I Have To Live With This Guy! Preview

“I HAve To

LIVE With This Guy!”

by Blake Bell

Featuring: The lives of the Partners & wives of top comics creators!

C HA P T E R a n d V E R S E THE TRENCHES

1. Adrienne & Gene Colan 2. Virginia & John Romita 3. Lindy & Dick Ayers, Loretta & Ric Estrada

- 6 - 24 - 38

THE THREE WISE MEN

4 . A n n & Wi l l Ei s n e r, M u r i e l & J o e Ku b e r t , J o a n i e & S t a n Le e

- 54

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING

5 . A d e l e & Ha r v e y Ku r t z m a n

- 84

Published by TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605 919-833-8092 • www.twomorrows.com ©2002 Blake Bell & TwoMorrows Publishing ISBN 1-893905-16-0 First printing, September 2002 • Printed in Canada All reproductions in this book are copyright by the respective copyright holders, as indicated in conjunction with the individual illustrations, and are used here strictly for historical purposes. All prominent characters are trademarks of their respective holders.

The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher.

2

LOSS

6 . J o s i e & Da n D e C a r l o 7. A n n e T. M u r p h y & A r c h i e G o o d wi n

- 1 02 - 116

INDIE , UNDER , OUTIE

8 . D e n i Lo u b e r t & Dav e S i m 9. Melinda Gebbie & Alan Moore 1 0. Ed S e d a r b a u m & H o wa rd C r u s e

- 12 6 - 148 - 164

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

1 1. J a c k i e Es t r a d a & B a t t o n L a s h 12 . J u l i e & Dav e C o o p e r

- 178 - 19 6

Cover art adapted from Bill Everett cover to Spellbound #2 (Apr. 1952). Original image Š2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Pg 1 image from Bill Everett cover to Adventures Into Weird Worlds #6 (May 1952). Original image Š2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Cover Design by Blake Bell and John Morrow Interior Design by Blake Bell Production Assistance by Eric Nolen-Weathington

Dedicated to Luke and Jen on the homefront, Len and Corey for 20+ years of comic memories.

3

CHAPTER ONE

ADRIENNE &

GENE COLAN

“If anybody could draw a hand on a doorknob and keep your interest, it would be Gene.”

The above is a “rubber chicken dinner” line from Stan Lee, former editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics, but truer words have rarely been spoken about a style as unique as Gene Colan’s. Stan Lee encourages every artist during the 1960s through Marvel’s front door to draw like Jack Kirby except for two—Steve Ditko and Gene Colan.

They arrive at Lee’s door fully formed, and alterations of their fundamentals would be akin to spraying water on a fiery oil slick.

But the talents of the above three artists fill Marvel’s coffers more than their own pockets. The comic book industry has a work-for-hire history, ensuring a creator receives no compensation—other than one’s page rate— even for creating pop culture icons such as Ditko’s Spider-Man, or Kirby’s Hulk. If you don’t step into the engine of the company, if you don’t leave to make greater monies in the animation or advertising fields, you stay because you just love drawing comics.

That love can leave you beaten and broken. Industry swoons and fads can see a freelance artist gasping for air, with a family to support, and no hope of pension or medical benefits. The artist and spouse may think the job on the table will pay for the month’s necessities, but one industry slump, one bout of illness, even a work-free vacation brings home the reality that the gerbil’s wheel of pumping out page after page has to spin non-stop. Step off for a breather, or a drink, and you may never get back on board.

You’ll find even fewer people who love as hard and as faithfully, and perhaps as blindly, as Adrienne Colan.

One is unlikely to find someone so protective of her mate in all aspects of life—the emotional, the physical, the financial and the ego. She is a perfect example of what the male freelance comic book artist, under this industry’s ‘big top,’ requires: a safety net for a partner who will walk a financial and emotional tightrope, never being able to see beyond the next job on the table, or even if there will be one.

Is it truly the love of the medium, the industry, the finished page in front of the artist that keeps people like Adrienne and Gene Colan coming back for more, even into the twenty-first century?

It’s September 21, 1926 and Gene Colan is born to the Bronx. After attending George Washington High 6

©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

School, a public school focusing on gifted students in the visual arts, Gene falls under the tutelage of illustrator Frank Riley and the Japanese surrealist Kuniashi. Pen and ink prevent him from an early grave in World War II, where Corporal Colan spends two years in the Philippines producing art for the Special Service in the Army Air Corps.

With so many peers off at war, Gene finds work at Fiction House in 1944 drawing Wings Comics. Hired for sixty dollars a week, he arrives at Stan Lee’s office doors in the Empire State Building of 1948. The early work is nondescript, but during the 1950s, Gene’s trademark flourishes begin to shine through, especially in the horror genre.

It does him no good. The floor falls out of the industry in the middle 1950s, aided by persecution by government, media and P.T.A. organizations. Stan Lee’s company claws back dramatically in 1957. The hands of Gene Colan pump gas for a living at a local service station, while he chases jobs at the nadir of the industry, Charlton Comics in Derby, Connecticut, known for the lowest page rates (and quality of product) in the business.

Ten years of working in comics—Gene is left with nothing. He finds work in New York at the Paul Sherry studio, drawing stick figures for educational films. Any attempts at flourishes are quickly crushed by an art director only concerned with the client’s requests for the bland. And what is expected? If you can’t make it as an artist, you either pump gas until you are gray, or you take what your talents afford you.

At least it was work. No child of The Depression is going to hang on a wing and a prayer. With the comic industry in tatters, what chance does a freelancer like Gene Colan have? In the eye of the hurricane, who loves you enough to reach in and pull you out?

It’s 1942 and Forest Hills, NY, trumpets the birth of Adrienne Colan. Her Broadway dreams are dashed in 1955 when her parents’ dream of owning a home places the young teenager miles away in Fairlawn, New Jersey.

Adrienne comments, “It was really just twelve minutes over the George Washington Bridge, but when you’re a teenager, and you can’t drive, Manhattan is a world away.

I was absolutely thrilled for my parents and totally bored Left: Gene & Adrienne’s wedding picture, 1963. out of my gourd!

Below: Gene’s work for Marvel Comics in the 1950s.

“I wasn’t exposed to art much. From fourteen until the end of high school, it was initially Elvis Presley.

The Beatles came and Elvis Presley was over. It was like I closed the door. I couldn’t listen. At the same time, there was Motown. I still love jazz: Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Dave Brubeck. I introduced Gene to Brubeck’s Take Five album.

“Through all those, there would be Frank Sinatra; Frank Sinatra doing and singing anything. I watched Frank’s films and had every single album.”

The influence of Adrienne’s father will dominate how she’ll regard, and manage, Gene and his career. He’s a small business owner in Queens, his independent spirit transposed onto his daughter, to Gene’s ultimate benefit later in life.

“When we used to live in Queens, my father would get on a truck at three in the morning,” says Adrienne. “He would go to the manufacturing plants that produced meats like corned beef, pastrami, salami and hot dogs and distribute them to the restaurants, delis and diners. He made out really well and tucked the bucks away.

“It was always his dream to have his own manufacturing plant and soon enough, he did, in New Jersey.

My dad had an expression all his life. He said, ‘A peanut stand, but my own.’”

Her father’s home by three in the afternoon, 7

allowing Adrienne to develop a mythical image of the man. “He was a hero to me. He built his own darkroom for photography and won awards.

“He didn’t grow up with a life of privilege to say the very least.

He was the oldest of four boys, from a broken home. He was supporting the entire family at the age of eleven plus two immigrant-divorced parents. He married my mom and wound up still taking care of his parents and my mother’s parents.

“My mother was like Imelda Marcos,” laughs Adrienne. “She had a gazillion pair of shoes! He built her a whole closet just for shoes!

He went on to build exquisite furniture for the house. There was almost nothing he couldn’t do. He built his own stereo cabinet. He even put together the radio parts.

“My mom’s entire life centered around the family, our Jewish culture, beauty parlor Fridays and maid three times a week, no matter what. She’d read two, three books at a time, many of the struggles of the Jewish people and family life.

“They fought about two things: ‘Your family stinks—no, your family stinks.’ The other was my mother’s shopping. Bills would arrive at the house, they would disappear into their bedroom and I could hear him just quietly confronting her. Before you knew it, plates were flinging, tears flowing, and cupboards were slamming!”

Music dominates Adrienne’s memories of her father, and explains its importance in her own life. “My father liked great symphonies. He was very diverse and had the first record album that was on the unique sides of Jerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck. They had like an ensemble called ‘West Coast Jazz.’ It was just so progressive and so fantastic. He would bring home the album to West Side Story and then go see the show.

“My Dad would play Rachmaninov and Stravinsky, and stand in front of the stereo, pretending he was the conductor. He was a very modest and quiet man but, in the privacy of our own home, he really let go with complete abandon. He’d also be completely blown away by Sergeant Pepper’s—that particular album knocked him out.”

Adrienne enrolls in secretarial school, taking her right back into Manhattan every day. “School would let out and I would take the subway up to Harlem visiting record shops and such until Harlem signaled they didn’t want me. It wasn’t me not wanting them. Towards the end of 1960, early 1961, it was clear to me I wasn’t welcome in the neighborhood and so I didn’t go.”

Single, with girlfriends, working in New York City in the summer of 1962, the group is always on the look out for “Mr. Right.” Adrienne’s twenty year-old life will take a dramatic turn when she and friends decide to go away one weekend to Tamiment, a singles’ resort in the Poconos of Eastern Pennsylvania.

“It’s the first night and everybody goes out on the veranda after dinner. It’s just swarms of people. I had always told my mother, when I married, I want it to be like Tony and Maria in West Side Story. They meet at the dance and everybody else seems to disappear.

“It seems like everybody coupled off within seconds. All that is left is this huge gooney-looking guy and I am with a very gooney-looking girlfriend. She’s very, very tall, and awkward. I was really quite pretty in my day— slim and dark-haired. This gooney guy starts walking over and I thought, ‘Oh, brother, he’s going to pick me. He’ll never go for Rochelle.’ Sure enough, he does—I can’t even attract the gooney guy!

“I’m sitting alone on the wall by the veranda. I look over to my left—another man appears. He hesitates, then takes another few steps towards me, as if he’s trying to keep his options open. I’m thinking ‘I’m a thin, 20year-old, dark-eyed, dark-haired, cute little chippy in my best little summer, spaghetti-strapped dress, so what gives?’

“Now,” laughs Adrienne, “I’m getting cranky, like, ‘Come on!’

“He does come up to me and says, ‘Would you like to take a walk?’ We take a little walk, give a kiss, and just love one another instantly.”

The man is Gene Colan, alone at the resort (“definitely girlfriend hunting,” says Adrienne), on a sugges8

CHAPTER TWO

VIRGINIA & JOHN ROMITA Above: John Romita, age 18, and Virginia Romita, age 17.

There is but a singular difference between the careers of John Romita and Gene Colan: one was driven from The Company—the other embraced it. As a consequence, while Colan fell off the mainstream radar, Romita’s profile has never abated. Work is always on his table.

The name “Romita” is a testament to the only given in the industry: if you climb into the engine of The Company, you will likely drive away with a Cadillac, not a jalopy.

Arguably, Gene Colan’s talent exceeds that of John Romita’s. Ask Romita and he will modestly (almost punishingly so), dismiss his efforts as inferior to the likes of his peers at Marvel Comics, the Steve Ditkos and Jack Kirbys. “I keep wanting to hit him on the head,” says Virginia, “and say, ‘Stop being so humble. You’re terrific.’ It’s the way he is.”

There are three keys to John’s career health: his connection to, and the elevation of, the Spider-Man franchise; becoming an employee of the company; and a clean, polished style that presented little difficulty in communicating a story to readers young and old.

Simply put, John Romita is the Norman Rockwell of comic book art.

Few in the industry rise from farther depths to such a pinnacle. He also has the distinction of “being married” to the same woman since he was eleven. Perhaps no other woman can say they followed their husband’s career from chalk drawings on the streets of Brooklyn to newspapers all over the world.

“I was born in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg,” says Virginia Romita, “and John lived downstairs. He moved into my building when I was about nine. He first lived across the street for a short period of time. He was very shy.

One day he walked in and said, ‘Hello,’ and I was so shocked, I nearly tumbled down the stairs! That was my first crush.”

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early 1940s, is a ghetto neighborhood according to Virginia. “It was just apartment houses and tenements across the street. We were in a house made of up of six apartments. It was very poor, no heat—just the stove in the kitchen.”

Without television and video games, families attend Church for entertainment, and kids hit the streets.

John hits the streets with chalk in hand. “We didn’t have much money,” says Virginia, “and did a lot of walking 24

because we didn’t have cars or even bikes. We were a large group traveling from church to church going to all of their dances.”

John is the neighborhood artist, but the family can’t afford pen and ink. Asphalt is John’s earliest drawing board. Whatever scars will exist in Virginia’s subconscious from the poverty of her early life, time and remembrance of the budding courtship will wash the bad memories away.

“There weren’t any cars parked against the sidewalk, so John would do these big drawings in the streets.

They could go on for blocks, just with chalk—a one-hundred-foot Statue of Liberty. Of course the rain would wash it away, and when he got older, the guys would begin asking for nudes,” laughs Virginia. “I disapproved and told them I was very disappointed in John.”

Poverty is such a factor that sometimes, one comic book has to support an entire block. “Comic books were very important to us,” remembers Virginia. “One person would buy a comic book and everyone got a shot at it. John was one to draw super-heroes like Superman and Batman in the streets.

“I liked the simple stuff like Archie. We looked at them as much as we were able because comic books were not the kind of thing we could purchase. If I had a comic, my father would call my brother and I to dinner and if we did not immediately come, he’d come in and tear it up. We were very obedient!”

The independent streak that will serve Virginia well in the lion’s den of Marvel Comics saves her from a life of poverty of her own. “My mother wanted me to quit school and go to work with her in the garment industry.

They were both from Europe. It was Depression time. They only cared about making a living and, of course, I had to contribute also. But I did finish high school—at least that—and immediately went to work.”

With John living downstairs, and her upstairs, Virginia relishes the free spirits in the close-knit Romita household. “My father was one of the strictest men ever created,” says Virginia. “The only real freedom I had was to go downstairs and listen to them all singing. John’s house always had music. His father’s friends would play guitars and mandolins. John’s sisters, all three of them, sang. I thought, ‘Oh, my God. That’s great having a family like that,’ whereas it was just my brother and I. Those were good days.”

In fact, Virginia’s love for John almost has her evicted from her own home. Virginia’s father, a stern disciplinarian, doesn’t take too well to a couple of teenagers getting too cozy in his own home. “One day,” says Virginia, “my father saw John put his arm across my shoulder. He spoke to me later in the evening and said, ‘Is he your boyfriend?’ I say, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Did you let him kiss you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I did.’ He said, ‘Don’t do that anymore.’ I said, ‘No!’ and he smacked me,” laughs Virginia, obviously at ease with the memory now.

“He said, ‘Alright, you have to leave the house’ and I said, ‘Alright!’ But my mother said, ‘No, no, no! You can’t do that!’ He never discussed it with me again.

“I fell in love with John three separate times. I chased him until he caught me. By about seventeen or eighteen, I was stuck on John, but with my father, you had to have that ring on your finger. He adored John, and when we became engaged, he was very pleased.”

Her father may be strict, but as long as John is willing to work, his career choice of “artist” is not a concern. “There was about a month where John didn’t have any work,” says Virginia. “That was many, many years later. When we got married, he was in the service and getting Army pay. We got married from that same house: 229 Ellery Street.”

John Romita and Gene Colan’s careers are mirror images. Both Colan and Romita consider Milton Caniff (of Terry and the Pirates fame) their “god.” Both appear at Marvel around 1949, are let go in 1957, move to DC and then rejoin Marvel within a year of each other in the mid-1960s.

John wants to be an illustrator, but like many artists, comic books are chosen as the launching pad. His entry to Marvel Comics in 1949 is covert. He’s ghosting for an artist named Lester Zakarin, who takes credit for all the art chores, but actually John is doing all the penciling. When Stan Lee asks for changes, Zakarin panics and tells Stan he can’t draw in front of people—he needs absolute quiet—and then runs the pages over to the New York Public Library, close to the Marvel offices in the Empire State Building, for John to correct.

“John and I really started going together after high school,” says Virginia, “and I remember the first check he earned doing work, ghosting for Lester. He bought everybody these wonderful presents—a blue velvet skirt was one of mine. It was such an exciting moment for him.”

Stylistically, Romita’s artwork of the 1950s is an uneasy hodge-podge of influences when compared with the slick look that will develop in the 1960s. But John is a producer, just what the industry values most in the “Golden Age” of comics. Even when drafted into the service in 1951, Lee still feeds John scripts.

25

26

©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

In the Korean War, John’s artistic ability saves him from the front lines. His honeymoon, however, almost gets him thrown in the barracks. “He wasn’t aware he couldn’t leave the country,” says Virginia, “so we went to Quebec City for our honeymoon. Once we were in Canada, he suddenly thought maybe he shouldn’t be leaving the States without letting someone know where he was. His Major, Major Tobin, came to the wedding and no one asked where we were going. He said, ‘Oh God, if they ever found out, I’d be put away!’ Fortunately they never did.”

Three months into their marriage, Virginia is expecting their first son, Victor, and never goes back to work until she begins her time at Marvel, almost two decades later. During the 1950s, however, Stan Lee and Joe Maneely are just names.

“I hardly ever went into the city after our second child. As the boys got much older, I went into the office and met people, but it was always in-and-out.”

The life of a freelancer in the 1950s is as turbulent as the Jersey shoreline.

“John worked all the time. For him, it was a job. It was not pleasant times. When the page rates got cut, he had to do more pages. When you’re freelance, you don’t know how to pay your bills because you never know when that check is coming in.

I needed a more regimented life. We had no medical insurance, nothing. Those were anxiety attacks I would have. John would have them too, but being the man of the family, he would never burden me.”

As difficult as it is for the family financially, the peculiarities of his creative process take a physical toll on the freelance artist. “He couldn’t seem to create early in the day,” remembers Virginia. “Lunch, breakfast, and dinner would distract him. The only time he worked steadily was after everyone went to bed and he could work through the night.

“John was a volunteer fireman in our village, and he was at the tail end of a job he had to get in for Stan before we went to Bermuda on vacation. He got called out because there was a fire in a freight car on the tracks between Floral Park and New Hyde Park, and it couldn’t be put out for twenty hours! We got to Bermuda, finally, but John slept two days away to make up for the sleep from finishing the job and putting the fire out!

“We just didn’t chip away at each other. We disagreed on many things: where to put the furniture, whether we should go out or stay home, or visit my parents in Connecticut because he had a deadline to meet, or a job to get. Fortunately, I didn’t need a very active social life; just the one we had with family and friends was good enough.

“It worked very well when the kids were young. He’d take them to the park and play ball with them. He spent a lot of time with them. That’s why he has a good relationship with them now. However, when he had a deadline he had to meet, there was no playing with the kids. He put his time in, with very little sleep, working out of the attic for peace and tranquility. He had a window he was able to look out.”

The artist becomes well known in the later 1960s for the pin-up quality of his women, but Virginia’s only experience posing for John is lethal. “The only time he ever asked was when I was expecting. I wasn’t too happy with how I was looking, so I thought, ‘Well jeez, now I don’t feel too bad.’

“He got me a jacket, put it on me, sat me down and said, ‘Alright, fold your elbow.’ I said, ‘What do you want to do?’ He says, ‘I want you to fold your elbow. I have to see how the creases are from the arm on the man’s jacket.’”

Ah, the sensitive male artist—“I was devastated!” laughs Virginia. “I thought he was going to do something to make me look great. All he wanted was to see the folds on the man’s jacket on my arm.

“He didn’t discuss his work then

27

Characters TM & ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

because he would get a full script. It’s not how it got to be later on where he was able to plot from some sort of breakdown. I would come in and look. Sometimes he would bring it downstairs, so he could be a part of the family.

In the 1960s, he’d sometimes get stuck on a particular plot and what I said wouldn’t always help, but it would help him to think in a different direction.”

In the 1950s, the rush to deliver a job (and to pick up the next one) allows for “hands on” experience for Virginia. “He’d ask me to erase his pages. Sometimes he’d have me drive to deliver pages, and he would be in the passenger seat erasing pencils from around his inks. That’s how I’d see his work. It’s not as if I had made any kind of study of what he was doing. I just thought it was important that he earn money to pay our bills.

“We delivered when Stan was living out on the island to save time. I’d sit out in the car. I didn’t go into Stan’s house. He would go, deliver the pages, get in the car, come home and go to sleep. He was exhausted because he had pulled an all-nighter.

“When he worked for DC Comics, you brought in the work, you got a check and you went home. Once I delivered one by train when I was about eight months pregnant, because he’d started another one. I went into Manhattan and just left it at the desk. I used to take care of the bills, too. Later, he just took it off my shoulders.

That made me very happy.”

Comics may have started as a job, but Romita soon took his artistic chores seriously. “John wanted to be a magazine illustrator,” says Virginia. “It was very hard for him because he realized that’s not where he would be able to earn a living. So John said, ‘I’m going to try to be the best damn artist there is.’ That’s when he really decided to buckle down. Of course, then he’s slowing down because he’s taking more time with what he’s doing. It was really hard when Stan dropped John.”

In early 1957, Stan Lee cuts Marvel’s output to the bone. In the space of a year, John’s page rate drops from $44 to $24 per page. When the final cut comes, Romita has spent two to three days doing production work on a western story, whatever he can to pull in money for the family. Stan’s secretary calls John and tells him to stop work on the story. John asks for a hundred dollars for the work done, but never sees the money.

John tells Virginia to tell Stan Lee to go to hell if he ever calls again. He will not return to Marvel for eight years.

John himself is unable to escape the Colan-like fate of having to take on another job to make ends meet.

“We were on thin ice financially,” says John, “with two youngsters in a tiny bungalow—four small rooms and a Above: self-portrait of John from Marvelmania, 1969. smaller attic studio—so I took on a paper route. For Top Left: panel details Marvel Tales #152, Aug. 1952. three years I delivered 300 daily newspapers six days a Bottom Left: Virginia, recently married, Nov. 1952. week and 450 on Sundays. I earned about $120 a week that we had to bill and collect monthly ourselves.

“Virginia wrote out bills, mailed them and we waited weeks for checks to come in—ranging from five to twenty dollars. Some folks didn’t pay until she and I drove around to collect in person. I won’t go into what those newspapers did to our family car! I was a zombie for those three years and heard not a peep of complaint from Virginia. Anything we have now is never enough to compensate her.”

“That’s when he went to DC Comics,” remembers Virginia, “and immediately got a rate increase and things picked up. He didn’t care about not working for Marvel. He was happy to be earning a living. It worked out well, because we had just moved into the house we’re in now.”

Much like Colan, Romita days at DC Comics are a seemingly endless wash of drab romance stories that

Sgt. Fury TM & ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

LINDY & DICK AYERS ©2002 the respective copyright holder

CHAPTER THREE

LORETTA & RIC ESTRADA

38

What do you do—what does this industry do to you— if you don’t have the natural talent of a Gene Colan, or the guile of a John Romita who worked his way into the company and the security within? What if you don’t sublimate your artistic voice for every passing fad? What if all you do is tell a clear, concise story in sequential format?

The Army calls them ‘foot soldiers.’ The comic industry calls them expendable. Dick Ayers and Ric Estrada—whose origins couldn’t be less similar—will never be the flavor of the month, never ones to ride a hot trend, but they both have an underrated (some say long-forgotten) ability to present a narrative that can lead one’s eye easily across a page in an industry where pictures and words are supposed to combine to present a unified whole.

If a Gene Colan, Kirby or Ditko can get handed the short stick, what chance do a couple of veterans have in this medium?

Perhaps there is no more heroic a tale than the struggle of one person’s fifty-year uphill battle, and another’s ability to raise eight children, suffer huge medical debt and abandon the comic industry just to physically survive.

One assumes the persons are Dick and Ric, but the real heroes of this tale are Lindy Ayers and Loretta Estrada.

Charles Lindbergh makes his historic flight from New This Page: wedding pictures, Dick & Lindy, 1951.

York to Paris in 1927. A pair of recent immigrants take note of the Previous Page: Ayers’ Sgt. Fury sketch, 1999 occasion to name their daughter, Charlotte Lindy. Born in and Estrada war art, 2001.

Passaic—a town in New Jersey—Lindy spends her early childhood living on a seventy-five acre castle estate in Tarrytown, New York; her Swiss father a gardening superintendent of huge estates in the Westchester County area.

The Depression sees many large estates lost, and the family retreats to Scarsdale, continuing to live on the land of others. “He always had a staff of about eight working for him,” says Lindy, “because, in those days, his gardens had to be in magazines like Better Homes and Gardens. The rich were always competing with chefs or gardeners, so you had to produce!”

One of the fringe benefits of her father’s job is rifling through piles of comics stashed in the garage on the estate. “One of the chauffeurs, Edward Nord, had a lot of time waiting for the bell to bring up the car. I grew up with Batman and Green Lantern. I don’t remember Marvel heroes like Captain America, since I always liked DC Comics.”

Of German descent, her mother—a cook in New York City for Stanley Isaacs, Borough President of Manhattan—can’t protect Lindy from the anti-German sentiment on U.S. shores at the outbreak of war. “When I was really little, because my mother used to talk German to me, some little kid called me a Nazi—this was when Hitler first came to power. I didn’t know what a Nazi was, but after that I never would speak German. In high school, I took German but it was a mental block.”

Listening to Roosevelt’s post-Pearl Harbor address from her high school auditorium inspires Lindy to join the 39

war effort. “I volunteered for everything. When I graduated high school, the government tested us and I scored very high on shorthand, so they offered me a job at the Transportation Corps. I was too young, or I would have enlisted.

“I had relatives in the war on the German side. We lost a lot.

One of my cousins was a doctor and was lost on the Russian front.

We couldn’t communicate or write letters, because everything was stopped. We didn’t know until afterwards if the family had survived.

“After the war, our jobs were terminated and I went to work for the Waldorf Astoria hotel, which was interesting, because the United Nations was there. We used to hide behind the curtain up on the balcony and listen in.”

While Lindy’s husband-to-be is serving his time in the Army, life for Loretta Estrada in northern Wyoming couldn’t be more different.

During the War, someone has to make the food to feed the nation, and Loretta is born to a farm and cattle ranch owner four miles south of the Montana border. With a population of 200, the paved streets and bright lights of Manhattan are only a dream to a girl who rides a school bus fifteen miles over open prairie roads.

“My father looked a lot like Ernest Hemingway,” says Loretta, “and wore the little small mustache right above the lip that was very popular during the 1930s. He wasn’t very tall, but very, very stocky—very strong.”

From Mormon pioneer stock, her mother’s resilience and talent for singing and piano has a profound influence on Loretta. “You grew up canning everything and provided for yourself if you lived on a farm. From this, I developed the ability to know, whatever life hands you, you’re going to make it through somehow.”

Loretta also indulges in reading comic books at a young age, but the content is far more regulated than Lindy’s, given Loretta’s parents’ strict religious and moral beliefs. “She would allow us to read historically based—or the really silly, funny ones, like Donald Duck or Archie—comic books. She would not allow us to read romance comic books. She thought they were absolute trash and she would not allow us to read anything really violent. We never had an issue about super-heroes because we just weren’t interested. I read one I now realize Ric probably illustrated. It was the Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders strip.”

The one-room country schoolhouse with six grades at one time leaves the young farmer’s daughter painfully aware of the difference in lifestyles between her and those ‘in town.’ “We went shopping once a month in Powell, Wyoming, about 30 miles away, which had maybe 2,000 people in it. It seemed huge to me.”

Her dreams of a career in music are dashed by a desire to grant her father’s wish to have someone in the family in the medical profession. She becomes a physical therapist instead. “During our first year of marriage,” says Ric, “she often shocked me with her clinical descriptions of her physical therapy cases—broken clavicles, fractured tibial plateaus, dislocated scapulas. Her glorious medical jargon dumbfounded me, let alone her enthusiasm. Eventually this dumb cartoonist steeped in the wham-crash-ka-boom lingo of comics got used to her scientific speech.”

“I had no idea I would end up marrying an artist,” says Loretta. “I had a dream when I was growing up—I would go to the chicken yard to gather eggs, which was one of my chores. When I got there, it had turned into a ballroom and I was wearing a beautiful ball gown, dancing with a dark stranger; and then the dream would end. That dream reoccurred periodically in my life until I met Ric and then it stopped. To me, that was, ‘Okay, you’ve met the stranger, now just take it from here.’

“Growing up, my sisters and I would play games and somehow, I was always going to New York. I remember when the first Barbra Streisand TV special came out.

My family wasn’t interested, but I was totally fascinated. One of the colleges to which I applied that had a good physical therapy program was New York University.”

In the fall of 1967, Loretta makes her way to Manhattan. While regrets linger over a chance not taken in the field of music, her immediate concern is dealing with 40

41

©2002 William M. Gaines Agent

the culture shock, as well as heading out with no pre-planned accommodation. “I flew a red-eye flight because it was the cheapest way to go. I arrived just before daybreak and my first impression of New York City was of all the lights. I still cannot believe my over-protective parents put me on an airplane and did not know where I was going to be staying. When I graduated from college and got my first job and had my first paycheck in hand, I worked with a voice coach for a couple of years.”

“She has a crystalline alto voice,” says Ric, “ and I love her piano playing. I hate her vocalise—that is, her singing warm-up exercises. Those ten-tofifteen minute ‘aaa-aaa-ooo-aaa-ooo’ could drive the monoliths on Easter Island batty. On the other hand, she hates my snoring, so we’re even.”

Religion would become a major concern of Loretta’s life in New York, and will be directly responsible for her meeting her future husband.

For Lindy, her name provides an initial attraction for the returning war veteran, Dick. Laughs Lindy, “In those days, when boys saw an airplane, they thought it was Charles Lindbergh up there, and they’d wave to him. Being named after him had a little influence on Dick dating me.”

Above: Estrada page from E.C. Comics’ Two-Fisted Tales #30, 1952.

Lindy spends part of the Top Left: Loretta in Wyoming, October 1959. summer of 1950 at Candlewood Lake Bottom Left: Loretta head shot, 1965. where she would first meet Dick. “I took a liking to him, but I didn’t think anything of it because I was dating someone else. He looked German because he had blonde hair and blue eyes.

He was shy and handsome, but still he was fun. He got engaged to this gal, and it didn’t work out. About five months later, someone said, ‘Why don’t you ask Lindy out?’”

The two marry six months later. “Dick was working on Ghost Rider, for Magazine Enterprises and living in White Plains with his parents. We lived with our parents in those days, then you got married and left home.

“Dick would tell of his father and grandmother reading the comic strips to him and encouraging him to make up stories with his toy soldiers. His father started him drawing stick figures and then making them ‘talk’ like they did in the comic strips.

“His earliest memories are of sitting on his father’s lap and having Popeye read to him. He’d say his grandfather, who was a brakeman on the train from New York to Buffalo, would bring home piles of newspapers and his grandmother read the comics to Dick as he sat on her lap.

“One Sunday, Dick’s father made up the dialog as he read the comics to Dick. This was when he discovered Dick could read them himself because Dick told his father he wasn’t reading what it said in the strip.”

“When I first met Ric,” says Loretta, “I thought he was a weird Greek.”

Her Polish father is an incredibly devout Catholic, but her mother’s dedication to the Latter-Day Saints

JOANIE

STAN LEE

&

Spider-Man TM & ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Sgt. Rock TM & ©2002 DC Comics

ANN & WILL EISNER ©2002 Will Eisner

CHAPTER FOUR

MURIEL & JOE KUBERT

54

Much like one can link the paths followed by the Colans, Romitas, Ayers and Estradas, the same can be said of the wives of three of the most significant creators, and businessmen, in the history of the comic book medium. Ann Eisner, Muriel Kubert and Joanie Lee all meet their husbands within three years of each other, after all three men appear together near the birth of the industry in the late 1930s.

The similarities do not end at the chronological. All three men will reap their earned rewards as business juggernauts, allowing their spouses to live a much different life than that of the struggling freelancer. All three will either own their own creations (or can lay official claim to that status) or cement their place in history by the attachment to the companies for which they will work or run.

One will find the traits of their fathers in each of the men these women will marry. Ann Eisner’s father is a stockbroker who owned his own firm until his passing. “You could say I was born with a tarnished silver spoon in my mouth,” remembers Ann from her earliest upbringing in New York City, “since the peddlers and impoverished immigrants amongst my ancestors had preceded me by at least two generations on both sides. I always thought of myself as American. We didn’t speak anything but English in my home.”

Towaco, New Jersey, in the early 1930s, houses no more than five thousand people, but a small, neighborhood business, Fogelson’s Supermarket, is run by a man whose mantra in life is “get at it and get it done,” says Muriel Kubert. Apropos considering she will marry a man perhaps matched only by Will Eisner for his creativity and business savvy.

There’s little ‘New York’ about Joanie Lee’s origins. Born in Newcastle, in the north of England, her father is in the building business; her grandfather writes poetry. “I am a ‘Geordie’ as they call us,” says Joanie, “from Tyne Side; one of three sisters. I crossed on a blacked-out ship, the old Mauritania, while the Above: Joanie Lee modeling, late 1950s.

Japanese war was still on. I’ve been an American Below: Muriel Fogelson Kubert with sister Lenore, 1938. citizen for two years now, even though I could have become one fifty-five years ago. That’s how long Stan and I have been married.”

If one travels to the Imperial War Museum on Lambeth Road, across the Thames river from downtown London, one can experience a recreation of what it was like to live in war-torn England when the Nazi bombing rained down on the English skies.

“We had an air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden. One night when the dive-bombers came over, I remember cheering when some planes were blown out of the sky. We’d run into the shelters when the sirens went off, but after the first year we didn’t bother. We just got used to it. America had been safe from all that, with two oceans to protect her, but nobody anywhere is safe anymore.”

Unlike today, when a child sees the movie version of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s creation, Spider-Man, and is more likely to buy the video game rather than the comic, reading is a family event in Ann’s household. “My father would bring home the Sunday Funnies and we would read them 55

avidly—the Katzenjammer Kids, The Timid Soul, Tillie the Toiler, Little Orphan Annie, Maggie and Jiggs, and that ilk. I didn’t care for most toys girls of my age played—I always wanted books. I couldn’t then, and still can’t now, draw a straight line.”

Art is taken as an easy elective at Booton High, while Muriel’s turntable spins Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra. Highly adept with numbers, Muriel graduates from high school at sixteen, and majors in Business Administration at Rider College, New Jersey. MurieI’s skills in business— typing, shorthand and bookkeeping—will be invaluable to her future partnership with Joe. When confronted with the person of Joanie Lee, one cannot help but feel one is playing Lawrence Olivier to her Vivien Leigh. Joanie’s own oratory skills can be just as sweeping and dramatic as her husband’s. “I studied Elocution at the London College of Drama,” says Joanie. “I had little parts in pantomime. Reverend Moody once said to me, ‘My God, if Joanie had been around then, Shakespeare would have wanted her for his plays because of her wonderful voice.’ But, alas for me, Shakespeare wasn’t around in my time.”

Her ability to perform for an audience of one, or a thousand, can only be matched by her husband’s same verve for hyperbole. What brought her to New York City?

“To find Stan Lee!” laughs the actress, model, and writer, with four parts humor, but one part conviction enough to convince you she is very likely not joking.

Ann Eisner’s life changes forever on Labor Day 1949. Nonplussed about the burgeoning comic industry of the 1940s, Ann is completely unaware with whom she will be spending an afternoon car ride to Maine. “It’s rather a romantic story,” recounts Ann. “My older sister at that time was widowed, and she had her two boys in Maine. I lived in New York, as did Will. I was working but got time off to visit her.

“Arthur, a friend of Will’s, was dating my younger sister. He said, ‘This friend of mine and I are going to drive up to Maine this weekend, if you’d like a lift.’ I thought that was wonderful, but I didn’t know Will wasn’t the least bit interested in taking someone along. Where I was going would take him out of the way.”

They do take Ann along, but she is daunted by the level of sophistication displayed by a man already successful with a decade of The Spirit newspaper strip under his belt. “I thought he wasn’t going to be interested in me. He’s only six years older than I am, but he seemed like ages older in the sense of being worldlier. When I first saw Will, I thought he looked so poised and put together.

“Most of the boys I had gone out with were just that—boys. Will was a man. To this day, he is comfortable with people—all kinds of people—and talks to them easily. When I get to know people I am ‘easy’ with them, but I don’t have Will’s innate confidence in myself.”

Ann may not be imbued with Will’s outgoing nature, but so impressed is she by the man, she organizes a little skullduggery of her own to reestablish a connection. “We had had so many laughs on our trip that Will and Arthur stayed overnight in a cabin on the grounds before going on to their destination. I could tell right away he was a bit absent-minded, always involved in something, so I asked Arthur for Will’s number, to thank him for giving me a lift.

“I asked Arthur if they had given anyone a ride back to New York. He told me that they had and told me the girl’s name was Margot. I called Will, therefore, and said, ‘This is Margot. I just wanted to thank you for the lift.’

“Arthur had neglected to tell me Margot had a foreign accent, so Will, of course, knew 56

1970s, responsible for shepherding the underground movement out of the “Summer Of Love” and into the 1970s, but he is stunned at what Ann reveals to him concerning her opinion of Will’s work.

“My periodic dinner conversations with Will and Ann seldom touch on the art or business of comics. Out of respect for Ann, I tend to avoid ‘shop talk’ during our meals, as does Will. But at one such dinner, probably in the late 1970s at their White Plains home, I impulsively asked Ann something that had never come up before. ‘What do you personally think of The Spirit? Do you have a favorite story?’

“Ann stated matter-of-factly that she had ‘never’ read The Spirit or any of Will’s comics. Will, chuckling, confirmed her statement was true. As a die-hard comics aficionado, I couldn’t believe my ears. He had a fascinating career. And he was not just any cartoonist. He was a living legend! That Ann had failed to open one of the leather-bound volumes of vintage Spirit sections in their library and neglected to peruse various Eisner publications during their then nearly three decades of marriage dumbfounded me. The look of utter disbelief was readily apparent. The genuine shock, if not the theatrics, perhaps struck a small note of guilt in her. Or she chose to humor me. “‘Perhaps I should take a look at some of it,’ she said softly, and we swung quickly back to other topics.”

Married in 1950, at the age of twenty-six, Ann is a working woman, unconcerned about her father’s initial resistance to Will’s career choice. Without the benefit of hindsight, Ann treats Will’s work as one would treat any husband who leaves for work at nine in the morning and returns home at five in the afternoon. “What he did wasn’t important to me. I liked him as a person. The Spirit, and his earlier work, were not factors in the early part of our marriage. We moved to Westchester County, White Plains, shortly after we were married and he went to work on a commuter train like everybody else’s husband I knew. I didn’t care what he was involved in, as long as it was legitimate. I didn’t want to go visit someone in jail!”

The newspaper industry puts the squeeze on comic strips in the early 1950s, and Will abandons The Spirit in the fall of 1952. Eisner builds his own company, American Visuals Corporation, creating comics and cartoons for educational and comLeft: Joe Dope by Eisner for Army Motors, Mar. 1945. mercial purposes. For the U.S. Army, he produces P*S Magazine.

Above: Ann Eisner in Chattanooga, 1999.

His list of clientele includes record (R.C.A.), oil, and phone Below: Private Joe Kubert at Fort Dix, 1951. companies and the Baltimore Colts football team.

The discontinuing of The Spirit is a relief to Will. He wants to go out on a creative high, but Ann speaks more to the relief from a personal standpoint: “He wanted a stable environment and a steady income. He was still doing creative work, if you see his P*S Magazine. We had never been friendly with other cartoonists. Our social life was with our friends; a very eclectic group of doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, peddlers—anybody. It had nothing to do with what they did. There was always someone you’d meet in between who were comic fans, who would then recognize his name, but that was in passing.”

“I never went out with anyone else after I met Joe,” says Muriel, of that summer of 1950 onwards. Joe is drafted into the army during the Korean Conflict, but the courtship is spared serious interruption as Joe is stationed in Fort Dix, New Jersey. “I was in Rider College, in Trenton, so he would go AWOL to see me. Sometimes Joe would lend me his car and I would deliver his work to DC Comics.”

Engaged around Christmas time, Muriel graduates college early in March, and they are married the next July. Amongst the five thousand or so people in Towaco, Muriel recalls but one cartoonist in town. Being an artist may very well save Joe Kubert’s life. “He’s very lucky,” says Muriel. “That’s why I tell who ever draws to keep on 59

Enemy Ace TM & ©2002 DC Comics

and I don’t want to do my own laundry!’ They flew him up, so then I wasn’t the least bit concerned that I was doing something terrible, because I was retiring. That was the only part I had felt guilty about, because I knew he loved to teach.”

Will also plays the role of sage to younger hopefuls. “Cartoonists are constantly asking him to look at his work, which he does most of the time, and give his opinions. I should say ‘suggestions’ because he doesn’t like ‘opinions.’ When someone asks him who’s the best, the most creative, he says that’s so subjective, and never thinks of it that way.”

“At the Empire State Building offices,” says Joanie, “I remember Stan standing on a chair, telling the artists how he wanted certain poses drawn and acting out some scenes. He was a natural actor as well as an editor. He would act out many of the parts himself, with his arms and legs flailing and hopping around the room. It was an unforgettable sight.”

Joanie claims Stan to be the buffer between Stan’s young artists and the more unforgiving Goodman. “Stan cared greatly about the artists—all the creative people. Nobody knows how many times he would argue with Martin, behind closed doors, Above: Enemy Ace sketch by Kubert, 1996. because he didn’t like the way Martin was treating, or Right: Muriel Kubert profile, 1983. underpaying some people. But Stan didn’t want anyone to know about those arguments because he always wanted the public to think Marvel was a great place where everyone always got along beautifully—and for the most part, they did.”

Before Joe Kubert becomes an editor at DC Comics in 1967, his dream of starting his own art school is prevalent in his mind. John Costanza, a letterer in the comic book industry—a man who learned his craft from Joe—also lives in Dover and comes over to the house. “Joe would correct and critique his work,” recalls Muriel.

“There are so many people that wanted to learn how.”

It becomes a reality when a piece of property falls into their laps, forcing them to make a move. Daughter Lisa, whose friend’s family owns the property, introduces Muriel and Joe to the site. Says Muriel, “Our daughter knew about our dream. My youngest, Andy, was finishing off high school, so I had the time to devote to it. It was right in Dover. We worked out a very good deal for seven acres of property with a beautiful mansion and a pool in the back. Also on the property was a carriage house with a big garage underneath and two apartments over it.”

Muriel sends away for every catalog from every school she can contact, picking what will best apply to their school. “One person that helped with ideas was Jack Adler, who was in charge of production at DC Comics. Joe’s hardest part was how do you put into actuality what you’ve been doing artistically all your life?

“The next step was finding out how you run a school. We had to be approved by the New Jersey Department of Education and had a wonderful guy down there who helped us with everything. We bought the property in May or June of 1976 and opened the school in September with twenty-two students in that first class.

“That’s not only the school itself, but it’s furnishing the carriage house for dormitories. At that time we were going to garage sales or the Salvation Army and bought the dressers, the tables, the pots and pans. The first year, I remember laying out the kits in one of the rooms in that mansion—twenty-two of them—one pencil here, one here, so I don’t skip anybody; until they had a kit put together.”

Twenty-two students are accepted the first year and not many more apply. “I don’t think we advertised. It was all press releases we would put together and send out to the Comic Buyer’s Guide or whoever else was interested. We did put one ad—a little ad—in the New York Times. I learned that’s not our audience.”

The “buzz” for Muriel comes from seeing former students’ names succeeding in the industry. “There was 76

together it was all jibes and wisecracks and good-natured kidding, never anger or meanspiritedness.

“It was the same thing with Stan and Bob Kane. They were the best of friends.

They used to talk about doing a movie together but laughed about the fact they’d never be able to do it because they’d never be able to decide whose name would come first on the credits.”

Stories of Stan’s feud with Jim Warren are legendary, and either time soothes the battle scars or whitewashes them in the name of preserving a healthy, clean legacy. “We had a beach house next to his,” says Joanie, “in Westhampton, Long Island. He actually kept a World War I or II airplane at the front of his house. He was a colorful character. Stan liked him a lot.

“Stan fell in love with the warm weather of Los Angeles. When we came out for a visit, Stan said to me, ‘Do you think you could live out here?’ The thought of leaving New York was horrendous to me. I felt near to civilization, I was near to my sister in Canada, closer to flying back to England—everything. But I thought if he wanted it so badly, we’d give it a try.”

The change of lifestyle is dramatic, but not compared to the change in Beverly Hills since they arrived to today. “The food when we came here,” says Joanie, “was like big platters of cowboy food. Rodeo Drive was a little sleepy village until Judith Krantz put Beverly Hills on the map when she wrote her best-seller, Scruples. Then came all the French coutures, and everything New York has, and it has the incredible weather.

“When we would go to Martin’s for dinner, it was always ‘The damn wholesalers owe me money!’ That was the biggest mistake Martin Goodman made, when he shut down his own distribution company in the 1950s because he thought he’d make more money by going with the American News Company. No sooner did he make the switch then the AMC went bankrupt and Marvel was left high and dry with no distribution for a while.

“I loved Martin and thought he was a wonderful man—a gentleman of the old school, a self-made man.

Not particularly generous, but nobody’s perfect. Martin’s office was divinely furnished. His wife Jean had exquisite taste. They also had an incredible house, decorated by Jean.

“Goodman made the decisions, just as Perelman later did. Stan was the talent, the engine they needed to make it all go. Stan never sold one penny of Marvel stock when he had a chance, not even when Ron Perelman had it and it eventually went bankrupt. That’s something he should have done, but that’s not Stan. I said it to him once, but he’d say, ‘Oh no, we don’t really need to, and it’ll be bad for Marvel if people think I’m selling out.’ He’s always been that way, thinking of the company and of other people. It was the same with Stan Lee Media—he never sold his stock.

Luckily we didn’t need it.”

Good thing, too, because Stan’s Internet venture, Stan Lee Media—his quest to create a Marvel Comics on the ’Net—comes crashing down around him 80

CHAPTER FIVE

ADELE & HARVEY KURTZMAN

“As Will Eisner would say, ‘I would give Harvey advice about money matters because he would ask me, but he never took the advice and he never made any money.’”

Adele’s quote above aptly describes the dichotomy that is her husband, Harvey Kurtzman: he may have been comics’ greatest innovator, but may have also been too far ahead of his time. The man who probably influenced more people worldwide than anyone else in this book had neither the patience of a Joe Kubert nor the business acumen of a Will Eisner. His quest for innovation, his unerring desire for perfection, and his inability to deal with authority figures who didn’t breathe the same high standards left him in the precarious position of knowing the value of his legacy, but unable to translate it into a monetary value.

His early experiments with the comic book page put him on par with Will Eisner; his creation of Mad Magazine splattered his influence across the globe; his Little Annie Fanny character for Playboy became symbolic of a generation, and all of the above created the “Kurtzman Umbrella” under which an entire generation of underground comix cartoonists would fall.

Side-by-side with this whirlwind of a man is Adele Kurtzman. Everything must be viewed through the prism of artist William Stout’s astute comment about the woman’s sense of humor: ‘Harvey was not a real funny guy, but his wife Adele has a killer dry wit.’ She, like Harvey, was ahead of her time, describing herself as a holy terror for her mother, growing up in the 1930s in the Bronx.

“I was a terrible teenager,” says Adele. “My mother used to call the police. When I tell my children that now, they look at this old mother and say, ‘Our grandmother called the cops on you?’ I regret it because I must have put my mother through living hell. I went to a girls’ school because my mother thought it would be safer.

“I had great parents. If my mother would tend to give us a little swat, my father would stand in front of us and say, ‘Don’t hit the children!’ We had a project where he, my sister and I crossed every bridge connecting New York City to other places.”

While her father toils as a factory worker, her mother stays home with the kids, tending to all the lost souls 84

in need from the extended family. “These were rough times. We Left: Adele & Harvey (with Rene Goscinny’s head had many people living with us. They helped keep the place cropped off) in their Manhattan Apartment, 1950. going. My mother took in two cousins whose mother had died.

Below: Adele at Cloisters Park, NY circa 1947-48.

They came for a short period of time and stayed twenty-two years.”

Adele’s Bronx neighborhood is an Irish-Italian mix, with a little German. “We had a Nazi spy in our building,” says Adele. “He had one of those dumb shortwave radios. I don’t know what kind of messages he was sending out, but looking back, he was very stereotypical of what a Nazi spy might look like.

He was the first person I remember wearing tennis shoes. I don’t remember grown people wearing sneakers then, so we probably should have known he was a spy.”

She witnesses the would-be interloper dragged out in chains from their building. “It was kind of exciting. It was kind of pathetic. I don’t think he knew much,” laughs Adele. “The price of lettuce, that would be about it.”

Wanderlust describes Adele’s desire to soak up the pop culture influences of her day. “We just kept going as often as we could to movies like Casablanca or Make Way for Tomorrow—tear-jerkers about old age. Growing up as a first generation American, you yearned for better things, and the movies affected you. You wanted to look like they did and you wanted to go places.”

Adele doesn’t exhibit the slightest interest in artistic endeavors during her youth, instead presenting herself as a typical teenager with little focus other than to move right into the workforce. “My jobs were short-lived.

I was a waitress in Schraffts, worked for Sears-Roebuck and then did some proofreading for Editions for the Armed Services, the little paperbacks that were sent overseas.

“I wouldn’t have met Harvey because, even in those days, I thought I was going to be ‘Queen of England.’

I didn’t take typing or any kind of business courses. When I went looking for a job, I had a friend who was very good at that, and she answered the ad in the New York Times’ classified section for a proofreader at Timely Comics.

She did a great resumé, typed it herself, and they hired me.”

In the mid-to-late 1940s, the Empire State Building houses the only true bullpen Marvel Comics (known then as Timely Comics) will ever have. Myth has it she is Stan Lee’s secretary, but she insists this to be untrue. “I wasn’t hired by Stan and I couldn’t have been a secretary. I didn’t know how to do any of that stuff!”

Her direct contact on the job was mostly with Alan Sulman, associate editor to Stan. “I was told it was because I had good legs,” laughs Adele, “which, of course, was very important.”

Adele reads every piece of original artwork on its way to the presses, but remembers little investment in the finer points of her job. “I was very young, just out of high school. I read comics all day long, looking for spelling mistakes in the balloons on the original art. I’m embarrassed, but I don’t remember ever seeing anything wrong!

There may have been a comma, or a period, but to tell you the truth I don’t ever remember writing anything down.

If I did, I faked it.

“Stan would look at the stuff I proofread too, and did find mistakes I made, but he was very busy and very glamorous. He was young and cute—good looking. He would blow a whistle and everyone would have to start drawing. Frank Giacoia was busy reading The Daily News when this happened, so Stan sent him home. I guess artists were notorious goof-offs.”

In contrast to the freelancing 1950s and 1960s, the Marvel Comics of the 1940s has a coterie of staff artists working in the fourteenth floor offices, with Adele in the middle of all the craziness. “They also had movie star magazines, and those men’s magazines—muscle magazines. I worked in a room with all men. I still know Al Jaffee, but there was one other woman, Violet Barclay, who was an inker. She used to call herself Sheila, then Violet.

To me, she seemed very stunning, very exotic looking. I assume a lot of the guys were crazy about her. She and Mike Sekowsky dated a little.

“They poked fun at Allen Bellman because he’d bought a TV set. I remember thinking, ‘TV?! What kind of nonsense is that?’” laughs Adele. “It must have been a very crude set in 1948.”

85

©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Frank Torpey is the sales manager who convinced Martin Goodman to publish comic books, but Adele and the Bullpen crowd have a dim view of the lurker. “They also used to make fun of Frank. He would come to the water cooler and all the guys would say Frank’s job was to sneak around and see that people were working.

“I worked right in the Bullpen, and then went into a smaller office with Al, Frank Carino—or Carin—and Bob Sanders. To me, it was another world. They were all very nice to me. I was a kid.

“If it weren’t for the atmosphere, it would have been the most boring job I’ve ever had. Super-heroes never got me. Chris Rule did Patsy Walker, and there was Millie the Model—they were kind of fun to look at. Super Rabbit was sarcastic, and I liked that.

“Syd Shores, the Captain America artist, was a very quiet guy, who seemed nice to me, but he didn’t seem to be part of the gang. Al Jaffee was the one to which I had the most connection. He was so funny and a great observer of people.

“Martin Goodman just floated. He looked like someone whose feet never touched the ground. He was very impressive. He had white hair and an air of confidence about him. I’d never known anybody like that. He was a ‘Mr. Big.’ I remember his office being so impressive, like a paneled office.

“I also wrote advice to the lovelorn in the middle of the comics. That was the most depressing thing I’ve ever been through. You’d get letters from young kids that had been treated badly. It seemed like a very cruel world to me. I did that freelance when I went to college. It wasn’t romance books, just ‘Letters from Aunt Bibi’ or whatever title they gave me. I didn’t submit the letters because they were so pathetic.”

Adele’s first connection to Harvey is through his work. She hasn’t yet met the man, but is impressed by his craft enough to rig a contest she is overseeing designed to have fans picked their favorite comic. “I kept this big chart, and I lied and gave Harvey the most votes. It didn’t matter what was in the contest—I just put checkmarks beside Harvey’s material. I’m trying to think of a nicer word, but lying is the word. I phonied up the works like Florida between Gore and Bush!

“His stuff was unique and very different than the usual. When I first saw it, I said to Al, ‘There’s the type of man I’d like to marry.’ In our family, money was important, but funny was more so.”

Al sets Adele up on a blind date with Will Elder for a reunion at the High School of Music and Art, leading to her first encounter with Harvey. “He had seen me when he had come up to the office, and was either too shy or too scared to introduce himself.

When I met him, he was doing freelance work like the one-page “Hey Look!” strips. Professional people liked that, but I don’t know if the kids got it.

“Harvey was funny and kind of cheap,” laughs Adele. “He didn’t have any money. Doubleday used to have a place where you could play records, a little booth, and listen to them for free. That’s where he took me on our first date.

“He was a confident man, but desperate to get away from his family. It was a difficult atmosphere. He saved money in the Army and got his own place. First, he lived with a friend from high school in a very ritzy neighborhood in New York—Sutton Place. He then he got his own place near Columbia University.

“My parents liked Harvey because I had been going out with really sleazy people,” says Adele 86

CHAPTER SIX

JOSIE & DAN DeCARLO

The alleged ‘hi-jacking’ of Little Annie Fanny artwork by Hugh Hefner is very tangible for Adele, but it can’t compare to the legal struggles of one of the most beloved couples the industry has ever known. Would one be surprised to discover—in one’s heliocentric, super-hero mindset—that the creator in this book whose work has been seen by the most people is none other than longtime Archie artist, Dan DeCarlo?

He will be the Jack Kirby of that company, responsible for pop icons like Sabrina, The Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats. He will also suffer the same financial and creative fate as Jack Kirby at Marvel Comics.

The fight for even a minor piece of the merchandizing pie from his employer, Archie Comics, will have fatal results, leaving his beloved wife Josie (on whom the character in the Pussycats is based) alone, fighting the U.S. Government for his Estate, and trying to raise a teenage granddaughter on her own.

What little humor can be found in their struggles is diametrically opposed to the soft, sweet nature of the man and woman. Humor is the basis of Dan’s career and their lives together, making the struggles to the end even 102

more heartbreaking. Still, much of the focus on their lives should be of celebration and laughter, since this is what predominates their time together from the very beginning.

Josette Dumont’s beginnings are far from amusing. Shuffled from France to Belgium, her teenage years coincide with Nazi occupation, and she spends her youth on the run from bombings and swarms of enemy invaders.

“At the time my parents were married in the mid1920s,” says Josie, “my father went to do his military service in Germany. Since my mother was an only child, my grandparents decided we’d stay with them. When my father came back, my grandparents wanted to keep me with them because they didn’t want to be left with no one, what with my mother leaving them to go live with her husband too.

“I grew up with them to the age of twelve until, one Christmas Eve, my grandfather was killed by a train. My grandmother and I went back to Belgium to live with my parents, but it wasn’t an easy adjustment. I was not accustomed to a disciplinarian father. It was a simple life until I was sixteen and World War II started.

©2002 Dan DeCarlo

Left: The cruise where the costume of Josie is born, Jan. 1966.

Above: Dan & Josie in Charleroi, Belgium, 1945.

Below: Gettin’ out a Dodge!, 1945.

103

“I was cheated out of my teenage years.

Those four years of war, I haven’t forgotten one incident because the bombs were dropped in my own town. The panic was contagious. When we were invaded, we all had the same idea, running to get to the south of France for fear of living under German occupation.

“Those who had a car were fortunate. We only had bicycles and it was difficult because we were constantly meeting with columns of soldiers and there were detours all the time. It took about ten days to arrive at the point where we were bombarded again so badly that we were buried in a house.

“The English forces came to dig us out and then, from that point on, my father realized there was no point in going any further. Every time we went a few kilometers, the Germans were doing the same thing. We were in the north of France and we came too close to death to go on any further.

“When the Germans came in, my father said, ‘You have to hide because I’m going to see what they do, how they behave and then maybe you’ll come out from the hiding.’ All the terrible stories we’d heard in school from our studies of the First World War were implanted in our minds, all the atrocities of that time.

“These were the columns of the Elite soldiers. They looked strong, but they didn’t seem

©2002 Dan DeCarlo ©2002 Dan DeCarlo

Above & Bottom Right: more Dan & Josie cartoons, 1945.

Below: postcard drawing sent back to brother Vince, 1945.

Top Right: First day in America, May 19th, 1946.

104

to bother anyone. Sure enough, after all the Elite went by, they left behind all the elderly soldiers to just occupy the town. They were nicer. They didn’t want the war any more than we did. Finally we waited there for about a week until we were told we could go back home.

“Back home, the last two years of the War were horrible. We couldn’t do anything anymore. We were always threatened with reprisals if we didn’t obey their rules. They would come to a movie and if somebody did something to aggravate them they would say, ‘you, you, you’ and take you away. Nobody ever saw those people again. It was frightening.

“It was also difficult to put food on the table.

You had to try to go to the farms and buy the food on the black market, trying to mix that and the things we would get with the stamps, just trying to survive.”

Life in a constant state of alarm for the Dumonts keeps them ignorant to the outside world— unaware of the French Resistance and the atrocities committed against Jews. “We weren’t even aware there were so many people who were in contact with the BBC,” says Josie, “and tied to the underground.

The French had their Imaginary Line and thought it would never be crossed, but the Germans went around it!”

Liberation is swift and exciting for the Josie.

The Allied Forces are coming, but such news can never be treated as accurate. “Everyone was on the street, singing, drinking and getting the Americans a good bottle of wine that had been hidden from before the War. We felt so sure we were safe, but it was not exactly so because there was the ‘Battle of the Bulge.’

It was in December and it made us realize we’re still not as safe as we thought.”

The end of the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ brings Nazi surrender and a return to normalcy for young Josie, the difference now being their town is occupied

by Americans. One in particular catches Josie’s eye.

“These soldiers were trying to find a place, French dictionaries in hand, and my cousin Georgette passed by and invited them for coffee. My father said, ‘Well, my daughter didn’t go out with Germans and she will not go out with Americans,’ but my cousin insisted, so he let me go.”

The two women meet their dates and Josie, more outgoing than her soon-to-be husband, says, “I’m going with the small one.” The small one is Dan DeCarlo.

Dan had arrived with the Air Force in Charleroi, Belgium at the end of January 1945 after being stationed in London the three previous years.

©2002 Dan DeCarlo

He’s mostly a draftsman, drawing pin-ups for the nose of the planes. “I remember Dan saying,” says Josie, “‘the little one is mine,’ and I was his for fifty-six years.”

After surviving occupation, the couple’s constant communication problems seem a minor obstacle. “From the beginning, he was drawing cartoons to make me understand what he was trying to say, which was fun. He was at our home all the time. My father had accepted him, so there was no problem anymore. We would go to the movies, the opera, to pubs and the Officers’ Club for learning the Jitterbug.

“He’d do cartoons, trying to write the captions in French! At least he was trying! I gave him a picture of me at sixteen. He wrote on the back, ‘Jo Jo Dumont, age sixteen-and-a-half; still no sign of brains, Dr. Dan.’ “When we met, he would ring my doorbell and I would open it, but there was no one there. I always had to look out because he would always step aside to hide.

His shyness was superficial and he quickly outgrew it.”

Dan has enough points to be discharged, but Josie refuses his initial requests to leave for the United States. He re-enlists, staying behind six months to marry her in February of 1946, before returning to the United States, his new bride to follow on her own.

Josie fears leaving home, but is anxious to reconnect with Dan. “When I left my family there was no

airplanes. They thought, ‘When will we see her again?”

A boat of 500 war brides arrives in New York Harbor with Dan waiting at the port. “It was a shock because every time we showed the Americans something that was quite beautiful, in architecture or something, they would say, ‘We have that much bigger in the United States.’ We sometimes thought they were exaggerating. When we came here, we said, ‘Oh my God, it’s true!’

“Fortunately, I met a friend from home at the train station and discovered we’d be living in the same town. It was a mixture of excitement and happiness. I’d married the man of my dreams and his family was happy about Dan bringing home a war bride. However, it was a little frightening at the beginning. It took me three years to feel comfortable. I start to learn English from going to the movies. When I made friends, life began to change for me.”

The first years of their marriage are difficult thanks to a foreign environment, Dan’s struggles to establish his career as an illustrator, a tiny house with ten people in six rooms, and giving birth to twin boys.

She makes a decision—a sacrifice—only heard of in the days of (what news anchor Tom Brokaw would 105

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANNE T. MURPHY & ARCHIE GOODWIN

Mirrored in the society surrounding it, the attitudes expressed by the women and men of the previous thirty years in the field would stand in sharp contrast to the generation of creators swarming the New York scene from the “Summer of Love” onwards. The illusion that creators seemingly lived within blocks of each other, and attended the same social functions, would become reality.

The Eisners, Kuberts, and Romitas might as well have lived oceans apart. The 1970s breed of creators, however, would resemble a theatre subculture in proximity and structure. The chauvinistic walls of the comic book industry would come down piece by piece. Creators who would pose as spiritually enlightened beings run smack into women whom will no longer consider their place at their husbands’ side; quiet and subservient to the needs of their careers.

At the center of this seismic shift would be Anne T. Murphy. Few would place a higher value on equality in the home and workplace but more importantly in the social, and mental, struggle of stagnation vs. change.

Archie Goodwin would pass away in 1998—the effects of cancer winning the battle with his immune system— leaving Anne to deal with this loss, this industry’s ethical disregard in terms of honoring one in death who was so cherished in life, and her desire to not be confined to a past thought only in terms of repetitious retellings of Archie’s comic book career.

Born in 1937, Archie Goodwin comes out of the service and returns to the age-old women’s magazine Redbook in the very early 1960s. He’s working in the art department, but already has a history with comic books.

To please his father, Archie briefly attends the University of Oklahoma in 1955, but deliberately abandons his studies to realize his true desire. He attends New York’s School of Visual Arts, establishing friendships with men who would become peers—artists Al Williamson and Angelo Torres, as well as John Benson and Larry Ivie. His resume is dotted with minor appearances in fanzines and smaller publications, but during his return to Redbook he meets his most important ‘collaborator.’

“When I first met Archie,” says Anne T. Murphy—in her early twenties at the time, “I was in the Redbook fiction department. He talked about going into comics, but it wasn’t a reality. I never had any idea that people did comics. It never crossed my mind that there was somebody behind them, but I think what we had in common was an interest in art and books. We had a similar sense of humor; we were friends.

“After one particular party, I said to Archie, ‘Are Herb Trimpe and Linda Fite a couple?’ He said, ‘Not as far as I know.’ I had picked up this vibe, though, and Linda recently said, ‘We liked each other for a long time before we liked each other’ and I knew exactly what she meant. She meant that personal ‘touching off’ recognition before it enters into a romance.”

Anne and Archie certainly share a quest to shed themselves of the stifling social mores and expectations of their parent’s generation. “We both had parents who thought the ideas of going into art and writing were 116

ridiculous,” says Anne. “They wanted us to do something more solid. They were very unsupportive. Later on, when I got a degree in art at the Pratt Institute, Archie was very supportive—a contrast to our parents.

“Archie had a fight with his father to get here to go to art school.

Archie’s father, even years later, believed the business was going to fall apart. There were a lot of people who thought comics and art was something you do when you’re a kid and should put behind you to become a banker, a lawyer or something serious.”

The two date each other for about year in absolute secrecy from their co-workers and relatives. “I had moved out into my own apartment, which had caused a lot of trouble with my mother. We were engaged for ten weeks. I called my mother up one night and said ‘Oh, by the way, I’m getting married.’ I had never even told her I was dating anybody because I had a bad experience with her before.

She always found something wrong with everyone I dated, unless I didn’t like them and then she said ‘What did you do to chase him away?’ Neither of us had a smooth relationship with parents, although his mother was nice.

Left: Anne & Archie wedding photo.

“I came from an Irish-Catholic family. He was from Above: Redbook fashion shoot, early 1960s.

Oklahoma—a southern Baptist. Gray Morrow always thought Below: Anne & brother, early 1950s. that was hysterical. Irish Catholics didn’t go that far afield. My mother’s first question was ‘Oh, is he Catholic?’ and I said, ‘No, he isn’t.’ She said, ‘Ohh... what does he do for a living?’ and I said, “He’s a commercial artist.’ The final straw was when she heard his parents still lived in their hometown. There was this very, very long pause, and she said, ‘You don’t know anything about him. He could have a wife and children back in Oklahoma.’ But he did charm her and I think she eventually forgot he was a southern Baptist.”

Anne’s struggles with her mother mirror Archie’s battles with his father. “He had stress with his father until the day his father died. Archie never had to complain about my mother, because I did it for him, but I also complained about his father.”

Archie would become famous for his masterful handling of artists and their egos, inspiring the best work out of them without beating them up, and one can trace this back to a reaction against his father’s behavior. “Archie found a way, even as a kid, to have people like him without having to beat someone up, and he made it work for him. He wasn’t like his father and probably chose not to be. I don’t know why anybody would want to be like his father, but I wouldn’t want to be like his mother, either. Flora was sweet, but accepting Marvin’s bullying wouldn’t have been my way. It was something Archie sensed about me 117

©2002 Archie Goodwin estate

118

©2002 Archie Goodwin estate

with which he connected. Marvin, who skipped our wedding entirely, visited once before his death. When he started bullying, I told him, ‘I’m not Flora,’ and he backed off.

“We were both stepping out of what our parents thought we should do—what ‘grown-ups’ did, what was the ‘right thing to do’ and what was the ‘smart thing to do.’ I was perfectly okay with the idea of alternative careers, that someone wasn’t going to be a stockbroker or a doctor. That’s the direction our kids have taken.

“Archie came from a very white Protestant place. He never dated anything but Catholic ethnics and one Japanese girl. I would have been stifled to marry some Irish Catholic from Fordham University. Archie escaped by coming to New York.

“I saw parents pressure their kids. Society has a lot of standards about success. You get a good job and make good money. The fact is you only have one life, and if you are not happy with what you are doing...

“When you’re in your early twenties, what’s the worst that can happen if it doesn’t work out? You’ll say, ‘Gee, it didn’t work out. I’ll go on to something else.’ You don’t have to live with the regrets. If you get yourself pushed into someone else’s idea of a good career and give up what you love, just so you’ll be respectable and be ‘a success,’ you’ll waste your ‘once around’ in life.

“Our daughter Jennifer loved working with animals and we had friends who worried, ‘Well, what’s the next step for her? Will she be a veterinarian?’ She didn’t want to be a vet. They would look at my son, Seth, on the schooner and condescendingly say, ‘It’s Both Pages: Archie’s lunch bag drawings for a job for a boy.’ There’s this notion that you’ve got to get ahead and you’re son Seth & daughter Jennifer, late 1970s . not really a success unless you climb to the top and you’re in charge of everybody. Now, think of that as a social value. That means one person out of every five hundred is going to feel, ‘Gee, I’m a success.’

“Comics were in a real slump in the early 1960s. There was no business. It’s a world you can’t visualize—there weren’t conventions and the people who were interested in comics had probably been involved with fanzines for a long time. There wasn’t this big thing, this ‘you’re the fan and I’m the big star’ division. There was no money in it, either. I knew about Archie’s interest in comic books and I had met Al Williamson by that time and some other people. When Russ Jones started gathering the Warren creators, Archie got the job of writing the scripts.”

Anne is getting her Masters from New York University at night, and Archie begins pumping out sometimes two stories a night for Jim Warren’s horror magazine Creepy. “People were beginning to see problems with Russ Jones. When he was ousted, Archie was perfectly poised, considering he was writing all the stories and had professional magazine experience— more professional than the Warren books—to take over and was offered the editor’s job.

“Warren had an apartment in the city—the place on 47th Street— right near Andy Warhol’s first Factory; you could see the silver doors. Jim was taking a summer weekend at one of the hotels by the airport and Archie said, ‘We’ve been invited out there to swim in the pool and to talk business,’ and I said, ‘Airport hotel?’”

Jim Warren tells of drawing up a single-page contract, which

CHAPTER 666

DENI LOUBERT & DAVE SIM

While Anne T. Murphy deals with defining herself as a woman in a man’s world, Deni Loubert fights to define herself in one man’s world. She too will stand on the cusp of a generation. It’s 1977 and the comic book industry is dying a slow death at the newsstands of North America. There are few outlets for independently-minded individuals to birth a creation they could call their own. Deni Loubert will prove to be as destined to create something tangible in the publishing world as Dave will in the arts. The two will build a castle before Deni will have to rescue herself from its tall towers. She won’t come out unscathed, but will blaze a trail for women and men taking up the mantle of self-publishing for the next twenty-five years.

Dave Sim will have you believe women represent an emotional void into which the rational man is drawn, but had Dave Sim not been drawn to Deni Loubert, the history of comic book self-publishing would’ve had a dramatic void. Exploring her role as publisher in their company, Aardvark-Vanaheim, puts to death any of Sim’s complaints that the female in a relationship restricts the male’s creative spirit.

In fact, without the foundation his partner gives him, his three-hundred issue run of Cerebus may not have been finished until the year 3004, if it had gotten off the ground at all. Contrary to Sim’s expressed opinions, there is little evidence to suggest he would have been emotionally and physically able to produce a comic, and a company, from scratch. Deni put the train on the tracks and Dave has been able to ride it smoothly ever since.

Deni is born almost eight years ahead of Dave in Timmins, Ontario—a small town about an eight-hour drive northwest of Toronto. Her father works in the McIntyre Mines before moving the family to Arizona when Deni is five; the family living in a trailer while he works on the railroads. They cross the U.S. to northern California, return to the nickel mines of Sudbury, and eventually stop in the San Francisco Bay area during Deni’s high school years in the mid-to-late 1960s.

The family moves into what would become Silicon Valley. Wall-to-wall glass by the 1980s, the Valley is rural and agricultural and the burgeoning underground comix scene is where Deni gets her first real taste of comics.

“Everybody read the Fabulous Freak Brothers in high school,” she says. “We were all experimenting with grass and, after school, you’d sit around, pass a joint, read the Freak Brothers and listen to Pink Floyd—typical 1960s.

“Like a lot of little girls, I had a crush on Robin. The first super-hero comic book I read was Batman and Robin. The Polka-Dot Man would pull polka dots off his costume, throw them at the wall and jump through. I loved Millie the Model, but wasn’t allowed to bring comics into the house, so I read them in grocery stores. My parents didn’t consider them good reading material.”

Deni’s desire to write and publish can be traced back to the voluminous amounts of books in the household. “My mother would sit down with me when I was not in school yet and go through these big books we had with a lot of the French Impressionist from the 1920s, a lot of street scenes by Monet and Renoir. I would do book reports in grade school that were ten-page documents bound with covers. Today, my brother Michael owns a 126

bookstore in Kitchener.”

Do you marry your father? In Deni’s case, there are many parallels. “We always used to laugh how he was not in favor of women in the workforce, but all his daughters eventually owned their own business. My dad had a grade six education and ending up running an accounting department for a huge company that made malls in California. Both of my parents definitely raised me to think there was nothing you couldn’t do.”

She studies for a year to be a nursery school teacher, but her father uproots them again in 1970, returning to Canada; this time to Kitchener, Ontario. For one so creatively inclined, Deni’s first job is in a plastic extrusion factory making faucet handles. “You spend three months there and you date a guy, his dad works in the factory, he works in the factory, his brother works in the factory and you look around and go, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to be this!’”

Since returning to Canada, Deni’s interests have shifted from comics to science-fiction. “I had gone to my first good-sized convention in Toronto with some friends and was blown away by this whole other world I had no idea existed. It just inspired us all and we formed a writing group.”

Looking to expand her knowledge of production, Deni canvasses Kitchener for like-minded individuals. “I specifically wanted to take charge. This was before photocopying was so easily available. Gene Day’s Dark Fantasy was one of the better ’zines out there. I was looking at it and saying to the writing group, ‘We’d be much more motivated to write on a regular basis and do good work, if we published something.’

In the summer of 1976, Harry Kremer’s Now and Then Books is to comics what Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Shop in London, England is to music. It is a gathering place with an owner more than willing to assist prospective writers and artists in producing a couple of issues of whatever pie-in-the-sky project walks in the door. “Harry’s was the place to go if you were into science-fiction,” says Deni. “I went to talk to Harry about sight unseen buying twenty-five or fifty copies, but he wasn’t there.

“Dave was there, working in the record division. I read Gene’s Dark Fantasy on regular basis and Dave was one of the regular contributors. Cerebus came together from my desire to put together a little kind of sciencefiction/fantasy magazine.”

The upstairs of the store houses the comics and magazines, the back gathers all the gamers, and downstairs are the records and collectibles. “I’d find Rosemary Clooney 78s of old jazz recordings. If you wanted it, Harry could find it for you. A lot of the people I met who became illustrators, or were going to be illustrators for our personal magazine, I met through Harry. ”He was a big, funny, warm-hearted bear of a guy who would do anything for the people that were part of his universe. He was generous to a fault; quiet and yet when he said something, you paid attention. He hired Dave to give him a job because Dave was trying to sell cartoons. Dave was working behind the counter in the record division a couple days a week.”

For one whose life will become consumed by them, Deni is unaware of the process of making comic books. “When I met Dave, I was surprised to find there were guys who penciled and guys who inked. I started talking about my project and he had all these questions. Before you know it, we’re talking about Gene’s publication, fanzines, comics, science-fiction and we talked for two hours. We totally clicked the first time we met. ”He was bright, cute and into all of this weird kind of stuff I was. Dave’s very charming. Even back then he was very charming. I was a little bit more pop; he a little bit more on the edge. I asked him out—invited him over to my place for dinner—but hadn’t even gotten his name yet. He tells me and I’m, ‘Are you the Dave Sim that does the illustrations in Gene’s magazine? I really like your stuff. Can I get you draw some illustrations for our book? Why don’t you come to my place next week, I’ll make dinner and pick your brain about how you put these things together.’”

Dave is eighteen, Deni twenty-five. Dave would have been a senior in high school, but dropped out to do cartoons. He told his parents school had nothing left to teach him as a cartoonist and they sent him out to earn a living. He had moved out a month or two before meeting Deni, living in a little studio, supporting himself working at Harry’s and with a little strip in the local paper.

“He had an aunt who was an artist and a very big influence on him,” says Deni, “He definitely came from a very creative family and, because of the background I came from, his family always seemed sophisticated to me.

They were college educated. Dave’s mother was a very strong person. His father was very creative and wasn’t into the traditional macho role. If anything, I had the father like that—the guy that worked underground in the mines 127

All images these pages ©2002 Dave Sim

and had the big muscles. Dave’s dad was a labor negotiator, a man who depended on his brains for a living. He grew up with much more liberal concepts in many ways of male and female roles.”

The main connection between the two is their collective desire to produce something tangible, not just talk about their dreams. They have much to learn from each other, but clearly, Deni is the worldlier of the two. “It was a bone of contention all along in our relationship. He was very young. I was the first person he had ever dated. I think it intimidated him a bit. I had been engaged not that long before I met Dave, then had broken it off, and he knew that. Just the fact that I was more experienced than him—I’d been doing drugs for a couple years, traveling around—was very intimidating to a young man who wanted to see his role in your life as being, at the very least, equal to you.

“When I met Dave, I had my own apartment and was working full time in a shirt factory in the mailroom. I worked all kinds of weird little jobs. I was a go-go dancer, worked an offtrack betting office, and in a factory making rubber stamps—the only woman in the entire place. I worked with saws and drills and learned how to set cold type. They didn’t want to hire me, but I pushed them. Years later I ran into the guy that owned the little business. He thanked me for pushing him because he had five or six women in the back now. You just had to push people a little about their perception of what a woman could do.”

“Totally kismet,” says Deni about her courtship with Dave. “He was like a lot of people you meet in comics. He’d loved comics forever. Before I met him, he had interviewed a lot of professionals for Gene’s publication. When we became professionals, it meant we had a footing with these people.”

Both Pages: illustrations from Dave’s early fanzine work, 1975-76.

The attraction for Deni is Dave’s fierce ambition to make a living in a creative field and his unabashed confidence in his skills. “I thought you had to live in an ivory tower in New York City to be a writer. He was the person that opened my eyes up and made me realize that, ‘No, you just do it. It doesn’t matter where you are.’ In terms of strictly life experience, there was a lot I taught him, but it was an eye opener to meet somebody with the ambition he had. It was not even a question of when or how.

I remember Dave telling me, ‘I’m going to be a millionaire before I’m thirty.’ This was on our third date.”

The fanzine they put together offers their first hard knock in the arena of self-publishing.

128

CHAPTER NINE

MELINDA GEBBIE & ALAN MOORE

148

©2002 Alan Moore

Writers—can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em. Hey, Image Comics tried, but even they eventually turned to the man handed the crown of most influential writer in comics of the past twenty years.

And female artists? ‘Hey Babe, you can always edit or color.’ If you were a woman in the 1970s and wanted to draw comics, you could have cracked the Berlin Wall with greater ease. What chance would you have in Underground Comix drawing (gasp!) pornographic images of subservient males stomped on by dominating women? Hey, it was cute for Robert Crumb to whip it out and drill the female species a new hole, but it was declassé for a woman to unnerve proper society in such a fashion.

Somehow a writer from Northhampton, England and an artist from Sausalito, California found each other, and found work in an industry no longer gathering creators within a fifty-mile radius of Manhattan.

It’s November 18th, 1953 and if you take a train ride one hour north from London, you can witness the birth of Alan Moore. Charles Dickens still has a hold on the industrial town and Alan grows up in Council Flats—houses rented out by the town for pennies a serving— more appropriate to the 1800s. With a brewery worker for a father and Above: He’s an artist, too. Moore’s fanzine art, Dark Fantasy v.4 #1, Mar. 1979. printer for a mother, the poverty Left: photo by artist Jose Villarrubia, (c) 2002, of Alan & Melinda. endured makes the Romitas’ Ellery Street tenements look like Bel Air. One grandmother has no indoor toilet; the other lacks electric light.

British comics are as dreary as the town “decor” until the late 1950s when DC’s stable of revived heroes and the Fantastic Four arrive on foreign shores. Alan deals acid, gets thrown out of school at seventeen and works an assortment of mind-numbing jobs at exotic locales, such as a sheep-skinning plant at the edge of town, or at the Grand Hotel, cleaning toilets.

He marries in 1974 and—staring at life on the doll or in an office job—first sets out to make his living in comics by the late 1970s. He is hired as the weekly cartoonist, doing a half-page strip for the British music newspaper, Sounds.

Breaking into U.S. comics is viewed by creators overseas as total lockdown, so Alan begins a stint at Marvel U.K., before finding his stride at Warrior magazine in late 1981, scribing two of his seminal works; “Marvelman” (to be published as Miracleman in the U.S.) and “V for Vendetta.”

149

©2002 Alan Moore

In 1984, Moore makes that cross-ocean breakthrough when DC Comics hands him their borderlinecanceled title, Swamp Thing, and Moore takes flight.

Soon, Watchmen follows and on the above four titles alone, he could retire with legend intact. Few people in the medium are tagged with the ability to raise the bar of expectations, and Moore sets it high.

After vowing not to work for corporate giant DC ever again—thanks to his disagreement with DC concerning licensing revenues of Watchmen-themed products, Moore lives the life of an independent creator, highlighted by the From Hell opus with artist Eddie Campbell made into a successful motion picture in 2001 starring Johnny Depp. In 1998, Moore envisions running his own imprint of titles and produces the America’s Best Comics’ line of books, seeing Moore turn into a 1990s version of Stan Lee, with writings in all five titles.

But this is only half the story. Moore’s Jack Kirby will be his partner in life and comics, Melinda Gebbie.

“I grew up in a beautiful little village called Sausalito, in the San Francisco Bay area,” says Melinda, “the only child, if not the favorite. Most of the memories are filled with the natural loveliness of that little town. We lived just down from Hurricane Gulch, where the Golden Gate Bridge crosses a rainbow painted tunnel and breaks through into golden sunlight from pearly fog on the other side of the bay. The child-sized roads were winding, the secret footpaths dappled in shadow.

Even as a five year old, I could wander barefoot everywhere. There was a stone elephant fountain in the postage-stamp sized park and, at five, I was the perfect height for the little brass water fountain.

“We lived in a tiny house at the top of a hill with a bejeweled view of the whole Bay—including Angel Island and Farallones. In my dreams, I sit sometimes with my feet in a shallow turquoise pool, looking out at that view.

150

“My father worked in a men’s clothing store; my mom, a legal secretary. Daddy had a little corner of the garage where he worked on his miniature models. Cable cars, clipper ships and tiny metal trains were kitted up with miniscule lanterns, or machinery—or even velvet seats for the tiny pullman cars. He could make anything from a bit of balsa wood or fabric.

“He also had a collection of George Petty-type watercolor drawings he’d kept in a cardboard portfolio. The colors were bright purples and greens. The skin tones were like cream. Looking at those rich 1930s and 1940s style portraits was like running my hands through jewels.

“By the time I was eight, I had been hooked on drawing for a good two years and had filled a cardboard box half my height with little stapled picture-books. Even at that age, I remember walking up the gravel drive to our gate making the vow that I would be an artist. It was the only thing I Top Left: Alan’s fanzine art from Dark Fantasy v.4 #2, May 1979. wanted to be.

Bottom Left: photo of Melinda in the late 1970s.

“My parents were fairly Below: more of Alan’s art from Back Street Bugle #25, Mar. 1979. indifferent to my interest. They were thankful I could play happily with my crayons and not bother them, except to show them my little creations when they were complete, ready to be stapled together.

“My parents died long before I had a chance to divorce myself from them. It could be read as a kind of cowardice on their part, not wanting to venture forth into the world of my violent pubertal drives, only to be cast off as discounted antiquities. But when you leave the game before the ending, you never find out whether there’s an upside to the proceedings. I think my mother died hoping I’d marry an architect and learn to love beige. Birth control did play a huge role in my intellectual development. Without it, I would have been a single mother of five.

“Archie Comics were the first comics I ever copied. I loved the sexy, kinetic quality they had. I must have been eleven at the time. At twelve, I got into Mad Magazine and became obsessed with copying Wally Wood’s Oina Lollabridgidas. Later, at about age seventeen, I fell in love with “Little Annie Fanny,” and drew versions of Annie that look quite similar to the ones I’ve done more recently.

“National Lampoon, in the mid-and-late 1970s, had a vicious bite. Their issues on starvation, boredom, and their high school yearbook tore the warm fuzzy ©2002 Alan Moore

151

C H A P T E R

ED SEDARBAUM & HOWARD CRUSE

T E N

A superficial snapshot of the comic book industry illustrates a very masculine, middle-class, white palette.

The 1970s brought Virginia Romita into the workplace with husband John, Deni as co-publisher with Dave and Gebbie as a talent unto herself in the underground comix world. These are stories of feminine liberation, but another color on the palette is of a subculture standing completely at odds with the overwhelming majority of product being sold and published in the business. What chance of success has a gay cartoonist in the Wonder Bread world of comic books?

He starts by heading underground. Howard Cruse battled with himself, his peers and industry standards to carve a niche in a medium that can’t relate to the irony of the word ‘homo’ in ‘homo-superior.’

But strip away the ‘sexual’ in ‘homosexual’ and Eddie Sedarbaum and Howard Cruse exhibit many of the same traits as all couples in the business. Born worlds apart, the two converge on New York City—‘pushy’ Brooklyn Jew falls for ‘polite’ Baptist southerner and spends the next twenty years in unwedded bliss.

Before moving to Queens at the age of ten, Eddie’s predominately Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn is scarred by the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II. “If you were Jewish, you couldn’t escape it,” says Eddie.

“The losses were staggering. We watched all the films as they started showing up on television. We heard all the stories, some of which turned out to not be true. The claim that people were turned into soap and lampshades was, apparently, not true.

164

“Between the misinformation, and the curious logic only a kid can apply, I remember going to the house of relatives, much more Orthodox than my parents, and seeing kosher soap. It was a bar of soap supervised to make sure nothing unkosher, like lard, went into it. It was decorated with a Jewish star in the middle of the bar and I didn’t understand why my relatives would have soap made from their own relatives. World War II may have been over by the time I was a conscious kid, Above: New Yorker Ed on left, Alabamian Howard on right, early 1950s. but you could still see military Left: 1987 photo of the couple against a New York backdrop. dirigibles coming in to dock over Brooklyn. It was still a naughty hoot to put your pocket comb under your nose and pretend to be Adolph Hitler.”

Prominent in his early memories of life in post-War Queens are the beatings he takes from his older sister.

“Because she had a chest, I didn’t know what would happen to her if I punched her. I was terrified I might punch it by mistake, and it would explode!”

In the 1950s Ozzie and Harriet coating of America, there are no positive messages, no reference points for a young man trying to crystallize his feelings of queerness. Eddie reacts by indulging in intense self-hatred and pop culture iconography celebrating the questioning of authority. “Growing up gay, society achieved its goal of making me be intensely self-hating. Even the positive messages were really frightening. I might not have known I was homosexual—I would have never conceived of the word or the concept—but whenever pop culture said, ‘Well, of course you will get married and live in a house,’ to me that was alienating because I somehow knew I could never achieve that. It was going to be a big test, I was going to fail and the whole world will know and hate me.

“As I got a little bit older, I focused on parts of the culture that celebrated wackiness and little bits of cynicism; Mad Magazine, for example, or Tom Lehrer songs. As soon as the beatniks came along both I, and my whole crowd, immediately thought, ‘Oh, yes, that’s for us.’ I didn’t really call myself a beatnik in high school but I sure tried.

“More than anything, it was about being with other misfits. It didn’t hurt that the misfits seemed to have a more sane view about things like warfare and poverty. The beat generation wasn’t particularly political, but it certainly didn’t trust authority.

“Even before there were beatniks, by sixth grade, my group of boys that hung out together had a name for our class of people. We called ourselves the ‘Duhs.’ It meant we were the awkward ones that didn’t fit in, but didn’t really care because we knew we were better than everybody because we were against war and injustice.

“I’ve always enjoyed George Carlin, but had problems with him because he is kind of intolerant and, for the sake of humor, expresses things kind of simplistically. There is still something of the butch bully in him, but he was very meaningful to my generation—he was the only one talking about drugs, resisting authority and being a hippie.”

Eddie first starts to have a picture of his queerness when puberty dawns, but the roots, and the repression, extend back into his childhood. “I was terrified of my own homosexuality. I can remember at age six enticing my friend into a game that involved touching and knowing this was something I shouldn’t let anybody know about—knowing that he might have rejected me for asking. I couldn’t tell you why I knew it was a dangerous secret.

“It was all a question of learning to recognize the feelings within me, just like some people don’t get high 165

©2002 Howard Cruse ©2002 Howard Cruse

the first time they smoke pot because they don’t know what to look for. At least now there are some positive messages out in the world you might have heard before you start wrestling with it. When I was growing up there was nothing—zero.”

While a fan of non-super-hero comics like The Three Stooges, Martin and Lewis or 3-D comic books, one of the first manifestations of his ability to identify his homosexuality is his Superboy rescue fantasy.

“He would come to my mental rescue if I was being punished for something I felt was unfair. Superboy would pick me up in his strong arms and carry me home.

I once did a really bad thing at day camp and my punishment was to stand on a table in front of everybody with my arms outstretched holding out these really heavy sneakers. It was actually a little like torture and humiliation and that was when I first thought Superboy should take me away.”

They are his first memories of the desire to be affectionate with someone of his own sex. “It is questionable,” says Eddie, “to say homosexuals are those who want to have sex from the same gender. That leaves out the more important preference to have affection from the same gender. That’s certainly true of what Howard and I have together. I don’t care how sexual a relationship is with a spouse, you spend far more time worrying about one another, or picking each other up because it’s raining, or whatever. The question is really whom you want to make a family with—whom do you want to be protected by?”

In Howard’s 1995 award-winning graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby, he portrays the story of Toland Polk, a young man struggling with his own acceptance of his queerness, and part of that is a not-so-uncommon theme amongst gay men in the 1960s and 1970s. Both Howard and Eddie try to eradicate their impulses by either fathering children with women or marrying them.

“A surprising number of gay and lesbian teenagers end up pregnant because they are trying to prove something to somebody,” says Eddie. “I felt very threatened by the whole notion of being an adult with the consequences from being evil, sick and illegal! I had a really bad case of low self-esteem. I had trapped myself into a relationship with a woman whom I married and didn’t know other homosexuals.

“There were a few people with which I would have sexual experiences but none of us were in the head space to say ‘I am homosexual’ or ‘You are homosexual and this is what we are doing.’ If I ever met somebody I could have anonymous sex with, I would almost always claim it was the first time. Unconsciously, I thought if I didn’t link all the experiences together, then it wouldn’t say anything about who I was.

“It was really screwed up!” laughs Eddie. “When I finally did come out and started doing peer counseling, I quickly realized the main job of a person who’s just coming out: to re-socialize in such a way that you really believe the entire world was wrong and you were right. Most community leaders would frown on such a philosophy, but a homophobic society makes us internalize, so that’s really the case.”

Eddie remains married for ten years, participating in the hippie and anti-war movement, but completely missing out on the 1970s homosexual liberation. “My wife knew I had a history when she met me. I think we both, without saying the words, conspired to believe that now that I found a woman—and had all the rewards of being a married man—those feelings were going to go away. It’s similar to the way some Marxists think that once there’s a classless society, homosexuality will go vanish.

166

C H A P T E R

JACKIE ESTRADA & BATTON L ASH

E L E V E N

Just who is Jackie Estrada? Surely “Batton Lash” is a nom de plume, stolen from a U.S. College football team? The fact you can’t answer either question illustrates the plight of the 1990s independent publisher/artist stuck between mainstream monotony and the obscure, self-indulgent, indie comic book world.

She’s slept on Michael Kaluta’s floor, done Dave Stevens’ laundry, and in between has been one of the most influential figures in West Coast fandom, the face behind the Eisner Awards, run a organization dedicated to the inclusion of woman in the comics medium, and helped her husband navigate the perils of self-publishing, Hollywood, and the decline of mainstream comics. Her tale exposes the good ol’ boys network of comics’ ivory business towers and how narrowly focused this industry has become, where anything other than men in tights and men in diapers is left gasping for air.

With a father in the Navy, Jackie Estrada is lifted from city to city in the first eight years of her life. Hawaii, Washington DC, and North Dakota are all called home until 1954 when, during the Korean War, the family is transferred to the San Diego area.

“We lived in a little suburban community in a town called Chula Vista. All of the things people love about the 1950s is what I grew up with—all the great TV shows, the 1950s music from pop music to rock and roll, seeing the monster movies and cartoons at the Saturday matinee.

“Once I got old enough to start having real preferences, I gravitated toward reading science-fiction and 178

gothic mysteries; classic works like Edgar Allan Poe and the complete Sherlock Holmes. My mother would get mad at me for reading all the time. ‘Every time we go to somebody’s house for a birthday for your little friends, you have to go where the books are.’”

Perhaps as a reaction to being constantly uprooted, or force fed the 1950s American ideals, Jackie develops a morbid phase in 1960 and turns to writing to express this. “My one friend’s pseudonym was C. Sick.

I was Rapid D. Mise,” laughs Jackie. “I prided myself that I could take any topic and write a morbid story about it. For instance, we had to write a story from the viewpoint of an inanimate object. I told the story from the viewpoint of a butcher knife used to kill somebody.”

Her first interest in comics comes not from super-heroes, but from a magazine poking fun at tight-assed America. “I was a Mad Magazine fanatic,” says Jackie. “During the 1950s, Mad was the comic magazine you had to have—25¢ cheap. I went nuts over the Ballantine paperbacks that reprinted the early Kurtzman issues, like The Bedside Mad and Son of Mad. I would write Mad-type material for the high school paper.”

Jackie rarely buys comics, reading them only when friends or cousins would have them lying around. “I read Mary Jane and Sniffles stories, but I did buy my favorite, Katy Keene. My only attempts to draw things were trying to do paper dolls and pinups for Katy Keene. It was a thrill decades later to meet Bill Woggon, who created Katy Keene.”

In her senior year, 1964, she becomes editor on the school newspaper, and the path of her life is set. “If you saw American Graffiti—set in 1962 in California—that’s pretty much what life was like in Chula Vista. We even had Wolfman Jack on the radio.”

With high aptitude tests, she majors in Journalism at San Diego State University. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with newspapers, especially after studying them for four years,” laughs Jackie. “I realized the kinds of students who were taking journalism were the kinds who were out there writing for newspapers—which accounted for the fact that most reporting was superficial and facts were rarely accurate.

“I wanted to be a magazine editor. We had a great teacher who had worked at the New York Times. To pass the class, students had to market eight articles and sell at least one. We learned you don’t start off sending everything to Esquire and The New Yorker. I sold all eight to places like Left: Batton does his best Bryan Ferry impersonation at this 1996 signing.

College Store News, and Grit. I Above: teenage Jackie at her typewriter in 1960. really got into photography and did Below: Jackie with Bill Woggon, Katy Keene creator, 1981. the photos for my articles.”

In her last year of high school, she meets her future husband, Davey Estrada. “One of the first questions he asked me was, ‘So, what do you think the meaning of life is?’” laughs Jackie at her response. “I was like, ‘Umm, my favorite color is blue!’ He’d play me jazz records and gave me lots of interesting books. I started to think, ‘You know, I’ve reached that point in my life where I better start using my brain.’”

Philosophically, the two would mesh under the guidance of Objectivist writer and creator Ayn Rand. “I majored in journalism and 179

©2002 Batton Lash

minored in philosophy and English. That’s when I read all of Ayn Rand’s works. I read The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged—all her non-fiction work. We enrolled in the Nathaniel Branden Institute and went to all the sessions offered in San Diego. The courses were on topics like economics, the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and taught by people associated with Rand. We belonged to the Students of Objectivism at San Diego State, and we subscribed to the newsletters Rand and Branden published.”

Jackie is a major proponent of the Individual. Rand helps her to develop a coherent philosophy, from a personal, economical and political vantage point. “The level of discourse about politics in high school was pretty pathetic. My parents were Democrats. My dad was a huge FDR fan. My mom really didn’t pay that much attention to politics.

“I was a senior in high school when Kennedy was assassinated. For some reason, I wasn’t too surprised.

I sort of said, ‘What’s the big deal?’ At that point, I had already decided it didn’t matter who was President because of the way the government was structured. The individual person in that role didn’t have much influence. I also wasn’t one of those people who thought the Kennedys had ushered in Camelot. I didn’t care about what Jackie Kennedy wore.”

Rand’s followers take her teachings to extremes during the 1960s, but Jackie is unfazed by the exclusiveness of what she views as a bastardization of the novels’ original intent. “There were several hardcore Objectivists who thought everyone should adhere strictly to Rand’s writings and ideals. If you dared say anything not in the canon and that wasn’t part of 100% Objectivism, they didn’t want to interact Below: Batton’s homage to Will Eisner’s The Spirit, 1990. with you.

“When I tried to talk to other people, I realized they had one viewpoint about politics and a different viewpoint when it came to, say, economics. They were contradicting themselves all the time. I think that’s because too many people swallow information wholesale without examining it. They get some beliefs from what their parents or religion tell them, and other beliefs or attitudes from what their teachers or their friends tell them. I tried to get them to see the contradictions and they would just get mad.

“Of course, this was the 1960s, when you started having the whole antiestablishment, counterculture, hippie outlook that got all the attention and was supposed to represent what all of us of that generation thought. At San Diego State, that was maybe 4% of the population. The rest of the students just wanted to learn enough to go out in the world, earn a living, have a family. They had no interest in love-ins or protests.

“I actually put together a book called The University Under Siege. The student protesters felt they shouldn’t be responsible for their actions because, ‘It’s okay for us to destroy property because we have a cause. It’s okay for us to prevent other students from getting 180

C H A P T E R

JULIE & DAVE C OOPER

T W E L V E

By the turn of the century, people such as Julie and Dave Cooper have fully embraced the Anne T. Murphy ideal of defying parental and societal expectations to find their artistic niche in a world of growing high commerce.

Dave Cooper the person defies all expectations. A product of a generation defined by the crowd who followed in Dave Sim’s indie footsteps—Joe Matt, Seth and Chester Brown—their work expresses concerns never dreamt by the likes of Will Eisner. Bordering on the hardcore, there exists a startling dichotomy between the gentle nature of Cooper the man and the hyper-sexual nature of his work.

His obsession with the grotesque begs the obvious question—what kind of woman would marry Dave Cooper? And if the mainstream, super-hero world of comics collapses, will artists like Dave Cooper be the dominate force, or will a life unappreciated in the medium push them out to more commercial work unrelated to the fourcolor world?

They put something in the water up in Canada. In 1914, a man named of Shuster is born in Toronto, and co-creates a little strip about an alien who leaps tall buildings in a single bound. The impact of mainstream artists like John Byrne and the independent messiahs Sim, Seth, and Brown suggests the landscape of this American-born industry would be gravely different without contributions from their ‘frozen neighbors to the north.’

It’s 1967 and Dave Cooper is born to the town doctor in Nova Scotia but moves to Ottawa—the capital of 196

©2002 Dave Cooper

Previous Page: Julie & Dave in his studio, 2002.

Left: mini-Julie at a year-old in Ottawa, 1970.

Below: unpublished sketch of Julie in Honduras, 2001.

Canada—when he is nine. Julie is born a year later to serious French-Catholic parents, but like many of her generation, the practice of religion is a mere inconvenience. “We were forced to go to church every Sunday morning,” says Julie. “My early memories were, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m missing Star Trek!’”

Born the youngest of five—a twin in a family that has two sets of twins (they really put something in the Ottawa water)—her parents divorce when she is ten, helping to form her value system of questioning society’s reasoning behind such traditions. Dave and she will meet in 1986, but not marry until 1995.

“My father is from a generation with old fashioned values. He instilled that kind of moral in us—‘She’s a girl, she can’t do that’—very stubborn rules.

But my father showed me how to take care of the household, which comes in handy because Dave buries his head in his work so dutifully that I take care of everything else, which works very well for me. I probably see myself as more like my father. He’s more of a take control kind of guy.”

The influence of her mother— a proofreader for the government— serves her well with Dave, as she proofreads all his work before ink hits the pencils. Unlike Anne T. Murphy, Julie’s rebellious nature is more tangible in its manifestation. “I outgrew the Catholic guilt thing when I turned sixteen or seventeen,” says Julie. “I was at war with my parents. It took me ages to see them as adults without them being huge parental monsters.

“I was pretty counter-culture, although earlier influences were Star Trek—the science-fiction angle always attracted me, even at that young age— and the Spider-Man cartoon at noon was the highlight of my very young life. My twin brother and I didn’t really play together. He was so different from me.

Today, he’s more of a Mr. Business Man. He’s a chartered accountant. That is so alien to me. I’m more of an artist, kind of a granola girl.”

197

Julie grabs hold of whatever comics her brothers bring into the house, and they too are ones that exist on the fringe. “Swamp Thing was my favorite,” says Julie. “It was so romantic—big bulgy guy and there’s always this woman in trouble. I liked Jonah Hex. When it started to peter out, Jonah Hex was shot finally and then was stuffed.

The books I remember are the ones with him being stuffed and these really odd things happening around his stuffed body.”

The admitted focus of Julie’s high school life is slacking and socializing, the product of a generation divided between the omnipresence of big business and a creative child’s need to express oneself in a society having few financially feasible avenues for that. “I skipped class a lot—which is terrible. I hope my kids never read this!

I listened to Pink Floyd, the Beatles, and David Bowie. When I listen to it now, it just slings me back twenty years ago. I can’t believe I sat for hours listening to that stuff. We would just sit in the grass making those whistles out of grass blades,” laughs Julie. “I still enjoy doing that!

“I’ve always wanted a family and I knew there was something in the arts world I wanted. I didn’t really have a focus, unfortunately; just a vague ‘arts related’ interest. It always amazes me when I see these young kids who think and tell me, ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’ I really envy them.

“They didn’t know what to do with artistic kids back then. I still wonder if they know now. You just hope the parents are aware the child needs some kind of extra input artistically, outside of school.”

After graduating high school, Julie does attend a two-year art course at another high school in Ottawa, focusing on fine arts and illustration. “I was drawn to the life drawing and photography. That’s where I met Dave.

I was in the illustration class looking through old drawings and I saw this piece by him. It was this very nice, vegetable illustration. It was really cartoony, just black lines, with minimal hatching.

“I got all excited and asked the teacher for it and she said, ‘No way! How did that get into there? I’m keeping this!’ I couldn’t believe this teacher. A student told me that Dave was famous, but a teacher acting that excited about a piece of Dave Cooper art?!”

Dave’s reputation at the school precedes him. He is the famous school artist. At this time, Julie defines Right: two pages from Weasel strip, late 1990s.

Below: teen Dave & Julie, 1987.

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO ORDER THIS BOOK!

I Have To Live With This Guy! Will Eisner does *what*? Alan Moore said *that*? Dave Sim is *really* like that? Take a deep look into what its been like living with comic book creators over the past 60 years, with the people who know them best! This trade paperback explores the lives of the partners and wives of Will Eisner, Alan Moore, Stan Lee, Joe Kubert, Harvey Kurtzman, John Romita, Gene Colan, Dan DeCarlo, Dick Ayers, Archie Goodwin, Ric Estrada, Dave Sim, Howard Cruse, Dave Cooper, and more! In addition to sharing memories and anecdotes you'll find nowhere else, their better halves have opened up private files to unearth personal photos, momentos, and never-before-seen art by the top creators in comics!

Once you've read this book, you'll see: You only thought you knew them!

(208-page Digital Edition) $7.95

198

http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=511