Comic Book Creator #37 Preview

Winter 2025 • The Steve Englehart Issue • Number 37

T A STEVE ENGLEHART Portrait by KEN MEYER, JR.

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Ye Ed’s Rant: Your humble editor on his obsessive/compulsive pathology, re: comics!..... 2

©2025 Ken Meyer, Jr.

COMICS CHATTER

About Our Cover

The Miller Reconciliation: With the help of Barbara Friedlander, Ye Ed examines the accomplished if not completely unblemished life of DC Comics editor Jack Miller........ 3

Cover art by SAL BUSCEMA, Pencils JIM MOONEY, Inks Cover colors by GLEN WHITMORE

Read It in the Funny Papers: The tale of short-lived underground comix tabloid......... 12 Arnold Drake at 100: The final portion of CBC’s three-part interview with the legendary comics scribe on his creating Doom Patrol, Deadman, and post-Marvel/DC work ........ 16 Once Upon Long Ago: Steve Thompson name-drops plenty about comics pro chums.... 29 Ten Questions: Bob Fingerman yaks with Darrick about his loves (hint: his doggies!).... 30 Incoming: Missives on the tragic George Caragonne and also Gerber the Great.............. 32

Captain America TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

They Came from Missouri: Ken Steinhoff, news photog, on Show-Me comics scribes... 34 Dan DiDio: Part two of Greg Biga talk with the writer-editor about his DC exec years....... 38 Comics in the Library: Richard Arndt on Nell and some girl named Turtle..................... 47 Brown’s Bulletin: Comics fan Gary Brown and the journey of his old Lois Lane ish......... 48 Hembeck’s Dateline: We’ve got a good feeling about Fred’s force-filled installment!.... 49 THE MAIN EVENT Above: This issue’s main subject, Steve Englehart, hoped Sal Buscema might produce new cover art, but our pal Sal wasn’t available.

But, to keep Steve happy, we found a scan of the original art for Sal’s great Captain America #155 [Nov. ’72], with inks by Jim Mooney!

Man, I loved thish!

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BACK MATTER Important Announcement! Sick of waiting 90 days for each CBC? How’s 60 sound?... 73 Creators at the Con: Kendall Whitehouse shares comics pro “Personal Tales” portraits.. 78 Coming Attractions: Roarin’ Rick Veitch beckons us into his head come next April!....... 79 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Valda skewers Master Rich by Ernie Colón...... 80 EDITOR’S NOTE: The Jack Butterworth interview in CBC #35 was transcribed by TOM PAIRIN. Apologies to our friend for the inadvertent omission.

Right: Swiping from the Heritage Auctions’ description of this John Romita, Sr., artifact: “This is the earliest original artwork we have ever seen of ‘This One’! Mantis was created by Steve Englehart and first illustrated by Don Heck in The Avengers #112 [June ’73] in what began the long-running ‘Celestial Madonna’ story arc. Romita, Sr., was made the art director of Marvel Comics in 1973, and had a hand in the development of new characters, such as Mantis.”

PLEASE NOTE: Some imagery in this issue has been digitally enhanced with software.

Comic Book Creator ™ is published bi-mothly 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. Six-issue subscriptions: $73 US, 117 International, $29 Digital.

All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2025 Jon B. Cooke/ TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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

The Enlightenment of Steve Englehart From his Midwest upbringing to time in the U.S. Army to his start as an artist working for Neal Adams — as the very first Crusty Bunker! — (and dating Bob Oksner’s cute daughter!) Stephen Kerfoot Englehart talks about his breakthrough early to mid-’70s work, with emphasis on his daring Captain America run, trippy Doctor Strange sagas, and masterful achievement with The Avengers. Plus we find out about his treatment by the mainstream comics companies and early independent comics work................. 50

LARRY TODD, MARY WINGS, and MICHAEL ZULLI

up front

The Miller Reconciliation

A look at the truth, lies, and tragedy that diminished the reputation of a DC Comics writer/editor

by JON B. COOKE

Photo courtesy of Barbara Friedlander. Strange Adventures, Deadman TM & © DC Comics.

[NOTE: I confess I’ve been curious about the life and career of Mr. Jack Miller since reading his engaging scripts for early episodes of “Deadman,” in Strange Adventures, and noting he was also editor of that title at the start of the character’s celebrated run. His bio in the Deadman [2001] collection simply states Miller was a DC editor between 1964–69, had written for comics and other fields since the ’40s, and was dead by 1970. But a few years before that biographical sketch appeared, I had heard salacious rumors and mysterious references about Miller when I interviewed DC personnel for early issues of Comic Book Artist, yet, a quarter-century later, it came into sharper focus when I spoke with Miller associate editor and protégé Barbara Friedlander. I’d initially intended to name this feature, “The Miller Redemption,” but, in my investigation, I discovered a more complex story, one no less heart-wrenching and tragic). — JBC] Viewed from the inside, one could quip the “DC” on 1960s’ comic book covers at National Periodical Publications stood for “Decidedly Cruel,” at least in the offices of certain mean-spirited, sometimes crooked editors at 575 Lexington Avenue. Superman group editor Mort Weisinger was notorious for brutalizing his stable of freelancers. Jim Shooter, at the tender age of 14, suffered the most vile verbal abuse: decades later, the future Marvel editor-in-chief (no milquetoast, he) remembered Weisinger as “a monster.”

Then there was Robert Kanigher, overseer of the DC war titles and prolific writer, prone to ridicule and scream at his artists. Gene Colan called him “impossible… very abusive… [and] he was a lunatic, in plain English.” (Artist Mort Meskin was said to have suffered a nervous breakdown because of Kanigher’s harangues.)

Even the revered “Uncle Julie,” father of the Silver Age Julius Schwartz, had a reputation for impatience and wasn’t averse to barking frustrations in a freelancer’s direction. (And woe be the cordial young female who ambled near his — or, it is said, Kanigher’s, for that matter! – lecherous reach, but that’s a whole other story).

In his 2017 book, Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC, author Reed Tucker shared, “Kanigher, Weisinger, and Schwartz made up the core of DC’s editorial staff in 1960 — just one year before the dawn of the so-called Marvel age of comics — and they represented an old-fashioned mentality that would, in a few short years, find itself woefully out of step with the changing times.”

One could also say DC stood for “Distressingly Corrupt,” given the extortion taking place in some offices, most blatantly from behind the desk of the company’s humor editor, a notorious gambler who demanded kickbacks from freelancers, as well as forcing them to work gratis on his outside projects. But evidence of DC veteran Lawrence Nadle’s schemes didn’t come to light until just prior to his demise from a heart attack, on December 26, 1963.

Artist John Romita, Sr., who was a DC romance comics stalwart before defecting to become “Jazzy John” at the Marvel Comics Group in 1965, said, “I never gave an editor a kickback. I did get caught by Larry Nadle, but only for one story, and I like to think he liked me a little bit better than the other guys. Otherwise, he would have taken me for more than one story. You know, you’d get a check and then you’d sign a personal check over to him for that amount, and then you owed the company a story. And, when he died, I owed them one story, 360 bucks worth.”

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2025 • #37

MILLER’S CROSSING Discovery of more of Nadle’s unethical activity came to light just before his abrupt death at 60. Then-DC editorial director Irwin Donenfeld told me, “I caught a double-dip in our yearly audit and I found a whole bunch of scripts (not the originals, but copies). I asked him, ‘How come we have all these scripts, why haven’t we used them, and why are you sitting on all this inventory?’ I read a couple of them and said, ‘Boy, that’s familiar!’” The former executive then chuckled. “The titles were strange… At any rate, the editor died shortly thereafter; he went suddenly with a heart attack.”

By early 1964, Nadle’s passing created an opportunity for longtime DC contributor Jack Miller to ascend to a full-time editorial position at the company. Miller had been a DC scribe since at least 1942, where, into the following decade, he was responsible for text pages and letter columns, as well as the oft regular series assignment, which included “Martian Manhunter” in Detective Comics, “Congo Bill” in Action, “Tommy Tomorrow” in World’s Finest, and “Aquaman” in Adventure. After a shakeup in the romance line in 1963, upon editor Phyllis Reed’s departure, Nadle had assumed her duties, which then passed onto Miller, who began editing the love comics titles, Girls’ Romance, Girls’ Love Stories, Heart Throbs, Secret Hearts, Young Love, and Young Romance.

The saga of Jacob Edward Miller began 55 years before, on January 10, 1909, in Passaic, New Jersey, when the only son of Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents Morris and Ida was born. He had two sisters: elder Rose and younger Lillian (Lily). Son of a house painting contractor, Miller developed a knack for writing plays, which were often performed in area community theaters and, initially, north of the Catskills’ Borscht Belt.

“In the late 1930s, before he was married,” Miller’s daughter, Leslie, shared, “he used to go to the Adirondacks and work at a camp putting on plays. That’s where he started first producing plays, it was the incubator for the Ridgewood Players. He loved the Adirondacks.”

Upon graduating New York University, Miller married local Jersey girl Helen Tuckman, on November 18, 1936. During the time of their nuptials, according to the couple’s marriage license, he was employed as advertising manager for a newspaper out of Passaic. “There was also Movie Time, a weekly local publication he self-published through local advertisers for movie theaters,” Leslie explained. “Movie Time listed whatever movie was playing in Passaic or Patterson, and had ads from shops around the area. So he earned money from that, too.”

For a spell, Miller weathered the Depression by working

Above: Jack Miller at Barbara Friedlander’s wedding, in 1969.

Below: For a period, Jack was editor and writer of Strange Adventures. His caricature appears in the upper right of the word balloon on Neal Adams’s cover of SA #207 [Dec. ’67].

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in the Writers’ Program of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal jobs effort. Along with brother-in-law Irving S. Mates (and many other wordsmiths), Miller helped produce “a comprehensive and colorful history” of his native county, Bergen County Panorama [1941]. During this same period, Miller and Mates (who would enjoy a long, successful career as trade journal editor) jointly copyrighted something titled “Who Do We Appreciate?” (Whether that was a song or play… or whatever!… we haven’t a clue!)

Helen and Jack’s son, Bruce, was born in October 1937 and daughter Leslie arrived in August 1940. On October 16, 1940, Miller, then 31, registered for the U.S. military draft, which listed him as 5' 10½" and 155 lbs. In that same year, the U.S. Census reported the Miller family as residing with Helen’s parents.

Miller’s Time

Courtesy of the Miller family, here are some candid pix of Jack, his wife, Helen, and their children, Bruce and Leslie, as well as a school portrait from Jack’s youth.

“He started the Ridgewood Players, in the [New Jersey] city of Ridgewood,” Top: A 1934 playbill featuring a Leslie said, “because they had a theater you could rent. portrait of playwright Jack Miller. They were a huge number of people and they put on plays, which were always sold out… That group went on for many years. The last play they put on was [Gilbert and Sullivan’s] The Mikado. It was a sold-out event and he stopped [the troupe] after that (for what reason, I don’t know). In any case, the whole cast used to come every Christmas with gifts for Bruce and me, and they continued that for years after they disbanded.”

Miller’s daughter also shared that her father did some writing for television during the ’50s and early ’60s, including teleplays for The Twilight Zone and Playhouse 90. “Jack submitted/sold mul-

tiple scripts,” Leslie relayed. “At least one was aired. Was good money for each script, but it was on contract. DC Comics was more consistent.” (It is entirely fair to say Miller may have used a pseudonym for one or more of those efforts.)

Above: As best as can be ascertained, Jack Miller’s first job for DC were text pages by “Jay Marrs” in Wonder Woman #1 [Sum. ’42].

As a generator of nom de plumes, Miller was exceptional, with the Grand Comics Database listing some 55 pen names incorporating his initials, J.M., a signature affect he used for his DC text pages and comics stories, as well as on Trojan Magazines* work in the early ’50s. His most often employed false name, Jay Marrs, was first seen on a two-page text story, “A Message from Phil,” in Wonder Woman #1 [Sum. ’42].

While specifics of his arrival at DC aren’t clear, Miller’s earliest work looks to have been for editor Sheldon Mayer and later mainly on Jack Schiff’s and Weisinger’s books. Still, whether these gigs made enough to earn a living remain a mystery, as the 1950 U.S. Census describes him toiling as a sales jobber in wholesale household furnishing, as well as the family living with brother-in-law and newspaper editor Mates. There is also mention of Miller being a novelist and non-fiction writer, and the GCD speculates he may have also scripted episodes of Gunsmoke and The Invaders.

Doubtless is the fact Miller and fellow DC editor George Kashdan moonlighted as writers for New York-based animation house Trans-Lux for the syndicated cartoon series, The Mighty Hercules, on which he wrote scripts for many of its 128-episode * Given it shared the same Manhattan address as DC Comics of the ’40s/’50s, at 480 Lexington Avenue, pulp publishing house Trojan Magazines, which produced a comics line between 1949–54, is a good indicator that the imprint was at least partly owned

by DC publisher Harry Donenfeld, Irwin’s father.

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All photos, playbill courtesy of the Miller family. Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

#37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

the drake dossier

The Comic Book Man

The finale of a three-part interview celebrating of the 100 th birthday of the late Arnold Drake Who is Arnold Drake?

For those who missed parts one and two: the Manhattan native, recipient of the very first Bill Finger Award, is celebrated as co-creator of The Doom Patrol, Deadman, and The Guardians of the Galaxy, as well as co-author of the graphic novel widely considered the first of its kind, It Rhymes with Lust [1950].

In his extensive career, Arnold [1924–2007] worked for just about every major comic book publisher in innumerable genres. — JBC. Below: Luis Dominguez depicts A.D. and he working on their 2002 Heavy Metal story, “Tripping Out.” Who’s that lady serving drinks…?

Conducted by JON B. COOKE [Editor's Note: When last we left the conversation, Arnold was discussing an increasingly nasty atmosphere in the late ’60s at DC Comics — arguably publisher of his best comics work — and his decision to jump over to Marvel for an (albeit short-lived) stay. That portion showcased his large body of humor work, which included notable scripts for The Adventures of Jerry Lewis and Stanley and His Monster. We pick up the interview to cover some other DC-related subjects, including what was a labororganizing effort among the writers . Note that footnotes are courtesy of Drake fan/friend Marc Svensson, who refers to his interview with A.D. in Alter Ego Vol. 3, #17 [Sept. ’02] . — Y.E.] Comic Book Creator: Was there, in fact, a writer’s strike at DC? Arnold Drake: There was never a writer’s strike. A bunch of the writers, led by Bob Haney and myself, got together. That would have been about eight of us, seven, eight, something like that. We wanted to be dealt with as a group rather than individuals, because the house was playing us off against each other. We had some real gripes. Everybody says that the “strike” was about health insurance. The strike was not about health insurance. What it was about was recognition, which is a lot more basic than health insurance. It’s about [DC Comics president Jack] Liebowitz being willing to say, “I will talk with one or two of you guys who will represent all the writers.” Well, the writers wanted to do it, but the artists

* The list of people involved in the failed attempt to unionize is consistent with my original interview and subsequent conversations over the years, with the exception of “Wood brothers.” There were three Wood Brothers: Bob, Dick and Dave. Bob, artist and publisher at Lev Gleason comics, was convicted of killing his girlfriend and was killed in a car accident shortly after his release in 1966 and most assuredly had nothing to do with the DC writers. Dick Wood is the unmentioned brother, although I suspect his involvement was minor. ** Interestingly other than here, I have never heard Arnold, Bob Haney, or anyone else bring up Leo Dorfman in reference to the failed union. Leo Dorfman wrote some of the zaniest stories printed in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen and some of the other Superman titles. He was incredibly prolific in the Mort Weisinger stable.

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#37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Illustration © the estate of Luis Domiguez. Courtesy of Marc Svensson.

were not interested. The artists, almost to a man, said, “We’re not workers, we’re artists. Unions are for workers!” And when I said, “Look, I’ve been a member of the Screenwriter’s Guild for quite a while, and screenwriters who consider themselves both writers and artists are workers, or they wouldn’t have bought the guild.” That didn’t cut any ice. They were not interested in that kind of talk. I think they were just also kind of scared.

CBC: They were just rationalizing.

Arnold: Yeah, and I think they were convinced that, if they did that, they’d all be fired.

CBC: Did you help lead this? This was you and Bob? Arnold: Yeah. Essentially it was Haney and myself, with a lot of back-up from John Broome. Unfortunately, John was out of the country most of the time, so we didn’t get all of the strength from him that we might have, but he was solidly behind us.

[Bill] Finger was behind us, [Gardner] Fox was behind us, the Woods — Dave, in particular, was. Otto Binder was strongly behind us.* CBC: Edmund Hamilton?

Arnold: No, he wasn’t.

CBC: Who was Leo Dorfman?

Arnold: One of the writers. I believe Leo was with us. I didn’t really get to know Leo very well. The only artist who went along with it was [Kurt] Schaffenberger.** CBC: Did George Kashdan play into this at all?

Arnold: Well, he was an editor there and he was sympathetic. And I think that’s one of the reasons that they got rid of him.

CBC: Was he the only sympathetic editor?

Arnold: Oh, no. [Jack] Schiff was. But Schiff kept clear of us, even though he was very sympathetic to what we were doing.

Kashdan did not keep clear of us, and made it evident that he thought that they ought to negotiate. I think he tried to make the point that I made in Liebowitz’s office, which is, “If you do this, you will bring great honor to the field. The field right now is looked down upon. If you recognize a guild like this, you will improve conditions and raise the image for everybody, including the publishers.” That was one of the seven points I tried to make. I think Liebowitz saw nothing but, “Unions, unions!”

Years later, Infantino told me that the moment we left the room, Leibowitz called his Friday-morning-golfing-buddy, [Marvel president] Martin Goodman to say, “The writers are forming a union!”

Arnold Drake portrait © the respective photographer. Courtesy of Marc Svensson. My Greatest Adventure TM & © DC Comics.

Incidentally, at a private meeting, Leibowitz unconsciously insulted me by saying, “When I was your age, I was a socialist, too.” But when he was 40, nearly every first- or second-generation Jew was a socialist. So were lots of Germans, Italians, and Irish. Now [referring to the George W. Bush administration] Washington is in the hands of a thousand Christian fascists and corporate capos.

CBC: Was that talk between Leibowitz and Goodman the reason you and Stan Lee (Goodman’s cousin) didn’t hit it off well?

Arnold: Probably. Plus Stan’s unacknowledged guilt about stealing my Doom Patrol and calling it, “The X-Men.” To say nothing about switching my “Brotherhood of Evil” into his “Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.”

CBC: Let’s talk about The Doom Patrol. What kind of guy was Bruno Premiani?

Arnold: Very intelligent. He was a dedicated anti-fascist. He was forced to leave Italy because of Mussolini and then, some years later, he was forced to leave Argentina because of Peron.

He had started as a political cartoonist in Italy when he was about 17 years old. And Mussolini didn’t like his cartoons.* CBC: Do you know roughly what year he was born? Was he your age?

Arnold: Yes. He was about 10 years older than I am. My guess is he was born somewhere between 1912 and 1913, something like that. [Wikipedia states January 4, 1907.]

CBC: And did you guys talk politics at all?

Arnold: Oh, yeah. He came to my house one night for dinner and he started talking about McCarthyism, which was prevalent at that time. And he said, “You know, it’s like fascism.

It could be the road to fascism.” And I said to him, “Bruno, you were chased out of Italy, you were chased out of Argentina.

Don’t get chased out of this country, because you may have no other place to run to.”

Bruno was a very different experience, I think, for all the editors at DC. They had never quite seen what he had brought, which was a great deal of intelligence and understanding of his time and place, a great respect for the work itself, and dedication to it. The wonderful thing about Bruno is that he had learned to get along. I don’t know how hard it was for him to learn that, but he had learned it, which means that… Well, when he had a disagreement, when [Murray] Boltinoff would say to him, “Bruno, would you do this?” Or “Would you do that, instead of what you’ve done here?” Bruno would look at it for a moment and then nod his head, and say [affects an Italian accent] “I will do it, Murray, but it will be very poor.” So he had learned to get along. * Arnold told this story to me a bunch of times, and I never got tired of hearing it. It is abbreviated for this interview and, please keep in mind, I am retelling an Arnold Drake story that he told in his own entertaining way. It is a story as telling of Arnold as it is of Bruno Premiani. Arnold’s long version went something like this, with the exception of my comment in the parenthesis: When Bruno was young and Mussolini was coming to power Premiani’s political cartoons were pointing out the true nature of Mussolini and his Fascist party. (I would like to quickly point out Premiani was there for the birth of the word “fascist” and contributed to our understanding of its broader definition. He was not just a “dedicated anti-Fascist”; he was the original anti-Fascist.) When the warrants for his arrest were issued, he had to flee, and flee he did. He next wound up in Spain. Premiani was soon in the same situation he was in Italy after criticizing Franco.

He was also still too close to Italy and Mussolini, who were still COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2025 • #37

This page: Above is It Rhymes with Lust [1950], written by Drake and Leslie Waller and drawn by Matt Baker. Below: Drake pen-&ink portrait by Dominguez. Inset left: A very young Arnold Druckman, courtesy of his daughter Pamela.

I worked closely — and still do — after 40 years, I’m still working with Luis Dominguez, who was probably the artist closest to Bruno in style and personality and friendship. They came up here six months apart, from Buenos Aires, where they had worked together on the Argentinian version of Classic Comics, and things like that. And Bruno, as I said, learned to get along, through various (probably nasty) experiences. But Luis has never learned that in all these years. Luis will still blow his top and walk away from a job because it isn’t exactly the way he would like to do it. For the last 10 years, I’ve been his agent and he’s turned down more than one assignment that I’ve gotten for him, simply because… Well, for example, I got him an assignment to do some Christmas cards and they had religious themes. He didn’t object to that. (I mean, he did object, but he didn’t make a big noise about it.) But when I got him an as-

Above: Comic book great Arnold Drake on the balcony of his Manhattan apartment, circa 1999. The photographer is unknown.

Below: The Doom Patrol, an Arnold Drake creation, debuted in My Greatest Adventure #80 [June ’63]. Art by Bruno Premiani.

i nterested in his affairs, so Bruno fled to Argentina. When he was in Argentina, he became an outspoken critic of Juan Peron, because Bruno was Bruno. He had to leave for another country, and Bruno soon found himself in the United States. Eventually Bruno felt he had to flee the United States and return to Argentina with the situation improved there. When asked why he had to “flee,” Bruno cited the rise of Ronald Reagan, stating, “I know a fascist when I see one!”

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This page: Above refers to Arnold’s last Doom Patrol issue, #121 [Oct. ’68]. Below is cast of the Doom Patrol [2019–23] TV show.

a fairly simple answer.” And he said, “What’s that?” And I said, “Bring in an editor-in-chief from outside the organization.

Bring in somebody who will impress the hell out of both Schiff and Weisinger.” And he said, “Who would that be?” And I said, “Offhand, I don’t know, Mr. Liebowitz, but I would try to hire a top vice president at Time magazine, for example.” And he said, “Are you crazy? You think that there’s an editor at Time who would want to go to the comics business?” And I said, “Yes, if you offer him double what they’re paying him.” So he said, “No, no, no, no.” Which was a part of the “we’re really a whorehouse, why would anybody want to do business with us?”

And another time he told me proudly how Mort had brought him a marvelous proposition. There was a guy who I think was from Boston, but was now living out on the island where Mort lived, and they used to come in on a train together, and they would talk together, and this guy was fully prepared to bankroll a pilot for a Superman television cartoon for TV, a Superman TV cartoon. And Mort brought it in, and Liebowitz was kind of excited about it. The guy’s willing to put up his own money and so on, and so forth. So he told me about it, and my reaction was, “I don’t understand why you don’t form your own studio and do Superman here, and use your artists to do storyboards, and then get some professional animators.” He said, “What do I know about the animation business?” And I said, “What did you know about the comic book business in 1937?” But, see, that’s the other aspect of him that I spoke of, the non-risk-taking Liebowitz.

CBC: The accountant.

Arnold: Yeah. He saved the business, and then it couldn’t bloom, it couldn’t blossom, because of him.

CBC: Now, if you look at it with the sheer change of the writing, all of a sudden the medium age of writers, between 1966 and ’68, dropped to basically teenage level. Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Mike Friedrich, any number of very young, green writers who were comic book fans coming in, while the old guard literally disappeared overnight, except for Weisinger’s books, and even then, even Julie Schwartz, he didn’t have Gardner Fox or John Broome anymore. Leo Dorfman was gone in short order and replaced by Cary Bates… And I don’t know if I told you this before, but I interviewed Joe Orlando before he passed away, and he told me a story about you sitting in Liebowitz’s office, that was disparaging. He basically portrayed you as being a very arrogant writer, as being somebody who was just very arrogant.

And he said that, I’m paraphrasing, but, “Little did Arnold know that the artists were in charge now.”

Arnold: Well, I knew that.

CBC: And then you weren’t there anymore. All of a sudden your credits started appearing over at Marvel. You didn’t do “Deadman” anymore. You were gone.

Arnold: They didn’t throw me out. I walked out.

CBC: Was it a hostile environment that made you walk out?

Arnold: I made a deal with Irwin Donenfeld and he had reneged. I went into his office and I said, “Irwin, you know the climate in the business has changed, and your answer is Carmine Infantino.” I said, “That’s a very good answer, but that’s only half of the formula. What you have is a Jack Kirby.

You need a Stan Lee.” And I said, “I’m offering myself.” So he said, “Well, that’s interesting, but you’ll have to give me time to think about it.” So I said, “Well, how much time do you want?”

And he said, “Six months.” So I understood that he was saying, “You’re a schmuck.” So I said, “Oh, okay. Well, I’m agreed that you want six months to decide, but in the meantime, I want a 30 percent raise in my rate.”

CBC: Might as well go for broke, right? [laughs] #37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Doom Patrol TM & © DC Comics.

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known that, he would have been with us in a shot. And I’m told that Gil tried to do it, himself, about 10 years later.

So I think I was a pretty sh*tty organizer. [Jon laughs] So that didn’t help too much. And I offer as an explanation, in part, the fact that both my parents died within about six months of each other at that time.

My wife was inordinately fond of my mother, because my wife’s own relationship with her mother was not good, and she found in my mother the mother that she wished she had. So, when both my folks died within six months of each other, it had quite an impact on us. So I said, “Screw this.

Let’s pack our bags and go someplace for a while and try to get this out of our system.” So we did that. We went to London and lived there.

CBC: Is it in the late ’60s?

Arnold: Nineteen sixty-seven, yeah.

CBC: And this was after the…

Arnold: After the meeting. There were two meetings.

Everything changes that… As a result of our discussions, which I guess I led… I don’t think there’s any question I did… as a result of that, Liebowitz came to respect me. I don’t think he trusted me. There was no reason why he should. But he respected me, and he would open questions with me that I don’t think he discussed with anybody except maybe his top editors. At one point, he said to me, “I don’t have a real editor-in-chief. I have these two men, Weisinger and Schiff, but I don’t have an editor-in-chief because, if I appoint one, the other one will leave.”

So he said, “I have no answer for that problem and it’s gone unanswered for a number of years.” So I said, “I think there is

’sixties snapshot by steinhoff

They Came from Missouri

Newspaperman Ken Steinhoff on encountering two comics scribes from the “Show Me” state

This page: Clockwise from inset right, a 1966 photo of Ken Steinhoff, which a friend annotated, “The sun never sets on the cool”; at a dinner with fellow Southeast Missourian co-workers, Denny O’Neil shows his flask pouring technique; that same meal has a friend clowning around as she offers O’Neil a forkful (that’s fellow journalist Jerry Obermark at left); and Steinhoff’s press credentials from his mid-’60s Missouri newspaper jobs.

Dinner party photography is by and courtesy of Steinhoff.

by JON B. COOKE Today, when newspaper veteran Ken Steinhoff looks back at his diverse experience “spraying ink on newsprint,” he’s grateful to have lived in a “Golden Age” of the industry when, he said, “It was still fun to be in the newspaper business.” And some of the fun started when Steinhoff was a paid intern at the Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian, where police beat reporter (and future comics scribe) Denny O’Neil was on staff.

“Well, Denny was a hell of a writer and the Missourian was an interesting place. Denny and his girlfriend, Anne, weren’t very happy because it was a little provincial for their way of thinking,” Steinhoff recalled.

“Denny had a big city perspective…

Denny had an interesting past. He had served on one of the naval vessels that participated in the quarantine during the Cuban blockade, and he talked about not being sure whether he would have a front row seat for the beginning of World War III.” Back in 1998, O’Neil told me, “After the military hitch, I went back to St. Louis and, for about a year, was a substitute teacher for sixth grade to senior high school. One day a week, I drove a station wagon for my father, who was a grocer. I thought that this was not what I wanted to do with my life, so I answered an ad that was in

Editor & Publisher magazine for a beat reporter in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a little town about 110 miles up the Mississippi [River] from St. Louis.

I worked there for only about six months, but it had such a huge effect on my life that it seems longer than it was.”

Even 60 years later, Steinhoff retains vivid memories of his friend’s brief stay.

“He was a cop reporter and he also was the district news editor… a guy that rode herd on all of the stringers we had in the far-flung empire of southeast Missouri.”

While a staff photographer at the daily, Steinhoff would be amused by his mischievous colleague. “When Denny was working as cop reporter, it was at the height of the Civil Rights movement, and he doctored up what was purported to be an AP bulletin that he left conveniently where it would be found at the police desk, that said demonstrators were coming to Cape Girardeau in a caravan and violence was entirely possible. Well, you can imagine how that tip was received by the police department and, after they determined that it was a hoax, they invited themselves over to Denny’s apartment (which was in the back of the police department) and searched to find out if his typewriter had been the one that created it.

Fortunately, the typewriter was the one that he used at the office.”

* In addition to his pittance of a salary, Steinhoff, fresh out of high school, would sell photos to the paper for five bucks each, sometimes ending up with a higher paycheck than even senior reporters.

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#37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photos by, courtesy of, and © Ken Steinhoff. Used with permission.

MILLIE THE MALLARD Then there was the tale of a mother duck. “One of my most profitable assignments* — and one that caused Denny much angst — was Millie the Mallard,” Steinhoff said. “We had a swimming pool in Cape, and there were round circles cut in the concrete where trees grew up and they had rocks around ‘em and stuff. And we received a breaking news report that a mallard had taken up and made a nest and had laid eggs in that protected space. So they sent me out to take pictures of it. They sent Denny out to do a story, and Denny did such a masterful job of writing it that it captured the attention of all of our readers who became obsessed with finding out the story of Millie. And, of course, I enjoyed it because I got paid $5 for every picture that was published. But Denny soon became unenamored with becoming a Boswell to a Millard duck.

“One night, somehow or another, I got keys to the fence surrounding the swimming pool so I could take pictures of Millie in repose, and Denny and Anne decided to come with

that guy from brooklyn

In the House of Superman

Dan DiDio discusses his executive editorship at DC Comics and his future in comics world Conducted by GREG BIGA [In our last issue Dan DiDio described his upbringing in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush; along the way, revealing his perennial love of movies, monsters, comics, and cartoons.

He also shared how those pursuits brought him into contact with some luminaries of the broadcast world as he segued from frustrated accounting student into a producer of television content, including the glamorous realm of daytime soap operas. In this concluding segment, we pick up the conversation after Dan made his leap into DC Comics as the replacement for departing longtime DC executive Paul Levitz. — G.B.]

This page: Clockwise from above is cover to the Identity Crisis [2005] collection; splash to Jack Kirby’s gag three-pager in Fantastic Four Annual #5 [Nov. ’67], back when Lee and Kirby were having fun; and official DC company portrait of Dan DiDio shot by Mitchell Haddad.

CBC: Wow. That is that is a ridiculous number based on the freelance life of the comic industry. That’s amazing.

Dan: Yeah, and remember, we’re churning out 60–70 books a month. That isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. This included everyone, like inkers and colorists. Because ultimately, the reverse of this was people felt if they didn’t get put under contract that they weren’t respected. So, we’re putting people under contract not because you’re worried about them going elsewhere, but because you didn’t want them to feel bad. [laughs] I laugh about it, but what it really did was create a sense of family and belonging to everybody involved. Everybody became vested in what we did. Everybody felt like they were part of the family. Ultimately, it was that family feel that really creates that camaraderie which leads to content and better storytelling, and just a better energy all around.

CBC: Your leadership style, from your belief system, is that something that was innate and made itself happen? Or was that purposeful for you to make that feeling happen?

Dan: One thing I love about comics or even animation and things of that nature is, I love anything that’s collaborative and creative. You know, I approach the creative process as sort of like [Sam] Sheepdog and [Ralph] Wolf. [laughs] The constant churning and turmoil and the explosion of creational ideas that goes back to that piece of art of Stan Lee standing on top of the desk in the Fantastic Four Annual dictating a story to Jack Kirby. And that, for me, is what creative is. I love that. But I love the craziness that goes with it. And then #37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Identity Crisis, DiDio portrait TM & © DC Comics. “This is a Plot?” TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Photo by Mitchell Haddad

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Comic Book Creator: Stepping back briefly, because you mentioned about your team-building: who were some of the folks that you immediately brought onto your team?

Dan DiDio: I used the entire editorial department, really.

Because, ultimately, they’re the guys on the frontline. They’re doing it, day in and day out. You’re not doing it. So you see the beginning to the end but, if it changes too much in the middle, by the time we get to the end, you’re not gonna have a chance to fix it. On the talent side, it was interesting, because as people used to say, I was the guy that started the talent wars in some ways. Because I kept on saying, “Marvel found ways to constantly poach our talent.” Because they were relentless. They would call the guys working for us every day. The guys were basically telling me, “I decided to go with Marvel.” I just wanted to stop fooling people. I’d say, “That’s not good. We’re trying to be respectful.”

So what I wound up doing was saying, “Fine, if that’s the game we’re gonna play, how about I put you on contract?

And then I can get you into the competitive rates Marvel is offering. And that way I remove any uncertainty from your life and give a guarantee of work. That way, your focus is only on work because you’re guaranteed X-number of dollars and X-page rate for the next few years. How does that sound?” And the first person to sign up that bought into the program was Judd Winick.

I will always be grateful to Judd for being the first one to have enough faith and belief in the system and what I was trying to do, and join in. But, I tell you, by the time I get into 2007–08, we might have had about 140 people under contract.

Infinite Crisis TM & © DC Comics.

the ability to go out and have a drink and enjoy each other’s company afterwards. Because none of it is personal. It’s all about getting the best product. And that’s why I always say, “I only do the products that have to do with people.”

And that came back to haunt me at times. But, at that moment, for that time, we were all in sync, we were all in that mindset. I would say that continued through for, really, the first five, six years that I was there, which is good.

CBC: And you already mentioned two things, which I want to just get back to. One was Identity Crisis. That was Brad Meltzer who did that?

Dan: Yes, he did. First of all, Brad is an accomplished novelist in his own right. He had no reason to be in comics other than the fact that he loves them. And he was writing Green Arrow at the time, and he presents that script, and it was a challenging script. But what I loved about it was how it took something that we remember from the past, and cast it in a new light, and still felt true to the past, but presented everything so much differently. I felt that was the template for what we needed to do moving forward, not to completely reject the goofiness or craziness of the past. But finding a way to contextualize it and make it feel like it’s something that’s relevant to people who were reading books today. And he knocked it out of the park.

Quite honestly, I didn’t know whether we were going to go or no. And what we wound up doing is writing the entire book out. He wrote the entire series of books and presented it to [DC publisher] Paul [Levitz] for approval as a complete book. And I think Paul always respected strong writing, and challenges and things that thoughtfully explore issues and take you through a rigor perhaps, but also in a way that is not exploitive. And to Paul’s credit, he supported this. And when he supported it, we knew we had to deliver to that expectation. And I’m happy to say that we did.

CBC: Was this kind of the timeframe when DC most purposely kind of raised the age limit of what they were expecting the readership to be?

Dan: I’m not gonna say that we raised the age limit of what the DC was expecting the books to be. I’m going to say that DC finally acknowledged who was reading the books.

CBC: Gotcha. It’s not eight-year-olds going into some dime store anymore.

Dan: I had to deal with that in the animation business, too; the pretense that it was a bunch of kids watching cartoons and not adults. You know, that’s kind of the same thing here. I think everybody had to realize that we were an aging audience. So, in order to make this work properly, we had to be respectful of the age that we really were attracting. And that’s what we went after. And we weren’t going over the top and being exploitive, but we were being a little more mature. Which became interesting because it did start to blur the lines between what was a Wildstorm product and what was the Vertigo product. DC was inching up, so that we were all getting a little bit closer and COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2025 • #37

brushing against the other in themes and sensibility.

CBC: How was the fan and sales response to that?

Dan: Extremely strong. Each one of our launches were doing better than expected or better than what previous launches were to this. And you got to remember too, contextually, this is a post-9/11 world. So there’s a lot of angst at that moment, a lot of frustration, a lot of fear. Even from a New York point of view, you know, the simplicity and the fun and playfulness were lost after the Towers went down. You know, I think what you’re seeing is a reflection of that mood, playing out in the comics.

CBC: What was the mindset or the plan going into Infinite Crisis or Countdown: Final Crisis?

Dan: Well, first of all, a lot of my logic was finding all the successes DC had and finding ways to recapture or emulate the previous success. So I was only looking at characters with successful runs. They had established audiences. But I also knew that Crisis was a defining moment for DC. And Crisis was a word we owned. We didn’t want to lose it. That’s why, with Identity Crisis, we wanted to take that name and make sure we reestablish it. Just like Secret became Marvel’s word. We wanted Crisis to be DC’s word. So, we’re going down that road. And we didn’t know what the event was going to be. It started so dramatically different. There’s a couple of funny stories along the way.

Above: Portion of a double-page spread from Identity Crisis #6 [Jan. ’05], with art by Rags Morales (pencils) and Michael Blair (inks), which includes a controversial sequence of an enraged Batman, distressed that the villain of the mini-series was lobotomized by the JLA, is “mindwiped” by team members.

Below: Infinite Crisis [2005–06], written by Geoff Johns, centered upon a conflict arising between Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, and it examined the notion of heroism, even of the misguided variety. This poster art used to promote the Infinite Crisis video game is by Edith Braim.

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Photo courtesy of Steve Englehart.

You have to wonder what the frick was in the water when it came to the young

Little known fact: While still in the U.S. Army, Steve actually began his comics

writers at Marvel Comics in the first half of the ’70s. Roy Thomas, who had

career as an artist, working as Neal Adams’ very first “Crusty Bunker” (in all but

more hip and self-aware than Stan Lee’s sometimes over-eager, wink-wink

appreciation for the man’s storytelling, I’d been enraptured with “Stainless”

ascended to the editor’s desk, had ushered in new vibe to the scripting, a little writing, and the Rascally One opened the door for an amazing crew of talents

that smashed the paradigm. At the forefront was Steve Gerber, Don McGregor,

and — our spotlighted scribe this ish, one STEPHEN KERFOOT ENGLEHART — all whose experience and sensibility helped to launch Marvel’s Second Wave.

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name), which you’ll learn about in our lively discussion forthwith. As for my own Steve’s Captain America during the Watergate and post-Nixon eras. The writer’s

take on the character perfectly captured the rudderless drift many Americans felt upon Tricky Dick’s resignation, which evoked not the expected jubilation over

finally being rid of a crooked president so much as angst for our country. — Y.E. #37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Steve Englehart portrait © and courtesy of Kendall Whitehouse.

Interview Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Comic Book Creator: You were born April 22nd, 1947, and your middle name is Kerfoot…? What’s that from?

Steve Englehart: We’re not exactly sure. It’s a family name, but not recognizably any language. So, you know, it just is.

CBC: That’s kind of a cool name. Did you continue it?

Steve: No, we did not continue it. We did find a town in Wales once named Kerfot, with just one O, but nobody there understood how that might connect to me, so I got no explanation.

CBC: What’s your ethnic background?

Steve: Well, I have the German name, but DNA stuff says I’m like 60% British Isles, you know… Central European whatever.

CBC: Your father worked for the Louisville CourierJournal and the Dayton Daily News, right?

Steve: Yeah, he was a journalist, starting out at the Dayton Daily News, and I lived in Dayton from age one to three. Then he got the job at the Louisville Courier-Journal, so I lived in Louisville from three to 13. Then they made him the Indiana bureau chief, because Louisville is right on the river between Kentucky and Indiana. And so we moved up to Indianapolis, where I lived from 13–18. Then I went to college back east.

CBC: Do you have brothers and sisters?

Steve: One each, yes. I’m the oldest.

CBC: Were you a bookish child?

Steve: There are actual books that I handmade, where I would type a story and figured out the pagination — you know, if you cut the pages and folded them together into a booklet, so that you read it in the right order, and so forth. So I was not only interested in stories, but also in the process, the actual physicality of a book. I will jump to comics at this point: I was really fascinated about how the four-color process worked. And, you know, how they did all that stuff in addition to liking the stories.

CBC: That’s interesting. To what do you attribute that to? I mean, to be actually into the construction, to create signatures of a booklet and all that?

Steve: I don’t know, it’s just something that fascinated me. Growing up in the ’50s, there was Superman, Batman, and whatever, but there was also the Dick Tracy reprints. And I loved them and still love Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy.

I noticed as, as they did the reprints, that there was content that had been in the newspaper and then, in the Harvey reprints, when they reprinted the comic strips — this was after the Comics Code [was established] — they took out the violent stuff, but they only took the violent image out of the black plate. So there would be guys holding the shape of a gun that was colored blue, shooting a red blast, but there was no actual gun. You know what I’m saying? The black plate had been edited, but not the other plates. That was one of the intricacies, the secrets of the business… people think that because I write comics, I should be into science fiction, but I’m much more into mysteries and wanting to know the secret. I can’t say why I feel that way; it’s just what I like.

CBC: Were you a precocious child? Did you start reading early?

Steve: Yeah, I think so. I read The Hardy Boys, which my father had from when he was a kid. So I had Hardy Boys from the ’30s and had Hardy Boys from the ’50s. It was interesting how they had changed them over time, you know. I

can’t draw any overall conclusion from that, other than I like to see behind the scenes, here they were in 1930 doing something, and here they are doing it in the ‘50s…

CBC: Those little booklets that you made…? What were they?

Steve: A couple of them were Hardy Boys books and they still exist. My mom kept them. I would have to figure out what pages, how the pages would line up, and then I would type on the pages. To this day, I’m a two-finger typist, even though I’m a professional writer. I would type to the end of that page, and then I’d figure out where the next page would appear, and then I’d go continue the story on that. It was the process that was interesting.

CBC: Did you borrow your dad’s typewriter or have your own?

Steve: I don’t remember. I can’t believe I had my own. On the other hand, I can’t believe that my dad could loan me a typewriter because he was working on it, you know? So I guess we must have had a second one.

CBC: What did you aspire to at that young age? Did you want to write? Did you want to be Franklin W. Dixon?

Steve: I was interested. The thing that caught me into comics as printed was the art. Part of that is there weren’t groundbreaking stories in the ’50s. It was all pretty, pretty bland and, you know, Comics Code approved. But you did have Dick Sprang doing Batman art and that was fascinating… I only wrote because I was asked to write something, at the start of my career. I enjoyed the writing and they liked what I wrote. And so we went on from there.

But no, at the time before that, I was pointed in an artistic direction.

CBC: Did you visit your dad at the newspaper?

Steve: Sometimes, yeah, sure.

CBC: Did you like it? Did you get the sense of a bullpen?

Steve: When he was in Louisville, he was the night city editor for a while. I don’t know if it was the whole time, but I remember going to see him at night, after my mom and my sister and I had been someplace, we stopped in, but he was busy being the night city editor. So we didn’t hang around or poke around or whatever. I’ve seen newspaper offices, but I don’t think it made much of an impression, one way or the other.

CBC: Were you distant from your dad or able to bond with him?

Steve: He was sort of a distant guy. I mean, we weren’t far apart, but we weren’t, you know, close either. So somewhere in the middle.

CBC: Was he an FDR Democrat or Dewey Republican…?

Steve: This is when newspapers were probably at their height, in the ’50s. He had his personal politics, but he never got into politics. I remember politicians would send him gifts at Christmas time and he would send them back, that kind of thing. I mean, he was he was very apolitical in his job. Politics were a personal matter. I think he was a Democrat, but he never slanted the news.

I look back on that as the golden age of journalism, where Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite… when journalism was an honorable profession, trying to present the news accurately without fear or favor. I liken that a lot to the golden age of comics and, in my case, the bronze age. But things have deteriorated in both of those professions from when they were at their best.

Transcription by Tom Pairin • Portrait by Kendall Whitehouse COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2025 • #37

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Previous spread: On left page are Steve and Terry Englehart from the 1980s. On the right is Kendal Whitehouse’s portrait of the writer, taken at San Diego Comic-Con in 2012. Above: Steve distinctly recalled being put off by comics for a time because of this lame response Superboy [#73, June ’59] editor Mort Weisinger gave to a reader’s question. Cover art by Curt Swan (pencils) and Stan Kaye (inks).

Below: Steve’s brother, Tom, is 10 years younger, and here’s a pic of the latter’s arrival at Casa Englehart, when Steve was… (Ye Ed checks his arithmetic)… 10 years old!

#37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Superboy #73 clipping courtesy of Marc Svensson. Photo courtesy of Steve Englehart.

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of the guys that were posited as the bad guys in the world, you know? So, yeah, we didn’t like Communists particularly, but I don’t think it affected me very deeply being in Kentucky and Indiana… I wasn’t running into Communists, so I didn’t have to worry about it.

CBC: How old were you when you moved from Kentucky?

Steve: Thirteen.

CBC: That’s an impressionable age. Did it have an effect on you to be yanked out of Louisville?

Steve: Yes, to an extent. The Courier-Journal had a Washington bureau, so there was a guy permanently in D.C., but every year they would take one of their editors and send him CBC: Were you an informed as a youngster? Did you read the to Washington to gain larger experience, whatever. So, in ’59, news at all or were you… we moved to Washington for nine months, something like that.

Steve: Yeah. We subscribed to both Time and Newsweek, And so I was yanked out of fifth grade and went to sixth grade and I read them both cover to cover every week. Again, reality in Washington, which was interesting to add to my experience, fascinates me, you know. What do people do? How does it but to be dropped into a whole other school system, new all work? You know, that kind of thing… Every week I would friends, all that good stuff, and then to be yanked out of it plunk down — we had big, big windows in the living room that again after nine months… So I went back to Louisville and, for faced the sun — and I would lie in the sun and read Time and better or for worse… I was always a smart kid. And that year, Newsweek and there were two newspapers a day back in those in the seventh grade in Louisville, they instituted what I guess days. I read everything. you would today call AP classes, where they took people they CBC: Coming into the 1960 election, what was that like at considered smart and put ’em in special classes. And so I was in your age? You were about 12, 13 years old. Did it look like “the with all the other people who were considered smart. And so we torch has been passed to a new generation,” so to speak? Was it had our smart group dynamic going on. an optimistic time?

Then I was yanked out of that in the eighth grade to go to Steve: Yes, absolutely. The ’60s… I have to jump sideways to Indianapolis, and I had started studying Spanish in the seventh comics again because the ‘60s felt like a time of just unlimited grade, under a Cuban teacher who had fled Cuba. So I started possibilities. I mean, it started with the young president who studying Spanish in the seventh grade and, when I got to Indiavery quickly said, “We’re going to the moon before the decade napolis, they did not have any Spanish for the eighth grade. So was out.” And so, I think, that had a lot to do with Marvel I had to wait till the ninth grade to continue Spanish and then Comics getting on their feet… it was the time you could wear a the teacher was not a good teacher. I knew more Spanish than costume. There were the mods and the rockers, and just everyshe did… body sort of blossomed in the ’60s clothes-wise, comics-wise, So all that jumping around was disconcerting, in a sense. music-wise, all that stuff. So, yeah, it was a cool time to be 13.

But, on the other hand, when you’re 13-years old, you just go And, of course, like everybody else who’s old enough to do it, I where your dad goes. I mean, you don’t need to parse it particcan remember when Kennedy got shot, which was a shock. But ularly. My wife was an Army brat and she talks about moving evthen, right after that, the Beatles appeared and we were off to a ery two years and so my situation wasn’t that terrible. But I was whole new thing. sorry, having been anointed as a smart kid and put in smart kid CBC: I actually had a friend track down that Superboy letter classes, it was weird to not have any access to that the following column, there’s a letter that says exactly what you said in an inyear. But you know, whatever… you do what you do. terview, where the reader asks the editor why doesn’t Superboy CBC: When you were in Kentucky, did you have neighborfight the commies and Mort Weisinger answers, saying Superhood kids that you hung around? boy doesn’t get political. So that actually had an effect on you?

Steve: Sure. Yeah.

Steve: Well, I just explained that my dad never got political, CBC: Did you maintain any of those friendships afterwards or but that was his job — not to be political — but, were the friendships all done? in terms of Superboy, any of those guys, it Steve: Yeah, they were all done. I mean, we had no internet. seemed like there were always obvious eneOnce we moved, you know, unless I was going to write letters mies in the world and it didn’t make any sense to people… Though I would do that, that was about my only to me that the super-heroes would just ignore option. that. I thought that at the time (and I’m not sure CBC: Were you close with your siblings? when I gave that interview where I talked about Steve: Yes. My sister was born two years and two days after that), but I can immediately connect that to the me. My brother was born ten years after me, so I was I was tight Captain America/Watergate stuff. So, when I with my sister. And so, you know, by the time he was eight, I had a chance to do something… was gone away to college. So that was just a different relationCBC: I think the timing would have been ship. But my sister and I obviously were close together… right around when the Cuban revolution had CBC: So did you watch a lot of TV? taken place. It was the June 1959 comic book Steve: Yes, I did. Loved TV. Louisville, in those days, had no and the Cuban revolution happened in January ABC station, so I would hear about things like 77 Sunset Strip of 1959. Were Commies the bad guys when you and Maverick, and I couldn’t see them except when I went to were a kid?

Washington. We only had two network stations in Louisville, Steve: Yes, they were, but I don’t know that I back in the day. was ever right-wing, so I never thought of them CBC: Were the schools you went to, were they all-white or as demons or anything. But they were just sort were they integrated?

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#37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

“Terror of the Pterodactyl” TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Young Romance TM & © DC Comic.

Above: Steve’s first scripting gig (plotted by Al Hewetson), in Monsters on the Prowl #15 [Feb. ’72], illustrated by Syd Shores. Below: Steve art job for the “Do’s and Don’ts of Dating by Paige Peterson” one-pager, Young Romance #174 [Sept. ’71]. Inks by Vince Colletta.

Lips of Hell,” #10, Mar. ’71] job that he was doing, and he only worked on it on the weekends when I was there. I mean, he did his other stuff during the weekdays, but every week I’d come up and we’d do the Vampirella thing. And he insisted on having my name on the credits, which nobody did for their assistants, let alone a guy who’s just breaking in as an assistant. But he said, “This way, when you go onward, you’ll have a published credit.”

Neal was just the best guy ever in those days, and I’m fully aware that he changed over time. But, at that point, he was just the best guy ever. And when I applied for conscientious objector, I had to be interviewed by a shrink and a priest, because this was the ’60s. You had to be interviewed by an officer knowledgeable in matters pertaining to conscientious objection, and there aren’t any, because why would an officer know that? But they assigned me a W.A.C. Major, which I thought is about as bad as you could get, because to be a W.A.C, you had to want to be in the Army. And to be a major, you would have to re-enlist in the Army. But she was the one that I had to talk with to convince her that I was sincere. And Neal, on his own dime, came down to Maryland to testify about my character. That’s kind of guy he was… so: wow!

CBC: When you were working together, did you guys just talk about life in general?

Steve: We did. Neal was a very interesting guy. When I told him about the whole conscientious objector thing, that was fine with him. And, in fact, I’m sure that he thought that was a good idea, but he never pushed me. You know, he never was trying to convince me that I ought to do anything in particular.

We would talk all weekend, and every Sunday, I’d go catch a train and go back to Maryland, to Aberdeen Proving Ground…

You asked me if I’m a forthright kind of guy…? I guess I am, going to Neal Adams at the height of his popularity and say, “Hey, how about if you take me on?” But he did and so, when I got out of the Army, I did have a published credit. I knew people in the business and I was on the path to being a comic book artist, which was what I had still been shooting for.

CBC: Did you just volunteer? Were you were you doing this for free or did you get any reimbursement for it?

Steve: What…? For working with Neal? I got fed and that tion, I said, “You know, when I get out of the Army, I would like to work with you.” I mean, what a ridiculous thing to say, right? was enough, you know. No, he wasn’t paying me for that.

CBC: Did you work on any of the DC stuff?

But he said, “Well, can you come up every weekend?” And I said, “Yeah, but I’m in the Army.” And he said, “But just come up Steve: Yes. I did some one-page mysteries for Murray Boltinoff. Filler things. I did backgrounds for Bob Oksner on every weekend.” And so that’s what I did.

“Supergirl” and Jimmy Olsen. I did some backgrounds for Dick So while not every Friday, for most of them I’d go hop on the train and go to New York. Neal liked the lightbox at DC that Giordano on some Detective stuff. I mean, I was in the entering I guess he didn’t have at home (or maybe this was a better one, phase of things, doing the pickup stuff. Same as when I started writing, where I was doing romance books and things like that, but he liked working on where you start out small and hopefully work your way up. it). So he would, as a rule, CBC: You’ve previously mentioned you had done work with hang around after 5:00 Dick’s brother-in-law, Sal Trapani, and the Bob Oksner stuff. How until midnight or 1:00 did you come upon that if you’re just coming up on weekends? in the morning working.

Did Neal have those pages for you?

And I would work with Steve: No, this was with when I was in the Army. It was only him and then I would go with Neal. Right when I went to New York, then I’d do a thing for to Columbia and would sleep on a couch, and then Murray Boltinoff and either he or somebody would say, “Well, I would go out to his house Bob Oksner needs somebody to do backgrounds. And then I’d go to Bob, who lived in New Jersey, and I would go to his place. in the Bronx, I believe, on Saturday and spend all day I didn’t spend the night there. I probably just went down on the Saturday and did it. I don’t think I was sleeping at Columbia out there. Um, I would get when I was doing that, but I’m not exactly sure. But, at this fed and I would play with point, I did go to Bob’s place and do backgrounds for him. And his kids, but it was there when I worked on this Vam- I’d go to Dick’s place and do backgrounds for him.

CBC: What was Bob like? pirella [“The Soft, Sweet

Photo courtesy of Steve Englehart. Amazing Adventures art courtesy of Michael Friedlander. Amazing Adventures, The Beast TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Steve: Bob was a great guy, too. A really nice guy… most people in comics are. (I mean, not everybody, as you may be aware, Jon.) Bob was just a friendly guy and had a really nice art style, and he had cute daughters, as I recall, around my age.

I took one of his daughters out once when I was down there, on a Saturday night. So I must have brought her back, but I didn’t pass out at his house. So I’m not real sure what I did on the Saturday nights when I was doing working for him, but I was keeping busy. I was doing the entry level stuff, but that’s what I was at the time: entry level.

CBC: Wow. For the Vampirella job you were working on, did you ever have any dealings with Warren editors or Jim himself?

Steve: I dealt with Jim later, when I was writing Vampirella.

We would stop by, once I was in New York. In those days, you

had to be in New York City. I knew John Severin was out in Denver and Sal Buscema was in Washington, D.C., but otherwise, everybody was in New York. So, if you were in Warren’s neighborhood, you’d just drop by.

I mean, by that time, if you’re actually doing work for them, it’s not so weird to drop in. Jim took a bunch of us to dinner one night and then brought us back up to his apartment. I remember he had a bidet, and he was showing it off his bidet… none of this is to snark on anybody. I liked Jim. When the Jules Feiffer book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, came out, I went to my bookstore at Wesleyan and had him order it for me. It had fascinating stories of what happened in the ’40s and I got to see these early characters and so forth.

So, by the ’70s, I thought, “If you’re going to be in a business, you should know everything about it.” So I was fascinated and really paid attention to how comics done in the ’40s. Who did them… and about the ’50s, etc. So what I’m trying to lead up to here is that Wally Wood and Bill Everett were still around in New York, at that time. Will Eisner was around. I went to parties with Wally Wood and helped him when he was supremely drunk and got him on a subway and rode with him to his stop.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2025 • #37

I mean, the stuff you do when you’re entering this magical world…!

CBC: You were the first of the “Crusty Bunkers”? Is that fair?

Steve: In retrospect, yes.

When Neal took me on, he had never taken anybody on before, and there was no name for it. It was just assistant. But I guess he liked having assistants and so, you know, then he started getting more of them, they became the Crusty Bunkers. So, yeah, in retrospect, that’s fair to say.

CBC: You once told a story that Neal taught you not to believe companies’ sales reports.

You saw evidence of numbers not matching what Neal had been told…?

Steve: Yes. Definitely.

That’s endemic at DC. When Joe Staton and I did Green Lantern and then Green Lantern Corps, Dick did a column about how we had doubled the sales on Green Lantern, and yet we never saw any royalties… We’re in the jumping all the way to today. You may or may not know that Joe Staton and I don’t get a dime for Guy Gardner. We have never gotten royalties. We’ve never gotten credit for Guy Gardner.

CBC: Not even a gratuity like Marvel does?

Steve: Nope. DC’s official position is that there was a guy named Guy Gardner.

Completely different guy, but because I said it was the same guy, then I didn’t create anything. You know, Joe didn’t create anything. We’ve been after them for 40 years about that, and Guy Gardner is about to be in the Superman movie, and I really don’t want to rain on James Gunn’s parade. I like James Gunn. I like the Guardians movies. I like the Suicide Squad movie. But whenever Guy Gardner comes up, people go, “Whoa, what do you think about that? And I go, well, they’ve been ripping us off for 40 years. So I’m hoping that we can resolve that, and feel free to tell your readers I would like them to resolve it. I would like them to give me and Joe what we should get. And so when people come around, I can say, “Yeah, I love Guy Gardner.” End of story. But I mean, that’s just DC’s thing. You’ve seen about

Above: Steve in 1973. He scribbled on the pic, “Note the glasses!”

Inset left: Evocative Amazing Adventures #12 splash. Tom Sutton (pencils) and Mike Ploog (inks).

Below: AA #11 [Mar. ’72]. Art by Gil Kane (p) and Bill Everett (i).

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Above: Coming in a year widely heralded as one of the best in the artform’s history, Booster Gold debuted in 1986. Created by Dan Jurgens, the super-hero character was later called “the greatest hero you never heard of,” and was a sketchy fellow from the future deemed a “lovable rogue” by The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide.

This spread: Wonderful spread

by Dave Cockrum from Giant-Size Avengers #2 [Nov. ’74], featuring Mantis, and some time-travelin’ baddies.Below: The Avengers #116 [Oct. ’73]. Art by John Romita (pencils) and Mike Esposito (inks).

#37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The Avengers TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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me and the original Batman movie, where they ripped me off?

I do not like them.

CBC: Did Marvel treat you any differently?

Steve: Yes! When they didn’t give Kirby credit on the Avengers movie, everybody gave Marvel sh*t. So somebody at Disney was smart enough to go, “Well, we can give these people credit and we can give them some money because we’re Disney and we have infinite amount of money.” (They did at the time.) So they went to people who had created stuff and, you know, me and everybody else and said, here’s a contract, we’re going to give you X-amount of money and we’ll give you a screen credit and so forth. And I’m sure part of it was, “Let’s buy their goodwill.”

I’ve been very clear because I bitched about Mantis… I love James Gunn, but that’s not my Mantis. And that’s my point. The movie was fine. I like Pom Klementieff. I like the Mantis that was on screen, but wasn’t my Mantis.

So I’m perfectly happy to say whatever’s on my mind. But fact is that when Mantis or Star-Lord or Shang-Chi or any of these characters show up, I get a screen credit and I get some residuals. And I was talking to Steve Epting about Winter Soldier. They took Bucky Barnes and turned it into Winter Soldier

and they get paid for that; whereas DC would go, “Nope, you didn’t create it.” So the two companies are very different in how they treat their talent.

CBC: Tell me about that epiphany that the artist’s life wasn’t for you.

Steve: It wasn’t so much an epiphany. I got on staff at Marvel, I took Gary Friedrich’s slot as the lowest ranking editorial person for six weeks.

CBC: How did you get that?

Steve: Well, that’s the story. Because I was in New York, I got to know pretty much everybody in comics, including Gary. We went to a couple bars together now and again, and somebody was murdered — a stewardess — in the apartment above Gary’s in New York and his wife said, “I want to get the f*ck out of here for a while. Let’s go back to Missouri, where you’re from.” So Gary got in touch and said, “They’re gonna need somebody to fill in for me while I’m gone for six weeks. Would you want to do that? I’ll talk to Roy.” And I said, “Yeah.” I was, at that time, living in Milford, Connecticut, which is a two-hour train ride out of the city. So I would have to take a two-hour train ride in and a two-hour train ride out every day. And so I wasn’t like leaping at this. But getting on staff at Marvel, that was a step forward that seemed like a good idea. So I went down, talked to Roy and again, in my forthright manner, I said, “Yeah, I’ll do this four days a week; I’m not coming for five.” And he said, “Okay, sure.”

So I was on staff at Marvel.

At the end of six weeks, Gary had a six-page monster story and he was just so laid back out in Missouri, he didn’t want to write it. So he sent it back. Roy looked around the room and asks me, “Well, you want to write this thing?” And I said, “Sure, I’ll do that.” And I went home that night, wrote it, brought it back, and they liked what I wrote. So then they said, “Hey, you want to write some more stuff?” And I said, “Sure.”

And, pretty soon, I was not doing very much in the way of art, but I was writing and, in those days, they didn’t let you on the super-hero books until you served an apprenticeship writing romance and Westerns and monsters. So I wrote romance and Westerns and monsters, and did do art on a couple of romance books, too. I was still doing it, but I did like the writing. You know, it turns out writing is not hard for me. I like the process of the logical systems, as I said, about languages and so forth. It’s like, okay, you’ve got all these ideas now, how do you put them together in some sort of coherent narrative that has a big climax, has good visuals, and all those things you have to think about when you’re writing comics? I liked doing it. And so, I did a complete one issue of The Ringo Kid with Dick Ayers, which never got printed. I did several romance stories, writing and drawing. I did some monster stories, and then after X-number of months, they said, “Well, you want to write ‘The Beast’?”

CBC: What about art? Did art just fall by the wayside because you got too busy with writing?

Steve: Yes. I stayed on staff for a while, and I would go home at night. I eventually moved to Stamford, which was 45 minutes out of the city, not two hours. But I would be on staff by day, and then I would go home at night and I would write, and that took up my time. I didn’t have any time to do any art after that.

Stopping with the couple of romance stories that I did, that was probably the last art that I did. And it’s been so long, when people now have me sign stuff and ask me to do a little sketch, I’m like, “Nope, I haven’t drawn anything for 50 years. I’m not not gonna do that.”

CBC: So what were you doing up in Milford? Why so far away?

And what were you doing?

fighting Commies, but it wasn’t the same Commies. It was a different type of Communist. And racism certainly had nothing to do with Vietnam in that regard. Well, I mean, it was racism…

CBC: It was the rationalization for the war. I mean, flat out we were there to fight Communism. That was the big threat. The domino theory and all stuff like that…

Steve: But the thing was that, growing up in the ‘50s, there was a certain type of “We hate Commies,” right? That’s it. And I think it was that mindset that led to the war. But I don’t think a lot of people who were fighting the war were to… It moved on. I mean, this was a different sort. This wasn’t the evil Russian mastermind infiltrator, look-under-your-bed, kind of Communist. This was a bunch of guys across the ocean, and they might have been Communists. And that’s why we were fighting them, but I don’t think that the people who were actually doing the fighting thought in those terms.

CBC: Did you invent Roxxon?

Steve: Yes. Roxxon. Yes, I did.

CBC: That’s kind of daring, right? You were taking on Exxon?

Steve: Well, yeah, but I don’t think Exxon was going to come after me for it. I don’t know how daring it was…

Captain America, Nomad TM & ©Marvel Characters, Inc.

[At this point, Steve regals the interviewer with an anecdote about “Studio Zero,” which we’re saving for next issue’s in-depth article on Englehart & Company almost getting in Rolling Stone magazine! — Y.E.] CBC: Well, my brother and I, we instantly recognized the double X as being play on Exxon.

Steve: Oh yeah, sure.

CBC: Just a curious question: did you receive, way back in the ’70s, did you receive comp copies of every single thing that was published?

Steve: By Marvel and DC? Yes. I mean, not from Charlton or anything like that, but yes, we all got every book that both companies published.

CBC: They sent you packages when you were out in California? You received a weekly package?

Steve: Yes. So, as I said, I read everything on my way to becoming a professional. And then, after I got to be a professional, I got all the books for free, which was fine, you know, but I continued to read everything. I like to know what else is going on in, in whatever world I’m in.

CBC: When I was a kid, I was truly annoyed at this idea of using one page of art and turning it sideways and printing it as two pages of art because it was just so obvious by the thick ink line from being enlarged and you’re like the only guy who remembered it and you’ve mentioned it repeatedly. It just seems outrageous to do something like that and cheat the freelancers (and readers).

Steve: I’m totally with you on all of that. But you’re working for the company and they go, “This is what we’re going to do.” And you go, “Well, okay, then.” But I totally agree. You could tell that it was blown up. I think I would try to make it a double-page spread so that at least it could be one piece of art, but sometimes it was panels and you could see the panels were bigger and everything was bigger and all that. They didn’t do it for too long, but it was a dumb idea, but it was somebody in accounting somewhere going, “Well, look how much money we could save if we did this!”

CBC: But it was also ripping off you freelancers.

Steve: Yeah, but what are you going to do?

CBC: Steve, you certainly did something by ’76. You walked.

Steve: Well yes, you can do that. I have walked several times COMIC BOOK CREATOR • Winter 2025 • #37

over the years. But it’s not like I want to walk. “I think this would be really cool, let’s do that.” Somebody said to me once, “You think like a hero, which is why you write super-heroes” and, you know, whatever… But I do have a sort of sense of right and wrong, and making a page twice as big as it ought to be is wrong. But it’s not like “walkable” wrong. But there are things where I’ve said, “I can’t do that,” and then I leave. So I’m glad they didn’t keep doing that but, at the time, that wasn’t big enough for me to do anything drastic.

CBC: But things were starting to pile up on each other. As a reader, I recognized there was an exodus from comics that just went over to alternative comics. You went to Europe and became a novelist at the same time there was this great exodus coming from comics. And your career really tracks that. Did you feel like you were at the forefront of that exit or was it just you amongst the other guys? Do you think your actions, perhaps, could have encouraged others to do things to their own benefit?

Steve: I would say “perhaps.” I don’t know any specifically.

When I did walk, there wasn’t a mass exodus behind me. So I don’t know that I encouraged anybody directly. Indirectly,

Above: Cover proof for Captain America #176 [Aug. ’74]. Art by John Romita. Below: Nomad by Sal Buscema.

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#37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Batman, The Joker TM & © DC Comics. Comic Book Artist TM & © Jon B. Cooke.

on, too, so… The Red Skull has weird sh*t going on. I guess my comic-book view of things is that those guys are just cool characters, you know?

CBC: One thing I noticed too with the Mantis character: I think that’s really revealing that what you did is that you let the character grow on her own. You would repeatedly call her a “Saigon slut,” right? And, in the end, she was not anything like that. It seemed to be denigrating the plight of South Vietnamese women who were forced to work a life of prostitution during the Vietnam War and yet she shook that off.

Steve: She was supposed to be a femme fatale. I’m sure you’ve read this in other interviews, but she was supposed to come in and create tension in the Avengers by sort of coming This page: Please don’t get snip- on to all of them. And that was her goal. That was what I had in py because virtually no attention mind for her. Something to shake up the team. was given in this interview to Steve But right after I introduced her, Roy said there weren’t goand Marshall Rogers’ great Batman ing to be any annuals that summer, and I had really loved the work in the ’70s. That extended annuals as a reader. So I said, “Well, I’m writing The Avengers conversation — which included a and The Defenders. Can I do a summer-long thing where they separate interview with the artist fight each other?” And he said, “If you screw up one deadline, — took place in Comic Book Artist everything will fall apart.” And I said, “I won’t screw up any Collection, Vol. 3 [2002], available deadlines.” And he said, “Okay, then go for it.” That was the at the TwoMorrows website (in the editorial thing.

CBA Special Edition #2 PDF). Here’s So, all of a sudden, I had to do a story in which she particthe wonderful original and printed ipated and she had to be fighting on the Avengers side and artwork by the late, great Marshall doing stuff. And so the whole thing about her being a femme Rogers for Ye Ed’s compilation. fatale later came back in a minor sense with her and the Vision

and Wanda, but she suddenly took a turn becoming like a real teammate and not a distraction. And I said, “Well, that’s interesting.” Now I’ve got her in the book, but she’s different from what I thought she was going to be.

I’ve told this story in analogy many times. You write, you come up with an idea, and the guy’s going to go to Chicago and then for whatever reason, he has to go to Cleveland, and you can force him to go to Chicago or you can say, “Okay, well, now that he’s in Cleveland, how does that change what I want to do?” And that was basically what I learned by doing her in each issue. I would do a story that moved the Avengers forward and concentrated on other Avengers and this and that and the other thing. But she was there and she’d have to do something.

And last issue, she did this thing, so now she’s at this point. So now, in this issue, she’s going to move off of that point. She didn’t have to end at any point. It was not like, “Oh yeah, she’s eventually going to become the Celestial Madonna.” It was just, “Here’s a story and then here’s another story. And there’s a mystery about where she came from. And then there’s…”

Every once in a while, I’ll read interviews with other writers and they’ll go, “My characters determine where the story goes.” And I go, “Yeah, then that’s the best way to do it, rather than try to force anything, try to make things happen, you know.” So that’s Mantis.

CBC: It seemed to me with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Mantis is this sensual creature. Or at least, you know, this hyper-empathic character that seems to contain a germ of an idea from the original comics, and yet she was somehow transformed into this different character. Do you see any of your Mantis in the movie character?

Steve: I’ve said for a long time the only thing those two have in common is they’re both female. All of the attributes of the comic book Mantis were jettisoned before you got the movie Mantis. But the empathy, the sensitivity? Yes, I can see that. I asked James Gunn why he brought in a character and then completely changed it. And he said, “Well, I needed a character like the one I had in the movie.” And, as a writer, I can understand that. You’re putting together a group and you need certain elements to kind of bounce off each other and so forth.

I’ve been very vocal about the fact that I was disappointed. I spent a year-and-a-half creating this particular character and then it all got jettisoned. But, on the other hand, I’m not the kind of guy to go, “Well, James, you shouldn’t have done that.”

He was making his movie. He needed what he needed. So, I like the Mantis on screen. I like those movies. I like Pom Klementieff as Mantis, etc. But it wasn’t my Mantis and I had spent a lot of time on Mantis, so I was naturally disappointed.

The situation that exists with Disney and Marvel is, if they use Mantis, I get royalties, right? Even if it’s not my Mantis, which is kind of weird, but okay. I’m sure you’ve read those Hollywood interviews where they say, “What was it like working with that actor? Oh, that actor was great. I love that actor.

Everything was fabulous all the time.” If I don’t think so, I’ll say so. But Disney doesn’t complain that I’m not totally on board all the time. So that’s cool, you know? So that’s the end of that.

CBC: To be precise, they’re not royalties, right? They are gratuities.

Steve: Yeah, I guess they probably are.

CBC: Because Marvel is the “creator” of all things Marvel, right?

Steve: But it wasn’t, “If we give you this, you have to kiss our asses all the time.”

CBC: Were you a nut for Watergate? Did you watch all the proceedings that were taking place on a daily basis on weekday

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW,

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#37 • Winter 2025 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Batman, The Joker TM & © DC Comics. Comic Book Artist TM & © Jon B. Cooke.

on, too, so… The Red Skull has weird sh*t going on. I guess my comic-book view of things is that those guys are just cool characters, you know?

CBC: One thing I noticed too with the Mantis character: I think that’s really revealing that what you did is that you let the character grow on her own. You would repeatedly call her a “Saigon slut,” right? And, in the end, she was not anything like that. It seemed to be denigrating the plight of South Vietnamese women who were forced to work a life of prostitution during the Vietnam War and yet she shook that off.

Steve: She was supposed to be a femme fatale. I’m sure you’ve read this in other interviews, but she was supposed to come in and create tension in the Avengers by sort of coming This page: Please don’t get snip- on to all of them. And that was her goal. That was what I had in py because virtually no attention mind for her. Something to shake up the team. was given in this interview to Steve But right after I introduced her, Roy said there weren’t goand Marshall Rogers’ great Batman ing to be any annuals that summer, and I had really loved the work in the ’70s. That extended annuals as a reader. So I said, “Well, I’m writing The Avengers conversation — which included a and The Defenders. Can I do a summer-long thing where they separate interview with the artist fight each other?” And he said, “If you screw up one deadline, — took place in Comic Book Artist everything will fall apart.” And I said, “I won’t screw up any Collection, Vol. 3 [2002], available deadlines.” And he said, “Okay, then go for it.” That was the at the TwoMorrows website (in the editorial thing.

CBA Special Edition #2 PDF). Here’s So, all of a sudden, I had to do a story in which she particthe wonderful original and printed ipated and she had to be fighting on the Avengers side and artwork by the late, great Marshall doing stuff. And so the whole thing about her being a femme Rogers for Ye Ed’s compilation. fatale later came back in a minor sense with her and the Vision

and Wanda, but she suddenly took a turn becoming like a THIS CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER real teammate and not a distraction.

And IOR said,DIGITAL “Well, that’s ISSUE IN PRINT FORMAT! interesting.” Now I’ve got her in the book, but she’s different from what I thought she was going to be.

I’ve told this story in analogy many times. You write, you come up with an idea, and the guy’s going to go to Chicago and then for whatever reason, he has to go to Cleveland, and you can force him to go to Chicago or you can say, “Okay, well, now that he’s in Cleveland, how does that change what I want to do?” And that was basically what I learned by doing her in each issue. I would do a story that moved the Avengers forward and concentrated on other Avengers and this and that and the other thing. But she was there and she’d have to do something.

And last issue, she did this thing, so now she’s at this point. So now, in this issue, she’s going to move off of that point. She COMIC #37 didn’t have to end at any point.

It was BOOK not like,CREATOR “Oh yeah, she’s STEVE ENGLEHART is spotlighted in a career-spanning eventually going to become Celestial Madonna.”

It was interview,the former DC Comics’ romance editor BARBARA redeems the late DC editor JACK MILLER, DAN just, “Here’s a story andFRIEDLANDER then here’s another story. And there’s DIDIO discusses going from DC exec to co-publisher, we con100thfrom. birthday celebration for ARNOLD DRAKE, take a mystery about whereclude sheour came And then there’s…” a look at the 1970s underground comix oddity THE FUNNY Every once in a while, I’ll read with other writers and PAGES, andinterviews more, including HEMBECK! they’ll go, “My characters determine the story goes.”

And (84-pagewhere FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 I go, “Yeah, then that’s the best way to(Digital do it,Edition) rather$4.99 than try to https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_132&products_id=1800 force anything, try to make things happen, you know.” So that’s Mantis.

CBC: It seemed to me with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Mantis is this sensual creature. Or at least, you know, this hyper-empathic character that seems to contain a germ of an idea from the original comics, and yet she was somehow transformed into this different character. Do you see any of your Mantis in the movie character?

Steve: I’ve said for a long time the only thing those two have in common is they’re both female. All of the attributes of the comic book Mantis were jettisoned before you got the movie Mantis. But the empathy, the sensitivity? Yes, I can see that. I asked James Gunn why he brought in a character and then completely changed it. And he said, “Well, I needed a character like the one I had in the movie.” And, as a writer, I can understand that. You’re putting together a group and you need certain elements to kind of bounce off each other and so forth.

I’ve been very vocal about the fact that I was disappointed. I spent a year-and-a-half creating this particular character and then it all got jettisoned. But, on the other hand, I’m not the kind of guy to go, “Well, James, you shouldn’t have done that.”

He was making his movie. He needed what he needed. So, I like the Mantis on screen. I like those movies. I like Pom Klementieff as Mantis, etc. But it wasn’t my Mantis and I had spent a lot of time on Mantis, so I was naturally disappointed.

The situation that exists with Disney and Marvel is, if they use Mantis, I get royalties, right? Even if it’s not my Mantis, which is kind of weird, but okay. I’m sure you’ve read those Hollywood interviews where they say, “What was it like working with that actor? Oh, that actor was great. I love that actor.

Everything was fabulous all the time.” If I don’t think so, I’ll say so. But Disney doesn’t complain that I’m not totally on board all the time. So that’s cool, you know? So that’s the end of that.

CBC: To be precise, they’re not royalties, right? They are gratuities.

Steve: Yeah, I guess they probably are.

CBC: Because Marvel is the “creator” of all things Marvel, right?

Steve: But it wasn’t, “If we give you this, you have to kiss our asses all the time.”

CBC: Were you a nut for Watergate? Did you watch all the proceedings that were taking place on a daily basis on weekday