Modern Masters Vol. 13: Jerry Ordway by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

T H I R T E E N :

JERRY ORDWAY

By Eric NolenWeathington

M O D E R N M A S T E R S V O L U M E T H I RT E E N :

JERRY ORDWAY edited and designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover art by Jerry Ordway front cover color by Tom Ziuko all interviews in this book were conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by Steven Tice

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • September 2007 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-893905-79-5 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway unless otherwise noted. The Acrobat, The Messenger, Proton ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway. WildStar and all related characters ™ and ©2007 Al Gordon and Jerry Ordway. Red Menace and all related characters ™ and ©2007 Pet Fly Production, Inc., Flyworks Productions, Inc., & Second Row Productions, Inc. All-Star Squadron, Amazing Man, Aquaman, Arsenal, Atom, Azrael, Batgirl, Batman, Bibbo, Black Adam, Blaze, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Brainwave, Captain Atom, Captain Marvel, Cat Grant, Clark Kent, CM3, Commander Steel, Creeper, Cyclotron, Darkstar, Deadman, Dr. Fate, Dr. Mid-Nite, Dr. Sivana, Doom Patrol, Doomsday, Eradicator, Extant, Firebrand, Firebug, Flash, Fury, Gangbuster, Geo-Force, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, Harbinger, Hourman, Huntress, Hyppolyta, Impulse, Infinity Inc., Jade, Jimmy Olsen, Joker, Jor-El, Justice League, Kal-El, King Kull, Lex Luthor, Lobo, Lois Lane, Manhunter, Martian Manhunter, Mary Bromfield, Mary Marvel, Max Mercury, Metamorpho, Mr. Bones, Mr. Mind, Mr. Miracle, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Mongul, Negative Man, Nightshade, Nuklon, Obsidian, Plastic Man, Power Girl, Primal Force, The Question, Ragman, Ra’s al Ghul, Ragdoll, Rainbow Raider, Raven, The Ray, Red Star, Red Tornado, Reverse Flash, Rex the Wonder Dog, Richard Dragon, Riddler, Rita Farr, Robin, Royal Flush Gang, Shazam!, Shining Knight, Solomon Grundy, Starman, Steel, Supergirl, Superman, Superwoman, Tarantula, Tawky Tawny, Vicki Vale, Waverider, Wildcat, Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman, and all related characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Tom Strong, Top 10, and all related characters ™ and ©2007 America’s Best Comics LLC. Timespan, Undertow ™ and ©2007 WildStorm Productions. Angel, Arkon, Avengers, Beast, Black Knight, Blob, Bucky, Captain America, Cyclops, Daredevil, Firestar, Freedom Force, Giant-Man, Hawkeye, Hulk, Iceman, Iron Man, Jean Grey, Mystique, Namor, Odin, Photon, Prime, Punisher, Quasar, Scarlet Witch, Spider- Woman, Squadron Supreme, Thor, Thundra, Titania, Vision, Wasp, Wonder Man, The Wrecker, X-Factor ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Mighty Man, Savage Dragon ™ and ©2007 Erik Larsen. // Supreme ™ and ©2007 Rob Liefeld. // Hellboy ™ and ©2007 Mike Mignola. Grace, Mecha, Rebel, Ruby, Titan, Warmaker ™ and ©2007 Dark Horse Comics. Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Princess Leia, Star Wars ™ and ©2007 Lucasfilm Ltd. Buck Rogers ™ and ©2007 The Trustees of the Dille Family Trust. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future ™ and ©2007 Landmark Entertainment Group. Sectaurs: Warriors of Symbiote ™ and ©2007 Coleco Holdings, LLC. Editorial package ©2007 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To Mike Wieringo—one of the best artists and perhaps the best human being I have ever had the pleasure to call a friend. Your work and your deeds are an inspiration, and we miss you greatly. And as ever, to Donna, Iain, and Caper. Acknowledgements Jerry Ordway, for the long conversations and for taking the time to rummage through the art files. Special Thanks Walt Grogan, Geoff Johns, Michael Mikulovsky, Tom Ziuko, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Thirteen:

JERRY ORDWAY

Table of Contents Introduction by Geoff Johns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: All You Need is a Little Incentive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Keep ’em Flying—the Pages That Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Part Three: To Infinity Inc.... and Beyond! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Part Four: He’s an Artist! He’s a Writer! It’s Superman! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Part Five: It’s All about Family... the Marvel Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Part Six: Marvel, Alan Moore, and the McCarthy Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Part Seven: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Part 1:

All You Need is a Little Incentive college by the time I really had much memory of him. He came home on school breaks and I remember him working as a coach at the local playgrounds in the summertime. It was a bonus because he was driving, and took us places, almost like an uncle would. My brother Joel, who is two years older than I am, shared a room with me growing up, and we’re still pretty close, even though he now lives in North Pole, Alaska. Growing up in Wisconsin, they were both fishermen and hunters, which I really never was. I liked to draw, and read comics.

MODERN MASTERS: You were born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and you were born in November of ’57? JERRY ORDWAY: Yeah. I was a Thanksgiving baby. MM: Was it really on Thanksgiving? JERRY: It really was. My mother, a single mom, raising myself and my two brothers. She ran a tavern as kind of a home business, basically, because we lived in the back of it, and she usually did a big Thanksgiving dinner for all the customers. Most of the customers were retired guys and old war veterans and stuff, and they were regulars and a lot of them were there from 7:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night, so she would generally feed them, as well. But she had a big Thanksgiving spread. And the story that I always heard was that she had the bar open all day, prepared and served turkey dinners to a couple dozen people, and then washed the dishes and cleaned up after this whole thing before she called my Aunt Mary to drive her to the hospital. Unfortunately, they didn’t make it on time and a couple of Milwaukee’s Police helped deliver me. It’s probably the only time I was ever early for anything. [laughter]

MM: Did either of them read comics at all? JERRY: Yeah, my brother Mike was of the age that he read stuff during the ’50s, but it was also during the EC scare—the Congressional hearings and all that. I heard his complaints many times that he was only allowed to read Classics Illustrated and maybe Gold Key. When he got older and dumped comics, he still had a box of comics in the basement of my aunt’s house, and unfortunately there were no super-hero books except for two. One was Superman 3-D, and the other one was Captain 3-D, the Kirby 3-D book. The rest were Classics Illustrated, so I was kind of disappointed. My brother Joel and I probably both discovered comics around the same age. When we were pretty young we used to get bags of coverless comics and beat-up comics from this friend of our family—mostly Superman and Batman. They were pretty worn out, but I know we pored over them before my mom probably tossed them out. We really got into it later though, when the Marvel Superheroes cartoon was on TV,

MM: So you had two brothers. Older brothers? JERRY: Yes, both of them. My oldest brother Mike is 15 years older than me, so there’s a big gap there. My brother Mike was effectively away at 6

around 1966. He and I both used to run home from school to watch that. We discovered the comics later, as an offshoot of that. MM: So you didn’t really become a Marvel-head until later in the game? JERRY: Well, with the giveaway comics that we got, I think I was too young to really register much about them except to recognize Superman and Batman, and I don’t think I was really at a reading age at that point. I was maybe four or five, and not totally absorbing it. When Marvel Superheroes came around, I was closer to eight years old, seeing them on TV first with all the action, and like, “Wow! Cool characters!” My brother really liked Thor, and I liked Captain America and Iron Man, so it was a progression from there. And a lot of stuff happened in ’66, too, because the Batman TV show came on. A lot of people hate the show, but I loved it. I was the right age for it. And I think it helped comics a lot, because it brought comics back into the vocabulary for a while, with Adam West as Batman appearing on the cover of Life or Look magazine. MM: At what point did you start paying attention to the credits in the comics? JERRY: Oh, I think when we first got the Marvels on a train trip to Colorado. We were going to my older brother’s graduation from college in May of 1967. We were heading to the train station to take a train to Denver—it was an overnight train ride. My mother handed us a dollar and we went to the Milwaukee train station lobby, the little gift shop, and found a dollar’s worth of 12¢ Marvel comics. I took a chance on Spider-Man and Daredevil, who were not on the TV show, but they looked interesting. Thor. I think Fantastic Four, even. And then we really fell in love with them on that train ride. We read them over and over. With Spider-Man I just really zeroed in on Stan Lee and John Romita. MM: What are your earliest memories of drawing? Were you drawing before you got into the comics? JERRY: Yeah, I think I was always somebody who used to draw. I was always into craft stuff when I was a little kid. When I was in first or second grade, the teacher asked us to write about, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wanted to be a clown or a race car driver. [laughter] I never heard the end of that. [laughter] Whenever I was misbehaving and making my mom mad, she’d say, “This is the little clown who’s going to make me laugh?” MM: How long did you hang onto that dream? [laughter] JERRY: Honestly, I don’t know. That would probably have been ’63, ’64, something like that. If you didn’t want to be a race car driver, you probably wanted to be an astronaut. The local TV stations that ran Marvel Superheroes—because it was a syndicated show—a lot of cities ran contests during the show. Kids would send in drawings, and you could be entered to win a bicycle. There were three age groups, and I was in the youngest 7

Previous Page: A 1990s reimagining of Jerry’s childhood creation, Proton. Above: Jerry (sitting) and older brother Joel in their finest cowboy regalia ordering up sarsaparillas at their mother’s tavern. Left: Jerry (age 8 or 9 here) stands guard outside his mother’s tavern. Proton ™ and ©2007 Jerry Ordway.

Part 2:

Keep ’em Flying— the Pages, That Is ence was really not very good, because a picture would turn black, so all you really got were silhouettes and tantalizing bits of details. But it was clear once I started getting these that the detail was going to be up to me. Rich Buckler, while he was really good and he was doing really good super-hero stuff, he was on the clock, so to speak. He had a book set in the 1940s, but he wasn’t really referencing beyond what Roy had given him, and he wasn’t too careful about it, either. In the preview that ran in Justice League there’s a scene where a mysterious figure, who turns out to be Robotman, is seen wandering around Washington, DC. And in this one shot Rich had found a picture of the World War II Memorial, which he drew as a big element in this page. I get this page, and there’s a big note on the art that says, “War Memorial not there yet because this is 1942.” [laughter] So it was like, “Oh, I guess that’s up to me.” That’s what that was like. I mean, Roy would ask for changes, and it was stuff like “change Robotman into Liberty Belle.” That wasn’t the type of thing that you would do as an inker. That’s penciling. And that was from the git-go, that was the deal. But here’s the worst part: On that preview, I busted my butt, and I was totally scared, and I was totally panicky about the whole thing, but I did the best I could. I would talk to Len Wein because I didn’t know Roy Thomas, and Len was the editor. I turned in the first preview, Len loved it. He said, “Oh, great, beautiful. You did a great job and fixed things that needed to be fixed.” About a week before the first issue, I get a letter from Roy. I still have it. I’ve never really brought it up to him, but it was painful at the time. It had to be about six pages singlespaced of panel-for-panel critique of all the stuff that I did wrong. He started out by saying, “I had

MM: You shared a studio with Machlan and Vey while you were in Wisconsin, right?

JERRY: Right, we set up in the beginning of ’84 in a studio we called Jump Start Studios. That was kind of instigated because Pat Broderick had moved with his girlfriend from Florida to Milwaukee. She worked for the yellow pages company, the advertising company. He and I hooked up right away, and he was pretty aggressive about wanting to have a place outside of his house to draw in, so he was a good influence in that sense, that he pushed all of us to do a studio setup. Pat had worked at Continuity, and he was clearly better established than any of us. It was exciting, too, because Pat knew people that we didn’t, in the business. And it was fun to watch someone else draw, too, as I had been working in my Mom’s house previously. And, man, he was fast. He did a good job, but he didn’t linger on anything. If he had to do five pages in a day, he could do it. I was working on Infinity Inc., and then that led into Fantastic Four and then Crisis within that time at the studio. MM: With All-Star Squadron, what did you do for reference? Because you had to draw historical figures from time to time. JERRY: Oh, all the time. When Roy found out that I was the inker— boom!—the mail shows up, and there’s a box packed with Xeroxes of old comics. It was like he Xeroxed his whole collection with characters that might be needed, reference, whatever. He Xeroxed some of his military uniform books. Each script he sent would come with a little stack of Xeroxed reference, which was great and I certainly appreciated it, but Xeroxed refer18

hoped that Dick Giordano was going to be the inker on this thing.” So I’m immediately like, “Oh my God, I can’t compete with Dick Giordano.” It totally deflated me. I was feeling nervous, but still really good, and then suddenly it was like someone popped that balloon. This thing is hilarious now, but at the time it was like getting an F on a report card or something like that. I mean, it was a painful blow to my ego. I was used to success, especially when I applied myself, so it was really disheartening. MM: I assume you got paid more than a regular inker. JERRY: Yeah, I was being paid as a finisher, and the finishing rate was a couple dollars more than inks. MM: Just a couple? JERRY: Roy was always fair about this part of it. He really did work me hard, but he did say, “If DC won’t pay you extra, I’ll pay you out of my own pocket.” So it wasn’t like

money was a big issue, it was just that I felt like I was being called upon to do more and more. And the first issue of All-Star Squadron pages doesn’t arrive, and it doesn’t arrive, and it doesn’t arrive. And then I get a couple pages in the mail, and I’m thinking, “Okay, why am I getting these pages?” They were towards the end of the book. I found out that the first twelve pages had been lost by Federal Express; I never got the pages. I was like, “Well, what do I do?” “Well, we’ll send you copies of what Buckler did and you just ink it on vellum.” I never had practice inking on vellum. Vellum is tricky. If you put down brush lines and ink, it wrinkles. When I got the Xeroxes, I only had portions of Roy’s comments, because the Xerox would cut a half-inch off the margin of each side of the page. I had to reconstruct as best I could, and ink on the vellum, and it really was—I mean, it was just not great, coupled with the bad critique I got previously. By the second issue I felt like I was actually making some progress, and I think that there is a distinct jump in what I was doing 19

Previous Page: Commission drawing of The Tarantula. Above: This 2-page spread appeared in 1983’s The DC Sampler.

Part 3:

To Infinity Inc.... and Beyond!

MM: Had you planned on being on Infinity Inc. for only a short period of time, or was that just kind of the way things happened?

what was selling in the direct market versus what was selling on the newsstand, and Titans was the benchmark we were going for. After a couple issues, honestly, I was just kind of disappointed and I was looking for a change. It’s hard, too, when you invest a lot in a group of characters like that over the ten issues that I did. I certainly felt like I’d developed the characters visually, and developed their powers, to some degree, too. We were still working plot-style, so there was a lot of input on the drawing side as far as how to set up a fight scene or some sequence like that. It wasn’t as simple as nowadays with a full script, where the writer really takes you all the way through what the characters are doing. In a case like this, it was, “Here’s pages 4-8: big fight. Let’s get something good for all the characters to do visually.” [laughter] You basically have to invent, and that’s what we did. With the Obsidian character, a lot of his specific powers were really not defined, whereas Jade was clearly more of a Green Lantern spin-off and could use her green power energy to create things like the Green Lantern had done. With Obsidian, the shadow stuff just kind of came out of nowhere. “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if the shadow kind of creeped up on the wall and it turned out to be him?” The powers kind of came out of finding visual ideas for the fights.

JERRY: No, Mike Machlan and I both had our contracts, and the contracts were written in a vague way to incorporate whether either of us would draw. Mike’s plan was that he was going to draw it and I was going to ink it, and then when that switched at the last minute and I started drawing it, we both had 12-issue contracts. It was open, certainly, to stay on another year or whatever, but my initial feeling was that the book wasn’t going in the direction that I thought it was going to go in, because the initial promise of Infinity Inc. was that it was going to be more akin to New Teen Titans than a traditional Justice Society book. And I think Roy did a lot more with that after we left. I don’t know if he just had this one story that he wanted to get out of the way and then move on beyond the Justice Society, but while we were there, all I was seeing was the same stuff that I drew in All-Star Squadron, and I was tired of it. Not that I didn’t like the characters, it just was.... Infinity was also our chance to grab a bigger audience and break into a wider audience like Titans had. Titans encompassed an audience that read X-Men, for example. I mean, Titans was DC’s best-selling title at that point. People were talking about

But, like I said, I was ready for a change. And I wasn’t under an exclusive contract with DC, so I was getting a lot of inquiries from Marvel about my availability. I also had kind of a silly dispute. Looking back on it, it’s kind of funny, but I was trying to get a better page rate. I’d been working at DC for a couple years, and they weren’t willing to bump me up to that next rate level. I got an offer from John Byrne to ink Squadron Supreme, which he was going to be drawing with Mark Gruenwald, and I actually inked a promo piece that John drew that ran in the Marvel books as a teaser, which made it look like Marvel was going to do the Justice League “the right way.” It was a silhouette shot of all the characters, who were supposed to look like Superman and Hawkman and Wonder Woman and all that. While I was finishing up Infinity Inc., and after I had done that teaser thing, John left the Squadron Supreme project and asked me to ink Fantastic Four. And I went, “Ooh! Wow! That’s going to be hard to turn down.” And I know Mark Gruenwald was disappointed that I bailed on the Squadron Supreme, but at that point Byrne was my connection, and Mark really wasn’t, so I just followed John’s offer. And that was my first working experience with Mike Carlin, which was to become a long-term friendship. MM: So it was actually John that came to you, rather than one of the editors? JERRY: Exactly. I was pretty loyal to DC, and I felt like if I was getting my steady work from them, I couldn’t do more than a book a month, so I never really looked for trouble. But I had gotten some inquiries, and I know I had some scripts that were sitting in the studio as possible projects to do, but they had no deadline. I know one guy that I had a script from was Carl Potts. I also had a couple of scripts for What If?— a Kurt Busiek script and a Peter Gillis script—but Byrne’s Fantastic Four trumped all that. I agreed to do the six issues of inks on the Fantastic Four as a way to recharge my batteries. MM: Was that the first time you met John? Had you met him before that at all?

JERRY: I had never met him. I had sent him a letter when he’d first taken over the full art chores on Fantastic Four. He was inking it himself, and he was getting trashed in the fan press for, “Why isn’t Terry Austin inking him?” So I sent him a letter basically saying, “Good for you. Go for it. I like what you’re doing on it.” And that turned into a pen pal thing. We exchanged probably three or four letters over that year. To be honest, I never met John in person until I moved to Connecticut in ’87. All the Fantastic Four stuff was done with Mike Carlin as the middle-man. I really had no contact with John beyond that except to hear, “Oh, he liked it,” or, “He didn’t like this.” But going to Marvel and doing the Fantastic Four with Byrne was something 29

Previous Page: Unused pencils intended for the Infinity Inc. entry in 1991’s Who’s Who in the DC Universe #16. Above: Promotional art for the Squadron Supreme mini-series. Pencils by John Byrne. Infinity Inc. ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Squadron Supreme ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Unused cover art intended for X-Factor #8. The #5 box was a stat used for positioning only. Next Page: Superman!

go. It was called Crisis of the Soul, and it involved the Corrupters. It was about an alien race putting a quarantine on Earth and how it would affect the heroes on a more human level. We had worked on this back and forth, and Paul and I had a couple of convention lunches where we hashed out stuff and worked on the story, and then Paul worked on it to try to organize how it would cross over into the other books and everything, and it got pretty far along. Bob Greenberger was the editor, Karl Kesel was set to ink it, and Len Wein was going to dialogue it over Paul’s plots. Then, in November or December of ’85, Mike Gold came to DC. The project was, I believe, taken from Greenberger, and my understanding of it was that it kind of stalled under Greenberger because none of the other editors really wanted to play along with another crossover. I didn’t know any details then. I was still in Wisconsin, far from the power struggles. Then, in late December I got a call from Pat Bastienne asking me how my meeting with Mike Gold went that past weekend, to work out Crisis II. She assumed I was there, because I had been in on the project from the start. She says, “Mike Gold tells me that he had his story meeting and everything went well.” I had never been asked to show up for a meeting, so I felt really angry, because I’d been involved with Paul in the story. I felt like suddenly I was being aced out of this thing. So I told Pat that, “In all my years, I’ve never wanted to break a contract, but this thing is no longer the project that I agreed to, and I want out.” So I got out, and then, coincidentally, got a call from Carlin offering me Fantastic Four, because Byrne had left that book. Superman wasn’t ready to go, obviously, so I took on the Fantastic Four for a couple issues, knowing I wasn’t going to be on there long-term. They wanted me longer, but I knew that Superman was around the corner at some point, and I would still do that. 36

Part 4:

He’s an Artist! He’s a Writer! It’s Superman!

MM: What kind of lead time did you have on Adventures of Superman? At what point did you actually start working on it?

Machlan was going to be inking. Within the first couple months, there was major trouble. It was just an unfortunate situation, because there was clearly.... I wasn’t party to any friction between Marv Wolfman and John Byrne, but clearly there were some issues. I don’t know if Marv just didn’t like the idea of being subordinate, in a way, because Byrne was controlling the mythos at that point, or if it was something else, but plots were really slow coming. By the time I started on my second issue of Adventures of Superman, the first one was horribly late. Mike Machlan bowed out because it didn’t look good for him. He wasn’t a fast inker, and he wasn’t getting pages. He got through the first one, but by the second one there was nobody to ink it, so I inked it myself, which made it even later. That first year on Adventures of Superman was just painful. And, again, it was a bad time for Marv. I never really bonded with Marv. I never had any contact with Marv during Crisis, so we really didn’t have the benefit of, like, maybe he and George, where they were pals or whatever. All I knew was that I wasn’t getting plots, and when I was getting plots, they were not what I was

JERRY: I started in May of 1986, while I was doing the Fantastic Four stuff. I think the last thing I did was part of this big Fantastic Four anniversary issue, and during that time I remember getting photocopies of what Byrne was doing on Man of Steel. Andy Helfer was sending photocopies, and I knew I was going to be involved with one of the books, but I actually was expecting them to ask me to ink the Byrne Superman. But they said, “Oh, no, you’re going to be doing one of three books,” and the early word that I got was that Alan Moore was going to write the one I was going to draw, and I was like, “Whoa! Cool!” I really liked Swamp Thing, and I thought he was really good on Superman. But, of course, it turns out that this was wishful thinking on Andy Helfer’s part. He had a wish list of people that he wanted. Marv was also set up to be writing one of the books, so somewhere along the line I wound up being teamed up with Marv and Mike 37

Right: Just for fun Jerry painted this homage to Superman II back in 1979. The movie impacted the way he would later approach writing Superman. Below: Inset artwork for the Overstreet Price Guide. Next Page: Jerry at his C.C. Beck-iest. This Captain Marvel sketch was awarded to the winner of a Wizard magazine contest promoting The Power of Shazam! Captain Marvel, Shazam!, Superman and all related characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

ning through them, and then we’d team up once or twice a year on a big story that actually crossed all the way across, that was beginning, middle, and end within different titles. MM: During your time on Superman, was there any particular storyline you came up with that you were particularly proud of? JERRY: The Warworld story was a team effort, but I pushed for the gladiatorial combat. I always loved Fantastic Four #94, where the Thing had to fight on that gangster world. And I really liked the idea of taking Superman and putting him in a different type of costume, because, again, it just wasn’t done, and all of these things were big, big decisions from DC’s point of view. But of all the stories that I was involved with, the one that I think probably owed most to me was the engagement storyline. And I don’t think anybody would deny that that was something that came from me, because I got married around that time, and I just put it forth. I said, “They’ve been together a long time, and we’ve been developing them as a romantic couple. Why can’t we get them engaged? It doesn’t mean they have to get married. They could be engaged for 56

20 years and they could break up. But I think it’s the next step.” The comic fans expect some sense of things moving forward, and I think with the Superman books, for so many years the elements were fixed and immovable. I think that we opened up lots of story ideas by being able to do this. And the plan was that they would get engaged, but that he would have to reveal his identity. That was always part of it, because otherwise Lois Lane looks like the biggest idiot in the world. That’s why, when I did my reveal segment, it was that she’d always kind of known. I thought that was kind of a cute bit. And what’s funny is, I just recently was watching the Richard Donner cut of Superman II, and they were kind of doing some of that in there. My cue for Superman was mostly from that first movie—just the humanity that those actors brought to the screen. That was the hook for me, that was my Superman. Even though I grew up on Marvel Comics, I still knew about Curt Swan. I loved Curt Swan’s work, but Superman was not my cup of tea. I watched the ’50s TV show in reruns when I was a kid, and I liked it well enough, but that movie was my inspiration. So when I saw the Donner cut, it was a full circle kind of thing, because that was what I tried to get across with Lois and Clark and their relationship was the idea that they wouldn’t be together if they didn’t like each other.

Part 5:

It’s All about Family... the Marvel Family

MM: Did you start working on the Power of Shazam! graphic novel as soon as you were done with Superman?

wanted to do something that was kind of all my own, as well. First we had to get approved for hardcover status. Then the next thing was, “Gee, can I color it? I don’t want to do it on blueline, I would like to color the art itself.” And those were all control issues for me at the time, because I knew what would happen if it was done on blueline. They would want all the line art done first, and then the blueline color would be done after the line art, and I didn’t want to lose control of that, because that’s what happens a lot of times. I think it might have happened with the Kuberts when they were doing Adam Strange, where there’s a lot of pressure then, “Well, the pencil art and the ink art is done, so why can’t we get Joe Blow in production to do the blueline color, to speed it up?” So I told them, “I want to do it full-color on the board,” and they would worry about reproduction. Because they didn’t really do a lot of that. It was during the beginning of incorporating computers, but it was still a film process for doing painted artwork. That was my goal, and I painted myself, so to speak, into a major corner with that, because it was a very slow process. It’s one thing to say, “I’m going to color this myself,” but it’s another thing when you start working on the actual drawing itself. The black line isn’t as strong, so your contrast has to be good.

JERRY: Around the time I stopped drawing Superman and switched over to Adventures and was just writing, I think that is when I first got going on it. It was one of those projects that started up really slowly, because I had to get the story approved first. A lot of thought went into setting up what Fawcett City was going to be about, and all the other little details. It was definitely before “The Death of Superman,” so it had to be around ’91, maybe? MM: Yeah, that sounds right. Late 91, I guess. Now, at that time, was it just going to be a graphic novel, or was there a series in discussion? JERRY: At the time the Byrne Shazam! project had just collapsed. I think their ultimate goal was to have a series, and it was one of the few times where I felt like I could call some shots, because Jonathan Peterson was the editor and he really wanted me to do it, so I think I had the option there to push things a little bit. Doing monthly comics back then, there was no guarantee of anything being reprinted in a book form. None of the Superman stuff had been collected, which was frustrating, and I 57

Part 6:

Marvel, Alan Moore, and the McCarthy Era year. I knew Shazam! was ending, and my third child, my son James, was just born in September of ’98, so I was also a little frightened—I had another mouth to feed. And DC, all they could do was say, “Well, you shouldn’t worry about it. You know you’ll get work.” I got a call around the time I was finishing up Shazam! to ink an issue of Thor over John Buscema’s pencils, which was like a dream come true. That got me into [Tom] Brevoort’s office, and then a little later I got a call from Brevoort asking if I would be willing to write a three-issue arc of Avengers to spell George and Kurt. I said, “Well, coincidentally, I happen to have a hole in my schedule.” So I agreed to do it, and I also said I’d be willing to draw it, too. He said, “Oh, sure, great.” Two days later I got a call from Mike Carlin, who at that point was the managing editor—he was the bigshot. He was calling me from Arizona while he was on vacation to say, “Please don’t make any moves, we’ll make this work, we’ll work this out.” But by then it was already done. I felt kind of hurt, y’know? After putting a lot of years in at DC, to feel that I could be just shuffled off.... I would never dispute the right of an editor to make a change like that, but I had a deal in the works for twelve issues, and all they

MM: Why Avengers next? Did DC not have anything lined up for you?

JERRY: The last year of Shazam!, Karl Kesel was doing a World’s Finest mini-series for DC. I don’t remember if he was, at that point, writing Harley Quinn, but he had plenty of stuff, and he asked me if I would be willing to come onto Adventures of Superman again, to do the dialogue. He would just plot the book. He and I worked that way for that year, and as he was wrapping up his run on Adventures he said, “I’m passing the torch back to you.” Joey Cavalieri was the editor, and Joey was like, “Yeah, great!” So I agreed to write Adventures of Superman for a year, and Joey put in for my contract. Then Joey was replaced, and the new editor, Eddie Berganza, came on. I thought I was secure; I thought I was going to get a shot, but the word came down that they were probably going to can everybody and start fresh. Berganza called me and said, “I’m starting fresh, so you’re out.” I had had a verbal agreement to do a year’s work, and they had been working on a contract for it, and that was my dispute. My first call was to Terry Cunningham, and I said that I felt DC owed me a commitment of writing for a 78

had to do was call me and say, “Come up with a character or something.” That would have solved it. But it led to a lot of hard feelings, and I tried to make mine Marvel at that point. MM: Did you discuss what the story was going to be with Kurt? JERRY: He said, “Here’s where we are, and here’s where we’re going.” His main thing was to say I get to break Justice’s leg in my story so that it’ll feel like it’s an important part of the continuity, but then I had to kind of shoehorn that into it. But it was my story. It was fun, but The Avengers, Spider-Man, and Daredevil were my all-time favorites as a kid, so working on The Avengers was like, “Oh my God! This is really scary!” [laughter] I had done Superman and all this other stuff, but I felt very intimidated. And I felt intimidated by being at Marvel, because I really didn’t know anybody. I tried as best I could to catch on there, but I’m not a networking guy. I’ve always been an assignment-oriented person. In the case of Avengers, Brevoort called me and said, “Here’s three issues, come up with something,” and I can do that. But I’m not going to sit on my hands at home and say, “Ah, the ultimate She-Hulk story,” and type up a spec script. Number one, I’m drawing full-time, I don’t have time to type up spec stuff. Number two, I don’t think about super-hero battles. [laughs] I liken it to the old Hollywood studio system, where someone would call you up and say, “You’re doing Gone with the Wind on Monday. Report to wardrobe,” as opposed to being Clark Gable trying to develop a role for himself by optioning a book. MM: I’ve always liked the Wrecking Crew. They’re one of those quintessential Kirby creations. [Jerry laughs] Did that have anything to do with you picking them? JERRY: Yeah, in the Thor comics, the issues where the Wrecker first appeared were classics to me. I just thought that was the greatest, and that was kind of the impetus there. When you get an assignment like that, it’s not like they say, “Use whoever you want.” It’s, “Who do you want to use?”, and then you start throwing out characters, and they say, “Oop, can’t use him. Oop, can’t use him, he’s in this. Oh, we just used him.” So I

wouldn’t say the Wrecking Crew was my first choice [laughs], but it was in the top 500. [laughter] It really was like that. But they were available, and the Doomsday Man from Captain Marvel was available, because he was pretty lame. [laughter] Really! I said, “Well, let’s see. When’s this story come out?” And it was supposed to be a March book, so I said, “Well, what about Mardi Gras?” I think Tom suggested using the Cajun Captain Marvel that Roger Stern had done in The Avengers. So that dictated another piece of it. You always try to think of a scene or something that gives you a hook—something that gives you some entry into the story—and what opened that door 79

Previous Page: Cover pencils for Avengers #16. Above: Cap chastises The Wrecker for his between-meal snacking. Pencils for Avengers #16, page 13. Avengers, Captain America, The Wrecker ™ and ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: “Badger Auto,” 1979 watercolor painting. Top Right: Color guide for the cover of Mad #448. Right: Proposal art for the Power of Shazam! graphic novel. Next Page: Painted cover of Power of Shazam! #1. Page 100: Painted cover of Power of Shazam! #2. Page 101: Painted cover of Power of Shazam! #10.