is a little higher because there’s more people doing it. The explosion of manga in the late ’90s and early ’00s, brought in all the female artists and writers, which is gigantic because that’s half the population and we’re getting exposed to really well-written stuff, material that’s well thought-out, and not just super-hero stuff. All that combined, plus the popularity of animation and the cheapness of sophisticated tools allows anyone in the world to create all this stuff, and so the level of competition keeps rising because, with the internet, we can see what the other person is doing. We can also see what the next generation is doing and it just feeds itself… So, yeah, I think it’s one of the best times ever for that stuff and it makes me hopeful that comics will always be around in one form or another.

I remember the first year I was working full-time in comics as a professional, I was talking to Aaron Lopresti, a friend of mine, who was sharing a studio with me in Portland. I’m thinking, long-term, at whatever age I was—23 or 24 or 25—“I can’t imagine that I would quit reading comics.

I think I’ll be reading comics until I retire or whatever. So that means everybody else my age or older will be reading comics, so that means my career is ensured.” So that means comics will be around until I will want to quit doing them. [chuckles] And the cool thing that’s happened is comics kept growing and growing. The health of it… I wasn’t thinking financially, but rather the health of the medium itself, by seeing how good comics are today. I think that’s just great, because the reinvention of comics keeps happening.

CBC: Prior to Image, there was an explosion of black&-whites, largely due to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

You were an up-and-coming comic artist with improving abilities. Did you have any thoughts about doing your own self-published comic book stories?

Terry: All the comic books I was doing in the summers during high school were my own stories. Based on that right there, Dark Horse was an Oregon comic book company that started in 1985, when I was a freshman in high school. For me, to see that stuff being produced in Oregon…? That was one of the biggest influences in my career, I think.

CBC: Did you have any of that stuff printed?

Terry: No, I never had the wherewithal to finish anything I did in those years. The fact that I did anything is fairly amazing. Nothing I ever started got finished. If it got penciled; it didn’t get inked, or lettered, or whatever. I think I wanted to finish them, but…

With a friend of mine who didn’t draw, we were big fans of comics and really liked the independent stuff—the Dark Horse comics or the more science fiction or fantasy material. I bought a lot of Marvel stuff because it was available, but I was also always a fan of everything. I grew up with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Super-hero stuff was fun, but that wasn’t my main thing, so when all the b-&-w stuff happened, when the Dark Horse books were happening, I thought it was so cool to see people create their own worlds and the opportunity to do stuff that wasn’t just super-heroes was very exciting to me. That kept me interested in comics.

Harley Quinn, Batman, associated characters TM & © DC Comics.

This page: Above is Terry’s pencils for his art on the cover of Harley Quinn by Karl Kesel and Terry Dodson: The Deluxe Edition, Vol. 1 [Nov. 2017]. At far right is same with Rachel’s inks. Inset right is Harley commission piece by Terry.

I really enjoyed Barry Windsor-Smith’s work because he was doing all the fantasy stuff. After he was gone for years from Conan and then came back to Marvel in the ’80s, but there was a period where he was doing the fantasy work with watercolors—the Pre-Raphaelite work—and I thought, “This is what I want to do.” That was the coolest stuff ever. What I’ve done in my career is been very much based off of that. I have not looked at that work since then, but all of the influences there were based on me being exposed to that stuff when I was 15 or 16. I started water-coloring art at that age because I loved how his stuff looked. I do watercolors today, so his influence on me ends up being how I use colors on my work today.

CBC: Were you known in school for drawing? Did you draw stuff for your high school yearbook?

Terry: I wasn’t known for drawing until I was a junior or senior in high school. So, I drew stuff for banners, graduation, and things like that. My mom may have had me do a couple of things for her class. Before that, I don’t think that anybody really knew that I drew. Comics were not a public thing for me. [chuckles] Though, when I was a junior, I had friends into comics and we would bring them to school. But, by the time you’re a junior or senior, you don’t really care about what anybody else thinks, you’re your own person by then, but before that, no one really knew.

Most of my friends didn’t read comics.

CBC: In college, did you have anything published in the school newspaper?

Terry: No, I didn’t (but I was being published in comics professionally—I just skipped that intermediate step). I did not have any association with anything like that. In school, no one in my art classes would have guessed I liked comics because I was so focused on more thoughtful stuff—classical art. All of my focus was on charcoals or COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

Above: West Virgina state seal—with its official Latin motto that translates as "Mountaineers Are Always Free")— and map of the Mountain State with a star indicating Dixie, W.V., where Tim spent his high school years as a teenager.

painted work or figure studies, nothing with any real illustrative or commercial value to it.

CBC: So, the first time you saw your name in print was with the Malibu stuff?

Terry: That was in 1993. In 1991, I got a job drawing the Rod Stewart comic [Rock N’ Roll Comics #38, Nov. ’91]. I went to the San Diego Con and got that job, got that one issue, which was murder to do. It was 29 pages of pen-&-ink, due in a month, and it turned out awful, and I didn’t get another job because of it. That was the first comic I did. The next summer, I went to San Diego and I didn’t get anything, but out of that came the Malibu job because I’d made enough connections.

I had an agent I met that summer—Steve Donnelly from a creative art agency—I signed up with him at that San Diego convention, I think, and he’s the one who found the Malibu job for me. He got me that job and, every job after that, I got on my own. So, after a year or two, I didn’t need to keep the agent. But he’s the one who got my stuff shown to Malibu. There was a group of people he represented and I think half of those were the new young artists who launched the Malibu line.

CBC: Did you work for Todd Loren? Did he hire you?

Terry: Right, Todd hired me. I had attended San Diego in 1991, we talked, and he called me at home and offered that assignment.

CBC: What made it awful?

Terry: Oh! I don’t think there was a good page or drawing in the whole thing. I literally just drew it as fast as I could, which at that point, was not my specialty. [chuckles] I knew how to draw, but I didn’t know how to draw fast—not a comic book. Two years later for Malibu, I spent three weeks on the sample pages and I was barely happy with them.

CBC: What was the content?

Terry: It was two pages from the Mantra #1 script. I ended up using them in an actual comic book and I spent a 49

This page: The Dodsons’ cover art for Harley Quinn #14 [Jan. 2002]. Next page: Covers of Terry’s French Songes albums produced between 2006–12, featuring his voluptuous Coraline character.

Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy TM & © DC Comics.

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#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Songes, Coraline TM & © Terry Dodson & D.P. Filippi.

lot of time on them. It was a learning process.

I had done some samples for DC through the mail and those pages would be really tough to make to look great. What they’re asking me to do is not my strength. I had become a pretty good artist, but not a fast artist. It was trial by fire when I went on to Mantra. Mantra was okay. I went to San Diego that summer, met an editor from DC, and he hired me to do the Team Titans book, so I was assigned two books a month only three or four months since becoming a professional. Then, Barbara Kesel at Dark Horse asked me to do a three-issue mini-series [Will To Power]. So, there was a point, a year into my career, where I was drawing 60 pages a month for three months.

CBC: Wow! Terry: So, I learned how to draw comics in that time period. [chuckles] CBC: Were you always good at drawing women?

Terry: That’s the weird thing… not that I know of or, well, not intentionally. As I was trying to break in, I was imagining getting Spider-Man or X-Men work. The one reason I’ve taken to drawing more women than anything else was because, back in the beginning, when someone would look at my samples, they’d say, “Your women are really good; you should be doing more of them on your pages.” “Oh!” This was a Punisher sample and there would be a female character in the background, and the person said, “Draw more females in your samples.” So I did! I started doing more X-Men samples, a group that had a bigger range of characters and more 50/50 male to female ratio on my sample pages, and I got hired to draw Mantra because it was a female character and they knew that was what I could do. That wasn’t that I was focusing on it; it was me thinking, “Oh, it’s an opportunity.”

So, no, before I really started working, it wasn’t a focus at all. I think what really helped me out was three or four years of figure drawing in college, because I was drawing real people—real women—every day, so I knew what they looked like. I wasn’t drawing fantasy people or looking at comic books to figure out how to draw them. To this day, that’s the backbone of my art skills: all that the figure drawing and drawing real things to get the action and feeling across, knowing what real things look like and getting the facial expression or the action across to the reader. I became a pin-up artist—or whatever artist!—by sheer need to fill a void by the industry.

CBC: At the same time, there was some outrageous objectification of female super-hero characters in comics at that time, particularly in any number of Image comics. I think you started off a little “bosomy,” so to speak, but it became very noticeable for an observer that your women looked realistic. They didn’t necessarily appear overly exploited, certainly not when compared to other work of that period.

Terry: Right. I’ve heard that. It helped that I learned to draw from real life and I work with a woman in my studio every single day. There’s a woman here. More importantly, there’s a woman looking at my pages as I draw them.

So I need to draw a character that is not objectified, or else I’ll get a comment about it.

Which is great.

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CBC: There’s a woman in the studio also seeing the other comics coming in over the years, many with clearly exploitive over-emphasis on female bodies…

Terry: The thing about Rachel is that she is extremely removed from the comic book stuff, aside from the inking she is doing. Of course, if something is put in front of her, she’ll say something, but comics are “nine to five” for her. She loves doing her job and I can show her something I really like, but even though she really loves her job and gets in a zone with it, she doesn’t look at anything else. If I show her something overtly sexual, she’ll say, “This is awful.”

[News of the Derek Chauvin verdict interrupts the interview, and the case is discussed, as talk turns to Matt Fraction’s essay in Adventureman regarding the killing of George Floyd.—Ed. note.]

Terry: Boy, what a year it has been!

CBC: What a year, indeed… I was very moved

by Matt’s text piece commenting on George Floyd’s death and the aftermath—what he wrote, voicing it in the plural, as coming from you, too.

Terry: It was such a weird time for us—and for everybody, of course, with the pandemic—as Adventureman was going to launch in April.

Because of Covid, it got taken off the schedule because Diamond just stopped. When everything finally lined back up again, it was mid-May (whatever the day was) and we were putting the final touches on that book and the George Floyd thing had happened, along with the riots.

It was a really weird time. We were discussing it and I always felt I was drawing the book with this multi-racial cast and I really wanted to make sure we justified why people were there. I know they’re make-believe characters, but it felt really important that we said something, otherwise we were just cashing in on people’s races as opposed to making interesting characters, so I thought it was important we said something in there. I suggested that to Matt and went he wrote something. He ran it by us all, and it was terrific.

He has kids and he lives in Portland, so he’s seen a lot more stuff on the streets than I have. He was pretty affected. His kids are young and he has to explain what’s going on to them.

It was really cool to have that platform and put that information in [“Anti-racism resources” listings, Adventureman #2]. We felt it was pretty important and timely. Matt did almost zero promotion for the book when it came out because so much was happening since the week before— the riots—everything was really exploding. He didn’t want to do anything he felt wasn’t right. It fell to me to promote the book, as I’d spent four years working on it and hadn’t yet been paid, so, as bad as things were, I had to do interviews, go online, and post stuff. My opinion is that we’re creating entertainment and a diversion for people from the crises, we hoped. It is a very positive book for everybody—at least we hoped!—and hopefully we made something that is fun and entertaining. It felt like almost every person who found it, liked it and it was a diversion for them.

CBC: Pardon the expression, but Adventureman comes off as really wholesome stuff, and I do not mean that as a put-down. It’s engaging and open to all ages.

Terry: Oh, yes. Matt has worked on a lot of comics and it bothered him that he couldn’t read them to his kids, so he decide with this one to go 51

This page: The mini-series Spider-Man/Black Cat had a three-year gap due to writer Kevin Smith’s film commitments.

Above are covers for #1–3 [Aug.–Oct. 2002]. Below: WonderCon 2020 commission.

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Spider-Man/Black Cat TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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in a different direction. This is the one comic he knew that his daughter could read! I always pictured this title as being basically all-ages—but not exclusively a kid’s book—which anyone could enjoy. It was always in the back of my mind that Adventureman was for his daughter while I was working on it. So it is definitely “wholesome”—which is such a badly-used word now—but it is! If children want to read it,

it’s there for them. There are loads in there for everyone, like many of my favorites— Bone, Calvin and Hobbes, and Star Wars. It’s not made specifically for a child, but it’s accessible.

CBC: Is there another story arc coming?

Terry: Yes, I’m currently three issues into the next six-issue story arc. The first four issues got so out of hand. It ended up to be 144 pages, which is average 35 pages an issue—they were gigantic issues, especially if you’re both drawing and coloring them. It was brutal! [chuckles] These issues I’m not working on will be more in the 22- or 24-page range, closer to other titles being produced in the industry. It’s going to be six issues. We don’t have to tell such huge stories to relate as we did in the first arc. We had so much we had to get across in the first one. Our plan is five or six issues a year, but we have ideas for the first five years of story mapped out.

CBC: So that will be your main storytelling excursion every year?

Terry: Yes. That is. I’ve come to that reality. What I’ve come to realize is I’m doing Adventureman and a couple of covers a month. I’m cutting back on covers because now Adventureman is out in the world and I want the story arcs out regularly. Both drawing and coloring it is taking way longer than just drawing a book. Each page takes me close to twice as long as a Marvel page. There’s so much more storytelling and detail and backgrounds… and it’s my book, so I know what everything is supposed to look like. I know it’s for the good of the story that I need a detailed establish shot three pages in a row, which take me a day apiece.

They have to be there, otherwise I’m compromising both the story and myself. It’s my guilt comic! [chuckles] CBC: Some of the scenes are grandiose… the architecture alone…

Terry: Most of the projects I pick for myself are things I’ve always wanted to do. So every time I do a new comic or story, I want to take something I really like and put it into whatever I’m working on. My interests are so varied. For instance, do a story that includes 1890s architecture and other retro designs. It’s about finding something that really excites me and want to spend my time on to make it a thing I’m proud of and have hopefully learned something from and broken new ground.

CBC: Which one of you determined to the Doc Savage character speak with larger word balloons and bigger type, connoting strength, which Claire also has after she becomes “enhanced”? That’s a clever detail that adds to the storytelling.

Terry: That was Matt. He loves that kind of stuff. I can’t remember the conversation between him and [letterer] Clayton [Cowles] and if Clayton suggested it.

CBC: When Claire took her hearing aids out of her ears and you had some fun things going on where you couldn’t see what people were saying with the fogged-up, blurry word balloons, but you could faintly make out what the father was saying. That’s something Barry Windsor-Smith is so adept at … adding that extra dimension of bringing the lettering and word balloons into the cartooning… into the storytelling, if you will… using the actual mechanics of comics is very cool.

Terry: This is my third creator-owned book. My first two were for European publishers. If you work for a European

Wizard, The Comics Magazine TM & © Wizard World, Inc. Black Cat, Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

publisher, they expect you to put in the word balloons and all that kind of stuff. Working on Adventureman, I only occasionally put in the word balloons, but I always design the pages with word-balloon placement in mind. I did all the sound effect lettering. Now, Clayton does the actually lettering and word balloons, but sound effects—so much of the cartooning storytelling—I do myself. I feel like I need to.

If I had more time, I would do the balloons. But I’m always designing the pages.

One lesson I learned by doing the balloons myself was that, for English to French, the balloons have to be different sizes and it all has to be changed when translated. And then you alone have to change it all. I lost so much time doing corrections in the balloons that I swore I wasn’t going to do that again. Even though I think it’s so cool to do the balloons myself. Having the art at hand and being the one designing the size and doing the placement. I can cartoon the balloon, rather than just a circle. It takes on a life of its own. Occasionally I’ll draw the balloon in and actually draw wherever the sound is in that balloon. The cartooniness— it’s my love of Calvin and Hobbes coming through.

CBC: Let’s talk about Coraline. I think that was the first creator-owned project you did…? You also did that exclusively for the French market. Can you talk about it?

Terry: Sure. First of all, I’ve always been a fan of Franco-Belgian comics, since 1985 or so, when I was 14 or 15… the same time when I was discovering independent comics, I discovered that Dark Horse was doing reproductions of Cheval Noir, with the Dave Stevens covers, and Marvel was doing the Epic line with the Moebius stuff, so it was normal for me to discover all of these European artists. So, when I was discovering Arthur Adams and John Byrne, I was also discovering all these European guys, thus the desire to work on European books has always been there, as long as there was a desire to work in comics. I was contacted by Les Humanoïdes in the summer of 2001, when I was drawing the Harley [Quinn] book for DC and they were looking for American artists to work with European writers, to kind of establish a beachhead for the company here in the U.S. I was sent two ideas. One was Coraline and the other one was also a great idea. I liked them both and it turned out that the script for Coraline was done.

Both books were amazing, but Coraline was ready for me. I started working on it in 2002.

This is hilarious because I’m fairly good at managing my time and scheduling my career: I took the assignment because I had just said yes to a Kevin Smith Black Cat/Spider-Man book. Kevin Smith had a reputation for not turning in scripts on time. I’m thinking, “This is perfect; when I’m waiting for Kevin’s scripts, I’ll work on Coraline.” That’s exactly what happened. [chuckles] There was a three-and-a-half year gap, which was perfectly fine because I was under contract with Marvel and they kept me busy. That kept me busy.

I worked on the Coraline book in my spare time between 2002–05, I drew it and, between 2005–06, I colored it. In that time, I taught myself Photoshop. I also drew 40 issues of other comics during the same time. I wasn’t just working in a vacuum.

That period was me learning how to draw and color for myself because my work was shot from pencils. I decided

to develop a style that worked with Photoshop, where I could do my art from start to finish, though I didn’t want to learn how to ink just then… I wanted to do my own work. I figured out if I scanned in my line art from my sketchbook and colored it, that’s the process I figured out on the pages. I did all that and then, from that, I’ve been able to color all of my own work ever since, learning how to use the Photoshop.

CBC: What was the story of Coraline about?

Terry: She was a nanny for a young boy and set in kind of the Steampunk-ish/Victorian era… It had all the stuff I really like or became a fan of. It’s in my favorite era of artwork I really like—the 1870 to early 1900s—old school illustration and French Impressionism and poster art—I love that stuff. This project had all those things in it. I wasn’t really aware of what Steampunk was, but it’s something I took to very naturally. I was a big fan of art nouveau. I loved that stuff. Here was a comic where I could do all that stuff.

I was a fan of British period piece movies and TV shows… women in corsets—all that pretty, elegant stuff—and this book allowed me to do all these things. Basically, the story was this beautiful woman was this nanny for this boy and

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This page: Terry’s Spider-Man/ Black Cat was another significant assignment in his career, and the feline burglar has since become one of the artist’s signature characters. Top is Terry and Rachel’s art for Wizard #130 [July 2002] (subsequently used as a variant cover for Black Cat #1 [Aug. 2019]), and above is the published issue. Inset at left is commission later used as Black Cat #2 [Sept. ’19] variant cover.

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Above: Awesome commission

by Tim featuring a fave Jack Kirby character. Below: Tim has stated Sam J. Glanzman's Kona comics [Dell, 1962–67] made a profound impact. Inset right: Photo of SJG with his beloved dog Lucky, circa 2000.

This page: Another triumph for Terry was his Wonder Woman run. Above is WW #13 [Dec. 2007] art. Inset right is detail from WW promo poster. Below is WW #75 cover [Sept. 2019].

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

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there were a lot of beautiful shots of her. It was great! Because I got to create these pages and every page had something beautiful or interesting on it—a castle design, mechanism, or costume… I am a big fan of [American illustrators] Rockwell and Leyendecker, and they always did these amazing Victorian-looking characters, so I was able to study their work more.

CBC: Was it a narrative?

Terry: Yes, it was a twovolume—supposed to be a three-volume—comic, where she’s essentially supposed to help him become a kid again, because he’s so consumed with inventing things that she has to help him get his brain back to being a child again. And, along the way, there were always a lot of sexy shots with her in it. [chuckles] I don’t exactly understand what the boy had to

do with her being sexy, but… that was what that was.

CBC: It was a French comic. [chuckles] Terry: I’ve never really had to explain what it was except to say, “Just look at it!” [laughter] I really had a lot of fun creating it all—drawing and coloring it all. I had a blast doing the artwork for it. It allowed me to do what I could not do for Marvel or DC because there just wasn’t the opportunity to do artwork like that there. Essentially that artwork I did on Coraline improved my abilities as an artist and so I was able to change my mainstream work for the better—at Marvel or DC or wherever else I wanted to go in my career.

It really improved me as an artist and changed my work enough to make it more… me, I guess, than it had been before. I had all these other influences I was able to play with and integrate into my work and push my style to more of my truer sensibilities as opposed to just standard super-hero stuff, which was never my sensibility. When I got into mainstream comics, I really had to unlearn a lot of stuff in order to get it done. I’d forget what I know and adapt. With the Coraline project, I was able to bring back things I learned in college and things that I liked that I hadn’t been able to do on Spider-Man. CBC: Was Coraline well received in Europe?

Terry: It was! It did very well. It was really cool. For me, it opened up my career because, while I was working on it, I met Bernard May, a big art collector, who owns a comic art gallery in Paris, and I ended up doing six shows with him over the last decade or so. I just finished doing a show with him. That opened up doors to work with other writers and artists in Europe and for me to travel and meet all the artists and go to the stores and really discover what people have been doing in Europe for the last 20 years.

My very first trip to Paris was in 2001 to meet with Humanoïdes and do a store signing. I picked up Blacksad then, which is gigantic book nowadays, but then only the first or second volume was out at that time. That book was a huge influence on me. I’ve had them ship me comic books to sign at stores and ship me whole boxes of books back to me because I bought so much stuff over there. [chuckles] It’s one of those indirect influences that came out of that project. I’ve now gone to Paris to sign there 10 or 12 times since then. I have so many friends there—store owners, publishers, artists, and writers….

CBC: Do you speak French?

Terry: When I came back from that first trip, I signed up for French and studied it for two years, so I can read and write French a little bit, and I can speak some. But since I learned it so late in life and really don’t have a chance to practice, it’s hard for me to understand what someone is saying.

The second project I did in Europe, Red One, I did with Glénat, who are actually the publishers of Adventureman in Europe. That writer, Xavier Dorison, wrote his script in French and, instead of having them translate it, here’s what we’d do: He’d email in French for me to read and I’d email him back in English. His English is better than my French. That was easier, because we could say exactly what we wanted to say and the other person could figure it out. His scripts to me were in French. I’d have it translated because I didn’t know French that well, though being able to sit and read it.

CBC: Was Red One reformatted for the Image comic? The panels look so small.

Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman TM & © DC Comics.

Terry: Yes, Red One and Adventureman are drawn in the same way. They’re both drawn much larger—and wider— for the European format. It is about an inch wider in print than U.S. format. All my pages are actually done in a way… what I came up a halfway between the two, so my pages aren’t as tall as American pages and not as wide as French pages. There’s a little bit of white in the pages, but not enough to notice; however Red One was really dense that when we shrunk it down for the American comic. It was extremely dense. Now Adventureman isn’t nearly as dense, but it’s the exact same format and exact same cut. It looks better because I learned better what to do.

CBC: That must be exciting to have two separate and distinct fan bases, one here and one in Europe.

Terry: What’s cool is that there is a crossover. Pop culture of everything is across the world, everybody knows what everything is, so in Europe there are people that are fans of European stuff and American stuff and then there are people that are just fans of American stuff or just fans of European stuff. There’s almost a third fan base that doesn’t know it. They’ll find something in there.

CBC: It’s a pretty girl, usually!

Terry: Right! What I tried to do with Adventureman, I’m trying to combine the best of American and French comics.

I don’t think what I’m doing is either straight-up American comic book or straight-up bande dessinée [BD]; it’s an amalgam of the two. There are things that are great about both and I’m such a fan of both types of comics, I’m trying to integrate what I like about each of them. Plus I also like anime and manga, so there’s actually stuff that I do that is manga influenced. And, doing your own work, you can do that. There’s an internal logic there that makes sense to you.

As long as you’re telling a good story and it makes sense to you. Anything interesting to you, you keep adding to it.

Traditionally, the French stuff is so dense that it’s kind of hard to get into, the American stuff is so open, I guess, to a French reader, so what I try to do is the best of both.

It’s a bit more of the openness of the American stuff, but with denser French storytelling, with believability, locations, settings, and acting. Working with French writers has really educated me, I’ve learned so much from them—at least from their scripts. And, on Adventureman, I now have an editor, Philippe Hauri, who I really respect his opinion and get very good feedback, the best feedback I’ve ever had from an editor.

CBC: Who were your influences?

Terry: We’ll do it chronologically: initially, while they weren’t artists per se, Star Wars and The Hobbit got me looking at art and design. They were a gigantic influence on me during childhood. Before I got into comics, I got to know, at age seven or eight, about some really cool artists, Frank Frazetta, Maxwell Parish, and Norman Rockwell. Then there was the Star Wars stuff… and Disney cartoons were a big influence. All of that was a pretty good foundation for illustration and fantastic art.

When I started reading comics regularly, the first person I became a fan of was John Byrne. His was the first style I recognized. I remember as a kid buying a comic and the store owner telling me who did the artwork—“That’s by Ditko!” I was like, “Huh?” I had no idea you could possibly look at a drawing and recognize who the artist was that did it! I was 11 or so. Eventually I did get to know the artists by their style, like a signature almost, and that blew my mind. So, John Byrne was the first for me as a comic book person. Then Michael Golden was at about the same time, Art Adams was humongous and got me excited about the X-Men. Then there was latter-day Barry Windsor-Smith, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, Dave Stevens… I remember seeing a jungle girl cover he had done. I bought that just for the cover art and then started researching and found out about The Rocketeer. This was before Comico had launched the Rocketeer book and when it was really hard to find his stuff. It was kind of an obsession to try and find out who he

was. At the same time, European artists like Olivier Vatine and Moebius… those were during my teenage years.

Then, right before I started to break into comics, I had taken painting classes, so I got exposed to more fine-art painters or classical painters. The big one I learned about was John Singer Sargent, who is still, to this day, a gigantic favorite of mine and I see his fingerprints on so many people’s work. You can trace a lot of stuff back to his paintings.

The day I actually got my first comic book job, my big three comic book people were Jim Lee, Adam Hughes, and Mike Mignola. Twenty eight years later, they are still giants now. After that, working in comics full-time, I got exposed to so much stuff. And who influenced the artists whose work I loved, on all levels, going back? I really got back into Michael Golden, who I liked as a child, but working as a professional, to see his stuff and start to understand what he was doing… I gleaned so much about rendering and storytelling.

The Bruce Timm Batman animation work was big then and all that design work and simplification was influential. I learned a lot about how to design stuff in my sketchbooks from looking at Timm’s work. I remember, in my first year of working, picking up The Making of Aladdin, which included the character design and animation of Glen Keane, and that really flipped a switch.

That was huge, because I had grown up with Disney stuff and had gotten away from it, but as

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Above: Justice League #28 [Sept. 2019] variant cover features the Amazon demi-god and two associates. Below: Terry’s rendition received its own action figure in 2007.

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of cool art. Ever since then, I buy art—a variety… not just comic art, but also animation and then classical illustrators’ work, like Dean Cornwell.

I collect a pretty good range of stuff—European comic artists, American comic artists, modern comic artist, classic illustrators, fine art oil paintings…

CBC: You worked across the spectrum of mainstream comics for most publishers from the ’90s to the present.

Terry: Yes, the bulk of my work was for Marvel and DC, because they paid well and they had fun material to work on. For about 15 years, it alternated exclusive contracts between Marvel and DC. In ’99 to around 2013, I had an exclusive with one company or the other at the time. They didn’t care if I worked for smaller companies, so long as I didn’t work for the other! [chuckles] I think Marvel said, “Do whatever you want; just don’t work for DC.” [laughter] CBC: Marvel was going through some real big corporate changes—Marvel Reborn. Did you have any view or opinion of that?

Terry: When Marvel bought a distributor and all the other distributors collapsed?

CBC: Exactly.

Terry: It was all going on, but the weird thing was, I guess I was smart in that I kept agreeing to projects that were a long way off. I wanted to make sure I was employed while there were a lot of changes going on in the industry. I did get offered regular work, but I trying to agree to the next next project. I remember I took on an almost a year-long Star Wars project from Dark Horse, because it was something I really wanted to do, but I also agreed to a Marvel graphic novel which I agreed to be doing a whole year later after that project. That was the way I was approaching work at that #26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Count Chocula TM & © General Mills IP Holdings II, LLC.

a working professional, to see that type of stuff again—color work and design in general of modern Disney animation—was humongous. It was stuff that I had learned in college, I could trace to animation— expressions and movement—stuff as a professional artist, I had skills I hadn’t had previously, so integrating that stuff into my work and discovering more of it was important.

Also modern bande dessinée artists are definitely some of the biggest influence over the last 20 years, over the span of time I’ve been producing work for the European market. Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad, and Claire Wendling, who did comics in Europe for a while before jetting over to animation, and now pretty much just draws for herself, doing amazing work. Mathieu Lauffray is a French artist still working today, who did covers for my Star Wars books at Dark Horse, in the ’90s. He ended up doing more comic book work, which is super-cool. I learned a lot about layouts and storytelling from him. So my influences are pretty broad… [chuckles] I also like visiting art museums to check out older work, from earlier times, and it’s always a blast to see those paintings in person.

I really can’t forget so many of my peers, from Chris Bachalo, Carlos Pacheco, Travis Charest, Becky Cloonan, and, even to this day, Olivier Coipel, who I consider a good friend, is continually doing amazing stuff! Plus all the stunning young talent working in animation, comics, concept, painting that I’ve discovered—especially on Instagram—so much amazing talent!

CBC: Do you collect art? Do you have any original art by other artists?

Terry: Yes. Since I first staring going to conventions, I’ve had to get sketches from people because I’d never seen that stuff —I’d only seen bits and pieces in magazines—but it was cool to get sketches. The year I started working, I went to San Diego and had money, so I picked up a lot

Red One TM & © Xavier Dorison & Terry Dodson.

point, which was to stay working and also remain in good graces with everybody. At that point, there was the Star Wars project and then came out with some X-Men work at Marvel, and also a Batgirl project with DC. After a couple years doing X-Men work at Marvel, I bounced over to do Harley Quinn with DC. Again, that’s when the period starts where I was working under exclusive contracts. So that was me making sure, A: doing what I wanted to do, and B: staying in good form with both companies.

CBC: Quickly, did Marvel have to wait for you to stop being exclusive for Harley Quinn stuff to take on the Spider-Man/ Black Cat stuff?

Terry: Yes. The timing of it was perfect, though. I had maybe an issue or two left of Harley after that contract was up in order to do Spider-Man/Black Cat. It just turned out perfectly. I lucked out. It was just one of those things in your career where you’re glad it works out all right. I went from one project to another project I was excited about. It just worked out perfectly.

CBC: Was it earlier that you saw, “I’m being treated differently.” You gained some prestige?

Terry: With the Harley run, I could feel it both professionally and, I guess, editorially. Before that, I was smart enough to make good decisions about what I realized I should work on to establish me and play to my strengths.

And what schedules were optimal for me to do my best work. That was happening before Harley, but when Harley happened, I knew I was in a really great position artistically and professionally. I was ready to go into it a full 100% and so it turned out it was a huge bonus. I knew it would be a fun project to do and the schedule was good, and having Rachel ink me and getting the colorist I wanted (the then-unknown Alex Sinclair, who I picked from an eight-page story he had colored… and the character!

Yes, I would say that was the point from then on, I had the opportunity to do what I wanted to do.

CBC: Was one main appeal of Harley the humor?

Terry: The main appeal was I was a big fan of Bruce Timm and that school of artists. The project before Harley was Generation X, which I worked on for Marvel for a little over two years, about teenage mutant characters. While working for that, I’d design all those characters in a Bruce Timm animation style for their new costumes. Whenever they introduced new characters, I designed them in that Timm style stuff in my head. Harley was the epitome of that Timm style. I was drawing in that style anyway, so when I got the call to do that book, I was… that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I could work with that amazing design, work with shadows, work in Gotham with red skies. From an art director’s perspective, I could do the book like I wanted it to be. It wasn’t the humor, per se, but that was a bonus. It was a chance to work in a different direction and play with different strengths.

CBC: Have you ever done in the direction of “big foot”— like Frank Cho and Adam Hughes are capable of? When they do humor, it’s very pleasurable and seems a natural fit.

It seems natural with your work, too. Have you gone all out with your humor?

Terry: There was maybe a page or two in Harley sticking pretty close to the true animated style. That was very easy and natural for me. Going in that direction, I’ve had to hold back or I’d start doing that in whole stories. I find myself sometimes doing that in Adventureman in panels. Whole characters will go a bit Disney. Matt called it, “Going Disney on some panels.” He loves it.

CBC: “Going Disney.” [chuckles] Terry: I think it’s a natural progression of my style. It’s a matter of keeping it from getting to be too much.

CBC: It would be nice, as a suggestion, as a one-shot, going all-out in that direction. You seem inclined to lean that way and it works. Humor mixes well with the sensuality of the work. Obviously one sees it in Harley.

Terry: When I go back and look at Generation X, because

it was a teenage book, I’m surprised how far I pushed my style in that book.

Then, in Harley, it was different, but still similar.

Today I see it in Adventureman because we have a 12-year-old boy character in there. Definitely, if the right project came along, I’d do it. It would be fun to do a funny animal book and that would be the style I would choose. I’d go a lot broader and more cartoony. It would be the matter of what the story is. That would dictate it. And there were so many giants who worked in style, thinking of the E.C. era.

CBC: Cool. Obviously Rachel inks your stuff and you merge into one artist. You literally melded together… when did you get married?

Terry: December, 1996.

CBC: I notice, in old credits, her maiden name was Pinnock…?

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This page: Red One is the as-yet unfinished saga (written by Xavier Dorison) of uninhibited Vera Yelnikov, elite Soviet spy, and her uproarious visit to the U.S., in 1977.

Top is cover to the U.S. collection [2015]. Left is the French version’s cover art.

Previous page: Terry was one of three contemporary artists chosen to do their take on the General Mills “monster” cereal characters.

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This page: Red One was developed as a French comics production—though named Red Skin on the continent— one that the creators hope to finish.

Above are two pages of Vera’s visit to French publisher Glenat.

Below are three covers of the 2015–16 Image mini-series.

10 or 15 years, it’s more editorially… catching things that I forgot to draw—earrings, bracelets—or just call me out on a drawing not good enough or clear enough. It’s annoying to have to fix something, but in the end, it’s the best.

CBC: You were inked by another real master, Kevin Nowlan…

Terry: He asked specifically to ink my work. I was on Kevin’s list of people he wanted to work with. I wasn’t forced on him and he wasn’t forced on me. I knew his style pretty well. My work at the time was finally professional (in my opinion) on a regular basis. I was producing what I thought was my best work, day in and day out, work I was happy with. It was my fourth year of working fulltime when I finally felt like I knew what I was doing.

So, I knew Kevin Nowlan’s strengths and loved his stuff. I had studied how he used blacks. Then I would pencil my pages knowing he was inking them, so I’d nail down the facial expressions the way I liked them and wanted him to ink them and, from then on, everything else I’d leave a little bit looser, knowing Kevin would ink them the way he does

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Red One TM & © Xavier Dorison & Terry Dodson.

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Terry: Yes. I think we were working together for a couple of years, off and on. She was ready to work and I was ready to work with an inker who was close by to whom I didn’t have to mail my work. It wasn’t a year after that we got married. My wife or not, Rachel was the right inker for me.

Everything else is a bonus. The right person is here. She likes what I like and we’re both headed for the same goal with the pages. If there’s a problem, she’ll show it to me and I’ll fix it. She’ll not try to guess what I’m thinking. In the past

Some Questions for Rachel Dodson

Colossus, Kitty Pryde TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Comic Book Creator: What’s your background?

Rachel Dodson: I grew up on acreage in Oregon, in a big family—so I was outdoors a lot—riding horses, playing with my siblings. And, of course, drawing was big. Me and my sisters would draw together. I didn’t go to camp as a kid as our home was already like a summer camp.

CBC: How did you first meet Terry and did you share any of his interests and did he share any with yours?

Rachel: We met in high school. We did have similar interests: we both liked to draw, music, and arts in general, plus doing stuff outside—hiking, the beach, sports… I came from an artistic background—both of my parents are artistic—and, actually, my whole family is artistic and musical, and that helped Terry fit in with my family.

CBC: Creatively, what were your pursuits in your teens and early 20s? Did you aspire to a career in the arts?

Rachel: I like ecology and wanted to be a marine biologist. I always did take art classes and painted throughout high school. I decided upon interior design for a career, because my biology teacher talked my out of a career in sciences, saying there was no money in it.

CBC: By Terry’s admission, you didn’t have a particular interest in comics. Having now worked in the field for a number of years, can you share any impressions and insight you may have about the art form and about the comics industry?

Rachel: I’ve definitely seen a change in the number of women working in the comics industry. Plus, I notice how competitive the industry has become—which is exciting.

The industry has changed a lot—the number of genres, etc.… it’s not like most people think. It’s just not for kids anymore. I look at comics for their art, as I do appreciate a well-drawn book, but I only read the daily newspaper comic strips (not comic books), where the quality is few and far between compared to comics. I guess I should be reading more comics!

CBC: What is the creative process like working with Terry? Is there an easy flow to it and do you express any shortcomings—any room for improvement in the work—you might find?

Rachel: Straightforward: Terry pencils and I ink those pencils. We do have the advantage of me being able to ask Terry a question about the art at anytime— whether about the drawing or techniques—which I feel is a real advantage with collaboration.

CBC: Loaded questions warning: To what do you attest the fact that your inks are a perfect complement to Terry’s pencils? What makes you guys such a successful team?

Rachel: We have similar tastes and aesthetics, and not a lot of competing ideas.

Both of us are trying to do our best work.

CBC: Do you have admiration for any other specific inkers?

Rachel: Frank Frazetta, Booth, Cole, Mark Farmer, Kevin Nowlan, Mark Schultz, and Dave Stevens (who was such a big influence), as well as Brian Ewing, and I interned for a year with Gary Martin at the beginning of my career, which was very helpful.

and it was so much fun to see what he does. That was really cool. I worked very hard on those pages to make them clear for him.

CBC: Any other artist teamings that come to mind?

Terry: Karl Story was the last inker who inked me closest to what I liked, and Mark Farmer who was doing amazing work on Alan Davis and Adam Hughes, at around the same time Rachel was coming in. For newer artists hired at Marvel to ink me for the past year on the X-Men/Fantastic Four book, because we were running behind schedule and my drawing wrist was bothering me, and I could not put in the hours, so we used someone to finish a bit more than I was capable at that time. I gave the finished pages to Rachel to do and the looser pages, I sent them to a guy, Ransom Getty, and I had him sample ink some pages, and he did a great job. He broke in as a fan of my work, so he already knew and liked my style. Still, what Rachel does is so great, better than anyone else on my work and our visions are similar.

With Ransom, I could have worked with him for six months and we would’ve gotten a lot closer, but to force a guy who pencils and inks his own stuff to just basically trace my stuff wouldn’t be right. But it was great to find someone who I could trust, like I trust Rachel, to finish my work.

CBC: You seem to be a practical gentleman.

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Above: Onetime high school sweethearts and longtime creative collaborators, Terry and Rachel Dodson have been married for nearly 25 years! This pic of the couple is from 2019.

Below: Variant cover art detail from X-Men: The Wedding Special #1 [July 2018].

Now you’re doing Adventureman and you did the Red One. You did Coraline, which means you have to set aside in-progress work and you talked about how advantageous it was that Kevin didn’t show up to finish the Spider-Man/Black Cat scripts, so you could finish up the side projects. With projects in various stages and sometime unpredictable as to when you’re getting paid, how do you keep up with everyday finances? Do you save up?

Terry: Yes. Especially with Adventureman.

With other books, the page rates were better, but ownership wasn’t so good. With Image, Matt and I own everything. We have full decision making, there’s no interference on anything, so Image pays us an upfront rate per issue, which is a percentage of what I’d make from Marvel or DC. Basically it’s enough to keep the wheels moving, and that’s why I still do two covers a month to enable me do the book.

After the book is on sale and the royalties come in, that’s good, but as I’m doing it, it takes so much longer that I have to plan out contingencies to keep income coming in while I’m doing it.

CBC: I think I saw on your Wikipedia page, an amazing number of clients outside of comics. How do you get gigs like that? Do they come looking for you?

Terry: Yeah, you know, one great thing about working for Marvel and DC is that your name is put on products that are put in front of millions of people. With the internet, people can find you. Starting in 1996–97, I began 59

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#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Harley Quinn TM & © DC Comics. Adventureman, associated characters TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc., and Terry Dodson. All artwork © Terry Dodson.

Previous page: Clockwise from top left is a 2013 comic con commission; two of Terry’s Emerald City Comicon posters; from left, Enrico Marini, Bernard Mahé, Terry, and Juanjo Guarnido, at New York Comic Con 2019—pick the American among these European comics artists!; Rose City Comic Con print from 2013; Terry titled this set-up at his NYCC hotel, circa 2019,”the glamorous life of con sketching”; Terry produces prints for San Diego Comic-Con, which he has for sale at his booth. This page: From top left is S.D. Comic-Con booth #4706, “same bat place, same bat channel for over a decade” at the show, which he shares with artist and longtime pal Aaron Lopresti; Terry watercolor setup; McKenzie the horse and rider Rachel Dodson in a watercolor by Terry; various sketchbooks; NYCC print, 2019; friends for over 20 years, flanking Terry, is Philippe Hauri and Olivier Jalabert, both of Glenat BD, Terry’s publisher in France; and, at center, is an art print exclusively created for Terry’s Australian comic con tour in 2013.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

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Above: Terry was artist on the odd five-issue mini-series, dated Sept. 2003–Jan. ’04, Trouble, an off-target attempt to attract a younger readership by launching a decidedly mature-themed romance comic book. The premise included sexually active adolescent versions of Aunt May and Uncle Ben of the Spider-Man mythos.

Below: Terry briefly worked with Kelly Sue DeConnick on Avenging Spider-Man. Cover detail from #9 [July 2012].

Inset right and below: Illustrations by Tim done for TSR (which was bought by Wizards of the Coast some years back).

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of that nature. Red One was proposed to me in 2009 and Adventureman was supposed to be late 2009 or ’10, so I’ve been working off these ideas for over a decade now. My plate has been full for over 10 years with these ideas and trying to get through them to work on something else. Even now, I know, if it’s successful, I’ll be working on Adventureman for at least three or four more years.

CBC: Is one notion behind Adventureman for it to be a concept pitched to Hollywood?

Terry: No, not at all. But obviously, it’s definitely a possibility. When I’m drawing stuff, I don’t think about that; I don’t really care. I realize that I would look at it as extra income to enable me to do my book. I think there’s enough there so if people wanted to invest, they could make a movie, or a series, or cartoon, but I’m not doing it because I want to sell it… I’m doing it because I enjoy creating and it’s a cool world to play in and spend my weeks and months and years working on. But I’m 100% behind whoever wants to develop it, as long as they pay me, [chuckles] because it gives me more time to work on my stuff and bring it to a level of quality I want to achieve. That’s my goal. If I can do a book I’m really proud of after spending a whole year on it and am happy with it, I’m fine with it being sold it off as toy line or whatever, because that’s a bonus. It’s a bonus to help move me on to the next project.

CBC: Is there a level of compromise you could corrupt a project you’re working on if you had that consideration to begin with. Do you purge your mind of expectations?

Terry: That kind of thing like what happens afterward? I don’t really care. I would care … but I assume that whoever would want to want to adapt a project would hopefully get the gist of it, but I obviously don’t—at least today—I don’t care what they do with it. To me, it’s an entirely different entity at that point, I just see it as someone developing it into something else. It doesn’t bother me.

CBC: Do you perceive yourself as a strong pragmatist?

You are pragmatic about it. The allure of it being more than 400/500 miles south in Hollywood has got to be … look at your peers …?

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Inset right: The Dodsons’ exuberant variant cover art for Marvel Legacy #1 [Nov. 2017], sporting a partying Mary Jane Parker.

getting interesting job offers from not only comic book publishers, but video game companies, animation studios, magazines, toy companies, or whoever it was.

When you do work for hire for Marvel or DC, you get a page rate and get to keep your artwork, but the big benefit is that your name and your style— the quality of the work you do—gets seen by millions of people across the globe. You can’t touch that with just the page rate; it’s that advertising you get for your name is great, so if you’re happy working for those companies to start out, it’s really worth it. If you like doing it anyways, it’s a bonus.

When I started, I just wanted to work on The X-Men or whoever, that was my idea, but soon I realized that many people were seeing my work and learning my name, and, soon enough, what I really wanted to do was work on creator-owned stuff, and my name is being promoted by Marvel and DC. If, for creator-owned work, I can grab a percentage of people who follow my work at DC and Marvel, then I can afford to do creator-owned stuff.

The first time I did a sketchbook for myself was 2001, and that sketchbook was filled with all creator-owned stuff.

After a decade of professional work, I said, “Enough people come up to my table at San Diego Comic-Con (or wherever I am) willing to buy stuff, that I can sell work just by virtue of my name being on it and my work being in it.” It’s much better for me to sell “myself” now at the conventions. So I realized people will accept other work by me, not just my art on Spider-Man, Star Wars, or Wonder Woman.”

CBC: Do you write at all?

Terry: Not really. Only because I’ve been a victim of being offered [chuckles] really good projects by really good writers. There have been points in my career where, working on a monthly, where I thought, “I really should work on my own story,” but something else would come along and I would have to shelve it again. I’ve been working on a creator-owned idea in my head for a decade that is fully formed, but now, as the idea is 10 years old, I’m not sure how much I want to do it. But that would be probably what I’ll do next because it’s ready to go. I’d still like the idea of working with a writer, at least in an editorial fashion, where I can bounce ideas around because I’ve never written my own series, so I want to make sure someone is going through it and making sure that I’m not missing anything major. And to judge whether the idea is solid and fun enough for readers. I would be concerned I might be blind to my writing faults without some outside feedback (as I know beginning artists are).

CBC: It’s an advantage to be able to work with a writer.

Terry: Yes, but I think the purest form of storytelling is a singular vision—like a Will Eisner, Bill Watterson, Frank Miller… But, yes, working with a writer is advantageous.

I’ve met enough professionals at the big companies that they email me story ideas. I’ve looked at hundreds of ideas over the last 20 years that would be creator-owned and

Matt Fraction portrait © Kendall Whitehouse. X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Doc Savage TM & © Advance Magazine Publishers Inc.

Fraction’s Adventures with Team Dodson

Comic Book Creator: Can you describe your first collaborations with Terry and Rachel, and what made you folks click to eventually pursue Adventureman?

Matt Fraction: I was a long-time fan of Terry and Rachel, and we were teamed on Uncanny X-Men during my tenure there, when Ed Brubaker brought me in to co-write with him. I learned so much working with them that, when the chance to launch Defenders with Team Dodson came, I leapt at it. At some point during that time, where the monthly comics machine ultimately insists a book come out every 28 days or whatever, we realized that kind of delivery tempo did the book and our plans for it a disservice. We started looking for the kind of world, the kind of characters, and the kind of story we both wanted to create and would allow us a broad enough canvas to accommodate whatever ideas or interest or passing fancy caught our attentions—hello, Adventureman.

CBC: Please share about Doc Savage and the appeal of Philip José Farmer’s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, and in particular the influence the “Kenneth Robeson” creation has on Adventureman.

Matt: I’m really a tourist in the world of Pulp at best, a dilettante at worst. I’ve read a little bit of a lot—enough to know I can’t speak to any of it with any sense of authority or understanding. The brilliance, for me, of Farmer’s His Apocalyptic Life is that it’s an all-killer no-filler “Greatest Hits” sampler of the Robeson/Doc canon.

There are a few books I have like that, those kind of fictional concordance-encyclopedias. Farmer did one for Tarzan, too; there’re the two infamous Kingsley Amis/“Bill Tanner” Bond books that serve a similar purpose… beyond how much fun it is to absorb that much of the Doc Savage world (or Tarzan or Bond or whomever) that fast, the idea of the book itself being a kind of in-universe item occurred to me at some point. What if it was a How-To book? What if everyone forgot? The story, the core of it, came fullyformed after that.

CBC: Can you please describe the appeal of Terry’s work and whether he gets the props he deserves in the biz?

Matt: Well, the appeal of Terry’s work to me comes from the sheer volume of work, exploration, consideration, design, and life he pours into his pages while making it all seem so effortless and… what’s the word. Sprezzatura. I think people throw around “deceptively simple” a lot when they don’t know what to say about something they enjoy, but Terry’s work is, literally, deceptively simple. He works and time he puts in to thinking about his characters, their postures, their faces and expressions, their body language; what they wear and how they wear it, how they choose to style their hair, how he indicates their movement—and then the spaces they’re in, the décor, the shape of things, the design and style down to the fixtures on the wall and the features in the corners. I believe every single thing has weight, every single item occupies space, every single room holds air and atmosphere, and every single character bristles with light and life.

There’s an… it always puts me in the mind of the Nine Old Men era and style of Disney animation, the life and character and elegance of any single line doing so

much more work than any dozen lines by someone else.

And that doesn’t mention the extraordinary eye for color he has, nor the collaborator he has in Rachel, who does the best pull-outs in the business and knows how and where and what to pull focus towards in Terry’s panels…

Terry and Rachel build worlds from the ground up, and every single person that lives in there has a story to tell in the way they realize them on the page.

So, y’know. No. Terry and Rachel deserve more props.

CBC: Can you compare and suggest similarities and differences in your other collaborations, say with David Aja and Chip Zdarsky, in relation to teaming up with Terry?

Any anecdotes and insight on precisely how you and Terry collab, would be superb... let’s say, pre-pandemic, did you guys physically get together to work on the concepts and storyline?

Matt: That’s like describing different cuisines. One thing Terry and I figured out… well, let me kind of go back to your first question: There were sequences in our X-Men bits, a few large set pieces where, at some point, we were tracking maybe a dozen characters and I was trying to figure out how we could give everyone a moment to do something awesome.

I didn’t quite write the sequence plot style (when a script specifies actions on a page and maybe some of the dialogue, but without panel breaks or exact dialogue, which would be done after the pencils were finished) but I came close—more like (as I remember, anyway) a kind of cascade of action—“A does this as B does that, then B does this so C does that, but D does this other thing”—leaving Terry to stage it how he saw best, most exciting, most clear.

It was hugely educational for me, in terms of action staging and in terms of collaboration. Because, look, I can read every comic ever made a zillion times, but I’m not gonna outwrite what Terry can draw in a big action set-piece.

And it was exhilarating and scary to trust a collaborator like that. It felt, in a lot of ways, like the first true collaboration I’d ever done in a comic, in some ways.

So, cut to a few years later and we’re prepping Defenders and I propose writing the book for him purely “Plot style,” or at least as “Plot style” as I can manage, which somehow always tends to be longer than a “full style” script for me. And it was just as fun and educational and, I think, good as anything else we’d done. Because it means a writer isn’t treating an artist like an employee, but a real and true artistic collaborator.

But that then showed us how to do what we really wanted to do, it couldn’t happen in a 28-day assembly line factory.

Long story long, I guess: from X-Men to Adventureman, I became a better, more trusting, more truthful writer and creative partner. Not just for Terry, but for anybody I write for. That’s something this writer-driven era of comics have beaten out of a lot of people: we should be writing for our specific artists, and together we’re creating books for our audience. Too often these days, I think, artists get used as delivery mediums for blobs of text that smother pages and panels, and cripple the flow and life a comic needs.

Working with Terry made me a better writer for artists.

And for comics.

CBC: There is a delightful modern twist on the Doc Savage story model, with the diverse contemporary team membership which solidifies the nature, if you will, of family. Can you speak to that? That is, Doc Savage, whatever

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Above: Dodson collaborator Matt Fraction in 2014. Photo by Kendall Whitehouse. Below: Cover detail from Uncanny X-Men #514 [Oct. 2009]. Inset left: Bantam paperback edition of Philip José Farmer’s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life [1975].

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way DC would ever let me write Wonder Woman, nor would I want to, so why not do all of that in a sandbox, only limited by what Terry and I can imagine? I don’t think it should be a radical or even political notion to push ourselves to learn and grow and do better and still kick ass…

CBC: Please share what your plans are for Adventureman and any insight regarding its reception.

Matt: More, bigger, weirder, more epic, more mythic, more places, more people, more myths and legends, more more more. And I have no insight regarding its reception. It feels like it launched into the Covid void and, like everything else this last 16 months, has been lost to a pandemic. The first collection is one of the most beautiful things my name has ever been on though and I’m grateful there’s been enough of a response and a lot of enthusiasm to allow us to keep making more.

I think the second arc is even better than the first and our plans for the third are more epic and exciting still.

Terry: Right. What I think about that is I have no problem selling out as long as I retain all the rights to publishing and all my rights to... I have no problem giving up the movie rights or whatever those rights are as long as it doesn’t affect what I do every day at the table and the comic book itself. I wouldn’t care what they end up doing with the property as long at it doesn’t affect me.

CBC: Did you do 23 issues of Harley Quinn? Were they unbroken?

Terry: That’s a good question. I know we had one or two fill-ins. I don’t know the reason why. There was a special month or something. Actually when I was… about a year-and-a-half into Harley, I had developed a repetitive stress problem in my drawing arm. So I actually couldn’t draw with my right hand for three months, so I started drawing with my left hand. [chuckles] I developed repetitive stress in that hand because I’d never done it before. I went to the doctor for the second time and he finally sent me to therapy—and it’s been 20 years, so it’s much better now—but during that time, I know I had to have some help with the pages. I finished Harley doing most of it with my left hand while my right arm healed.

This sounds goofy, but you know my regular inker who works in the studio put the finishes on it and that made a big difference, by saving some time and we still had Alex [Sinclair] coloring. The lines weren’t as clean as they’d be with my right hand,

but the storytelling was still there. The art’s in your head and any good artist is able to use either hand - and should be able to use any tool. Eventually, it’s what’s between your ears that makes you an artist. I quit doing Harley earlier than I normally would have because that was going on and I switched over to the Spider-Man/Black Cat. I had a huge lead time and knew that I could heal that arm up over that year with that real relaxed schedule. I was still doing Harley covers and getting ready to do Spider-Man/ Black Cat and doing the physical therapy and lifestyle changes to get myself ready to work again.

CBC: That must have been chilling.

Terry: It was. The day I could no longer hold a pencil to finish the page I was drawing was in mid-September, only a few days after Sept. 11, 2001. A lot had already happened in the world and then this happened to me, though there’s obviously no connection between the two; it just helps to remember when it happened.

CBC: Not a good fall.

Terry: I went to Paris to meet with Les Humanoïdes about the Coraline book a couple of weeks after that. We were going to take our very first vacation in Europe late September and everybody cancelled the plans because of Sept. 11. We ended up just going to Paris for five days. That was two or three weeks after I’d gotten repetitive stress. Originally the doctor thought I had carpal tunnel, so I was wearing the brace and not doing anything with the arm at all. When I went to Europe and did all those drawings left-handed and this was weeks after. I’m sitting there thinking, “I’m getting ready to do all these European projects,” so I was trying to think positively.

I was 30 years old and had been working for seven-and-a-half years. I had just finished Harley and was at the peak of my career and I may not be able to work anymore. It was kind of scary. I was pushing that left hand to work and it was working; I had adapted, but it was definitely a scary thing.

CBC: Do you know of many ambidextrous artists?

Terry: No, not really. I remember thinking about another artist who might have had carpal tunnel or something and ended up having to quit working.

I know that Frank Frazetta, after he had his stroke, he started working left-handed, which doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know if that was beforehand or after. I see other artists do it online occasionally, but I believe in the theory about drawing is in your head and your hand is just a tool.

CBC: But that’s probably easier said than done.

Terry: [Chuckles] I just know I had to do it!

CBC: John Severin was naturally ambidextrous. I only just learned that the other day.

Terry: I know it got to be fairly normalized for me because I produced

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Adventureman TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc. & Terry Dodson. Doc Savage, associated characters TM & © Advance Magazine Publishers Inc.

his appeal, is an archaic archetype, perhaps, and you’ve turned it on its head—the adventure is at home, in New York City, not in some faraway land, with a team not espousing some colonialist-type fantasy of a now bygone era. So I guess I’m asking, what’s up with Claire and her pals in comparison to Doc and his team...?

Matt: I find the colonial model lazy, played out, and, well, colonial, shot through with an inherent racism and sexism and imperialistic agenda that bores and offends me. Which is no reason to then throw out all the parts of the Pulp Era that still work, that still excite me and engage me, that provided the philosophical and iconographic underpinnings for the world of superhero comics—and if we take the work in good faith and strip the ignorance from it, we’re left with, well, like Farmer’s concordance, all-killer no-filler.

And some part of me wanted to write a big heroic adventure comic for my daughter, who, at two, was Wonder Woman obsessed, and there was no

Adventureman TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc. & Terry Dodson.

three-and-a-half issues like that, I think. I used my right hand for the super-tight details, but for 95% of the page, I did it left-handed. If you actually have to do it… if you have no choice but to draw left-handed, you’ll do it! [laughs] CBC: It makes you think about right brain/left brain. It’s a gift for you to be able to have done that through such a period of such stress. Not only because you just had to do it, but that you were able to do it.

Terry: Yes, and it helped that I had Rachel as the same person inking my work, and having the same colorist… we were already at issue #14 or 15 of Harley, we were a well-oiled machine, at that point. So it helped that the people who worked over my work made it all blend in and so the reader wouldn’t notice. Even I can’t tell per se which work was done left-handed and which wasn’t. Though it’s definitely more cartoonier-looking because it was easier to work that way.

CBC: Did the editors involved know this was going on?

Terry: I don’t remember if Matt Idelson knew. He had been my editor at Marvel years before and I had a really good relationship with him, but I don’t remember. I think I really lucked out because the issue I was working on was way ahead of schedule, because I was going to take time off for that vacation in Europe, I already had three weeks set aside for that, which you have to work pretty hard to do that. That’s probably how I hurt my hand to begin with. The system was set up for me to have a breather anyways. I don’t remember talking specifically with him about it.

CBC: It’s obviously a crisis.

Terry: Right. Yes. We were close enough to the end of the issue we were on, and the schedule was really good for the reason I described. I probably said something, but don’t remember. I guess I was optimistic that the doctors said, “If you wear your brace for a couple of weeks, you’ll be better,” which wasn’t the case, but what I really needed was to rest, to do exercises and strengthening and better posture. It was all about ergonomics to have a normal life— not holding the pencil so tightly, exercising more, and lifting weights, and taking breaks, which I really have adapted into my life. I work on a 20-minute timer—and have for 20 years now—where I get up every 20 minutes and walk around for five minutes.

CBC: That’s a really good idea, Terry. I should take your advice on that.

Terry: There was a study that came out about five ago, which said we ideally should be standing up every 20 minutes. The first eight years of my career, I sat all day and, ever since then, I’ve been getting up and it’s been very beneficial for my long-term health. I was doing it for my hand or arm or shoulder, but however bad the shoulder was, it is better now.

CBC: Let me read you a paragraph from a Slings and Arrows review about the first nine issues of Harley Quinn: “Dodson’s layouts have considerable imagination behind them. His figures are superbly athletic no matter what ambitious pose he’s worked out for them. And he keeps the tone cheerful despite some dark deeds. The caveat to Dodson’s attractive pages are his women being objectified fantasy objects, with breasts and buttocks emphasized, waists ridiculously thin, and what there is of costumes, having a sprayed-on look.” Is any of that valid?

Terry: [Pauses] You know, that’s the first I’ve heard something like that about my Harley Quinn run and it kind of took me back, because the response has been so overwhelmingly positive for so long and from such a wide range of fans. It’s been so long since I’ve looked at this stuff. It’s hard to remember what I was doing 20 years ago. Oh boy, I don’t know. I don’t agree with some of that because I learned to draw from looking at real life and pride myself in having always created costumes that didn’t look sprayed on; I’ve always drawn costumes that looked like real costumes, with wrinkles—and that’s a cheat I learned to do and make things look more three-dimensional.

As far as body proportions… maybe—but in relation to what, you know? That’s a lot of “eye of the beholder” stuff.

I’m drawing lines on paper to represent a real 3-D world and pushing the proportions of characters, it helps to make it readable for the viewer. I know I’ve reined some of the proportions a bit in the last two decades, so that is definitely a possibility, but I gave Harley more classic good girl proportions as I felt she was of that era. It’s hard to think about how outrageous that is as far as cartoon drawings. When I was drawing Spider-Man/Black Cat, immediately after those first issues came out, I know I was specifically reducing her chest, that got away from, something to do with zipper, I don’t know, I did see it published. I just thought, “Wow, I really need to pull back on this stuff.”

I think it was because I was getting better as a draftsman, so the larger breasts or larger proportions is more bad drawing—not being a good-enough artist to convey that femininity without being over the top. As I became a better artist, I was able to have less “outrageous” proportions.

It could register as being just as clearly a female without having to do oversized attributes—or whatever word we’re using to describe it—I’m a better artist now so subtly can factor in more. I do think there’s part of that which is valid, but it’s relative to what I was doing at the time it was coming out.

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Previous page: At center, Adventureman poster. Inset is imagery form the Bantam Doc Savage paperback series with art by James Bama. This page: Above is Adventureman #1 [June 2020] page; below an Adventureman character design.

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Above: Pencil from Adventureman #2 [July 2020]. Below: Cover art for Adventureman #4 [Oct. ’20]. Next page: Various covers Terry and Rachel have produced for DC Comics.

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Adventureman TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc., & Terry Dodson.

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CBC: There’s Adam Hughes, there’s Frank Cho, there’s you, there’s obviously the great Dave Stevens, all masters of what can be categorized as “good girl artists,” which offers a level of sensuality or perhaps sexuality in the work that really is attractive, though still arguably exploitive. Do you sense any tension thinking about your career and being characterized like that? How do you feel about that?

Terry: No, only because I know the projects I’ve been offered (not that I did) didn’t pigeonhole me—so I wasn’t getting that from editorial. Editors and writers could see I could draw and emote just about anything, which is a huge bonus. I try to do stuff appealing to me first and someone is always going to find something they don’t like in your artwork. At the counter side, I heard so many positive things from both men and women about the females—and the men—that I draw. Most of the time…

CBC: Though I didn’t mean “good girl artist” as a pejorative, either, necessarily.

Terry: No, no. I have a lot of love for that school. Gil Elvgren was a gigantic influence, especially in that time period. Harley wouldn’t look like that if it wasn’t for Gil Elvgren (who influenced Dave Stevens). I know I consciously tried to make myself not just a good girl artist, because I know I’m good at drawing most things, so I consciously avoided just taking that path. Fortunately, I get offered so much work from companies with a lot of variety that I’ve never been pigeonholed that way. A lot of the books I take are because

of the writer. I went from Harley to Black Cat to Wonder Woman, so it was “girl book, girl book, girl book,” but it was the book and writer that enticed me. It didn’t matter that it was a female lead. It was the project itself and whoever was writing it, the schedule, and how it was going to be launched. That’s what I was thinking about at the time.

I do recognize that having a female lead is a very smart way to bring in readers on what I do—because it is one of my strengths—and it’s fun to do! I find it a blast. Working with a full range of cast is fun, too. So, I guess I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a specific type of artist, I just want to be a good artist. I don’t want to be the person that only does “this” or does “that.” Even the females that I do, there’s a whole range in what I do that are not just good girl art. To be a GOOD “good girl artist,” you have to be a good artist.

CBC: That’s a lot of “goods.” [laughter] Terry: Yes, it is! I know that sounds stupid, but the margin for error is so minimal, the difference between a pretty girl and not is a billionth of a millimeter; it’s a fraction.

CBC: I was looking at your Princess Leia and it’s obviously “your” Princess Leia and not necessarily a depiction of Carrie Fisher. I was looking at her face and it’s Dodson’s version, not a caricature. Just an observation. Very cool.

Terry: Thanks. I can’t remember who, but when I was doing the first Star Wars book, my goal was to make them look like their characters but more importantly make them my versions of the characters, because I was emerging on my own as an artist at that time. I had no interest in tracing photos. I wanted it to be my Leia. There’s no doubt. I’d often succeed sometimes you try to reach for the stars, but you just don’t hit it, which is frustrating, but that’s always my goal: to make it be Leia so that everybody knows that’s Leia.

To me, my version feels more like Leia than tracing Carrie Fisher’s photo ever would. Some people can do it better than me, but I had a lot of fun doing it. I just roughed a Luke cover over the weekend and it’s the same thing. I know Luke and I know Mark Hamill, and I have this childhood love of Star Wars, but as an artist, I love the challenge of making my version of the characters and not copies of photos.

CBC: Nice. Oddly enough, one of the projects you had at around the same time, Spider-Man/Black Cat, was Trouble, which had photo covers and caused its own amount of trouble… Can you talk about it? How did you get the job? Why did you take the job? What did you think about the job…?

Terry: I know for a fact that Joe Quesada called up and asked me to do the job as a personal favor to do the book.

I tell everybody I did the job as a personal favor to Joe! We were waiting for the Spider-Man/Black Cat script from Kevin Smith. There was about a three-and-a-half year gap between those scripts and this is one of the things I did.

There was talk of Mark Millar and I going to do a SpiderMan book after that. Mark was big at the time. I knew it was limited. There was talk of what Trouble was—or what it wasn’t—going to be, but I grew up on the Frank Frazetta romance comics. That’s what I’m going to do; I don’t know what this book is, but that’s how I’m approaching it. I made it two issues working at that level [chuckles] and, by the time I got to the end of the third issue, I was like, “I’m not sure this book is worth the effort I’m putting into it.” I mean, there was nothing wrong with it—it was fine—but it wasn’t at the level I was used to working that hard at and getting something back out of it. I’ve never read it since then and I know a lot of people enjoy it. I actually had a blast drawing it, though I didn’t put the hours into it after the first two-anda-half issues that I did. Which isn’t to say I didn’t do a good job, as I originally was having fun with it, and then it was, “Hmmm, I’m not sure I need to put this much work into it”…

CBC: You mean the plot?

Terry: It was just kind of goofy, but not goofy to my strengths, I don’t think. I’ve not looked at it or read it since I drew it in 2005 or ’04. I recall the photographic covers more than really what I did on it. I don’t even remember even how the story turned out, honestly. It was “self-erasing.”

All TM & © DC Comics.

This page: Above is Adventureman #1 [June 2020] penciled cover art. Inset right is cover for the first collection. Below is a vignette of Claire Connell, star of Adventureman.

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[chuckles] CBC: You mean from your consciousness? [laughter] Terry: Yeah, I think so! I remember specific stuff from the first and second issues, which I really worked hard on. But, after that, I did professional work, but wasn’t that invested. I don’t work that way and it’s not why I do what I do. It was easy to draw and fun to draw, but very much “a job,” and I don’t usually do stuff as “jobs.”

CBC: Over time, that mini-series was considered controversial.

Terry: Mark or Joe or someone said something initially that it was fairly controversial, and I don’t remember what that was.

CBC: I think it was depicting the active sex lives of the very young characters… birth control … pregnancy.

Terry: It was at a time when the internet was big then, but there wasn’t Twitter. I guess the social media part of life wasn’t as pervasive as it is today. If it had been today, it would be a much different thing. I just felt isolated from it and was almost done with the project by the time it came out and I was already thinking about other stuff I was working on. I’m glad there’s people who really like the book. I sign that book at every show I do. People go, “It’s my favorite book!” Great! I’m glad I worked on something someone enjoyed. It wasn’t nearly the romantic comic I thought it might be—I don’t know what that means and I just thought of that now. It wasn’t the grand romantic book I thought it could be. It was more of a joke… well, not a joke, but… I don’t know…

CBC: A gimmick? I think the photographic covers were a terrible decision. [Terry chuckles] I was really surprised to realize that it was you drawing it. I must have known because I bought them because they contained really good art. But, overall, the book was just creepy.

Terry: Yeah, I know. It cracks me up. The bubble-gum cover cracks me up. I know what they were trying to do; it was an experiment to go after the teenage romance market.

But, looking at the story, that wasn’t what they were trying for. They probably should have gotten a romance writer to come in and write that book. I’m happy I did it, and the concept in general wasn’t a bad idea, but the execution I think was a little jumbled.

CBC: Wasn’t Bill Jemas involved in it? Did you have any connection? Trouble was his puppy, right?

Terry: Yes, it was. It was one of those “big idea” projects coming out of Marvel at the time. It was fun to be a part of it.

I got paid a normal Marvel rate to do a book that was completely different and I learned stuff on it. It was definitely a high-concept project where they thought, “Let’s try this.”

A lot of amazing stuff was coming from Marvel at that time because of them just going for it. It was a fun time to be involved with Marvel at that point.

CBC: It seemed from the outside, with Axel Alonso and Joe Quesada heading Marvel creatively—and I went to Marvel and I visited Joe to interview him about it, at that time—that period seemed to be explosively creative.

Terry: Yes! It really was.

That was a period where I worked exclusively with Marvel for four years. I left Marvel to work on Wonder Woman, which the perfect next thing for me to work on, but if I hadn’t had that, I probably would have signed up with Marvel because there was so many cool things going on. And, after my two-year run on Wonder Woman, I came back to do Marvel work for basically five more years, so there was a period there where they were producing really innovative books and they had really good editors. Axel Alonso was the editor who offered me Spider-Man/Black Cat. I’m still talking projects with him at AWA; I don’t have time to do them, but he’s still the one that has had a lot of confidence in me (and vice versa) and still makes proposals to me. He’s offered me so many of my jobs at Marvel.

CBC: It seems to me Axel was truly remarkable as an ed-

Star Wars TM & © Lucasfilm Ltd. CBLDF poster © Terry Dodson. Claire Connell TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc., & Terry Dodson.

itor and belongs up there with the pantheon of great comic book editors.

Terry: Yes, definitely. In my career, he’s one of the best and most influential editors I worked with. I think he’s a visionary. The problem with becoming editor-in-chief at Marvel—or any company—is there’s a time, and then you’re gone, they burn everything down, and start all over.

It’s unfortunate maybe that he became editor-in-chief.

Obviously, I don’t know any details about whatever happened. I always feel sorry for someone when they become editor-in-chief because that’s it! [chuckles] That reign won’t last! That’s maybe the reason why Tom Brevoort is still at Marvel—because they haven’t named him editor-in-chief! [laughter] Tom’s doing a great job doing what he does and I presume he’s experienced enough to know that the minute he becomes editor-in-chief, he’s done! [chuckles] Tom is great, I love working with him!

CBC: I was just thinking about Archie Goodwin. He only lasted six or eight months as Marvel editor-in-chief and he’s maybe the greatest editor in the history of American comics.

Terry: Yes, and there is a difference between being a great editor and being an editor-in-chief. Axel was kind of editor-in-chief the whole time, in a way.

CBC: He was definitely creative director.

Terry: Exactly. That’s what he did. For whatever, sales did whatever at Marvel and they wanted to move to somebody else and Axel is still the same great editor and visionary person. For him, I’m sure it’s maybe better now to do something completely different—he’s still in comics, but outside the mainstream super-hero books, I guess.

CBC: Do you read the new AWA line?

Terry: They sent me some stuff. Honestly, no. I’m aware of some of the stuff, but this past year, I haven’t picked up and read much new stuff—mostly because I haven’t been out much! And I have to Axel about working for them, but Adventureman, it’s all consuming!

CBC: How was Wonder Woman pitched to you?

Terry: Dan DiDio wanted to know if I’d like to come over to DC. I was perfectly happy at Marvel and was, on the side, still doing the Coraline stuff, but we were talking. He said, “How would you like to do Superman or Wonder Woman?”

I said, “Oh, what’s going on with Wonder Woman? What are you doing?” He said, “Well, it’s going to be a relaunch, about five years later in the storyline (or whatever it was), with Allan Heinberg writing it. You can do whatever you want.” I thought, “Okay, that sounds awesome!” I talked with Alan a week later and he said here’s the storyline, but you can do whatever you want with the look. I said, “That sounds amazing.” I had complete freedom and a really good schedule with a character I knew. I grew up kind of with the TV show and wasn’t old enough to know if it was good or bad, and I liked the character but I didn’t really care much about Wonder Woman. I liked what Alex Ross had done with Kingdom Come. Through that, I could see a character I could draw. His Wonder Woman is probably the closest to what I do.

It’s a cross between his and Lynda Carter, and is closer to what I draw, whatever that means.

That’s just me looking at them. I really liked Darwyn Cooke’s Wonder Woman from New Frontier, as far as how they act and feels more like how I try to draw her.

CBC: You gave her a little heft, right? Kinda like COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

Above: Monster and Dames cover, Emerald City Comic Con’s 2017 souvenir book, later made into a print. Inset left: Variant cover art for Star Wars #10 [Mar. 2021]. Below: Claire Connell character designs.

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All TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Ghost TM & © Dark Horse Comics, LLC. Vampirella TM & © Dynamic Forces, Inc.

Xena…?

Terry: Yes. That’s just what I had in mind, it’s a prototypical Terry Dodson body type—perfect for Wonder Woman. It was just like with Harley: I knew I was ready to draw the book before it got offered to me; it’s just what I wanted to do.

CBC: Shifting away from the objectification and bringing character into a more realistic physique.

Terry: Wonder Woman’s costume is stupidly small, but I stretched it out as far as they would let me. I added an inch of material above her breastplate and inches to the length of her briefs. I just felt like she’s a character who is a warrior. If she had to wear the outfit, I had to make sure it was semi-practical and showing some decency. She can exude being a sexy person, but is not drawn in a sexy outfit. I’m not getting the words right, but she’s a very powerful, attractive person and the costume should reflect that. I actually wanted give her the leather skirt she has now, made popular in the movie.

They didn’t go for that, but let me add the eagle/WW, and I ended up giving that skirt to Donna Troy and I feel that version is a minor inspiration on the movie version, which makes my decision completely justified.

CBC: I think the word is dignity.

Terry: Dignity! There you go! We’re getting there! [chuckles] This year of Covid has taken my words away! I talked so little this past year. That’s the word I’m looking for: dignity. That’s right, exactly.

And I loved drawing the cape on her! It made her majestic. Anytime they let me do it or work it into the story, I’d draw the cape. The cape gave her an extra level of dignity—like a queen… like a princess. It was a nice extra element. I also made her hair longer than normal to act like a cape and would cover her up to give her that extra degree of dignity.

CBC: You did about 18 issues? A yearand-a-half?

Terry: Exactly. That was weird because I went through three different writers in those 18 issues. I was going to have a two-year stamp on it and we ended up with script delays and three different writers. They were all good and everything I worked on, I love, and I still talk to all three writers, and I’d work with them all again. For a launch, that book did very, very well. It was 150,000 copies, which were the best Wonder Woman sales in ages. But then, by issue #2 or #3, we were shipping late, and you just couldn’t do that in the industry at that time. We had a book that was going to be really successful. It did well, but not as well as it should have done.

CBC: Was it the writing that held it up?

Terry: I can’t blame Allan for being late.

After the first issue, he was delivering two or three pages at a time, and I can only draw them so fast. I can’t draw it too fast, because I don’t know where the story is going far enough. So, you give me a script for a whole issue, I’d do the first couple of pages slow and then speed up, but if you give me two pages at a time, I draw them at a slow pace because I can’t draw pages ahead of the script I haven’t received yet. So getting COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

more pages at that pace is like starting over again. The first issue’s script I got in one clump, the whole 20 pages (or whatever) and I’m pretty sure that, after that, by the second or third issue, the delivery of the pages slowed down. I can’t say that’s Allan’s fault—it’s the way I work that it naturally slowed me down. But I was doing my best work at the time, which I was extremely proud of and happy with, and in the long term, I don’t care that’s how it worked out because the pages turned out great—the story turned out great. What I’m doing with Matt on Adventureman, I tell him, “Write the whole story beforehand. If you can’t give me the whole story, please give me the outline of the whole issue, so my brain is already solving design and storytelling problems. I’ll know where things are going.” I simply work faster that way, when I know the whole story.

CBC: Did you hit it off with Matt Fraction when you worked with him back at Marvel in the late ’00s?

Terry: Yeah! I love the X-Men stuff that we did together and it was maybe a year into that project when we were doing a couple of issues of The X-Men in New York City and I told Matt, “Man, if you’re ever do a book set in New York, let me know,” and that was Adventureman. That was me saying that to him that started him kicking around the Adventureman idea in his head. Six months later, he sent me the outline. Some of the stories weren’t exactly what I wanted to draw because of editorial dictates, but the script he gave me, I enjoyed how he wrote. It was very “drawable.” I enjoyed drawing what he gave me to draw, even if it wasn’t characters where I was interested in the storyline, per se, but the actual writing and reading and being able to understand the scripts and understanding everything, and being able to draw everything he asked for on that page, there was never a problem. Which, for me, is the sign of a good writer. [chuckles] I don’t have to think that hard to figure out what to do. He understands what belongs on a comic book page, how the flip works, where you need a spread, and how many panels work with the right amount of breathing room and stuff. So I would say, yeah, we hit it off based off of that.

CBC: Is Matt in Portland? Pre-Covid, did you meet up with him?

Terry: Yes. Since we started doing Adventureman, the last time I talked to Matt in person pre-Covid would have been November/ December 2019. We were about to launch Adventureman when Covid happened. Still, we talk all the time, but not in person. Before Covid, meeting maybe twice a year would have been normal, but since Covid, we haven’t met. It’s been a year now. We’re about to do three issues in the next arc. I’ll probably see him more now.

CBC: Did you work with [Fraction’s wife and comics writer] Kelly Sue DeConnick on Captain Marvel because of your acquaintance with Matt?

Terry: That was because I was under contract at Marvel, so they just called me up, but I knew Kelly Sue because of Matt. It was like, “Oh, cool, I’ll work with Matt’s wife on this.”

I knew her already and I knew she was somebody I’d want to work with. It was a blast to work with her on the Captain Marvel stuff.

CBC: Kelly Sue did awesome work on Captain Marvel. Can you to tell 71

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#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Logo TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc., & Terry Dodson.

Page 70: The Dodsons maintain a steady income by producing variant covers not only for DC Comics and the occasional independent outfit, but notably for Marvel Comics. Here’s nine efforts of recent vintage. Page 71: Two covers produced for two of the aforementioned independent outfits. At top is Terry’s cover for Ghost #1 [Dec. 2013], Dark Horse Comics, and, at bottom, his ”virgin variant” for Vampirella Vol. 5, #5 [Nov. 2019], Dynamite.

This page: At top is Terry at his drawing table, June 2019; at left is Rachel at her drawing table, June 2019; and, above, Terry at his standing desk, August 2019, in a photo by John Fleskes.

Next page: At the last minute before sending this issue off to press, Terry kindly shared the cover art for the first issue of the next story arc of Adventureman, coming in September.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

73

fed Criminal Masterminds,

Adventureman TM & © Milk

Inc., and Terry Dodson.

74

readers what is Red One? Can you give a background?

Terry: Red One is the Soviets’ greatest super agent who is sent to work in the U.S. undercover to conduct subterfuge from the inside. It’s 1977, undercover Russian agent goes to Hollywood, chaos ensues… She ends up getting into moral fights about things that from her upbringing that are counter to her way of thinking. She’s a communist, more socialist kind of person, and she runs into stuff that she’s against… such as, the religious right—and she’s not religious in the slightest—and other things that set her off. Her character is the opposite of her antagonists in the book. There’s so much more to the two volumes and I heard from an amount of people who loved that story. It did so much better here in the U.S. than I ever thought it would, doing better here than it did in France. Which is kind of a shock, as the writer Xavier Dorison is huge in France.

CBC: She’s a provocative and charming, stridently pro-Soviet character. [chuckles] Terry: Yeah. For me, she’s pro-Vera, pro-people, her pro-Soviet goes a little off the rails as her personality is so strong. She was such a goofy character… well, not “goofy,” but I’m not sure of the exact word. I’d never worked on anything like that character or in the time period.

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Adventureman TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc., and Terry Dodson.

Above: Another sneak peek at Terry Dodson’s pencils for a page from Adventureman #5, coming this September. Inset right: Terry shares about this box of sketch pads, “All my drawings and pages, mostly sketchbooks from 1982–92, my pre-professional work, to when I started to work full-time.

So, kids, draw… Draw a lot!”

Below: Stay current with Terry’s work by visiting his “Bombshelter” blog site at thebombshelter.blogspot.com.

There was so much I would have liked to play with over time, even more than I spoke with the writer about doing.

The reason why there isn’t a Red One #3 so far is because Adventureman is taking three times longer to produce than I imagined it taking. So that’s just completely blown my career schedule for years! And now that I’ve invested so time into Adventureman, that I can’t not continue with it. Which is to the detriment of Red One. But I do plan on returning to Red One, if at least to finish the storyline that brings closure to the story, so I do plan to come up with a relatively short conclusion to that story, to have closure for all the readers.

And the character! I love Red One and the setting and I’d love to have some more of it. I have ideas and settings I really want to play with still, and Vera is such a unique character that the world needs more of!

CBC: Let’s do the same for Adventureman. What is it about?

Terry: It’s the story of a mother and a son whose favorite books are called Adventureman, which is a series of pulp magazines from the ’40s. The mother runs her own mother’s bookshop, and Claire and her son bond over the stories, but, as it turns out, there’s things in that book that are coming to life in their world today and it’s turning out that maybe Adventureman wasn’t just a story, but real. What does a mother and son do with the information? How does it affect their lives and, obviously, the world? Basically you have a super-pulp world come to life today, into the 21st century New York City—a 1940s pulp world emerging into today’s world. It puts the mom, a medically retired police officer who lost her hearing in a shooting, and how does she deal with it? She takes a potion that makes her the same super-heroic kind of character that her and her son read stories about. What happens when you become that character today? What happens with the family around you and with your child…? Not just a man in the ’40s with super-powers and his super-pals around him.

CBC: It was a cipher for Doc Savage.

Terry: Adventureman and his gang are a cipher for Doc Savage. The set-up is what happens today if Doc Savage actually was alive and his villains and enemies start to come into modern times.

CBC: When I was a kid, I was so excited about the James Bama covers, I bought the Doc Savage paperbacks—I bought six or seven of them. After about the third one, I thought, “That’s enough for me!” [chuckles] They were basically the same story told over and over. But you and Matt have captured the appeal. I’m glad you zeroed in the New York City setting. Doc Savage, just like early Marvel Comics, was set in the real New York, and it’s very fun stuff.

Terry: Right. The thing is, I’ve never read a Doc Savage book. I’ve seen the covers and my brothers had the books in the house. The James Bama covers were awesome.

Adventureman TM & © Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc., and Terry Dodson. Scooter girl illustration © Terry Dodson.

Yet today, I haven’t actually read an actual story. Matt sent me Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, by Philip José Farmer, a mock biography of the character and his interconnectedness with other famous fictional characters. That’s kind of what he sees as Adventureman’s bible. And what if all the information in that book were real and a true guide. I’ve only read parts of it; my interest waned quickly, but I loved the world it was set in. I love New York. I love going to the city and the architecture and simply being there. And I told Matt that’s what I really liked about his Aventureman story.

New York is one of the main characters in the book. I really understand that ’40s time period, especially the artists who did that pulp artwork. I loved the art and artists and the design of that period. I absolutely love that stuff; I adore it. It’s a chance for me to design stuff and create my own version of the buildings and costumes and color and the looks of the people. It’s a classy-looking time period in design, for fashions and vehicles…. It’s such a blast!

CBC: The art deco.

Terry: Exactly. It’s funny because when I was a teenager, Rachel was doing some paintings based on ’80s art deco.

It was kind of Miami-looking deco-y stuff that was popular in that decade. I thought, “Art deco… really cool.” That was my first exposure to it. Then I started working on Coraline, which was art nouveau, which was completely different. My mind was in the nouveau-y world for 15 years and then Adventureman came along and I realized how I love art deco, this “hard” and “industrialized” version of art nouveau, as well. It’s so fun to be working in that style, but I’m glad I had all those years working in art nouveau beforehand, to bring a “Terry Dodson look” to it—taking it and making it your own by making homage to art deco and art nouveau, but it’s still me, I guess, and what I like.

CBC: When can we expect the next story arc?

Terry: Adventureman returns in September. I’ve been working on it since October. There were a couple of starts and stops. I finished basically drawing Adventureman in October 2019 and worked on X-Men/Fantastic Four for six months while I was coloring Adventureman before it was going to launch in April 2020. But then Covid happened and we had a couple of extra months. I colored Adventureman from April into September, so that was 140 pages over those four or five months. Once I sent the fourth issue out, I cre-

ated two new covers for the hardcovers, plus all the design work for the collections, which was two intense weeks of 10-hour days with me and Leonardo Oleo, who was the designer, who created the logo and cool graphics you see in the book. So, after four years, Adventureman was done and I took three or four weeks to do a Batman Black and White story with [writer] Becky Cloonan, and then I did a couple of covers, and returned to Adventureman. So, I really only took a month off from Adventureman, maybe, and even then it was still on my mind because Matt was already writing the fifth issue.

CBC: I was very happy because, despite delay after delay in my personal life, your CBC cover will still be helpful for you guys in promoting Adventureman.

Terry: I’m not sure when it will come out, but the cover will be very relevant because it’s what I’m promoting for September, when Adventureman will again be out in the world. [chuckles]

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

This page: Terry Dodson channels his very finest Norman Rockwell in the delightful image above of “Scooter Girl” taking a scoot through the city. At inset upper left, courtesy of Terry’s lively Twitter account, are examples of the man’s obvious fixation of Vespa-style, twowheeled vehicles!

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creators at the con MORE OF THE WAY WE WERE Sigh. Don’t we all miss the physical proximity of our peers, our heroes, and fellow fans at real-life comic book conventions… am I right? Continuing his look at the distant past—i.e., the 2019 New York Comic Con—our intrepid (and either

Brian Stelfreeze in Artist Alley. Brian only just recently finished his collaboration with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates on Black Panther.

rank sentimentalist or nostalgically wistful) convention photographer, Kendall Whitehouse, shares more pix of pre-Covid 19 era Jacob K. Javits Convention Center comic book peeps grinning in their element! Here’s to in-person events for all of us in the very near future! — Ye Ed.

Brit comic artist Tula Lotay (a.k.a. Lisa Wood) is founder of the U.K.’s largest comic book convention, the Thought Bubble Festival!

Comic book vet—and inker nonpareil—Klaus Janson teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and is author of how-to books on comics.

Photography by Kendall Whitehouse

All photos © Kendall Whitehouse.

Artist pals Jason Shawn Alexander (left) and Bill Sienkiewicz. Jason’s current project is co-creation Killadelphia and Bill is part of DC’s revival of Milestone Comics.

As of late producing covers for Dynamite’s Kiss comics, here’s Jae Lee working on a commission for a fan.

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Artist Dave Gibbons arrives on stage to join the cast of HBO’s Watchmen series. #26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

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Alter Ego • Back Issue • Comic Book Creator • Draw • Jack Kirby Collector:

Uh-Oh!

Looks like we jumped the gun and listed Comic Book Creator #28 — The Comic Book Creator Tribute to Richard Corben — for pre-ordering too soon, and find that we still need to work out some kinks on certain rights concerns, and thus have to delay publication for the time being.

Once everything is ironed out, we will re-list the issue for ordering, so please stay tuned to www.twomorrows.com for updates, and thanks for your patience and understanding.

Back cover or inside cover: $800 ($700 for two or more) Full-page interior: $600 ($500 for two or more) Half-page interior: $300 ($250 for two or more) Quarter-page interior: $150 ($125 for two or more) AD SIZES: COVERS & FULL-PAGE: 8.375” wide x 10.875” tall trim size, add 1/8” bleed. (7.625” x 10.125” live area.)

HALF-PAGE: 7.625” x 4.875” live area (no bleeds).

QUARTER-PAGE: 3.6875” x 4.875” live area (no bleeds).

Call or e-mail for frequency discounts!

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These rates are for digital ads supplied (PDF, JPEG, TIF, EPS, InDesign, or Quark Xpress files acceptable). No agency discounts apply.

CBC for me, see?

coming attractions: cbc #27 in the fall

Paul Gulacy: Comics’ Kung-Fu Master! ™

$9.95 in the USA

Shang-Chi TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

A TwoMorrows Publication No. 27, Summer 2021

The art and career of PAUL GULACY is celebrated in CBC #27 with an extensive retrospective

by GREG BIGA that includes memories from the artist himself and a vast array of peers, including Val Mayerik, P. Craig Russell, Tim Truman, Roy Thomas, and others. From ShangChi, Master of Kung Fu, Sabre, and James Bond 007 to Batman: Prey and Catwoman, we examine this of this superb cinematic comic book artist’s influences and his influence on an entire generation of creators. Plus we feature an extensive JOE SINNOTT MEMORIAL (also compiled by Greg Biga!) that includes heartfelt testimonials from an army of the masterful artist’s peers and admirers. Rounding out CBC’s main features is part one of a fascinating chat with distributor, publisher, and mail-order bookseller supreme BUD PLANT, discussing his very early days as underground comix retailer, top West Coast distributor, and fledgling publisher of Jack Katz’s First Kingdom. Rich Arndt expands his usual column to chat with war comics anthologist AUGUST UHL, and Darrick Patrick has ten questions for Italian comics artist ROBERTA INGRANATA. Of course, our regular team of Whitehouse, Ziuko, Thompson, and others are also onboard this ish, along with the latest HEMBECK Dateline strip!

Full-color, 84 pages, $9.95

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Summer 2021 • #26

79

from the archives of Tom Ziuko

Hawkman, Hawkgirl TM & © DC Comics.

a picture is worth a thousand words

In 1984, DC Comics released a set of 12 Justice League of America postcards penciled and inked by George Pérez, for which I provided colors. Done in the pre-digital era, this is my hand painted coloring for the Hawkman and Hawkgirl entry. —TZ 80

#26 • Summer 2021 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

FROM TWOMORROWS & JON B. COOKE

JOHN SEVERIN: TWO-FISTED COMIC BOOK ARTIST A spirited biography of the EC COMICS mainstay (working with HARVEY KURTZMAN on MAD and TWO-FISTED TALES) and co-creator of Western strip AMERICAN EAGLE. Covers his 40+ year association with CRACKED magazine, his pivotal Marvel Comics work inking HERB TRIMPE on THE HULK and teaming with sister MARIE SEVERIN on KING KULL, and more! With commentary by NEAL ADAMS, RICHARD CORBEN, JOHN BYRNE, RUSS HEATH, WALTER SIMONSON, and many others. By GREG BIGA and JON B. COOKE. SHIPS FALL 2021!

(160-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $14.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-106-6

OLD GODS &SOFTCOVER NEW

AND LIMITED HARDCOVER EDITION JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #80 is a double-size book

titled “Old Gods & New”, documenting the genesis of Kirby’s FOURTH WORLD series, his use of gods in THOR and other strips prior to the Fourth World, how those influenced his DC epic, and affected later series like THE ETERNALS and CAPTAIN VICTORY. To commemorate this landmark publication, TwoMorrows is offering both a SOFTCOVER EDITION, and a LIMITED HARDCOVER EDITION (just 400 copies), only available directly from the publisher! By JOHN MORROW, with contributions by JON B. COOKE. (160-page full-color LIMITED HARDCOVER EDITION) $35.95 • (Std. trade paperback) $26.95 (Digital Edition) $12.99 • Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-098-4 • NOW SHIPPING!

CBA BULLPEN: The Magic Is Back!

COLLECTING THE UNKNOWN ISSUES OF COMIC BOOK ARTIST! COMIC BOOK ARTIST BULLPEN collects all seven issues of the little-seen labor of love fanzine published in the early 2000s by JON B. COOKE (editor of today’s COMIC BOOK CREATOR magazine), just after the original CBA ended its TwoMorrows run. Featured are in-depth interviews with some of comics’ major league players, including GEORGE TUSKA, FRED HEMBECK, TERRY BEATTY, and FRANK BOLLE—and an amazing all-star tribute to Silver Age great JACK ABEL by the Marvel Comics Bullpen and others. That previously unpublished all-comics Abel appreciation (assembled by RICK PARKER) includes strips by JOE KUBERT, WALTER SIMONSON, KYLE BAKER, MARIE SEVERIN, GRAY MORROW, ALAN WEISS, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, MORT TODD, DICK AYERS, and many more! Includes the never-released CBA BULLPEN #7, a new bonus feature on JACK KIRBY’s unknown 1960 baseball card art, and a 16-page full-color section, all behind a KIRBY COVER! (176-page TRADE PAPERBACK with COLOR) $24.95 • (Digital Edition) $8.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-105-9 • NOW SHIPPING!

New Comics Magazines!

ALTER EGO #174

ALTER EGO #175

KIRBY COLLECTOR #82

FCA [FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA] issue—spearheaded by feisty and informative articles by Captain Marvel co-creator C.C. BECK—plus a fabulous feature on vintage cards created in Spain and starring The Marvel Family! In addition: DR. WILLIAM FOSTER III interview (conclusion)—MICHAEL T. GILBERT on the lost art of comicbook greats—the haunting of JOHN BROOME—and more! BECK cover!

Spotlighting the artists of ROY THOMAS’ 1980s DC series ALL-STAR SQUADRON! Interviews with artists ARVELL JONES, RICHARD HOWELL, and JERRY ORDWAY, conducted by RICHARD ARNDT! Plus, the Squadron’s FINAL SECRETS, including previously unpublished art, & covers for issues that never existed!

With FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and a wraparound cover by ARVELL JONES!

“THE MANY WORLDS OF JACK KIRBY!” From Sub-Atomica to outer space, visit Kirby’s work from World War II, the Fourth World, and hidden worlds of Subterranea, Wakanda, Olympia, Lemuria, Atlantis, the Microverse, and others! Plus, a 2021 Kirby panel, featuring JONATHAN ROSS, NEIL GAIMAN, & MARK EVANIER, a Kirby pencil art gallery from MACHINE MAN, 2001, DEVIL DINOSAUR, & more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Oct. 2021

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Dec. 2021

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Feb. 2022

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships April 2022

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Winter 2022

KIRBY COLLECTOR #83

BACK ISSUE #131

BACK ISSUE #132

BACK ISSUE #133

BACK ISSUE #134

THE KIRBY LEGACY AT DC! Explores Jack Kirby’s post-Fourth World Bronze Age DC characters! Demon, Kamandi, OMAC, Sandman, and Kirby’s Odd Jobs (Atlas, Manhunter, and more). Plus: the SIMON & KIRBY Reunion That Wasn’t! Featuring BISSETTE, BYRNE, CONWAY, GIBBONS, GOLDEN, GRANT, RUCKA, SEMEIKS, THOMAS, TIMM, WAGNER, and more.

Demon cover by KIRBY and MIKE ROYER!

1980s MARVEL LIMITED SERIES! CLAREMONT/MILLER’s Wolverine, Black Panther, Falcon, Punisher, Machine Man, Iceman, Magik, Fantastic Four vs. X-Men, Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D., Wolfpack, and more! With BOGDANOVE, COWAN, DeFALCO, DeMATTEIS, GRANT, HAMA, MILGROM, NEARY, SMITH, WINDSORSMITH, and more. Cover by JOE RUBINSTEIN. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

STARMEN ISSUE, headlined by JAMES ROBINSON and TONY HARRIS’s Jack Knight Starman! Plus: The StarSpangled Kid, Starjammers, the 1980s Starman, and Starstruck! Featuring DAVE COCKRUM, GERRY CONWAY, ROBERT GREENBERGER, ELAINE LEE, TOM LYLE, MICHAEL Wm. KALUTA, ROGER STERN, ROY THOMAS, and more. Jack Knight Starman cover by TONY HARRIS.

BRONZE AGE RARITIES & ODDITIES, spotlighting rare ‘80s European Superman comics! Plus: CURT SWAN’s Batman, JIM APARO’s Superman, DAVID ANTHONY KRAFT’s Marvel custom comics, MICHAEL USLAN’s unseen Earth-Two stories, Leaf’s DC Secret Origins, Marvel’s Evel Knievel, cover variants, and more! With EDUARDO BARRETO, PAUL KUPPERBERG, ALEX SAVIUK, and more. Cover by JOE KUBERT.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Spring 2022

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Nov. 2021

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Jan. 2022

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships March 2022

2021

“Famous Firsts!” How JACK KIRBY was a pioneer in comics: Romance Comics genre, Kid Gangs, double-page spreads, Black heroes, new formats, super-hero satire, and others! With MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, plus a gallery of Jack’s pencil art from CAPTAIN AMERICA, JIMMY OLSEN, CAPTAIN VICTORY, DESTROYER DUCK, BLACK PANTHER, unseen ANIMATION CONCEPTS, & more!

SUBSCRIPTION RATES Alter Ego (Six issues) Back Issue (Eight issues) BrickJournal (Six issues) Comic Book Creator (Four issues) Jack Kirby Collector (Four issues) RetroFan (Six issues)

ECONOMY US $68 $90 $68 $46 $49 $68

EXPEDITED US $80 $103 $80 $56 $59 $80

PREMIUM US $87 $113 $87 $60 $63 $87

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

INTERNATIONAL $103 $137 $103 $69 $72 $103

DIGITAL ONLY $27 $36 $27 $18 $18 $27

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com Don’t miss exclusive sales, limited editions, and new releases! Sign up for our mailing list:

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All characters TM & © their respective owners.

ALTER EGO #173

BLACK HEROES IN U.S. COMICS! Awesome overview by BARRY PEARL, from Voodah to Black Panther and beyond!

Interview with DR. WILLIAM FOSTER III (author of Looking for a Face Like Mine!), art/artifacts by BAKER, GRAHAM, McDUFFIE, COWAN, GREENE, HERRIMAN, JONES, ORMES, STELFREEZE, BARREAUX, STONER—plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and more! Edited by ROY THOMAS.

PRINTED IN CHINA

ALTER EGO #172

ALFREDO ALCALA is celebrated for his dreamscape work on Savage Sword of Conan and other work for Marvel, DC, and Warren, as well as his own barbarian creation Voltar, as RICH ARNDT interviews his sons Alfred and Christian! Also: FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, PETER NORMANTON’s horror history From The Tomb, JOHN BROOME, and more!